A spectral summons

In late January 2025, German police investigated a crime whose only traces were images and videos circulating on social media. Two activist collectives had posted photographs and a video clip documenting an art-action at the Tesla Gigafactory in Berlin. The clip opens with a cross-highway view of the monolithic factory and its glowing TESLA sign. Cut to a close-up of a laser projector whirring to life. Cut to the same factory façade, which has become an impromptu drive-in theater. In the projection, Elon Musk stands behind a podium, backed by horizontal blue blocks and two lines of white stars. The cut-off text in the lower left corner reads: “Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla” and “The Inauguration of Donal …” Musk’s voice rings out: “Thank you … for making it happen. Thank you.” He thumps his chest with the right hand and pumps his arm out and up, palm down and fingers rigid. Turning, he makes the same gesture to those seated behind the stage. A dry, female voice begins to speak with a prosody and accent familiar from British public broadcasting: “This is the Tesla Gigafactory in Berlin, where Elon Musk builds cars for the European market …”

Splicing together clips from social and news media, the video plots out the connections between Musk’s technological enterprises, his immense personal wealth, and his political activities. It traces Musk’s ties to the German Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) and other far-right political actors. Across the montage of video footage, social media posts, and photographs culled from various sources, the iconic “Hitlergruß” salute recurs, linking bodies in a transnational white supremacist formation. As the video concludes, the narrator issues a call to action: “When you buy a Tesla, you’re supporting a far-right activist.” The Tesla logo blazes up on the darkened factory wall, stamped by a red circle with a diagonal strike-through. The letters “H-E-I-L” append the factory’s “T-E-S-L-A”, matching them in font, size, and color. And Musk’s saluting figure reappears, inflated to monumental proportions and limned by a faint halogen glow. It is this final image—the luminous cut-out salute and lettering—that recurs in social media posts and reports by international news media.

And that is the crux of the problem. The salute, an icon or token of the infamous “Heil Hitler” greeting, is the crime that Berlin police were called to investigate. German law prohibits the dissemination of iconography associated with National Socialism, including the Hitlergruß. In the German Criminal Code, these symbols fall under the heading of “support for unconstitutional groups”, and their reproduction is punishable by up to three years in prison.

The act-action dubbed Heil Tesla and other mediated reenactments of Musk’s gesture by artivists raise urgent questions around the authorship, “quotability”, and performativity of gestures as they move across bodies and contexts. Who should be held accountable for this mediated gesture? Does the salute count as a “rigid performative”—an expression whose effects are regarded as inescapable and indefeasible (Fleming and Lempert Reference Fleming, Lempert, Enfield, Kockelman and Sidnell2014)? Or does its significance depend on intentions and context? If so, whose intentions and which context? This article focuses on two art-actions staged in early 2025: Heil Tesla, orchestrated by the Berlin-based Zentrum für politische Schönheit (ZPS; en. Center for Political Beauty) and the UK-based Led by Donkeys (LBD), and Elon’s Arm, a guerrilla installation in Barcelona by the French artist James Colomina. Both actions resurrected Musk’s salute on the infrastructure of his own enterprises, and both were documented by their creators, circulated on social media, and taken up by traditional news outlets. I argue that these interventions show the power of reanimation and resus-citation to divert the performativity of even the most conventionalized gestures by undercutting the presumed coherence, autonomy, and authority of the gesturing subject. These art-actions embrace the critical potential of animation as a media process that involves the displacement of signs associated with embodied agency and subjectivity (e.g., voice, gesture, and face). By the same stroke, their discursive afterlives evince the unruliness of resus-citation as a mode of citationality that reenacts a prior utterance in a reflexively non-sovereign body. The reanimated and resuscitated gesture’s critical operativity rests on this diffraction and multiplication of communicative agency, which exceeds any would-be sovereign actor or author.

In the German context, the juridical framework that attempts to fix the gesture’s force by linking form, effect, and culpability rests on the same fantasy of a sovereign actor that the act of reanimation splinters. No equivalent ban stiffens the gesture’s performativity in the Spanish context and, accordingly, Elon’s Arm relies on the salute’s historical freight—its emblematic status and affective charge—to carry a critique of contemporary fascism and its semiotic and material infrastructures. In both art-actions, reanimation becomes a means of routing critique through the apparently sovereign figure—Musk’s embodied performance of technofascism (Mimura Reference Mimura2017)—toward its infrastructural grounds. Yet both must reckon with the possibility that a resus-citation retains something of the prior gesture’s animus and malignant efficacy.

The artistic use of gestures as instruments of political critique has precedents, among which Bertolt Brecht’s Gestus is the most salient. Gestus describes a technique of “alienating” bodily movements (Brecht Reference Brecht1964) and other expressive forms in order to render their social and historical character visible. The art-actions that I examine share the Brechtian premise that restaged gestures can disclose the conditions—and contingency—of naturalized power relations (Benjamin Reference Benjamin2003; Weber Reference Weber2010). Yet they are not reducible to Brecht’s model in their aims or operativity. Heil Tesla and Elon’s Arm do not simply offer “cognitive maps” of diffuse power relations, as Fredric Jameson (Reference Jameson1991) would have it; instead, they attempt to reroute energies, attention, and affects already in movement, working from within the systems that condition and consolidate political power.

