Introduction

WHERE TO BEGIN THE ANALYSIS

THE FIRST ISOLATION: FOCUSING ON THE BEHAVIOR OF ONE PARTICIPANT AT A TIME

Our problem is how to study and describe great complexity. We are beginning with a traditional isolation focusing on one participant — watching his behavior and analyzing it. Then we isolate the behavior of another participant and so on.

In general systems theory, such a focus holds us at the organismic level of organization (Bertalanffy 1950; Miller 1965). Such an Einstellung is traditionally taken in classical biology, medicine and psychiatry, and the psychological sciences. In this focus we do not see social organization or communication, but rather the behavioral contribution of each individual to the total process. We must bear in mind that it is a heuristic practice to focus on one person as if he were behaving alone, but we can later integrate the contributions of each person by standing back and visualizing their relations at the social level.

THE SECOND ISOLATION: DELINEATING A LEVEL

The structure of behavior is such that small activities are successively combined into larger and larger configurations. Words, for example, are combined with gestures and pitch patterns to form sentences. Multiple sentences are combined and, together with postures of address, form utterances. Or we can begin by viewing the total structure of a transaction and analyzing this step by step to its component acts. Thus an activity is made up of subactivities which are made in turn of ‘sub-subactivities’ to the smallest element of phonation and movement.

This kind of successive integration is called a hierarchy of levels — in this case, levels of behavioral integration, not of conceptual or physical systems (Miller 1965). In the case of behavior the integrations consist of successive patterns of movement or change.

When we study such a hierarchical integration, we must examine all of the constituent movements or else we will not be able to reconstruct the relations between them. Operationally we define these relations by continually moving our observational focus back and forth from parts to wholes, because each defines the other. Any given unit of activity is at once, depending on how we look at it, an integration of smaller acts and a unified entity that occurs in some larger configuration. So we break down activity analytically to its constituent sounds and movements in order to describe it. Then we test the relations of these constituents to make sure they go together as an entity. These operations are described in Appendix B.

SELECTING AN INITIAL LEVEL

In operations like these, where we go back and forth alternately examining the composition of an action and then its location in a larger system of activities, it does not matter where we begin. Theoretically we could start with any level. We could view first the total behavioral integration of Session I, then take an analytic direction. Thereby, we can separate successively smaller elements until we describe microunits of speech and gesture. Or we could start by examining all of the microacts and depict how they were combined in the total structure of Session I.

Actually we are going to begin in the middle. I am going to isolate a level of activity whose units I call positions. These units of activity involve the orientation and movements of the total body of a participant. They are of a duration from seconds to twenty minutes or more. Since they involve the whole body they are the smallest unit of behavior which occurs naturally at the individual or organismic level. A person can arrive at a transaction, perform one position, and leave, but he cannot be present and perform less than a position. He cannot, that is, act with only some part of his body. There is another reason to begin here. At the beginning and ending of a position, a gross shift in bodily position occurs which is easy to spot in reviewing the transaction.