Task for Practice seminar №5

Ex.1 What are the main features of non-verbal communication as a social code?

Non-verbal communication is communication between people by means other than speech. Non-verbal communication (NVC) derives from the following major sources:

 

1) eye contact (amount of looking at another person’s body and face)

2) mouth (especially smiling or grimacing in relation to eye contact)

3) posture (for example, sitting forwards or backwards)

4) gesture (as with the use of arm movements when talking)

5) orientation (of the body to the addressee)

6) body distance (as when we stand too close or too far away from others)

7) smell (including perfumes)

8) skin (including pigmentation, blushing and texture)

9) hair (including length, texture and style)

10) clothes (with particular reference to fashion)

 

Non-verbal communication is not quite the same as ‘body language’ because any claim about a language must refer to an agreed and identifiable grammar and syntax. NVC is not always so precise or advanced; the vocabulary of non-verbal signs is more limited than speech. Even so, it is a mistake to consider NVC as isolated from speech. Instead, some complex interaction is envisaged between word and body signal, and one that is not always complementary. Imagine yourself interviewing job applicants. You might not offer employment to a candidate who refuses to look at you, always frowns, hunches both shoulders, sweats a lot, and has a Mohican hair cut – despite the fact that he or she gives thoughtful and interesting replies to your questions. As Argyle (1978) emphasizes, body language or NVC can be an intricate process.

Take eye contact as an example for discussion. Mutual eye contact (where both people look into each other’s eyes) can be a sign of liking, but prolonged gaze leads to discomfort. Goffman (1969), for example, describes the sustained ‘hate stare’ as exhibited by bigoted white Americans to blacks. The directed eye contact violates a code of looking, where eye contact is frequently broken but returned to, and leads to depersonalization of the victim because an aggressor deliberately breaks the rules which the victim adheres to. Eye contact is often enhanced by size of pupils, eyebrow inflection and movement, and smiling. Dilated pupils, intense looking (directed gaze), smiling, and the ‘rapid eyebrow flash’ are usually associated with sexual attraction.

There are many cultural determinants and variations in NVC. Mehrabian, for example, found that patterns of gesture differed for Jewish and Italian groups within the USA.

Similar differences have been observed for body distance, often described as personal space and implying the distance preferred by each individual when interacting with others.

No simple predictions about non-verbal behaviour can be made. So much depends on the types of relationships and communication between people. Intimacy and content of conversation must be considered in relation to situations we find ourselves within. It seems that we often seek some kind of balance in communication when speaking with our bodies.

The major consideration is that of reciprocation, meaning the answering of another’s body questions. Subtle negotiation between participants is envisaged over time. This involves the constant monitoring of, and adjustment to, others’ actions: in this way reciprocation is guaranteed. If somebody that we have just met stands too close to us then we tend to back away from them. The other person may then realize that they have offended us and show embarrassment or apology through less eye contact and more blushing. Our reactions to their embarrassment may be similar embarrassment, and so on. Of course all of this will affect verbal communication; it will probably be an altogether disastrous encounter.

Ex.2. What are the main ideas and periods of Structuralism?

Structuralism is an intellectual enterprise characterized by attention to the systems, relations and forms – the structures – that make meaning possible in any cultural activity or artefact. It is associated with a number of French writers who became influential in and after the 1960s.

Structuralism is not an interpretative approach to meaning. Unlike certain well-established kinds of literary and cultural criticism, it does not seek to reveal the hidden, essential or intrinsic meaning of a text or artefact. On the contrary, structuralists refuse the very idea of essential or intrinsic meaning, together with the notion that individual

texts or individual people are the source of the meanings they generate. Structuralism is an analytical or theoretical enterprise, dedicated to the systematic elaboration of the rules and constraints that work, like the rules of a language, to make the generation of meanings possible in the first place.

Thus early structuralism was distinguished by the use of Saussurian linguistics and its terminology: especially the notions of signifier and signified; langue and parole; synchronic and diachronic; paradigm and syntagm. These and other distinctive features of a language structure were used to show how disparate and apparently unorganized phenomena were actually instances of the same structural patterns and relations just as all the different things that can be said in speech depend on the rules and constraints of langue. Further, structuralism was dedicated to showing how such structures were to be found in all kinds of cultural activity. Thus there are structuralist analyses of architecture, fashion, food, kinship networks and the unconscious, as well as of the more obvious signifying ‘systems’ of cinema, television and literature.

The most prominent names in structuralism are Roland Barthes (criticism) and Claude Lé vi-Strauss (anthropology). Other influential writers who were associated with the enterprise are Louis Althusser (Marxist theory), Jacques Lacan (psychoanalysis) and Michel Foucault (studies of sexuality, madness and incarceration in terms of theories of power, discourse and knowledge); see Sturrock (ed.) (1979).

During the 1970s structuralism underwent a transformation. This was partly due to the proliferation of different positions within the enterprise, which eventually became too diverse to be understood as a unitary approach. It was also brought about by the unease which some of structuralism’s original proponents began to express that it was becoming itself the very type of intellectual orthodoxy that it was originally set up to challenge. The outcome of this transformation was to produce at least three rather different fields of study:

1) Semiotics which had hitherto been synonymous with structuralism but which became established as a major strand within the study of popular culture.

2) Deconstruction which is overwhelmingly a mode of literary analysis, derived from the writings of Jacques Derrida. Derrida, a philosopher, showed how the philosophical assumptions that underlie writings are not by any means the guarantors of their meaning – on the contrary, the discourses in which such assumptions are presented systematically undermine the philosophy. This approach has given rise to an entire deconstructionist movement which is particularly influential in literary studies in the USA. In this guise, the approach is a ‘method’ whose only precept is to take nothing for granted – doubt and questioning raised to the level of doctrine. Deconstruction is, then, one of structuralism’s logical conclusions.

Structuralism sought to challenge the common sense assumption that meanings are the result of their author’s intentions, or that language is simply a referential nomenclature (an instrument that simply names an already-existing world). Deconstruction takes these notions further, and concerns itself solely with the signifier (not the signified or the socially ‘fixed’ sign). Applied to the study of literature, deconstruction has produced a characteristic form of criticism in which the verbal virtuosity of the critic is as much in evidence as reflections on the object of study. The object of study (a work of literature, for instance) is in fact given no especially privileged status; it is not a warrant for its own reading. On the contrary, deconstruction is dedicated to teasing out the repressed, marginalized and absent in the chosen discourse.

3) Post-structuralism which is hard in practice to separate from structuralism. It is more alert to psychoanalytical theories and the role of pleasure in producing and regulating meanings than was the highly rationalist early structuralism. Post-structuralism is also more concerned with the external structures (social process, class, gender and ethnic divisions, historical changes) that make meaning possible than was the early version, which was mostly concerned with internal or ‘immanent’ textual structures. Hence structuralism shifted its focus from the text to the reader, but this shouldn’t be taken as a radical break – post-structuralism is implicit in structuralism itself.

Structuralism has been seen as a characteristically twentieth century way of understanding the world. The nineteenth century was notable in many different fields for work which sought causes and origins (Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism) as the framework of explanation. Structuralism shares with other twentieth-century enterprises – in physics and astronomy especially – attention to relations and systems as the framework for explanation. Instead of treating the world as an aggregate of things with their own intrinsic properties, structuralism and physics respectively seek to account for the social and physical world as a system of relations in which the properties of a ‘thing’ (be it an atom, a sign or an individual) derive from its internal and external relations.