In my view, the danger of Musk’s gesture lies in its reproducibility through technological, social, and political assemblages that amplify and naturalize far-right stances. Heil Tesla and Elon’s Arm flex this reproducibility to offer speech acts that are not so much “double voiced” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin1984) as double-jointed: reanimated gestures that embody multiple, opposed perspectives. But such double-jointed gestures are ambivalent. The operations that allow Heil Tesla and Elon’s Arm to bend the salute against the Tesla brand—stiffening, stretching, and suturing the gesture’s designation of fascism—risk reproducing the very force these artists aim to subvert. To reanimate a prohibited gesture is thus to bet on a sign whose performativity is at once overdetermined by history, proscribed by law, and indeterminate in uptake. The critical force of such actions is barbed by the risk of misfire.

Anatomy (and dissection) of a gesture

Public reactions to Musk’s inaugural salute reveal some of the tensions around treating gestures as “political speech”. The initial flood of news media and social media discourse in early 2025 included discussion of Musk’s intentions and emotional state, appropriateness of context and verbal co-texts, and―most emphatically―whether the gesture merely resembles (is iconic of) a fascist salute or constitutes a token instantiation of the Hitlergruß type.

Many of Musk’s defenders contended that his gesture’s resemblance to a Nazi salute was unintentional and any suggestion to the contrary is a symptom of liberal anxiety and paranoia. They pointed to Musk’s awkwardness and his autism diagnosis, implying that criticisms of the gesture were cruel, discriminatory, and a manifestation of “cancel culture” (Jacques Reference Jacques2025). For such commentators, the gesture could not count as a Nazi salute if not consciously intended as such by its author. On this standard literal reading, the author is the final determiner of a sign’s meaning. Perhaps the most prominent attempt at defeasement came from the Anti-Defamation League, which tweeted: “It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge” (ADL 2025). These remarks take recourse to the figure of the “author” in a paradoxical way, by suggesting that Musk’s diagnosis of neurodivergence complicates the mapping of communicative intent onto communicative effect. In the last instance, these commentators suggest, the interpretation of Musk’s movement as a Nazi salute is a departure from authorial intention and thus a paranoid, conspiratorial, and unauthorized reading.

Defenders alternate between suggesting that Musk’s salute was a fully involuntary movement (and thus not exactly a gesture) and suggesting that it was a gesture—a deliberate bodily movement—but not that type of gesture. In the latter instance, they emphasize Musk’s accompanying speech (the gesture’s co-text) and argue that any resemblance to a Nazi salute is a function of malicious decontextualization. To show the power of decontextualization (or perhaps simply for the sake of adding noise to the circuits of discourse), many of Musk’s defenders circulated screenshots of Democrats with their right arms outstretched. Others pointed to Musk’s words—“thank you”, “my heart goes out to you”, “the future is bright”, etc.—and asserted that his movement merely illustrates his heartfelt gratitude to his addressees. Ingrid Jacques’ opinion piece for USA Today exemplifies this argument:

In concluding, Jacques asserts: “People misspeak and make odd gestures all the time. It’s the context and their intentions that matter” (my emphasis).

Not incidentally, the statement from the Brandenburg Public Prosecutor’s Office (Staatsanwaltschaft) on the Heil Tesla art-action echoes this sentiment around decontextualization:

Such comments suggest that the real crime is decontextualization, which manifests a “confusing similarity”. Gestures are often regarded as distinctly “inalienable” from their contexts of embodied enactment (Lempert Reference Lempert2019; Taylor-Neu Reference Taylor‐Neu2025), in contrast to words or even voices, which are defined by their capacity to be reproduced across contexts (to “circulate”). Musk’s defenders thus take recourse to an ideology of gestures that fuses intentionality and inalienability as two sides of the same sovereign-headed coin.

Linguistic anthropologists have long observed that context is a slippery thing, however. Critics of Musk’s salute also invoke context, but they thematize other elements. For instance, many writers note that the gesture addressed a live audience, including prominent far-right figures, and was performed by a man whose previous public remarks evince fascist sentiments and who has repeatedly given a platform to far-right voices. Moreover, critics point to the ritual context: a presidential inauguration that was televised, livestreamed, and recorded for infinite replay, and whose participants not only included those physically (co-)present in the Capitol but also those watching in real time and after the fact. Context, these commentators argue, is what renders Musk’s gesture dangerous and indefeasible.

Indeed, the salute magnetized global attention because it stretched beyond the context of its physical enactment and invoked prior discursive events. The gesture drew scrutiny precisely because it was not “inaugural”—it was a citation in a long interdiscursive chain. Commentators of various political stripes picked up on this citationality immediately. Neo-Nazis and other far-right actors responded with gleeful social media posts, while most others reacted with horror. Across numerous repetitions, critics assert, this gesture signifies a particular political stance: “Ein Hitlergruß ist ein Hitlergruß ist ein Hitlergruß” (A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute) (Jacobsen Reference Jacobsen2025).

The Hitlergruß is not a “rigid designator” in Saul Kripke’s (Reference Kripke1980) formulation. One can imagine a universe in which this straight-armed salute did not refer to fascism (the movement’s meaning was less stable only a century ago). Yet even if the gesture is not logically rigid, its designation has been stiffened through recurrence and habitual association. Scholars have theorized these kinds of highly conventionalized gestures as “emblematic” or “symbolic” gestures. In David Efron’s (Reference Efron1972) coinage, emblematic gestures are those that bear no morphological resemblance to their object. Such gestures are closest to the model of the Saussurean linguistic sign or the Peircean symbol (they are relatively “lexicalized”). Adam Kendon favors the term “quotable gesture”, suggesting that their most salient feature is “they can be quoted or cited in a ‘correct’ […] form” as is possible with words or phrases (Reference Kendon1992, 92). Under German law and in the eyes of most, the Hitlergruß is an emblematic gesture: it alludes to and performatively enacts an unequivocal political stance in a relatively regimented manner. However, precisely because of this performativity, the gesture is treated as “unquotable” in the eyes of German legislators (with some allowances made for historical and artistic depictions). In other words, the Hitlergruß is treated as both a “rigid designator” and a “rigid performative” in Luke Fleming and Michael Lempert’s (Reference Fleming, Lempert, Enfield, Kockelman and Sidnell2014) formulation: it is a sign whose performative force cannot easily be defeased or placed in parentheses by decentering the reference through citation. Even if this performativity is anchored in Nazism, uptake indicates that the gesture is not wholly rigid or unequivocal.

