1: There is no space: meaning and embodiment in mediated environments Michael Schandorf Dept of Communication University of Illinois at Chicago @mschandorf mschandorf@yahoo.com Abstract How are we to understand digital objects? How are we to relate ‘cyberspace’ to physical space? ‘There is no space’ attempts to provide a set of theoretical tools to understand ‘spaces’ of online interaction and what happens within them without resorting to filamentous constructions of ‘disembodied’ online interaction or to the underlying idealistic Cartesian dualism that pervades many of the theoretical positions that ostensibly refute it. To do so, Schandorf makes connections between cognitive processes of human subjectivity, the embodied, gestural enactments of physical social spaces, and the social interactions that take place in online environments. The crux of the argument is that meaning and subjectivity, like identity, are social phenomena: individual cognition requires social interaction. Similarly, social interaction, mediated or immediate, defines our spaces of subjectivity. This connecting of online ‘spaces’ to embodied cognition may provide a way to understand digital objects and the online interactions they enable through a reconsideration of the concept of space. 2: Meaning is a messy business. Reference and representation, language and concept, the aesthetic and the instrumental, the perceived and the enacted, are, in experience and practice, thoroughly conflated, inextricably intertwined. Teasing apart the nodes of the network, the sticky strands of the web that weave and bind meaning into a contextual whole is difficult enough in situations of physical co‐presence between interactants, or between a viewer and a physical aesthetic object. Mediated communication and the appearance of digital arts, transcoding and transmedia, would seem to on the one hand bind these phenomena and conceptions even tighter, and on the other hand to dissolve the very ground upon which we approach them in the shift to new, mediated, social spaces. In approaching problems of representation, we have for nearly a century, largely relied on abstractions of signification, structuralist theories that separate the percept from the perceived, the perception from the thought, flattening the process of meaning into an “endless chain of signifiers” with no ultimate reference, no ultimate source. The arrival of digital communications technologies and the advent of wholly digital aesthetic “objects” has been received, by for example followers of Baudrillard, as the ultimate vindication of this structuralist paradigm: there is no original, there is no source, there is no “aura” – we are enveloped in Walter Benjamin's Orwellian nightmare. I dissent. I believe that what digital communications technologies in fact make apparent, make visceral, in the bare absence at the heart of our antiquated theories of meaning, is the absence of the body. Feminist rhetorical theorists, among others, have attempted to bring the body back into theories of meaning. But, because their arguments tend to rely upon a conventional linguistic theory of reference (“a structuralist view of language as syntactically self‐sufficient,” in the words of Ruthrof [2000, p.114]), which in turn relies implicitly on a crude, and ostensibly refuted, Cartesian dualism) dividing language from the world, and ultimately mind from body, the results have been little more than a veneer, lipstick on a disembodied pig, leaving a Cheshire sneer hanging in the air. I argue here that the way to address, and eventually overcome the perplexities of meaning in online spaces is – paradoxically, from the conventional perspective – to return the physical body, the embodied mind, to the center of the web of meaning. We must understand meaning – all meaning – as socially enacted and technologically (culturally) mediated within and among physical human minds. To make this argument I will move from physical communication to textual communication to digital communication, demonstrating connections among them, and the ultimate inseparability of thought and action, aesthetic and instrumental, individual and social, as supported by contemporary cognitive and neurosciences. The implications of spreading the chain of signifiers out into a multimodal, intersemiotic field of interaction will be shown to have significant consequences for the conceptualization of agency: the Enlightenment dream of the rational and linear will give way to the distributed, social and networked, which is necessarily historical, necessarily culturally and technologically contextualized, and necessarily embodied. 