CFP: Body Diagrams: On the Epistemic Kinetics of Gesture

Body Diagrams: On the Epistemic Kinetics of Gesture

Symposium on body semiotics at the 14th international Congress of the German Society of Semiotics [DSG] 2014 “Verstehen und Verständigung” [Comprehension and understanding] at the University of Tübingen 23rd  – 27th  September 2014

Invited Speaker: Prof. Frederik Stjernfelt, professor of semiotics, intellectual history, and theory of science,  University of Copenhagen

Across various disciplines, the epistemic kinetics of manual gestures and other forms of bodily movement typically employed in everyday discourse as well as more specific contexts of meaning-making and knowledge mediation is becoming more and more recognized. Not only regarding abstract subject matters such as mathematics, physics or grammar has physical action been shown to enhance cognitive functions, e.g. learning new concepts and connections (Goldin-Meadow 2003; Mittelberg 2008; Núñez 2008; Roth 2003; Tversky et al. 2009). Gesture, posture, and forward movement also assume crucial roles in ascribing meaning to objects and scenes in the visual and performing arts, e.g. design, image, drama, dance, and film (Arnheim 1969; Bredekamp 2010; Johnson 2007; Mittelberg et al. to appear; Müller & Kappelhoff 2012).

Not limiting gestures to communicative modalities apt to represent objects and actions or to manage social interaction, this section explores gestures as diagrammatic tools in the dynamic development of human conceptualization and knowledge of the world. Taking into account kinetic, haptic and sensed qualities of meaningful experience and expression, the guiding assumption is that concrete body diagrams do not merely represent and reproduce, but first and foremost bring about, transform and constitute ideas and understanding in action-perception cycles. Bodily practices of interest include manual and full-body gestures of indicating, pointing, placing and positioning, gestures of seizing, capturing, articulating and explictating, gestures of drawing (Gansterer 2011), graphing, underlining, labeling and delimiting, gestures of (re- and dis-)placement and expansion, gestures of opening and resistance of the body, gestures of linking, relation and correlation, merging, grouping and splitting, gestures of schematization, gestures of creation, performance and displaying (Dirnmoser 2009), that is, gestures that generally instill coherence, understanding, and meaning. 

Taking Peirce's (1960) notion of the diagram as icon of relations as a starting point, this section on body semiotics and diagrammatic reasoning is particularly concerned with the semiotic genesis of physically generated diagrams/graphs, i.e. "moving picture[s] of thought and action" (Peirce MS 296:6 c.1907-1908; Stjernfelt 2007) in multimodal processes of showing, explaining, interpreting, and understanding. While acknowledging the fact that such gestural diagrams may indeed trace relations or constellations already experienced or learned, by relating gesture and diagram, however, our main aim is to explore their creative potential and epistemic functions, that is, ways in which body diagrams may serve to sense, trigger and establish new thoughts, connections and conceptual/semiotic structures. 

In respect to the formation and visualization of diagrammatic signs through the human body not only different types and degrees of iconicity, physicality and material permanence are relevant, but also the specific interaction of iconic, indexical, symbolic, metaphoric and metonymic modes in each instance of association and signification (Cienki & Müller 2008; Enfield 2003; Fricke 2012; Jakobson 1956; Mittelberg 2010). Attention will be paid to the performativity and mediality of gestures as movements and interaction, as well as to the perception of bodily postures in general and the movement of body parts, especially the "enacted hand" (Gallagher 2013) or exploratory hands and their practical and cognitive engagments (Streeck 2009; Hutchins 2010; Clark 2013). Thus, the body itself - or parts of the body - are to chart and act in meaningful multimodal performances by creating diagrammatic structures. Such more or less schematic, emergent configurations resulting from different semiotic processes shall be investigated in the light of recent theories of embodiment, enactivism and the extended mind (Gallagher 2005; Gibbs 2006; Krois 2011), as well as empirical findings from gesture research, cognitive linguistics, and the substantial investigations in the field of diagrammatology that have offered essential new insights in recent years (Hoffmann 2007; Pietarinen 2006; Pombo & Gerner 2010; Stjernfelt 2000, 2007, 2010).

Interested contributors are requested to submit a short abstract to the heads of the symposium (see contact info below) by the end of April 2014 -Extended Deadline-. A peer-reviewed publication of selected papers is planned.

Contact:

Prof. Dr. Irene Mittelberg

RWTH Aachen University

Human Technology Centre 

Theaterplatz 14

52062 Aachen, Germany

[email protected]

Dr. Alexander Gerner

University of Lisbon

Centre of Philosophy of the Sciences at the University of Lisbon (CFCUL)

Science Faculty

Campo Grande

1749-016 Lisboa, Portugal

[email protected]

Selected references:

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Bredekamp, H. 2010. Theorie des Bildakts. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

Cienki, A. & Müller, C. (Eds) 2008. Metaphor and Gesture. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Clark, A. 2013. Gesture as Thought? In: Radman, Z. (Ed.), The Hand. An Organ of the Mind. Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 255-268.

