Elaborated Knowledge: Reading Kinesis in Pictures

Individuals learn, or try to learn, about other people from observing them and analogizing what they see to their own bodily or kinesic knowledge. We watch (for example) the position of limbs and the movement of eyes. We react to evidence of different states of muscle tension. Artists make use of their own kinesic knowledge and count on our understanding of it. But body language does not always reinforce knowledge available in other modalities, say, in language. As in other aspects of communication, conflicts are common between what can be known by observation and what may be known by other modalities. These conflicts are not errors but are a systematic aspect of the way we construct knowledge. The gaps between modalities are the necessary ground for human flexibility and creativity. A brief look at the work of Edouard Manet, Diane Arbus, and Barbara Kruger illustrates how artists take advantage of the conflict between information derived from bodily knowledge and that derived from language or other modalities of knowing. We often see how people feel. Our assessment of what someone tells us may depend less on their words than on a kinesic intelligence by which we judge intentions and sincerity. We learn a lot by looking at others and by drawing analogies between their bodies and our own. As part of the project of deepening our understanding of the human ability to interpret complex It has been my good fortune to be able to discuss aspects of this paper with Charles Altieri, Sharon Baris, Robert Gerwin, Beverly Green, and Wendy Steiner. I am grateful for what I have learned from each of them. Poetics Today 17:2 (Summer 1996). Copyright ? 1996 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. This content downloaded from 129.194.8.73 on Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:29:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 158 Poetics Today 17:2 texts and images, I have been interested both in specifying distinguishable competencies and in exploring how these separate ways of knowing interrelate in the process of interpretation. I assume the modularity of mind: the mind/brain is a heterogeneous collection of processors or modules, each suited by evolution to respond to a particular form of energy.1 Concurrently, the brain assures the neurological calibration between the incoming structures of information, for example, sound waves and light waves, so that we can turn to look at something we hear, speak about something we see, and so on. In principle, the translations between modules, though never complete, are sufficient; if they weren't, the species would not have survived thus far. Small gaps, or conflicts between the outputs of different modules, are thus integral to the system itself. But this is not necessarily bad news. I aim, in this paper, to demonstrate how it is that the complexity of intermodular calibration is at once a threat to successful communication and the door to the elaborated knowledge of aesthetic experience. It is important to understand at the outset why it is a principle of the modularity hypothesis that the calibration between information from different modules can never be complete. If they could, the diversity wouldn't be real or useful diversity. The modules are different because the stuff we need to know about the world comes diversely packaged. If there weren't an irreducible difference between the structures of information manipulated in different modules, keen hearing and touch could compensate entirely (for example) for lack of sight, but we know this is not the case. To put it another way, the connection and coordination of incoming data quite regularly meets the conditions of being necessary and sufficient for understanding, even though that understanding is never complete. Virtually all understanding is based on incomplete information, and is thus inferential. The brain makes a judgment an interpretation based on the information available to it from different sources. What we think of as knowledge, then, is always the result of inferential interpretation from less than complete knowledge. This is as true of seeing, which requires the coordination of different input from each of two eyes, as it is of the decision to pick up a spoon to stir one's coffee or of a reading of King Lear. All understanding is a result of interpretation, from identifying object boundaries to reading literary texts, and all interpretation is cognitively continuous. Aesthetic judgments are not different knowledge so much as elaborated inferences produced at one end of a scale of complexity. The quantum advantage to the organism of having a variety of windows on the 1. In Spolsky 1993 I set this theoretical position out more fully, and trace the different ways the mind can be seen to make meaning in different styles of literary criticism. This content downloaded from 129.194.8.73 on Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:29:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Spolsky * Reading Kinesis in Pictures 159 world, even when those windows produce gaps that must be filled inferentially, is that those gaps are the loci of creativity. Not only is there no need for all systems to be entirely translatable into one another, but