1. Carrie Noland (2009) frames her argument in Agency & Embodiment with the image of the graffiti 3: artist. As the writer inscribes letters, words and images on the wall, the practiced, repetitive, movements inscribe themselves into his body. Physical practice inscribes the communicative act, the aesthetic statement, into the muscles and ligaments, into the schemata and “scripts” of the body itself. Such reflexive inscription is characteristic of all communication. Our mouths and throats accommodate themselves to the formation of our native dialects, for example, 'accenting' our speech with tell‐tale traces that are all but impossible to disguise or remove. As with the voice, so with handwriting or, in fact, any form of writing, even hunched over our laptops methodically tapping keys. “The body we observe in the act of writing,” argues Noland, “may indeed be communicating a message or completing a task, but it is simultaneously measuring space, monitoring pressure and friction, accommodating shifts of weight. These kinesthetic experiences that exceed communicative or instrumental projects affect the gestures that are made and the meanings they convey” (p. 2). And they have always done so. It is in movement, and only secondarily in language, that the human mind arose: symbolic interaction arose from gestural signals. This is no novel or revolutionary claim. The idea that the origin of language can be found in gesture can be traced back to the Epicurean poet Lucretius, with more recent developments by John Bulwer in the 17th century; Etienne Condillac, Giambattista Vico, and Charles de Brosses in the 18th century; and Sir Richard Paget and Andre Leroi‐Gourhan in the early and mid‐20th century, respectively. Debra Hawhee argues that “Paget’s bodily theories of language turns on its head the relatively recent commonplace of ‘the body as a discursive formation’, offering instead discourse as a bodily formation” (2006, p. 332). Leroi‐Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech, a classic of paleoanthropology, is an encyclopedic argument for the evolutionary connection between the face and the hand, cognition and tool use, language and gesture, and ultimately the (social) body and mind. More recent arguments and evidence for the evolutionary priority of gesture, drawing on the cognitive sciences, have been developed by Armstrong (1991), Donald (1991), Deacon (1997), Stokoe (2001), Armstrong and Wilcox (2007)1, and others. As far back as the early 1960s, Leroi‐Gourhan demonstrated the contiguous neurological connections between the speech centers of the human brain and areas of the motor cortex involved in movement of the hands and face. His intellectual descendents have expanded this evidence and taken the resulting ideas much further. “In our view,” argue Stokoe and Marschark, “language had to begin with gestures… because only gestures can look like or point to or hold up or otherwise visibly reproduce what they mean” (1999, p. 178). Raymond Tallis similarly argues that the basic act of pointing represents the root of human consciousness. The cognitive capacity for indexicality, Tallis asserts, is constitutive of the theory of mind necessary for the conscious differentiation of self from other. Pointing requires a pointer, something being pointed at, and someone for whose benefit the pointing is taking place. This reflexive, “indexical awareness… is the necessary condition, the 'deep background' of pointing” (2010, p. 28), and ultimately human self‐awareness and agency. Pointing, the 1 Armstrong and Wilcox (2007) for example, (updating Leroi‐Gourhan) present arguments and evidence that bipedalism and the gradual development of technology (representing the products of socially learned skills) preceded the evolutionary development of a vocal apparatus capable of full human speech. The implication is proto‐human cultures enacted and transmitted through gesture and sign: language without speech. Such an idea is far from alien to any of the millions of people today for whom a sign language is a first language (see Sacks 2000, Stokoe 2001). 4: paradigmatic indexical gesture, is fundamentally dialogical, pointing out something for another while drawing attention back to the pointer whose body is used as the referent, the base of the vector of the pointing act. Even in the case of one person pointing directly at another for the sole benefit of that other, what is being indicated is the social context, the relationship between the two individuals. I point at you to get your attention, to ask a question, to challenge. The gesture away from the self and for the other, instantiates a set of relations in the world that is unique to human consciousness, and that forms the basis of the human capacity for symbolic representation and language. The idea that communication is social is essentially tautological. But the idea that language, in its capacity to structure human thought, is a social phenomenon (as opposed to the manifestation of an individual, all but solipsistic cogito) has been a bone of contention for centuries – the inevitable result of the metaphysical dualism inherent in most Western philosophy. Recent neuroscience, however, has emphasized the fact that not only language but individual human cognition, afforded by and built upon a structure provided by language, is indeed a social phenomenon. Physiologically, the anterior language center of the brain (Wernicke's area) is contiguous with the primary sensory‐motor cortex (which controls movement and sensation), the primary auditory cortex (which processes sound) and several areas of activation relating to the perception and processing of the movement of others' mouths, eyes, hands and bodies (Puce and Perrett, 2003). In this same region of the brain, an area called the angular gyrus is a crossroads of vision, hearing and touch. What this implies is that the production of