Gesture in the Head : Mathematics and Mobility

Mathematics and gesture. An odd couple: the supreme form of abstract thinking and its crude antithesis, physically expressed feeling. If mathematical symbols engender thought which exceeds that available to speech, gesture seems an atavistic return to a time before speech, allied to simian calls and grunts. Mathematics is everywhere in contemporary digitized culture, gesture is marginal, confined to the cultural periphery of body discipline in sport, military training, and techniques of dance, theatre, and music performance. Certainly, gestures-cupping hands, jumping on the spot, shrugging, pointing, looping the loop, giving the finger, genuflecting, tying a knot, doing a backflip, spiralling a finger, nodding the head, twisting a wrist, and a thousand other such “disciplined distributions of mobility” (Gilles Chatelet) – appear to show little connection to mathematics or indeed any other intellectual practice.