Michel Foucault’s chironomia

…whereas the hands may almost be said to speak.– Quintilian

Michel Foucault’s personality was intense & deliberate; his explosive laughter was famous. But his hands have not been paid attention to. Foucault’s gesticulations exhibit a simmering touch for the dramatic, his hands following a stylistic poiesis to calibrate his next cogitation. Take, for instance, at @1:48, when the interviewer observes: “… it’s like watching yourself in a mirror, and you’re both strangers,” at 1:58 when Foucault adds:”… how can we know if not with our knowledge?”

The philoso­pher sits back at 6:10 and emphat­i­cal­ly uses his dies­tra. A gen­tle man­ner­ism as if he were lead­ing a pianis­si­mo for the string sec­tion in an orches­tra. He address­es a broad­er (imag­i­nary) audi­ence in the stu­dio (unlike today’s politi­cians, look­ing straight at the cam­era to estab­lish cus­tomer rap­port). @ 6:58 he leans for­ward: “… and also this curi­ous notion of human­ism…” savor­ing his words (the book being dis­cussed, Les mots et le choses, is open­ly anti-human­ist).

@ 7:14 he inci­den­tal­ly looks at the cam­era: “…on peut dire que l’homme n’ex­is­tait pas.” Still, he looks at the cam­era to restate this point @ 10:24, after hav­ing dropped, en pas­sant, that “Sartre is a philoso­pher of the 19th Cen­tu­ry” (pur­port­ing: he’s every­thing I’m not)

Aris­to­tle was the first philoso­pher to give some seri­ous thought to the hands. In his less­er-known On the Parts of Ani­mals, one has a rare chance to see Aris­to­tle, the zool­o­gist, in action. One mar­vels at his bound­less curios­i­ty, which inspects the most minute ani­mal mor­pho­log­i­cal details; his con­clu­sions informed by intri­cate, unex­pect­ed rela­tion­ships:

… in ele­phants, though they must be reck­oned poly­dacty­lous, as their foot has nei­ther cloven nor sol­id hoof, the fore-feet, owing to the great size and weight of the body, are reduced to the con­di­tion of mere sup­ports; and indeed their slow motion and unfit­ness for bend­ing make them use­less for any oth­er pur­pose. (Ibid.)

(to his cred­it, lat­er, in Book 4, 12, Aris­to­tle observes that the ele­phan­t’s trunk is a kind of hand)

Here comes the point in the con­text of hand tHiNk­InG:

… it is the opin­ion of Anaxago­ras that the pos­ses­sion of these hands is the cause of man being of all ani­mals the most intel­li­gent. But it is more ratio­nal to sup­pose that his endow­ment with hands is the con­se­quence rather than the cause of his supe­ri­or intel­li­gence. (Book 4, 9)

Aris­to­tle starts from the premise that if nature gives us hands, it is because we can use them; hence, we can not find hands in ani­mals that are not intel­li­gent. Fol­low­ing his tele­o­log­i­cal rea­son­ing, for a hand to be such, it must func­tion as such, i.e., the form of a human being is respon­si­ble for the mat­ter being the mat­ter that it is, so the form of a human being is respon­si­ble for a hand being a hand.

Quin­til­ian, one of the best rhetori­cians of antiq­ui­ty, offers a dif­fer­ent angle in his Insti­tu­tio Ora­tio:

As for the hands, with­out which all action would be crip­pled and enfee­bled, it is scarce­ly pos­si­ble to describe the vari­ety of their motions, since they are almost as expres­sive as words. For oth­er por­tions of the body may help the speak­er, where­as the hands may almost be said to speak. Do we not use them to demand, promise, sum­mon, dis­miss, threat­en, sup­pli­cate, express aver­sion or fear, ques­tion or deny? Do we not employ them to indi­cate joy, sor­row, hes­i­ta­tion, con­fes­sion, pen­i­tence, mea­sure, quan­ti­ty, num­ber and time? Have they not pow­er to excite and pro­hib­it, to express approval, won­der or shame? Do they not take the place of adverbs and pro­nouns when we point at places and things? In fact, though the peo­ples and nations of the earth speak a mul­ti­tude of lan­guages, they share in com­mon the uni­ver­sal lan­guage of the hands.

In the 17^th Cen­tu­ry, John Bul­w­er bor­rowed Quin­til­ian’s idea of uni­ver­sal lan­guage to build a vocab­u­lary of hand ges­tures in his Chi­rolo­gia, or the Nat­ur­al Lan­guage of the Hand (1644). He seemed to have been influ­enced by Fran­cis Bacon’s idea of “man­u­al hiero­glyph­ics” (which the lat­ter inher­it­ed from Vale­ri­ano Pieri­o’s Hiero­glyph­i­ca, 1556). Ulti­mate­ly, the enter­prise may have paid off in a dif­fer­ent field. 

Before we go, how about this pho­to of our anti-human­ist philoso­pher don­ning his famil­iar white turtle­neck, ges­tur­ing audi­toris mit­i­ga­bit, while guard­ing the rear of a famous “19^th Cen­tu­ry” French philoso­pher?

The hand RULES.