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      Motor Intentionality: Gestural Meaning in Bill Viola and Merleau-Ponty

      *Carrie Noland *
      / University of California, Irvine/
      cjnoland@uci.edu 

      (c) 2007 Carrie Noland.
      All rights reserved.

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          "Is it possible to express emotions without the movement of
          the face?"

          --Bill Viola

   1.

      During the last fifteen years of his life, roughly from
      Phenomenology of Perception of 1945 to the lectures on "Nature" of
      1958-61,[1 <#foot1>] Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed a theory of
      the gestural that has provided a fruitful new direction for
      continental philosophy. By combining a set of unique
      commitments--to Husserlian phenomenology, to Gestalt psychology,
      to Marxist materialism--Merleau-Ponty inaugurated a school of
      thought that associates human understanding not with cogitation
      but with /embodied/ cogitation: he is interested in the body's
      implication in what the mind thinks it knows. Indeed, it has
      become almost banal to claim that Merleau-Ponty is the philosopher
      par excellence of embodiment.[2 <#foot2>] But what has been far
      less frequently acknowledged is the degree to which that
      embodiment is conceived by Merleau-Ponty in terms of the gestures
      the animate human form can execute, the movements by means of
      which that body explores the world. Phenomenology of Perception
      is, almost from the first page to the last, a meditation on the
      role of the gestural in acts of embodied perception and cognition.
      Gestures clearly hold a privileged place in Merleau-Ponty's
      philosophical and aesthetic writings, but what he means by the
      word is not always easy to discern. In Phenomenology of
      Perception, The Structure of Behavior, and the lectures collected
      in Nature: Lectures and Course Notes, "gestures" ("gestes") cover
      the same ground as Mauss's "techniques of the body," especially
      when treated in the context of the acquisition of habit.
      Elsewhere, though, "un geste" appears as a rather amorphous type
      of sign, a smile, for instance, but also a way of clenching the
      brows, scratching an itch, playing a keyboard, or applying
      paint.[3 <#foot3>] It would seem that gesturing, for
      Merleau-Ponty, is the inescapable medium in which animate forms
      navigate environments and enact intentions. Gestures are
      therefore, for him, the link between a naturally given body/world
      and an existential/cultural situation. Neither produced entirely
      by culture, nor imposed inevitably by nature, gestures are a
      culture's distinctive way of conjugating what Merleau-Ponty once
      called the body's "general power." Gestures are a social
      manifestation of the body's biologically driven "cleaving" to the
      world.[4 <#foot4>]

   2. It is perhaps due to this crucial, intermediary position of the
      gestural that it has become an important category for contemporary
      theorists of the body, especially those interested, as is
      Merleau-Ponty, in examining how cultural, organic, and
      technological forces interact to give birth to embodied beings.
      Nowhere has this interest been more pronounced than in the area of
      new media theory. In fact, new media theory has become a locus for
      a renewal of interest in Merleau-Ponty's writings, just as the
      aesthetic objects privileged by new media theorists frequently
      thematize, register, and even dissect the gestural dimension.
      Although performance studies and dance ethnography have made
      headway in championing the contributions of Merleau-Ponty, it is
      arguably in the area of new media theory that his insights have
      been most fruitfully explored. JosÃ(c) Gil, Mark Hansen, Brian
      Massumi, Brian Rotman, and Sha Xin Wei each argues persuasively
      that phenomenology's approach to embodiment promises to correct a
      technological determinism that in the past has rarely considered
      the role of situated performance in humanity's commerce with
      machines. One of the most provocative thinkers of the gestural is
      the video artist Bill Viola, whose works have not incidentally
      been at the center of a number of studies by new media theorists.
      Like Merleau-Ponty, Viola finds in the performance of gestures a
      key to how socialized beings manage to convey spontaneous,
      unscripted meanings through sedimented forms. It is productive to
      analyze Viola and Merleau-Ponty side by side, for Viola throws
      into relief aspects of the phenomenological project, especially
      with regard to the significance of the gestural, that have not
      previously received attention, while Merleau-Ponty suggests a new
      and provocative reading of Viola's works.

   3. The analyses I generate here of both Merleau-Ponty and Viola go
      somewhat against the grain of current scholarship. By focusing on
      the gestural, I upset a trend in new media theory that associates
      embodiment not with motricity but instead with a far more
      mysterious entity called "affect." Throwing the spotlight on
      affect in his 1983 Image-Mouvement, Gilles Deleuze in effect
      inaugurates this trend, leading a generation of young scholars
      back to texts by Henri Bergson (and, to a lesser extent, William
      James) that emphasize the mind's debt to the body understood
      largely in terms of sensation.[5 <#foot5>] "Movement" also emerged
      as an important term, but always in its abstract form, associated
      with change and passage, something the body does in time (bodies
      "/move/," as Massumi underlines), but subordinated nonetheless to
      affect (bodies "/feel/," he adds) (1).[6 <#foot6>] As a
      consequence of this priority accorded to affect, new media
      theorists have too frequently credited affectivity--an affectivity
      divorced from specific motor sequences--with the capacity to lend
      human subjects independence from both the species-related response
      mechanisms and social conditioning so central to Merleau-Ponty's
      own speculations. However, in Bergson's work, to which
      Merleau-Ponty is also indebted, affectivity and motility are not
      only profoundly intertwined, but the latter is accorded an
      ontological priority with respect to the former. In a passage from
      Matter and Memory that has become a kind of touchstone of some new
      media theory, Bergson establishes the role of bodily affects in
      the process of embodied perception, arguing that the body's
      interoceptive sensations mediate its interaction with external
      stimuli. Waves of affect, he writes, "interpose themselves between
      the excitations that I receive from without and the movements I am
      about to execute" (17). In other words, the body is a source of
      sensory feedback that intervenes between the external world and
      the internal world either to filter out or to focus on certain
      elements of the exciting environment.

   4. Bergson also makes it clear that this affective filter serves
      perception, which is in turn invariably action-oriented and
      intentional. In passages far less frequently cited by new media
      theorists, Bergson insists on "the /utilitarian/ character of our
      mental functions, /which are essentially turned toward action/"
      (16; emphasis added). He states that "perception as a whole has
      its true and final explanation in the tendency of the body to
      movement" (45), and that therefore all aspects of perception--the
      absorption through the sensory organs of an external stimulus, the
      affect it produces within the body, and the memories of past
      actions which it evokes--work together to provide a motor
      response. To that extent, perception must always be seen as "an
      elementary question [posed] to my /motor activity/" (45; emphasis
      added). In most cases, the nervous system formulates a response
      over time; it requires an "interval" which becomes, in Bergson's
      language, "a center of indetermination" (Bergson 64; Deleuze 92).
      During this interval in which the motor body seeks the appropriate
      way to respond, there is certainly an experience of qualitative,
      affective states; however, more crucially for Bergson, this
      interval is also filled with nascent motor actions proposed by a
      body attempting to choose which habit, which embedded motor memory
      (skill, or "I can"), will best serve the demands of the present
      moment.[7 <#foot7>] Voluntary ("represented") memory works in
      tandem with motor (enacted or "lived") memory to produce a
      response that is not entirely predictable and yet is supported by
      the past: "The progress by which the virtual image [the
      representation of movement, or voluntary memory] realizes itself
      is nothing else than the series of stages by which this image
      gradually obtains from the body useful actions or useful
      attitudes" (131). Humans are thus not machines, they do not
      execute automatic reactions, precisely because, although "turned
      toward action," they mediate their actions through another layer
      of experience that Deleuze associates with affect, Bergson with
      memory, and Merleau-Ponty with what he calls a kinesthetic
      "background" ("fond") that includes skills and the kinesthetic
      memory of performing them.[8 <#foot8>]

   5. It is important that when Bergson introduces "affection" it is not
      as a variety of emotion but as the experience of pain. Elaborating
      on affect for the first time, he writes: "There is hardly any
      perception which may not, by the increase of the action of its
      object upon our body, become an affection, and, more particularly,
      pain. Thus we pass insensibly from the contact with a pin to its
      prick" (53). This affect-image, or "prick," is itself a "source of
      positive action" (55); the affect is "nothing but the effort of
      the damaged element to set things right--a kind of motor tendency
      in a sensory nerve" (55-56). Most decidedly, affect does not alone
      fill up the interval, the space in between. Instead, "choice is
      likely to be inspired by past experience, and the reaction does
      not take place without an appeal to the memories which analogous
      situations may have left behind them" (65).

   6. Deleuze is faithful to Bergson with respect to his account of
      affectivity, but, significantly, he neglects Bergson's emphasis on
      motor memory as it interacts with affect to shape the subject's
      ultimate course of action. In fact, Deleuze tends to exaggerate
      the role of affect, attributing to it the capacity to produce, on
      its own, the action that is "unpredictable" and "new" ("quelque
      chose d'imprÃ(c)visible et de nouveau" 91). For Bergson, in contrast,
      affect is only a "tendency" that aids the organism in preparing
      itself for a more meditated response. In Bergson, affect is
      associated with bodily states such as pain, while in Deleuze it
      takes on the color of emotion. Deleuze goes so far as to identify
      the human face (as opposed to the pinprick on the skin) as the
      locus of affection, or at least as the site where it is displayed.
      By identifying self-affection with the cinematic close-up, Deleuze
      makes it seem as though affect were entirely an affair of
      large-screen emotions, and that it is these emotions that
      ultimately govern the way a subject will respond. However, Bergson
      himself makes it clear that while an affect such as pain may play
      a role in producing an attitude toward virtual action, memories of
      past actions are what capture and filter the sensory information
      in the first place and continue, throughout the interval, to offer
      their skilled answers in response to pain.[9 <#foot9>]

   7. Merleau-Ponty develops to a far greater degree what Bergson
      assumes as a given, namely, that human subjects are primarily
      engaged in answering a motor question with a motor response by
      searching through a catalogue of movement memories or gestural
      routines. In fact, Merleau-Ponty returns to Bergson in
      Phenomenology of Perception to confirm that "attention to life is
      the awareness we experience of 'nascent movements' in our bodies"
      (90-91). It is possible to approach works in new media in such a
      way as to recall Bergson's original emphasis on "nascent
      movements," an emphasis too often forgotten in the reduction of
      the interval to "self-affection." This can be attempted even in
      the case of new media artists famous for heightening our awareness
      of the affect supposedly recorded on the screen. For instance,
      although Bill Viola has been treated by theorists as an artist
      concerned with the /emotional/ intensity communicated through the
      screen to the viewer, it can be shown that he is equally
      interested in the gestural routines that frame the emotions his
      filmed subjects perform. In my analyses of Viola's "The Passions,"
      a series of digitalized video installations first exhibited in
      2003, I reinstate the significance of muscle memory in the
      productive moment of indetermination by focusing on the relation
      between gesture and affect, rather than on affect alone. In doing
      so, I aim to reanimate the notion of embodiment that new media
      theory has borrowed from Bergson and from Merleau-Ponty. I balance
      a celebration of affect as autonomous resistance to sedimentation
      by revealing affect's reliance on the habitual muscular
      articulations Merleau-Ponty diagnoses in the Phenomenology as "I
      can"s. In my readings, embodiment is not simply a matter of
      sensory feedback, or "self-affection"; rather, embodiment is a
      dynamics inflected by social patterning and thus impossible to
      theorize without reference to gestural regimes.