This is the discursive terrain in which the ZPS, LBD, and James Colomina intervene. They leverage extant discourse around Musk’s gesture, divert its attentional pull, and exploit its slippages in order to illuminate a larger (infrastructural) political-economic formation. I propose that these interventions modulate the gesture’s significance and force through processes of symbolic stiffening, stretching, and suturing. More broadly, they evince the power of gestural reanimations to para-cite and ex-cite prior enactments in ways that potentiate critique.

Animation and de-authorization (copies chasing copies)

Heil Tesla’s effects hinge on the supposed indefeasibility or “rigid performativity” of the straight-armed salute in Germany. The action drew outsized attention because the gesture is criminalized under Section 86a of the German Penal Code due to its tight historical association with the Third Reich; police did not investigate to find the perpetrator but to discover whether the “crime” actually took place under German jurisdiction. A glance at this history shows how the salute’s sovereign force and significance were stiffened through law and convention while also disclosing the instabilities that haunt citable gestures.

When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, the salute became an obligatory form of greeting, most often accompanied by the words “Heil Hitler”. It was compulsory in all public encounters, and those who refused to use the “greeting” could be prosecuted and fined or sent to concentration camps (Kershaw Reference Kershaw1987). Sociologist Tilman Allert suggests that the gesture mediated all interpersonal relations by subjecting them to the authority of the Führer; it was thus an oath of fealty to a spectral third entity masquerading as a greeting between individuals (Reference Allert2008, 42). The gesture’s status as a sacred oath was evinced by the fact that Hitler himself rarely gave the salute (he instead received it with a vertical palm) and those excluded from the ethnic community were strictly prohibited from using the gesture (Allert Reference Allert2008, 51).

Three aspects of Allert’s reading bear elaboration. First, he suggests that the salute was a means for individuals to “stage their ‘public personas’” and was “tantamount to disassembling [their] own distinct identity” (2008, 51; my emphasis). In raising the rigid right arm, the subject performs their submission to a sovereign power and, by the same stroke, performs their dissolution into a racially defined collective. The performance of a gesture, in this account, is a performative abdication of individual sovereignty and arrogation of phantasmal ethnic identity. Second, such performatives were already rife with potential infelicity (and ripe for parody), precisely because the gesture could be enacted by “unauthorized” subjects. One state memo articulates this fear succinctly: “There have been reports of traveling vaudeville performers training their monkeys to give the German greeting on command […] We therefore order you to keep an eye on all vaudeville shows in your municipality and, in case of violations, to see to it that said animals are destroyed” (Hessian State Gov. Memo, July 1934, cited in Allert Reference Allert2008, 61). And third, the gesture’s “German authenticity” was debated from its earliest appearance in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) (the Nazi) ranks. In response to skeptics, NS deputy Rudolf Hess argued that it was not “un-Germanic” but rather emerged out of a “natural reflex” (Hess 1928, cited in Allert Reference Allert2008). Conversely, Mussolini asserted: “it’s the Germans who have copied and keep copying the Romans. We’re the ones returning to our origins” (Mussolini 1938, cited in Allert Reference Allert2008). What emerges is less a paradox than a parable of ex-citable gesture: for the 12-year duration of the Third Reich, the Hitlergruß was treated as sacred, self-grounding performative whose effects were underwritten by the same authority that it aimed to constitute; yet it was susceptible to profanation through unsanctioned reanimations and haunted by its own status as a copy of a copy—a citation of Italian Fascists’ citation of the Roman salute.

Soon after the 1949 founding of the Federal German Republic (FRG), the gesture was criminalized as a symbol (Kennzeichen) associated with “unconstitutional organizations” (StGB, §§ 86–87). In principle, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was founded on a constitutive exclusion of Nazi ideology and its most visible emblems: a symbolic exorcism that appears ironic against the backdrop of failed “denazification” in the occupied zones of post-WWII Germany (Griffith Reference Griffith1950, 74; Niethammer Reference Niethammer1982).Footnote ¹ Across shifts in semantic meaning—the flip from sacred to profane and from prescribed to proscribed—the gesture’s designation and presumed force persist: it is taken as enacting allegiance to a sovereign power; the decisive difference is whether the sovereign power is the existing state or the spectral sovereign that the state excludes as its own condition of possibility. It is this juridical apparatus—including its fictions and fault lines—that Heil Tesla set into motion by reanimating Musk’s salute in Germany.

