The gesture does not mark time, if time is a movement forward, but makes time, holding the present open to attention and unpredicted exchange. The grimace is such a gesture. So is a deadpan nonresponse. A situation can grow around it or not, because it makes the smallest opening, a movement-created space. The gesture is thus only a potential event, the initiation of something present that could accrue density, whether dramatic or not. The movement could make a situation, and then the gesture would start to look different in it. In this view the present is not always a sense of something fleeting or a metaphysical experience of loss; nor is it mainly a dumping ground of anachronistic historical forces. When the disturbance of the gesture is lived as adjustment, remediation, or adaptation, the present is a stretch of time that is being sensed and shaped—an impasse.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.
impasse.md