Communication without words

Lady Mitchell Hall, Cambridge, 17 February 1989⁹

Wittgenstein once asked what was left over after one subtracted from the sentence ‘I raise my arm’ the sentence ‘My arm goes up.’ A comparable question about communication might go something like this: ‘If I were to set aside all those communications which are expressed or expressible in words – written, spoken or signed – what would be left over?’

For anyone who regards language as the canonical form of human communication, the answer would probably be ‘Not much is left over’ and the residue, such as it is, is either a redundant supplement to words – something which the telephone shows we can do without – or else a sadly impoverished alternative which we are sometimes compelled to use when circumstances make the ordinary use of words awkward or impossible.

On the other hand, for those who regard language with suspicion – especially written or printed language – on the grounds that it misleads and confuses as much as it informs and expresses, eliminating words and sentences exposes a level of communication of unsuspected richness, one in which human beings express their true meanings. The idea is that articulate language is a barrier to, rather than a medium of, communication; and that if only this barrier could be removed, human beings would revert to a golden age of wordless, heartfelt communication. This attitude to non-verbal communication has been encouraged by the popularization of right-brain/left-brain studies and, amongst those who sponsor the soft primitivism that I have just referred to, it is widely assumed that the verbal capabilities of the left cerebral hemisphere have been over-developed by a culture which puts too much emphasis on linguistic finesse, and that the expressive repertoire of the supposedly holistic right hemisphere has been dangerously neglected as a consequence. In fact there are those who go even further, insisting that favouring the verbal capacities of the left hemisphere not only conceals but actually deforms and disables right-sided accomplishments. The most widely publicized example of this claim is to be found in Betty Edwards’ bestselling Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979). In this astoundingly popular and not altogether unpersuasive book, Miss Edwards sponsors a pedagogical programme designed to diminish the influence of linguistically determined ways of seeing the world. Her argument is that by learning to overlook those parts of the world which are easily nameable we can revert to a mode of perception more favourable to successful drawing. Here is one of her recommendations.

The left hemisphere is not well equipped to deal with empty spaces. It can’t name them, recognise them, match them with stored categories, or produce ready-made symbols for them. In fact, the left brain seems to be bored with spaces […] Therefore, they are passed over to the right hemisphere […] To the right brain, spaces, objects, the known and the unknown, the nameable or unnameable, are all the same. It’s all interesting10

And so on. There are some other interesting strategies recommended in the book and as someone who has always been frustrated by his inability to draw nicely I am bound to admit that the exercises suggested by Miss Edwards have brought about an unexpected improvement in my performance as a draughtsman. Now, whether this has anything to do with a conflict between right and left halves of the brain is not really the issue here. In any case I don’t intend to discuss the visual arts as an example of non-verbal communication and I only introduce the topic of drawing to illustrate the extent to which antagonism to language has infiltrated itself into at least one important department of educational theory. There are other examples, though. Although the advertising industry is almost promiscuous in its use of verbal slogans, the creative emphasis falls more and more upon the persuasive power of imagery – slow-motion shots demonstrating the lustrous lightness of newly washed hair, or the soft resilience of freshly laundered towels. In fact it would be tiresome to list the repertoire of non-verbal devices deliberately designed to bypass a critical vigilance based upon language.

A comparable tendency is to be found in the theatre. Inaugurated in the 1960s with the rediscovery of Artaud’s manifestos in favour of the so-called Theatre of Cruelty, drama in the last quarter of the twentieth-century displays a noticeable interest in bizarre expressionistic décor, extended pantomimic gestures and sometimes a cacophony of non-verbal sounds. In the increasingly popular idiom of so-called ‘performance arts,’ actors and audiences revel in non-verbal excesses in the belief that such behaviour addresses itself directly to the human soul and that all other forms of traditional theatre are disgustingly ‘literary.’ This repudiation of language is often associated with the more romantic forms of political radicalism, the idea being that language is one of several devices by which the ruling elite manipulates cognitive structures to its own advantage, and that it is only by storming the Bastille of linguistic tradition that human beings have any hope of being restored to a state of primeval egalitarian fellowship. This attitude is one of the things that has given non-verbal communication such a bad name, and since it already has a somewhat shaky reputation due to the fact that it has no powerful theory associated with it, its academic credibility suffers in comparison to that of formal linguistics. In fact, even if one succeeds in dissociating oneself from some of the more romantic claims that are made on its behalf, it’s easy to get the discouraging impression that communication without words is after all a residual topic and that once orthodox language has been subtracted all that is left is a rubbish heap of nudges, shrugs, pouts, sighs, winks and glances – or, to put it another way, that non-verbal communication is simply the behavioural exhaust thrown out of the rear-end of an extremely high-tech linguistic machine.