Enfield, N. 2003. Producing and editing diagrams using co-speech gesture: Spatializing non-spatial relations in explanations of kinship in Laos. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 13, 7-50.

Dirnmoser, G. 2009. Rethorik der graphischen Elemente online: http://gerhard_dirmoser.public1.linz.at/FU/strukturale_Rhetorik_V3.pdf

Fricke, E. 2012. Grammatik multimodal: Wie Wörter und Gesten zusammenwirken. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Gallagher, S. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gallagher, S. 2013. The Enactive Hand. In: Radman, Z. (Ed.) The Hand. An Organ of the Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 209-225.

Gansterer, N. 2011. Drawing a hypothesis. Figures of Thought. Wien: Springer.

Gerner, A. 2011. Diagrammatic thinking. In: V. Havránek/Tranzit (Ed.) Atlas of Transformation. Zürich: jrp-ringier, 173-184.

Gibbs, R.W. jr. 2006. Embodiment and Cognitive Science. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Golding-Meadow, S. 2003. Hearing Gesture: How our Hands help us Think. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hoffmann, M. 2007. Seeing problems, seeing solutions. Abduction and diagrammatic reasoning in a theory of scientific discovery. In: Pombo, O. & Gerner, A. (Eds.). Abduction and the Process of Scientific Discovery. Lisbon: Publidisa, 213-236.

Hutchins, E. 2010. Imagining the cognitive life of things. In: Malafouris, L., Renfrew, C. (Eds) The Cognitive Life of Things. Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind. Cambridge: Mc Donald Institute Monographs

Jakobson, R. 1956. Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances, In: Roman Jakobson - On Language, L. Waugh & M. Monville-Burston (Eds.): 115-133. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.

Johnson, M. 2007. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Krois, J. M. 2011. Körperbilder und Bildschemata. Aufsätze zur Verkörperungstheorie ikonischer Formen, H. Bredekamp & M. Lauschke (Eds.). Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

Mittelberg, I. 2008. Peircean semiotics meets conceptual metaphor: Iconic modes in gestural representations of grammar. Metaphor and Gesture, ed. A. Cienki, & C. Müller, 115-154. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Mittelberg, I. 2010b. Geometric and Image-schematic Patterns in Gesture Space. Language, Cognition, and Space: The State of the Art and New Directions (Eds.) V. Evans & P. Chilton, 351-385. London: Equinox.

Mittelberg, I., Schmitz, T.H., Groninger, H.  (to appear). Operative Manufakte: Gesten als unmittelbare Skizzen in frühen Stadien des Entwurfsprozesses. In Hinterwaldner, I., Ammon, S. (Eds.) Bildlichkeit im Zeitalter der Modellierung. Operative Artefakte in Entwurfsprozessen der Architektur und des Ingenieurwesens (Eikones Reihe), München: Fink.

Müller, C. & Kappelhoff, H. 2011. Embodied meaning construction. Multimodal metaphor and expressive movement in speech, gesture, and in feature film", Metaphor and the Social World, 1.121-153.

Núñez R. 2008. A fresh look at the foundations of mathematics: Gesture and the psychological reality of conceptual metaphor. Metaphor and Gesture, A. Cienki & C. Müller (Eds.), 93-114.

Peirce, C.S. 1907-1908. Manucript 296:6 c.

Peirce, C.S. 1960. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931-1958). Vol. I.: Principles of Philosophy, Vol. II: Elements of Logic, eds. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Pietarinen, A.-V. 2006. Signs of Logic: Peircean themes on the philosophy of language, games, and communication. Dordrecht: Springer.

Pombo, O. & Gerner, A. (Eds.) 2010. Studies in Diagrammatology and Diagrammatic Praxis (=Studies in Logic 24, Logic and Cognitive Systems). London: College Publications.

Roth, W.-M. 2003. From epistemic (ergotic) actions to scientific discourse: The bridging function of gestures. Pragmatics & Cognition 11, 141-170.

Stjernfelt, F. 2000. Diagrams as a Centerpiece of a Peircean Epistemology. In: Transactions of the Charles Saunders Peirce Society, 36 (3), 357-384

Stjernfelt, F. 2007. Diagrammatology: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology and Semiotics. Dordrecht: Springer.

Stjernfelt, F. 2010. The extension of the Peircean Diagram Category. Charting the Implication of a Diagrammatical Revolution in Semiotics. In: Pombo, O. & Gerner, A. (Eds.) 2010. Studies in Diagrammatology and Diagrammatic Praxis (=Studies in Logic 24, Logic and Cognitive Systems). London: College Publications, 57-72

Streeck, J. 2009. Gesturecraft: The Manu-Facture of Meaning. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Tversky, B., Heiser, J. Lee, P. Daniel, M.-P. 2009. Explanations in gesture, diagram, and word. Spatial Language and Dialogue, K.R. Coventry, T. Tenbrink, J.A. Bateman (Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 119-131.