On Gesture and the Postindustrial City

Graham Livesey

Gestures, as significant and often symbolic (or metaphorical) movements of the body, belong to both language and space, gesture is an essential part of human communication. Gestures range from the posture assumed by the entire body, through a wide range of movements of hands and limbs, to the subtlest movements of the face. The linguistic dimensions of bodily gestures are particularly explicit in the sign languages employed by the deaf. Through the use of complex hand and arm movements, together with other facial and bodily expressions, the deaf are able to carve out a linguistic space in which the shape and locations of gestural signs create a visual language or landscape; a spatial zone around the body has been structured as a linguistic space. True sign languages employed by the deaf, as opposed to various translations from spoken and written languages, are independent languages with their own grammars, structures and expressive potentials; they are complete symbolic and expressive systems that convey the full range of human intellectual and emotional communication. As one might expect sign languages, such as ASL (American Sign Language), are extremely spatial. Oliver Sacks, who devoted a text to the subject, writes:

The single most remarkable feature of Sign [ASL] - that which distinguishes it from all other languages and mental activities - is its unique linguistic use of space....We see then, in Sign, at every level - lexical, grammatical, syntactic - a linguistic use of space: a use that is amazingly complex, for much of what occurs linearly, sequentially, temporally in speech, becomes simultaneous, concurrent, multi-levelled in Sign....what looks so simple is extraordinarily complex and consists of innumerable spatial patterns nested, three-dimensionally, in each other.1

Sign languages employ the fullness of space and time, to create narrative structures that have a cinematic virtuosity, allowing the signer to manipulate space and time.2 It has been demonstrated that the deaf have a greater perceptual sense of space than do the hearing, and when describing objects or spatial conditions can employ bodily gestures to give very detailed portrayals. Sign languages arise from gesture and, thus, unlike speech, are fully embodied. From the sign languages used by both actors and the deaf we can learn about the expressive potential of the gestural body and also about the figural and linguistic dimensions of space, what may be called the "grammaticization of space,"3 all of which are pertinent to the design of buildings and cities. The interaction between body, space and language in theatrical performance and sign language provides relevant models for exploring the latent potential in postindustrial urban space for the making of architecture. Gestural languages arise from a specific cultural context, and like all languages the meaning of a certain action and the potential for expression is prefigured by the linguistic milieu from which it derives; against this background speech and interpretation emerge.

Those who have studied the nature of human gesture have developed classification systems for gestural communication. Wilhelm Wundt, the pioneering German psychologist, published a work in 1921, subsequently translated as The Language of Gestures, in which he ascribes gestures to the following categories: demonstrative, imitative (descriptive), connotative (descriptive) and symbolic. While the text is dated in many of its propositions, his system still provides a useful structure, and corresponds closely with a more recent formulation found in David McNeill's Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought, although McNeill adds a group that addresses prelinguistic forms of gesture that incorporate rhythmical and punctuation types of gestures.

Demonstrative forms of gesture are the simplest and most direct. In effect, they are a pointing, towards things in the world, towards ourselves.4 They provide an orientation to the world of others and for our body.5 Demonstrative gestures are immediate and concrete, reverting back to prelinguistic conditions. Therefore, they are also used to express emotions. Wundt identifies two basic concepts: "parties to a conversation" or differences between 'you' and 'I' (or self and other), and "spatial relationships" or spatial directions as they pertain to the body. Demonstrative gestures "originate in the person's own body as the center of all spatial orientation."6 Other demonstrative gestural concepts include: dimensional qualities; parts of the body; and "gestures which place the three dimensions of space in the context of past, present, and future,"7 in other words uniting space and time. The notion of pointing contained in these kinds of gestures are essential to all communication and orientation in the world.

Wundt divides descriptive gestures into those that are imitative and those that are connotative. Imitative gestures are pictorial or representational, in that they replicate the form of an object. In this case an object is drawn in the air or imitated by the hands. For instance a house can be indicated by making an outline of its typical form with the index finger and an animal can be described by hand forms that imitate its characteristic shape.8 The gestural facility of the hands is supported by facial expressions. Connotative gestures represent objects by "singling out arbitrarily one of its secondary traits to represent it."9 Closely related to imitative forms of gesture, the connotative form is identified by Wundt as being either transitory or held indefinitely, and can border on the symbolic.10 Both forms of descriptive gesture fall within the realm of metaphor, hence they give a innovative and poetic dimensions to gestural languages.

Wundt explains symbolic gestures as a final and broadest category, in which a sign invokes a "mental concept." As opposed to the directness of demonstrative and descriptive forms of gesture, symbolic forms operate through association, giving languages abstract and poetic dimensions. Symbolic gestures operate like spoken languages and other symbolic structures in that they are deliberately created and must be learned, they belong to a shared understanding.

Human gestures both shape and are shaped by the spaces in which they occur, it is a reciprocal relationship. As North American cities have evolved through the modern and postmodern periods the public realm has steadily transformed. Spaces of the contemporary city tend to be open and indeterminate, an ever changing landscape of structures and surface zoning that challenges any traditional behaviour; there has been a general reduction and homogenization of gestural behaviour. Conversely, in the spaces of the city that tend to overwhelm both the human and the "architectural gesture,"11 new languages have emerged that give definition to these spaces. In order to produce new forms of urban space urban designers must study human action in these spaces, the codes of suburban postindustrial culture. As we contrast the public spaces of the postmodern city with those of its predecessors, we can note that public communications between citizens has often been displaced into new spaces, technologies and languages.