            "opening up the spaces between the emotions"

   8. Bill Viola's "The Passions" series, first exhibited in its
      entirety at the J. P. Getty Museum, consists of twenty-one video
      installations, almost all in color, mounted on various types of
      LCD and plasma screens.[10 <#foot10>] According to the artist,
      "Quintet of the Astonished" (see Figure 1) was the first piece
      composed, the avatar from which the other installations were
      generated.

      Figure 1
      *Figure 1: "Quintet of the Astonished"*
      Bill Viola, 1998.
      Used by permission of the artist.

      At the time of its composition (1998), Viola was in residence as a
      Fellow at the Getty Research Institute. He had already been
      studying the Renaissance paintings housed in the Getty collection,
      but when he was invited to participate in an exhibition at the
      National Gallery in London, he decided to base his commissioned
      piece on a painting the National Gallery owned, Hieronymous
      Bosch's "Christ Mocked" (see Figure 2).

      Figure 2
      *Figure 2: "Christ Mocked"*
      Hieronymous Bosch, ca. 1490-1500
      Â(c) The National Gallery, London.

      Imitating the compositional grouping (but not the verticality) of
      Bosch's painting (c. 1490-1500), Viola placed five actors into a
      tight arrangement in which they could dramatically change their
      postures over time without invading one another's intimate
      emotional space.[11 <#foot11>] The figures in "Quintet of the
      Astonished"--four men and one woman--transpose the four
      darkly-clad tormentors and the one fair Christ-figure in Bosch's
      painting. Viola filmed the five actors with high-speed
      35-millimeter film (with frame rates of up to 384 frames per
      second instead of the normal 24), which he then transferred to
      video, thus creating a sixteen-minute-long video strip out of
      approximately one minute of real-time performance. The display
      conditions of "Quintet of the Astonished" were also carefully
      controlled: the color video was rear-projected onto a screen,
      measuring 4'-6" long by 8' wide, mounted on a wall in a dark room.
      The influence of "Christ Mocked" can be seen in Viola's choice of
      colors, lighting, and the framing of the screen, which was
      recessed in space, evoking a small chapel in a cathedral.

   9. Similar to the other three "Quintets" that would eventually emerge
      from the same inspiration ("Quintet of Remembrance," "Quintet of
      the Unseen," and "Quintet of the Silent"), the "Quintet of the
      Astonished" portrays only the upper half of the body of each actor
      (pelvis to head), with a special emphasis--as in the painting--on
      the hands. Indeed, as can be witnessed by observing the short clip
      available at the Getty website
      (<www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/viola/index.html>
      <http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/viola/index.html>), the
      actors' hands attract the viewers' attention as much as, if not
      more than, their facial gesticulations. At one point during the
      sixteen-minutes that compose "Quintet of the Astonished," a hand
      with four fingers spread wide occupies the center of the screen;
      if we compare the composition with that of "Christ Mocked," we see
      that this hand has been placed at the location where in the Bosch
      painting we find the corresponding four folded fingers that rest
      on Christ's shoulder. A visual echo of these folded fingers can
      also be found on the left-hand side of the frame, where a male
      figure rests his hand on the shoulder of the pale female figure
      that recalls Bosch's Jesus. In the video, the outstretched fingers
      in the center of the frame remain immobile for a long time, but
      the two hands of the figure on the right-hand side, and one hand
      of the figure in the right-hand corner next to him, sway back and
      forth distractingly, evoking the intensity of the posture assumed
      by the figure in the lower right-hand corner of the Bosch canvas.

  10. In his preparatory notes to "Quintet of the Astonished," Viola
      writes that he hoped to capture "a compressed range of conflicting
      emotions from laughing to crying"; the emotions were to "come and
      go so gradually," Viola continues, that it would be "hard to tell
      where one begins and the other leaves off" (qtd. in Walsh 33). In
      a later interview, Viola explains that he was less interested in a
      dramatic portrayal of the emotions /per se/ than in the
      transitions from one emotion to the next. He asked his actors to
      move fluidly and gradually through sorrow, pain, anger, fear, and
      rapture in such a way as to "ope[n] up the spaces /between/ the
      emotions" (qtd. in Walsh 200). In order to achieve this effect,
      Viola gave his actors two sets of instructions: they could either
      "work from the outside in," as in the technique analyzed by
      movement theorist Paul Ekman, "or from the inside out," as in
      Method acting.[12 <#foot12>] The first choice would put the body
      "in a place that will engender emotion," and the second would
      create "an emotional life within that is then expressed
      outwardly."[13 <#foot13>] Although the two approaches to the
      connection between (externally observable) bodily movement and
      (internally felt) emotion derive from two different theories of
      acting, they both presuppose a causal relation: what happens
      emotionally finds its correlate in kinesis. According to Viola's
      account, his directorial style emphasized the inner-toward-outer
      Method approach, for he refrained from choreographing the actors
      in any way and simply gave them an emotion to express. Actors
      "were free to invent whatever gestures and expressions suited
      their individual tasks," recounts one observer (Walsh 36). This
      statement is belied, however, by the placement of the actor's
      hands, which intentionally (one cannot but assume) evoke the hand
      positions of the figures in the Bosch painting.

  11. Although Viola is clearly interested in the physicality--almost
      athleticism--of the exercise, no accounts I have found attend with
      anything like thoroughness to the pelvis-to-head embodiment of the
      labeled emotions. For instance, Mark Hansen's readings of "The
      Passions" in "The Time of Affect" and New Philosophy for New Media
      concentrate exclusively on the facial gestures and the transitory
      phases between them, phases that reveal, according to Hansen
      (following Deleuze), "the unpredictable . . . and the new" (New
      Philosophy 6).[14 <#foot14>] Viola locates a space of freedom in
      the excess of affect over categorical emotion, that is, in the
      fuller "field of intentionalities" revealed by the transitional
      phases captured on the screen. In his readings, Hansen relies
      faithfully on Bergson's concept of a self-affecting organism, but
      he strips this self-affection of its relation to "the movements
      [the subject is] about to execute," and thus to the "motor
      intentionalities" identified by Merleau-Ponty. To some extent,
      Hansen can do so because he takes in only the facial
      gesticulations, which correspond more neatly, at least according
      to some, to distinct categorical emotions (and thus disclose,
      under deceleration, their ambiguous "in betweens"). Ignoring the
      physical manifestations of feelings (or, rather, performed
      feelings) in the shoulders, hands, and sternum of the actors,
      Hansen assumes that the strong emotions Viola seeks to capture,
      such as joy ("laughing") and sorrow ("crying"), are registered and
      communicated by facial features alone.[15 <#foot15>] The face,
      according to Hansen, displays a kind of semiotics of emotion, and
      it is between these facial signs that we should locate
      unpredictable and new affects. In Hansen's account, the larger
      body gestures, such as the waving of the hands back and forth in
      the right-hand corner of the frame, do not maintain the same tight
      relation to expressive values (such as joy, or grief), nor do they
      seem to have the potential to release the unscripted "in betweens."

  12. If we were to watch the actors' performance in real-time, we would
      see a rapid succession of emotions that would probably appear as
      exaggerated grimaces, a kind of facial typology or catalogue of
      stereotyped emotional expressions. But we would also observe
      violent and rapid upper body movements and be made far more aware
      of the actor's choreographic blocking.[16 <#foot16>] Slowing down
      the frame speed has the effect of revealing the in-between facial
      gesticulations, but it also discloses the enchained movements, and
      the ambiguous pauses between enchained movements that the body
      makes as it moves toward the expression of a violent emotion.
      Specifically what the viewer believes to have witnessed while
      observing these transitional, in-between states may in fact depend
      a good deal on the training the viewer has received. For instance,
      as a scholar of video and film, among other media, Hansen focuses
      primarily on the facial expression of the actors, what he terms
      their "affective tonality" ("Time of Affect" 611). In contrast,
      when a phenomenologist trained in the tradition of Merleau-Ponty
      observes the actors, it is more likely the muscular /tonicity/
      rather than the emotional tonality of the gesticulating bodies
      that catches the eye. In my own case, for instance, the facial
      gesticulations appear in the context of the subjects' larger body
      movements. Trained as a dancer, I am struck by the changes in
      posture, the shifts in weight, the strange angles at which the
      head is carried, the degree of tension in the hunched shoulders,
      the compositional play of arm positions, the vectors created by
      the finger, as well as the dynamics of facial muscle tone.
      Further, as a former performer, I view these figures bringing the
      Bosch painting to life /as performers/, not subjects engaged in
      spontaneous emotional release. Studying them closely, I attempt to
      imitate their blocking: I learn their roles, copying the large
      body movements such as shoulder crumpling, hand lifting, and mouth
      contorting. Yet, try as I might, I cannot produce through sheer
      will the twitch of a facial muscle or the trembling of a cheek. In
      that regard, Hansen is correct when he insists that new media
      technologies can expose to sight elements of aliveness (he says
      "affectivity," I say "motility") that are performed without volition.

