Parataxis

Newbold, R. F. 1986. Nonverbal Communication and Parataxis in Late Antiquity. L’Antiquité Classique 55: 223-244.

In discussing the proper conduct of a young man, Cicero in De Officis includes a section on prepriety in bodily movements and outward appearance (I, 126-132). His discussions embraces manner of speech, clothing, gesture, posture, gait and facial expression. Cicero recognises that is his society people are judged by appearances as much as by what they say ar achieve, and urges everyone with a concern for propriety to use the various nonverbal channels of information to present themselves in a favourable light. (Newbold 1986: 223)

Goes to show the scope of Cicero's musings as well as indicates towards the importance of appearances in any era.

The distinction between presentation and representatian of the self is drawn and elaborated upon by J. Spiegel and P. Mechotka, Messages of the Body, New York, 1974, pp. 3-6. Presentation is an act or performance: in can be unrelated to inner states. (Newbold 1986: 223; footnote 2)

In natural behaviour one represents his true feelings [esitab tõelisi tundeid]. In contrived behaviour one acts or presents a script-like configuration. A fake smile is a presentation, while a genuine expression of happiness represents felt happiness.

In his Christianised version of the De Officis, composed c. 391, St. Ambrose had a section that parallels Cicero's discussion (I, 67-89). Abrose's treatment is more expansive and has a different emphasis. Whereas Cicero stresses the avoidance of solecisms and the presentation of the inner self through external channels and glosses over the deception this may entail, Ambrose stresses the fidelity of nonverbal means for representing the true self: "the attitude of the mind is seen in the bodily posture ... body movements are like the utterances of the soul" (I, 71). (Newbold 1986: 223)

This sounds awfully Augustinian. That is, from this statement one could easily reach Augustine's cordis inspector.

Ancient rhetoricians were fully aware of the importance of optimizing every channel for sending messages. Even if one does not speak or move, one cannot help emitting information about oneself via posture, facial expression, clothing, hairstyle, skin colour, etc. Indeed, such fields of information will then be more avidly studied for clues. Deception and tension (the latter being caused by the former) can be discerned in awkward, stilted behaviour, change of pace in speech or movement, stiffness, exaggerated gestures, alterations in voice pitch, etc. Much of this information is exchanged subliminally but whet inauthenticity is sensed it may intensify efforts to strip off the mask. (Newbold 1986: 224)

I agree with M. R. Key, that not only deception but excessive attention to nonverbal communication produces this tension. That is, if the subject is aware that his or her bodily behaviour is being scrutinized, it may produce so-called "false positives."

...it may be helpful to provide some concrete support for this intuition and to list most of the means by which information can be transmitted nonverbally between humans:

1. Gesture: gestures may be numerous or few, expansive or inhibited, free or stereotyped, jerky or smooth. 2. Posture: not just the altitude (lying, sitting, kneeling, standing) and attitude) or angle of the position, but whether the person is relaxed or tense, steady or unsteady, 4. Facial expression: scowl, smile, nature of gaze. 4. Body adornment: clothing, cosmetics, hair or beard style, jewellery, insignia, tattoo. 5. Gait: manner and pace of locomotion. 6. Autonomic nervous system responses which reveal emotional states: blush, pale, horripilate, sweat, tremble, weep. 7. Silence. 8. Eye contact or avoidance: an important source of signals about fear and security, dominance and submission. 9. Spatial arrangements: arrangements of furniture or distance between bodies. 10. Odours. 11. Pictures: painting, sculpture, mosaic, engraving, diagrams. 12. Dance, mime. 13. Architecture. 14. Music. 15. Handwriting (graphology). 16. Tone, volume, timbre, pitch, speed of utterance. 17. Nonverbal human sounds: wail, snore, groan, whistle, etc. 18. Touch - self or others: kiss, emrace, stroke, hit, fidget, scratch. 19. Inanimate signalling devices: spears, arrows, stones, flags, mirrors, smoke.

See L. Forsdale, Nonverbal communication, New York, 1974; C. Wolf, A psychology of gesture, London, 1945; P. Ekman and W. V. Friesen, Unmasking the face, New Jersey, 1975. Information may be transmitted via dreams, telepathy or the genetic code. Abstract patterns or designs ob objects may also convey nonverbal information. (Newbold 1986: 225)

Neat list. 2 out of the 3 works cited I haven't read yet.

Words are the primary means of secial control. Rulers issue edicts and stipulate through words how subjects should behave towards each other, towards outsiders and towards the ruler. Oral precepts organize behaviour and complement other forms of social control prevalent in the community. (Newbold 1986: 228)

The fact that "oral precepts organize behaviour" (or, that verbal sign systems organize nonverbal behaviour) should be one of the main tenets of concursive study: to investigate ways in which language controls the actions of bodies, or common expressions not only describe but (prophetically) guide physical behaviour.

Nonverbal clues to real emotions and intentions behind the verbal facades and the ostensible badges of status become increasingly valuable. People are more practiced at lying with words than faces, and with faces than bodies. (Newbold 1986: 228)

This is a fairly common observation and indulged by Ekman and Friesen's suggestion that people control their faces and fands more than the behaviour of their lower extremities. Yet, in the 21st century, one cannot help shake the feeling that this might not hold as true as it once did. More people are more versed in so-called "body language" and "more practiced" at lying with beth their faces and bodies. The wide use of the "basketball steeple," for example, by almost every single high politician - no matter the nationality - is a testament to this suspicion.

Words inadequately express intense feeling. People may therefore reject the verbal medium and turn to their bodies as a medium of expression. They protest and dissent not by logical argument, lies and verbal mystification (the weapons of the authorities, the allies of social conformity) but by embodying their arguments in gesture, posture, costume ("dumb insolence") and by bodily occupation of centres of power and influence - or by removing their bodies from the scene, "dropping out". (Newbold 1986: 229)

I did not expect this discourse in such an article. It almost seems like these matters are universal. Some thoughts for the semiotics of protest.

Body language is more easily and sooner learnt than verbal language. It is preverbal. Emission of information is more subliminal, and assessment of perceived information more intuitive. And the process is paratactic in that it comprises an array of signals that are not produced in the logical, organized, hypotactic manner of sophisticated speech. Body langugae is a shifting constellation of juxtaposed elements. Yet. if paratactic, it is also simultaneous (as opposed to the sequentiality of verbal discourse) because facial expression, posture, gesture etc. may be prolonged and because a range of signals are emitted simultaneously. Words are bits, pictures are wholes. (Newbold 1986: 230)

This last sentence is by far the simplest formulation of the discrete/continuous distinction.

Pictures, and words that conjure up pictures - metaphors, myths, ecphrases - can all convey a less fagmentary impression of the world. (Newbold 1986: 231)

"Words that conjure up pictures" (or rather images of bodily behaviours) are what I mean by concursivity. What are ecphrases?

When the Sycarusean tyrants Gelo and Hiero tried to monopolise the power of words by forbidding citizens to utter any sound at all, the citizens devised a strategy of silent signs to carry on their (ultimately, successful) resistance. See V. Farenga, Pindaric Craft and the Writing of Pythia IV, in Helios, 5 (1977), pp. 3-38. (Newbold 1986: 231; footnote 25)

Bradbury's Fahrenheit's shares a characteristic with this - the written word is forbidden and a resistance movement of "book people" forms.

Both verbal and nonverbal communication have a formal mode that seeks to control and limit idiosyncratic interpretation. But in a society that has found words to be the most ready, clear and efficient means of instruction and exposition, nonverbal communication offers a world of dumb insolence and subtle nuances to be delicately explored. It offers a comparatively low risk method of challenging authority and traditional assumptions. Nonverbal communication can offer "space" to explore and in which to assert autonomy and individualism. (Newbold 1986: 231)

I haven't reached this conclusion, but it seems correct. At least in the sense that words of resistance ore muffled and erased, but behavioural resistance is too volatile or fluid to be controlled in this way.

Parataxis spatialises discourse and creates a non-linear, analogical-topological syntax. (Newbold 1986: 232)

A. R. would probably appreciate this kind of talk.

The greater literary interest in nonverbal communication, particularly gesture, reveals a pictorially inclined interest in space rather than in sequential time. References to nonverbal cues force the hearer or reader to make more attempt to visualise the scene, the movements and the spatial relationships between characters. If only the words of the speakers are gien, the temporal aspect of events is emphasised. Gesture, like parataxis, spatialises, and draws the reader into the immediacy and drama of the situation. (Newbold 1986: 234)

Very much an aspect of concursivity. I have a hunch that concursive study might yield a manner of speaking (with constant references to bodily behaviour) that may make the listener visualize more... And, perhaps, it the process become as if hypnotised and unanalytical.

