An Encyclopaedia of Futile Gestures

What is it about difference that makes us want to make one even when doing so will turn out to be tragically futile?

What is a ‘futile gesture’? It is surely more than a useless one, it is tragically useless. But, like all gestures, futile gestures turn on the idea of ‘making a difference’; they are the tragic case where the supreme urge to make a difference makes nothing at all.

At its simplest (and most abstract), anthropologist Gregory Bateson argued, culture is a network of ‘differences that make a difference’. Otherwise understood, it is the art of finding the reticulated points on the ‘map’ that best represent the meaning of the ‘territory’ taken as a whole. So, trying to communicate means descrying which differences will ‘make the difference’ and which ones are just noise. Some differences—and our gestures toward them—take on the most profound importance individually and collectively. Moral and other kinds of clarity depend on them—making them when the time is right. Isolating the right movement for the right moment will make all the difference, so we think, and so we act.

Being able to recognise the markers of true difference is crucial, then, but it is not always, or even usually, possible. Sad to say, we make do: we would rather gesture at something that might have meaning than remain in the child-like state of indiscrimination William James describes as a ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’. A world without any decisive differences cannot be serious, for some it is not really a world at all. And so it is that there arise gestures that do nothing more than stand in for that unavailable difference which we would truly want to make if only we could.

Cook  …war is a psychological thing, Perkins, rather like a game of football. You know how in a game of football ten men often play better than eleven?

Miller Yes, sir.

Cook Perkins, we are asking you to be that one man. I want you to lay down your life, Perkins. We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war. Get up in a crate, Perkins, pop over to Bremen, take a shufti, don’t come back.

Goodbye, Perkins. God, I wish I was going too.

Miller Goodbye, sir – or is it – au revoir?,’ 

Cook No, Perkins.