  13. It could be argued that what we witness when we observe Viola's
      videos is not a performance that actually took place and that
      therefore it is incorrect to designate Viola's subjects as
      "performers." From this perspective, the bodies we see on the
      screen are not real bodies but only digital photographic
      reproductions of real bodies manipulated in post-production to
      appear in guises otherwise not exposed to view. Yet however
      distorted the images may seem, they have not been digitally
      transformed. That is, the bodies filmed did indeed execute the
      twitches, tremblings and contractions that are only visible to the
      observer when the execution of their movements has been slowed
      down. A trained actor's body has actually executed the movements
      that radical deceleration allows us to see. Furthermore, it is to
      those bodies and their movements that we, as spectators,
      kinesthetically respond. True, many of the actors' facial
      gesticulations and upper body movements have not been voluntarily
      produced and are therefore not "performed" in the sense of being
      intentionally constructed to express a particular categorical
      emotion. But these movements are nonetheless /human movements/
      available as potentials belonging to the human kinetic
      disposition. They cannot be considered skills /per se/, but they
      are the building blocks of skills. They are decidedly not products
      of digital remediation, pure manipulations of playback that no
      human body could perform.

  14. I would insist in addition that these involuntary facial
      gesticulations escaping both categorization and real-time
      perception occur--/and on some level are experienced by the
      subjects/--as tension in the jaw or as the sudden release of
      constriction in the brow. That is, they are kinesthetically
      available but culturally meaningless. This distinction is
      important, for in some cases the in-between gesticulations /can/
      be felt by the body performing them even if they are not voluntary
      gestures invested with meaning. Although people cannot always
      voluntarily reproduce twitchings and tremblings, some varieties of
      twitch or tremble can in fact be reproduced by trained actors or
      mimes. An observant and skilled performer will be able to train
      herself to imitate, for instance, those involuntary contortions of
      the face that a human subject makes upon awaking from sleep; the
      acquisition and willed reproduction of such normally involuntary
      forms of motility is a large part of an actor's /mÃ(c)tier./ I am not
      claiming that Viola's actors are in control of or consciously
      experience the finer shifts in their musculature during the
      in-between phases the video exposes, but rather that such shifts
      are experienced somatically and remain accessible, under certain
      conditions, as movement material from which performances--and even
      cultural signifiers--can later be made.


            "on the basis of the animal's embodied history"

  15. The muscular dynamics I perceive could be seen to belong to what
      Merleau-Ponty calls the "autonomous" body, the "prepersonal" body
      that "gears itself" or "cleaves to" the world, even before the
      subject assumes a perceptual, cognitive, sexual, or emotional
      attitude toward it (Phenomenology 97). For Merleau-Ponty, as for
      Bergson, there is always a crucial connection between affect (that
      which is felt) and movement (that which is performed), that is,
      between the anticipatory, protentive attitudes and the nascent
      motor actions the body, cleaving to the world, prepares to make.
      The clenching of the brow and the twitching of the cheek do not
      only express an indefinable emotion; they are also elements of a
      nascent motor project, one that contributes to the realization of
      intentions on the order of the kinetic. The body's sensations of
      itself (its "self-affections") may indeed, as Hansen states,
      provide a constant flow casting itself forward before the actual
      initiation of activity (in the protentive moment); however, the
      body also has its own intentionality, which is "essentially turned
      toward action" upon the world (Bergson 16). This motor
      intentionality (or what Merleau-Ponty sometimes calls a "motor
      project") relies for its execution on already acquired skills, the
      "I cans," that a situated, socialized body is capable of
      performing. For Merleau-Ponty, the moving body has a prior claim
      on the world, or rather, the world demands movement of the body,
      and this incontrovertible exigency produces movement patterns that
      will determine--as actualized gesture in the present but also as a
      history of gesturing in the past--the production of the
      unpredictable motor response.

  16. Recent research in cognitive psychology and neurobiology tends to
      support Merleau-Ponty's schema, which subordinates all varieties
      of intention to the motor body. In a 2003 essay, the
      phenomenologically-oriented neuroscientist Francisco Varela
      asserts that movement is the trigger for all further perceptual,
      sensory, and affective activity: "Whenever /motion/ is an integral
      part of the lifestyle of a multicellular [organism]," he writes,
      "there is a corresponding development of a nervous system linking
      effector (muscles, secretion) and sensory surfaces (sense organs,
      nerve endings)" (89).[17 <#foot17>] Varela takes it as axiomatic
      that "cognition depends on the kinds of experience that come from
      having a body with various sensorimotor capacities . . .
      themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological and cultural
      /context/" ("Reenchantment" 329). This context is composed of the
      kinetic dispositions of the animate body (the biological context)
      combined with its history of realized movements. Protention, on
      the neural level, he explains further, is "incoherent or chaotic
      activity in fast oscillations . . . until the cortex settles into
      a global electrical pattern . . . selectively binding a set of
      neurons in transcient aggregate . . . a creative form of enacting
      significance /on the basis of the animal's embodied history/"
      (333; emphasis added).

  17. What Varela suggests here is that the sensorimotor capacities of
      the body are /not/ entirely free and independent but rather
      underwritten by neural circuits laid down by past actions ("the
      animal's embodied history"). At the same time, however, there is
      creativity in the act of making significant (or making significant
      in a different way) a past action with respect to the situation at
      hand. Varela hypothesizes that when the subject is confronted with
      a new situation that does not appear to conform to a previous one
      (and that therefore might not be resolved by rehearsing past
      actions), the neural circuits suffer what he calls a
      "microbreakdown." During this "microbreakdown," or neural
      reorganization, the system hesitates, searches among a "myriad of
      possibilities," multiple ways of creating new aggregates,
      connections, circuits, and eventually, behaviors. What is called
      upon here, though, is a creativity that is partial and responsive,
      still enchained by the kinetic dispositions and realized gestural
      routines (the "embodied history") of the organism itself. Neural
      connections are not made in a vacuum, Varela asserts, but instead
      with reference to the organism's physiological possibilities for
      flexion and its acquired "I cans." The motor resolution to the
      "microbreakdown" is always performed within a cultural,
      intersubjective context. The number of possibilities for realized
      neural connection, albeit extensive, is nonetheless limited by the
      pressure of the social, the requirement that the movement be a
      legible (appropriate) interpretation of an environmental
      challenge. Thus, when Viola asks, "is it possible to express
      emotions without the movement of the face?" he is asserting, as is
      Varela, what one contemporary philosopher has called "the primacy
      of movement."[18 <#foot18>] To this extent, Viola adds his voice
      to a growing chorus of cognitive scientists, such as Varela, and
      developmental psychologists, such as Daniel Stern, who have
      actively sought to extend and corroborate experimentally the
      tradition of phenomenology inaugurated by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.

  18. Stern and Varela are essential references here, for they both
      counter, in provocative ways, the current preference in new media
      theory for analyzing the role of affect rather than gesture in the
      exfoliating independence of the self. Addressing the relation
      between movement--in this case, the earliest gestures performed by
      the neo-natal infant--and the meanings these movements soon
      assume, Stern introduces in The Interpersonal World of the Infant
      a distinction between "vitality affects" and "categorical affects"
      that has proved significant for dance and new media theorists. The
      distinction is especially pertinent for analyzing the works of
      Viola, for it neatly summarizes the difference between a named
      emotion--the anger or joy the actor has been asked to perform--and
      the in-between gesticulation--twitching, trembling, or
      clenching--that I have been relating to a kinetic, motor order of
      action. Stern locates a domain of sensibility in the newborn
      infant that he associates with the infant's "vitality," its first
      interoceptive experiences in and outside of the womb. "Vitality
      affects" are the body's sensations of itself /as an animate form/,
      one that is constantly in movement.[19 <#foot19>] Stern spells out
      clearly that "vitality affects" are not "feelings" in the sense of
      "anger, fear, or rapture." Instead, "vitality affects" involve
      kinesthetic distinctions, such as between jerky and smooth, taut
      and relaxed, corresponding precisely to the clenching and
      releasing movements I pointed out in Viola's "Quintet of the
      Astonished." According to Stern, these kinesthetic discriminations
      are the true background of both cognition and affective (in the
      sense of emotional) experience. In The Interpersonal World of the
      Infant Stern proposes that "all mental acts . . . are accompanied
      by input from the body, including, importantly, internal
      sensations . . . . /The body is never doing nothing/" (xvii;
      emphasis added). According to Stern, the motor body is at every
      moment supporting and informing mental processes in some way, by
      assuming or holding a posture, by displacing itself in space, by
      contracting or relaxing its muscles. "Envision Rodin's Thinker,"
      he proposes:

          He sits immobile, posing his head on his hand and an elbow on
          his knee. True, he is not moving, but there is extraordinary
          tension in his posture, suggesting active, intense
          proprioceptive feedback from almost every muscle group. This
          feedback, along with the thinker's presumably heightened
          arousal, provides the background feeling against which his
          specific thoughts are etched. (xvii-xviii) 