such an arrangement would actually be a disadvantage because it would be entirely rigid. It would close all possibility of reaction to new situations, or to old situations in new ways. The gaps in the system-the places where inferences must be constructed--are sites of productive indeterminacy in all brain functions. So the first advantage to interpretive theory of assuming the hypothesis of brain modularity is that it allows a theory of creativity in interpretation. Second, and this is what I am particularly interested in here, it broadens both the descriptive and explanatory power of that theory which, at the moment, is grounded overwhelmingly in language interpretation. A reader's access to literary texts, however, also depends, for example, on the ability to construct visual images, and then to draw analogies and inferences from those images as well as from words. An account of a reader's ability to produce mental imagery in response to words will clearly be an important aspect of a theory of receptive competence. Toward this end, I began the exploration of the visual system as we depend on it to interpret complex pictures. The understanding of pictures requires kinesic intelligence, itself dependent on visual intelligence. If we can see how people feel, we can imagine how they look, and then how they feel, from descriptions in language of how they look. This kind of multiple embedding is of course the site of conflict as well as confirmation. An interpretive theory will have to account for both. What Is Kinesic Intelligence and Who Needs It? Human kinesic intelligence is our sense of the relationship of parts of the human body to the whole, and of the patterns of bodily tension and relaxation as they are related to movement.2 Kinesic knowledge is also our sense of the muscular forces that produce bodily movement and of the effect of that movement on other parts of the body and on objects within the environment. Kinesic knowing is knowing that you lean toward a heavy trunk to push it, and that you swing your arm backward to throw a ball forward. Kinesic sense is also a spatial understanding of the relation of limbs to torso-their relative lengths and bulk and their relative extension and natural orientation: if you catch your toe on a step you will fall forward and 2. On kinesic (or kinesthetic) intelligence, see Bateson 1968, Gardner 1985, Sacks 1984, and Jackendoff 1987. This content downloaded from 129.194.8.73 on Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:29:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 160 Poetics Today 17:2 extend your arms. The knowledge of one's own body's poise and control, or lack thereof, allows one to make analogies to other bodies and to draw inferences from those analogies. It contributes to one's ability to assess the chances of an outfielder's catching a fly ball, or to infer that someone who is bent over feels tired or defeated. By extension, our kinesic intelligence is called upon to help us understand two-dimensional pictures or icons, from Rembrandt's sad prophet to the international traffic sign for a school children's crossing. We also use it to produce mental imagery. Recognizing the facial and bodily gestures of other people is dependent on the kinesic sense, although these are also conventionalized within cultures. Both folk wisdom and academic opinion agree that reading another person's body language is a powerful mode of knowing about that person. Students of nonverbal communication assume that kinesis provides an extra way of knowing that reinforces or disambiguates verbal messages. This belief is probably a result of the assumption that kinesis is less open to conscious control than other modes of expression, and therefore that it delivers a kind of direct truth. I can guard my tongue, but may not have such control over my smile. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1972 [1966]: 377-78) surmised that "courtesy rules" in many cultures, such as the taboos on observing other people, or parts of other people, witness this truth. In Western culture, he notes, one is taught that it is rude to stare at people: "too much information," he claims, "can be got that way." While there are obvious cultural differences between body languages, there is also some evidence that we can count on being able to recognize some universals in the expression of emotion. According to the work of Paul Ekman et al. (1972), the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and interest, seem to correlate cross-culturally with facial gestures. If it is true that some categories of communicative bodily behavior are less easily brought under voluntary control (and if some are even universals), then these gestures are, we could say, situated on a border between biological and cultural knowledge: they may be just a bit more "natural," more resistant to cultural manipulation. Norman Bryson seems to be claiming this, as he puzzles out the relationship between what one knows by recognizing a stereotype and what one knows by observing and identifying with another human body in a picture. He calls the codes of gesture and posture "under-determined." In contrast to the codified representations of stereotypes, "gesture is the last outpost of the sign as it crosses from the