18/06/2025
I thought I'd share the views of Swiss sinologist J.-F. Billeter on how gestures are born. This text relates to pretty much everything we do and resonates with the gongfu learning path that we try to follow. 🙂
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Let us observe a child who tries to pour water into a glass for the first time. We understand the difficulties he encounters because we have faced them, and we know from experience how, from the coordination of movements, at a certain moment a gesture is born. We know that this birth is an event, a beginning. It is a source of pleasure and it gives power. I now have this gesture in me and I can produce it when necessary. Who is “I”? – the body.
Let us observe again. Adjusting the movements is hard, it costs energy. When they unite to produce the gesture, the expenditure of energy drops. When the gesture is fully developed, it drops again. The gesture is like produced on its own. The conscious part of our activity, which focused on shaping the gesture, is now free. It just controls the ex*****on. Then, as the skill progresses, it enjoys a new freedom (…).
There are various lessons to be learned from this progression. The development and growing mastery of the gesture is accompanied by progress in knowledge. I know the gesture to the extent that I own it. I understand it when I see it done by someone else because I can execute it within me. I can imagine it when someone talks about it : I know what it is about. Thanks to this gesture that I own, I also discover the properties of the objects I handle and thus I can grasp certain laws of physics : the curve that water follows in its fall, the momentum that must be given to move the mass of water, the retracting movement to stop the pouring. This learning is the foundation of our knowledge of reality – and gives us access to knowledge of ourselves. Because when the mastered gesture allows me to detach myself from it internally, I can observe it from within while performing it. I can observe it more and more precisely and completely; and thus better understand my own activity. (…)
The gesture provides a paradigm, that of integration. It arises from a process that I would call “integration work” and then develops into more and more complete integration of the activity. (…) This paradigm accounts for the genesis of all our gestures, from the simplest (opening a door) to the most complex (playing a few notes on the violin).
Consider this last example. The violinist did the first work of integration by learning to hold the bow and to produce sounds; another by learning the positions of the left hand and the passages from one to the other; another by successfully coordinating the playing of the left hand with that of the bow to produce a series of notes; yet another by managing to string together the notes so that they produce a pattern, then a whole melody, and the musical expression appears.
As is always the case, this integration work has progressed from one level to the next. The violinist could only approach the upper level when the gesture of the lower level was acquired, or in the process of being so. The musician was able to engage in the work of integration of the higher level as the gestures of the lower levels had become natural and carried on by themselves. (…)
When the gesture appears and becomes natural, [the musician's consciousness] gradually extends to the larger resources that must support his playing. It extends downwards, illuminating remote regions of the body’s activity. The musician gradually becomes a spectator of his/her own activity, sees it better and better, through some kind of internal dissociation. This internal vision is a phenomenon that we can observe in all our gestures, even the simplest.
We have difficulty in conceiving this phenomenon because “to see” in our mind means “to apprehend an object from outside, at a distance”. But here the dissociation is not the effect of a separation in space. It results from a reverberation that takes place within our activity and by which our activity becomes sensitive to itself. One can see it by diving into oneself. One must close one’s own eyes to see this way, for the daylight is dazzling.
Jean-François Billeter, Un paradigme
(Translation by yours truly and a bit of online translator. As far as I know, the book has only been published in French and German.)