[...] and speech: sermo derives ultimately from serere, to tie together: cf. Sanscrit sarat, thread; Greek seira, rope; Latin series. (Newbold 1986: 236; footnote 39)

Very useful etymological note for sermo corporis (speech of the body). Seda etümoloogiat võib ära kasutada ka arupaela mõiste täpsustamiseks: "pael" on siin see komponent mis seob tähistaja ja tähistatava, aga ka süntagmaatilises/semioosilises mõttes seob ühe märgi teisega ja teise kolmandaga, et moodustuks mõtterong või kõnevoog (aga miks mitte ka mõttevoog ja kõnerong?).

In the Fourth Century, reports of image worship by Christians became common and church leaders became concerned that worship of Christ's image would divert attention from His teachings. (Newbold 1986: 237)

In this sense what goes on today with people being converted by means of The Passion of the Christ is nothing more than moving image worship.

Nonverbal communication involves more of a person than verbal communication: it permits a more comprehensive expression and perception of the personality. (Newbold 1986: 237)

Useful for "the nonverbal self," and for arguing against textualist accounts of selfhood.

Successful memorisation requires mobilising all the senses and the translating of as much information as possible into concrete, graspable images that are more easily stored and recalled. The larger the preceding accumulation of cultural achhievement preserved through writing, the greater the demands on the memory, and the more need to revert t analogic, imagistic modes of storing, interpreting and synthesising the ceaselessly proliferating and complexifying patterns of data. (Newbold 1986: 238)

Made me think of how to reorganize this blog if I should ever desire to systematise the wealth of knowledge collected. Right now every post has at least one image, serving as a memory-anchor. Yet every post contains numerous quotes on a variety of subjects. If I were ever to reorganize this data according to subjects, I'd probably have to create or aquire somehow a representative image or several for every subject.

Church and state evinced their continued faith in verbiage to impress, control and instruct via an abundance of edicts, inscribed laws, titles, panegyrics, sermons, exegeses and polemics. But to win hearns as well an minds, nonverbal means alse have to be employed. (Newbold 1986: 240)

This "faith in verbiage" is a good substitution for Birdwhistell's expression "over-believing in words."

Muscular tension is easily communicated and observers tend unconsciously to imitate the attitude of the observed. In particular, people tense when stared at. (Newbold 1986: 242)

This may be an important facet of military training.

Idol, John L. 1991. "A Linked Circle of Three" Plus One: Nonverbal Communication in "The Marble Faun". Studies in the Novel 23(1): 139-151.

As for the hands, without which all action would be crippled and enfeebled, it is scarcely possible to describe the variety of their motions, since they are almost as expressive as words. For other portions of the body merely help the speaker, whereas the hands may almost be said to speak. (Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria)

"Almost" doesn't really even cut it any more. Sign languages do enable one do speak with hands.

Writers early and late have noted body language and recorded it as a means of narrating action and expressing character. Nonverbal acts have long been the stuff of poets, dramatists, and fictionists. Characters within many of the pieces we call masterworks have shown themselves to be attentive students of body language, for example, Hamlet, who says, "One may smile and smile, and be a villain." (Idol 1991: 139)

Indeed this is the justification for studying nonverbal communication in literature: writers have long been and still are the primary agents of putting actions into words. I believe that many concursive expressions that any given person may know originates not from scientific studies but from fiction.

The reluctance of Kenyon and Donatello to touch contributes to Kenyon's efforts to persuade Miriam to assume responsibility as Donatello's mentar: "I am a man, and between man and man, there is always an insuperable gulf. They can never quite grasp each other's hands; and therefore man never derives any intimate help, any heart-sustenance, form his brother man, but from woman - his mother, his sister, or his wife" (p. 285). (Idol 1991: 145)

These are actually wise words, although the word "insuperable" sounds odd, as if it should be "insurmountable" [ületamatu]. And too bad that the author of this article isn't more analyticas. He's merely quoting one passage after the other and constructing his own - nonverbalistically filtered - narrative.

In heaven, I am very sure, there will be no occasion for words; - our minds will enter into each other, and silently possess themselves of their mutual riches.

(Hawthorne in Idol 1991: 149)

Words are, I am very sure, a significant part of the riches of the mind.

Halton, Eugene 2004. The Living Gesture and the Signifying Moment. Symbolic Interaction 27(1): 89-113.

though we like to think of ourselves as creatures of the tongue, communication between people is largely rooted in conversations of gestures. We converse in public contexts through our faces and gazes and bodily language, through mostly subconscious gestures of communication and entrancement, and not simply through our verbal utterances (Birdwhistell 1970; Darwin [1872] 1998; Hall 1959, 167, 1983). (Halton 2004: 89)

I am not a creature of the tongue. Rather, I'm a creature of the beyboard and the mouse.

Mead,s concept of the generalized other, though a good starting point, needs to be supplemented by a more detailed understanding of body semiotics, one that can bridge the prehistoric world of hunter-gatherers - from whom our present bodies are shaped - with that of contemporary technoculture, in which our present bodies live. (Halton 2004: 90)

This author's jargon is pleasantly different, yet it is clear that "bodily language" and "body semiotics" is exactly what I'm into.

The Greek term phronesis, usually translated as "prudence" or practical knowledge, had an early literal meaning for the area around the heart (phren), including the life-breathing lungs. To say that the heart and lungs are associated with reasonableness seems odd to a modern person knowledgeable about the brain. For we live in the mechanical universe described by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, where he stated, "For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings." Yet the living, breathing, pulsing, bodily center of gravity makes great sense when one shifts a conception of knowledge to one of awareness as a basis for reasonableness. For that is what we mean when wy say that someone acts "with heart," or "from the gut," namely, that the bodily organs of awareness - of the perceptive practice of the senses, emotions, and imagination - are brought to bear in the moment for interpretation and for acting upon the situation. (Halton 2004: 90)

In my mind the heart and lungs play a very significant role - if not in reasonableness (a foreign notion for me, then) - in cognitive processes. Namely, the lungs serve to acquire oxygen and the heart is the center of blood circulation. Combined with the stomach, that is, metabolism or the source of energy, they function in a complementary manner. I measure this subjectively by how well I understand what I'm reading or how well I grasp the text and what ideas of my own the text manages to spark. When my own comments are lengthy then I'm well provided for, if short and keyword-ish, then not so much.

The self goes far deeper than discourse, and the spontaneous self can also do "self-constructing." That, after all, is what living is about. (Halton 2004: 91)

Neat. Tell this to the textualist essentialists for whom the self exists only in discourse.

As the philosopher and logician Charles S. Peirce (1931:par. 627( put it mor than a century ago, "The mental qualities we most admire in all human beings except our several selves are the maiden's delicacy, the mother's devotion, manly courage, and other inheritances that have come to us from the biped who did not yet speak; while the characters that are most contemptible take their origin in reasoning. ... It is the instincts, the sentiments, that make the substance of the soul. Cognition is only its surface, its locus of contact with what is external to it." Peirce championed rational science, yet acknowledged that in practical conduct there are modes of inference that go deeper than rational inference. (Halton 2004: 91)

I see this as a pharaphrase of Peirce's three interpretants: emotional (sentiments), energetic (instincts) and rational (cognition).

I propose that a cultural template has come to prominence, which I term the mechanical other. We live in a world in which the mechanical other of technoculture has been relentlessly colonizing the inner world of humanity and the outer world of the biosphere. It represents the transformation of Mead's model of the generalized other into one that in anticommunity, antidemocratic, and, most importantly, antiorganic, having as its purpose the colonization and replacement of those supreme gifts of our organic, sensing, and signifying nature by the dictates of the automaton. It is a driving force in social life these days, manifesting in all the aspects of electroculture, from the Internet to CD burning to television to surveillance to automated encounters ... and on and on. (Halton 2004: 91-92)

I appreciate this discussion because I'm trying to approach related matters in some way or other. That is, the numerous gadgets (technoculture) which man has set between himself and the rest of the nature (in A. Leopold's sense) are worthy of being studied, or at least it seems like a prime time to study these matters.

Same of the capacities of the organic, signifying bodp that make us most human, such as the spontaneus gesture, are precisely what the mechanical other seems intent on deleting. Yet I claim that it may be precisely these deep-rooted abilities for what I term self-originated experience that can ultimately offset automatism (Halton 1995, 2000).
We are live creatures, not word processors, capable of feeling, sensing, and interpreting the world, of opening the doors of perception that reach past the "mind forg'd manacles" of route habituation, of opening awareness to see the world as it truly is: infinite. Andi it is the feelings, sensings, images, and gestures that open us to the fulness of the living moment and that best feed the reflective self. (Halton 2004: 92)

Very much the same anti-textualist sentiment manifest elsewhere (e.g. humans are not "vocabularies incarnate").

