Non-Verbal Communication
The Dance of the Wild Body
The following is a school assignment. I hope it subtly indicates how the way we conceptualize communication today does a great disservice to learning it, especially for autists. Failing such “scientific” approaches, many people struggling to communiate resort to supernatural frameworks for explaination.
The assignment also enquired about socioeconomic and cultural differences in body language, which my job selling Beer provides me plenty of material to work with.
The Nature of Communication
I have spent the last ten years studying human communication using the methods of famed Canadian scholar and pioneer of media studies, Marshall McLuhan. He understood mimesis, or the natural way people resonate with, or rub-off onto one another, as underlying our capacity to reach across our individuality and commune. It is an animal capacity.
Words are not about conveying information; this is a newfangled 20th century conceit concocted by engineers at telephone companies. While they may know how to make sound travel across a wire, telephone engineers cannot tell us more about communication than the centuries of culture which humanists study. From this older vantage, we see that communication is not the Bell Laboratories definition. That is, communication is not the transmission of a message from sender to receiver through a channel, overcoming noise, as is so-frequently taught. Rather, communication is the magical way which a person’s postures, gestures, and utterances can create a shared sense of perception, creating a larger shared sense of being between individuals. It is the melting of people into a common experience of sense and feeling by any means.
Therefore, in answering the questions in this assignment, I must take exception to its underlying assumption: that I do not pay attention to non-verbal communication. Rather, I intuitively understand communication to include words while, at the same time, not reducing it to those words. Gestures, postures, and utterances are the older and more universal form of communication, as interactions with foreign-language speakers easily demonstrates to anybody. As such, my attention is ready to consider them in all situations.
1. When Attuned to Postures and Gestures
There are plenty of times when I am deep in my own sense of self, and thus ignoring other people. In this mode of interaction, I am merely going through the motions.
Over twenty years of work in customer service, including a five year stretch where I was stoned out of my mind for the entire duration of my full-time work, I have developed a broad and convincing repertory of rehearsed responses and voices. I can talk my way through entire interactions and conversations with people while not even being there. At my old job, while stoned, I’d frequently come to after a long daydream and find myself closing-out a conversation with someone, of which I had no memory at all. I’d consult the register and learn I had just served a whole string of people without being present for it. It scared me.
This no longer happens. The habits of it, however, still constitute a fair share of my public service persona. I believe that my rehearsed, automatic social self is cordial, but likely evidently fake and plastic to my more attentive conversation partners. I’d reckon such partners are at best 10% of the population.
When I give people my fuller attention, things can all-too-easily get intimate and, often, more volatile. If I don’t very carefully regulate my sense of detachment and keep some distance, then the gravity of encounters begin to tip things toward my direction. Some people get giddy or flirtatious, winking and lingering, hoping I’ll make a pass. Other people get scared, and their hands tremble and they either swell up some stoic strength to keep it cool. Or they begin talking too much and repeating themselves nervously in failed rituals to dispel their own discomfort. I think experiences like these have only framed for our secular appreciation as that between celebrity idols and their fans. Outside of that specific relation, our cultural language to describe these experiences takes on an occult or supernatural quality. I thoroughly reject the underlying metaphysics of these terms.
As McLuhan told Pierre Trudeau in a March 26, 1974 letter, “Charisma is looking like a lot of other people—anything except one’s self!” As I said above, communication entails an openness which allows many other people to rub-off on us, possess us, become within us. I feel like a melange of all the people I’ve known closely, and can often feel them within me as I laugh, or make a face or gesture which I think of as “them”. They rise to become within me, intuitively.
In his book I Am a Strange Loop, written decades after his more famous Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter reflects deeply on his memories of his late wife Carol. She survives in him; his memories of her, and in the times he recognizes he is thinking and acting like her, or as her:
In some sense, all Gödelian loops-of-self (i.e., strange loops that give rise to an “I”) are isomorphic at the most coarse-grained level, and therefore in lowest approximation they may not be hard to transport at all; what makes them different from each other is only their “flavouring”, consisting of memories, and of course, genetic preferences and talents and so forth. So, to the extent that we can be chameleons and can import the “spices” of other people’s life histories (the spices that imbue their self-loops with unique individuality), we are capable of seeing the world through their eyes. Their psychic point of view is transportable and modular—not trapped inside just one perishable piece of hardware.
