![]() ![]() Crucially, his volumes also include illustrations of the gestures he describes. ![]() In his Chirologia (1644) and Chironomia (1648), John Bulwer calls gesture “the only speech which is natural to man it may well be called the tongue and general language of human nature which, without teaching, men in all regions of the habitable world do at the first sight most easily understand.” Bulwer, who also contrived a finger-spelling alphabet that he called “the deaf and dumb man’s friend,” claimed that his gesture manual had another application, being “so ordered to serve for privy ciphers for any secret information”: in the latter instance, he apparently forgot for a moment his own assertion of the universal legibility of gesture. In their “mute expressiveness,” the head, face, arms, hands, fingers, nails, chest, abdomen, genitals, knees, and feet have all got something to say. For a start, gesture seems a sort of anti-Babel, supplying meanings that language cannot: in Giovanni Bonifacio’s Art of Signs (1616), the whole body is employed to counter this tendency of the spoken word toward opacity. In the treatises and manuals that appeared in the centuries to follow, there is a growing sense that instruction in the proper use of gesture answers some widespread failing in public life. Why, the gestural conservative wonders, do they keep doing that thing with their hands, arms, shoulders, crotches? The gestures of the (racial, national, or generational) other appear both random and programmed, meaningless and mechanical. ![]() It’s a complaint that has echoed through the decades since, as subsequent generations have been characterized as increasingly shambling, ataxic, and slack, but also regimented, uniform, somehow less than human. Certain “invisible powers”-the economic forces responsible for the simultaneous loosening and mechanization of the social sphere-had rendered daily life, for many, almost indecipherable. “By the end of the nineteenth century, the gestures of the Western bourgeoisie were irretrievably lost”: so writes Giorgio Agamben in his 1992 essay, “Notes on Gesture.” The early years of the twentieth century were marked, the philosopher contends, by a frantic effort to reconstitute the vanished realm of meaningful movements: hence the exaggerated articulations of silent film and the mad leaps of modern dance. ![]()
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