  19. For Stern, then, "background feeling" is produced by "intense
      proprioceptive feedback" and kinesthetic sensation ("extraordinary
      tension"), not necessarily by /emotional/ tone.[20 <#foot20>].
      Stern's kinesthetic and proprioceptive "background" can be
      productively compared to what Merleau-Ponty calls
      "/praktognosia/," or kinesthetic background, a non-cognitive (or
      better, non-verbal) knowledge composed of signals the body
      receives all the time. These "body signals" are received in the
      womb, in the crib, seated in a chair: they issue from what Stern
      calls an "as-yet-unspecified self," they are the "background music
      of an autonomous body that, under certain circumstances, can
      become louder and enter our awareness" (xviii). These signals are
      indeed a type of affect, but they are related more to motor
      intentions than to formulated feelings or desires. If one of
      Viola's actors were to become aware of the tension in her
      shoulders (even while concentrating on the emotion the tension
      accompanied), she would be accessing the normally muted
      "background feeling" underlying her thoughts and emotions. (And it
      is only by focusing her attention on such a kinetic arousal or
      "vitality affect" that she might develop the capacity to repeat
      the movement voluntarily.) Although vitality affects eventually
      become linked to specific emotions, the tension in the shoulders
      could conceivably be experienced as just that: a rapprochement of
      the shoulder blades at a particular spot on the upper back. As
      Stern points out, our movements, before we attach meanings to them
      (or, more accurately, before meanings are attached to our
      movements in an intersubjective milieu), are indeed capable of
      providing us with a rich somatic awareness of executing them.
      Executing movements, then, can allow us not only to feel emotions
      but also to feel ourselves in the act of performing them. The
      performance of emotion through motor action renders a kinesthetic
      knowledge of what it feels like to move as well as a heightened
      sensitivity to our motor projects. Somatic attention to movement
      qualities can bring us back into contact with embodied
      "proto-signification" before it acquires what Merleau-Ponty calls
      a "figurative significance" or emotional charge (Phenomenology
      225).[21 <#foot21>]

  20. "Vitality affects" precede "categorical emotions," according to
      Stern; initially, an amplified somatic awareness is, Stern
      conjectures, the only type of awareness the neonatal has. It
      precedes full-fledged consciousness of self yet it is the basis
      upon which all future experiences of emotion and acts of cognition
      will be built. For this reason vitality affects are different from
      the more culturally-inflected "categorical emotions" that Darwin
      identified. Vitality affects are the earliest and most primitive
      cultural organization of the sensorimotor apparatus. The "emergent
      self" that entertains these affects is precisely that: emergent,
      in the process of being constituted as a distinctive, bounded,
      socialized body according to "embodied schemata" developed with
      slight differences by each culture.[22 <#foot22>] It is important
      to note that for Stern, the movements the human body performs and
      the vitality affects with which these movements are associated,
      undergo almost from birth some degree of cultural organization, a
      point to which we shall have occasion to return. Unlike Hansen,
      who insists on the radical openness of the sensorimotor body to
      situational contingencies, Stern recognizes the extent to which
      cultural patterning imprints itself upon even the earliest
      gropings of the human infant. Stern observes, however, that while
      "vitality affects" are associated primarily with the "emergent"
      subjectivity of the infant, they nonetheless remain available to
      humans throughout their adult lives, albeit in a less pure, more
      semanticized form. In a formulation relevant to my later argument,
      Stern proposes that under certain conditions we may become aware
      of these "elusive qualities" of kinesis, such as "explosive,"
      "surging," "fleeting," and "fading away" (Stern 54). As in the
      case of the actor's /mÃ(c)tier/, layers of sensorimotor organization
      that are normally inaccessible ("pre-reflexive") can at times
      become the matter of a reflexive consciousness. The "categorical"
      and the "vital," the culturally meaningful and the kinesthetically
      meaningful, are constantly in a relation that can be revealed
      through the application, as we shall see, of specific techniques.


            groping through the space of the present

  21. Turning to "Anima," another installation from "The Passions" (see
      Figure 3), we can see how Viola addresses, artistically, Stern's
      distinction between the categorical and the vital, emotions and
      kinesthetic experience.

      Figure 3
      *Figure 3: "Anima"
      Bill Viola, 2001*
      Used by permission of the artist.

      In this color video triptych, three actors express by gesture four
      categorical emotions--joy, sorrow, anger, and fear--but at a
      technologically decelerated pace that reveals the "in-between"
      gesticulations, the constant movement or aliveness, linking one to
      the next.[23 <#foot23>] Recorded in a single take, "Anima"
      originally lasted one minute; extended through digital
      manipulation, the finished piece is comprised of over eighty-one
      minutes of playback time. Strangely, the name "Anima" evokes the
      categorical, fixed posture, rather than the vital, or
      forever-in-continuous-motion. At first glance, "Anima" would seem
      to refer us either to the word "soul" or else to an equally
      transcendent register, that of Carl Jung's archetypal female,
      associated with the "humors," or moods and feelings. At the same
      time, however, "Anima" strongly suggests the word "animation." The
      tension in the title between "Anima" as archetypal fixity and
      "Anima" as pure mobility is reflected in the piece itself, which
      involves a set of emoting (rather than talking) heads.

  22. As Hansen observes in "The Time of Affect," the faces in "Anima"
      appear to be "registering an overabundance of affective
      information" (594). But while these faces may indeed be
      supersaturated with emotion, engaged in displaying "interstitial
      microstages of affectivity," they also unveil a surprising
      diversity of movement possibilities available to the human face.
      Again, whereas I am struck by the lugubrious or sudden shifts in
      the underlying muscle tone of the faces, Hansen remains fixated on
      their "emotional tone" (587). To Hansen's eye, Viola's
      technologically manipulated playbacks bring us to confront a
      "constitutive vitality" (613) in excess of our perceptible
      emotional states. But if we are to remain faithful to the
      dialectics of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach--as well
      as to Stern's insistence on the "emergent" semantics of
      kinesthesia--then contact with our "constitutive vitality,"
      whether visual or somatic, would be strictly impossible. In
      existential terms, there is no lived vitality purified of all
      socialization, no life-force that could be manifested by an
      actor--or seized by a spectator--that wasn't already organized
      into recognizable expressions, or gestural routines. The form of
      vitality that the actors might be experiencing in these
      "in-between" states has to be, in Stern's and Merleau-Ponty's
      view, an /emergent/ signification, a motility in the process of
      being shaped by the cultural (expressive) weight it will soon bear
      and toward which it is ineluctably moving. To give just one
      example drawn from "Anima," the play of rippling muscles on the
      actor's cheeks might not be immediately equivalent to any one of
      the categorical emotions the actors were asked to reproduce.
      However, these (as yet) non-taxonomized micro-gestures, these
      in-between phases through which the muscles pass, are nevertheless
      already directed toward, /moving toward/, the legible gestures
      between which they fall. To that extent, they remain elements of
      skilled practice, points on a movement continuum that the gesture,
      as sign, splits into fragments.

  23. It is entirely plausible that during the performance of a gesture
      such as a pout or a grin, that is, during the in-between phases we
      witness in "Anima," there occur any number of microbreakdowns,
      moments when the features of the face (the continuously rippling
      muscles) could depart on alternative motor paths. The execution of
      the gesture could thus be seen in Husserl's terms as a layered
      instant composed of both retentions--the body's grasp on that
      which was just performed--and protentions--the body's grasping for
      that which it could enact in the future. Merleau-Ponty's
      contribution to the phenomenology of embodiment could be said to
      lie precisely here, in the application of Husserl's paradigm of
      time consciousness to motor, rather than to cognitive,
      intentionalities. Merleau-Ponty understands movement to be, like
      thought, shot through with retentive patterning, the sedimentation
      of previously executed gestural routines, and at the same time
      future-oriented, groping through the space of the present in
      search of those movements that will best address the demands of
      the next lived moment.

  24. In kinetic terms, however, this does not mean, as Hansen would
      have it, that the protentive, anticipatory element of the lived
      present "intends the new /prior to any impression or perceptual
      present/" (New Philosophy 252).[24 <#foot24>] Merleau-Ponty is
      clear on this point: protention can only prepare for the future by
      relying on the actions of the past. (What counts as this past,
      however, still needs to be defined.) In Varela's view, protention,
      as an activity of the neural system, has to depend on "already
      established circuits, each of which is generated by gestures the
      human animal has the resources to perform. Although Varela wishes
      to maintain the creative moment in the neural grasping toward "a
      myriad of possibilities," he concedes that it is "out of the
      constraints of the situation and the recurrence of history, [that]
      a single one is selected" ("Reenchantment" 334). In other words,
      the continuum of rippling facial muscles will be tamed into a
      legible grimace or smile. Merleau-Ponty is even more restrictive
      in this regard, for he adds that constraints are not only cultural
      (the facial gesture must be legible) but biological as well: that
      is, constraints derive both from "the situation" and from the
      nature of the animate form, the anatomical capacities for certain
      types of ambulation and joint flexion that are reflected in the
      varieties of neural connection that can be made.

  25. Ultimately, what we witness in "The Passions" is the pull of two
      forces, each of which contributes to the uniqueness and yet
      repeatability of the gesture. The "vital" and the "categorical"
      are linked together in decelerated video images: on the one hand,
      the in-between movement that Merleau-Ponty dubs a
      "protosignification," such as a twitch or a tremble, and, on the
      other, a fully legible signification, an iterable, acquired
      gesture, such as a beaming grin. My own viewing of the
      installations reveals not a body freed from "I cans," not a mass
      of "vitality as such," but rather a motor body in the process of
      organizing itself within an intersubjective situation to play the
      role to which it has been assigned. After all, what we are looking
      at in "Anima" is a troupe of actors who were told to imitate a
      given set of nameable emotions. The things their faces do may not
      always be subject to classification, but the salient point is that
      their in-between muscle movements are nonetheless part of the
      body's directedness toward the performance of a certain task:
      here, the emoting of nameable emotions according to established
      (aestheticized, perhaps even commercialized) modes of
      communicating them.


