created 2025-06-30, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025
rel: On Hands Manicule, Body in Books and Analysis of Love
Why I’m reading
Tantalizing, in the footnotes.
Growing up I had anxiety and panic attacks. The derealization symptoms would be the worst, in that my hands would feel completely divorced from my body – almost acting automatically or distanced in an uncomfortable way (you can simulate this uncanny feel by lifting your right hand across the back of your head, so it appears on your left side of your eye and shaking it.)
These feelings faded but thinking of my hands as a kind of evolutionarily leveraged, meager output of a seeking mind (and the cursor on the screen as well) are somewhat scary when you process them.
Leroi-Gourhan summarized his views in the two volumes of Gesture and Speech (1963-4), concluding with prophetic reflections on the shift to electric and electronic devices and automation. The Musée’s display dedicated to “The Human Body” had observed that “industrial motive forces tend to eliminate completely the action of the body as a motive force and automatic machines even lead, to a large extent, to the disappearance of the differentiated operations of the hand.” Gesture and Speech went further, presenting automation as a threat to humanity. From its origins, Homo sapiens had transferred evolution from the human body to the “curtain” of technical objects which surround it, defining culturally and historically specific “sociotechnical milieus.” Automation introduces a temporal lag between human bodies and this extended exoskeleton. “Every rise of civilizations has been done by the same physical and intellectual man who lay in wait for the mammoth,” he argued; thus “our electronic culture, barely fifty years old, has for its support a physiological equipment which is forty thousand years old.” A new threshold was crossed when memory and thought were handed over to machines, in what he described as the “the exteriorization of the brain.”
As a result, he surmised that the “homo sapiens of zoology is probably near the end of his career” as well as “on the verge of exhausting the planet.” He imagined an approaching society directed by “master illusionists whose role will be to study the psycho-physical diet of human masses” (data analytics) where forced activity in “recreation zones” (gyms) would balance “sedentary productivity” (working from home), all “supported by the vitamin element of tele-diffused emissions” (amazon.com).[7] The seemingly friendly and innocuous automatic slide projector in the advertisement, requiring “no gesture” of its users beyond the pushing of a button, was a portent of humanity’s upcoming fall into an enfeebled state akin to that of the Eloi in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.