2019/2 — #Gesture

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(Not) doing it for the Vine: #Boredom Vine videos and the biopolitics of gesture
Kendall, Tina (2019) , S. 213-233
This article proposes an analysis of gesture in relation to Vine videos that use boredom-related hashtags to classify bodily movements and gestures and to link them to a particular mood, situation, or state of mind. Drawing from Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Notes on Gesture’, the article situates Vine videos within the emergent attention economy of twenty-first century media, which aims to extract profit from even the most mundane of our daily gestures. As I argue, gesture in these videos is marked by an uncomfortable tension between digital network culture’s demand for both entertaining content and sufficiently entertained subjects, and the obdurate state of lethargy and stalled agency that these videos often express. As such, the gestural in these Vines is caught up in the neoliberal logic of means and ends, while also holding out the possibility of interrupting this logic to disclose what Agamben calls ‘pure means’, or the ‘emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings’.