Chapter 3

POINT UNITS THAT SERVICED AND RELATED THE PARTICIPANTS

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

— Sigmund Freud. Collected Papers, 3,

London: Hogarth, 1949, 94.

Ordinarily an account of a communicational event would begin with a description of the language behavior. But I will begin instead with a description of certain nonlanguage activities which appeared to service the participants and the relationships thus maintaining and developing participation and interrelationship.

Some of these behaviors were simple physical tasks at their inception but they quickly came to be used as signaling devices or sequences of representative activity which were shared among members of the group. So I will first distinguish simple ecological acts or actonic behavior and then describe a class of representational behaviors, i.e., behaviors that represented more complex social activities like courtship and maybe play.

THE PHYSICAL TASK OR ACTONIC POINT UNIT

If we had film recorded the hour or so before Session I and the hour afterwards we would have observed a good deal of physical task behavior which prepared for the main event. Cameras were set up and the furniture was arranged. Marge was dressed for the occasion by the clinical assistants and after the session the two therapists and the observers were served luncheon.

M. Harris (1964) has described sequences of task behavior like this and termed them ‘actones.’ And some of Pike's ‘behavioremes’ are physical tasks of this nature — eating breakfast, for instance (Pike 1954). Such behaviors are addressed to props or other things, but the objects of address can be other people in activities like feeding, love-making, and grooming, and the object of such behavior may be the self.

I am going to consider such behaviors as members of a common class, suggesting that they service the site, the participants, and the relationships of the transaction. Such activities thus maintain a transaction, but they can also be used to change it.

In some transactions actonic behavior is featured. People come together in order to manufacture a product, to feed, to groom each other, or to prepare a site for a later transaction. In transactions that are explicitly conversational such actones are intercalated in the stream of language behavior. So people may munch a candy bar, smoke, adjust the lights or furniture while they are speaking or listening.

In Sessions III and IX complicated servicing behavior was introduced at 12 and at 24 minutes. In Session III, for instance, Malone combed Marge's hair and got her to comb his.

Actonic Acts in Session I

Actonic and servicing behavior was less conspicuous in Session I. Behaviors of this type occurred as follows:

1. Pipe lighting. Whitaker took out his tobacco, filled his pipe, and lit it. It is noteworthy that he did this about a minute before he shifted his position and moved in closer to the women at 18 minutes. He moved back to his original position at 29 minutes.

Malone also filled and lit his pipe. He did so in each instance just after Whitaker had done so. In fact, we will see, Whitaker did not make the moving-in behavior until Malone had lit up or at least until he had shown that his pipe was lit by tamping it and blowing a conspicuous puff of smoke through the bowl.

The pipe lighting act, then, was an actone, but the smoking behavior which followed constituted some kind of signal system (see Chapter 12).

2. Nose blowing. At 4 minutes: 45 seconds, Marge took a Kleenex from her skirt and blew her nose. Immediately afterwards Malone took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose.

Malone put his handkerchief away, but Marge continued to hold her Kleenex. She waved it around and then dropped it near Whitaker.

3. Picking up. At 12 minutes Marge dropped Kleenex on the sofa near Whitaker. He moved forward, uncrossed his legs, and rested his weight on his legs. Then he picked up the Kleenex and handed it to Marge. This act was the occasion, then, of Whitaker's second moving-in shift.

At 22 minutes Whitaker leaned forward and picked up a minute object from the floor. He played with this in his hand for the next few minutes, then put it under Marge's nose and ordered her to smell it.

Notice again that the picking-up act was not simply an element of housekeeping. The object which was picked up was used for a number of minutes in a kind of playing and signaling behavior and these sequences terminated in a brief physical contact between Whitaker and the girl.

4. Contacting. We can conceive of the tactile acts in contacting as actonic behaviors which connected two participants. McBride (1966) calls this kind of behavior bond servicing.

5. Clothing adjustment. From time to time the men adjusted their coats. When Marge sat down near Mrs. V, the mother tucked her skirt under her legs as if to separate herself and define her territority. When Marge would change her leg positioning she would rearrange her skirt. As is usual in such behavior, she lifted her skirt slightly before pulling it down, thus giving the men a lady-like peek at her legs.

On other occasions, however, Marge exhibited her thighs by allowing her skirts to ride up. Then she would pull her clothing down when she stood up.

