3a. In early use: The employment of bodily movements, attitudes, looks, etc., as a means of giving effect to oratory.
3b. Now only: Movement of the body or limbs as an expression of feeling.
4. A movement of the body or any part of it; now only as expressive of thought or feeling.
(From the Oxford English Dictionary)
Two fragments, cursory-sounding remarks culled from very different quarters of academia, have been especially inspiring in providing this entry. One is the opening sentence from a rather elliptical short essay, “Notes on Gesture”, by what is arguably Europe’s greatest living philosopher, Giorgio Agamben; it states, rather dramatically, that “by the end of the nineteenth century, the Western bourgeoisie had definitely lost its gestures.”
The second quote belongs to American sociologist Richard Sennett, whose seminal The Fall of Public Man, published in 1977, in essence expands on a remarkably similar observation; a handul of pages into the book’s opening chapter “The Public Domain”, Sennett asserts: “There was a quality about the bourgeois life of the last century all too easy to forget – its essential dignity. There was an effort – diseased and destined to collapse, to be sure – to make distinctions between realms of experience, and thus wrest some form out of a society of enormous disorder and harshness.”
However far apart their respective interests and perspectives may lie, Agamben’s philosophical treatise and Sennett’s historiography of social life clearly concur in a sense of bereavement and loss, their elegiac tone repeatedly bemoaning the decline of ‘gesturality’ and the dissolution of the bourgeoisie’s mannered, gestural space – a space that, for all its restrictions, limitations and calls to order, seemed determined by certain modes of ‘formalized’ or ritualized behavior, by the self-conscious uses of style and form, and henceforth truly sought to embody the convergence of ethics and aesthetics in the public sphere. Both Agamben and Sennett in some sense seek to restore the gesture – or at least the idea of the gesture – to its former glory, that of a centralizing, organizing principle in public (i.e. civic) life; both look back at the gesture as a way of being that elevated ‘life’ to the level of what Agamben, in the same collection of essays, calls a ‘form-of-life’ – that is, to an essentially aesthetic view of life as an art of the everyday.
What exactly is the historical framework of both assertions, and what light do they shed on the contemporary condition? According to Agamben, “an age that has lost its gestures is, for this reason, obsessed by them. For human beings who have lost every sense of naturalness, each single gesture becomes a destiny. And the more gestures lose their ease under the action of invisible powers, the more life becomes indecipherable” – a formless muddle from which we can no longer wrest any sense of orderliness or even meaning, as Sennett would have it. “In this phase” – Agamben notes that it is “at some point between 1885 and 1971” that “everybody had lost control of their gestures and was walking and gesticulating frantically” – “the bourgeoisie succumbs to interiority and gives itself up to psychology.” Once again, Agamben’s phrasing echoes Richard Sennett’s prescient findings concerning what he himself has called an “intimate vision of society”, in which this regime of “intimacy” should partly be understood as “an attempt to solve the public problem by denying that the public exists” – indeed, a conviction that has eased its way into our contemporary society’s overall consciousness by way of modern psychology, “and of psychoanalysis in particular”. This erosion and ‘immoralization’ of the public domain and of public life in general, brought on in part by what Sennett perceives as the triumph of an ‘intimate’ vision of society, now makes for a worldview – if we are allowed to use this term at all – in which public and/or civic life has become a matter of mere formal obligation: “Most citizens approach their dealings with the state in a spirit of resigned acquiescence, but this public enervation is in its scope much broader than political affairs. Manners and ritual interchanges with strangers are looked on as at best formal and dry, at worst as phony” [my emphasis, ed.] Clearly, Sennett deplores this steady devaluation of what are here called ‘manners’ and ‘rituals’ – Agamben’s gestures, “movements made with a part of the body in order to express meaning or emotion”, or “the use of body movements to communicate” – and the related stigmatization of ‘formalism’; not only does it entail an ever-growing confusion over the limits and possibilities of the private and the public (much to the detriment of both spheres of experience, to be sure), it also accounts for a much poorer experience of everyday life, one in which there seems to be much less room for the dignity of performance, play, theatricality – that is, an essentially aesthetic appreciation of life’s many possibilities and potentialities.