language and movement is directly, neurophysiologically integrated with the processing of sound, language, and the nonverbal communication of others: social interaction is a basic requirement for individual cognition and language production, communication is cognition. Linguist, psychologist and eminent gesture researcher David McNeill argues that physical gesture and language are generated together from dynamic cognitive processes that serve as the seed of both conceptualization and communication, both thought and social interaction. McNeill has focused intensely on the importance of (particularly co‐speech hand) gesture to pre‐linguistic and dynamic cognition. McNeill’s “growth point” theory (McNeill 2005; McNeill & Duncan 2000) uses theories of cognitive metaphor and embodied cognition (e.g. Johnson 1987; Lakoff & Johnson 1999; Damasio 1994, 1999) to propose a “minimal unit of imagery‐language dialectic,” that serves as the seed of conceptualization from which thought and language, conceptualization and communication, develop simultaneously. The “image” referred to here is not a visual image, but a pre‐phenomenological gestalt (a la Bergson) encompassing the conceptual‐(intra)perceptual significance of the idea at hand, and from which linguistic and physical (gestural) expression arise together. Gesture, in other words, is intimately tied to thought as not just a reflection, but as a mechanism of intrapersonal dialogue (Kendon 2004, p. 81‐82). Put more simply, “gestures contribute to thinking by helping speakers decide what to attend to and what to say” (Alibali & Kita 2010, p. 21). Thought is a physical process. Communication is cognition. “Contact with the other,” argues Noland, “is what establishes our capacity for interoceptive experience in the first place” (2009, p. 25). 2. “All organisms make proactive use of their whole bodies to gain visible, audible, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory information. Organisms of a social species will also use these systems naturally to gain and 5: communicate social information. So considered, human cognition‐communication is a multimodal system of systems. It integrates the sensory systems and much else” (Stokoe & Marschark 1999, p. 176). This integration is a social process regulated by social norms and group identifications. “Willingly or not,” Kendon asserts, “humans, when in co‐presence, continuously inform one another about their intentions, interests, feelings and ideas by means of visible bodily action” (2004, p. 1). The emotional, affective, socially indicative processes underlying these phenomena are, in fact, what make “rational” human thought possible (Damasio 1994, 1999, 2003; Ramachandran and Blakeslee 1998; Ramachandran 2011). For centuries, particularly since the Enlightenment, philosophers have argued that rational thought is the binary opposite of the emotional, that true, pure, human‐defining rational thought and decision‐ making requires the elimination of ‘animalistic’ emotion. But the neuroscience could not be clearer: rational thought and decision‐making require emotion, are built atop emotion. Emotion provides the basis for value judgments, a position from which to frame or contextualize particular circumstances without which decision‐making is significantly impaired or impossible. Neurophysiologically, the neocortex in which higher‐order thought takes place, sits directly atop, actually wraps around the limbic system, which is the seat of emotion. Most sensory information runs through the limbic system before reaching the higher regions of the cortex. In the visual system, for example, the optic nerve reaches directly into the limbic system, which shapes perceptual information before it passes into the visual cortex: we see not with our eyes but with our brains, and what we see is heavily conditioned by the emotional context of the specific situation (Ramachandran & Blakeslee, 1998). While it’s true that emotional processes can sometimes interfere with judgment (Damasio 1994, p. 192), we might say (to borrow a little ironically from the computer metaphor of the brain) that this ‘is not a bug, it’s a feature’ that is related to ‘fight or flight’ processes and social identification. Emotions are not extraneous but prior to rational thought, providing a ground from which rational thought develops. And it is emotional information that we constantly communicate in nonverbal and gestural signals, “willingly or not.” “Language and speech,” argue Beattie and Shovelton, for example, …are primarily concerned with propositional thought and the communication of semantic information about the world, whereas the movements of the body, changes in facial expression, and posture and hand and arm movement are assumed to communicate emotional information and form the basis of the social processes through which interpersonal relationships are established, developed and maintained. (2007, p. 221‐2) Gesture, as a crucial emotional and affective foundation of social interaction, is intimately bound to both language and thought, intrapersonal communication and social cognition. All of this is to emphasize that, ultimately, social context is the “crucial element in how humans think” (Rotman 2008, p. 91). Ruthrof (2000) makes a similar argument by