These behaviors, too, were elements in more complex sequences. Some of them were constituents of preening routines that I will describe later. The exhibitionistic leg behavior served to turn the men away from Marge (point 4, repelling: see Addendum to Section B). This is usually the case. The myth is, that a woman is seductive if she exhibits thighs beyond the mode of an era or lets her knees drift apart, but observations in any mixed company will show that this behavior regularly causes men to cover their eyes, avert their faces, move back, and turn to someone else for conversation. On the contrary, preening behaviors such as the brief skirt lifting, pressing the calves together, and showing a little thigh will bring attention to a woman.

6. Stroking. Marge would stroke her lower thighs with a slow, rhythmical movement. When she did this Malone would stroke the seat of his chair in the same movement.

This behavior is depicted on page two of the fold-out multimodality transcript. The significance of synchronous movement between two participants will concern us later.

Formation of the Actonic Point: Modalities of Behavior

Notice that two of these behaviors constituted a brief intercalated position. Whitaker turned his whole body to Marge at the second contacting and spoke to her as he put his palm under her nose. And he used his whole body in picking up the object from the floor. But the others are actions which involve a single bodily region. They are carried out with torso and hands while the participant is also speaking or listening.

In other words the participants use their bodies differentially. They perform one set of behaviors in one relationship and another set in some other relationship at the same time. For instance, Whitaker picked up Marge's Kleenex, handed it to her and brushed her hand, without taking his face and eyes away from Mrs. V. This was the case in each of the other actonic acts I have described. The men lit their pipes without watching what they were doing. They kept listening to Mrs. V as they did so. And Marge did not stop her passive protests or contentions to exhibit her thighs or wave her Kleenex. In the case of the stroking behavior the lower half of the body was involved, while Marge simultaneously directed her upper body to Malone or the camera, and turned her head to address Whitaker.

Thus the body is differentiated in its communicative usage. The head, face, and vocal apparatus are used in one relationship, the upper torso and hands in another, and sometimes the lower^. body and legs are employed in yet a third relationship.¹ Notice, too, that the activities of these regions are of different logical types: i. e., the activities of the head region involve facial expressions and language, which are symbolic actions; the activities of the body and hands can be symbolic when gestures are used, but these actonic behaviors alone are not symbolic. These differential activities have led communication theorists to distinguish modalities of communication or channels of communication at the social level. Thus human communication is multichanneled (Birdwhistell 1965) (Table 3-1).

TABLE 3-1: A Listing of Behavioral Modalities in Communication

LANGUAGE MODALITIES

Linguistic

Paralinguistic

COMMUNICATIVE BODILY MODALITIES

ARTIFACTUAL BEHAVIOR
(Including dress, cosmetics, insignia, use of props, and bodily noise)

I use these regional differentiations as the first of two bases for distinguishing the subunits of the position. The behavior of the upper or lower body or the head region constitutes one division of positional behavior. And the participant who directs his head to one vis-à-vis and his body to another and performs a different kind of sequence in each of these relations is evidencing multiple simultaneous actions in a position. The basic bodily posture of the position is maintained during these differential activities so the constituent modalities collectively belong to one position. Mechanically, the participant positions his body, balanees on his buttocks (or on his buttocks and legs), then directs his head toward one relation and his body toward the other.

Notice that these regional activities are addressed to someone; the bodily region is oriented to someone, and the activities are pitched or directed to this person.

Sometimes different logical types of activities are addressed to the same person. Marge, for example, would look at Whitaker and speak to him. Simultaneously she would turn her body to him and act courtingly.

In this case, however, the two behavior sequences thus addressed differed markedly in the significance of their content. Marge acted sexily, but she spoke a lament, saying she was dead (multimodality transcript and points 8 and 14, Addendum to Section B). In this case we can say that the addresses are co-oriented but the messages are different and actually antithetical. This kind of behavior is one form of ‘double binding’(Bateson et al. 1956). Bateson and others have attributed double binding to schizophrenia, but we see it in many transactions where the participants are not known deviants.

Sequences of Point Behavior: Point Units

Actonic sequences within a position are often addressed to one person after the other. Marge, for example, would address a Kleenex display to Malone, then to Whitaker, then back to Malone.

So the behavior of a bodily address and modality is often segmented into sequences of actonic behavior. These constitute separate subunits of behavior. So the position is subdivided according to two kinds of dimensions: by bodily region and by successive segmentations of any of these. We will see in Chapters 4 and 5 that speaking behavior is also segmented in this way. So a model of positional divisions might look like the following:

Each of these subunits of behavior has the characteristics of a unit as I described them in Chapter 2. I will call them point units because they roughly correspond to a point that a participant may make in a transaction, i. e. , one idea, actonic task, or representation (Chapter 5). I will describe point units that featured language and gestures in the next two chapters.