Indeed, it is precisely here that the overlapping notions of ‘performance’ and roleplay come into force – and with these, the notion of an artful way of life, of a consciously lived form-of-life. Sennett ventures that “the artfulness which is squandered in self-absorption is that of playacting. (...) Playacting in the form of manners, conventions, and ritual gestures is the very stuff out of which public relations derive their emotional meaning. The more social conditions erode the public forum, the more are people routinely inhibited from exercising the capacity to playact. The members of an intimate society become artists deprived of an art.”
Sennett is right in noting that handling one’s self in the public realm is nothing less than an art, and it is this artistry of manoeuvring human society as a “theatrum mundi” – in essence an art of the gesture – that is progressively on the wane in contemporary (global) society. In this view, the so-called formlessness of contemporary life, its loss of dignity and essential civility, its lack of a consciously artful organon for living and interacting, does not only announce itself as an ethical (or, more pointedly, political) problem – manifested most clearly in the abandonment and atrophy of the public sphere, and in the consequent culture of withdrawal from the life of the polis – but also poses an aesthetic challenge, one that is connected to the overall impoverishment of the various forms and styles of social experience. In favoring interiority (“content”, personality, psychological states) over exteriority (“form”, exchange, propriety), contemporary society not only strikes us – dixit Sennett – as formless and disorderly on a purely political level , but ultimately also as a rather uninspiring, uncouth mess divested of all sense of ‘theatre’, and with very little opportunities left for the nurturing of various artful ways of living – a world, in short, that, through its surrender of the gesture, has become devoid of style.
Turning back to Agamben, we again recognize the entanglement – surprising, perhaps, to our current sensibilities – of the gestural and the political: if these are indeed truly ‘post-political’ times, they are so precisely because we live through the crisis of the gesture – the crisis of posture and demeanor, of conduct and bearing. Tellingly, Agamben calls the gesture that which “opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human”; in a related note he describes politics as “the sphere of pure means, that is, of the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings.” In this sphere, the gesture operates as “the exhibition of mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such.” Much like the notion of “form-of-life” seeks to annul the false, essentially Platonic dichotomy of “form” and “content” (with the latter invariably triumphing over the former in the hierarchic structuring of valuation), the gesture effectively works to transcend the equally crippling dyad of means versus ends: “If producing (poiesis) is a means in view of an end and praxis is an end without means, the gesture then breaks with the false alternative between ends and means that paralyzes morality and presents instead means that, as such, evade the orbit of mediality without becoming, for this reason, ends.” In other words, “what is relayed to human beings in gestures is not the sphere of an end in itself but rather the sphere of a pure and endless mediality. It is only in this way that the obscure Kantian expression “purposiveness without purpose” acquires a concrete meaning” – an expression borrowed, of course, from Kant’s epochal Critique of Judgment, where it is invoked as a defining characteristic of the experience of the beautiful. In the sphere of the gestural, human beings are afforded the opportunity to exercise this so-called “purposiveness without purpose” in everyday, lived experience – hence experience their lives as the potential object of beatification, that is, of an art that is wholly their bodily own.
It will have become readily apparent by now, I assume, why this historically informed notion of the gesture and gesturality should be brought to bear on a reconsideration of the idea of the academy – indeed, what better place to both teach and learn the various ‘arts’ that are imbedded in these notions of gesture, gesturality and gestural space, than the Academy itself?