analyzing social and cultural context as implicit deixis. Deixis, the basis of indexicality, comprises signs that provide information about a person’s position in relation to her world and the people and objects in it. In linguistic terms, personal deixis includes, for example, pronouns and points to the differential relations among 6: interactants and objects in a communicative situation, including hierarchical social relations; spatial deixis (e.g. that, there, go, come) indicates the communicator’s physical position in relation to others and objects in the world; temporal deixis (e.g. then, now, meanwhile) refers to the time of the communication in relation to other actions and situations. If indexical awareness is the fundamental ground of human consciousness in the sense Tallis (2010) suggests, then deixis represents its functional instantiation in the way people position themselves and others in relation to the worlds of which they are a part. Symbolic representation is secondary and possible only within a deictic context. Ruthrof argues that “the vast majority of deictic aspects are concealed or implicit” (2000, p.48‐49). The ways in which we understand ourselves, our worlds and our places in them are strongly conditioned by the inherent cultural assumptions we bring to bear upon them: “Implicit deixis… is the result of pedagogy from the minute we are born into the community and gradually changes as a culture adjusts along its historical trajectory” (p. 49). Furthermore, Ruthrof argues that social context, i.e. implicit deixis, “is not primarily a verbal phenomenon but a nonverbal constraint on the manner in which we are to envisage designated objects of thought. Deictic constraints are at the heart of our characterization of a culture” (p. 52). We are socially disciplined, shaped by the assumptions, values and categorizations of our cultures, the culture into which we are born, those with which we come into contact, and those with which we choose to identify, not only by verbal indoctrination but fundamentally by nonverbal ways of being in the world, ways of interacting with others, ways of enacting and performing ourselves in accordance with the set of relations privileged by our social context. Another way to understand this point is that social and cultural contexts are developed and maintained through “phatic” communication. Phatic communication is non‐informational meta‐ communication that functions solely as a means for the interactants to recognize the social bond or connection embodied in the interaction itself. It is communication that serves a social bonding function as pure form – an often highly ritualized interaction (e.g. greetings) that reinforces the set of culturally privileged relations instantiated in an implicit deixis. Knowing the form and playing your part in a given social situation is more than a marker of politeness; it is a marker of in‐group identification – just as a refusal to follow the rules of etiquette in a given situation is perceived as an indication of dissociation. And it applies as much to behavior on online discussion boards or social network profile personalization as to elevator etiquette, proper greetings, or small talk. Linguistic anthropologist Branislaw Malinowski coined the term 'phatic communion' in 1923 to describe “free, aimless, social intercourse,” the kind of “small talk, gossip or chit‐chat” (Coupland et al, 1992) that occurs apart from any specific activity or task being performed. Cheepen (1988) describes phatic communion as simply “chat,” and includes narrative as one of its aspects. This emphasis on what the Oxford English Dictionary describes as communication “that serve[s] to establish or maintain social relationships rather than to impart information, communicate ideas, etc.” has led many scholars to understand phatic communication as trivial. Miller, for example, argues that “in phatic media culture, content is not king, but ‘keeping in touch’ is,” and that this represents a horrible dilution of culture and society (2010, p. 395). 7: But, considering the findings and implications of cognitive and neuroscience research concerning the function of emotion in social cognition, there is a strong argument to be made that phatic aspects influence all social interaction, and are fundamental to human communication‐cognition, generally. Laver (1974, 1975, 1981) argues that phatic communication fulfills initiatory, propitiatory and exploratory functions and, furthermore, both constrains the thematic development of interaction (i.e., it is sequentially meaningful and uncertainty reducing) and confers crucial indexical meanings (i.e., it is socially diagnostic) (Coupland et al, 1992). In Goffman's (1959) terms, phatic communication helps participants establish a “working consensus” in social interaction. Phaticity, therefore, “may be best seen as a constellation of interactional goals that are potentially relevant to all contexts of human interchange” (Coupland et al, 1992, p. 211). This critical role of phatic communication is perfectly reasonable if we understand it to be the crucial means of establishing implicit deixis through emotional connection and social identification. Such a broad reach is also consistent with Malinowski's original formulation