"Conversation of gestures" is often taken to mean the gestural languages of other animals and an immature developmental level of humans, in which the child has not yet learned how te internalize, or take the role of, the generalized other. Yet this developmental level of the conversation of gestures is not erased by later development but continues as a significant element of the mature generalized other in public life. In Gregory Bateson's (1972: 614) words: "If ... verbal language were in any sense an evolutionary replacement of ommunication by means of kinesics and paralanguage, we would expect the old, predominantly iconic systems to have undergone conspicuous deccay. Clearly they have not. Rather, the kinesics of men have become richer and more complex, and paralanguage has blossomed side by side with the evolution of verbal language." (Halton 2004: 92-93)

So conversation of gestures is not a "developmental stage" but a substratum of human interaction. I would have guessed as much, as I was not familiar with how this term is taken by others; I see even analogues of Mead's example of dogs in humans when a confrontation ensues between two men and they stand chest to chest reacting to each other's subtle movements, ready to "solve" their issues with fists. Bateson is as insightful as always (and for some reason I still have not read him myself). Though I would take issue with nonverbal communication construed as a primarily iconic system - I think all varieties of semioses are mixed up in nonverbal behaviour. The remark about coevolution of verbal and nonverbal systems is a point for concursivity (in the wide sense of relationships outlined in Rebane 2013).

"The significant symbol is then the gesture, the sign, the word which is addressed to the self when it is addressed to another individual, and is addressed to another, in form to all other individuals, when it is addressed to the self." It strikes me as interesting that in this definition, Mead stresses addressed. For the gestural level of human public life is not always conscious, though it plays a significant role in the comprehension of utterances. Hence gestures may be "addressed" to others and to one's self - meeting Mead's definition of a significant symbol - without one necessarily being aware of what the gesture, or body language, is communicating. (Halton 2004: 93)

Addressing the self is also the definition of Lotman's autocommunication; and it is interesting that the significant symbol can be transmitted without being aware of its meaning. This seems like a contradiction, as significant symbols - as far as I understand them - have the same significance for the sender and receiver. But whatever, the human animal is capable of much, why not communicating with itself without understanding the message...

Freud draws attention te the ways that the child internalizes the most significant objects in the environment, the parents - an insight sorely lacking in Mead's theory, which does not singe out the parents for special developmental attention. (Halton 2004: 94)

His interests were probably more general than the down-to-earth phenomenon of family. Baldwin, for example, narrativized his daughters playing on the porth and using an internalized father-figure in their play while the real father sat and watched. And Juri Lotman had, as I understand, internalized various addresates of his own preference (probably poets, writers and other scientists; probably "culture" as an individual as well).

The gestural level of communication ought to be the bodying forth of communication, even as speech is the mouthing of it. I have a book at home titled Italian Without Words, which playfully suggests that one can engage in a full public life in Italy through the range of gestures one exhibits (if you violently disagree with this idea, imagine the gesture you could respond with to address your disagreement). Since the time of Mea writing. kinesics has shown how deeply body language is embedded in communication. (Halton 2004: 94)

This sounds like a joke. A good one. But it could very well be, especially because Italian gestures have been aptly studied (e.g. Efron in the 1940s). Though it is almost blasphemous to use "kinesics" and "bedy language" as equivalents, considering how Birdwhistell authored the former and opposed to the latter, I do have to agree that nonverbal communication as a field of study has been grrowing exponentially since Mead's time.

Many thinkers identified with postmodernism do not admit natural aspects of the self, despite thhe fact to which case studies such as Sacks's or the work of Damasio call attention. Yet aditting that we are born with a temperament or biosocial needs does not disallow possibilities for major change and even transformations of personality. The self is composed of many ingridients that are not even personal: our ancestors have a way of finding expression in us, and there are mammal characteristics, not even specific to humans, that nevertheless are crucial for the development of the human self, such as play, mother-infant bonding and separation, and REM dreaming. Consider the spontaneuos smile or sob, as Damasio describes the process:

A ... spontaneous smile that comes from genuine delight or the spontaneous sobbing that is caused by grief are executed by brain structures located deep in the brain stem under the control of the cingulate region. We have no means of exerting direct control over the neutral processes in those regions. We are about as effective at stopping an emotion as we are about stopping a nseeze. (1999: 48-49)

These biosocial characteristics remain essentials of the self, despite recent claims that there are no essentials, no human nature, no universals, no reality to the self, and that it is simply a social construction. One reads this in authors such as Rorty, who conveys the assumption in quasi-easygoing language: "It's socialization all the way down," he says, reciting a version of socialization as a kind of passive indoctrination into rote conventions, a view that no social science undergraduate could get away with. Rorty denies the place of biology, experience, extra-conventional meaning, purposiveness, and pragmatic consequences in human conduct: all crucial to the four original pragmatists. It is why I call Rorty an antipragmatist, a fragmatist (Halton 1995: 219-46). (Halton 2004: 95-96)

Amusing. I have my own distain towards Rorty and authors who rely on his version of textualism. But I have to admit, I am not completely against textualism. "Text" is very useful as a heuristic device. It is when phenomena are reduced to textual constructions that I get mad. This is mainly so because these fragmatists deny the importance of my object - the human body and the semiosic processes it that go on within and between bodies.

Gergen in incapable of delivering a rich understanding of the living self because he is weighed down with inadequate, obsolete Saussurean semiotics. The shadow of Saussure's anorexic understanding of signs is now an unconscious uncritical assumption not only of Gergen, or Rorty, but of the postmodern turrn generally (Halton 1986: 43-70, 95-105; 1995: 79-119). Peirce and Mead allow signs to do many more things than the Saussurean tradition does: in addition to conventional meaning, signs touch experience, they are not limited to a conventional disguise for it, abstracted from it. Human conduct is semeiosis - sign-process - in the pragmatist tradition. (Halton 2004: 97)

Anorexic sounds about right - it lack the "object." I hope for a semiotics that will indulge in biology, medicine, anatomy and physiology, and this surely requires triadic sign relations, that is, it requires objects.

Scientific materialism is rooted in a conception of the universe as basically composed of dead matter in motion, out of which life springs by chance, yet the word itself (Latin, materia) springs from the life-giving capacity that defines a mother, and by analogy, the shoot-produced trunk of a tree, "-mater being the trunk, which produces the shoots; mater, therefore, is here a transferred use of mater, mother" (Partridge 1958: 387). Like many otheri inversions produced in modern consciousness and traceable etymologically, the dead matter universe of materialism literally derives from the life-giving mother-tree. Behind modern materialism, it would seem, stands the shadow of what the Ba-mbuti pygmies have called for forty thousand years Mother Forest. (Halton 2004: 99)

Good-to-know etymology.

In an interview, Kenneth Gergen could literally not eved admit that he loved his wife, because it clashed with his ideological social constructionism. It wasn't that he didn't love her - in the everyday sense - but that he couldn't bring himself to use the word love because of his ideological belief in social constructionism as mere conventional determination of the self. To his wife, Mary Gerger, also a psychologist, replied: "Look, when I ask you whether your love me, don't go through these torturous questions of what's really real about love and how you'd know. Just say the words meaningfully and I'd be a lot better off" (Stephens 1992: 40). (Halton 2004: 100)

I am possesed of a similar belief. I refuse to use the word love because if love is present thin it doesn't need to be articulated verbally, it should be articulated in concrete actions and feelings. Otherwise this word could get devalued and turned into a household expression like "love you, hon," uttered even when it is not felt or otherwise present. That is, it may turn into a mere consolidation, a reification.

Surely, we life life with logic and rationality, but we live life from our bodies, whose feeling, sensing, communicating capacities go far deeper than rationality alone, in my opinion, and form a better basis for conscience. (Halton 2004: 103)

I like this. Short and to the point.

A new balance of reasonableness is called for, a new kind of civilization that can reattune to those extrarational bodily capacities as essential for reasonableness (Montagu and Matson 1983). Those balancing attributes of human nature remain embedded in the human body. As Nietzsche said in Beyond Good and Evil, "To be mistaken about the rhythm of a sentence is to be mistaken about the very meaning of that sentence." Or more succinctly, in the words of Irving Mills and Duke Ellington: "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)!" A nation cannot make valid democratic interpretations for long if it does not practice the autonomy required for democracy. If it shifts to practicing auomatic culture instead of autonomy, it quickly becomes as "democratic" as the former German Democratic Republic. (Halton 2004: 103)

The codependency of how and what of verbal expression, as well as - metaphorically - other fields (such as democratic practice).

Consider, for the moment, Ludwig Wittgenstein's claim from his book, Tractatus Lagico-Philosophicus, that "the world is all that is the case" (" Die Welt ist alles was die Fall ist"). And in the conclusion he stated: "What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot we must pass over in silence." This is the voice of tragic, overweening rationalism, which would silence, not only fallibility, but preconscious sensibility and gestural and figurative communication. (Halton 2004: 107)

Because there are numerous things that cannot be sayid clearly.

Landwehr, Margarete 2002. Literature and the Visual Arts: Questions of Influence and Intertextuality. College Literature 29(3): 1-16.

