Kantor, Jacob Robert 1922. Memory: A Triphase Objective Action. Journal of Philosophy 19(23): 624-639.
...why should it be necessary, in order to be objective, to reduce complex human behavior to extremely simple processes? Such a reduction we find in the description of memory as simple habit actions. (Kantor 1922: 624)Similar objection could be raised against the necessity of "units" which has driven away many a scientist from the field of semiotics.
Whenever we start a memory reaction it is invariably implied that the behavior initiated shall be continued or suspended until some specific posterior time. The immediate act is initiated in order that some related action should occur. We make engagements in order to keep them; we memorize in order to recite after some longer or shorter intervening time interval. (Kantor 1922: 626)This generality aptly describes the function of writing, the function of which in this case is to enable easy reading after some interval of time. I emphasize easiness because, in this blog for example, only those bits and pieces which seem like they could be important at some point in the future are recorded and commented. The bold emphases enable one to discriminate most important parts at a glance and comments stand as an achor to what is significant about it. All in all, when combined into a single PDF file, it enables me to Ctrl+F the whole corpus of my oriationes logoi. This is something distinctly new that was markedly impossible for thinkers of previous ages without information technology.
Another important point for the understanding of memorial behavior and one which argues for the continuity of such reaction is the fact that memory reactions involve very close connections between specific responses and particularly stimuly coördinated with them. A given stimulus must call out directly a specific name or a specific act of some non-verbal sort. (Kantor 1922: 626)Thus far this is the earliest use of the word "nonverbal" I have discovered. Given that this does not yet refer to "bodily behaviour" variety of nonverbal phenomena, I am most likely still far off from finding the "holy grale" of first use of "nonverbal" in the sense of overt bodily action or behaviour.
...we have no room in our description for the sorcerous reinstatement of mental states in the remembering mind through a mysterious association of ideas, a process usually made more mysterious still by means of various forms of imaginary neurology. (Kantor 1922: 629)Burn! Yet psychology did not forsake "mental states," "association of ideas," etc. much like semiotics did not heed Charles Morris and stop speaking in vague terms such as sign, language, and meaning.
Projective Memory Acts. - In this class we might consider two types (a) the intentional and (b) the unintentional projective memory response. (a) By intentional projective memory we mean the action in which the person purposely postpones, suspends or projects a response into the future to be later performed. As illustrations we might take the situations in which the person makes an engagement, or arranges to do something later, or memorizes some information to be used at a future date.In my case this distinction makes perfect sense in that whatever I quote and comment for future use is intentional projective memory and whatever I remember from the top of my head but have not written down for my blog for specific use is unintentional projective memory. The first case occurs with almost every text of my own choosing, the second mostly with seminar texts (read because of the influence of "a group convention").
(b) By unintentional projective memory we refer to situations in which the person is not spontaneosly involved in the memorial action; either he is disinterested or does it merely through the influence of a group convention, although the person himself and not the stimuly plays the predominant role in the total behavior segment. Typical of such memory reactions are the casual information behavior which involves acquiring memory materials by sheer contact with things. (Kantor 1922: 630-631)
By casual remembering we mean the kind of activity in which some unimportant and even obscure stimulus starts off a train of memory actions to absent things or events. The whole procedure is unconditioned by any need or necessity, but once the process is started it gains momentum and proceeds apace. Each recovered element serves to arouse a further factor. On the whole, the action is passive at the time and no special practical value accrues to the person, although it may be the source of no end of amusement of depressive uneasiness. (Kantor 1922: 631)It is as if the author is describing Peirce's semiosis, although with the distinct difference that semiosis seems more active and accrues some special practical value (e.g. the generation of meaning?) to the person. Might it be that semiosis is nothing more than casual remembering vested with self-control and made to serve rationality? This sounds like something that should be investigated...
In direct recollection the need to have some information such as a name or event, or when we must recover a lost article, stimulates us to bring about the operation of a consummatory phase of a memory behavior. Here the primary emphasis is upon the recall for the purpose of achieving some practical result... (Kantor 1922: 631)This seems like an everyday occurrence, but the description again sounds like that of semiosis. Perhaps semiosis can be thought of in these terms but instead of memory we would be dealing with the process of thinking? But I digress, semiosis must also account for feeling and behaving, not only thinking.