codified into the concrete (where it disappears)" (1983: 154). This sounds like the claim made by the anthropologist Adam Kendon that "the study of gesture allows us to look both ways: . . . inward toward the process of mental representation . . . and outward to the social processes by which communicative codes become established" (1986: 44). This content downloaded from 129.194.8.73 on Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:29:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Spolsky * Reading Kinesis in Pictures 161 But Bryson confounds several different kinds of messages in the visual field, not all of which are equally underdetermined. He lumps together as "a register of connotations" "physiognomics, pathognomics, gesture, posture, [and] dress," all of which he sees as equal "provocation to perform an act of interpretation which is strictly speaking an improvisation, a minutely localized reaction that cannot-impossible dream of the stereotype-be programmed in advance" (1983: 153-54). Many gestures, however, are entirely conventional, and dress can certainly be stereotyped. Posture, eye focus, blushing, and expression are somewhat more resistant to cultural codification. However, whether or not there is a stable relationship between what is natural and what is culturally coded (and this is far from clear), it is important to note that students of nonverbal communication have found that those gestures that are assumed to be under less conscious control are more likely to be believed than more conventionalized messages, when the two conflict.3 Artists can be expected to take advantage of the possibilities of conflict these assumptions produce and to play at the borders between modules.4 The viewer of a painting, then, is in something of a bind: we naturally "learn" from what we see by analogy with our own bodies. Yet we cannot assume that paintings deliver direct kinesic knowledge: no matter how "natural" a figure looks, it has not escaped encoding. Body language in painting inevitably evokes a kinesic reaction from the viewer, but is also interpreted as embedded within a set of contexts, most of which depend on kinds of knowledge that are not kinesic. Most immediately, titles of pictures or words used within them demand to be accounted for in any interpretation of the kinesthetics of figured bodies.5 The art-historical context of the picture, or the setting and interests of the viewer of the painting, are taken into account as well. I am par3. "When either consistent or conflicting messages are given over multiple channels, the kinesic tends to be the most believable" (Rosenfeld, Shea, and Greenbaum [1981]). The authors here cite seven references to experiments which are said to demonstrate this claim. 4. Identifying kinesthetic representations in painting as separate from other aspects of visual understanding (i.e., understanding the meaning of a painting by its references to earlier painting), would be (and here I am sympathetic with Bryson's aims) appropriate to what Elaine Scarry has called "the interventionist impulse of materialist criticism" (1988: xi). In her introduction to Literature and the Body she makes the case for a consideration of bodies in the aftermath of an idealist criticism which, in its emphasis on the nonreferentiality of language, promoted a view of artistic production as inconsequential. She claims, then, that attention to the body is therapeutic: "The body is both continuous with a wider material realm that includes history and nature, and also discontinuous with it because it is the reminder of the extremity of risks entailed in the issue of reference" (ibid.: xxi). Attention to the kinesic/somatic aspects of communication should further the investigation of whether and how art and art criticism can work to diminish those risks. 5. I will use the word kinesics for bodily knowledge, and kinesthetics for its refraction through pictures. This content downloaded from 129.194.8.73 on Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:29:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 162 Poetics Today 17:2 ticularly interested in demonstrating how one's kinesthetic understanding may compete, rather than cooperate, with other structures of information, complicating rather than simplifying the reading of the image. To this end, we might focus initially on two particularly powerful aspects of bodily kinesthetics in pictures: eye focus and the alignment of head and torso. Both operate in the dimensions of space and time. Both reveal the spatial orientation of the body to other figures in or out of the painting. Analogies or disanalogies suggest themselves either between figures in the picture, or between the figures and the viewer. Furthermore, because bodily motions and reactions are sequences, the portrayal of any instant within the sequence allows temporal inferences about what has just happened and what might be about to happen. They suggest a narrative. Notice the intermodular calibration at work: while neither the ability to analogize, nor to construct narrative sequences are themselves kinesic abilities, they both depend crucially on structures of information gained by kinesis. Deriving Narrative from Kinesic Clues It is part of our bodily intelligence to be able to distinguish