A Response to Gesto

A note of appreciation for Gesto, by dorothé Depeauw and Patrícia Bizzotto, which can be viewed here.

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In this remarkable work, Gesto, dorothé Depeauw and Patrícia Bizzotto have provided us with that rarest of things: a point of entry to the landscape of the Real. The concept of “gesture” carries certain connotations related to the body and especially to the making of a sign through movement. However, in approaching Gesto, we must take care in apprehending what kind of gesture is at stake. To that end, we would be well-advised to think of the notion of “body” in the sense that it is used in the work of Spinoza. Not human bodies or even animal bodies, but bodies as abstract entities in a fundamental field that the mathematician might denote as a Platonic reality (paradoxically just as real—if not more so—than the reality of our sensory experience and intuition, despite how far it might diverge from the latter). 

Similarly, this gesture can only secondarily be thought of as a sign in a discourse. Rather, the movements of these bodies correspond to forces and dynamics that we might call infrasemantic (and perhaps even infrasensible). That is, Gesto occurs in the before of meaning, and even before a perception is encoded by a unitary perceiver. This gesture is more to do with the movements of particles, waves, fields, and flows, in a dimension that precedes all subjectivation. This precedence is atemporal, non-chronological; therefore it subtends the various processes that produce a subject, even subsuming them, but never producing a linear relation of before, during, and after. Every gesture that will mean something as a sign to another is already and irreducibly a polyvalent gesture or set of movements in the Platonic-Spinozan field.

Accordingly, Gesto abounds with structures that signify nothing and yet admirably illuminate that toward which all signification asymptotically inclines. Repetitions (taking the form of attractors, oscillations, and loops), intensities and their subsidings, sudden movements and stillnesses, silences both auditory and spatial, dialectics of continuity and discontinuity, variations of velocity, all manner of shapes, proximities and distances, arrangements and rearrangements of objects, sudden arrests, contortions, and questions of contact, touch, merger. In the spatiotemporal field conjured by Gesto, we access an expansive taxonomy of events that constitutes the range of possible perturbations and rests in the field of the Real. Here we have nothing less than the essential materials needed in order to rework from the roots a wide array of psychoanalytic concepts.

What would a psychoanalysis in the spirit of Gesto look like? We can’t answer this question definitively, nor comprehensively. But we must not shy away from responding in the provisional and experimental ways that are available to us. To that end, I would suggest that a psychoanalysis based on the gesture as movement of an abstract body in the spatiotemporal field of the Real would be a psychoanalysis more liberated from the strictures of sense, and therefore less bound by the preconceptions which tend to produce normative and disciplinary tendencies in the analytic encounter. The gesture that is more fundamental than a sign—though it inevitably becomes clothed in all manner of signs—cannot be fully subsumed into the order of received meanings and discourses. A psychoanalysis curious about this most fundamental (and ultimately elusive) field of quintessential abstract movement is a clinical method that is less prone to the maladies that plague our discipline—those forms of interpretation that invariably do violence to complexity, to singularity, and ultimately, to the subject’s dignity. Accordingly, Gesto says so much because it says so little. Rather, it shows, it demonstrates, that which eludes speech, that which paradoxically is the wellspring of speech, and that which must orient our practice if we are to produce a clinical movement more adequate to the real movements that we encounter in these figures we have been accustomed to calling—rather narrowly—“speaking-beings” (but who now appear to us as dynamic forms not representative of anything but their own becoming).