Another Object Becomes the Adequate Stimulus. - In these segments a different object from the one to which the response is to be made initiates the consummatory phase of the response. This form of memory may safely be called the typical sort and it undoubtedly constitutes a larger serues of actual memory behavior segments. Moreover, the reactions of this type constitute the most effective of our memory behavior. Because of the range of objects that can serve to arouse the reaction the memory behavior can be carried over great stretches of time and place. A striking example of the power of such memory actions as we are now discussing is supplied us in the operation of the extremely complex behavior in which we use printed and other symbolic records to incite memory reactions to function. (Kantor 1922: 635)I wonder if it would be too far of a stretch to call this "semiotic memory" e.g. when signs ("printed and other symbolic records") are made to stand for memory?
Nielsen, Greg M. 2000. Action and Eros in the Creative Zone: Kant, Weber and Bakhtin. Dialogism 4: 34-53.
For Alexander more than for Joas, this process hasled to an understanding of theory as being fundamentally rooted in empirical analysis. From the point of view of subfield research, theory must be limited according to its capacity to be shaped into testable hypothesis. (Nielsen 2000: 37)It becomes very clear that what I am set out to do (something to the effect of writing "the history of the study of nonverbal communication") is basically a construction of a bad theory that cannot be readily shaped into testable hypotheses.
Kant defines sexual appetite as a universal inclination we have for enjoying anothe human being's sex. Sexuality per se 'is not an inclination which one human being has for another as such, but is an inclination for the sex of another'. Acting on such an appetite means turning the other into ab object of impulse. Polygamy, concubinage, prostitution, bestiality, and incest are some of the forms of sexual practice that Kant gives as examples of deviation from the categorical imperative. All violate the notion of the person by separating human and sexual love or by exploiting the other (the object of sexual inclination or possession) as simply a means and not an end. According to Kant, the sexual inclination towards another can only be exercised by all genders ethically should the sexual act with the other be achieved under the umbrella of the monogamous marriage contract. 'Sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite, as soon as the appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one ccasts away a lemon that has been sucked dry.' Sexual love needs to be combined with 'human love' and placed into the construct of rights over the body in order to escape degrading the other person. Only when both partners have the same full rights of access to each other's bodies can one actually give oneself up or abandon oneself in order to get oneself back. Thus, it is only through a contract of marriage rights that we might exercise our sexual impulse without violating the categorical imperative. (Nielsen 2000: 39-40)This struck two cords. Firstly, these problems are dealt with artistically in Brief Interviews with Hideoes Men. Secondly, it struck a chord with modern discourse on homosexuality. Specifically, the note of conservative christians who claim the logical fallacy of slippery slope to be logically valid, that allowing homosexual marriages will soon bring about the profusion of marriages with animals and even corpses. This idiotic contention, an attitude clearly premised on religious imperialism rather than common sense, is regularly argued against with the notion of consent. That is, grown ups of whatever sex or gender can give each other consent, or "full rights of access to each other's bodies." In this sense Kant is deeply outdated, in that today there is little need for marriage to achieve mutual consent. A simple "are you okay with this?" seems to suffice. And returning to the first chord, in Brief Interviews with Hideoes Men one character recounts a story told to him by a casual lover, a spiritual young girs who recounted her experience with a murderous rapist. She eshablished deep eye contact with the maniac, "focused" on him with the sole intent of establishing a connection so that he wouldn't kill her afterward. She held the crying man lovingly while he raped her. In a sense she gave her consent, but merely in the impure sense similar to Elaine Scarry's discussion of how a military trainee who is compulsed to participate in the training "consents" every morning when he wakes up and puts on his soldiers uniform. This seems less like consent than, for example, "acceptance" of a forced situation.
Weber's pivotal Kantian assumption is that reality contains an infinite number of elements. The human mind is capable of grasping only a limited number of these elements. The actor abstracts through concept formation those elements that are meaningful. Those meaningful elements, abstracted from the infinite number of elements in empirical reality, are chosen on the basis of the presuppositions of the actor. In other, words. the meaningful elements are chosen because they have significance for the actor, or, as Weber suggests, are 'value-relevant'. (Nielsen 2000: 42)Is this proto-semiotics?