of 'phatic communion' as a fundamental human characteristic and process. “In discussing the function of speech in mere sociabilities,” he wrote, we come to one of the bedrock aspects of man's nature in society. There is in all human beings the well‐known tendency to congregate, to be together, to enjoy each other's company. Many instincts and innate trends, such as fear or pugnacity, all the types of social sentiments such as ambition, vanity, passion for power and wealth, are dependent upon and associated with the fundamental tendency which makes the mere presence of others a necessity for man. (Malinowski, 2006/1923, p. 297‐298). Phatic communication is emotionally bonding, socially disciplining, and culturally enactive, functioning to instantiate the implicit deixis that provides the background cultural assumptions that frame social interaction, as well as the general indexical awareness that physically grounds communication in a given situation. Furthermore, phatic communication is largely nonverbal and gestural, shaping our speech and disciplining our physical presences by conditioning our possibilities of movement and thought, action and reaction. Nonverbal communication and gesture are thereby understood as the crucial embodied background of linguistic communication, and therefore human conceptualization. 3. Conventional linguistics, especially following Chomsky, has drawn a firm line between language as a system of signifiers (syntax) and language as a vehicle of meaning (semantics). Consistent with the Saussurean doctrine of the arbitrariness of the signifier, meaning is said to be largely divorced from any necessary relationship to ‘objects in the world’; meaning is understood to be a function of differential syntactical relations. But language – and meaning – is more than syntax. Ruthrof argues that “there is no meaning in language unless something else, something nonlinguistic, is added” (2000, p. 42); language is not a self‐contained formal system. The Saussurean assumptions of conventional linguistics, according to Ruthrof, have two major drawbacks. First, the arbitrary relation of signifier and signified makes it essentially impossible to find a place for the nonverbal deictic grounding of human interaction, 8: such as [the] tactile or aural mappings of the world, inside our linguistic, conceptual frames. Moreover, once we have declared our master theory of investigation to be language we will find it extremely difficult to discover anything in nonverbal semiotic domains that is not already prefigured in language. In other words, we will only rediscover quasi‐linguistic characteristics. Yet to understand how tactile or olfactory semiosis works it seems a dubious starting‐point to suggest that they must operate like linguistic signs. To apply a reductio ad absurdam to this problematic, we could ask what the haptic and olfactory equivalents are to noun phrases, present participles, the passive voice, and so on… We must remain open to the possibilities that nonverbal signs operate differently from their natural‐language relations. (Ruthrof 2000, p.22‐23) Second, the structuralist assertion that meaning is but a consequence of syntactical relations begs the question of meaning: it makes sense (i.e., has meaning) only if one already knows the language. I can recognize a language that I do not understand to be a system of relations, but it doesn’t mean anything to me unless or until I can connect it to my embodied, social, nonverbal understanding of the world: One can demonstrate the validity of the ‘intragrammatical’ or syntactical, relational argument only by tracing the steps that are necessary in order to ascend from the cognition that we are dealing with signifiers to the level of the signified. In other words, we must show how the sounds of linguistic expressions become meaningful in a social sense… [T]he very Saussurean sign as a relation between signifier and signified can come about only when we exit language, when we combine the empty schemata of linguistic expressions with nonverbal signs. (Ruthrof 2000, p. 23) In contrast, Ruthrof develops a ‘corporeal semantics’ arguing that “Linguistic signs are always parasitic on nonverbal signification” (p. 24): ...the body is always already a part of language as discourse… in the form of nonlinguistic signs: as olfactory, tactile, gustatory, aural, visual, and many other subtle, nonverbal readings of the world. When we learn language as part of social pedagogy, the community guides us to systematically link the sounds of language expressions with nonverbal sign complexes. For language to be meaningful, members of a speech community must be able to share, to a high degree, the way in which language and nonverbal readings are to be associated with one another. From this viewpoint, the body is present in language at the semantic level as community‐sanctioned perception in the broad sense. (p. vii) Language has no meaning, there is no signification, without some connection, in whatever attenuated analogical sense, to embodied experience. It is with our senses that we make sense, that we locate linguistic meaning in relation to our nonverbal readings of the world (olfactory, tactile, gustatory, aural, visual, gravitational, thermal, etc.) and to the