Gesture-ing in drawing via theory of Whitehead and Barad

The coined term gesture-ing in the article's title, “Gesture-ing in Drawing via Theory of Whitehead and Barad,” refers to a drawing that is being developed as the article is being written, and provides the motif through which its topic is mapped. In addition, the term relates to the combined role of theory of Whitehead and Barad that is itself gestured; combined in the sense that the drawings are stylistically diagrammatic and include annotation, and are made in cooperation with the article, as it is being written and accommodating the latter's argument. The main drawing, of two featured drawings, Gesture drawing and Index Cards drawing, involves gesture and gesturing of line, while bringing in relevant theory in the form of handwritten index cards and paratext pertaining first to Whitehead and then to Barad. The two drawings are gradually developed, as the article is being written, towards a single combined drawing. Whitehead is relevant to the gesturing of movement from his termed event here to event there within an occasion and the next-new occasion, as and through a passage of nature. Barad's referencing is in terms of intra-activity as and within the middle-ness of such movement. Aspects of Barad's agential realism enable consideration of human-agential and material-agential intra-activity, to suggest how the medium of and as the drawing is sympoietic (Donna Haraway), which is how the author, as the visual work's human agency, prefers to consider the near-autonomy of how simple drawing materials work. The combined ratio of practice–theory–agency–materiality is explored through the narrative, the article itself, which is at-once textual and, albeit through reproduction only, visual–material. The role of digital reproduction is introduced as, itself, an agency as relevant to the process as liquid coffee poured on newsprint, as a key material component of the drawings.