Bakhtin also takes up an axiological or 'point-of-view theory' that he calls exotopy, or the theory of the excess of seeing. Where Bakhtin differs from Weber is over the meaning of the relation between the points of view and how they exist through one another as much as they exist outside of one another. The way in which the self conceives the other, or the author sees the hero, is always from outside the other. This 'outsidedness' gives the advantage of an excess of seeing that in turn makes the cross-over or doubling process of the self-other relation possible. The selfg-other relation is doubled in the sense that each of us sees the other from outside and each of us has the advantage point of a view above and over that which the other might have on herself or himself. (Nielsen 2000: 48-49)Finally I have a label for the point-of-view approach in Florenskij, Bakhtin, and Uspenskij. This "seeing from the outside" (exo - outside; topos - place) is relevant for nonverbalism as well, as almost everything non-self-comminucative/non-proprioceptive is exotopic. In this sense, exotopic seeing is sysonymous with exteroception.
Bakhtin sees the relation between the inner and the outer body as transgredient in the same sense of the self-other relation.Peeglinägu! Peeglinägu! #peeglinäguMy own body is, at its very foundation an inner body, while the other's body is, at its very foundation, an outward body. When we see our outer body in the mirror we invariably attitudinze a bit ... giving ourselves one expression or another that we deem to be desirableeither according to our own value judgments or according to our anticipation of the other's evaluation and what we might feel about what they might think. (Nielsen 2000: 50)
Koczanowicz, Leszek 2000. Freedom and Communication: The Concept of Human Self in Mead and Bakhtin. Dialogism 4: 54-66.
In the last sentences of his article, Taylor evokes Bakhtin's concept of the dialogical self as an alternative to Mead: 'we need not Mead and his like, but rather Bakhtin. Human beings are constituted in conversation; and hence what gets internalized in the mature subject is not the reaction of the other, but the whole conversation, with the interanimation of its voices.' (Koczanowicz 2000: 56)I think I need Mead and his like rather than Bakhtin, because Mead seems to pay more attention to nonverbal communication or what he calls "the conversation of gestures."
For Mead the basic entity of mental life is meaning, understood as a phenomenon constituted in action. Mead offers the following definition of meaning: 'A gesture by one organism, the resultant of the social act in which the gesture is an early phase, and the response of another organism to the gesture, are relata in a triple or threefold relationship of gesture to the first organism, of gesture to the second organism, and of gesture to subsequent phases of the given social act; and this threefold relatioship constitutes the matrix within which meaning arises or which develops into the field of meaning'. In this way meaning is constituted by gesture and a subsequent social action. (Koczanowicz 2000: 57)Yet another precipitation of Goffman's self-other-situation model, given that "subsequent phases of the given social act" constitute the social situation.
Me is a system of internalized attitudes that allows orientation in the world and the controlling of interactions with others. (Koczanowicz 2000: 58)If this statement is supplemented with the notion of "the conversation of attitudes" then it starts to look like "nonverbal/gestural repertory/capital."
Bonetskaia, N. K. 2004. Mikhail Bakhtin's Life and Philosophical Idea. Russian Studies in Philosophy 43(1): 5-34.
According to his own testimony, Bakhtin did not like Moscow. His life passed mostly in the provinces, in towns within the pale of settlement in the 1920s and in such backwaters as Kustanai and Saransk in later Soviet times. Unattached and wandering are characteristic of Bakhtin's spirit. Cut off as he was from the spiritual foundations of the Symbolist philosophers such as P. Florenskii and S. Bulgakov, Bakhtin is somewhat closer to the existentialists N. berdiaev and especially L. Shestov, who clearly represented the beginning of the post-Christian period of Russian culture. (Bonetskaia 2004: 9)There is a collection of essays by L. Shestov available in the repository. I think I might go for it.