Types of Actonic Points

The simple actonic or physical task units seemed to be used in three types of point performances:

Type A: ‘Contentless’ Points That Maintained Orientation

Often a participant will orient his body toward others in the basic posture of a position, then turn his head and address some particular member or some person who has not been included in his basic postural orientation. In such cases he may not perform any activity with his body and hands, but rather hold these regions motionless. Sometimes the converse relation is seen. The body is addressed and a sequence of nonlanguage behavior is directed to another person. Meanwhile, the head is addressed to some other person but the face is held ‘dead pan’ without expression or speaking.

This kind of behavior seems to do several things which we can abstract as a single function. First it does offer distracting and invitational behavior to those addressed. It does not comment on what is occurring in the active modalities. It therefore directs attention elsewhere to some principal activity—speaking, for example. Thus the ‘contentless’point can maintain orientation in a relationship which is at the moment ‘inactive.’

Type B: Actonic Points Used as Signals

We might not ordinarily think of actonic task behaviors as communicative. They do not stand for or symbolize distant things or events. But they are communicative, whatever their purpose or intent.

The actonic sequence is a customary sequence of action. It is therefore recognizable and meaningful to anyone who observes its occurrence. The observer can know what is going on and often he can name the sequence and gain information about the context from seeing it occur. He can also join in the performance; he can ‘commune’ with what is going on.

Thus the actonic sequence is as important in maintaining social organization as is language and gestural communication. The actonic point can also be used to signal. It can be used to direct or pace or represent some other behavior. An infant, we would say, does not at first cough in order to solicit his mother’s attention, but he can soon learn that the cough has this consequence and he can later learn to use the cough accordingly. In the psychological sciences we have often acted as though any behavior that is not intended to provide information is not communicative. If we take this position, either we overlook a great deal of significant activity in communication or else we have to use what Kubie calls the teleological fallacy, and attribute some specific motive to every act (Kubie 1964). So a behavior is communicative if it is customarily patterned, regardless of the performer's intent.

The Pipe-Smoking Signals

As I have described, Whitaker lit his pipe before making his 18-minute shifts toward the women. And Malone ‘answered’ by lighting his pipe.

Only when Malone had responded did Whitaker make the postural shift. So the pipe lighting seemed to be a signal.

This hunch—that smoking behavior was a coordinative signal — was borne out by the analysis of smoking behavior in Sessions III and IX. In these sessions Malone was the active therapist who moved in toward Marge, and Whitaker stayed back in his original closed posture until after minute 24 of the session. In these two sessions Malone first lit his pipe, then when Whitaker did so, Malone made the move-in shift.

In Session IX, when Malone was the initiator, he once started to move in toward Marge without waiting for Whitaker to light his pipe. But he never completed the move-in, returning instead to his original position. Then, several minutes later when Whitaker did light up, Malone completed his moving-in shift (Scheflen 1967).

The pipes were used as signals in another way. The active therapist smoked right handed until after 24 minutes in each session. The less active therapist smoked left handed until his move-in at 20 minutes. Thus the specific handedness in smoking reliably indicated who was the active therapist in the moving-in progression.

Mrs.V seemed to crack this code rather quickly. Whenever Whitaker would light up he would soon thereafter form a coalition with Marge and she would act sexy and begin contending. Mrs. V at first made the nose-wiping signal or warning when Marge got sexy, but after the first two repetitions of this sequence she started monitoring when Whitaker lit his pipe. Later still, she monitored when Whitaker took out his pipe.

The Kleenex and Hand-Playing Sequences

The ‘housekeeping’ activities of nose blowing and picking up an object from the floor were similarly used in a signaling activity (Figure 3-1). After Marge blew her nose, she kept the Kleenex in her hand. She shook it and waved it in a way that I think was a signal to the men. She would shake it toward Whitaker when addressing him. And she waved it back and forth between the men when she was seeking to speak to both of them. Just before 12 minutes, as I have said, she dropped it near Whitaker. In retrieving it he moved into his second progressive posture and touched Marge. Marge again dropped her Kleenex near Whitaker at 18 minutes and immediately afterward he began his third moving-in shift. Whitaker behaved analogously in the second half of Phase I.

You will recall from Chapter 2 that he picked up the object at about 23 minutes and played with it for the next two minutes. He held it in his left palm and rolled it around with his right index finger. Marge watched this behavior, enthralled as though hypnotized. Then at 24 minutes Whitaker held it under her nose.