            /the hold of the /habitus

  26. If we take Merleau-Ponty seriously, then we have to conclude that
      the moving body cannot be captured, by any technology whatsoever,
      in an entirely non-oriented state for the reason that it is always
      in the process of moving toward socially meaningful gestures in an
      intersubjective milieu. Making meaning, for Merleau-Ponty, is
      inescapable, but paradoxically it is also an acquired skill. Such
      skills, or "I cans," are the way an organism "gears itself" to an
      environment, the way it makes this environment meaningful in the
      first place.[25 <#foot25>] Without a defined set of motor
      capacities establishing our proprioceptive and kinesthetic
      being-in-space, the world around us lacks meaning /for our body./
      According to Merleau-Ponty, then, affects are epiphenomena of
      movement, and not the reverse: "Our bodily experience of movement
      is not a particular case of knowledge" Merleau-Ponty insists; "it
      provides us with a way of access to the world and the object, with
      a '/praktognosia,/' which has to be recognized as original and
      primary" (Phenomenology 162). Merleau-Ponty thus provides a
      convincing understanding of protention as drawing not from a self
      "prior to any impression" but rather from "/praktognosia/," the
      body's embodied knowledge, a resource of "I cans" that cast before
      us a set of movement possibilities capable of making sense of a
      given world. For Merleau-Ponty, we are only "open" to the
      unpredictable arrangement of circumstances because we have
      autonomous bodily functions--such as breathing, focusing the eyes,
      and grasping with the hands--that "gear" us to an environment.
      This paradox is central to a rigorous, dialectical phenomenology,
      the paradox that we are only "free" because we are capable of
      being enchained, that we can only see because anatomy, training,
      and experience cause us to see a certain way (139).

  27. For Merleau-Ponty, what makes us capable of spontaneity is not the
      limitless capacity of the neural system to create new movements
      but rather the limitless capacity of the neural system to connect
      the movements human anatomy allows, to enchain human possibilities
      of kinesis in new ways.[26 <#foot26>] "Human" always includes both
      anatomical and social elements. As we have seen, it is impossible
      for Merleau-Ponty to imagine a movement entirely pure of cultural
      inflection simply because such a movement (even an autonomous one)
      is never performed outside of an intersubjective space. The
      "freedom" to innovate, to produce "the unpredictable" and "the
      new," then, should be seen to derive not from a projection of
      "emotional tone" ahead of bodily performance and beyond learned
      response; instead, such "freedom" could be attributed to the
      untapped movement potentials of the human animate form, potentials
      that are emergent and in the course of being explored. On this
      reading, the subject's motor body does not contain limitless new
      ways of moving but rather new ways of moving that have not yet
      been organized by /a single culture./ The subject's body knows
      more about movement, both as kinetic possibility and kinesthetic
      experience, than any one cultural /habitus/ allows the subject to
      name. We could imagine, for instance, that at least some of the
      involuntary facial contortions produced by the actors in "Anima"
      derive from movement potentials consistent with the human kinetic
      disposition that have not yet been invested with cultural meaning.
      But they could conceivably achieve the status of meaningful,
      voluntarily produced gestural signs in a culture other than our
      own. These ways of moving (and the neural connections underlying
      them) might be inscribed in a /habitus/, but they are nonetheless
      inscribed on a deeper, phylogenetic level, on the level of the
      kinetic dispositions of bipedal anatomy. This in no way implies an
      a-historical biological determinism for, as Merleau-Ponty
      repeatedly states in the late lectures in Nature, the explicit
      limits of bipedal anatomy remain unknown and subject to continuing
      exfoliation in an intersubjective milieu.

  28. It is significant, of course, at what point a gestural routine (an
      "I can," habit, or skill) intervenes in the acculturation of the
      body. As anthropologists from Mauss to Bourdieu have observed, a
      gestural routine learned early on can influence in seemingly
      inescapable ways the body's motor being.[27 <#foot27>] Later
      training and observation, however, might eventually allow us
      access to alternative movement capacities, options that will
      themselves be limited by the personal history of the singular
      body, its injuries and the peculiar shape of its bones. Many of
      those movement possibilities exist as virtual pathways, movement
      logics that could be pursued, even within the gestural routines we
      already possess.[28 <#foot28>] Most of the time, as Drew Leder has
      remarked, the subject remains ignorant of kinesthetic feedback and
      therefore of the alternative logics the body might pursue.
      Following the lead of Heidegger, Leder calls the normative state
      of the body "/ecstasis/," a condition in which we execute gestural
      routines with the sole intention of accomplishing specific tasks
      (like smiling). But the awareness of movement is not eradicated by
      its "absenting"; instead, this awareness merely recedes into the
      "background" (Leder 21), potentially available to be called up
      again. In the wake of Leder, dance ethnographer J. Lowell Lewis
      has proposed that situations of skill acquisition are particularly
      ripe with occasions for heightened kinesthetic awareness, and thus
      provide a more immediate contact with both the socially acquired
      "I cans" and the movement possibilities they fail to privilege.
      "The hold of the /habitus/ is not absolute," writes dance theorist
      Deidre Sklar; in fact, that hold may be "broken, inviting opening
      beyond routine." Against Bourdieu's objection that anything beyond
      the /habitus/ cannot be an intentional object of consciousness,
      Leder, Sklar, and Lewis maintain that this "beyond" can, through
      the application of culturally-elaborated practices, become an
      intentional object of /motor/ consciousness.[29 <#foot29>]

  29. It is thus arguable that normally absented motor intentions, those
      nascent motor actions never fulfilled but fleetingly proposed, are
      precisely what we witness in "Anima" and "Quintet of the
      Astonished" at the moment when the actors pass from one emotional
      expression to the next. That is, these actors are drawing on a
      kinesthetic "background," a continuum of motility that they will
      eventually parse or differentiate into gestures we recognize as
      fully meaningful in our shared cultural context. Clearly, Viola's
      subjects are not in the process of learning a new skill, and thus
      they are not necessarily exercising a heightened consciousness of
      what their bodies, at every stage, are doing. Yet the camera
      recovers the consciousness of a process that the subjects
      themselves may not have, a consciousness of a process through
      which the body discovers within itself a movement, a virtual "I
      can," that is not immediately exploited but that could eventually
      be bent to the service of a meaningful cultural performance. It is
      during the transitions between recognizable gestures that the
      body's history emerges as a resource for kinesthetic experience,
      motor action, and, in the case of expressive gestures, signifying
      power. What Viola's videos show is that legible, categorical forms
      of expression (gestural signifiers for particular emotions)
      possess, when performed, a quantity of motility that /exceeds/ the
      recognizable form of the signifier, the parsed gestural sign.

  30. The videos of "The Passions" series also show that this excess
      motility, the body's "vitality," is not free of the structures of
      signification, the legible forms and routines, toward which it is
      moving and into which it will eventually resolve. For this reason,
      it is not possible to identify a movement that is not traveling
      toward the legible form it will ultimately embrace. The tension
      between the categorical and vital, the legible and its excess, is
      also a tension between conventional meaning and what Merleau-Ponty
      calls "gestural meaning." The term "gestural meaning" is a
      catechresis for a meaning that falls between iterable terms and
      that opens up a new space in the system of signs. The "gestural
      meaning" of a movement is that element of its phenomenalization
      that troubles the structures of signification in which it is
      caught, not, however, because "gestural meaning" is outside of
      these structures entirely, but because it is in the process of
      conforming to them. Arguably, movement practitioners are
      especially attuned to this gestural excess, the "beyond" of
      routine, and can accordingly intervene more successfully in the
      process of conformity, derailing--if only briefly--the resolution
      of kinesis into sign. Telling a story about skills with skills (as
      Gregory Bateson might put it), the trained movement practitioner
      may appropriate to a greater extent than other people do the
      kinetic possibilities of the individual body, redirecting movement
      toward sequences previously undefined.[30 <#foot30>] What we see
      in Viola's videos, however, is not the choreographer's dramatic
      and purposive reinvention of the moving body, but the material out
      of which such reinventions are made.


            the architecture of the hand

  31. If we insist on naming the "in between" gesticulations perceptible
      to viewers of "Anima" "microstages of affectivity," that is, if we
      emphasize affect over kinesis, then we imply that at every moment
      the filmed subjects move they are /expressing/ rather than /doing/
      something with their bodies. But what if we were to pull our focus
      out of the affectivity we think we see as we regard Viola's images
      and retrain that focus on the gesticulations themselves? Could the
      lived present then be treated as primarily a movement phenomenon,
      as I believe Merleau-Ponty wished it to be, a phenomenon to which
      movement analysis should be applied? How would this change in
      emphasis affect our approach to Viola's performing bodies? What
      other works would have to fall within our purview if we were to
      take this analytical turn, and how else might we want to look at
      them?

  32. It is noteworthy that the installation in "The Passions" series
      that has received the least critical attention is "Four Hands" of
      2001 (see Figure 4).

      Figure 4
      *Figure 4: "Four Hands," Bill Viola.*
      Used by permission of the artist.

      Here Viola mounts four small LCD flat-panel display screens on a
      shelf (the dimensions are 9" x 51" x 8"). On each screen Viola
      projects moving images of a pair of hands: those of Bill Viola's
      son, his wife, his own hands, and the hands of an elderly actress
      named Lois Stark (intended, perhaps, to evoke his mother who had
      recently passed away). The Getty catalogue informs us that "Four
      Hands" was shot with a black-and-white low-light film. In the
      frame, we see only the subdued iridescence of taut or creased skin
      as it moves over the spiny bones of the hands. Peter Sellars
      describes the scene beautifully in "Bodies of Light," one of the
      critical essays included in the Getty volume: a "series of
      gestures," he writes, "are shared across the 'four
      hands'"--really, four /pairs/ of hands--"in sequencing that
      remains slightly elusive. Sometimes a gesture initiated by a son
      is taken up by the mother; sometimes the mother is teaching and
      leading her son" (161).

  33. Although in the finished work the emphasis is clearly on the
      transmission of symbolic gestures from one generation to the next,
      Viola tells us that his initial inspiration came from images of
      isolated individuals in the act of gesturing, such as "The
      Annunciation" by Dieric Bouts of the Netherlands (see Figure 5),
      the seventeenth-century English chirogrammatic tables of John
      Bulwer in which hands are cropped and placed into grids (see
      Figure 6, engraving from Chirologia, or the Natural Language of
      the Hand, of 1644), and paintings of Hindu and Buddhist mudras
      (see Figure 7). Viola's account of his sources has somewhat misled
      his critics into believing that the sharing of gestures in "Four
      Hands" underscores their universal quality as opposed to what
      Sellars clearly seizes: the passing down of a gestural /habitus/
      from mother to son.