The academy, whether it be the institution for higher education in the arts that is at stake in the current discussion, or any educational institution devoted to a particular subject and style of teaching and/or learning, or the so-called “academic community” itself – i.e. a more or less legislated society of scholars whose goal it is to promote a particular aspect of knowledge and/or culture – has long been recognized as both a site and instrument of what I would like to call the production of objectivity. That is, not only does the academy survey and entrench the establishment of ‘objectivity’ as the epistemic horizon of both the production and distribution of knowledge (whether it be of an artistic nature or otherwise), it also serves to ensure the transmission of a certain type of expertise in the production of objects as the ultimate goal (‘objective’) by which the success of the academy can be measured. In short, as the site of this “production of objectivity”, the academy is ultimately – and necessarily – complicit in safeguarding the productivist primacy of reification (“commodification”) as the governing principle of all art making, while also implicated in securing the hegemonic model of (‘scientific’) objectivity as the ultimate testing ground for all forms and practices of knowledge production. Predictably, this view of the academy as a production unit that is firmly locked into the global economic apparatus has existed in a state of constant tension with an altogether different (an equally powerful) projection, and with an altogether different idea of academic “production values”, namely that of the academy as a site for the production of subjectivity – and of course, this tension largely accounts for the history of the idea of the academy as such.
A staple-item formula in much post-war French thought, the theorem of the production of subjectivity ventures that – in the words of its most vocal political theorists of the last decades, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt – “subjectivity is not pre-given and original but at least to some degree formed in the field of social forces”; more specifically, it is “grounded (…) in the functioning of major social institutions, such as the prison, the family, the factory, and the school.” Ironically, Negri and Hardt name the school’s architectural features as one of the prime examples of a site where subjectivity is produced: “When the boss hails you on the shop floor, or the high school principal hails you in the school corridor, a subjectivity is formed.” Furthermore, Negri and Hardt hail the critical breakdown of these various institutions – incidentally, one of the defining traits of the coming-into-being of what they call “Empire” – as the paradigm shift that signals the ‘spread’ of this authoritarian, control-obsessed production of subjectivity to all corners, nook and crannies of contemporary life: “The production of subjectivity in imperial society tends not to be limited to any specific places. (…) In the general breakdown [of the social institutions that produce objectivity, ed.] the functioning of the institutions is both more intensive and more extensive. The institutions work even though they are breaking down – and perhaps they work all the better the more they break down.” In short, just about everywhere in the biopolitical sphere, “life is made to work for production and production is made to work for life.” One thing that is glaringly absent from this rather gloomy view of the social fabric, however, is the ‘fact’, or the assumption of the possibility of this fact, that we (the worker, the student, the patient, the inmate) are not only the objects of these processes of production in which ‘our’ subjectivity is formed – we can also be its subjects. We can seize upon these various production sites – most notably in the realm of pedagogy – and thus partly become the authors of our own subjectification. Surely it is here that the view of the academy as a “site of potentiality” comes into full effect, and that the gesture can in turn be restored to its originary centrality in the constitution of civic order, an order which we can actively help gain shape in these very processes of the production of subjectivity.
Indeed, as a liminal space that marks the transition from one closely guarded subjectivity (childhood, puberty and adolescence) to another (citizenship, or all the socio-economic and political associations that might accrue to form the exemplarily elusive category of the ‘citizen’), it is hard not to think about the academy as a laboratory of sorts where the aspiring members of a community in the making – the Realwelt of adulthood they will come to inhabit once they have left the academy’s relative liberties behind – can more or less freely experiment with exploring a wide variety of avenues into more established (and, within the given institutional context, necessarily age-dependent) notions of subjecthood, dabble in as many styles of ‘self’ as possible, and try on as many ‘roles’ as the theatrum mundi can possibly make available to them. In its idealized state – a state that it is continually obliged to strive to attain, or at least, as its theoretical possibility, model itself after – the academy appears to be felicitously exempt from many of the pressures that characterize and cripple the experience of adult life that it is supposed to ‘prepare’ us for, and ranking foremost among these pressures we must surely recognize the obligations of identification, and of identity as an immutable law of self-management. The academy is that “temporary autonomous zone” where we are under no pressure as of yet to merely ‘be’, that is, adhere to one given identity, but are instead granted the opportunity – an opportunity, to be sure, that we have to seize ourselves, actively and self-consciously – to incessantly ‘become’, and scour the world of possibilities for a multitude of modes according to which subjectivity can be produced.
