Gestural System

Definition

The gestural system is Baudrillard's term (The System of Objects, 1968, Part A, ch. II) for the organized repertoire of bodily gestures a culture deploys in relation to its objects. The book's historical thesis is "the great shift from a universal gestural system of labour to a universal gestural system of control," in which muscular effort gives way to buttons, levers and remote action: "only man's 'extremities' now have an active part to play in the functional environment." The shift is the practical face of the object's abstraction: "freed from practical functions and from the human gestural system, forms become purely relative." It is the counterpart, in the everyday object-world, of the functional-system's emphasis on integration over adaptation, and it conditions automatism.

Key Claims

The traditional gestural system of effort drew on the whole body. So long as energy was muscular, "the tool remained embedded in human relations, rich symbolically speaking but not particularly well designed structurally"; the tool's "beauty – the 'style'" lay in "the style of the relationship in its reciprocity."
Control abstracts praxis. "A prehension of objects involving the whole body has given way to simple contact (of hand or foot) and simple surveillance (by the eye or, occasionally, by the ear)." The system called for is "cerebro-sensory vigilance" (Naville).
It is split into control and play. "It is not simply that the old gestural system of effort has been stretched out into a gestural system of control: it has also been split into a gestural system of control and a gestural system of play" (sports and physical leisure as "compensatory release").
The operational field becomes abstract. "Man's abstract relationship to his (technical) objects, his 'spectacular alienation', is thus less a matter of his gestures having been replaced than of the abstractness of the very way in which functions have been split up."
Man becomes "less rational than his own objects." "Man has become less rational than his own objects, which now run ahead of him, so to speak, organizing his surroundings and thus appropriating his actions."
The symbolic dimension ends. Traditional tools were "living phalluses or vaginas"; the technical object represses this. "The whole gestural system of work was also obscene… The world of the objects of old seems like a theatre of cruelty and instinctual drives in comparison with the formal neutrality and prophylactic 'whiteness' of our perfect functional objects."
The functionalist myth internalizes the lost gesture. "The repressed gestural system is thus transformed into myth, projection, transcendence" (see functionalist-myth).

Key Thinkers

Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: effort→control; the abstraction of praxis; the split into control and play.
Pierre Naville (not yet paged) — "cerebro-sensory vigilance" as the new praxis.
Karl Marx — the labour/object relation Baudrillard re-reads semiotically.
Gilbert Simondon (not yet paged) — the technical-object philosophy supplying "technicity" and the energy-structure argument.

Automatism — the technical connotation that completes the control-system.
The Functional System — the objective discourse the gestural shift serves.
Objecthood — the object's anthropomorphic vs. technical status.
Everyday Life — the domestic register governed by gestural routines.
Interior Design — the discipline that redesigns the gestural environment.
Functionalist Myth — the myth that internalizes the repressed gesture.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the concept's defining source (Part A, ch. II): "Atmospheric Values: Gestural Systems and Forms"; "The Traditional Gestural System: Effort"; "The Functional Gestural System: Control"; "A New Operational Field"; miniaturization; "The End of the Symbolic Dimension."
Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

The effort/control shift is also a story about labour and deskilling. How does it relate to Braverman's labour-process thesis, or to the wiki's production-oriented practices?
Baudrillard's "gestural system of play" (sport, leisure) as compensation parallels his "active time / leisure time" split: is play liberation or its alibi (see everyday-life)?
If the gestural system of control is now touchscreen swiping and voice command, has the "extremities" thesis been radicalized — and what symbolic dimension remains?