The function of Whitaker's behavior is puzzling. It occurred only once so there was no way to make a context analysis of it.²

Figure 3-1:The Kleenex and Hand-Play Sequences

Type С: Representational Points

Defining Representational Behavior. I have already indicated that the actonic points, like nose blowing and clothing arrangement, were single units in larger sequences of activity. The remainder of these sequences consisted of point units that were not directed to physical tasks, but rather seemed to be representative elements in bond-servicing activities like courtship and mutual play.

Such behaviors look like acts that would be found in courtship or fighting or feeding if the participants in such activities were actually standing or sitting together in tactile contiguity. Imagine, for example, two lovers who are sitting across the room from each other. If they were sitting together they would hold hands, but across the room each person holds one hand as he would in hand-holding. Or a person may hold out his arms as if to embrace another, or a person may make sucking or eating movements as though he were being fed. Such acts refer to and suggest the larger sequences in which they normally occur but they are not symbolic in the sense that words are. They look like the larger behaviors they represent. So I will class them as iconic behaviors and call them representational acts. Since they were point units in Session I,I will call them, representation points.³

Representational Point Sequences in Session I. There were isolated representational acts from feeding, e. g. , sucking and chewing acts, but the usual repetitive sequences in Session I were of three kinds: (1) dominance-submission sequences, (2) quasi-courting activities, and (3) the sequencial manipulation of objects in the hand that I have already described, hesitantly characterized as play.

Dominance-Submission Displays. Territorial size and dominance are interdependent among animals (McBride 1964, 1969), and man is no exception. Those of highest status have the largest offices in a company, and the higher social classes have larger properties. The rule also holds in a transaction. So larger territories or locations were afforded to Whitaker and to Mrs. V, the older, in the session. Mrs. V and Whitaker maintained positions of sitting forward and erect when they explained. They also commanded the space in front of their eyes and Malone and Marge ordinarily did not stare into this space, except when they made an active intervention and interrupted the narratives.

Actually, dominance displays characteristically occur when someone begins to interrupt and this occurred regularly in Session I. When Whitaker asked a question he would sit taller, protrude his head, and jut his jaw. Such kinesic behavior characterizes a question which we would interpret lexically as a demand for reply. When Malone interrupted Marge, he would rock forward as I described in Chapter 1. He would also jut his face, hold it higher than usual, and keep his head erect. He placed primary stresses on his utterance and he articulated clearly in a steady, slightly slowed pace as is often done in command (see Chapter 5).

A striking thing about Session I, as compared to other transactions I have studied, was the lack of dominance displays between the men. Only in Session IX did such behavior occur when they differed about their strategies. Ordinarily males in a transaction will periodically exchange flurries of head raising, chest protrusion, jaw jutting, fist-doubling, staring, hooking the thumbs in the belt, and raising the voice.

But Marge and Mrs. V engaged in many periodic dominance displays toward each other and Marge sometimes directed these toward Malone. In contending Marge would sit up, very erectly, face her mother, meet her gaze, and raise her eyelids. She would, for a moment, speak loudly and sometimes take her mother's arm — a tactile act that usually holds a relationship and silences the addressee.

In answering, Mrs. V would at first show classical submission behavior. She would lower her head, lower her eyelids,⁴ and cock her head — a head position we often characterize as downcast.

But Mrs. V would soon reassert herself as she countered Marge's accusations. She would display the dominance behavior I have already described and Marge would fall into submissive behavior, gradually retreating from her contention. Marge showed similar submissive behavior toward Malone when he rocked forward and confronted her. And Mrs. V did so when Whitaker accused her or made an insinuation.

It is difficult, I think, for a Western woman to maintain dominance against a male display. If she does she will probably be accused either of masculine or of seductive behavior.

I would warn the reader against generalizing that dominance or submissive behavior is merely a personality trait which labels its performer. To be sure, some people usually maintain dominance and others usually are submissive, but exchanges of such behavior regulate the interaction. Ordinarily they do so in an automatic way that is not obtrusive or interruptive. They indicate, for instance, who will speak and who will listen at any moment. And a submissive display does not necessarily indicate a weak character. It may prevent a disruptive escalation of competitiveness and make possible the ordinary give and take of the transaction.

Quasi-Courting points. Much of the representational behavior in Session I was made up of elements from customary courtship behavior. In another publication I have shown that this behavior occurs in psychotherapy when rapport is being formed and it does not lead to seduction (Scheflen 1965). So I will call it quasicourting. I assume it is akin to, or a form of, flirtation behavior.