The term intertextuality, generally understood to connote the structural relations between two or more texts, became popular in the late 1960s as an alternative strategy to studying literary texts that would serve as an antidote to historically oriented approaches. The historicist assumes that a scholar can uncover an author's intentions, the sources of his/her ideas, and responses of contemporary readers. Key terms of this approach are "influence" and "inspiration." The concept of influence privileges an earlies text (or artist) ovel a later one for which it acts as a source. Conversely, inspiration regards the later text (or artist) as an innovative improvement over the previous one. (Landwehr 2002: 2)

This is the sense in which I would have used it, in relation with Dostoevsky's and Zavjatin's influence on Huxley and Orwell.

Although Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextuality, Mikhail Bakhtin, whose ideas she popularized, is regarded as having initiated the concept. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, originally published in 1929, Bakhtin criticizes historicist literary criticism and its views that the novel consists of a homogenous representation of reality, expresses an author's opinions, or reveals his or her psychology. Instead, he proposes the concept of the "polyphonic" novel, which includes includes a variety of idiolects employed by characters as well as extra-literary texts such as newspaper articles or anecdotes and, consequently, offers a multiplicity of ways of viewing "reality." A polyphonic novel differs from a realist work by its "carnivalistic" stance, which parodically dethrones dominant ideologies or institutions. Thus, the polyphonic novel demonstrates the "jolly relativity of every system" (Morgan, 1985, 11; emphasis in original). As Morgan points out, Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalization of literature constitutes a theory of intertextuality. (Landwehr 2002: 2)

I wonder if nonverbal behaviour could be among the "intertextual domains" (or, rather, intersemiotic domains). In Lotmanian theory this makes sense, insofar as everyday behaviour and "the nonverbal arts" are among the heterogeneous sign systems interrelated in cultural production.

Julia Kristeva introduced the term "intertextualite" in 1966 while explaining Bakhtin's notion of dialogism and carnivalization:

Bakhtin was one of the first to replace the static hewing of texts with a model where literary structure does not simply exist but is generated in relation to another structure. What allows a dynamic dimension to structuralism is his conception of the 'literary word' as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character) and the contemporary or earlier cultural context. (Kristeva 1986, 35-36; emphasis in original)

Building upon Bakhtin's theory, Kristeva substitutes the term "text" for Bakhtin's "word" and points out that the "horizontal" axis of subject/addressee and the "vertical" axis of text/context bring to light the important discovery that "each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read (1986, 37). Bakhtin considered "writing as a reading of the anterior literary corpus and the text as an absorption of and reply to another text" (39). (Landwehr 2002: 3)

In concursive study, this "another structure" would be the bodily realm, or knowledge of bodily behaviour. In a general sense, every description of bodily behaviour origitates from an earlier description of bodily behaviour. The language of description is rarely made up on the spot but rather consists of an intersection of literary expressions, mundane observations and efforts to place visual imagiations into verbal categories. This is what I understand as "a mosaic of quotations" in relation to nonverbal behaviour.

Culler situates a texts in "a prior body of discourse - other projects and thoughts which it implicitly or explicitly takes up, prolonges, cites, refutes, transforms" (Friedman 1991, 156). (Landwehr 2002: 4)

It is so pleasurable for me to get to bold something than begins with "A ". A prior body of discourse is an expression [libeväljend] than gives me some pleasure of the mind [vaimurõõm], as it improves the notion of "a/n universe of discouse." Of course I prefer "body" to "universe", although the common expressin "the body of [some abstract entity, like knowledge, for example]" disturbs me when I'm reading a text and scanning for terms that belong to "my neck of the woods" in terms of subject matter.

Miller's arachnology acknowledges a text as a weaving of other cultural and historical texts, but refuses to accept Barthes's notion of anonymity and advocates "the author" as a concept central to feminist criticism. In place of "anonymous textuality" that remains necessarily a form of negatiation with the dominant social text" (Friedman 1991, 158-59) (Landwehr 2002: 4)

More slippery expressions: "cultural text" and "social text" are loaded with meaning in "a prior body of discourse." Cultural text is a unique notion in TMS, and Social Text was the name of the journal that fell victim to the Sokal hoax. "A political intertextuality," though, sounds like the politico-ideological aspect of intertextuality. If we know that all sign systems can be appropriated for ideological purposes then it's not such stretch to view inthertextuality in terms of political/ideological interests.

"Influence" is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrog-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient: it seems to reverse the active/passive relation which the historical actor experiences and the influential beholder will wish to take into account. If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always more lively really. ... If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer and more attractively diversified: draw on, resort to avail oneself of, appropriate from, have recourse to, quote, ... copy, address, paraphrase, absorb, make a variation on, revive, continue, remodel, ape, emulate, travesty, parody. ... Most of thes cannot be stated the other way around - in terms of X acting on Y than Y acting on X. (Baxandall 1985: 58-59)

This is a very useful quote for technical purposes. Academic writing, just like art criticism, is riddled with these kinds of relations and it's a good idea to try to broaden one's vocabulary in this respect.

While the influence of previous written works on later ones can be quite obvious, such as in the case of parody or pastiche, it is conceivable that aithors may inadvertantly appropriate ideas, plots, or motifs from works they read years earlier. Conversely, an artist can deliberately employ/subvert cultural texts/codes as, for example, when parodying a certain genre or writing style. On the other hand, these codes may be so "embedded" in the artist's Weltanschauung or so enmeshed in his/her idiolect that the writer unwittingly employs them. (Landwehr 2002: 5)

I had to google with my mobile phone to finally find out what is Weltanschauung. It is "a comprehensive conception or image of the universe and of humanity's relation to it." At this point I'm not sure why some authors prefer this German term in otherwise non-germanic texts rather than using a literal equivalent, "world-view" (maailmapilt).

In "Influence vs. Intertextuality," Ulla Musarra-Schroeder argues for the rehabilitation of the concept of influence and sketches out three types of influence. First, an artist or writer may be influenced by philosophical, psychological, sociological, or scientific ideas from individual thinkers or their works. Second, an influence can consist of formal, stylistic, structural, or compositional principles. The model text could represent a certain genre or style or contain particular structural devices that the successor appropriates. Third, she restricts the concept of influence to include "only those phenomena which in some way have directed the process of creation of a text, the writing process" (1996, 170). This process of influence "may manifest itself in various ways in certain schemes or patterns of semantic, stylistic, compositional, or formal order or sometimes also in concrete inter-textemes such as quotations or allusions" (170). (Landwehr 2002: 8)

This makes perfect sense. In case of an iconic theorist, I could: 1) familiarise myself with the intellectual climate of the theorist and due to knowing the theoretical background, begin to think in similar ways; 2) emulate the style of writing and composition, e.g. mirror the structure of chapters (like Poyatos did with Korte) or even borrow design features, like Birdwhistell's unique horizontal lines; 3) borrow expressions, phrases or even whole paragraphs to illustrate/reinforce my own point.

Lessing associated temporality with literature and spatiality with painting and sculpture. Moreover, he privileged literature over art when he argued that the artist, unlike the writer, could only portray a single moment in timee and then from only one point of view. As Bryan Wolf points out, conventional associations of the visual with nonverbal immediacy consigns the visual arts to the "myth of presentness," Lessing's spatiality, whereas the modern world associates rhetoric, which implies a manipulation of "facts" or words in order to influence, exclusively with language (19902 185). (Landwehr 2002: 12)

Is there not such a phenomenon as "visual rhetoric"?

Shusterman, Richard 2009. Somaesthetics and C. S. Peirce. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 23(1): 8-27.

From its outset, the project of somaesthetics - briefly defined as the critical, ameliorative study of the experience and use of the body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning - has been largely inspired and shaped by the perspectives of classical pragmatist philosophy. Among the classical pragmatists, John Dewey has clearly been the preeminent influence on somaesthetics. The project was first introduced through a study [Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997), chap. 6. "Somatic Experience: Foundation or Reconstruction?"] of Dewey's views on immediate experience and embodiment and his work with somatic therapist F. M. Alexander. Moreover, reclaiming the still vibrant utility of the notion of experience that is central to Dewey and the classical pragmatist tradition, somaesthetics sought to balance our culture's unhappy obsession with oppressive norms of attractive body appearance (the realm of representational somaesthetics) by instead proposing a compensating focus on appreciating the inner experience of aesthetic feeling of one's own body (experiential somaesthetics). As this project developed, it was articulated in terms of three branches - analytic somaesthetics (a descriptive inquiry into the functioning of our bodily perceptions and somatic practices and their various cognitive, social, and cultural uses), pragmatic somaesthetics (a more normative inquiry into methods of somatic improvement and their comparative critique), and practical somaesthetics (the fully embodied concrete practice of somatic disciplines). Dewey emerged as the paradigmatic prophet of this field, for he was exemplary in vigorously and astutely pursuing all three of these branches, by making disciplined somatic self-cultivation a matter of personal practice and not just a topic for theoretical and mehtodological discourse. (Shusterman 2009: 8)

This is marvellous! It is as if some primary aspects of my nonverbalism have already been studied under the title of somaesthetics.