And yet…is it all that easy to subtract language in the first place? Can one really strip away the lexical component, leaving behind a non-verbal residue which has nothing to do with communication in words? The fact that one can commit words to paper without any apparent loss of intelligibility suggests that there is, in fact, a clean division between the lexical and the non-verbal component of human communication, and that the so-called kinesic variables such as facial expression, posture, and hand movements are just optional extras. But this conclusion overlooks the fundamental distinction between the meaning of an utterance and the meaning which the utterer wishes to convey by means of that utterance. Because, although it could be argued that what an utterance means is readily recoverable by anyone who can read printed English, it is important to understand that what the speaker wishes to express is more often than not defined by the factors which get lost in the process of transcription. The problem is that writing was not developed in the first place to preserve the meanings of talk or conversation. It was developed originally to promulgate priestly or legislative initiatives, and since these were collective and in some sense impersonal productions, what the writer meant was to all intents and purposes recoverable from what he wrote down. If there was any ambiguity, that is to say implications which might escape the first or indeed many subsequent readings, they were not the ones which would have made themselves more readily apparent if some form of graphic representation had preserved the tone of voice, the facial expressions or the hand movements of their author. So that there was no incentive to develop a notation designed to represent the non-lexical parts of an utterance. In fact, the notational shortcomings of writing only became apparent when authors tried to reproduce the talk of individuals. Then, and perhaps only then, the difficulty of identifying speech acts becomes apparent.

The notion of speech acts was introduced by the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin, who pointed out that in uttering this or that well-formed sentence a speaker is doing something over and above expressing its literal meaning. He or she may be stating, describing, warning, commanding, apologizing, requesting or beseeching. In fact, according to Austin there are more than a thousand of these acts which are performable in English, and unless the hearer or reader recognizes which of these is being expressed by the utterances in question, he or she has missed the point.

Of course, the identity of a speech act, its illocutionary force as Austin calls it, is often made apparent by an explicit lexical indicator: ‘I warn you that I will take steps to prevent you’ or ‘I promise that I will be there on time.’ And in such cases, the non-lexical cues – finger-waggings, handshakes and so forth – are indeed superfluous, and the printed text preserves everything that the utterer intended to convey. But for each of the thousand or so explicitly identifiable speech acts there are just as many for which there is neither a name nor a lexical indicator. And in that case the only way of identifying them with any accuracy is to hear them spoken and to witness the non-verbal behaviour with which they are preceded, accompanied or followed. A playwright will often do his best to supply this non-lexical information by telling the reader that the character shrugs, winks, or looks heavenwards as this or that phrase is uttered. A novelist can be even more helpful by saying that the phrase in question was spoken waggishly, or grimly, or that it was snapped out as the character turned angrily on his heel. However, the grain of this behavioural notation is unbelievably coarse and one is often surprised by the extent to which two performances of the same written utterance can differ – even when the actors in question are apparently following the same instruction with respect to intonation, facial expression or manual gesture. The result is that instead of trying to recover the often indeterminable illocutionary force intended by the author for this or that character, the actor finds himself inventing someone who might have wished to express this or that speech act by means of the speeches assigned to him in the text. In which case the non-verbal concomitants of the various utterances are improvised as if for the first time, and in the best of all possible productions an unforeseeable Lear, Macbeth or Rosalind emerges in performance, and the speeches come across expressing meanings which would have been hard to foresee from reading the bare text.

