There was a lot of interest in interactional synchrony, the dance we
unconsciously do with one another in face-to-face interaction [though not
always comfortably if there are cultural divisions], in the 60s in the
borderlands between nonverbal communication studies and clinical
psychotherapy. Very interesting here is Albert Scheflen's _Communicational
Structure_. Closely related to the Condon & Ogsten, Kendon, etc. work, and
with a very definite awareness of the affective dimension and the ways
people both consciously and unconsciously tug on these strings in
'manipulating' one another. This work was what first pushed me strongly
toward regarding, long ago, 'dyads' as single systems that could not be
reduced to the simple interaction of two autonomous 'individuals'. It
really ended for me the notion that the individual was a privileged unit of
analysis, even in psychodynamics. Group therapy as a movement was partly
also influenced by such considerations.
At about the same time there is an amazing article by Harvey Sarles, 1975,
"A Human Ethology Approach to Communication" in the classic collection
_Organization of Behavior in Face to Face Interaction_ eds A Kendon, R
Harris, and M Key. Sarles was a very original thinker and in this article
he discusses various sorts of evidence that people viscerally and
muscularly participate in a sort of empathic mimesis of those they are
interacting with, or simple are with. Among other things he hypothesizes
that this is the biological basis for our discomfort around people with
severe injuries, amputations, etc. As a cultural anthropologist, he is well
aware of the learned component in these matters, but is here taking
seriously the bodily attunements we make with one another, what turns
co-presence into genuine interaction, what grounds the material basis of
dyads and ecosociality generally. In most libraries and well worth reading.
Scheflen has a great article in this collection, too, laying out the basic
view that all communication is multi-channel, or as we would say today
multi-semiotic.
Kind of makes you wonder what may be missing from conventional analyses of
what happens to us when we interact across major differences of age,
gender, 'race' as well ... Plato once told a story about heterosexual
attraction arising from the tendency of primordially hermaphroditic humans
to restore their sex-divided wholeness ... just what might be happening to
male and female bodies as they engage one another, even visually, if they
are unconsciously and internally trying to mimic one another's physiology?
there has probably been too little attention paid to nonsexual physical
responses between the sexes ... and as Plato clearly knew, these sorts of
analyses can be extended in other ways to same sex attractions [or more
complex reactions] ... we might even be able to reintegrate sexuality into
the more general bodily sensitivity/sensuality/reactivity spectrum in such
an approach. Surely our current myths about how people react physically to
one another are no less fanciful than Plato's ... there is a lot of room
for a theory that we might all actually be able to take seriously.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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