Whether Kagan knew the memberrs of Patmos has not been clearly established so far; however, we do know that Buber's I and Thou was well known in Bakhtin's circle. The prevailing opinion is, however, that Bakhtinian dialogism emerged, at least initially, completely independently: perhaps I and Thou contributed to Bakhtun's choice of the term "dialogue," which does not appear in his early treatises. (Bonetskaia 2004: 14)Also available in the repository.
Bakhtin loves to use the term "word." One should not think that he means a lexeme, a dictionary word: for Bakhtin "word" is the synonym for an integrated and at the same time personal utterance. (Bonetskaia 2004: 19)Good to know. This could be expressed simple as: Bakhtin's "word" is not a type but a token.
Bakhtin's doctrine of the word, theefore, does not belong to "pure" linguistics: Bakhtin himself called it "metalinguistics." In the book on Dostoevsky, metalinguistics appears as a theory of dialogue; in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, as a sociological doctrine of language. Then in the 1930s this same metalinguistics demonstrates its capabilities in the analysis of the novel; in the 1950s it serves as a theory of speech genres; and finally, in the 1960s and 1970s, as a discipline dealing with the problem of a specifically Bakhtinian hermeneutics as textual interpretation. Such are the multifarious approaches to one and the same problem of language in Bakhtin's works. (Bonetskaia 2004: 19)It seems typical for metaterms to change their meaning over time (metacommunication is a good example).
On the other hand, the noveristic image in Bakhtin's theory is funddamentally a linguistic image. According to Bakhtin's "metalinguistics" of the 1930s, in the opposition of the speaker and the word the accent shifts to the second member of the pair. The hero as body, soul, and spirit disappears from Bakhtin's construction of those years, and image of the human being is replaced with "the image of language." Thus existential depth is reduced to the level of language: a postmodernist paradigm of being as a purely linguistic reality appears in Bakhtin's works. (Bonetskaia 2004: 23-24)Today I had a premonition, that I should some day write "A Straw-Man Verbalist," a chapter in which I set up the most detestable "postmodernist" and textualist claims, construct an enemy so to say, which I could then shoot down with a reminder that human beings are nothing without their bodies. Here "the image of the language" could be contorted to the degree of organicist - living and breathing - image of language.
What is important is that today Bakhtin fulfills his intended function - de is organizing the dialogue between Russia and the West. (Bonetskaia 2004: 32)So this is the reason for so many comparative articles (Bakhtin vs. Scheler, Rocker, Goffman, Mead, etc.). His dialogism is dialogued with other great thinkers. This actually made me wonder if I could pull off my own such dialogue: "Kinesic dialogism: Bakhtin and Birdwhistell." Because Birdwhistell furnished his own "dialogical" model of communication (for obvious reasons such as the nonlinear exchange of bodily information), this could actually be tenable. But I a am a dreamer.
Torop, Peeter 2005. Semiosphere and/as the research object of semiotics of culture. Sign Systems Studies 33(1): 159-173.
Furthermore, in Lotman's opinion, in order to understand dialogue, it is not enough to understand the language that is used in the dialogue. In his article "On Semiosphere" he wrote:In this sense it also makes sense to talk about the behavioural sphere: forms of behaviour "functionally" precede concrete manifestations of specific behaviour.Consciousness is impossible without communication. In this sense it can be said that dialogue precedes language and generates the language. The idea of semiosphere is based exactly on this: the ensemble of semiotic formations precedes (not houristically, but functionally) a single isolated language and is a precondition for its existence. Without semiosphere a language not only does not work, but doen not even exist. (Lotman 1984: 16)In the next stage of discussion on semiosphere, in his book "Universe of the Mind" published in 1990, Lotman emphasized that the dialogic situation has to be understood before dialogue: "...the need for dialogue, the dialogic situation, precedes both real dialogue and even the existence of a language in which to conduct it: the semiotic situation precedes the instruments of semiosis" (Lotman 1990: 143-144). Thus dialogue becomes not only a term closely related to semiosphere, but it becomes one of its ontological characteristics. (Torop 2005: 163)
Foreseeing the increase in the varieties of textual ontiologies and problems of understanding, R. Jakobson stresses the importance of distinguishing between homogeseous messages, i.e. those based on a single sign system, and syncretic messages, i.e. those based on the combination of several sign systems: "The study of communication must distinguish between homogeneous messages which use a single semiotic system and syncretic messages based on a combination or merger of different sign patterns" (Jakobson 1971: 705). (Torop 2005: 166)Indeed, perceptive. I presume that concursive messages (in which the verbal and nonverbal are "merged") belong to the class of syncretic messages.