The point I am labouring at such length is that there is a large and complicated repertoire of non-verbal behaviour without which it is impossible to communicate meanings through the medium of spoken words, and, although it is tempting to regard this non-lexical repertoire as something which can be painlessly removed without any significant loss of meaning, the experience of reconstructing talk from a medium in which the representation of this aspect of speech is so poor is a salutary reminder of its importance.

Up to this point I have concentrated on the way in which non-verbal behaviour helps us, as Austin would say, ‘to do things with words.’11 I would now like to turn my attention to something which is in a sense a mirror image of what we have been considering. How can we ‘say things with deeds’?

There is, of course, a sense in which all our actions or deeds speak louder than words, and that everything we do – or fail to do, for that matter – is open to interpretation and therefore counts as a communication. In fact, it doesn’t have to be anything properly identifiable as a deed to communicate interpretable evidence. A blush, a hangdog posture or a limp handshake can all convey information, and experts in so-called body language – horrid phrase – have compiled long lists of postures and gestures from which an observant onlooker can glean some information about the attitudes or intentions of others. Mere ‘presence’ can speak volumes. Someone who turns up at an occasion which is known to be an ordeal for him communicates information whether he wishes to or not. His unexpected presence may be interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as a deed deliberately intended to express his courage or defiance. A well-known alcoholic who unexpectedly turns up at a cocktail party may inadvertently communicate the fact that his sessions with AA have given him newfound confidence in his self-control. But his turning up at such an occasion may be an explicit act of communication – a way of saying without words that he can now resist the blandishments of the bar and that his friends and colleagues are to regard him as a reformed character. It is important to distinguish, as far as one can, between behaviour which wordlessly betrays information – behaviour, that is, from which an onlooker may glean something – and non-verbal behaviour which is performed with the express purpose of communicating this or that information. Here is another example: someone who manages to read in a noisy, crowded room may inadvertently communicate evidence as to his enviable powers of concentration, but since the act of reading monopolizes his attention, he is by definition ‘dead to the world’ and therefore unaware of that fact which his behaviour communicates. In contrast, I have chosen the following passage from Barnaby Rudge (1841):

‘How do you find yourself now, my dear?’ said the locksmith, taking a chair near his wife (who had resumed her book), and rubbing his knees hard as he made the inquiry.

‘You’re very anxious to know, an’t you?’ returned Mrs Varden, with her eyes upon the print. ‘You, that have not been near me all day, and wouldn’t have been if I was dying!’

‘My dear Martha –’ said Gabriel.

Mrs Varden turned over to the next page; then went back again to the bottom line over leaf to be quite sure of the last words; and then went on reading with an appearance of the deepest interest and study.

‘My dear Martha,’ said the locksmith, ‘how can you say such things, when you know you don’t mean them? If you were dying! Why, if there was anything serious the matter with you, Martha, shouldn’t I be in constant attendance upon you?’

‘Yes!’ cried Mrs Varden, bursting into tears, ‘yes, you would. I don’t doubt it, Varden. Certainly you would. That’s as much as to tell me that you would be hovering round me like a vulture, waiting till the breath was out of my body, that you might go and marry somebody else.’12

Unlike a person whose actual reading betrays his powers of concentration, Mrs Varden’s pretended reading prevents her from actually reading, because in order to monitor and enjoy its communicative effect it would be impossible for Mrs Varden to accomplish the deed of reading in earnest. But not all pretended deeds have to fall short of their normal function in order to accomplish their communicative purpose. Take the example of the burglar in Austin’s famous essay on pretending – surely a classic example of saying something with deeds as opposed to doing something with words.13 A burglar is inspecting a window with a view to breaking and entering, but in order to make his interest look innocent he pretends to be cleaning the windows. As it happens, the most convincing way of pretending to clean a window is to actually do so.