2. Richard Shusterman, "Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (1999): 299-313; Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd ed. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), chap. 10. Foucault is also invoked in these texts as an instructive exemplar of a philosopher impressively active in all three branches of somaesthetics. See also Richard Shusterman, "Somaesthetics and Care of the Self: The Case of Foucault," Monist 83 (2000): 530-51. (Shusterman 2009: 24)

Dayum, he even reached Foucault and his care of the self, though half a decade before his lecture transcipts and notes on the subject were published.

Our admiration of Dewey's enormous value in thi field should not, however, obscure the rich resources of other classical pragmatists for somaesthetics. In recent writings I have increasingly emphasized William James's important and wide-ranging contributions to somaesthetic inquiry. Like Dewey, James worked tirelessly, imaginatively, and ever courageously in all three dimensions of somaesthetics. His theoretical investigations into the bodily basis of mental activity (not only in our emotions but in our more distinctively cognitive and practical thought) helped make his Principles of Psychology a path-making book and indeed the book that inspired Dewey toward naturalism in the philosophy of mind. James's theoretical inquiries into the body-mind nexus were alse combined with intense study of various somatic disciplines to improve body-mind functioning and harmony of various somatic disciplines to improve body-mind functioning and harmony to expand consciousness. Moreover, James's pragmatism in somatic studies not only involved analyzing methodologies of practice but also took the form of experimenting with these disciplines in the most concrete and practical way by testing them on his own flesh and consciousness. (Shusterman 2009: 9)

I am somewhat familiar with James, as his Principles has also involved and influenced the study of facial expressions of emotion. With Dewey I have not come across so much. I have read the article by Martin Jay, "Somaesthetics and Democracy: Dewey and Contemporary Body Art," but quoted only three passages. One of them was about Shusterman's ambitious project of somaesthetics (which i put in bold) and Dewey's fascination with F. M. Alexander's nterapeutic uppor torso exercises. My comment was very brief: "All around interesting stuff." And it really is interesting. I like ambitious; my own projects are like that. I'm sure sooner or later I'll meet somaesthetics or Shusterman again, there's just too much congeniality to not follow up on this.

One reason for not bringing Peirce te bear in this project was that I developed somaesthetics in opposition to my neopragmatist mentors who used Peirce to argue for varieties of textualism that opposed the emphasis on experience and its somatic dimension that I was especially keen to develop. I was especially reacting to Richard Rorty, who emphasizes Peirce's assertion that "my language is the sum-total of myself; for the man is the thought," and who has been very critical of somaesthetics, criticizing that project as "a beautiful example of kicking up dust and then complaining that we cannot see." I should have done a better job of dissociating Peirce from the textualist neopragmatist interpretation he was given and instead paid more attention to the embodied dimension of his thought. (Shusterman 2009: 9)

It is as if Rorty feeds on criticism. Not only do his views piss people off, he manages to misconstrue other thinkers for his own purposes. If that is not a sign of a great (not good or bad, but great) thinker, I don't know what is. I should really look into Rorty's writing, ever if with the aim of dismissing him. Congeniality and sympathy is all well and good, but intellectual enmity and criticism can be much more satisfying - first you get angry, then you fling arguments and then you feel at peace. For example, I have met this quote from Peirce and I do not invest it with any special import; I know that Peirce indulged far more inclusive conceptions of selfhood. I'd rather invest in this: "the body of man is a wonderful mechanism, that of the word nothing but a line of chalk" (7.583, W 1:494, 1866).

11. See Nathan Hauser and Christian Kloesel, eds., The Essential Peirce, vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); hereafter EP. Peirce avows in "The Seven Systems of Metaphysics" (1903): "I am still a perfect ignoramus in esthetics" and "ignorant ... of Art" (EP 2.189-190). He refers to being "incompetent" for "defining the essentially good" in "The Three Normative Sciences" (1903; EP 2.201). (Shusterman 2009: 25)

This self-criticism must be viewed with regards to the word "ignorant" meaning "novice" or "beginner." I too am not afraid to admit my inaptitude in many fields which I do find interesting and beneficial (such as zoology, ethology, neurology, etc.) but which I have yet to aquaint myself further with.

The appreciation of aesthetic qualities in their innumerable varieties requires perceptual skill in discriminating such qualities, so that aesthetic enjoyment or pleasure is not a merely physical satisfaction but one that intrinsically involves cognition, even when it is essentially sensory and somatically based cognition. (Shusterman 2009: 11)

Today while riding to hometown in a train I had an eargasm. I was reading the last pages of the previous article and listening to last month's favourite tracks and got caught by one a track by Blue Sky Black Death from their album NOIR. I shut the laptop, pulled my hood over the headphones and closed my eyes to re-listen to the whole track from beginning to end, consciously making an effort to sway my body slightly along with the music and it managed to effect my body, to make it feel good andd pleasurable. At some point I was breathing along with the music and at one particularly intense moment in control of my upper body, clenching whatever muscles I could and releasing when the melody instructed to do so. The whole experience was like good sex, but with music. I'm sure I had managed to manipulate my dopamine levels and released an orgasmic amount; that is to say "eargasm" is not an empty word, one can really induce extreme pleasure via music if one wishes to. That is one aspect of my own personal somaesthetics.

Peirce cannot say "exactly what it is, but it is a consciousness belonging to the category of Representation through representing something in the Category of Quality of Feeling" (EP 2.190). Peirce suggests that the discriminating perception of such qualities requires not just natural sensory powers but skill developed through training - the sort of sensory-perceptual training advocated by somaesthetics and reflected in the Greek oot of aisthesis from which the term derives. (Shusterman 2009: 11)

Aisthesis (ja selle seos "aistmisega") is something Aare Pilv talked at length about during his presentation at Semiosalong. My memory fails me on the details but it did reinforce the impression that some common roots, like techne, ars, bios, etc. have an etymological Janus-face, that their meaning has changed considerably since the ancients and yet have retained some of it, which is not readily discriminable if one is not familiar with the specifics.

We know that Peirce had an unfortunately rigorous training in feelings of pain. Beginning in his senior year at Harvard and continuing throughout his life, Peirce suffered from an excrutiatingly painful neurological disease called "trigeminal neuralgia - then medically termed facial neuralgia," which worsens with age and whose pain is "debilitating" to normal functioning, let alone intense mental labor. On a happier note, we also know that Peirce spent considerable time in the pleasant training and testing of his gustatory asd olfactory discrimination with respect to wine. As Paul Weiss's biographical sketch relates, Peirce's "father alse encouraged him to develop his power of sensuous discrimination, and later, having put himself under the tutelage of a sommelier at his own expense, Charles became a connoisseur of wines. (Shusterman 2009: 12)

This is one of the very few biographical notes I have on Peirce. Despite knowing the general outlines of his categorical thought I know very little of the actual person.

With respect to somaesthetics, Peirce's intricate theory of signs - with its ramified classification of sign typologies - could be useful for understanding different forms of somatic signs, meaning, and body language and for tracing their interrelations. For instance, his distinction among tone, token, and type could help distinguish among (1) an immediate bodily feeling (tone) that is merely vaguely registered as a quality without being individuated clearly in consciousness but that still can influence behavior and contribute to a meaningful experience, (2) a particular (token) bodily feeling or movement (for example, a particular headache or golf swing) that stands out in consciousness as a particular thing, and (3) the more general category (type) of such a feeling (headache) or movement (golf swing). Similarly, Peirce's distinction among icon, index, and symbol could help distinguish varieties of body language: whether a certain bodily movement or expression denotes its referent or suggests its meaning iconically by resembling or imitatng a quality of what it denotes - say lifting one's arms triumphantly to express the elation of victory; whether the somatic sign functions as an index by being actually related to its meaning - sweating and turning red as a sign of being feverish or overheated; or whether the bodily movement functions as a symbol through having an established "interprrenatn" or convention that determines such meeting - say the two-fingered victory sign. (Shusterman 2009: 13)

This is exactly the kind of passage I've been waiting to read for the past few weeks. I wish to fuse nonverbal communication and Peircean semiotics and this is the first passage I've collected that points to this direction explicitly. Talk about congeniality...