Danesi, Marcel 2013. On the Metaphorical Connectivity of Cultural Sign Systems. Signs and Society 1(1): 33-49.
Connectionism [that the brain is a connecting organ, putting the bits together in a holistic way] has, however, always been an implicit working hypothesis in semiotics. It was the basis of Charles Peirce's theory of semiosis (1931-58). Peirce called the process of connecting forms to each other "abduction," defining it as a form of inference based on sense, experience, and the creative imagination. Lotman (1990) called the organizational structure of cultures an overarching "text" and recommended that the study of individual texts would lead to an understanding of hew the overarching one crystallized. Mertz and Parmentier (1985) used the term semiotic mediation to indicate how signs interact to produce meaningful wholes, and Parmentier (1994) subsequently argued that sign systems are structured according to reciprocally mirroring semiotic devices that create a sense of wholeness to people's experience of reality. (Danesi 2013: 34)Always good to see several strands of semiotics recollected as if without effort.
their [Lakoff and Johnson's] notion of "conceptual metophors" came forwald to provide the missing piece of the puzzle of how culture coheres into a cognitive Gestalt - a connective system of meaning. (Danesi 2013: 34)Lotman has his own a title for culture: "a certain unity."
But still missing from this framework is a relatively simple feature - the relation between linguistic and nonlinguistic forms in the connective system. This essay puts forward a concrete proposal of how the various nonlinguistic forms (material, visual, aesthetic, etc.) can be connected to conceptual metaphors and how this connectivity produces the sense of wholeness in a culture. (Danesi 2013: 35)I am excited. The introduction alreadi hinted that he proposes the notion of metaform. Now, Metaform is also an instrumental hip-hop artist who released a dark and beautiful album Standing on the Shoulders of Giants in 2008. I am exicted because not only is this term familiar because of the artist, it looks as if Danesi is going to propose basically what I have already termed concursivity. It may very well happen that his notion is better than mine and I will have to either discard or rethink a lot of notes I have made during the past year or so. Thus, before I will continue reading, I'll have a cigarette and ponder about all of this - perhaps a personally historical moment for me.
A "metaform" can be defined as the form that is connected interpretively (semiotically) to a conceptual metaphor as a consequence of the metaphor being distributed thoughout the cultural network of meaning. The latter can be called a "distributed sign" (DS), for lack of a better term, which in the meaning extracted of a specific conceptual metaphor that works its way into the interpretation and use of physical forms such as objects, rituals, symbols, and the like. An initial example is the meaning of chocolate as a symbol of love. This is the result of the DS derived from the conceptual metaphor love is a sweet taste. The DS works its way into the meanings of material forms (chocolate) and rituals (the giving of sweets at Valentine's Day) that are connected to love. The chocolate and rituals are exaamples of metaforms. (Danesi 2013: 35)Hmm, not exactly what I was expecting. Metaform in this sense seems more like a "part" of a metaphor "whole."
Conceptual metonyms are distributed in nonverbal domains as well, producing their own kinds of metaforms. For example, the face is a common metonym for personality ("There ar emany faces in the audience"; "His face tells it all"). It becamen a DS leading to metaforms of the face as a symbol of personality - this can be seen, for example, in the use of theatrical masks, in portraits that focus on the face, and so on. (Danesi 2013: 43)Dno, I think these examples can be taken quite literally (that is, metonymy is not necessary): when the audience is packed there are a lot of faces - remember that the face is the first thing one would count in this situation (counting pairs of hands in this situation would make no sense); and the face can tell it all - facial expressions can make verbal expressions unnecessary.