The most observant reporter of saying things by means of deeds was the late Erving Goffman, and it is to his work that I would like to dedicate the rest of this lecture. I do so as a grateful tribute to someone who has liberated the study of non-verbal communication from the dead hand of ethological reductionism.

A central feature of Goffman’s approach to non-verbal behaviour is his assumption that it is to be visualized against the background of institutional norms which create the salient facts of social life.¹⁴ Without an appreciation of these norms it is almost impossible to make sense, let alone describe, much of the conduct which characterizes our mutual involvements. According to Goffman, what lends credibility to our concepts of personal self is the recognition of certain rules or conventions which limit the claims we can expect to be acknowledged with respect to freedom from untoward threat, interference and so forth. We venture into public life protected not so much by the sanctions of formal law but by an unwritten charter of civil rights which assigns us both access to and independence from others with whom we come into contact.

Those who lay claim to these rights and expect to have violations recognized and remedied, know that they undertake reciprocal obligations and will be expected to provide appropriate remedies if they are guilty of infraction, even if innocently. In our transit across public places we rely on others recognizing the rules which assign us the right to proceed without being inconvenienced by impudent stares or unsolicited conversational openings. On the other hand, we also proceed on the assumption that we have some measure of personal access to others if the occasion unexpectedly requires it, and vice versa; and that if such openings ensue, that there are supportive rituals which allow us to engage in them without offence and terminate them without insult. In return for such a privilege we implicitly acknowledge that there are reciprocal obligations incumbent upon us.

What this means is that the individual in public feels obliged to broadcast an unceasing stream of non-verbal signs, intended to inform others – whether they be acquaintances or more often otherwise – of the place which he or she expects to have in the undertakings which follow. By means of such conduct, we inform one another about the legitimacy of our presence, the innocence of our motives and our readiness to grant access or cooperation if the situation arises. And at times or places where our actions are likely to be misinterpreted, the intensity of this indicative behaviour increases.

As Goffman points out, these signs have been neglected or disparaged as trivial items. Or even worse they may be misdescribed as vestigial bequests from our primate ancestry – yet another example of the naive reductionism which sometimes passes as orthodox science. Where Goffman scores is by allocating scientific importance to the moral representation of self in everyday life.

Consider for a moment the question of legitimate presence. In places where anything short of purposeful warning might be misinterpreted as either suspicious loitering or aberrant vacancy, the normal person feels obliged to put on a show, which tells anyone who might be watching that orderly motives are in hand. He or she will glance ostentatiously at his watch, as if to indicate that an expected arrival is late for an appointment and if he happens to meet the glance of a passer-by, he will more often than not look once again at his watch and cast a long-suffering glance at heaven; as if by recruiting sympathy for a familiar predicament he will pre-empt any suspicion of more suspect motives. Such behaviour will perhaps be even more pronounced if the innocent loiterer happens to have stationed himself at places where his presence might be misinterpreted. Washrooms and lavatories are classical locations for such conduct. In men’s rooms, which are the only ones from which I can report personal experiences, there are elaborate rituals for avoiding the impression of suspect motives. A concentrated stare at the white tile immediately ahead of one usually takes place when someone unknown unexpectedly occupies the stall alongside, sometimes accompanied by the onset of a tuneless and preoccupied whistle; anything to avoid creating the impression that one might be showing an untoward interest in the UG equipment of one’s neighbour. Of course such behaviour won’t wash, and I use the word advisedly, if the neighbour happens to be a colleague. For in that case, the elaborate precautions to avoid eye contact could be read as a suspicion of his motives and thereby create a second order of virtual offence.

For obvious reasons, the situation is less fraught with risk in the purposeful va and vient of open corridors. Nevertheless even here an unremitting etiquette prevails. It is an etiquette in which the participants tacitly assume that there are reciprocal obligations with respect to right of way, freedom from inquisitive glances and capricious encroachments upon privacy. All the same the management of eye movements leaves room for the possibility of accesses which can and often do develop into what Goffman describes as focussed encounters; episodes which are themselves introduced and terminated by rituals of greeting and farewell. Such episodes may, of course, be confused as passing acknowledgements, but the readiness to exchange such signals is one of the ways in which we register the normality of the passing scene and it is when we encounter consistent anomalies in the broadcast that we begin to suspect and perhaps report something odd.