Criminalization further stiffens the gesture’s force and designation by embracing a fantasy of the sovereign speech act (Butler Reference Butler1997; Slotta Reference Slotta2023) while folding a history of power relations into a form that seems to speak for itself. This stiffening enlists two contrasting figures of communicative agency. The first is the paradigm of communicative conduct that Judith Butler (Reference Butler1997) calls “sovereign performativity” and James Slotta (Reference Slotta2023) dubs the “sovereign speech act”, wherein the performative power of an utterance is backed by the coercive force of the state or another powerful institution. The German Penal Code figures the Hitlergruß as the instantiation of a threat (a “saying” that is also a “doing”), because it is tightly linked with an organization that “directs itself against the constitutional order or the ideal of international understanding” (einer Vereinigung, die […] sich gegen die verfassungsmäßige Ordnung oder gegen den Gedanken der Völkerverständigung richtet) (StGB, § 86). Here, the salute’s performativity is uncannily doubled, stamped by two sovereign powers and suspended between the present order and a spectral “once-and-future” fascism. On the one hand, the gesture invokes a past power on whose embers the current state was founded. On the other hand, the gesture’s present-day force is granted by the current state through the act of prohibition, which implies that some vestige of that former power remains available for reactivation. This power is taken to be congealed in the very form of the gesture, as evinced by the extension of the law to symbols deemed “confusingly similar” (zum Verwechseln ähnlich) to those prohibited (StGB § 86a). This operation recruits a second salient figuration of communicative agency, wherein a sign’s force is regarded as indissociable from its form (Fleming and Lempert Reference Fleming and Lempert2011; Slotta Reference Slotta2023). Rupert Stasch (Reference Stasch2008) glosses this sensibility as “form fetishism”, suggesting that the sign’s indexical force is felt to be “directly immanent in its […] shape” and presumed to “impinge materially on other elements of the world” (7). Whereas Slotta perspicuously distinguishes between the “sovereign speech act” and the “rhetorical word” (or sign) as two figures of communicative agency, I suggest that the criminalization of the Hitlergruß confounds this distinction by fusing the former into the latter, such that the form becomes a repository of sovereign force.

Artistic representations are typically exempt from prosecution, with certain stipulations. Such exceptions arguably prove the rule (of law) by maintaining juridical authority over the gesture’s use:

The state thus retains the right to judge whether any given instantiation of the salute constitutes a critique or a crime, and German authorities are obliged to investigate the “sense and purpose of the depiction in the context of the overall portrayal” (BfV 2022, 16).

Heil Tesla’s reanimation of Musk’s gesture (see Figure 1) both recruits and frustrates this legal apparatus, underscoring the difficulty of fixing a gesture’s performativity as it passes between mediums, materialities, and contexts. The fact that gestures can be entextualized—carved out of an interactional flow and treated as a bounded unit—renders them susceptible to de- and re-contextualizations that shift their force and significance (Taylor‐Neu Reference Taylor‐Neu2025).Footnote ² The artivist groups who orchestrated Heil Tesla play on two tensions inherent in the representation of communicative acts. The first tension pertains to citationality: How much of a sign’s interdiscursive and political context survives in reproductions/re-enactments that willfully mark themselves as different from that which they (iconically) resemble? Debates around Musk’s enactment are pregnant with this tension. The second tension pertains to animation: What happens to the authority and accountability of “the author” when their words and gestures are re-enacted by another body―in this case, a spectral body projected by a technological assemblage?

Figure 1.

Screenshots from “Heil Tesla” video posted to YouTube, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter).

Citationality describes the capacity to re-present snippets of discourse in ways that both resemble and critically dissemble prior iterations. Building on Derrida’s critique of speech act theory, Constantine Nakassis (Reference Nakassis2012, Reference Nakassis2013) frames citationality as a form of reflexive interdiscursivity that turns on partial qualitative resemblance (iconicity) and shifted indexicality. Acts of citation breathe new life into prior discursive events by accentuating the difference that attends acts of repetition (imitation, mimesis). Citation thus involves reflexivity regarding the relation between an “original” and its copy. In linguistic discourse, citation is often marked through punctuation and grammar (e.g., through double apostrophes or the formulae of reported speech). The art-actions that I examine use other means to mark a difference (of stance) from the gesture that they depict. In the Heil Tesla video, for instance, the brief shot of a projector punctuates the beginning of the reportage (i.e., reported/replayed footage), and the square projection field brackets the action unfolding within it. The click and whir of the projector and the beginning of the voiceover narration serve as a sonic frame for Musk’s words and the dampened roar of the crowd. Notably, the video’s later instances of reported speech (“To which Musk replied …”) reproduce Musk’s words and intonation but not his voice. Such formal features underscore the work of re-contextualization (the gesture’s mediatic displacement from one context to another) and address audiences presumed to be familiar with the cited event and thus capable of discerning the citational nature of the art-action. They invite critical reflection by dislodging the gesture from its immediate (albeit highly mediatized) context and co-texts.

Heil Tesla would appear to fall under the proviso that ironic or satirical depictions of NS symbols are not subject to punishment under German law. So why did the police investigate at length before eventually dropping the case? One clue lies in the wording of the statement from the Brandenburg Public Prosecutors Office (Der Spiegel 2025) cited above, which exactly reproduces a phrase from the Criminal Code: “confusingly similar” (zum Verwechseln ähnlich). For the artivists’ reanimation to count as a critical depiction of a prohibited NS symbol, German authorities first must determine that Musk’s gesture was a Hitlergruß—or was so formally similar that viewers could interpret it as such. Recall that this same official statement points to the artivists’ decontextualization as the source of the gesture’s apparent similarity; the citational operation that would typically exempt artistic depictions from prosecution became the grounds for a police investigation. And the artivists, in turn, recirculated news media reports on the investigation, including the official statement, to amplify their own critique. For instance, in an Instagram post published on January 24th, 2025, ZPS shared a screenshot of the article with the caption: “Yeah, sure, in the context of the U.S. presidential inauguration, the Hitler salute is totally understandable!!!” (Ja, klar, im Kontext der Vereidigung des US-Präsidenten ist der Hitlergruss noch absolut verständlich!!!).