In gesture, the raising of a hand designates notions of amelioration, betterment, growth, and so on, whereas the lowering of the hand designates the opposite notions. In bodily representation and perception, this metaform shows up in the common viewpoint that "taller is more attractive" / "shorter is less attractive." (Danesi 2013: 43)Again, I don't think these are mere metaphors. Happiness does produce the effect of raising the hands - I have personally wittnessed a girl and a boy standing face-to-face and intermittently with hugging the girs waved her hands in the air with a giddy expression in her face, as if she had just received good news. And didn't social psychologists prove long ago that taller people are perceived as more attractive?
The line of inquiry suggested here is really part of a frowing awareness in anthropology and linguistics of the connectivity between the verbal and the nonverbal domains of semiosis, a line consistent with the emergent linguistic and materialist-semiotic discourse on the mutual categorization of the order of objects and the ordering off objects (e.g., Jocjelman 2010). This article suggests that this kind of research consider a level of "ethno-metaforms" as part of the overall system of "ethnometapragmatics" (Silverstein and Urban 1996). (Danesi 2013: 45)Yeah, no, I am dissappointed. The notion of "nonverbal" here is too broad to fit my rather narrow interests as a student of nonverbal communication (or body motion and postures). Metaform theory may become useful for my purposes in another way, though. Concursive analysis takes account only of that domain of language use that refers to "body langugae," but there are many metaphorical phenomena that sort of "builds" on concourse - e.g. "body of research;" also, I'm still looking for means for making better sense of expressions such as Wittness's lyrics: "She's got a body language written out in cursive."
Lateiner, Donald 1996. Nonverbal Behaviors in Ovid's Poetry, Primarily Metamorphoses 14. The Classical Journal 91(3): 225-253.
Nonverbal behavior adds a visual and emotional dimension to these as well as to more "realistic" characters. (Lateiner 1996: 226; footnote 2)Well put.
The data inventories here survived the undeniable loss of many undocumented "real life" nonverbal behaviors. Readers should understand that some human gestures or postures fall into more than one category of any systematic terminology. Therefore, some complex acts of Achaemenides or Vertumnus appear in several soctions. (Lateiner 1996: 226; footnote 3)The limits of concursivity: concursive study may (turn out to) only yield verbal labels or descriptions for actions that do have name or succumb to description; thus may nonverbal behaviors may go undocumented. A hypothesis could be built from this: that the nonverbal behaviour which reaches the concursive status or level is the nonverbal behaviour that is most important for the common man (more exactly, to writers and readers).
Gestures (to use the common term) intensify or resolve face-to-face confrontations and determine the course of narratives. (Lateiner 1996: 225)E.g. concourse as a plot advancement device.
Ovid's one epic presents a wide range of nonverbal behaviors in portrayals of formal and informal communication. He highlights communicative blockage, failures in communication and persuasion, also defeated appeals, and he focuses on success in deceits, especially deceptive entreaty by body language and explicit words. He fingers and probes discrepancies among characters' self-image, their messages to others and their public repute. He draws attention to "face," a person's efforts to convey a persona, and to "leakage," tell-tale displays of nonverbal affect (postures, gestures, and sounds) that are hard or impossible to control. Ovid explicitly notes (Met. 2.447): heu! quam difficile est, crimen non prodere vultu! (Lateiner 1996: 225-226)The ancients were perceptive. The statement goes approximately: "Hey! How difficult it is not to let a look betray a crime!"
Five distinct categories of nonverbal behavior useful for analysis of ancient epic emerge from recent research on modes of expression conducted by social psychologists [Ekman & Friesen], comparative anthropologists [E. T. Hall], and literary semiologists [F. Poyatos]. Following this schema will fragment some oft-cited tales such as Vertumnus', but the gain will be to keep focus on the categories.Lateiner has made his own mix of Ekman & Friesen's classical "categarise of coding" and Edward T. Hall's contribution. Neat. And I suspect that "body-talk" - a useful if inexact term - is Lateur's translation of sermo corporis (I would have guessed "speech of the body" but body-talk is better, shorter).
A. Ritualized, conventional gestures, postures, orientations, & vocalics. [emblems]
B1. Affect display: psycho-physical, out-of-awareness emotional show.
B2. Subconscious, out-of-awareness gesture, posture, and vocalics.
