An Analysis of Behavioral Organization

AN ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIORAL ORGANIZATION William S. Condon Introduction. This paper' will seek to articulate a perspective which has emerged from more than twelve years of linguistickinesic microanalysis of sound film of human behavior and communication. That perspective might be described as fundamentally organizational in nature. Part of the task of the paper will be to clarify the term "organizational" as used in this context. It is often useful to attempt to get behind such basic terms to describe the observable sets of relations which may have given rise to their use. An investigator's sets of assumptions, insofar as he can be aware of them, are also often unrepresented. These exert a structuring influence upon how the investigator will logically segment his domain of inquiry. In that sense they constitute pre-investigative decisions about the nature of that domain. Considerations such as these are usually felt to be philosophical rather than directly relevant to the process of investigation. The forms of these assumptions can themselves be inferred, however, from a careful study of how the investigator has conducted his inquiry, particularly in its conceptual aspects. It makes a difference, for example, whether the investigator conceives of nature as composed of parts which are put together to form wholes, or as forms of organization within which subforms of organization can be discerned, or as some blend of these views. Nature may be neither discrete nor continuous but so ordered that the discrete-like and the continuous can be predicated of her processes when she is subjected to inquiry. The view adopted in this paper is that there is a genuine coherence among the things we perceive and think about, and that this coherence is not something we create but something we discover. We discover organized and ordered processes in terms of which one fact or event leads our thinking on to other facts and events. Ideas and hypotheses are derived from and clarified by arduous observation, which is attentive to the order of those events, and in that respect, the ideas and Sign Language Studies 13 hypotheses become more and more adequate as an expression of the relationships obtaining among the facts and events. By making or finding distinctions within the world, however, we do not break it into fragments which can never again be brought together. The order or patterns of processes are discoverable within and against a background of varying contrasts with other processes which interpenetrate even as they are also wider and are themselves material and temporal. The temporal is basic and involves history. Processes have their histories. There are many histories, so that while history is pluralistic, it is not, therefore, discontinuous. We cannot divide any events so as to leave them totally unconnected. The multitudinous histories of events have a vast interplay with each other; they sustain ordered coherences and relationships through time. A sound motion picture is fundamentally a historical document. It stores the sequences of visual and auditory processes, not entirely continuously, but sufficiently rapidly to provide a sense of such continuity. The initial confrontation with a sound film of human behavior (which is the domain to be analyzed) overwhelms the observer with its ongoing complexities. After many hours of re-viewing a film over and over, it gradually became clear that the first and major problem facing investigators of human behavior and communication was how to determine what a unit or segment might be. This problem was stated clearly by Gregory Bateson in Chapter One of the unpublished but basic pioneering work, The Natural History of an Interview (Bateson 1956). He said, "Our whole procedure and, indeed, any analysis of communication is shaped by premises which define the units into which the stream of data is to be divided. " Ray L. Birdwhistell, in many respects the founding father of kinesics as a discipline, makes the following insightful comment concerning the central problem of timing in such analysis: In biology, in chemistry, and particularly in physics, it has become increasingly clear that each system has its own developmental or change pace and shape, and that a system is best understood in its own terms. As we have grown more sophisticated in social research...