Walter Benjamin

The moral significance of gestures

“…Influenced by romanticism, commentators started to think that communication can only be optimized if it remains unspoilt by technique, etiquette and codification. Spontaneous rather than codified gestures were increasingly considered to be more authentic and more universal than ‘normal’ language (Pethes 2000, Knowlson 2006). The inevitable paradox here is, of course, that spontaneity itself may become codified: the more people start to argue that the body is more natural than anything else, the more this body becomes subjected to a new regime, a new discipline that tells us to be spontaneous or natural.…”