C. External adaptors: communicative objects and clothes; self-grooming.
D. Proxemics & chronemics: the social manipulation of space and time.
E. Informal, in-awareness gesture, posture, and vocalics.
These rubrics outline the following survey of Ovid's "body-talk," a useful if inexact term, and paralinguistic. (Lateiner 1996: 226-227)
...vix tollens lumina... (Lateiner 1996: 227)Google translate: "hardly lifted eye" - very much the routine of modern lecture classes.
Comic literature includes more bodily business and movement than tragic. Gawky bodies betray social pretence and pretensions. Undignified behavior suits the comic genre. Ovid exploits his predecessors' solemn poetic conventions, generic pastoral, elegiac, and epic vocabulary and motifs, in order to exploit the humorous potential inherent in both heroic and amatory characterization. One encounters disconcerting, maliciously intentional anachronism and "anatopism," conscious mis-timing and misplacement, especially in the free-floating similes. (Lateiner 1996: 228)This may be a rationalization for my own choosing of dystopian literature for analysis: dystopias are tragic (often ending in death [Orwell] or suicide [Huxley]) and thus not very frivolous with nonverbal behaviour. Just today I wondered if, besides dystopian literature, I should also perform concursive reading of fiction which is so explicit as to have "body language" in the title (e.g. Body Language and by Suzanne Brockmann Dead Body Language by Penny Warner).
The focus of nonverbal attention naturally falls on protagonists, whose nonverbal behaviors receive lengthier description... (Lateiner 1996: 230)Naturally... But why? Could it be that the authors "live through" the protagonists, sembling with them as "I" and view other characters as "Thou" whose consciousness (and detail behaviour) is less accessible? It is imaginable that, just like the protagonist of Notes from the Underground is "anonymous" (has no name, no verbal label) there could be literature wherein all but the protagonist's behaviour is finely discriminated?
Song (ritualized paralinguistic performance with marked pitch, pace, and tone)... [...] The dance (expressive standardized movement)... (Lateiner 1996: 231)Jesus Christ! Do the terms "song" and "dance" really need a nonverbalist definition?
Hands may be less expressive and explicit than words (manus autem, minus arguta), but Cicero recommends foot-stamping (supplosio pedis) at the beginning and end of emphatic verbal passages. This is part of a prlea for histrionics in court. Cicero in this passage criticizes the lawyers handling a case in which "no defence-lawyer groaned, none cried out, and none beseeched" the court (nemo ingemuit, nemo inclamavit patronorum ... nemo supplicavit). Since "the face tells all," in ore sunt omnia, for Cicero and Ovid, the face by itself can express all attitudes, moods, and emotions. The eyes, moreover, dominate the face. In general, "delivery is a kind of language of the body for which reason all the more ought to fit the mind cllosely" (est enim actio quasi sermo corporis quo magis menti congruens esse debet). Quintilian later says in a similar fashion (inst. or. 11.3.65): is [se. gestus] ... pleraque etiam citra virba significat ("gesture means more than the words themselves"). Vox, vultus, and gestus should match serious speakers' intentions. (Lateiner 1996: 323)Some age-old truths that somehow got lost for the postmodernist/textualists.
Ovid avails himself of this resource of shorthand report of emotional response, but with less detail. For his quickly moving narratives, one or two such visible or audible displays replace description or analysis of emotional states and dynamics. (Lateiner 1996: 234)That is, show not tell (though, to be exact, show by tell). I wonder how "reported speech" relates to concursivity...
Some philosophical critiqcs, unfamiliar with studies of nonverbal behavior, initially exclude "object adaptors" from the field of nonverbal behaviors, but material goods provide people and literature, a medium of words, with an essential communicative channel for feeling, action, thought, and social status - sometimes complementing, sometimes contradicting, sentiments in the verbal channel. "Say it with flowers" contains a very old observation on communicative tokens. Objects, like gustures, are indispensable to our interactions. Objects invested with political, social, or class value can support, supplant, or contradict a character's words or deeds. (Lateiner 1996: 241)Semiotics of objects.