In institutions such as hospitals or the BBC, where colleagues and acquaintances run the risk of passing one another many times in the same morning, the ritual resources for handling brief encounters are often over-stretched. First and second encounters can be managed by conventional openness; a third meeting may necessitate a humorously resigned grin; a fourth can be handled by pretending to be wrapped in thought; a fifth may require some dramatized horseplay such as play-acting a Western duel. And you’ve all seen and probably participated in the scene where a sequence of such meetings is brought to its climax by one partner coming right out with the movie cliché ‘We can’t go on meeting like this,’ or, less effectively, ‘Long time no see!’

All this, as Goffman points out, presupposes three levels of normal functioning:

a. The recognition of the fact that an individual is a potential source of alarm, inconvenience, offence and encroachment.

b. Recognition of the fact that each individual has both the obligation to minimize these aspects of himself and the capacity to do so.

c. Recognition of the need to perform remedial work if one recognisably infringes any of the norms which one intuitively regards as binding.

The point is that almost any configuration of events with which an individual is likely to be associated in public carries the risk of a worst possible meaning which might reflect unfavourably upon him, and it is a sign of intact mental functioning that one recognizes this risk, without of course being incapacitated by the thought, and at the same time that one is equipped to perform repair work if and when infractions occur.

It is, I think, in the analysis of this so-called remedial work that Goffman is at his most imaginative and productive. One of the things that makes his account so useful – so much more than the anecdotal triviality of which he is so carelessly accused – is his ability to compare and contrast this informal repair work with the formal structures of explicit legal process. As in law there is an orderly sequence of offence, arrest, remedy and reconciliation. But what distinguishes these interchanges is the fact that the offender is so often the first to recognize that an infraction has occurred and usually initiates the appropriate repair work without being asked to do so.

An even more important distinction is the fact that the remedial work is expressive rather than productive. In other words the remedial performance is designed to restore a favourable image of the offender as opposed to offering substantial compensation to the offended.

Taking his cue from yet another of Austin’s philosophical essays, the famous and often reprinted “A plea for excuses” (1956), Goffman distinguishes various forms of remedial ritual, of which the first is the so-called account.15 In this, the offender redescribes his or her act so that its offensiveness may be overlooked or discounted. It may take the form of an explicit explanation. Someone, for example, who finds himself in the embarrassing situation of seeming to have winked at an unknown passer-by may offer the account that he has some grit in his eye – this often accompanied by a flurry of overacted eyelid-rubbing and nose-blowing. In this way he re-establishes his image as an altogether innocent victim. Of course, one has to be careful in this context to recognize that many of the infractions I’m referring to are not necessarily offences against others, but represent errors of performance – imperfections which reflect badly on the offender, so that one undertakes remedial work, not for the purpose of making amends but to re-draw the picture of oneself so that it corresponds more closely to the one which one would like to project to the world at large. So important is this consideration – and it would be perfunctory to regard it as mere vanity – that it may motivate performances to anonymous and usually unconcerned strangers. You only have to think of the otherwise incomprehensible behaviour of someone who hails a cab with a flailing gesture of the outstretched arm and who, having failed, then feels it necessary to provide an account of what happened by using the same hand to smooth down their hair. Or in Goffman’s own example of the man who trips in the street, to his own and no one else’s inconvenience, who then feels it necessary to retrace his steps and conscientiously examine the sidewalk – as if to establish the impression that the fault lies in the pavement and not, as might otherwise be suspected, in the nervous system of the person concerned. The point is that whether it’s addressed personally or all round to anyone who might be watching, whether it’s verbal or mimetic, the function of an account is to correct a potentially unfavourable impression of oneself which an infraction of the unwritten rules might produce.

And the same principle applies to apology, although as Austin pointed out in his essay, the logic of apology is not the same as that of accounts. In making an apology one accepts blame for what has happened, but at the same time one tries to convince the injured party, if there happens to be one, or the world at large if not, that the error is not to be taken as representative of the real self.

