gesture sequences

Writing here about wisdom and 'knowing how', I mentioned the idea of embodied knowledge. I was thinking about things like the ability to cast. (Not so long ago, I was talking to someone who does a lot of fly fishing and who said that, when he sees a beginner casting badly, he has to restrain himself physically from stepping in and 'helping'.) I suppose experienced anglers can explain good casting in words but, in the end, those words are a representation of knowledge that is not linguistically grounded - a sense of how the body should feel when the action is performed correctly. Actually, I'm open to the idea that sometimes you have to go against your instincts to perform an action skillfully - do something that feels counter-intuitive - but maybe that is a beginner's experience, something that happens when you are laying down new habits. I'd like to hear what Ken and Martin have to say about it.

Thinking about these things led me to a book I like a lot, The Practice of Everyday Life, and particularly volume 2, the second half of which is focused on cooking, an everyday practice that is simultaneously complex, creative, tedious, demanding, potentially pleasurable, highly gendered, and wrapped up with both the economic facts of life and the particular tastes and attitudes of those around one. Luce Giard (who wrote that section of the book) coins the term 'gesture sequences' to talk about the practice of cooking. She begins the chapter by talking about the difficulty of explaining in language what the experience of 'doing cooking' involves:

How can one find the right words, words that are rather simple, ordinary and precise, to recount these sequences of gestures, bound together over and over again, that weave the indeterminate cloth of culinary practices within the intimacy of kitchens? How can one choose words that are true, natural, and vibrant enough to make felt the weight of the body, the joyfulness or weariness, the tenderness or irritation that takes hold of you in the fact of this continually repeated task where the better the result (a stuffed chicken, a pear tart), the faster it is devoured, so that before the meal is completely over, one already has to think about the next. A succession of gestures and steps, repeated and required.

I rather like this paragraph - it begins by asking what words can possibly be used to 'recount these sequences of gestures' and finally returns to the term with which it began, 'gesture sequences', although moving on to nuance the term 'gesture' a little in subsequent pages. (Gesture in Giard's sense includes mental elements as well as physical ones - activities such as 'organizing', 'deciding', 'anticipating', 'memorizing', 'adapting', 'modifying', 'inventing', 'combining', and 'taking into consideration'.)

Of course, what I'm wondering is whether Giard's way of describing cooking has anything to offer as we talk about fishing - that notion of a 'sequence of gestures', bound together over and over to 'weave the indeterminate cloth of [angling practice]'. I think it might. It's that idea of a complex structure constructed out of 'sequences of gestures' that I like - gestural routines that are 'repeated and required' but also varied, adapted, and recombined.

One final point. I enjoy reading Giard's writing - I love the way she comes to cooking from a sort of respectful distance and analyses the complexity of the process involved in it. I do find it difficult to get to the heart of what she is saying, though. I sometimes come away from it feeling that I've read something beautiful but that I can't summarize exactly what she was getting at. This might be a good opportunity to take a close look at her account of 'gesture sequences' and I shall do a few more posts looking at specific aspects of her texts (interspersed with other odds and ends, just for variety).

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