Another of Peirce's famous tripartide classifications (and one readily related to his classification of signs) is that of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. This classification, which reappears and is variously explained in different contexts of Peirce's theories, can be used to illustrate somaesthetics' key tenet that there are different levels of body intentionality and consciousness. I have distinguished at least four levels. The lowest level of somatic intentionality (which cannot qualify as full consciousness and could be paradoxically described as unconscious consciousness) is the sort of limited, obscure awareness we exhibit in our sleep: for example, when we intentionally (though unconsciously) move a pillow that is disturbing our breathing or feel we are too close to the edge of the bed (or our sleeping partner) and thus reposition ourselves without waking up to full consciousness. Beyond this level is the stage when we are awake and clearly conscious yet not explicitly aware of our bodily position or movements. We usually pay no attention to our feet or have an explicit awareness of them when we are walking. Yet, obviously eve without explicit awareness, one knows in a practical way where one's legs are and how to move them in walking. This level of unreflective, unthematized perception is what Merleau-Ponty hailed as primordial perception and as the key to the mystery of our successful perception and action. (Shusterman 2009: 13)

I'd rather say that firstness, secondness and thirdness is the foundation ef Peircean thinking, that all or most of his tripartite classifications are informed by the same logic, whether it is tone-token-type, icon-index-symbol or emotional-energetic-cognitive.

In deploying his famous pervasive three categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness to characterize consciousness, Peirce describes "the true categories of consciousness" as follows: "First, feeling, the consciousness which can be included within an instant of time, passive consciousness of quality, without recognition or analysis; second, consciousness of an interruption into the field of consciousness, sense of resistance, of an external fact, of another something; third, sythetic consciousness, binding time tofether, sense of learning, thought" (CP 1.377). These categories of consciousness correspond with the three higher levels of consciousness that somaesthetics identifies beyond the basic intentionality displayed when asleep, though Peirce's first caterogy of passive conciousness could perhaps be extended to cover also that lower level. Peirce provides a great deal more resources for somaesthetics' inquiry into the multileveled complexities of consciousness, the different degrees of vividness and intensity of feeling, and the varieties of attention through which our consciousness and discrimination of somatic feelings can be improved in order to achieve a better use of the self in perception, cognition, and action. To appreciate the range of these resources, we need to examine his writings in psychology. (Shusterman 2009: 14)

Yes, we do. I had forgotten about that passage which illustrates his 1-2-3 with sensations. That passage might be the one I'd like to combine with the 1-2-3 in Foucault, Lotman, Nauta, etc. A comparison of categories will some day spring forth from this.

Peirce offers some distinctions to differentiate some of the different levels of consciousness. One key distinction of levels is that between merely being somehow (even minimally) conscious of something and having a distinct awareness (an explicit consciousness) of thot thing. Peirce speaks of "sensations so faint that we are not fairly aware of having them" yet that must be present to some degree in consciousness since such presence seems necessary both to explain our correct perceptual discriminations and to provide the fundamental basis for training ourselves to bring such sensations into greater consciousness or explicit awareness. (Shusterman 2009: 17)

Almost unaware sensations constitute the pulp of nonverbal perception. [LV: vaevu- ja viivutunnetused]

>Peirce underlines that even faint feelings with "light subjective intensity" nonetheless "affect the emotions and the voluntary actions" and that usually "they are much less under control than ... more [subjectively] intense" feelings. This is obvious once we realize that it is hard to control that of which we are barely conscious. In order to deliberately control a feeling (or to intentionally work on it so as "to affects its transformations"), we need to direct our attention to it, and it is hard to attend to that which "is scarcely perceptible" in faint or dim consciousness so that we are not even aware of it (CP 7.555). Consequently, if we wish to increase our control of feeling so as to enhance our control of the actions that feelings (even faintly perceived feelings) affect, then we should devote some effort to impreving our recognition and discrimination of faint feelings by improving our capacities of consciousness toward greater skills of awareness and attentien.(Shusterman 2009: 28)

This discussion appears to be on thin ice. That is, these suggestions would be difficult to follow up with more modern discourse. This may be the reason why the article is published in a journal of speculative philosophy.

Among the faint feelings that often strongly influence us without our awareness Peirce highlights some "which are especially interesting. These are those which tend toward a reaction between mind and body, whether in sense, in the action of the glands, in contractions of involuntary muscles, in coordinated voluntary deed," and so on (CP 7.555). In short, Peirce identifies the particular importance of the sort of mind-body feelings that form the focus of somaesthetics in its attempt to increase our understanding of body consciousness so that we can better deploy it to improve our self-use and our interaction with our surrounding environments, including our interactions with others. A substantial part of our undertanding of others (including our misunderstandings) is guided, as Peirce realizes, by such faint sensations, which are often colloquially described in contemporary culture as "vibes" or "energy" (CP 7.35). (Shusterman 2009: 18-19)

I'm not even sure anymore if this is like cheating - he is uttering thoughts that I would have in some manner or another uttered in the future (but of course in terms of nonverbal behaviour).

But Peirce was likewise astute in acknowledging also the dangers of reflex feeling or self-consciousness. He recognized how such self-conscious reflection often seems te impede the fluidity of action and thought, redering us awkward, hesitant, and uncertain: "Everybody knows how sef-consciousness makes one awkward ad may even quite paralyze the mind. Nobody can have failed to remark that mental performances that are gone through with lightly are apt to be more adroit than those in which every little detail is studied while the action in precooding." Speaking from personal experience, he adds "that self-consciousness, and especially conscious effort, are apt to carry me to the verge of idiocy and that those things that I have done spontaneously were the best done" (CP 7.45). For precisely these dangers, James rejected the use of somaesthetic reflection in practical life, though he advacated its use (and indeed used it superbly) in his psychological theorizing. In practical life, James insisted that we should simply trust our spontaneity and habits: "Trust your spontaneity and fling away all further care." (Shusterman 2009: 20)

This exact same notion is often touted in texts on nonverbal communication; my first meeting of this sentiment being in M. R. Key's 1975 mimeographed monograph on paralanguage and kinesics.

John Dewey, through his work with somatic educator F. M. Asexander, rightly identified spontaneity as simply the product uf entrnched habit, which is often flawed and cannot be revised without placing it under the scrutiny of self-consciousness. Moreover, why must we concede that reflective consciousness of one's bodily actions necessarily impedes the mooth performance of those actions and that such consciousness must therefore be confined only to learning and habit correction?
In many cases where awkwardness of action is attributed to the fact that the action is performed with self-consciousness or reflective awareness, the awkwardness, I believe, does not in fact derive from the attention or awareness that one gives to the proper body movements needed for successful performance of the action. Rather, such awkwardness actually results from being distracted from the proper badily movements (and their attendant feelings) by overriding feelings of desire or anxious worry regarding the results (i.e., success) of the action and the verdict of how certain people judge the effectiveness of one's performance. The problem is not that of reflective awareness of what one is actually doing but, rather, distraction from one's actual actions by thoughts about one's success in achieving the ends of those actions. (Shusterman 2009: 20)

This may actually be a valid point. Self-consciousness can improve the habits of action and even the performance of action but only when one is self-conscious in terms of self-control or self-awareness, not in the sense of self-embarrassment or self-image.

...Peirce's philosophical theorizing alse speaks much less of the body than do his two famous classical pragmatist disciples. Though Peirce clearly affirmed the body's importance as a physiological ground for our mental life on earth, he did not explore in comparable detail the various ways in shapes our perception, feeling, and thought. If James's psychological theories pervasively insist on explicitly inserting the body and discussing its role at the core of every mental state and activity (except the will), Peirce is much more restrained in his account about the body's role in mental life, though he, of course, repeatedly recognizes in general terms "that intimate dependance of the action of the mind upon the body," mhich includes "the dependence of the action of the mind upon the state of the body" (CP 5.385, 6.551). Peirce likewise affirms the body's essential role in human consciousness, distinguishing through such consciousness the signifying human being from the signifying word: "A man has consciousness; a word has not." And what "we mean by consciousness" is "that emotion which accompanies the reflection that we have animal life" (CP 7.585). Peirce , however, is keen to emphasize that mind is much more than mere consciousness, with the latter's defining sense of animal vitality and "feeling" (CP 7.364-367). (Shusterman 2009: 21)

If I finally do get around to skimming Peirce's collected papers for references to the body and manage to compose a wealthy discussion then I can argue against Shusterman here and provide the perspective of inserting body language into his semeiotics. Hopefully.

Moxley, Roy A. 2004. B. F. Skinner's Adoption of Peirce's Pragmaticc Meaning for Habits. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 40(4): 743-769.