between stable and unstable positions-that is, between postures which, because of the relative alignment of body parts, can be maintained indefinitely, and those which cannot. The latter are, ceteris paribus, interpreted as being part of an action and thus as having a before and after, and usually as having a cause and/or an intention as well. Giving attention, say, to a book on one's lap, can be seen as a comfortable and thus relatively stable position. Stretching an arm up and away from the body will generally be interpreted with an explanatory motivation: as reaching for something, perhaps. We know, for example, that when one changes the focus of one's attention, the head moves first, and the torso only afterwards, to align itself more comfortably with the head. Looking at Manet's La nymphe surprise (Fig. i), we thus infer that we are observing a moment after. Something or someone has intruded on the stability of the woman's body and forced it to refocus. A misalignment between head and torso might also be interpreted as the moment before: before the figure decides to reorient her torso in order to commit her attention to what she sees. But that will not happen here, and we know that kinesthetically as well. We know she has already decided not to turn because she has hunched her left shoulder in the opposite direction from the orientation of her face, and her right hand seems positioned to draw it even further forward, as if to maximize the coverage of her breasts that her arm and the angle of her shoulder can provide. That her gesture, This content downloaded from 129.194.8.73 on Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:29:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Spolsky * Reading Kinesis in Pictures 163 Figure 1 Edouard Manet, La Nymphe Surprise (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires). furthermore, seems calculated to hide implies an intruder whose aim is to see what she does not want to reveal (a person, then, not an animal). Having concluded that she has, at least temporarily, decided against reorienting to give full attention to whomever she looks at or to allow his intrusive looking, we note other information that conflicts with this judgment. It is part of our kinesic understanding to recognize that eye contact This content downloaded from 129.194.8.73 on Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:29:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 164 Poetics Today 17:2 is made at pauses, at the boundaries of interpersonal communication, and is conventionally interpreted as an invitation to a response. It is a way of yielding the floor, of letting the other person know that it's his or her turn to speak. Conversely, one averts one's eyes to avoid giving such an invitation.6 If we say, then, that the woman's gaze invites response, we now infer from the conflict between the rejection of contact or response through body pose and the invitation of the eyes waiting for a response, that she looks at an intruder. Only an intruder-unexpected, and so far unexplainedcould account for the doubleness: though unwelcome, an intruder might present some danger and thus must be attended to. Not surprisingly, then, a survey of recent interpretations of this picture uncovers three different narratives. First, taking Manet's title, La nymphe surprise, seriously, one might be justified in assuming that the woman is surprised because she has been caught unawares. But does her expression show any anxiety about what might follow? Is she drawing her towel around herself because she does not want to be seen naked? As a second possibility, Juliet Wilson Bareau claims that without the title we might see the figure as drying herself, rather than hiding her nakedness. She is "shivering a little after her dip in the river. Her gaze, turned towards the spectator, indicates little more than the calm interest in the viewer-voyeur beyond the picture plane . . . as she continues with her toilet" (1986: 36). Rosalind E. Krauss enters a third story: "A nude woman stares insolently outward. The viewer realizes that ... he is the one who disrupts the private universe of the painting.... Looking begins to fuse with violation" (1969: 624). All three of these interpretations make inferences from the conflict between messages of the figure's eyes and her body. All three read "intruder" in one way or another. Yet it is important to note that even if this level of knowing evokes agreement that there is an intruder (a dram of truth that none of these three interpreters can resist), they still produce three different interpretations. Since recognition of body orientation and facial expression does not, apparently, prevent the emergence of different narrative explanations, the original hunch of so many-that bodily knowledge is less subject to conventionalization, and is therefore less ambiguousis here shown to be an oversimplification.7 The different readings of this painting reveal both identity and difference. Traditional art-historical reading, of course, has other ways of disambiguating. Identifying the story the artist had in mind, for example, and 6. See Argyle et al. 1981 on the functions of the gaze. 7. Manfred Clynes, in his early work on the relation of muscle state to emotion, acknowledges