What distinguishes a gesture from a mere knee-jerk reaction or a functional movement? Do gestures have a history and is it the same as the history of their meanings? What does it mean to learn a gesture or through a gesture? As some thinkers argue (Flusser) an added element of meaning, irreducible to any causal explanation, is the fundamental trait that separates gestures as a species of bodily movement. But this meaning is never (including the case of self-oriented gestures) abstractly constituted and indifferent to any cultural or social context. Thus in order to grasp the essential meaning constitution at the heart of gestures, a phenomenological account of their historical genesis is required. The trivial observation that one and the same gesture does not mean the same thing in different cultures and historical contexts, reveals that the process of gesture apprehension itself is in fact historically determined. In other words, gestural meaning is not a mere label added to a movement, but it emerges and is transmitted through lived, situated interaction in a complex web of historical typifications and cultural sedimentations determined both on the higher level of community and on that of the individual.
Hence, this paper investigates the historical genesis of gestural eaning in the context of the dynamic between the individual level of constitution and the all-encompassing cultural one. More precisely, by drawing on Husserl’s key concept of sedimentation (Hua XI), it attempts to trace both how the gestural modality of expression is determined by sedimented (bodily) meanings, as well as the way in which gestures themselves, as bodily movements, can reactivate latent meaning layers or even institute new meanings, like it is the case, for example, in the process of learning. This shows that, far from being a secondary or auxiliary mode of expression, gestures are essentially connected with and shape elements of personal history while revealing, at the same time, their social embeddedness.