Locating Meaning in Gesture

After a period of inactivity in the 1980s and 90s, gestural studies renewed its interest in the interconnectedness between gesture, spoken language, and thought. When exploring this scholarship, I found the similarities in language used to describe gesture in both gestural and image studies fascinating. University of Chicago psychology researcher, Susan Goldin-Meadow (2003), refers to gesture as “visual imagery” that conveys meaning and “can present simultaneously information that must be presented sequentially in speech” (emphasis mine, p. 24). Goldin-Meadow’s description relates closely to Murray’s definition of the non-discursive, which makes meaning all at once and not linearly.  Guest at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania since 2000, Adam Kendon (2004), describes both gesture and speech “as modes of expression” (emphasis mine, p. 2). He points out that considering gesture as a communicative mode complicates “the relationship between verbal language, imagery and thought” and challenges theorists who attempt to construct a model of speech production by only considering speech (p. 3). Although both scholars recognize gesture’s non-discursiveness, their treatments of gesture reveal a focus on its communicative properties.

Not surprisingly, gesture remains a constant area of interest to theater scholars. Jacques Lecoq (2006) is an influential theorist and teacher of physical theater, a method in which gesture serves as the foundation of performance. In his treatment of gesture in Theatre of Movement and Gesture, Lecoq argues that “gestures of expression” reveal concealed thoughts and feelings (p. 16), and that gesture “conveys an appearance, one that is presented for others to read” (p. 17). For Lecoq, gesture is both an unconscious revealer of thoughts and feeling and a conscious conveyer of information to be read. For him, one form of gesture closely connects the mind’s images with the body’s action and the other form describes gesture as a deliberate mode of communicative expression.  Although fundamentally different from Kendon’s and Goldin-Meadow’s perception of gesture, Lecoq’s definition more strongly emphasizes gesture’s connection to the mind’s symbolization and the body’s expressive capabilities.

Goldin-Meadow (2003), Kendon (2004), and Lecoq (2006)each group and define gesture with regard to their field and purpose, so I must do the same. Since this article is focused on the non-discursive mode, I am categorizing gesture into three groups: habitual, communicative, and non-discursive gesture. Habitual gestures are inadvertent bodily movements that are usually connected to feelings of nervousness or anxiety. For instance, I have watched a graduate student quickly pull a lock of hair on the left side of her head through her hand every time she made an argument during class discussion. Although her delivery sounded confident and her reasoning was sound, her hair-pulling always revealed nervous anxiety. Actions that have specific meanings can communicate as clearly as words and can become a language (albeit a limited one) all by itself; I call these communicative gestures. These actions connect closely with a specific community, culture, and/or society and are likely meaningless outside of those groups. The American ‘thumbs up/thumbs down’ gesture loosely translates as approval or disapproval;  however, in other countries, this gesture may instead convey a pejorative meaning.  Non-discursive gestures can (but not always) occur in conjunction with speech, but tend to be spontaneous, cannot be clearly defined by words, and may or may not be deemed communicative. The meaning of this type of gesture is ambiguous and the transcription into words is difficult, but they are intimately connected to our thoughts, emotions, and thinking/communicating processes, and as such, are an example of Langer’s symbolization. While each of these gesture types can act rhetorically, this article will look most closely at the non-discursive.