that "a sentic state can be expressed in a variety of modes-from tone of voice to gestures using many different parts of the body" (1977: 27). This content downloaded from 129.194.8.73 on Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:29:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Spolsky * Reading Kinesis in Pictures 165 then identifying the convention matching the woman's posture and expression with the conventionally understood emotions of the story is a conventional way of arbitrating between alternative narratives. But even with this resort to traditional disambiguation, this particular picture eludes interpretive closure, since art historians have reason to connect it both to the story of Susanna and the Elders and to a pastoral in which a satyr peeks out of the trees.8 Kinesis and Pictorial Composition In Manet's Le dejeuner sur l'herbe (Fig. 2), our kinesthetic sense again produces more puzzles than it resolves. The two kinesthetic representations which have drawn the most comment are the posture of the nude again, and the composition and relationship of the figures. In an age when the composition of figures in a painting was expected to indicate the status relationships, psychological ties, and the emotional and narrative dependencies of the figures, the grouping here would have been almost illegible. Both eye focus and proximity are responsible for the confusions. Why, if they are sitting close enough together for their limbs to be touching, or almost touching, do they seem so out of touch with each other? This question is asked again by the lack of eye contact between members of the group. The man at the right who extends his arm seems to be trying to make a point, but the woman surely isn't paying attention. Neither is the other man maintaining eye contact. We could call his averted gaze (Beattie 1981) "abstracted," and read it as a conventional indication that he is lost in his own thoughts and is not seeking response. Is the arm gesture itself one of emphasis, or an attempt to get the two to return their attention to his discourse? 8. Although the picture now hanging in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, is the one you see, with no other figures in the picture, Manet's preliminary sketches and recent X rays of the painting suggest at least two different contexts into which the figure might at first have been painted and then later, for various reasons, separated from. It might have had a satyr in the upper right corner, peeking out from behind the trees, as Manet's own title suggests (see Bareau 1986). But Krauss's explanation is strengthened if the context of the picture was the story of Susanna and the Elders. The argument for this contextualization is that in an engraving depicting the Susanna scene, for example, the woman is posed in the same way as Manet's bather, and the two old men are clearly present. (Vorstermann after Rubens, reproduced by Bareau [1986: 31]). Their very unattractiveness encourages the spectator's sympathy with the woman. If, however, as in Manet's version, the men are not present, and yet the spectator recognizes the reference, then he is the one being stared at; he (and it must be a he here) would have to recognize himself as the intruder. The painting might be a rather sophisticated joke. Tamar Yacobi (personal communication) suggests that the picture may refer to the Venus de' Medici in the Uffizi, a reference that would further complicate the reading since the gestures of the classical Venus are meant to exhibit, not to conceal. This content downloaded from 129.194.8.73 on Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:29:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 166 Poetics Today 17:2 Figure 2 Edouard Manet, Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe (Musee d'Orsay, Paris). Continuing the theme of nonconnection, one of the group has wandered off to bathe, and nobody is looking at her, nor does she seem to be looking toward them. As in La nymphe surprise, the woman's stare out of the painting and a twist away from the orientation of her torso implies the presence of someone or something outside the picture plane who has attracted her glance. Here too, the woman yields attention and invites a response. The immediacy of the intrusion, again, is suggested by the misalignment of her head, not yet accommodated by her body. Her shoulder is not hunched, however; she is not hiding or protecting herself from the intrusion. Nor does she reach for the wrap, the presence of which implies that she could cover herself if she wanted to. Why is she relaxed if a stranger is approaching? Is the intruder perhaps known and welcome? Is it the painter? Social codes provide additional fuel for inference: Manet's contemporaries attributed her lack of self-consciousness about her nudity to her being a prostitute. In fact, she was apparently identified by friends of Manet as a model he had painted before, and as such she was considered a woman of easy virtue. But if her role in the social event is that of a prostitute, why do the men seem not to relate to her with any sexual interest? Why is their posture so relaxed in her presence? On the other hand, if she This content downloaded from 129.194.8.73 on Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:29:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Spolsky * Reading Kinesis in Pictures 167 is a painter's model, then perhaps the relevant convention is the pretense that one is not excited by the nudity of a painter's model. But then why is there no evidence that either gentleman is or has been painting? Is the painter the one the woman looks out at? From the lack of eye contact among the figures in the painting we might infer a lack of other connection, but this would conflict with the inference we draw from their sitting so close together. The thematized nonconnection is contradicted by the nude's inviting a response from the intruder which she does not get from the men "in" the painting. Presumably one of the reasons that so many of the original spectators of this painting found it disturbing is that they found no way to resolve all of these questions in a unified interpretation. The painting was submitted to the Paris Salon of 1863, but was rejected, and was hung in the protest exhibition mounted by the avant-garde, the Salon des Refuses. The miscalibration of kinesthetic clues such as timing and sequencing allow the inference of a deliberate rejection of traditional norms of composition and can be a source of humor. Indeed, several art historians read the main female figure as drawing attention to the artificiality of the picnic, raising the possibility that Manet's grand picnic painting is a parody of the pastoral conventions of earlier works, such as Giorgione's Concert champitre. The same inferences about the body language of the nude woman in the foreground lead Robert L. Herbert to understand an affront to traditional art-historical conventions and conventional social behavior. Manet's parody of art is signaled by the traditional subject matter and the specific references to earlier pastoral scenes by Marcantonio Raimondo and Giorgione. His rejection of social norms is established by inferences from his model's "frank stare" which "fixes the onlooker's eye. At the same time, her very boldness . .. thwarts any male expectations of sexual submissiveness. She not only gives the impression of a living model, but of one who is in entire control of her actions." He cites E. Lipton: "Stark naked, she nonetheless refuses the erotic script" (1988: 173). If she is also a recognized model, it makes her appearance as a river goddess self-reflexive in a parodic way. Note here that it must be Herbert's kinesic sense that grounds his 9. We can see in the words of John House that he infers parody from kinesthetic as well as art-historical knowledge; he casts his reading in the past tense as a description of what contemporary audiences, seeing the picture displayed in the Salon des Refuses "must have thought": it must have seemed to its public a startling travesty of the idea of the fJte champetre: the modern costumes and the uncoordinated gazes of the figures, with the naked woman looking directly at the spectator, made it impossible to envisage the scene as an idyll taking place in a land of make-believe, safely distanced in time or space. (in Bareau 1986: 9, 12) This content downloaded from 129.194.8.73 on Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:29:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 168 Poetics Today 17:2 inference that her stare is "frank." Here is how I reconstruct the chain of inference: I assume that Herbert is reacting to what he knows about direct or averted glances. Michael Argyle et al. (1981: 286) says that the averted gaze functions to protect one from intrusion by cutting down on perceptual distraction while thinking. A direct gaze, then, is an appeal for interpersonal communication and implies the opposite of introspection. It implies nonthinking, noncognition, and thence, simplicity, openness, directness, lack of complication, and frankness as opposed to scheming or evasiveness. All of these suggestions of the opposite of thought are then also inferences of eroticism, of a frankness or openness which is physical rather than intellectual. The naked body of a woman, of course, reinforces this reading. It is possible that there is one other kinesthetic clue to a reading of the picture as parody, and that would be our sense of whether bodies are relaxed or tense. In the Marcantonio Raimondo etching (assumed to be the source of the grouping) the three figures are relaxed in an appropriately pastoral way; of course, they are two river gods and a nymph sitting by a river-that is, literally in their element. Manet's figures, however, are transposed city folk and they don't seem to know quite how to dress or act-unless they are taking their cues from the literary tradition of pastoral. We might say that it's no wonder they're not entirely relaxed; or we might say that their relaxation is part of the parody: go out to the country and pretend-to be river gods? So far, the evidence seems to support my claim that kinesthetic knowledge is not especially privileged in being less ambiguous than other kinds of knowledge, but before I leave this subject I want to acknowledge that there are also nonkinesthetic clues that reinforce the interpretation of parody: the picnic spilling from the basket invokes the classical cornucopia of an ever-providing nature, and the fruits must be symbolic