Blind Gestures: Chaplin, Diderot, Lessing

Phenomenology of Gesture Between Heidegger and Flusser

“…Social stratifications are also visible on the level of spontaneous gestures, because the expressiveness of ‘specifically proletarian’ or ‘specifically peasant’ gestures is not constituted in relation to a deliberate code, although they are the results of persistent symbolic sedimentations. For example, an analysis of Charlie Chaplin's gestures can shed light on changes of gesturing, depending on the social context, in the back-and-forth from proletarian poverty to bourgeois luxury ( City Lights ), or from the alienating automatism of technology-captive industrial movements to the free gestures of vagabondage ( Modern Times ); see Jesse H. McKnight (2008) and Kenneth Scott Calhoon (2000). Similar considerations can be identified regarding the gestures, postures, and outfits by which Audrey Hepburn marks class differences in My Fair Lady.…”