POLITICS OF GESTURE
JEREMY KAYOKA
BRUNSCHWIG, LIBER DE ARTE DISTILLANDI, P. 306, GIAMBATTISTA DELLA PORTA, DE HUMANA PHYSIOGNOMONIA LIBRI IIII, P. 59 + P. 86
Introduction
There is perhaps no place where modernity — in its most complete expression — and modernism have so perfectly fulfilled their projects of emancipation, functionalism, and specialization as in the operating room and the slaughterhouse. Through the subdivision of tasks, the hierarchical structuring of interventions, and the stripping away of symbolic meaning, these two spaces embody radical modern rationality.
Today, both are governed by rigorous standards: strict requirements for cleanliness, hermetic sealing, and asepsis. The professionals who operate in these spaces — the surgeon and the butcher — are subject to the same expectations. Hygiene protocols, both before and after the intervention, are considered just as important as the act itself.
The surgeon and the butcher must exercise extreme precision in every action, movement, and bodily contact — during the decontamination phase, preparation, the intervention itself, and the final cleansing. One could say that both are workers of the gesture.
Gesture
Before any intervention, both the surgeon and the butcher must wash their hands. This act must be carried out with protocol and precision. While its hygienic function is to eliminate microbial flora from the practitioner’s hands, it also takes on the tone of a ritual — through its systematic presence before and after each intervention, and through its codified, almost choreographed gestures.
Handwashing — and, more broadly, preparation — is a key moment: it is when the acting bodies enter into relation with the body to be acted upon.
In the politico-religious system of the scapegoat, the figure of the butcher and the surgeon was once embodied by a single role: that of the priest. Of course, these two professions also existed separately in different forms, but the ancient Hebrew priest, to speak more generally, embodied a combination of these two figures.
When someone was afflicted by illness or had committed a transgression — both of which were understood as causes of disease in this system — they would present themselves at the temple with an animal, whose size corresponded to the gravity of the condition. At the temple, the priest would symbolically transfer the illness from the human body to the animal’s body, which was then sacrificed.
Some go so far as to say that the animal consented, drawing from autopsies of archaeological remains that show no sign of struggle. This remains debatable, but what is certain is that once the sacrifice was completed, a portion of the animal’s flesh would become the priest’s daily sustenance — implying that the animal was dismembered and disemboweled, proof of a certain expertise in the anatomy of animal bodies.
At a time when illness was seen as a divine manifestation, the priest — as mediator between humans and the divine — was also a medical expert. He held knowledge of both human and animal anatomy.
Medical and animal knowledge have often intersected throughout history. If we step outside our hygienist and industrial perspective, we can see that these knowledges have long been closely intertwined. There were even moments when medicine and surgery developed practices based directly on knowledge of the animal body.
When the Roman Empire banned the dissection of human bodies in the second century CE, Claudius Galen posited that the human body was similar enough to that of animals that one could deduce human anatomy from animal dissection. This led him to several erroneous conclusions — for instance, his understanding of the female uterus was based on that of a rabbit.
Though his methods were scientifically questionable, Galen’s approach reveals something fundamental about the intuitive dimension of the gestures made by both the surgeon and the butcher. Faced with flesh, bone, and blood — with the ever-shifting morphology of an organ or a tumor — both must rely on intuition honed by experience, by the memory of a previous organ or a previous cut of meat.
Mechanization and robotization are tending to render this instinct obsolete. Even diagnosis is being dematerialized. Advances in biochemistry and biomedicine are transforming our relationship to flesh. We can see this, for instance, in the transition from laparotomy — which involves opening the abdomen and whose careful closure used to attest to the surgeon’s dexterity — to laparoscopic surgery, a minimally invasive intervention conducted from within.
Today, dexterity applies not to the manipulation of organs, but of cells. And in the food industry as well, it seems that synthetic alternatives to meat are what the future holds.
Thus, the gestures of the surgeon and the butcher are already becoming the ritual gestures of a bygone time.
Jeremy Kayoka is a Master’s student in Architecture at the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio.