Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (review)

Carrie Noland has written a tour de force, a theory of agency that holds kinesthesia at its center. Her book, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture, argues that a subject has the potential to access, through the practice of what Thomas Csordas calls "somatic modes of attention" (1993:135), a form of embodied agency that lies dormant in both involuntary and anesthetic (unfelt) gestures. Whereas previous studies of gesture have been largely confined to inquiries into its communicative and theatrical functions (Kendon 2004; Roach 1993), Noland is interested in considering the capacity to feel oneself gesturing. She claims that the kinesthetic experience of the involuntary gesture, such as the facial twitch, or the unfelt gesture, such as the writing body, affords opportunities for the "variation, innovation, and resistance" (1) of culturally and socially conditioned norms of embodied behavior.

Noland asks, "How does individual human agency exert itself despite the enormous pressure of social conditioning?" (1). To answer this question, she takes the reader through a genealogy of primarily French discourses on embodied practice from anthropology through phenomenology and poststructuralism. Marcel Mauss, André Leroi-Gourhan, Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida—with appearances by Anglophone theorists and artists such as Judith Butler and Bill Viola—are all marshaled in the service of her claims that the kinesthetic experience of gesturing might be the condition of possibility for agency. Noland is a sharp reader of texts culled from various media (writing, drawing, painting, digital media), and her insights are persistently grounded in an intimacy with the theoretical and artistic processes she investigates.

Following Mauss, Noland defines gesture as "learned techniques of the body" (2) or "organized kinesis" (7). As such, gesture is acquired through acculturation, but also through practice. The sustained repetition of gesture may exert pressure on cultural conditioning, effecting change as it affects the body. Gestures are thus habits, and habits are both performed and performative, "productive of new cultural meanings" (215). Writing against both Bourdieu and the early Foucault, Noland makes a strong case for the agentic power of gesture. However, the act of gesturing must be decontextualized to become self-reflexive and thereby acquire "the valence of critique" (212). The subject's ability to access the excess or felt sensation that gesture affords is contingent on an abstraction of gesture, the practice of repetitive movement out of context.

Noland acknowledges the importance of movement analysis and somatics training—the practice of learning to both see and feel movement qualities—for developing such sensitivity (5-6), but she stops short of exploring the specificities of such practices. She writes, "Such a critical sensitivity to our acts, however, demands isolation, a willed disconnection from the purposive, instrumental, or communicative contexts into which we, as cultural beings, are almost always thrust" (210). She seems to suggest that any self-reflexive, concentrated practice, any process of "skilling and de-skilling" (214) can lead to the discovery of agency as alteration, creation, or resistance. Other than brief mention of yoga, meditation, sex, faith healing, and dance training (92), she remains vague about what "a willed disconnection" might entail, using phrases such as "in certain cases" or "under certain conditions" to describe the sort of extra-ordinary work it takes to access the bodily sensations that accompany our habitual modes of moving through the world.

At the end of the book, Noland asks one final question: "If the body is a text on which culture has inscribed its marks, then what, precisely, does a subject feel when she 'drops down'? Where, in depth, is there to go?" (213). Just prior to posing this question, Noland suggests an answer. Thinking with Derrida's Le Toucher (2000) and Memoirs of the Blind (1993), Noland writes, "the solitude in which we 'adventure' during periods of somatic attention can lead to the discovery of what is not ours alone" (212). It is this underdeveloped idea, that somatic attention to gesture may afford us...