      Figure 5
      *Figure 5: "The Annunciation"*
      Dieric Bouts, 1450-55
      Â(c) The Getty Museum

      Figure 6
      *Figure 6: /Chirologia/, 1644.*
      John Bulwer, Chirologia; Or the Natural Language of the Hand.

      Figure 7
      *Figure 7: Hindu Mudras.*
      Bill Viola: The Passions (253)

      In his own comments on "Four Hands," Viola recounts how he
      determined which gestures to include, explaining that he sought to
      display those that are found in many cultures and religious
      traditions. He had been struck, for instance, by the resemblance
      between the depicted gestures of Christ and those of Buddha, but
      wanted to lift them out of their narrative contexts, present them
      solely as embodied signs capable of evoking on their own the
      intense emotions with which they seemed to be infused. Viola
      asserts that certain gestures are universal and innate, that human
      physiognomy, like that of animals, assumes shapes that signify in
      ways determined by genetic endowment rather than cultural
      conditioning.[31 <#foot31>] He does not entertain the theory that
      different cultures might provide alternative gestural vocabularies
      for the expression of a particular emotion, a theory that is
      advanced, in contrast, by Merleau-Ponty, for whom culture and
      nature are always clasped in an inextricable embrace. However, in
      "Four Hands" Viola's claim that the meaning of performed gestures
      is universal and innate is undercut by the scenes of transmission
      the video registers. Embedded in the sequential structure of the
      piece is the implication that such gestures are transmitted and
      acquired in an intersubjective setting, as a result of
      acculturation, miming, apprenticeship, and dialogic response. The
      mother and son, especially, appear to be miming each other's hand
      gestures, communicating in a motor language that develops through
      exchange, performance, appropriation, and variation. The unity of
      the two hands is broken by responsive differing, just as in
      intersubjective situations two subjects might perform the same
      gestures but in slightly modified ways, qualitatively contrasting
      with, replying to, the dynamics, velocity, and tonicity of the
      other's performance. The transmission scene of "Four Hands"
      implies that gestural vocabularies are at least partially acquired
      (rather than received at birth) and derive at least some of their
      meaning from the context in which they are performed. "Four Hands"
      illustrates perfectly Merleau-Ponty's contention that no sign is
      completely divorced from a biological substrate or immune to
      cultural re-shaping. The separation between pairs of hands (each
      pair appears on a linked but detached screen) suggests the
      subject's independence; he or she has chosen to express a
      signification in this manner, and thus the gesture must bear some
      relationship to its symbolic meaning if it is chosen for that
      purpose so frequently and by so many hands. At the same time, the
      easily discernable orange cables connecting one screen to the next
      like an umbilical cord foreground the /inter/dependence of the
      subjects and their gestural responses: Would the son make the same
      gestures as the mother if they were not linked by apprenticeship,
      furnished with occasions for the teaching and learning of
      expressive means?

  34. Ultimately, the architecture of "Four Hands" is ambiguous,
      allowing both readings their due: the performed gestures can be
      seen as necessary and innate or, alternatively, conventional and
      acquired. But what "Four Hands" demonstrates unequivocally is that
      the in-between microgestures, displayed during the interval and
      captured by the eye are not undirected "waves of affect" or
      "emotional flows." In contrast with the highly dramatic--even
      melodramatic--facial and upper-body gesticulations of the actors
      in "Anima," the quieter, monochromatic hand gestures performed in
      "Hands" announce far more clearly their approaching conformity to
      the categorical and the legible gestures of established gestural
      sign languages or mudras. Thus it is more difficult to claim that
      the "in-between" movements are fully free of cultural
      conditioning, an illustration of protention inventing movement
      without any recourse to the sedimented past. When we watch the
      hands moving in and out of defined, chiseled forms, we become
      aware of the activity of hands not as they search freely in a
      limitless continuum for the next pose, but rather as they move
      through a catalogue of nascent motor actions /toward/ the
      categorical, legible pose. "Four Hands" exemplifies the thesis
      that Viola's work reveals not vitality as such, the "feeling of
      being alive" in some abstract form, but instead motility in its
      dialectical essence, at once illegible kinesis and
      "proto-signification," the body as it edges slowly toward the
      codified expression of a culturally established, arbitrary, and
      conventional meaning.

  35. More than any other work in the exhibition, then, "Four Hands"
      exacerbates the tension between legibility on the one hand and, on
      the other, the ambiguous qualities of kinesis that exceed codified
      gestural forms. Because we are looking at hands, not at faces, we
      tend not to experience an intense affective identification with
      the image but instead engage in a detached, aesthetic
      contemplation of the architecture created by muscle, flesh, and
      bone. That is, in "Four Hands" the potential for a
      de-anthropomorphizing gaze is exponentially increased because the
      hands stand alone; they have been cropped from the expressive
      faces which, as Deleuze has argued, prove to be such a strong
      magnet for human affect. Once affect is not the theme and intense
      affective engagement no longer the solicited response, Viola's
      works can reveal a story about indetermination as a set of nascent
      /motor/ actions drawing from kinesthetic memories that cast our
      next move before us. Viola's achievement is to have succeeded in
      capturing /praktognosia/ itself, the kinesthetic "background" to
      being that Merleau-Ponty identifies with the gestural, situated
      meaning of our acts.


            the rewarded destinations of the face

  36. In conclusion, I want to return to the question raised at the
      beginning of this essay concerning the source of the unpredictable
      and the new. If, as I have been arguing, self-affection is both
      triggered and hemmed in by the culturally specific gestural
      routines on which we rely to act, then to what process or force
      can we attribute innovation, resistance, and the emergence of the
      previously unknown? If not affect, then what? A partial answer is
      indicated by Merleau-Ponty when he turns to the issue of gestural
      conditioning (the acquisition of a /habitus/) in the chapter
      entitled "The Body as Expression, and Speech." Here, Merleau-Ponty
      offers the example of the infant's smile as one of the earliest
      instances in which the given, autonomous body first confronts the
      pressure of cultural norms. When the smile is proffered, he notes,
      it is merely one gestural possibility among others emerging from
      the bone and muscular structure of the human face. But in an
      intersubjective setting, this movement possibility takes on a
      specific meaning; under normal conditions, the infant who repeats
      the now meaningful smile will receive reinforcement from
      surrounding adults: "a contraction of the throat, a sibilant
      emission of air between the tongue and teeth, a certain way of
      bringing the body into play suddenly allows itself to be invested
      with a /figurative/ [cultural rather than biological]
      /significance/ which is conveyed outside us" (Phenomenology 225).

  37. In this passage, Merleau-Ponty identifies a social dynamic that
      has been confirmed in more recent studies, such as those of the
      child developmental psychologist Andrew Meltzoff. In tests
      conducted with newborns, Meltzoff recounts, it was found that
      starting around twelve days after birth, infants regularly
      protrude the tongue "in imitation of an adult model" (qtd. in
      Sheets-Johnstone 247). Meltzoff claims that sticking out the
      tongue is something infants simply do from birth; it is one of
      their earliest "I cans," detached from an assigned meaning, the
      closest thing we know to a precultural reflex. Sticking out the
      tongue first appears to the infant as a feeling of movement (the
      movement of tongue on lips) and only later takes on cultural
      meaning as infants find their behavior repeated on the faces of
      their caregivers. Infants even begin a few days later to correct
      their ways of protruding the tongue; if at first they protrude the
      tongue in order to explore the tongue's dimensions and sensations,
      its "vitality affects" for their own sake, soon they will be
      seeking to approximate more exactly the behaviors they observe in
      others around them.[32 <#foot32>] Apparently, self-correction
      efforts inspired by the observation of others have the secondary
      effect of reducing the number of other gesticulations performed,
      or postures assumed; socially-motivated self-correction causes the
      muscles of the face (or body) to /tend toward/ the execution of
      only a certain, culturally-specific, even family-specific
      vocabulary of gestures. From very early on, then, the
      "in-betweens" (such as those we witness in Viola's "Passions"
      series) are not entirely free of cultural inflection; once even
      minimally socialized, the infant is less likely to engage in
      playful exploration of a fuller range of movement possibilities
      because only some of these possibilities have been experienced as
      culturally significant; only some of them have become the rewarded
      destinations of the face. However, that does not mean that, on the
      way to these destinations, the body has not passed through, or
      will not continue to pass through, many culturally non-invested
      gesticulations that could become, under the right circumstances,
      the movement matter of other types of performance. The process of
      correction that Meltzoff identifies implies that the body is born
      with a very extensive "motor power," as Merleau-Ponty puts it, a
      motor power capable of generating a host of gestures that will
      eventually have meanings and a host of gestures that will not.
      Further, and most importantly, every gesture that will be granted
      meaning in a cultural milieu will also, always, be merely another
      movement possibility, providing an experience of kinesis, a
      gestural materiality upon which "figurative significance" has
      contingently come to rest.

  38. Finally, Merleau-Ponty's discussion of infant language acquisition
      illustrates well the way in which kinesis, rather than affect
      alone, offers the possibility for gesticulatory innovations beyond
      the gestures prescribed by any one cultural system. In "Indirect
      Language and the Voices of Silence," Merleau-Ponty depicts
      language acquisition as a process of continual self-reduction, the
      "self" defined here as the vocal apparatus and its physiological,
      we might almost say material, possibilities of manipulation. "The
      important point," stresses Merleau-Ponty, "is that the phonemes
      are from the beginning variations of a unique speech apparatus,
      and that with them the child seems to have 'caught' the principle
      of a mutual differentiation of signs and at the same time to have
      acquired /the meaning of the sign/" ("Indirect Language" 40). If
      the child can grasp the difference, in an intersubjective setting,
      between "babbling" and sounds that bear intersubjective meaning,
      then this child knows /on a kinesthetic level/ how to do more than
      she will be required to do by any one given culture. The
      "principle" the child discovers is that a sound gains its meaning
      not purely from what it is, or purely from what it feels like to
      produce it, but rather from the way it differs from another sound.
      As well as learning the differential, conventional meaning of the
      phonetic clusters, then, the child also feels the not-yet
      classified or rewarded sensations produced by pronouncing these
      clusters, the qualitative continuum of movement she has been
      forced to segment into communicative or operational units. She has
      felt something that cultural representations do not allow her to
      store as perceptual image (or as nameable, categorical emotion)
      but only as motor memory, part of a "kinesthetic background" from
      which the future--as protentive projection--will later emerge.
      Physiological potentialities of the lips, throat, tongue, and
      vocal chords will be "repressed" (Merleau-Ponty's word) but they
      will remain /as prior inscription/ on the level of motor
      experience, that is, on the level of kinesthetic memory of past
      action. The child can draw on these lived "I cans" belonging not
      to culture but to the apparatus, if given the opportunity to do so.