normative cultural assumptions that we hold: 9: “Only as an intersemiotic2 event can language mean” (Ruthrof 2000, p. 65, italics in the original). Natural language instantiates an implicit deixis that “carries the totality of cultural modalities. Without these, linguistic expressions would be no more than impoverished abstractions” (Ruthrof 2000, p. 43). It is phatic, emotional, nonverbal communication that binds those cultural assumptions into a whole implicit deixis, a social and cultural context that provides a set of relations from which meaning can be generated. To know what something means is precisely to know how it fits in with everything else you know – and what you know is rooted in your multimodal embodied experience. In other words, consciousness is always consciousness of something deictically positioned. 4. I have argued that nonverbal and gestural interaction is the primary vector of cultural learning and social discipline because the nonverbal is the primary carrier of emotional information and social identification. Further, I have argued that individual cognition requires social interaction and a cultural grounding, and that nonverbal gesture, as a vehicle of implicit deixis, is tightly bound to individual cognition. In doing so I have tried to show that language and gesture, verbal and nonverbal, are tightly integrated in the processes of making and sharing meaning (and hence that meaning is far more than linguistic syntactical relations). I now want to draw a specific analogy between nonverbal gestural forms and uses of language that fulfill similar functions in our highly technologically and textually mediated world: text can be gestural. In order to do so, I must first back up and better elucidate the concept of ‘gesture’. 5. Adam Kendon, a linguist and leading historian of gesture, loosely defines gesture as “actions that have the features of manifest deliberate expressiveness” (2004, p. 15). This broad definition is intended to cover a wide range of nonverbal and/or paralinguistic actions that support a broad variety of utterances. For Carrie Noland (2009, p. 15), invoking Leroi‐Gourhan, what makes an act a “gesture” is the involvement of the body in a double process of active (muscular) displacement and (sensory) information gathering. Because I am specifically drawing a theoretical analogy between physical and textual paralinguistic gesture, the following discussion will generally limit ‘gesture’ to co‐speech gesture, which is the subject of a small but thriving linguistic sub‐discipline. Co‐speech gesture, or “the spontaneous movement of the hands that accompany speech” (Goldin‐ Meadow 2003, McNeill 2005), is a universal human phenomenon that straddles the boundary between conscious and unconscious activity. Even the blind make hand gestures when they speak, 2 Ruthrof is not making use of Jakobsen’s ‘intersemiotic translation’, which merely transposes one sign system into another: “I am not saying that all syntactic formations in natural languages are iconic reflections of networks of nonverbal signs. A certain syntactic independence cannot be denied, when new syntactic structures are used that draw on and extend some previous syntax rather than primarily reflecting nonverbal signs. The point is that the intersyntactic structuralist thesis as well as its philosophical parallel of 'intergrammaticality', according to which language works as an independent system of syntactic and semantic relations, are not tenable as a general rule. Temporal, causal and other relations between signs are not invented by language. All we can claim is that language is an effective medium for their multiplication and increase in speed as well as combinatorial range. ...[I]f language itself receives semantic values only from the nonverbal, then Jakobsen's position is incompatible. Likewise with analytical assumptions about meaning as definitional thought.” (p. 65‐69) 10: using gestural forms identical to those used by people with unimpaired sight, and even when talking to other blind people (McNeill, 2005). As we have seen, gestures are intimately connected to the process of thought and the production of language: binding a person's hands will affect the way she speaks. Animals, on the other hand, do not gesture. Some animals, such as chimpanzees, can be trained to use gestures when food rewards are involved, but they do not, for example, point in the wild (Tallis 2010). In human infants, however, gesture (e.g. pointing) is an important precursor to speech. Infants with autism do not point, making the absence of gesture an important diagnostic indicator of early cognitive development. The term 'co‐speech gesture' covers a wide range of behaviors in a variety of academic contexts. However, Kendon notes that “all” gesture scholars, whether encompassing the full range of “bodily expression” or focusing more or less exclusively on hands and arms, have generally agreed on a broad threefold distinction: “[1] indicative, demonstrative or pointing or deictic gestures; [2] imitative, depictive, or imagistic gestures; and [3] expressive gestures, that is, gestures that express a state of mind or mental attitude. Quintillian [1922], [G.] Austin [1802], Ekman and Freisen [1969], and McNeill [1992] also all discuss