Migrations of Gesture Quotes

“Franko suggests that deconstruction's understanding of gestures as signs caught in and generated by a system of signification neglects the ways in which the body's singularity-its gender, race, size, scope of movement, and so on-necessarily inflects the generalizing momentum of the signifying process, bringing into play embodied, performance-specific, and therefore noniterable instantiations of meaning-making forms of movement.'
In”
― Carrie Noland, Migrations of Gesture

“For Merleau-Ponty, to cite another seminal figure, gestures are not only productive of communication between agents, they also provide the individual agent with a private somatic experience of his or her own moving body.; And yet, as poststructuralists have persuasively argued, gestures are a techne, a language, even a semiotic regime; within any given culture, gestures inevitably become-or, to put it more strongly, already are-conventional and arbitrary rather than spontaneous and motivated; they are iterable and easily detached from the specific
contexts of their performance. The event of gesture can in fact furnish a semiotic material to be appropriated, manipulated, and reinvested with meanings that potentially have very little to do with the somatic experience of the subjectivities executing them.”
― Carrie Noland, Migrations of Gesture

“We believe that thinking about cultural production and subject construction through the category of gesture allows scholars from different domains to move back and forth between an organic, phenomenal understanding of human sign production (as expression or experience based) and a historicist, semiotic understanding of how the "human" is itself constructed through gestural routines.”
― Carrie Noland, Migrations of Gesture

“as movement that is not exclusively related to the body but generated instead by any apparatus-including the body understood as apparatus-capable of being displaced in space (deconstruction and new media studies).”
― Carrie Noland, Migrations of Gesture

“Derived from the Latin verb gerere, to carry, act, or do, gesture may be conceived in multiple and sometimes conflicting ways: as movement intimately and exclusively related to the body and its expressiveness (phenomenology); as conventionalized movement belonging to a system of signification imposed by culture upon the body (semiotics, linguistics, and rhetoric);”
― Carrie Noland, Migrations of Gesture

“Adorno thus provides a useful starting point for a volume on gestures and their migration because he understands gesturing to be more than simply a conduit of socialization, a techne that constitutes subjects in a thoroughly mechanical and predictable way. He also knows that gestures offer opportunities for kinesthetic experience; they "innervate," or stimulate, the nerves of a bodily part, and thus allow the body to achieve a certain awareness and knowledge of itself through
movement.”
― Carrie Noland, Migrations of Gesture

“What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced [facere] or acted [agere], but rather something is being endured and supported [gerere].
-Giorgio Agamben, "Notes on Gesture”
― Carrie Noland, Migrations of Gesture

“Adorno is worried that the loss of even the smallest gestures, involving the wrist or forearm, reveals a "withering of experience," a change in the "most secret innervations" of human beings as they navigate an intersubjective and object world.”
― Carrie Noland, Migrations of Gesture