Having finished with an introductory consideration of the body as a basic resource of artistic meaningfulness, I turn now to consider the hand, a part of the body so laden with significance that I’ll give it separate, albeit brief, consideration. Since the publication of John Napier’s pioneering book Hands in 1980, the human hand has been treated extensively in evolutionary theory and neuroscience, as well as in philosophy, most notably by Raymond Tallis and Colin McGinn. As with any interesting topic, there are not only a variety of approaches but also basic differences in conceptualization. For example, how should one delimit ‘the hand’? Is it just that part of the body at the end of the arm beyond the wrist, or does it include the neural mechanisms and circuits activated in its typical actions? Is it limited to the body narrowly construed, or is it illuminating to consider it together with the space of its use proximal to the human body? As throughout this consideration of resources of meaningfulness, I bypass these kinds of questions, and my treatment will be highly selective because wholly oriented towards considering what and how hands, and basic phenomena tightly bound to the use of hands, are recruited into the arts. The treatment in this post will also be brief and introductory, as much of my treatment of the hand will be more substantively addressed in the major following topics of gesture, artifactuality, technology, and language.
One might begin to consider the range of uses of the hand as comprising three great categories: manipulation, exploration, and communication. In manipulation the hand grasps something to some end. Napier influentially treats manipulation in terms of two major of categories of grips, the ‘power grips’ wherewith something is grasped and often engulfed with the entire hand, and the ‘precision grips’ wherewith human beings’ opposable thumbs are aligned with one or more fingertips. Neuroscientific research shows that power grips in their typical uses in fast and forceful actions stimulate temporal sensitivity, whereas precision grasps in their characteristic use in highly specific tasks stimulate spatial sensitivity. (Reed and Park, p. 104) There are additionally an indeterminate number of other grips that fall outside these categories, such as the hook grip that we use for carrying a pail’s handle, or the seductive ‘scissor’ grip used to hold a cigarette.
Much of the world’s art-making is of course inconceivable without the precision grips needed to make and handle the instruments of inscribing, marking, and painting. But a more conceptually fundamental point is that the structure of the human hand permits, as Raymond Tallis put it, “not merely a wider range of grips, of modes of prehension, but a limitless varied range of grips, each of which can be customized for the needs of the moment” (Tallis (2003), p. 35). Further, in ordinary human activities and tasks we change grips; one opens the jar (power grip with both hands), holds the jar (power grip) and grasps the spoon (precision grip), and ladles the peanut butter into one’s mouth. The use of the hand involves both seemingly endless variety oriented towards accomplishing tasks, and sequentiality of heterogeneous kinds of grips. As some authors have noted, both of these features are oddly language-like, with the former corresponding to that basic feature of language stressed by Chomsky, the infinite uses of finite elements, and the latter corresponding to something like syntax, the meaning-bearing ordering of elements.
In thinking about the ways that the body’s hands and their uses induce the conceptualization of lived space, neuroscientists have introduced the distinction between ‘peripersonal’ and ‘extrapersonal’ space. ‘Peripersonal’ space “refers to the space near and surrounding the body and is the region in which our visual system and the body can best interact to perform actions. It includes the space near the hands, or ‘peri-hand space’, as well as reachable space, and potentially even space just outside body reach.” Correlatively, ‘extrapersonal’ space “refers to the far space away from the body and well beyond reach.” (ibid, p. 101) Whereas perception of extrapersonal space is typically restricted to the distal senses of sight and hearing, peripersonal space is perceptually multimodal in further involving haptic and proprioceptive awareness. This point will later in this book show itself to be of great importance in the formation of artistic meaning in the visual arts. Even at this early point one senses how this point opens the possibility of explaining the old and seemingly unsustainable point that there are distinctive ‘tactile’ values in painting, especially in the depiction of gesture and in the use of both invoked and actual textures. Consider the use of the hands in Caravaggio’s ‘The Supper at Emmaus’ (1601):
The other two major categories of uses of the hand, exploration and communication, will be dealt with at length later, the former in the consideration of the major art forms of drawing, painting, and sculpture, the latter in the coming sections on gesture and language. On the latter I’ll note here a point a point suggested by the philosopher Colin McGinn, that when the hand is used for purposes outside the peripersonal zone, it tends “to become modified into a weakened or diluted version of its original, thereby becoming more symbolic than actual. We thus get “action at a distance,” as the original action is performed at some distance from the object of the action, in stylized form.” (McGinn, p. 55)
A final point, another one that will lead to a key element in our conceptualization of artistic meaning, arises in reflecting upon the relation between the hand and the body as a whole. The anthropologist John Tooby and the evolutionary biologist Irven DeVore note that “organisms are systems of co-evolved adaptations; a change in one feature resonates through the system, changing other features in the adaptive constellation” (quoted in Tallis, pp. 269-70). The evidence suggests that the human brain, the human hand, and tool-use co-evolve, and that evolutionary changes are not associated with increased visual acuity, but rather with developing manipulative precision (ibid, p. 37). Within the emergent infinite variety of grips, the human being develops a greater sense of alternatives: tasks might be accomplished by means of this or that grip; new imaginative possibilities arise in reverie on an expanding range of uses of a certain grip. Given Tooby’s and DeVore’s point about how changes resonate through the organism, the emergent agentive sense of the hand and its possibilities retroacts upon the prior conception of the body; the body too becomes more an agent of manipulation, exploration, and communication, more a thing of possibilities. If so, then it’s plausible to think that with each of our upcoming resources—gesture, artifactuality and technics, language—there will similarly be retroactive re-conceptualizations and enrichments of the prior resources. Additionally, this opens the door, so it seems to me, to understanding the difficult but perennial intuition that there is something inexhaustible about artistic meaning. Making sense of this intuition will be the final and hardest problem of this book.—Next, starting with McGinn’s point mentioned above, I turn to consideration of gesture.
References and Works Consulted:
Matthew Fulkerson, The First Sense: A Philosophical Study of Human Touch (2014)
Colin McGinn, Prehension (2015)
Chris McManus, Right Hand, Left Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms, and Cultures (2002)
John Napier, Hands (1980)
Raymond Tallis, The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being (2003)
Catherine L. Reed and George D. Park, “Functional actions of hands and tools influence attention in peripersonal space”, in The World at Our Fingertips (2021), ed. de Vignemont, Serino, Wong, and Farnè
Frank R. Wilson, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (1999)