Judith Butler (Reference Butler1997) suggests that juridical measures against “hate speech” can foreclose attempts to resignify injurious words and symbols by stiffening their performativity, irrespective of authorial intent or context. In the Heil Tesla case, however, this legal stiffening has the effect of drawing the state into the artivists’ choreography: the investigation becomes part of the performance; the German legal apparatus becomes a secondary object of critique; and legacy news outlets contribute to transforming a temporary, site-specific projection and series of social media posts into a “news event” (Cody Reference Cody2023). Indeed, ZPS frames the investigation as a kind of Clouseau-esque farce, coming soon to a streaming platform near you (ZPS 2025). Yet a sharper critique remains unvoiced. Butler (Reference Butler1997) reminds us that the criminalization of “injurious speech acts” obscures the extent to which those determining and executing the laws are part of the system of power relations that undergird the effects of such speech. ZPS’s portrayal of officials and officers tripping over each other to absolve Musk while chasing an art group for spreading the Hitlergruß raises questions regarding the state’s own interests. One cannot help but discern a rift between the state’s symbolic censure of far-right elements and the fact that federal and regional actors courted Musk’s Gigafactory project with fast-tracked permissions, subsidies, and infrastructure upgrades. The Heil Tesla art-action is thus a calculated provocation that leverages ambiguities inherent to the quotability and unquotability of the Hitlergruß under the auspices of German law.

Animation is likewise rife with ambiguities that trouble the law’s presupposition of a tight link between an action’s author and its effects. Linguistic anthropologists have theorized animation as the process of imbuing a figure with (the appearance of) life and movement. Building on Erving Goffman’s notion of “participant frameworks” (Reference Goffman1974), this literature complicates the classic “sender–receiver” model of communication in favor of a more distributed understanding of semiotic agency (see, e.g., Irvine Reference Irvine, Silverstein and Urban1996). To call attention to animation is to unsettle the presupposition that a speech act has a single, self-identical “actor” who is also its author and stakeholder; animation involves ambiguous distributions—and displacements—of agency. Indeed, Teri Silvio (Reference Silvio2010) emphasizes that animation involves a “many-to-one” relation whereby multiple actors collaborate to animate a single characterological figure, while Manning and Gershon (Reference Manning and Gershon2013) show how a single actor can animate multiple figures (e.g., avatars, online personae). Understood in these terms, animation is a ubiquitous yet underacknowledged feature of contemporary social and political life.

My analysis of the Heil Tesla and Elon’s Arm art-actions teases out a critical affordance that emerges at the conjuncture of citationality and animation: the capacity to “re-animate” (i.e., re-materialize and re-enact) prior discursive events and invoke alternative contexts through processes of “resus-citation”. I use the terms “reanimation” and “resus-citation” to indicate the performative and pragmatic entanglement of citation and animation in the two cases that I discuss. These art-actions are reanimations that hinge on the resus-citation of a prior communicative act.

How does this play out in the Heil Tesla case? The activists’ resus-citation of Musk’s salute underscores the gap between the gesture’s apparent “author” and its medium of (re)enactment (Goffman’s “animator”). By clipping the salute from its interactional (ritual) context, ZPS and LBD accentuate its status as a gestural unit. And by splicing this clip into a longer, documentary-style video text, they recast its significance. Although this act of de-contextualization and re-contextualization is not novel—it is a feature of virtually all reportage, commentary, and discussion of Musk’s gesture—the medium and theatrical framing distinguish it from the wash of retrospective discourse. Heil Tesla is a re-presentation that, by virtue of its transubstantiation and reflexive theatricality, becomes an event in itself and the object of subsequent discourse (cf. Cody Reference Cody2023).

Here, the act of reanimation de-couples the roles often laminated in face-to-face communicative acts—namely, author, animator, and stakeholder—and, in so doing, discloses a web of agencies thrumming within this apparently simple movement. The intentional, individual speaker presupposed in J.L. Austin’s account of the performative “speech act” comes apart at the seams. Judith Butler (Reference Butler, Street, Alliot and Pauker2017) suggests that such “decompositions” have distinct ethical and political stakes. Conventionalized gestures, insofar as they rely on acts of citation, occupy a peculiar para-linguistic space. For Butler, this means that quotable gestures, like linguistic signs, are haunted by the possibility of deviation through reiteration. But, more importantly, it means that gestures can be bent toward communicative projects unintended by their authors—they can be unauthorized. While the embodied salute was presumably “authored” and “animated” by Musk alone, the reanimated gesture suggests a murkier admixture of participants (Goffmanian role-fragments). Who is responsible for this enactment of a quotable–unquotable gesture? This is the provocation issued to German law enforcement and to the German public. Through their (unauthorized) reanimation of Musk’s gesture, ZPS and LBD posit that Musk is ultimately responsible—but not only for this highly visible expression of fascism.

By reanimating Musk’s gesture on the façade of the Tesla Gigafactory in Berlin and weaving it into a larger narrative, the artivists demote the self-evident co(n)text of the inauguration ceremony and promote other co- and con-textual aspects: the personal wealth and economic power that Musk has accrued through Tesla and his links to far-right actors in the UK, Europe, and New Zealand, with particular emphasis on his support for the AfD. The factory wall becomes visible as an infrastructure—not only for this site-specific art action but also, more importantly, for the contemporary operation of fascism through technological and economic assemblages. The gesture’s meaning as an expression of fascism and white supremacy is stiffened as the video traces iconic resemblances and indexical relations across a sequence of clips that span geographic sites. At the same time, the action stretches the gesture’s significance; it not only invokes fascism in its early twentieth-century incarnations but also accommodates its contemporary permutations and recombinations. This is textbook citationality insofar as it breathes new life into a prior discursive event by displacing its inaugural co(n)text and drawing out features that were latent (but not manifest) within the cited event (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2013, 57). Through Heil Tesla, the artivists demonstrate that the performativity of the gesture is not quite “rigid” but not so flexible as Musk and his defenders maintain. In sum, the Heil Tesla reanimation both stiffens and stretches the gesture’s performativity by suggesting: (1) it cannot not signify a far-right political stance (it is indefeasible); but (2) this referent is itself protean—not fascism as a fixed historical phenomenon but fascism as a tendency that finds ever-new forms and seeds ever-new formations. With Peirce, we might say that these interventions shift the indexicality of the gesture. Rather than telegraphing Musk’s emotional state or symbolizing his allegiance to the fascism of the Third Reich, the gesture becomes a psychosocial symptom (at some n+1 order of indexicality) of current political, technological, and economic relations.

