Gestures

By: Vilem Flusser, Nancy Ann Roth (Translator)

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Paperback | 4 July 2014

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224 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21 x 13.5 x 1.5

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Throughout his career, the influential new media theorist Vilém Flusser kept the idea of gesture in mind: that people express their being in the world through a sweeping range of movements. He reconsiders familiar actions—from speaking and painting to smoking and telephoning—in terms of particular movement, opening a surprising new perspective on the ways we share and preserve meaning. A gesture may or may not be linked to specialized apparatus, though its form crucially affects the person who makes it.

These essays, published here as a collection in English for the first time, were written over roughly a half century and reflect both an eclectic array of interests and a durable commitment to phenomenological thought. Defining gesture as “a movement of the body or of a tool attached to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation,” Flusser moves around the topic from diverse points of view, angles, and distances: at times he zooms in on a modest, ordinary movement such as taking a photograph, shaving, or listening to music; at others, he pulls back to look at something as vast and varied as human “making,” embracing everything from the fashioning of simple tools to mass manufacturing. But whatever the gesture, Flusser analyzes it as the expression of a particular form of consciousness, that is, as a particular relationship between the world and the one who gestures.

Industry Reviews

"Flusser transforms gesture to the level of metaphor, offering deep, sometimes metaphysical, interpretation of the human condition. Though it resists being put in a particular disciplinary niche, Gestures will surely become a standard for the many scholars who have already debated or acknowledged the value of Flusser's claims."-CHOICE

"Flusser's book transcends the time in which it was written."-International Journal of Communication

"Flusser's writings have a more accessible style, offering precise examples and analogies to specify key concepts. For this reason, the work of Flusser, especially Gestures, eclectically engages with deconstructive paradigms of philosophy at a level accessible to undergraduate students and academics."-Screen Bodies

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