in an explicit fashion [4] gestures that mark out, punctuate or in some other way make reference to aspects of the structure of the discourse, either in respect to its phrasal organization or in respect to its logical structure” (Kendon 2004, p. 103). A final form of gesture, typically excluded from study of co‐speech gesture, is [5] emblem gesture. As described by Goldin‐ Meadow, emblems include “the ‘thumbs up’, the ‘okay’, the ‘shush’, and a host of other hand movements, many of which have unprintable meanings. Speakers are always aware of having produced an emblem and produce it to communicate with others, often to control their behavior. The distinction, the fundamental requirement for the label of “gesture,” is movement or rhythm.” (2003, p. 5) While no single definition or typology of gesture has been universally accepted, Kendon (2004) has identified four basic properties. 1) Gesture can be executed more quickly than the spoken utterance. 2) Gestures are silent, which means they can be used simultaneously with speech and/or beyond the boundaries of the immediate interaction. 3) Gestures are visible, which means they can be used over much greater distances than speech. And 4), the production and reception of gesture do not require the same kind of mutual orientation among interactants as speech, and they can therefore be used successfully amidst distractions (e.g., in a crowd). To generalize these properties a bit further, gestures are compressed, extensive, paralinguistic communication. 6. Compressed, extensive, and paralinguistic also happens to be a fairly good description of the social cues that have evolved with the development of digital media technologies. New technologies always generate reactions from those concerned about the social changes such technologies bring. (I recently saw a cartoon of two cavemen with the caption, “I blame all the violence in cave paintings.”) In 1950 sociologist David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd made a compelling argument that modern technologies including the telephone, television and automobile were accentuating the “inner‐directed” character of many Americans and destroying traditional community bonds leaving most of us, in Robert Putnam’s (2000) more recent phrase, “bowling alone.” Such fears wax and wane, and recently a similar 11: tide of arguments has risen decrying the social effects of the Internet, social media and digital communications technologies that alleviate the necessity of face to face (or even telephone) conversation. To take one recent example, Sherry Turkle's Alone Together (2011) decries the growing propensity to text instead of talk, and the inherent inadequacies of rapid‐fire, decontextualized text messages compared with sustained, semantically rich face to face interaction. Others, however, have long argued that digitally mediated communication “does not depart discernibly from oral and written patterns of conversation” (Galegher, et al, 1998, p. 524). While empirical laboratory studies have found statistically significant differences between face‐to‐face interaction and CMC, the differences were very small (Walther 1994; Baym 2011). “Like speech,” argues Nancy Baym, “much CMC is direct, contextualized, and interactive” (2006, p. 39). Other scholars similarly point out that the forms and conventions of text‐based new media communication are much richer than initially might be supposed. Danet et al (1997) demonstrate that “online performance draws attention to the language and the medium, turning the lack of cues into a communicative asset” (Baym 2006, p. 41). So while CMC has been described as “playful” (Baym, 2006, p. 40) and “telegraphic” (Baym 2006; Cherny 1999; Werry 1996) because of its “ephemerality, speed, interactivity, and freedom from the tyranny of materials” (Danet et al, 1997), all of these characteristics apply to many instances and contexts of face to face interaction. Baym therefore argues that “mediated interaction should be seen as a new and eclectic mixed modality that combines elements of face to face communication with elements of writing, rather than as a diminished form of embodied interaction” (Baym 2011, p. 51). I want to make a similar, but not quite identical argument. Mediated communication should not be regarded as a “diminished form of embodied interaction”; rather, it can be understood as fulfilling many equivalent social functions. Specific forms of even text‐based new media communication, I argue, accomplish the nonverbal and gestural cues that are necessary to the establishment of implicit deixis in a space of online social interaction. At times the affordances supplied by social media environments are blatantly gestural. Evoking Goffman, Papacharissi argues that “Given the level of control over verbal and non‐verbal cues in a variety of online contexts, individuals may put together controlled performances that 'give off' exactly the 'face' that they intend” (2009, p. 210). Facebook’s “variety… of non‐verbal ‘pokes’ and gestures” are “props” that “provide the dramaturgical range within which to construct more elaborate performances of the self” (Papcharissi 2009, p. 212). And they do so by appealing to the very foundations of human communication: the emotional, embodied, social