The demarcation of space through the gestural extension of the body is a fluid process that builds upon the ephemeral landscapes of the postindustrial city. The body carves out of the ambiguous spaces of the postindustrial city spaces that can be comprehended, if only temporarily. These are the gestures of those struggling to give coherence to the urban conditions they inhabit; it is a grammar of space. Most importantly gestures unite time and space, therefore, contributing to the narrative order of the city. The spaces of the postindustrial city still function in developing narrative from the intersections, or events, that the structure engenders. Gestural structures used in performance, in conjunction with speech or by the deaf use combinations of the various types of gestures that Wundt describes: pointing towards, imitating or symbolizing. Given the nature of most postindustrial spaces, it would seem that what Wundt describes as demonstrative gestures, the most primary form of human gesturing, remains essential as an interpretative and heuristic (ie. hermeneutical) process that allows the body to constantly find new strategies for anchoring and reorienting itself to the spaces and structures of the city.

Wundt's second type of gesture, descriptive gestures, are pictorial, verging on the metaphorical. This form of gesturing populates space with a fleeting metaphoricity, it can transform the mechanistic and informational nature of postindustrial space into a world full of anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and productive qualities. The metaphorical aspects of gesture allow for what Nelson Goodman describes as a territorial invasion, where one conceptual or poetic schema invades another.12 This strategy can be a critical one, a kind of guerrilla action, or it can be revelatory, exposing new potentials for the city. The figural aspects of the gestural body can challenge the informational structure of urban space.

An extension of descriptive gesture Wundt labels symbolic gesture. Here, abstracted codes are employed that have an associative power. This may also have a transcendental power, and like the operations of language is part of shared understanding. The complex sign languages used by the deaf fall into this category. The gestural languages employed in the city up until the nineteenth century, and still maintained in more traditional societies, would also belong here.13 This is the aspect of the urban gestural space that has been altered, partly due to the proliferation of electronic technologies. The displacement of the expressive and emotive body from the public realm into the private realm, the realm of intimacy, challenges the city as a gesticulating community. Watching actors on a screen, in the protected comfort of our private worlds, provides a surrogate for our desire to confront the expressive human body in public.

Can the fecundity of face to face communication survive in the postindustrial city? There are a number of preliminary ideas that can be drawn from this brief exploration of gesture. Firstly, there is a close connection between gestural expressiveness and space, and a reciprocity between artifacts and the body. Secondly, following Wundt's system, gestures can be understood as demonstrative, descriptive (metaphorical) and symbolic and that these are each related to the diversity of public space. Thirdly, an investigation into gesture questions the nature and form of human communication in the city; in the face of ever proliferating electronic technologies that enhance communication at a distance.

The transformation of public space, particularly in North America, has occurred in part due to an increased emphasis on private space. Ironically, in contemporary North American cities, it is often among those who hold no real influence over the shape of urban growth that gestural languages still have powerful meaning, often as urban codes of resistance. One need only think of the gestural languages associated with Afro-American street cultures,14 or the collective expression that arises during times of protest. Both of these themes are documented in Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing, which traces cultural differences played out in a typical urban block in the Bedford-Stuyvesant district of New York city.

In the modern era the definition of urban space was increasingly determined by machines that extended the mechanical abilities of the body. This was added to the premodern city which more directly expressed the nature of the human body in space (for example, compare medieval Siena with contemporary Los Angeles). In the postmodern world we are adding layers of electronic technology that imitate our nervous and neurological systems and extend our intellect and communicative abilities. The decline of bodily gesture, increasingly filtered through technology, as the basic expression of our embodied existence in the city is understandable. For urban designers a new order of heterogeneous and anomalous spaces can be derived from an investigation of the postindustrial city. The vitality of public communication lies in the structure of urban spaces and their potential for public gesticulation. Beyond adding an expressive or figural aspect to the spaces of the city, human gestures are gifts to the city, gifts to the strangers that populate any city.

Notes

1 Sacks, O., Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), p. 87.

2 Ibid., p. 89.

3 Ibid., p. 76. The concept of the "grammaticization of space" Sacks attributes to Edward S. Klima and Ursula Bellugi.

4 Wundt, W., The Language of Gestures (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), p. 74.

5 Ibid., p. 76.

6 Ibid., p. 76.

7 Ibid., p. 76.

8 Ibid., pp. 78-81.

9 Ibid., p. 84.

10 Ibid, pp. 84-87.

11 A. Pope, Ladders, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), pp. 3-5.

12 See Goodman, N., Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1968).

13 See Sennett, R., The Fall of Public Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).

14 See Anderson, E., "Street Etiquette and Street Wisdom," in Kasinitz, P., ed., Metropolis: Center and Symbol of Our Times (New York: NYU Press, 1995).

[Graham Livesey is an Associate Professor of Architecture in the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary and a principal in Down + Livesey Architects. ]