Hands Up

Shutterstock, a company headquartered in New York and Berlin, sells access to images as a “global provider, with hundreds of millions of images and videos available for browsing and downloading online.

They promote the fact that they have customers in over 150 countries and are accessible in 21 languages 1. I put in a search for “waving hand gesture footage” and found this piece of stock—an actor hired by “Stockbakery” performing what the title of the clip claims is “hello.” Among the millions of bits of imagery and footage to wash up in such a search, this one caught my eye because I initially misread it. I misread the gesture as far more ambivalent—even a gesture of refusal accompanying the word “no.” To me, the actor’s lips seemed to purse to form “no” and, as we all know, a waving hand can also be used to decline, to fend off, to stop or repel. The possibilities are actually rather infinite.

Looking again at the image of the “hello-waving-hand-gesture-by-young-man” one is reminded to consider that this is an image for sale. We don’t know the name of the man who is waving, but who is being waved at, and what meaning the wave will carry, is open to be determined by “you,” the potential buyer of this man’s visage. The bit of visual residue is on sale as a mobile kernel of future content. It pretends that it might not indicate anything tethered to a past, only that it is available precisely to be employed by “you.” This man’s performance is open to be in your hands. In fact, through stockbakery using the platform of shuttlestock, it is you who are being greeted. You – potential purchaser. Money will already have changed hands, we assume, in that the performer is legible as an actor (though these are the lines that are blurred by the profession of acting itself, which often strives, by the craft of acting, to appear “as if” not acting). But that call and that response, has become a new call seeking a new response within the frame of shutterstock. And I have decided to purchase that image for this digital book. So the beckoning gesture was, in that way, successful.

But gesture is complex. And the exchange of goods and services—that is, gesture in the service of capitalism – is of course the only beginning or end of the life of any gestural form. The hand wave, for instance, is arguably not owned by anyone, even if this bit of footage that carries it, promiscuous as it may be, is making money for shutterstock and stockbakery. And the greeting supposedly performed by the hello-waving actor is also more complex than it may at first seem.

The Essence of This Chapter Subheader

In this chapter, I will take up gestures as ongoing body-jumping performances that have the potential to carry history in different directions with each irruptive singularity. History is, after all, that which is carried along with us as well as that which has already happened. Recall that for Marcel Mauss in 1935, gestures are essentially iterative, which is to say, capable of reiteration, and thus always already in double, triple, or nth time. Gestures become themselves through their capacities to be, as he writes, "acquired" or, if you will, carried along in time and replayed. Indeed gestures and other techniques jump among bodies, often by ways of intermediary media, crossing intervals of time and place. In "Techniques of the Body" Mauss tells a story of women in France who had begun to walk like women in America by virtue of the cinema that had hosted the bodily techniques. Bodily techniques jumped, that is, body to body by riding the media that carried them host to host.

Perhaps all gestures open intervals. Perhaps all gestures are interval crossers as well as interval openers. Opening an interval, a greeting (a mode of gesture) establishes both proximity and distance, opening a space for response or crossing an interval with response, or both. Greeting, writes Avital Ronell, “establishes a relationality.” It is as if a gesture, moving air if nothing else, is not only the hand that articulates movement, but is composed of the spaces between and among us—the spaces through which it moves in or toward relation. Vectors of energy, or vectors of possibility, gestures suspend possibility on their way to ricochet or reiteration. Calling out or hailing becomes not only a matter of extension across, movement into, or suspension of an interval, but (re)inaugurates duration and the open possibility of response. Extended out beyond a body, a gesture is carried perhaps by air, perhaps by stone, perhaps by film, light, pixels, algorithms, or perhaps by body to body transmission. A photograph, for instance, might be said to suspend and simultaneously extend an action as a gesture, implicitly offering itself at the jump: to be picked up and played again by another (body or thing) in some reiterative combination of sameness and difference--that is, in some response. A vocal call, too, carries a gesture in the grain of the voice, such as the one from police: “Hey, you there!” In Louis Althusser's famous “little theoretical theatre” of interpellation the hail anticipates, if not demands, response. For Althusser, gesture establishes not only relation, but the whole gamut of ideology that rituals of hailing extend. Thus gesture bodies forth ideological precedent and casts it into the future by way of anticipated response, articulating a temporal and spatial interval that migrates body to body, even as that same interval is a potential site, dangerous as it may be, for alteration.

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