  39. Perhaps inspired by Merleau-Ponty, Julia Kristeva also turns to
      infant language acquisition to explain the acculturated body's
      gesticulatory, expressive, and affective excess. In a clinical
      research experiment recorded in "Contraintes rythmiques et langage
      poÃ(c)tique," Kristeva studies the sounds produced by infants between
      four and six months of age. At this point, infants are engaged in
      a process of self-correction similar to that observed in
      Meltzoff's study on sticking out the tongue, only here, they try
      to shape (and parse) a continuum of unintelligible vocalizations
      into the significant phonemes of a single human language. With the
      help of audiotape, Kristeva trains her ear to hear the sounds /in
      between/ the phonemes of French, or, alternatively, Chinese (the
      cultural backgrounds of her clinical subjects). The sounds she
      hears in between recognizable phonemes belong to the extensive
      "motor power" of the human vocal apparatus, the physiology of
      which offers a range of sound-making movements capable of being
      conjugated into any one of the existing 6000 languages humans
      use--or even other languages not yet invented. And it is important
      to preserve this space of the /not-yet-invented/, the
      to-be-organized-into-culture, for, as Merleau-Ponty observes time
      and again, we do not know what nature beyond culture is. We do not
      even know what our own anatomy allows. "The psychophysiological
      equipment," underscores Merleau-Ponty, "leaves a great variety of
      possibilities open, and there is no . . . human nature finally and
      immutably given" (Phenomenology 219-20). On this reading, a human
      being's past, or "the animal's embodied history," as Varela puts
      it, includes culturally specific gestures acquired in infancy and
      skills learned later on, but also movements sketched out perhaps
      only once, available to the apparatus, the "equipment" with which
      we are born. All of these varieties of kinesis fall under
      Merleau-Ponty's capacious category of "I cans." The individual's
      motor repertory is thus not limitless, but it is certainly richer
      than any single culture can encode. We are a self-disclosing
      motility, the parameters of which undoubtedly exist but are not
      yet charted. They are certainly in excess of where each culture
      places them. This gestural excess, this "gesticulatory" excess of
      physical movement over cultural meaning is the protentive aspect
      of human being in time. It is this excessive, self-disclosing
      motility that, I suggest in conclusion, provides the conditions
      for the emergence of the unpredictable and the new.

  40. But to what extent can the neonatal or even prepersonal body play
      a role in creating new forms of motor actions once the /habitus/
      has left its mark? How can we become aware of our own "kinesthetic
      background," how can we reflect on the prereflexive self? Like
      Stern, Leder, Sklar and Lowell Lewis, Merleau-Ponty maintains that
      we indeed have numerous opportunities to return to and sensorily
      recapture the "vitality affects" or kinesthetic "background"
      investing our socially legible gestures with situated meaning.
      According to Merleau-Ponty, we can shift our attention from the
      meanings we are making to the kinesthetic sensation of making
      them, thereby revealing an alternative approach to the body as
      "proto-signification," a materiality upon which meanings will be
      inscribed. Merleau-Ponty refers to these moments as "dropping
      away," periods of extended attention to performance, when the
      semantic value of a word, for instance, recedes into the
      background and instead the "verbal gesticulation" is perceived as
      "a certain use made of my phonatory equipment" (Phenomenology
      469).[33 <#foot33>] If we can manage to separate ourselves
      momentarily from our semantic projects, not only do we hear the
      noise of the sound-clusters we call words, but, more importantly,
      we seize the cultural organization of sound /at the level of what
      it feels like, qualitatively, to produce it./

  41. Extending Merleau-Ponty's insight, the anthropologist Thomas J.
      Csordas has proposed that every culture offers its own set of
      "somatic modes of attention," skilled practices that encourage
      subjects to access this kinesthetic layer of knowledge and
      experience. "Somatic modes of attention," he writes, "are
      culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one's body in
      surroundings that include the embodied presence of others"
      (244).[34 <#foot34>] (His examples range from yoga and meditation
      to love-making, charismatic healing, and learning to dance.)[35
      <#foot35>] What Merleau-Ponty dubs "the tacit /cogito/, myself
      experienced by myself," is available through culture's own
      technologies of self-monitoring, somatic modes of attention that
      are themselves, of course, limited by the languages in which they
      are couched. We can only have a framed apprehension of that which
      resists already available cultural frames.

  42.

      Perhaps there is no complete escape from acculturation, no
      blissful "dropping away" from acquired routines. Paradoxically,
      however, each culture provides routines to counter routines, a set
      of procedures to reveal the gap in another set. Through slow
      motion technologies or somatic techniques that make us more aware
      of the continuum from which gestures have been cut, it is possible
      to increase one's sensitivity to the gap, to lie in wait for the
      emergence of that short but pregnant in-between, or interval, that
      the next step on the chain both renders possible and leaves
      behind. The freedom to produce the new and the unpredictable
      should not be attributed to protention as a total, unalloyed
      openness to the unknown, a projection of "emotional tone" or
      affect ahead of bodily performance and beyond learned response.
      Instead, such freedom to innovate should be seen to derive from
      our rich mnemonic store of socially acquired "I cans" as well as
      the proto-signifying resources of bipedal anatomy, that is, from
      an as yet unexhausted set of kinetic dispositions that are in the
      course of being explored, either to be pressed into the service of
      already established gesture vocabularies or, in privileged cases
      such as choreography, to be expanded into a logic of their own.
      Viola's works are indeed precious, for they expose alternatives to
      conditioning that emerge as we move from the past toward the
      always already will be.

      / Department of French and Italian
      University of California, Irvine
      cjnoland@uci.edu /

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          Notes

      1 <#ref1>. These lectures have been collected and published in La
      Nature: notes, cours du CollÃ(r)ge de France.

      2 <#ref2>. Despite Michel Serres's claim in Les Cinq sens that
      Merleau-Ponty largely ignored sensation and thus the role of the
      sense organs in shaping understanding, most philosophers, dance
      theorists, and anthropologists would agree that Merleau-Ponty is
      preoccupied with the question of the subject's sensual engagement
      with the world. With respect to kinesthesia in particular,
      Merleau-Ponty was influenced by Husserl's ideas concerning the
      primacy of movement and kinesthetic sensation. For a helpful
      rendering of these ideas in English, see Varela, "The Specious
      Present," and Petit.

      3 <#ref3>. See especially "CÃ(c)zanne's Doubt" and "Indirect Language
      and the Voices of Silence." It could be objected that
      Merleau-Ponty confuses expressive facial gestures with
      instrumental gestures or gestural routines. But there is reason to
      approach both varieties of gesture as skills, a point Ingold has
      recently argued persuasively. Ingold insists that even "speaking
      should be treated as a variety of skilled practice" (292); for
      him, verbalizations and facial signs are expressive gestures that
      are culturally acquired rather than biologically innate.

      4 <#ref4>. The notion of the body "cleaving" to the world comes
      from Husserl; see Petit 220.

      5 <#ref5>. See especially Part I, chaps. 6-7; see also Le
      Bergsonisme.

      6 <#ref6>. Massumi is wonderfully suggestive in his treatment of
      movement, but he does not analyze specific movements or movement
      patterns and their relation to the production of sensation.

      7 <#ref7>. Bergson devotes a chapter to motor memory and its
      tendency to seek resemblances between past responses and present
      solicitations ("Of the Recognition of Images: Memory and the
      Brain," 77-131). He distinguishes motor memory (images of habits,
      or gestural routines, "lived and acted" [81]) from intellectual
      memory ("representations"). The former /enacts/ memory by
      directing the body toward a possible action, whereas the latter,
      which Bergson renames "attention," pictures a possibility in
      thought: "To call up the past in the form of an image, we must be
      able to withdraw ourselves from the action of the moment, we must
      have the power to value the useless, we must have the will to
      dream. Man alone is capable of such an effort" (83).

      8 <#ref8>. By "kinesthesia" is meant the body's sensation of its
      own movement. With reference to Schneider, Merleau-Ponty writes:
      "The patient either conceives the ideal formula for the movement
      or else he launches his body into blind attempts to perform it,
      whereas for the normal person every movement is, indissolubly,
      movement and consciousness of movement. This can be expressed by
      saying that for the normal person every movement has a
      /background/ [fond] and that the movement and its background are
      'moments of a unique totality'" (Phenomenology 127; emphasis
      added). Subsequent studies on this pathology have identified
      Schneider as the "de-afferented subject," one who lacks a "body
      schema" (another way of understanding what Merleau-Ponty means by
      kinesthetic "background"). See, in particular, the work of
      Gallagher and Cole. Hansen mobilizes their research to argue that
      contemporary new media artists amplify the body schema, rendering
      subjects more aware of the role of kinesthetic feedback in their
      actions; see Bodies in Code.

