And we use media.
The media are my hands, my clothes, my cosmetics.
Whatever it is I'm using, they are media for representing meanings and gesture.
They're also in context, right?
So what does the gesture point to?
What kind of context?
This doesn't have any sense, like outside of what I'm pointing to,
context in situations are absolutely essential to that meaning.
And how is it like other gestures?
Which is fashion, the certain casual style or
formal style or a thousand, million fashions in the world,
there are always things about similarity and differences or demeanor, right?
Demeanor is about similarity or
difference to other experiences of a particular set of gestural patterns.
And finally, there is intention, right?
So in other words, I have reasons for my gestures.
Which are about my stance, my identity, my feelings, and
there are interpretations to those gestures which is power relations.
You're dominating over me by the way you're standing over me and talking to me,
for example.
Or, I might take offense.
That's an interpretation.
So in other words, I put meanings into particular context as well.
Again, my synesthesia point I want to make a round the metaphorical
power of these gestures.
When I say, I'm going to point something out to you, that's literally pointing out,
but I might be metaphorically pointing something out to you, which is like this.
I might have a kind of an aura.
I might demonstrate forms of behavior.
But behavior, actually things which are represented in embodied kinds of ways.
And also, I might have ways of acting things out.
I might have ways of, by my actions, representing a certain kind of meanings.
And that might be acting in the sense of literally up on the stage of a theater
acting out, or it might be little moments of acting out where I act something out
because I want you to act out being upset or act out being offended or whatever.
So that's me as an actor representing a meaning to you, communicating
a meaning to you via bodily configuration, these kinds of bodily meanings.
Now, I want to end here with the same point that I made about braille.
Remember I said about braille, incredible,
you can represent the whole of human meaning.
You can say as much in touch as you can in language.
Well here, you can say as much in gesture as you can in language via these much more
explicit, much more elaborate gestural meaning systems in deaf communities.
So these are examples here from American Sign Language,
these are the days of the week.
So this is using gesture in exactly the same way that we use language, and with
exactly the same scope, exactly the same depth, exactly the same meaning potential.
So in a way, these are kind of proof that there's nothing in human meaning that we
can't make in all the modes.
