Spiritual Space: The Religious Architecture of Pietro Belluschi by Meredith L. Clausen (review)

BOOKS HAND AND MIND: WHAT GESTURES REvEAL ABOUT THOUGHT by David McNeill. Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1952.416 pp. ISBN 0-226-56132-1. Reviewed Uy RudolfArnheim, 1200 Earhart Road, #537, Ann Arbor, MI48105, U.S.A. David McNeill's book is a momentous contribution to our understanding of kinetic and visual expression. It deals specifically with the interrelation of gestures and speech-a sensible and necessary limitation, given the wealth of experimental evidence and theoretical discussion McNeill has to offer. This does not keep the book from being an invaluable source for anybody interested in expression in general. Expression , of course, goes beyond gestures as a component of speech. It involves all bodily movements, including practical action as well as gestures. The human body expresses itself in the way people operate machines, reach for tools, or handle a patient. Without speech, the mind symbolizes its attitudes and stirrings in the dance and pantomime and in the visual images of the arts. All this amounts to a huge subject, well beyond a single scientific undertaking. By focusing on the interaction of gesture and speech, the author, a professor of linguistics and psychology at the University of Chicago, launches a frontal attack against the dominance ofverbal language, which has crippled much dealing with cognition in our time. He shows how speech relies everywhere on gestures in order to enlist the help of imagery and thereby make up for a main deficiency of the verbal medium. He shows experimentally that gesture, far from being a mere accompaniment of language, precedes it, because gestures depict images directly, and all thought begins as imagery. Imagery, the root of thought, expresses itself directly in the kinetic and visual medium of gesture . Secondarily, the mind gropes for words to account for the iconic experiREVIEWS ence. "Often have I regretted," writes McNeill, "not having video equipment with me at the talks of colleagues who so firmly believe that words, phrases and sentences are the only substantive parts of language" (p. 149). Their ample gestures refuted the dogma they were defending. Speech confines the expression of the human body mainly to the action of the hands and arms, our most articulate limbs. Gestures of the legs would be much poorer. By the same token, speech impoverishes the eloquence of the body, as the addition of talk to the silent cinema has so painfully demonstrated . Like the hands of Hindu dancers , our gestures make the most of this limitation. Since gestures are actions, they are most effective in depicting motion . McNeill shows that we do so in two ways. Sometimes the speaker's own body acts out the story he or she is telling . But just as often the story is performed by the speaker as a detached puppet play in front of the body. McNeill describes the basic difference between iconic and metaphoric gestures. Iconic gestures portray their physical counterparts, the way people or things behave in space or the way they are shaped. Metaphoric gestures make abstractions concrete by using their symbolic analogies of physical qualities. Extended arms express the hugeness of a problem, wriggling motions depict confusion. McNeill's detailed descriptions of how gestures represent ideas contribute greatly to our understanding of images as the carriers of abstractions. Both images and gestures can be analogical or digital. Unrestrained and spontaneous, our limbs move in space, doing their work and depicting things and ideas. In such analogical fashion they are "global and synthetic" and thereby congenial to images, when images also require no conceptual abstraction . Both media of cognition, however, can freeze into digitally defined concepts and thereby make languages possible . Languages can be gestural, aural, pictorial or verbal. The gestural communications of the deaf are coded sign languages; and McNeill in a delightful chapter describes the standardized gestural signs of different languages. The sounds of music are an aural language, geometric symbols are a pictorial language , and words are verbal languages. We are reminded that all cognition starts with imagery, whose most concordant manifestations are gestures and pictures . These kinetic and visual expressions can congeal into concepts, and they in turn give rise to the equally digital medium ofverbal language. Significantly , McNeill's...