      9 <#ref9>. I am reducing here a very complicated argument in which
      Deleuze divides Bergson's "image" into three types: roughly, the
      "movement-image" (the first image of the stimulus filtered in such
      a way that the organism can react according to its interest); the
      "perception-image" (the response based on memories of previous
      actions); and the "affection-image" (the response based on
      interoceptive feedback). See Image-Mouvement 91-96. In
      L'Individuation psychique et collective, Gilbert Simondon recasts
      Bergson's tri-part schema in the following way: Bergson's first
      moment, in which potential movements are sketched out by the
      organism, becomes the unconscious ("a fundamental layer of the
      unconscious which is the subject's capacity to act" [/la capacitÃ(c)
      d'action du sujet/]); the second moment, in which affect mediates
      the response, becomes the subconscious ("the layer of the
      subconscious which is composed essentially of affectivity and
      emotion" [/affectivitÃ(c): et Ã(c)motivitÃ(c)/]); and the third moment, the
      end result, becomes consciousness, or the realized action (99).
      For Simondon, individuality is located in the second moment, the
      intermediary layer of subconscious affection. He therefore focuses
      his inquiry solely here: "An analysis of what we call psychic
      individuality must center on affectivity and emotion" [/Une
      analyse de ce que l'on peut nommer l'individualitÃ(c) psychique
      devrait donc Ã(tm)tre centre autour de l'affectivitÃ(c): et
      l'Ã(c)motivitÃ(c)/]). Accordingly, he neglects to consider "unconscious"
      kinetic potentials as constituting the very movement history of
      the subject, a history that I claim is equally central to the
      unique psychic and somatic composition of the subject. Nearly all
      of affect studies has emulated Simondon's approach, one supported
      by Deleuze's early work on Spinoza in which he separates
      "affections" (sense impressions) from "affects" (emotions) and
      privileges the former. See Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy:
      Spinoza.

      10 <#ref10>. For a full list of titles, see the Getty exhibition
      catalogue, Bill Viola The Passions; all further references cite
      this volume.

      11 <#ref11>. The actors--John Malpede, Weba Garretson, Tom
      Fitzpatrick, John Fleck, Dan Gerrity--sometimes grasp each other,
      but they remain wrapped up in their own emotional and physical space.

      12 <#ref12>. Ekman has found that technically "putting-on" facial
      gestures is a more effective way to create emotional states than
      is searching the soul for emotional equivalents, as in Method
      acting. See Ekman, Levenson, and Friesen, "Autonomic Nervous
      System Activity" and "Voluntary Facial Action." For an application
      of Ekman's ideas to the acting, see Schechner, "Magnitudes of
      Performance."

      13 <#ref13>. Weba Garretson, describing Viola's process in an
      interview (qtd. in Walsh 35).

      14 <#ref14>. For Hansen, affectivity "comprises a power of the
      body that cannot be assimilated to the habit-driven, associational
      logic governing perception" (7). As a "framing function" (8)
      belonging to the body at any moment in history, "affectivity" can
      help explain the surging forth of agency, innovation, and
      resistance within and despite the material conditions of culture,
      within and despite, that is, the standardizing regimes of power
      that have appeared so inescapably coercive to Judith Butler and to
      Michel Foucault. Differentiating his own view from those of
      Jonathan Crary and Gilles Deleuze, Hansen writes that "the frame
      in any [technologically produced] form," such as the photograph or
      the video signal, "cannot be accorded the autonomy Deleuze would
      give it since its very form (in any concrete deployment) reflects
      the demands of embodied perception, or more exactly, a
      historically contingent negotiation between technical capacities
      and the ongoing 'evolution' of embodied (human) perception.
      Beneath any concrete 'technical' image or frame lies what I shall
      call the framing function of the human body qua center of
      indetermination" (8). I am indebted to Hansen's critique of
      Deleuze, but I add that this frame is socially constructed as well
      as physiologically informed.

      15 <#ref15>. See Hansen's discussion of the face and its
      privileged relation to the communication of affect in "Affect as
      Interface." Hansen is clearly influenced here by Deleuze's
      discussion of the human face in Image-Mouvement.

      16 <#ref16>. See, for example, the blocking of the arms and torso
      in Bill Viola's "Silent Mountain" (2001), also included in "The
      Passions."

      17 <#ref17>. He continues: "/The fundamental logic of the nervous
      system is that of coupling movements with a stream of sensory
      modulations in a circular fashion/."

      18 <#ref18>. Sheets-Johnstone reads phenomenology (especially
      Husserl) in a way that both complements and complicates Hansen's
      own understanding of the relation between time consciousness and
      motility.

      19 <#ref19>. Stern understands affect differently from Deleuze,
      but captures Bergson's emphasis on pain and discomfort, qualities
      of sensation related to bodily states.

      20 <#ref20>. Stern is collapsing here a difference that some
      theorists chose to maintain between "kinesthesia" and
      "proprioception." The latter has more to do with being able to
      estimate the body's spatial orientation and position with respect
      to some external coordinate. For more on this distinction, see
      Pieron. Stern defines the emergent self with respect to a sense of
      constant movement, even if this movement is that of the organs.

      21 <#ref21>. "The knitting of the brows intended, according to
      Darwin, to protect the eye from the sun, or the narrowing of the
      eyes to enable one to see sharply, become component parts of the
      human act of meditation, and convey this to an observer"; the
      shift from a reflex motion to a signifying gesture is described by
      Merleau-Ponty as a moment when the body "suddenly allows itself to
      be invested with a /figurative significance/ which is conveyed
      outside us" (225).

      22 <#ref22>. The vitality affects that relay the body's sensations
      back to itself are not entirely pre-cultural but rather the first
      matter upon which cultural distinctions play. According to Stern
      (as well as Merleau-Ponty), the autonomous body is never available
      to us in its precultural purity, but we can, as I discuss in this
      essay, catch glimpses of its resonance in the "embodied schemata"
      by which it is caught and brought into cultural
      (perceptual/cognitive) being. On "embodied schemata" (smooth
      versus rough, up versus down) as early cultural imprinting, see
      the groundbreaking work of Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind.

      23 <#ref23>. The actors in "Anima" are Page Leong, John Fleck, and
      Henriette Brouwers. "Anima" was completed in 2000; it measures
      16-1/2" x 75" x 2" and is mounted on three LCD flat panels--small
      computers with the maker's name, logo, etc., covered by a frame.

      24 <#ref24>. Hansen continues: "The future is unknown, and
      therefore consciousness can only depend upon itself." Compare this
      to Massumi's conclusions in Parables of the Virtual, which are
      closer to mine:

          If the body were all and only in the here and now, unlooped by
          dopplerings, it would be cut off from its "was's," not to
          mention its "would have been's" and "may yet be's." How could
          a body develop habits and skills? Are these not pastnesses
          primed in the present for the future? . . . . A body does not
          coincide with its present. It coincides with its /potential/.
          The potential is the future-past contemporary with every
          body's change. (200) 

      25 <#ref25>. "Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the
      intermediary of the body," he states (Phenomenology 159).

      26 <#ref26>. For a reading of Merleau-Ponty (and phenomenology
      more generally) that supports my own, see Patocka. I thank Mark
      Hansen for directing me to this work, one which, as far as I have
      been able to ascertain, has not yet been translated into English.

      27 <#ref27>. See especially Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of
      Practice. One finds the same division between macro-conditioning
      and micro-conditioning in analyses by Brecht (see Brecht, Ihde,
      and Howes).

      28 <#ref28>. On the virtual body and its exfoliation, see Massumi
      and Gil.

      29 <#ref29>. For Bourdieu, bodily hexis is "embodied history,
      internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history" (The
      Logic of Practice 56).

      30 <#ref30>. This is how Bateson defines creativity.

      31 <#ref31>. Theorists of gesture still ask whether the meanings
      of certain facial expressions are consistent across cultures (and
      thus can be considered universal and innate). McNeill summarizes
      the relevant research up to 1992 in Hand and Mind: What Gestures
      Reveal About Thought; Kendon provides another overview in Gesture:
      Visible Action as Utterance that focuses on the relation between
      speaking and gesturing. See especially 327-54, where he discusses
      arguments offered by Ekman and Friesen, who follow Darwin in
      believing that expression of emotion is innate (1972), and those
      of Kita and Ozyürek and McNeill, who are convinced that culture
      plays a much larger role in determining how emotion is
      communicated through gestures. In contrast, Sheets-Johnstone
      claims in "Corporeal Archetypes and Power: Preliminary
      Clarification and Considerations of Sex" that there are indeed
      universal gestures; she draws on research in primate behavior to
      demonstrate that there are species-specific gestures universally
      employed in similar situations. These gestures can thus be seen as
      "natural," or biologically driven (in Body and Flesh).

      32 <#ref32>. Commenting on Meltzoff's study, Stern adds that blind
      infants will perform the same gestures as not-blind infants during
      the first few months, but when they do not have the experience of
      seeing these gestures mirrored in the faces of their caregivers
      they stop making them or make them at culturally inappropriate times.

      33 <#ref33>.

          One day I "caught on" to the word "sleet," much as one
          imitates a gesture, not, that is, by analyzing it and
          performing an articulatory or phonetic action corresponding to
          each part of the word as heard, but by hearing it as a single
          modulation of the world of sound, and because this acoustic
          entity presents itself as "something to pronounce" in virtue
          of the all-embracing correspondence existing between my
          perceptual potentialities and my motor ones . . . . This is
          why consciousness is never subordinated to empirical language,
          why languages can be translated and learned . . . . Behind the
          spoken /cogito/, the one which is converted into discourse and
          into essential truth, there lies a tacit /cogito/, myself
          experienced by myself. (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology 459) 

      34 <#ref34>. "The ways we attend to and with our bodies, and even
      the possibility of attending, are neither arbitrary nor
      biologically determined, but are culturally constituted" (246).

      35 <#ref35>. As Csordas points out, in "Techniques of the Body"
      Mauss proposes that there is a "somatic mode of attention
      associated with the acquisition of any technique . . . but this
      mode of attention recedes into the horizon once the technique is
      mastered" (245). The anthropologist J. Lowell Lewis also insists
      that the period of habit and skill acquisition is particularly
      rich: "one is constantly monitoring how it feels for the body to
      do what it is doing, trying out and evaluating different feelings,
      and measuring the effects of those feelings as action in the
      world" (229).


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