The form and materiality of this (re)enactment underpins its performative and poetic effects. As a projection, it is scaled up, spliced into a larger “film text”, and projected onto the Gigafactory’s monolithic edifice while remaining somewhat phantasmal. This ghostly impression was amplified by early reports that questioned the video’s authenticity by claiming that Tesla security cameras showed no record of the event. As a digital video, it is rescaled and reformatted for social media viewing. It is sustained—and threatened—by the very infrastructure it critiques. As of today, the video remains available on YouTube, but a string of Reddit commenters remarked that it had been removed from various platforms and encouraged others to download it “before it disappears”. This resus-citation thus appropriates and subverts the monumental aesthetic characteristic of both twentieth- and twenty-first-century fascisms; the Heil Tesla gesture becomes a monument for the digital age, an icon that only briefly withstands the withering of iconic images (cf. Cmiel and Peters Reference Cmiel and Peters2020). Its stability is less a function of fixity than of uncanny recurrence (“circulation”). Yet the effects of this uncanny recurrence filter into the cited event, accentuating the uncanniness of Musk’s own gesture. In other words, Heil Tesla’s act of doubling exposes the gesture as already doubled and redoubled. The “inaugural” gesture is shown to be a copy of a copy of a copy. Even the supposed origin of this gesture, the “Roman salute”, is an artifact of silent film portrayals that exaggerated bodily movements to render them more visible and expressive (Bennhold Reference Bennhold2025). The activists wager that this revenant has teeth. If the gesture can be sutured to the Tesla logo and if the brand can thus be charged with the affects that other emblems of fascism have accrued, then the economic basis of Musk’s power can be undercut. This is the activists’ gambit and call to action, phrased in no uncertain terms.

Decomposing the acting subject, or the “prosthetic gesture”

James Colomina’s installation Elon’s Arm shares some features with Heil Tesla but differs in its staging, materiality, and legal-political context. Most notably, a straight-armed salute lands differently in Barcelona than it does in Berlin. Under Spanish law, the fascist salute is not prohibited tout court. It can, however, be prosecuted as a component of “hate speech” used to incite acts of violence or glorify past genocides or crimes against humanity (Ley Orgánica 10/1995, Art. 510). Recent controversies around the salute indicate that the bar for prosecution is much higher in Spain than in Germany, even in explicitly fascist usage by far-right nationalists (Da Silva Reference Da Silva2017). The contrast in Spain’s and Germany’s litigation of the salute reflects opposing approaches to the countries’ respective fascist histories: whereas the post-Franco democratic order was premised on a pact of “forgetting in order to heal” and has only recently adopted a “Democratic Memory Law”, the Federal Republic of Germany is regarded as the exemplar of a nation confronting its difficult histories (crystallized in the political and moral concept of Vergangenheitsbewältigung). Accordingly, the salute’s performativity in Spain is stiffened by the histories that cling to the form—specifically, histories of Falangism and Francoism—rather than through explicit legal proscription. Its appearance in a Barcelona parking garage marks an intrusion of these pasts into a scene from which they have been deliberately barred and engenders an impression of uncanny recurrence.

Elon’s Arm complicates our emergent understanding of reanimated gestures’ critical force. Like ZPS and LBD, Colomina rematerializes Musk’s gesture and appends it to existing Tesla infrastructure (see Figure 2), thereby transforming privatized urban space into an impromptu stage for public theater. In contrast to the outsized monumentality of Heil Tesla and the singular bulk of the Gigafactory, Elon’s Arm operates at the scale of 1:1, the life-sized or life-like, and incorporates an otherwise innocuous Tesla charging station. Whereas Heil Tesla’s orchestrators end with a clear imperative, “boycott Tesla”, Elon’s Arm relies on the gesture’s form, materiality, and contextual cues to shape audiences’ uptake. Moreover, when we corresponded via email, Colomina emphasized the physicality of his works; unlike a spectral projection cast onto an expanse of concrete, Elon’s Arm reaches into a space dedicated to the performance of everyday life. These differences of staging, framing, and materiality have implications for the reanimated gesture’s performativity. Insofar as it operates at the level of the body and eschews exposition, Elon’s Arm risks reduplicating that which Colomina aims to critique. The danger is not conviction in a court of law; it is public indifference or toothless titillation.

Figure 2.

Elon’s Arm installation, posted by James Colomina (Reference Colomina2025) to Instagram.

Those familiar with the street artist known as “the French Banksy” will immediately recognize his trademarks: lacquered red, life-sized, solitary figures positioned in urban spaces. Commentators tend to emphasize the whimsicality of Colomina’s corpus, which incorporates childlike figures or elements associated with children. I read these motifs in a slightly different way. Colomina juxtaposes the imagery of childhood—toys, cartoons, costumes—with the imagery of war—rifles, gas masks, tanks—in a way that recalls a longer tradition of carnivalesque street theater, emblematized by Guignol puppetry in France, cristobica in Spain, and Kasperle in Germany. This affinity to puppet theater (originally an itinerant and marginalized practice) not only reflects the satirical, populist tenor of Colomina’s work but also its resonance within a broader historical context. The aesthetics of Elon’s Arm are integral to its performativity. As a reanimation and resus-citation, the sculpture accentuates the grotesquery of its referent and subverts received understandings of category and hierarchy.

