In Our Hands: An Ethics of Gestural Response-ability. Rebecca Schneider in conversation with Lucia Ruprecht

Abstract

The following conversation aims to trace the role of gesture and gestural thinking in Rebecca Schneider's work, and to tease out the specific gestural ethics which arises in her writings. In particular, Schneider thinks about the politics of citation and reiteration for an ethics of call and response that emerges in the gesture of the hail. Both predicated upon a fundamentally ethical relationality and susceptible to ideological investment, the hail epitomizes the operations of the "both/and"-a logic of conjunction that structures and punctuates the history of thinking on gesture from the classic Brechtian tactic in which performance both replays and counters conditions of subjugation to Alexander Weheliye's reclamation of this tactic for black and critical ethnic studies. The gesture of the hail will lead us, then, to the gesture of protest in the Black Lives Matter movement. The hands that are held up in the air both replay (and respond to) the standard pose of surrender in the face of police authority and call for a future that might be different.Schneider's ethics of response-ability thus rethinks relationality as something that always already anticipates and perpetually reinaugurates possibilities for response.

The ethics and politics of data sets in the age of machine learning: deleting traces and encountering remains

“…Despite digital media’s obsession with newness, machine learning is largely about engagement with, and the extraction of value from, historical artefacts. According to Schneider (2018), the register of remains opens up to a response that ‘weaves past and future in intervallic resonance’ (p. 90) and creates a foundation for a ‘response-ability’ (Schneider and Ruprecht, 2017), in the sense both of calling ‘the past to appear for account’ and of being called by ‘the past to respond with account’ (p. 90). While seemingly straightforward, such an engagement often turns out to be complex, partly because ‘archives represent scenes of unbearable historical weight’ (Okwui, 2008) and partly because the methods by which we encounter these traces risk reproducing, in addition to subverting, the exposure of vulnerable archival subjects (Sutherland, 2017).…”

Phenomenology and its phantoms: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Leiris

“… 17. Leiris’s (1955) research resulted in Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et Guadeloupe . On his friendship with Césaire see Véron (2021). Leiris (1950) “L’Ethnographe devant le colonialisme” was originally published in Les Temps modernes in 1950.…”