Yes, now there’s a whole new reason to show up for class: to see if your professor is intellectual enough to use one of a series of seven hand gestures collected by a pair of MFA grads.
You’ve definitely seen it at some point. Maybe it was in a lecture in college. Maybe it was in a TED talk you watched recently. Someone is trying to explain some important historical connection, drawing up a grand theory of art or science or human progress, and there it is, as if by reflex: the hand lifts in front of them like an upturned claw, the fingers slowly turning an invisible dial. That’s “The Dialectic,” one of the hand gestures you’ll need to master to become a genuine thought leader.
Alice May Williams and Jasmine Johnson observed “the full complement” of these gestures in the process of earning their MFA at Goldsmiths College in London. In an effort to bring them out of the rarified world of academia and into the lives of ordinary people, the duo created a handy instructional website: The Glossary of Gestures for Critical Discussion.
Throughout their courses, Williams and Johnson saw the gestures repeated so frequently that “it became hard not to notice them spreading from academics to students and back again,” they explain–a sort of vicious cycle of performative thinking. The more they looked, the more they saw. Elaborate, double-handed gestures were typically reserved for the leading academics that visited as part of the program’s lecture series. “The Dialectic” proved to be especially popular with all ranks of thinkers. It’s “an unconscious twitch that says ‘take me seriously,’” say Williams and Johnson.
Having just done an in-class activity on gullibility in our online reading, it’s tempting to see their academic work as performance art in and of itself. (I checked: the MFA credential seems legit — but it is this serious ethnography? Social commentary? Tongue-in-cheek art? Who gets an MFA by watching hand gestures? the brain naturally queries.)
But if you visit the duo’s Tumblr and see the animated GIFs of their hand-gesture library, some of the hand jives are so instantly recognizable that you suddenly don’t care if it’s true or not. It’s just funny how on-target some are (making the ones you don’t recognize even funnier).
So whether you enjoy the Tumblr for fun or for serious intellectual reflection, I’m off to practice The Dialectic.
A Glossary of Gestures for Critical Discussion via kwout
If you’re new to academia and not up to The Dialectic, there’s always The Tiny Dialectic as a starting point.
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