John P. Spiegel and Pavel Machotka on Bodily Communication

Leonardo. Vol. 10, pp. 37-38. Pergamon Press 1977. Printed in Great Britain JOHN P. SPIEGEL AND PAVEL MACHOTKA ON BODILY COMMUNICAT10N John 6. Harries* Interest in non-verbal and non-pictorial communication has increased over recent years, but there is still no single discipline that deals specifically with the use of gestures, postures and styles of movement to convey thoughts, feelings and intentions. In Messages of the Body [I], John P. Spiegel and Pave1 Machotka set out to draw together lines of research extending to the areas of aesthetics, the behavioural sciences and visual art. They begin with a wide-ranging review of literature relevant to their subject, introducing concepts and theoretical ideas taken from biology, visual art, drama, dance and mime. This is followed by an exposition of their cognitive hypothesis of bodily communication and by the description of a group of experiments intended to test the hypothesis. A chapter by the film director Paul Williams is devoted to the action components in malefemale encounters and final chapter indicates future directions forexploration. The authors believe that an anachronistic cognitive model has prevented the development of a suitable approch to the phenomena of body communication. In this model, subjects express their attitudes or feelings and observers interpret them from the physical behaviour they see. ‘Expressive behaviour’ is thus regarded as an imprecise language that can be translated with some difficulty. Even in the few attempts that have been made at investigating the formal properties of the physical behaviour itself, the communicative activity of the body is treated as if it indeed possessed the properties of verbal language. But the authors maintain that the categories of linguistic analysis are inappropriate and turn instead to a different model, asserting that what is enacted in behaviour is a presentation, a performance, a pattern of movements presented to be seen. The connection with an inner state is tenuous and changeable, varying as a result of biological, social and cultural influences. Similarly with the ‘decoding’ by observers in accordance with rules learned from their own experience. Given this variable character of a presentation in relation to an inner state, an objective study of body movement requires that the movements be divorced from everyday activities, so that patterns can be sought, a morphology of movement determined. In seeking an ordering principle in movements, categories are proposed for dealing with the physical properties of the human body: in its environment (the personal category) and for human bodies moving in * Body movement researcher living at 5 Beth-Lehem, St. Kiryat Sharret, Holon, Isreal. (Received 26 Sept. 1975.) relation to each other (interpersonal and multi-personal movements). Another principle of classification deals with recognizable shapes of movements and patterns of movements. Verbal categories and diagrams are stigmatised as arbitrary, as being imposed on phenomena -not the discovery of something universally true of the phenomena. Nevertheless both categories and arrays of symbols are resorted to in the course of the investigations presented in this book. Methods such as dance notations are rejected as being specificof movement sequences without placing them in any high-level categorical system that ‘preserves the element of diffuse relationship and symbolic allusiveness found in ordinary body movement while still conferring order upon the phenomena’. An egocentric orientation of the body space is proposed, with a system of reference not necessarily based upon three rightangled coordinates. Radial coordinates (advantageously used to account for the radial symmetry that the body shares with plants) are introduced as ‘morebasic’. (This, by the way, is a concept that is consonant with the insights developed by Harry Blum in his growth geometry [2, 31.) As against 3-dimensional space, they quote R. Buckminster Fuller in favour of a 60-degree coordinate system that ‘would have served better for many purposes’. Their ‘areal radiation’ is an application of this to the body’s space as a conception congruent with the radial symmetry and the bilateral symmetry of the body. But ‘many’ purposes does not entail ‘all’ purposes connected with bodily movement, for other divisions of space are possible. If, as the authors assert, different cultures ascribe different significance to different portions of body space, it is surely possible, or even likely, that...