The representational acts of quasi-courting include microsequences of eye brightness, eyelid lowering, head cocking, smiling, stroking the legs with the hands, and exhibiting the palm or wrist (an intimate act for women).

In normal courtships these microacts accompany an increasing body tonus. Women bring up the head, protrude the chest so that the breasts are displayed, and bring up the legs into the tonus we see in a model's ‘cheesecake’ position. In males the abdomen is drawn in and the chest protruded.

Women may add to this complex a series of more overtly seductive acts like placing the hand on the hip, crossing the legs and displaying the thighs, and preening, e.g. making-up the face, brushing the hair back with the hand, opening a sweater or coat, or so forth. Males will also brush their hair back, rearrange their coats to square the shoulders, pull up the tile, and pull up their socks (Birdwhistell 1963).

In Session I Mrs. V occasionally showed attenuated and abbreviated quasi-courting behavior to the men. And Malone evidenced this behavior in relation to Marge during the early minutes of Session I. Whitaker displayed subtle quasi-courting to Marge through much of the session. He began with little behavior of this kind and increased the frequency as he and Marge progressively strengthened their coalition and challenged Mrs. V's story.

Malone quasi-courted Marge from minute 23 on and in subsequent sessions. In later sessions he did so consciously and deliberately to interest Marge and teach her to distinguish this behavior from seduction. (Marge had been a prostitute and had been unable to relate to men without having sexual intercourse.)

But Marge's quasi-courting was overt, obvious, and exhibitionistic. Just before any Period 2 she would begin to escalate the representative acts and courting tonus. At the beginning of a Period 2 she would cross legs and exhibit the total seduction routine as she made a sexy comment. During Period 2 she would retain the courting tonus, then end the period with a bizarre caricature of sexiness. She would exhibit her thighs grossly and make a silly imitation of sexiness. Whitaker would then break off his relationship with her and a Period 1 would recur.

Thus Marge would escalate a subtle point performance of quasi-courting in which she used only her body to a full and ostentive display.

Some of these behaviors are depicted in Figure 3-2.

Figure 3-2:Quasi-courting Behavior in Session I and IX

Other Nonlanguage Behavior in Communication. Dress and style. Dress, cosmetics, insignia, and the qualities of style are also communicative. I will describe these in detail in Chapter 6.

Odor, body noise, and the like. We can point to other classes of nonlanguage behavior which undoubtedly have a communicative function. Odors are emitted and perceived, but these behaviors are not recorded on motion picture film so I have no analytic experience with them. I also do not know of any research literature on the function of odor in human communication. Audible peristalsis, purposive joint cracking, denture noise, feet shuffling, and so forth have been studied (Watson 1962). These behaviors did not appear in Session I.

COMMENT: THE FUNCTION OF ACTONIC AND REPRESENTATIONAL BEHAVIOR

We can advocate the idea that a task behavior and a representational behavior maintain and develop relationships. Time and again in Session I a representational sequence would occur between two people, who would soon afterwards turn and speak to each other. And later I will claim that the quasi-courting sequences are one tactical behavior for making rapport with a psychotherapy patient (Part II).

If we are to have communication, two conditions must be met: first the participants have to behave communicatively, and second they have to be in attentive relationships to each other and can perceive the communicative behavior that each one performs. So the necessary contribution of a participant involves coded, meaningful behavior which is related to others.

We want to avoid dichotomizing these aspects. As a transaction proceeds, a meaningful behavior may develop a relationship within which some next phase of communicative behavior can occur. A recognizable meaningful language performance is just as likely to develop a relationship as is a set of physical contacting and quasi-courting behavior; so all of these dimensions maintain social organization. Similarly we can speak of physical task behavior but we do not want to dichotomize physical task and communicative behavior. The physical task behavior may maintain the communicational process as well as the spoken content. In fact speaking is the explicit task in a conversational transaction. So the task is to behave meaningfully while maintaining the relationships and holding the situation in a state favorable to the process.

We do best to hold that people have a number of different modalities and bodily regions to work with in maintaining the communicational process. They use each of these in a multichanneled system and features of each modality are integrated in a communicative unit like the position. And multiple simultaneous communicational relationships collectively maintain the group and constitute the social organization.

* Birdwhistell has called units of body motion which have a communicative function, ‘kinesic’ behaviors. They appear to have a morphology analogous to that of language; i. e., small elements of movement a r e successively integrated into larger units (Birdwhistell 1952, 1960, 1965).