Less insistent on logical features than Russell, Otto Neurath (1931-32/1959), one of the members of the Vienna Circle, advanced physicalistic language as a universal language: "[T]he physicalistic language has the capacity some day to become the universal language of social intercourse" (p. 289); and this language would be developed by purifying ordinary language:

What is orignally given to us is our ordinary natural language with a stock of imprecise, unanalyzed terms. We start by purifying language of metaphysical elements and so reach the physicalistic ordinary language. In accomplishing this we may find it very useful to draw up a list of proscribed words. (p. 200)

Neurath (1931/1983) saw that, "In the field of psychology, the physicalists are closely allied with Watson and his behaviorists. ..." (p. 50; and he (1931-32/1959) saw physicalistic language as unifying all of science:

The views suggested here are best combined with a behavioristic orientation. One will not then speak of "thought," but of "speech-thought," i.e., of statements os physical events. ... only physicalistic statements have a meaning, i.e., can become part of unified science. ... The physicalistic language, unified language, is the Alpha and Omega of all science. (p. 292)

In this unification, the physicalistic language would apply to all the sciences in "building up a uniform scientific language with a uniform terminology" (Neurath, 1936/1983, p. 133). Rudolph Carnap (1934), another member of the Vienna Circle, also thought such a language would be well-suited for science, "[Our] theory is that the physical language is the universal language ond can therefore serve as the basic language of Science" (p. 95). (Moxley 2004: 745)

What a bunch of toss. "Purifying language" in this sense seems almost like a movement towards a newspeak-science, and indeed, I would readily compare language of stimulus-response, primary and secondary reinforcement, reward conditioning etc. as the duckspeak of outdated psychology.

Skinner took issue with Russell's (1950, p. 82) claim that when we hear the word fox me show our understanding of that word by behaving (within limits) as we would have done if we had seen the fox. In part, Skinner (1957) said, "The verbal stimulus fox ... may, as Russel sayd, lead us to look around ... but we do not look around when we see a fox, we look at the fox" (p. 87). (Moxley 2004: 748)

How moronic. As if the word "fox" could float in a vacuum universe as a "verbal stimulus." In Bradbury's Fahrenheit, there's an illustrative example: "When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night. The others would never do that." In this example, Montag and Clarisse talked about an occasion when they were actually walking outside and when Clarisse mentioned the moon, then the moon was visible to both. Clarisse's words made an impact on Montag, made his interested in her talk, made him look at the moon to see what she was talking about. There is a whole gamut of meaning these idiotic reductionist theories of meaning are missing. That is why I cannot take behaviorism nor logic seriously. Meaning is not it's truth-value nor its behavior-response. Meaning is meaning. Sometimes a tautology suffices. For there are countless forms of meaning which cannot (yet or ever) be explained, at least not in a linear verbal form.

Meaning for the speaker lies in the contingencies of what the speaker says. Meaning for the listener lies in the contingencies for what the listener says or does. (Moxley 2004: 749)

I am unsure of what the "contingencies" are in this context, but my own understanding of this statement would be that the speaker's meaning lies in the words he is uttering, while the meaning for the listener lies in both the verbal and the nonverbal "output" of the speaker. This implies that the speaker is not as much dependent on the nonverbal behaviour of the listener as the listener is of the speaker's, and in some measure this might be true because the "cognitive capacity" of the speaker is tied up in speaking... Yet it is certainly not true that the listener does not influence the speaker with his or her listening behaviour. There's a whole lot of dynamism missing from this reductionistic account of communication. Again, speakers and listeners are not abstract entities floating in a pitch-black emptiness of the cosmos. They are people, beings with bodies situated in the world, constantly embedded into the mess of routines and surprises of everyday life, in environments, in spaces and places, constantly moving and breathing, metabolizing and endocrinizing (not even a word, I think)... That is, there's an endless array of "contingencies" missing from this account of "verbal behavior."

Peirce (1878/1992) included an acceptance of private events that anticipated Skinner's own acceptance of private events:

[S]ince belief is a rule for action, the application of which involves further doubt and further thought, at the same time that is the stopping-place, it is also a new starting-place for thought. That is why I have permitted myself to call it thought at rest, although thought is essentially an action... The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise. (pp. 129-130)

Belief was a rule for action, and thought was essentially an action. Accepting private events in his radical behaviorism, a terms he introduced in 1945 for his inclusive view of behaviorusm, Skinner (1974) also considered potential behavior as a kind of action or as rules for action:

[O]ur knowledge is action, or at least rules for action... There is room in a behavioristic analysis for a kind of knowing short of action and hence short of power. One need not be actively behaving in order to feel or to introspectively observe certain states normally associated with behavior. (pp. 139-140)

Skinner's first sentence - when he says that "knowledge is action, or at least rules for action" - paraphrases in reverse order Peirce's (1878/1992) "belief is a rule for action" and "theught is essentially an action" (p. 129). (Moxley 2004: 752)

Trying to again unite body and mind, here through belief/knowledge and action/behavior. My own approach this far is no better, combining text (in a broad semiotic sense) with movement (of the human body). What I like about these quotes is that thought is a form of action, a process, presumebly - because it's Peirce - a sign-process (e.g. semiosis). [LV: vaimurõõm on mõttetegevuse healoomuline tulemus]

In addition to his reading of Peirce, Skinner had discussions over the years with his friend and colleague at Harvard, the pragmatist W. V. Quine, who could have presented some of Peirce's views (see Cerullo, 1996). Quine (1981), for example, said, "Peirce scored a major point for naturalism, moreover, in envisioning a behavioristic sematics. Naturalism in psychology and semantics is behaviorism; and Peirce declared for such a semantics when he declared that beliefs consist in dispositions to actions" (p. 36). It may not be surprising then that John Staddon (2001), editor of the journal Behaviorulsm and Philosophy said, "The philosophy o radical behaviorism [Skinner's philosophy] isa descendant of the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce" (p. 96). (Moxley 2004: 754)

I cannot give a definition for naturalism but I have a distinct feeling that this formula (that naturalism in psychology and semantics is behaviorism) in heavily bent by Quine being an American, a logician and possibly other dispositions he may have that I'm not aware of. In any case, a continental thinker most likely would not state such a thing.

Two things here are all-important to assure oneself of and to remember. The first is that a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is "saying to himself," that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language. The second thing to remember is that the man's circle of society (however widdely or narrowly thes phrase may be understood) is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank than the person of an individual organism. (Peirce, 1905/1998, p. 338)

Considering that Peirce was by this time in an old age and so too was Lotman when he said very similar things, I wonder if this is the impression of thought-processes one accumulates as one gets older; that by the end of one's life when one is no longer part of a close homogeneous click (like a school class) and other likeminded same-aged people are already leaving this life... then one forms a mature idea of the nature of communication - that all you ever wanted to say to another person, ultimately (in the "ultimate (solitary) reality" as Powys would say), you are saying to yourself, transmitting to another who is actually a part of yourself. That all communication is ultimately self-communication, because that is the only guarantee a given communication has, that YOU understand what YOU are thinking, even if down the line, years or decades later.

James olse distinguished between hwo kinds of knowledge in a way that was to become fundamental for Skinner in distinguishing verbal from nonverbal behavior. James (1890/1983) said,

There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: We may call them respectively knowledge of aquintance and knowledge-about. ... The two kinds of knowledge are relative terms. ... the same thought of a thing may be called knowledge-about it in comparison with a simpler thought, or acquaintatce with it in comparison with a thought of it that is more articulate and explicit still.
The grammatical sentence expresses this. Its "subject" stands for an object of acquaintance which, by the addition of the predicate, is to get something known about it. ... when we know about it we seem, as we think over its relations, to subject it to a sort of treatment and to operate upon it with our thought. ... our senses only give us acquaintance. (pp. 216-218)

The similarity between James's term operate and Skinner's term operant is interesting even if coincidental. Issues raised by the two knowledges arre also addressed by James's (1911/1979) distinction between percept and concept, perceptual experience and conceptual experience, perceptual knowledge and conceptual knowledge. (Moxley 2004: 757-758)

And then I remember that I find these articles by searching the terms "semiotics" and "nonverbal". James's distinctions are neat but they still reify the distinction between body (peceptual) and mind (conceptual). Thi chiasm is still not bridged.

Science is a vast verbal environment or culture. (Skinner 1988: 44)

I rip out this short quip from a larger quote from: Skinner, B. F. 1988. The Listener. In: Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior. Cosumbus, OH: Merrill, 35-47. because I like this sentiment and indeed scientific literature [erialakirjandus] is a verbal environment or a subculture in which I am immersed, even if only in a small spot of a corner where this environment comes int contact with the reality of human bodily behavior.

Among the implications for Skinner's later views on meaning, the first is that the meanings of words vary in every single use. The meanings vary as the contingencies for the speaker and listener change, and some variation in the contingencies (however slight) must occur for each occasion of the word. Most of the details of these variations are neglible, but not all. As with natural selection, some variations may lead to a newly recognized sense, some may not. (Moxley 2004: 761)

This is more agreeable. Mostly because it likens the case of meaning for verbal and nonverbal forms of comunication and signification. Several times I've had to explain to people that there are very few "meanings as such" in nonverbal behavior, that there are many contextual dependencies (or contingencies). The meaning of every movement and posture varies with what it is preceeded and succeeded by. The major difference between the systems becomes that of dictionaries; there are many for verbal systems, but something analogous to dictionaries for nonverbal behavior are still just beginning to be created (even the term "dictionary" does not really fit).

Laferrière, Daniel 1979. Making Room for Semiotics. Academe 65(7): 434-440.