Quite apart from merely transmitting the ‘content’ that is destined to become the raw material from which we are to extract the business of our professional (and inevitably also personal) lives, the academy also allows us to both instruct others and ourselves, and hence be instructed in turn, in the ways of fashioning and stylizing that ‘content’ into a ‘form-of-life’ – an essentially aesthetic undertaking that clearly corresponds to Agamben’s theory of gesturality and mediality as outlined above. If what is taught to us in schools, academies and assorted “educational institutions” around the world is the mastery of knowledge as ‘content’ – in the process gaining insight into the ‘inner’ workings and ways of that world which we will soon be calling our own – then what we in essence teach ourselves in these various spaces of becoming and sites of potentiality is the art of shaping this mastery into a lifestyle, that is, into a life form that is aesthetically engaging – an art of the self.
Granted, it may seem rather commonplace to state that a proverbial half, if not more, of what we learn in school – or, indeed, in any pedagogical setting, of any kind – ‘happens’ outside the official and strictly policed channels of the school’s syllabi and curricula, its classrooms, gyms and labs; that the hallways, garden grounds, alleys and various other “spaces of stealth” tucked away inside the many folds of this exemplarily labyrinthine institution can offer as much learning-and-teaching experiences as the various officially designated sites for the (invariably hierarchical) transmission of knowledge and expertise ‘inside’ that institution. This ‘other’, informal schooling, a kind of secret knowledge passed along, both literally and metaphorically, the trenches, smuggling routes and corridors of the pedagogical establishment, provides the testing ground for life’s many experiments in becoming; it is a space – the Foucauldian notion of “heterotopia” comes to mind, for more reasons than intellectual fashion sense alone – where different behavioral practices can be tested and tried, a process that often involves the observation of already existing behaviors, emulating and perfecting them to one’s own ‘taste’, and adopting them, however, temporary, as a style of self. (Indeed, what student of the history of twentieth-century art has not fashioned his or her self after the dandyish ways of the historical avant-gardes – think of the mannerisms of Duchamp, Man Ray, Popova and many other masters of the geste – thus also appropriating the avant-garde’s utopian injunction to make Man anew?)
Finally, if this view of the production of subjectivity seems overly concerned with ‘form’ and aesthetics, it is well worth remembering that – in the memorable words of the late Susan Sontag – “the world is ultimately an aesthetic phenomenon.”
“All great art is founded on distance, on artificiality, on style, on what Ortega calls dehumanization. But the notion of distance is misleading, unless one adds that the movement is not just away from but also toward the world” [my emphasis, ed.] This is another quote handpicked from Sontag’s On Style, one that may help to lead us back to the facts of the gesture, and to the lessons art can teach us in this very respect.
The gesture is an art of moving the body away from and towards the world, of stylization and denaturalization – a language of body movements with which we learn to position ourselves right in front of this seeming dilemma, and in the process learn to give meaningful (and artful) shape to the rambling “prose of the world”. Take the example of the original, Platonic Academy, immortalized by Raphael in his School of Athens, in which the creation myth of western philosophy – roughly, the dialectical coupling of Platonic idealism and Aristotelian ‘materialism’ – is embodied in a simple play of imperious gestures: Plato, the elderly statesman of state philosophy, pointing towards heaven, the realm of ideas where the essences roam, and Aristotle, his wayward pupil, pointing down and towards the viewer instead, reminding his teacher of the pertinence of the real, hic et nunc. This is as much a painting about bodies and their uses, as it is about ideas – in fact, it is a painting about the articulation of ideas through the bodies that engender them. Surely the originary Akademeia, famously housed in a grove of sacred olive trees just outside the Athens city limits, here not only figures as a visual treatise on the history of Greek philosophy, but also as a model of the civitas, the civic community – i.e. the res publica, or public space itself – in which civil virtues are exchanged in a highly stylized, dignified choreography of body languages. (Like the academies of today, Plato’s Academy – or Aristotle’s Lyceum, Epicurus’ or Zeno’s various peripatetic pleasure gardens – was situated ‘outside’ the domain of everyday political rule, and it is precisely this relative freedom which ultimately enables the academy to function as an experiment in daily living.) The academy helps us master these languages, and eventually also create and try out – on ourselves as on those around us – new ones; its relationship to the world at large and to its “coming community” is ultimately an artistic one.