Elon’s Arm decomposes the acting subject and “speech act” in a different way than Heil Tesla. Whereas the ZPS/LBD art-action retains some interactional context (speech, movement, and environment), Colomina shears the salute at its apex and grafts it into a new mise-en-scène. In its new context and new flesh, the gesturing limb hovers between the human and the inhuman. It resembles a human arm dipped in hi-gloss paint or wax.Footnote ³ One affective precipitate of this operation is uncanniness. Linguistic anthropologist Rupert Stasch (Reference Stasch2008) suggests that uncanniness is a function of communicative practices that transgress norms of referentiality by disclosing affinities that crosscut categories of being and mark the fragility of bodily integrity and propriety. Elon’s Arm is grotesque in an analogous sense; it involves a coupling that “portray[s] the close presence to bodily being of what is strange to it and negating of it” (Stasch Reference Stasch2008, 14) but achieves this effect through the material substitution of polymer for flesh rather than through the kind of lexical substitutions that Stasch observes among the Korowai of Papua New Guinea. The outstretched arm subtends categories of organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate, and body and object, insofar as its form is human while its substance is visibly synthetic. Extending Stasch’s insights, then, we might observe that the arm’s uncanniness also derives from an impression of misplaced or displaced agency—from the decomposition of the embodied subject who is presumed to both author and animate the gesture.

The reanimated salute performatively dissolves the presumed sovereignty of the gesturing subject and draws our attention to its material and semiotic supports. Elon’s Arm subverts the norms of “classical” statuary, wherein figures are typically mounted on pedestals and elevated above the hustle of the everyday, serving as “radiant center[s] of a transcendent individualism” (Stallybrass and White Reference Stallybrass and White1986, 21). Colomina plays wittingly on these formal conventions. His piece echoes the stylized naturalism and plinth-mounted aspect of the classical statue while decomposing the body and situating the errant arm at eye level, among the parking stalls, chargers, pylons, and ventilation tubes that constitute an oft-unremarked infrastructure of economic life. Describing his aims, Colomina suggests that these red figures challenge “the weight of monuments, the authority of statues”, manifesting as unsettling presences that address audiences as bodies “before the mind catches up” (Colomina, pc.). His chosen title, Elon’s Arm, amplifies this uncanniness. It preserves a trace of the author (the proper name) in the possessive form, but the arm’s apparent autonomy undercuts this attribution of belonging.

Such an address is also uncanny in the sense elaborated by Sigmund Freud (1919 Reference Freud1976) and Ernst Jentsch (Reference Jentsch1906): you are hailed as a body by another body or body fragment that inhabits, at least for a moment, a space reserved for animate beings. In everyday cases of mistaken identity—for instance, taking a tree branch for an arm, a mound of garbage bags for a crouched figure—we quickly correct our categorization and move on, perhaps with a quickened pulse. But these sculptural presences are more insistent and not so easily assimilated to familiar rubrics of understanding. The outstretched arm “shares the same space as you, the same air. You can’t swipe it away like a photo or a text” (Colomina, pc.). It remains stubbornly ambivalent insofar as it appears without explanation.

Colomina does not offer narration or contextual cues beyond what the site provides. His reanimation gains its effects through the juxtaposition of found elements: the Tesla charging station with its sleek interface, glowing letters, and red accents is addressed by the glistening, disembodied, outstretched, red arm. Even more than Heil Tesla, this reanimation crystallizes the link between the gesture, the Tesla brand, and the infrastructure of contemporary (techno)fascism. Colomina is reflexive about the relation between his gesturing sculptures and their environment, asserting that “context acts like a resonance chamber” (pc.). We might recall Brecht’s observation that a quoted gesture is not self-sufficient. The characteristic postures of fascists, he suggests, are “hollow” when taken at face value: “[only] when the strutting takes place over corpses do we get the social gest of Fascism” (Brecht Reference Brecht1964, 105). Colomina likewise regards gestural alienation as a means of illuminating taken-for-granted arrangements. In his words: “When you take a gesture everyone thinks they know and put it somewhere else, it becomes unsettling”, and this affective jolt can lead one to reflect on the “social tensions, power relations, and absurdities” that have come to seem natural (Colomina, pc.).

The salute’s uncanny resus-citation troubles the relegation of fascism to a distant past. Colomina attributes this capacity for recurrence to gesture itself, articulating a particular understanding of gesture as a “silent language” that “just circulates” across pasts, presents, and futures: “It can wake a memory, speak of today, and open to tomorrow [… it] crosses borders, it goes straight to the gut […] gesture belongs to everyone. It’s not mine, it’s already there, universal, part of our collective memory. I just freeze it, twist it, so people look at it differently” (pc.). To be sure, such observations reflect a particular understanding of gesture qua “gesture ideology” (cf. Gershon Reference Gershon2010) that glosses over cultural specificities. But they also bespeak a particular understanding of how static artworks can invoke dynamic movements―an ideology of gestural representation rooted in the Western art historical tradition. Writing about gestures rendered in painting and sculpture, Jürgen Streeck highlights the synthetic capacity of artists to “squeeze [an] entire event into one […] frame” (Reference Streeck2009, 3). He further observes, drawing on Lessing and Goethe, that artistic renditions succeed insofar as they excite the viewer’s imaginative faculties and, in particular, their ability to project and integrate the slice of movement into a larger temporal expanse.