Apology, in other words, is aimed at convincing anyone interested that the miscreant recognizes his fault, and by that token alone, is to be regarded as someone whose typical tendency is to observe the conventions. Such a performance may be verbal or non-verbal. In circumstances when words are inappropriate or impractical, the apology may take the form of an elaborate pantomime of contrition. On entering a small seminar room, where a meeting is already underway, the show may take the following complex form: a self-uglifying expression of humility, plus an elaborate show of stealthiness – which is as good as saying ‘Yes, I am late, and please pay attention to my performance of humbly not wishing to be paid attention to’, i.e. ‘Here’s me entering as unostentatiously as I know how, so you can see how much I regret my rudeness!’

A comparable version of this is the face made by someone who barges into a room unannounced, expecting to speak to a friend, only to find that this friend is engaged in an intimate professional consultation with another colleague. Although a verbal apology would probably fit the bill, the offender may feel constrained to act the fool he expects to be accused of being. Hence an otherwise unintelligible grimace. Or the actor who stumbles over his words for the second time at a rehearsal. He will often apologize by overplaying the spastic idiot everyone around must suspect him of being.

There are also, I think, concealed apologies included in the otherwise straightforward rituals of farewell. As Goffman points out, the end of conversational encounters carry an increased risk of creating offence – in the sense that careless or perfunctory termination may convey the misleading impression that one couldn’t wait for the session to end and that as far as one was concerned the whole episode was a waste of time. On occasions where this is felt to be a risk, preventive apologies may be issued in the form of prolonged negotiations to meet again soon, or anything to avoid the potentially offensive gesture of actually leaving!

This of course raises the question of the apologies and/or accounts which accompany failed farewells. The situation I’m thinking of is this. One’s been talking with a small group of colleagues. Because of an appointment or whatever, one has to leave before the group as a whole breaks up. Having successfully manoeuvred an inoffensive farewell, one discovers that one has left a book in the room. Now, try and visualize the risks of re-entry. First, the offence to oneself. This is usually surmounted by merely explaining ‘Left my book,’ but since one may suspect that one’ll be thought a fool for having done so, it may be necessary to overact being a fool and murmur ‘Forget my own head next!’ Perhaps this show is reinforced by miming a stumble or a mindless struggle with the door on leaving yet again, but the situation is complicated by the knowledge that – in one’s all too brief absence – the space left by one’s departure is already in process of closing over; new topics are in hand and one might create offence to the members of the reconstituted group by seeming to reinsert oneself. Once again, the tip-toe manoeuvre – but this time it’s not quite an apology so much as an unsuccessful account. An account which tries to convey the impression that you’re not there at all. And so forth.

Now, in my enthusiasm for anecdotal aspect of all this, I have neglected to mention the other half of Goffman’s analysis of remedial procedure. I am referring of course to the process of closure – that is to say the ritualized responses, whereby the injured party acknowledges and accepts the accounts or apologies, thus allowing social activity to resume its productive course. If this so-called round is left incomplete, the offender – virtual or actual – is left hanging in the air, uncertain as to his moral status in the undertakings that will follow. These replies may seem too trivial to mention – a nod, a murmur, ‘that’s OK,’ or whatever – but if these signs are not provided, the offender is left with the uneasy sense that his or her offence, trivial or not, is permanently entered in the criminal record.

It is, I think, one of Erving Goffman’s most lasting achievements to have made these interchanges both visible and intelligible. And what makes his analysis so attractive is the fact that he has resolutely turned his back on the temptations to reduce what he has seen to some supposedly more fundamental principle of animal behaviour. As far as he was concerned, what we are witnessing in these exchanges is the expression of the distinctly moral part of human nature. In his own words:

If we examine what it is one participant is ready to see that other participants might read into a situation and what it is that will cause him to provide ritual remedies of various sorts (followed by relief for these efforts), then we find ourselves directed back again to the core moral traditions of Western culture.16