Shifting the emphasis from philosophical reflection to corporeal practice, it defines gestural ethics as an acting-otherwise which comes into being in the particularities of singular gestural practice, its forms, kinetic qualities, temporal displacements and calls for response. The introduction to this special section of Performance Philosophy takes Giorgio Agamben’s remarks about the mediality and potentiality of gesture as a starting point to rethink gesture’s nexus with ethics.
Schneider's ethics of response-ability thus rethinks relationality as something that always already anticipates and perpetually reinaugurates possibilities for response. The hands that are held up in the air both replay (and respond to) the standard pose of surrender in the face of police authority and call for a future that might be different. The gesture of the hail will lead us, then, to the gesture of protest in the Black Lives Matter movement. Both predicated upon a fundamentally ethical relationality and susceptible to ideological investment, the hail epitomizes the operations of the "both/and"-a logic of conjunction that structures and punctuates the history of thinking on gesture from the classic Brechtian tactic in which performance both replays and counters conditions of subjugation to Alexander Weheliye's reclamation of this tactic for black and critical ethnic studies. In particular, Schneider thinks about the politics of citation and reiteration for an ethics of call and response that emerges in the gesture of the hail. The following conversation aims to trace the role of gesture and gestural thinking in Rebecca Schneider's work, and to tease out the specific gestural ethics which arises in her writings. Thinking through this performance's subversive mimicry of In The Explicit Body in Performance (1997) you write about a 1990 piece by the Native American group Spiderwoman Theater called Reverb-ber-ber-rations. Lucia Ruprecht: Rebecca, my first question addresses how gestures in your work travel through time, and how these travels are inflected by a spectrum of political agendas. Both predicated upon a fundamentally ethical relationality and susceptible to ideological investment, the hail epitomizes the operations of the " both/and " -a logic of conjunction that structures and punctuates the history of thinking on gesture from the classic Brechtian tactic in which performance both replays and counters conditions of subjugation to Alexander Weheliye's reclamation of this tactic for black and critical ethnic studies.