In a statement circulated to French media outlets in the days following the installation, Colomina explains that electric charging stations are “supposed to power the future, breathe life into it, [and] usher in a new era” (Devailly Reference Devailly2025). Here, though, “something else is being charged”. Writing for Art Majeur, Jean Dubreil (Reference Dubreil2025) takes up this thread:

Colomina’s statement does not oppose innovation and a “dark […] history”. Rather, he suggests that Musk’s gesture is dangerous insofar as it “revives” and “reactivates” ideas that can become “anchored in people’s minds” (s’ancrer dans les esprits). His installation resists this normalization by rendering the gesture newly strange, by suturing two symbols into an uncanny, chimerical union.

Reanimation enables Colomina to stiffen and stretch the gesture’s signification and reroute its performative effects. He stiffens the salute’s symbolism—its conventionalized designation of a far-right political stance—by stripping it of linguistic ornamentation and slicing it from the longer stretch of movement. Here, Elon’s arm does not speak for itself. Rather, historical and contemporary contexts speak, radiating through the outstretched arm and rendering it indefeasible. By reenacting the salute and grafting it to a Tesla charging station, Colomina thus stretches the gesture’s meaning across temporal horizons (cf. Czirak et al. Reference Czirak, Nikoleit, Oberkrome, Straub, Walter-jochum, Wetzels, Slaby and Von Scheve2019). The salute cannot be said to “point” unambiguously toward a bygone fascist history; instead, it manifests as a malignant outgrowth of Tesla’s futuristic infrastructure, which illuminates it from below.

Colomina emphasizes that sculpted gestures compel participation and potentiate critique. Echoing the sentiments of scholars like Goethe and Lessing, he emphasizes the interactions that unfold as audiences engage the sculpture: “What could have stayed frozen in a studio becomes alive in everyday life” (pc.). As the gesture “rub[s] against traffic, noise, people in a hurry” (pc.), it is amplified, distorted—in a word, it is animated by the scene that it interrupts and recasts. In this sense, the sculpted gesture is also animating. It poses questions while withholding answers. Per Colomina, it “forces you to take a position […] it makes you react”. His practices suggest that this gestural capacity—to confront, provoke response—is a function of careful staging. Colomina installs his works in public places, where they can be photographed, circled, scrutinized, and eventually dismantled. In a phrasing that echoes Goffman (Reference Goffman1959), he asserts: “The street is the biggest stage in the world. […] It’s a daily performance, repetitive, almost invisible. When I put a sculpture there, it arrives like an unexpected actor interrupting the play” (Colomina, pc.). The intruding figure acts as a “switch” that flips the performance of everyday life into an improvised encounter between the urban space, the artwork, and passers-by who become spectators or actors.

In forgoing a script and stage directions, Colomina relinquishes authority over the reanimated salute’s reception. His assertions regarding the power of gesture indicate his own philosophy and aspirations, but the task of reanimation does not fall to the artist alone. Audiences are called to “take positions” (Colomina pc.; cf. Didi-Huberman Reference Didi-Huberman2018), to animate and be animated by the frozen salute. It is only through such reciprocal animation that the rigid arm becomes a potential lever of critique or “silent weapon”, in Colomina’s phrasing. And therein lies the risk of misfire: the possibility that this “weapon” is shooting blanks. For instance, in a video report on Elon’s Arm, a young man stands in front of the Tesla charging station and asserts, “I don’t think he [Musk] did it with that in mind. That’s what I think” (Reuters, Feb. 5, 2025). Critique is thus a structural possibility that Colomina’s works present without consummating.

Like Heil Tesla, Elon’s Arm renders the fascist salute both rigid and motile, susceptible to flexions and dislocations that reroute its force across physical and virtual sites. As the gesture is stiffened, stretched, and sutured to Tesla (both symbolically and quite literally), it becomes a medium of performative anti-fascist critique. Responses by journalists and audiences on social media—including those that disparage the art-actions—testify to the traction of such gestural reanimations amid a torrent of images.

Gestus, ex-citation, and “epic theater”

The power of these poetically estranged gestures lies in their affinity with those everyday gestures that we deploy unthinkingly in the course of interaction. Adopting a self-consciously theatrical register, the Heil Tesla and Elon’s Arm art-actions recoup some of the critical force that Brecht and others attribute to Gestus. In so doing, however, they move beyond caricatures of Brechtian theater that throw out affect with empathy in favor of a “cold intellectual” appeal. Moreover, they move beyond the theater as such. Their “stage” subtends physical and virtual spaces: the highway or parking garage feeds into the pocket proscenia of social media. Through such reanimations, the citation of a gesture becomes an ex-citation and resus-citation―an encounter between bodies and images of bodies whose unruly agencies figure power as non-sovereign, diffuse, and plastic.

Heil Tesla and Elon’s Arm operate within and against contemporary formations of political, technological, and economic power. They divert existing circuits of attention and affect, even as they borrow their momentum. And, perhaps most importantly, they depend on the very technological and communicative infrastructures that they critique. Tactical media and guerrilla art are by no means new. But I think that these actions show us something different about the critical potential of mediated gestures—specifically, the power of reanimated gestures to unsettle the sovereign figure and disclose its semiotic, technological, and material grounds. If you will permit me one last reach, one more iteration of an earlier gesture: these art-actions attempt to leverage apotropaic magic for projects of infrastructural critique. In the outstretched arm, mimesis flags its own performative conditions and reaches toward other, unauthorized political imaginaries.