A lot of people in academia are talking about semiotics these days. Books are being written, new journals are being formed, professional societies are being founded. In the United States semiotics has become fashionable particularly among the nontenured echelons of many French, English, and Slavic departments. Semiotics is being taught for credit at quite a few universities, such as Yale, Brown, Indiana, Kansas, Illinois, and Colorado. Brown University has gone so far as to establish a major concentration in semiotics which attracted over 100 undergraduates during the last academic year. (Laferrière 1979: 434)

A comparable quantity to undergraduates received in Tartu University in 2010.

Semiotics is not new. It may be a fad, but it is not new. It is in fact an old topic which, having lain dormant for centuries, is now receiving new vigor. It goes back at least as far as a gentleman of the Stoic persuasion named Chrysippus, who lived during the third century before the birth of Chirst. (Laferrière 1979: 434)

The name sounds familiar but not from an academic context.

Such specifically neurobehavioral discoveries as these are important to the semiotician, though they are often made by researchers who have no particular interest in the study of signs. Indeed a wide variety of researchers - neurologists, linguists, ethologists, anthropologists, sociobiologists, psychologists, philosophers, literary theoreticians, language pedagogues, and others - are constantly finding out things that are relevant to semioticians. [...] semioticians seem to practice this kind of "parasitism" more extensively than do other kinds of scholars, especially since the academic scene today is compartmentalized in such a way as usually to exclude a specifically semiotic compartment. (Laferrière 1979: 435)

This seems to agree with the conception of semiotics as an "umbrella science."

No semiosis takes place in the absence of an interpreter. The tree falls in the forest whether or not an interpreter is present, but the fall does not signify anything without an interpreter. Semiotics, then, is not merely the study of signs, but is the studyof how interpreters actualize the many potential semiotic relationships that exist in the universe. (Laferrière 1979: 436)

Yes, but if a tree falls in the forest and there is no interpreter present, is it still an index? :D

Let us now turn to another area in semiotics where interdisciplitary research is also raising some interesting questions and providing some fresh new outlooks on old questions, namely, the field of literary semiotics. The literary work of art is, from a semiotic viewpoint, a highly complex system of signs. According to the Soviet semiotician Jurij Lotman, the literary text is a "secondary modelling system" ("vtori¢naja modelirujuš¢aja sistema") of the world ultimately based upon the primary modelling system which is language. Literary art is, in this sense, twice removed from reality (including physical, psychological, and social reality) insofar as it uses an already existing linguistic model of the world to construct yet another model. This secondary model is capable of generating meaning over and above the meaning potentially generatable by the primarily linguistic model. That is, the semantics of literary work of art is more than just the semantics of tokens from the natural language in which the literary work is written. (Laferrière 1979: 437)

It is interesting how sometimes one needs to look at another's view to something familiar in order to better understand it. I just figured out how TMS's modelling systems theory could be put to use for my purposes:

• Nonverbal behavior as mere contraction of muscles or movements of bodies in space is a non- or zero-degree semiotic phenomenon. That is, one can move and posture throughtout one's lifetime without it ever crossing one's mind that what the human face has any significance.
• Words such as "smile" or "scowl" signify these general configurations of facial muscles in language, that is, in the primary modelling system. Labels are assigned and we are able to talk about things, able to model them.
• In literature or painting or what-have-you these words or signs are combined with other words or signs in complex ways in order to model more complex aspects of these realities. For example, in Bradbury's Fahrenheit (1953: 69) Montag ponders how after Clarisse asked him a simple question: "Are you happy?" he went numb. A numbness took over his face and his body and he felt as if the girs had taken his "smile" and ran away with it.
• On the tertiary level of culture, this very same literarily modelled phenomena is known as a complex that is related to other complex phenomenons. E.g. there is a culture-specific idea of a "kill-joy" character whose words are able to wipe the smile from another's face.

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WORDS

• "...a concern for propriety..."

  1. The state or quality of conforming to conventionally accepted standards of behavior or morals.
  2. The details or rules of behavior considered correct: "she's a great one for the proprieties".

• "...the avoidance of solecisms..."

  1. A grammatical mistake in speech or writing.
  2. A breach of good manners; a piece of incorrect behavior.

• "...rhetorically horripilating..."

  have one's hair stand on end and get goosebumps; "I horripilate when I see violence on television".

• "...a more censorious view..."

  Severely critical of others.

• "...results below may not in themselves be probative..."

  Having the quality or function of proving or demonstrating something.

• "...hence extensive preambles to pronouncements and lengthy titulature..."

  1. A preliminary or preparatory statement; an introduction.
  2. The introductory part of a statute or deed, stating its purpose, aims, and justification.

• "...verbal language becomes tarnished by its association with bureaucracy..."

  Lose or cause to lose luster, esp. as a result of exposure to air or moisture: "silver tarnishes easily".

• "...rhetoric... can be criticized as meretricious..."

  Apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity: "meretricious souvenirs for the tourist trade".

• "...the process is paratactic..."

  Parataxis (from Greek for 'act of placing side by side'; fr. para, beside + tassein, to arrange; contrasted to syntaxis) is a...

• "...metaphors, myths, ecphrases..."

  Ecphrase (verb): Express (an idea or question) in an alternative way, esp. with the purpose of changing the detail or perspective of the original idea or...

• "...the variously angled tesserae of wall mosaics..."

  1. A small block of stone, tile, glass, or other material used in the construction of a mosaic.
  2. (in ancient Greece and Rome) A small tablet of wood or bone used as a token.

• "...medium of insubstantiality, colour, chiaroscuro, texture, metaphor, gesture..."

  1. The treatment of light and shade in drawing and painting.
  2. An effect of contrasted light and shadow created by light falling unevenly or from a particular direction on something.

• "...serried ranks of spectators all wathing..."

  (of rows of people or things) Standing close together: "serried ranks of soldiers".

• "...church leaders gave conciliar edicts a polemical edge..."

  Of, relating to, or proceeding from a council, esp. an ecclesiastical one.

• "...Miriam's nemesis appears during their sylvan capers..."

  1. Consisting of or associated with woods; wooded.
  2. Pleasantly rural or pastoral: "vistas of sylvan charm".

• "...Donatello pushes the model from a precipice..."

  A very steep rock face or cliff, typically a tall one.

• "...leans against the parapet..."

  1. A low, protective wall along the edge of a roof, bridge, or balcony.
  2. A protective wall or earth defense along the top of a trench or other place of concealment for troops.

• "...an importunate demand for his presence..."

  Persistent, esp. to the point of annoyance or intrusion: "importunate creditors".

• "...the iconolatry of Donatello helps to sustain him..."

  the worship of sacred images.

• "...it told of a vilified intellect..."

  Speak or write about in an abusively disparaging manner.

• "...To mollify them..."

  1. Appease the anger or anxiety of (someone).
  2. Reduce the severity of (something); soften.

• "...A gleam of delicate mirthfulness in her eyes..."

  hilarity: great merriment.

• "...many readers consider Hilda a prig or a moral monster..."

  A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.

• "...static hewing of texts..."

  1. Chop or cut (something, esp. wood) with an ax, pick, or other tool.
  2. Make or shape (something) by cutting or chopping a material such as wood or stone.

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JOURNAL ARTICLES

• Evans, E. C. 1969. Physiogromics in the ancient world. Trans. of Am. Philosophical Soc. 59, part 5.
• Turner, E. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Anthropological Perspectives. New York.
• Blockley, R. C. 1976. Gesture as a Stylistic Device. Stanford German Studies, 31-34.
• Heffernan, James A. W. 1991. Ekphrasis and Representation. New Literary History 22: 297-316.
• Wolf, Bryan 1990. Confessions of a Closet Ekphrastic: Literature, Painting, and Other Unnatural Relations. Yale Journal of Criticism 3: 181-302.
• Dewey, J. and A. Bentley 1947. Definition. The Journal of Philosophy 44: 282-306.
• Morris, E. K. 1988. Contextualism: The World View of Behavior Analysis. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 46: 289-323.
• Moxley, R. A. 2002. Some More Similarities Between Peirce and Skinner. The Behavior Analyst 25: 201-214.

BOOK ARTICLES

• Pignatari, D. 1978. The Contiguity Illusion. In: Sebeok, T. (ed.), Sight, Sound and Sense. Bloomington.
• Culler, Jonathan 1981. Presupposition and Intertextuality. In: The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

BOOKS

• Josephs, H. 1969. Diderot's Dialogue of Language and Gesture. Oxford.
• Carney, T. F. and B. Zajac 1977. Communications and Society. Winnipeg.
• Mayo, C. (ed.), 1981. Gender and Nonverbal Behavior. Berlin.
• Barfield, Owen 1973. The Rediscovery of Meaning: And Other Essays. Wesleyan, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
• Montagu, Ashley and Floyd Matson 1983. The Dehumanization of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Bloom, Harold 1973. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press.