rather than realistic since they don't grow in the same season (Cachin and Moffett 1983: 165). The classical pastoral interpretation hinted at would cast the woman as goddess of nature, but here her beauty is far from ideal. Furthermore, the fashionable clothes discarded by her side parody any claim to divinity by locating her in a specific historical time, and make her "undressed rather than nude" (ibid.: 170). It is thus a combination of structures of information -kinesthetic and other-that produces the interpretation of parody. We again see that while the kinesic sense is indeed separable from other modes of knowing, it gives rise to inference and participates in the construction of narratives independently and in conjunction with information from other modules. It also produces ambiguous readings which seek disambiguation. When those other clues are themselves ambiguous, as is usually the case, preference judgments are made from the weight of the combined evidence. This content downloaded from 129.194.8.73 on Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:29:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Spolsky * Reading Kinesis in Pictures 169 Parody at the Juncture of Nature and Convention One of the many parodies of Manet's Dejeuner is the pastiche created by Sally Swain and titled Mrs. Manet Entertains in the Garden.'o In it, the mens' positions are taken by women (in man-tailored suits) while both Manet's women are now men-the one in the forefront entirely naked, and the one in the pool beyond only naked to the waist. The woman to the right leans on her left elbow as her raised right hand offers a coffee cup in mockery of Manet's pretentious gesturer. While Manet's men are at ease, and the woman in the foreground is not, Swain's sex reversal presents a scene in which the women, whose torsos and heads are aligned, seem to be at ease in their bodies, while it is the men whose bodies and heads are twisted uncomfortably, seeking response. The offer of coffee (sociability, warmth, sustenance), parodies the sexism inferred from Manet's kinesthetic distinction between the men who are involved in thought, or talk, and the women who are immersed in sensuality, one literally, as a bather, the other "frankly" seeking erotic response. The feminist parody here leads one to ask about kinesthetic knowledge: How far can we generalize from the commonality of human bodily experience, before we are enjoined to take into account the gender of those bodies? Since men and women do not have entirely the same experiences of their bodies, it is unlikely that they would produce and respond to art in the same ways. To begin an exploration of how women's kinesic sense produces artistic kinesthetics, then, and how these might relate to the words used as titles, my next two examples are pictures by women. The Conflict between Kinesis and Intention The first example is a photograph taken by Diane Arbus, titled A family one evening in a nudist camp, Pa. 1965 (Fig. 3). It is instructive to have a photograph in the context of my discussion of kinesic knowledge, and not only paintings. Part of Diane Arbus's artistic originality was to question the modernist assumption that a photographer, in photographing people unawares, would catch their body posture or facial expression exposing some truth about them that they would rather have hidden. She made a point of having her subjects pose, in many cases, even letting them choose the setlo. Swain's 1988 collection of parodic pictures is called Great Housewives of Art. She imitates the style of the artist, and his subject matter, changing some details so that the painting is now about housekeeping. Thus a ballet dancer in a tutu, painted in the style of Degas, is leaning over a vacuum cleaner in "Mrs. Degas vacuums the floor." Similarly, "Mrs. Klee cleans out the bird cage," and "Mrs. Matisse polishes the goldfish." This content downloaded from 129.194.8.73 on Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:29:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 170 Poetics Today 17:2 Figure 3 Diane Arbus, A Family One Evening in a Nudist Camp, Pennsylvania Pennsylvania. 1965. Gelatin-silver print, 14 "x14 " (37.3x37.1 cm.). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. Copy Print. Copyright ? Estate of Diane Arbus 1972. ting. Thus we see them as they claim they want to be seen, and yet what is revealed is still multivalent and mysterious. Our understanding of the particular figures in this picture is enhanced not only by our kinesic sense of body poses and facial expressions but also by our sense of the size and shape of our bodies." These notions, of course, 11. Jackendoff (1987: 195-96) cites evidence that this sense can be "fooled" as it were, or modulated, under experimental conditions, if certain muscles are mechanically vibrated; the body is thus apparently given contradictory clues about, for example, how long one's arms are. It doesn't occur to Jackendoff, however, that much less arcane cultural production, specifically commercial advertising, has a great influence on how one perceives one's body, and how one values its form. A woman may have an abiding sense of her body as being too fat, a man of being too short, an African in Europe of having the wrong kind of hair. i -