Gesture for the philosophies oyten supplies decipherable emotional reality when language offers sentiment of dubious authenticity (Josephs 1960: 48-61). Diderot and other philosophies were convinced that gesture, as a feature of human psychology, was prior to, and more honest than, words. They believed there was a universal, natural language of dynamic and fugitive gesture, more adequate and immediate than civilized and manipulable words. This expressive resource could supplement words and therefore was useful for actors portraying intense emotional experiences. (Lateiner 1996: 244; footnote 29)Another reason for some day reading Diderot.
Ovid reasized that humans initially recognize each other less by the words of speech, shared verbal greetings and ideas, than by more idiosyncratic nonverbal behavior, such as paralinguistic identifiers like vocal quality (accent, drawl, nasalization), stuttering, or vocal tempo, or gait, facial tics, expressive postures, and cocking of the head. A habitual movement of the eyes, exprissive hands, a slouched posture or loping walk, or one sarcastic tone of voice, even a smile (cf. 272) instantly enables humans to identify hundreds of other individuals. (Lateiner 1996: 244-245)The importance of nonverbal repertory.
The earliest studies (both reprinted) of A. de Jorio, La mimica degli Antichi investigata nel Gestire Neapolitana (1832) and D. Efron, Gesture and Environment (1941) study specific Italian (and Jewish) gestural communities. (Lateiner 1996: 249; footnote 36)Efron is well known, because Bridwhistell seemingly just replaced gesture with kinesics and environment with context for the title of his own work. De Jorio I am hearing about for the first time. Transration of his book, Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity is available in Tartu in wholly two libraries (one of them being Sebeok's collection).
Avid's reports of nonverbal behavior provide a helpful "silent language" to convey difficult human choices, social dilemmas, and personal emotions. Ovid anticipates, but does not replicate, modern character description or psychological analysis, novelistic or clinical. In the varied sufferings and aborted wooings of his epic, nonverbal behavior frequently underlines victimizing passions, societal tabus, and invincible responses to loss and frustration. References to involuntary affect displays, often quite unconscious for the characters, supply something like motives or "causes." (Lateiner 1996: 250)These are thi things I consider worthy of study in dystopian literature.
WORDS
- "...the timorous Hobbes..."
Showing or suffering from nervousness, fear, or a lack of confidence: "a timorous voice".
- "...a natural law of propinquity in marriage..."
1. The state of being close to someone or something; proximity.
2. Close kinship. - "...the absence of prejudice and rancorous feeling..."
showing deep-seated resentment; "preserve...from rancourous envy of the rich"- Aldous Huxley.
- "...the fair of Niort, for which Villon composed his diablerie..."
1. Reckless mischief; charismatic wildness.
2. Sorcery supposedly assisted by the devil. - "...the universal conflageration is merely the fire near which they are resting after the game..."
An extensive fire that destroys a great deal of land or property.
- "...an ideal of intelligence that lies before us of the clear refulgence of the intellect..."
radiance: the quality of being bright and sending out rays of light.
- "...the misprisions. of these partial approaches to the study of literature.."
1. The deliberate concealment of one's knowledge of a treasonable act or a felony.
2. Erroneous judgment, esp. of the value or identity of something. - "...the silent house of langorous Somnus or Sleep..."
dreamy: lacking spirit or liveliness; "a lackadaisical attempt"; "a languid mood"; "a languid wave of the...
- "...especially deceptive entreaty in body language and explicit words..."
An earnest or humble request: "turned a deaf ear to his entreaties".
- "...consequently and condignly, his voice is punished..."
Deserved; adequate: "On sober reflection, such worries over a man's condign punishment seemed senseless" (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.)
- "...the superhuman pretensions of the Augustan dispensation..."
1. Exemption from a rule or usual requirement.
2. Permission to be exempted from the laws or observances of a church. - "...Ovid's heroes beseech or expostulate with their bodies as well as with words..."
Express strong disapproval or disagreement.
- "...The perfervid manner..."
Intense and impassioned.
- "...Stupefaction, silent paralysis, loss of verbal contact..."
Ultimately from Latin stupefaciō (“strike dumb, stun with amazement, stupefy”), from stupeō (“I am stunned, speechless”) (English stupid, stupor) + faciō (“do, make”).
- "...her rebarbative and total rejection of males..."
Unattractive and objectionable: "rebarbative modern buildings".
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