Gestures

And yet this gesture should also be carefully documented! Have you ever noticed, at sociological conferences, political meetings, and bar palavers, the hand gestures people make when they invoke the ‘Big Picture’ into which they offer to replace what you have just said so that it ‘fits’ into such easy-to-grasp entities as ‘Late Capitalism’, ‘the ascent of civilization’, ‘the West’, ‘modernity’, ‘human history’, ‘Postcolonialism’, or ‘globalization’? Their hand gesture is never bigger than if they were stroking a pumpkin! I am at last going to show you the real size of the ‘social’ in all its grandeur: well, it is not that big. It is only made so by the grand gesture and by the professorial tone in which the ‘Big Picture’ is alluded to. If there is one thing that is not common sense, it would be to take even a reasonably sized pumpkin for the ‘whole of society’. (Latour, Reassembling the Social, 186)

The quotation, the animated GIF (from the highly entertaining Latournimata GIF Tumblr, of course)–these didn’t make it into my #nhuk presentation. Neither did the Stengersian gesture GIF below (would have been an odd fit, anyway) or any discussion of felicity and infelicity conditions extending from Austin’s pragmatics much like Latour does here to modes of existence, only in this case to ontographs and the disciplinary encounters they describe (by mapping). Cut. But what’s left will do: tiny gestures, crowned ontologies, an extrusion of ontographic methods with which to do alien discipliniography.