If this is true, than Carol survives because her point of view survives—or rather, she survives to the extent that her point of view survives—in my brain and those of others. This is why it is so good to keep records, to write down memories, to have photos and videotapes, and to do so with maximal clarity—because thanks to having such records, you can “possess”, or “be possessed by”, other people’s brains. That is why Frédéric Chopin, the actual person, survives so much in our world, even today. (pg. 237-8)
Hofstadter makes an all out of what I can only think of as an essential part of our humanity, and yet I think his description of the underlying mechanics of communication here are sound. This is also the central technique of art, as his allusion to Chopin indicates. It is technique, and it requires, first, careful and hard-won sensibility.
2. Particular Non-Verbal Cues
Of course their is a range of subtitle to the multitude of gestures and postures which people radiate while being vulnerable and expressive. There is also a degree of deception and simulation which is itself, when noticed, ironically communicates states counter to the normal sense of a gesture or posture. Depressed people who act happy exhibit an uncanny blend of smiles and laughs punctuated with small tensing gestures or long stares or trembles.
To act like gestures and postures can be labelled and listed for lookup, as though they were dictionary words, is a gross distortion of the nature of language. This framing of communication is sure to set up the autistic student for years of unnecessary confusion and failure.
Perhaps it is worth highlighting the negative space; the gap. There is a great wealth of things communicated in pregnant pauses and neutral stances. Like in Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, a great deal of drama hangs in lingering moments of stillness in everyday interaction.
3. Socioeconomic Strata of Communication
There are certainly differences between the styles of non-verbal communication between social strata. Socioeconomic success necessitates a degree of self-composure which the less-accomplished strata most-normally lacks.
The lower strata are heavily represented among my clientele: frequent alcohol drinkers. They lack filters or restraint, demonstrated in gross physical movements which invade the personal space of others. Sometimes they take up space like they own it. Of course, other times they seem to shrink as though wishing they could occupy none at all. There is, in short, frequently some telling mis-calibration of their physical existence with others. They may hang onto my eyes like clinging to my attention, or avoid my eyes entirely. Sometimes out of shame, or sometimes out of total internal preoccupation—they, too, are often well-rehearsed at going through the motions. When they do pay me attention, they often attempt, ham-fisted, to ingratiate themselves to me with long soliloquies and incessant platitudes without awareness of when to wrap it up.
New Canadians with money often express a sense of entitlement which is not normal among long-resident Canadians. They have something to prove to me; they evaluate my respect for them and their money with suspicion and insecurity. They are indiscreet with the contents of their wallet, which they make a big show of pulling out and opening only after given the total. These fat, straining billfolds often bear more banknotes than is practical—unless one finds social use in money as a dramatic prop.
They speak curtly, and switch starkly between complete indifference on the one hand, and all-consuming, expectant stares on the other. When they are busy, I and no other person exist to them—they won’t lift their eyes, or move out of the way for anyone while they are deliberating a purchase, or talking on the speakerphone or earpiece. But when they command my attention, they need it totally and completely. I often have to cut off their interrogations or demands and chastise them for interrupting my interactions with another customer, interactions I’ll initiate during their private deliberations. Here my own posture must become erect, and my voice and eyes clear and uncompromising. It is a power game I seldom play with anyone better-socialized into established Canadian culture.
Conclusion
I agree with the assignment that non-verbal communication is extremely important. Both to the therapeutic encounter, and to social existence in general. I believe however that emphasis on this point, and the assignments prescribed practices for improving our sense of it, is a band-aid upon a deeper problem. To end on a quip: non-verbal communication should go without saying.