gesture, such as the “contentless message” (Golder et al 2007, p. 2) of the Facebook “poke.” Such social media conventions, like many other common text‐based social cues in digital media generally, function analogously to co‐speech gestures. The typical definitional metaphor for the paradigmatic online communicative action, the hyperlink is, after all, a deictic gesture: a link points to another web page. The paradigmatic action of CMC – the hyperlink – is the paradigmatic action of human indexicality – the point, which Tallis (2010) identifies as the very root of human cognition and sociality. Gestures are compressed; they are faster than speech. They are (primarily) visual, concurrent with but capable of moving beyond the bounds of the immediate interaction. They, therefore, do not require interactants to maintain the same focus of orientation; they can move and function above, 12: below, or beyond an immediate interaction or conversation. Also, because of their critical function in emotional and interpersonal communication, gestures are often used for purposes of self‐display when, for example, there is a “need to make oneself a heightened object of attention in conversation” in order to compete with bystanders or other environmental distractions or claims to attention (Kendon 2004, p. 353). All of these characteristics are applicable to much text‐based digital media communication. All of the forms of physical co‐speech gesture are evident online: hyperlinks are deictic gestures, as are the syntactical conventions of Twitter; ASCII art, emoticons, and avatars are imagistic gestures; allcaps and flaming behaviors are expressive gestures; text‐speak abbreviations, acronyms, and other iconic text forms (e.g. “#FAIL”) are emblematic gestures; rhythmic gestures using punctuation and repetition are also common. Text messages, including tweets and status updates, often contain many of these conventions simultaneously, all of which emphasize the deictic and aesthetic elements (rooted in movement, rhythm and emotion) that reside at the heart of nonverbal gestural communication and directly enable identity performance and social engagement, continuing the community bonding interactions of tribe and village that have been integral to the evolutionary development of human consciousness. The gestural conventions of text‐based new media, therefore, offer a plethora of options for nuanced social interaction and identity performance. The performance of identity (Bauman 1975; Hymes 1974) is, in fact, the primary affordance of social media, which allows participants to “validate and engage with others” (boyd et al, 2010) and generate a widely dispersed intersubjectivity (Crawford, 2009) through active audience construction (Marwick & boyd, 2010) and the construction of “faceted identity” (boyd 2001) accommodating a variety of concurrent social contexts. The demands for reciprocity and self‐disclosure in social media, relate directly to the deictic and socially disciplining functions of nonverbal gesture, which is “embedded within… the action systems by which the environment and objects within it are manipulated, modified, organized and created” (Kendon 2004, p. 361). The gesture relies upon co‐presence, but co‐presence is much more than it used to be. The variety of mediated gestural forms available from 'merely' text‐based technologies of new and social media (especially on mobile platforms) evokes comparisons to McLuhan’s now proverbial 'global village' in what has been called “connected presence” or “continual connection” (Licoppe & Smoreda, 2005), “mundane connection” (Oulasvirta et al, 2009), “ambient co‐presence” (Stankovic 2009, Wilson 2009), and “social awareness streams” (Naaman et al, 2010) of “digital intimacy” (Marwick & boyd, 2010; Wilson 2009). Social interaction rich enough to acquire such monikers must be providing the social cues necessary to fulfill the functions of typical face‐to‐face, nonverbal gestures and social cues. And in fact, Michaud argues that “Twitter,” to take but one example, “upholds the intrinsic social function of communication” (2007, p. 34). In other words, CMC performs a clearly phatic function. To date, only a few “tweet typologies” have been published, and while those available (e.g., Michaud, 2007; Honeycutt & Herring, 2009; Oulasvirta et al, 2009; Naaman et al, 2010) vary widely, they have several commonalities, including greetings, weather, small talk, emotion, and metacommentary, that are immediately recognizable as categories 13: of phatic communication. The phatic character of social media has been noted by others (Miller 2008; Stankovic 2009; Parks 2010; Stankovic et al 2010). Parks argues that “For online settings such as social network sites, the most relevant … requirements are engaging in shared rituals, social regulation, and collective action through patterned interaction and the creation of relational linkages among members that promote social bonds, a sense of belonging, and a sense of identification with the community” (p. 111). If gesture is phatic communication, and new media communication is gestural, then the phatic communion of ambient co‐presence is “the way we interact, and the way we feel each other out there in the realm of the World Wide Web” (Stankovic, 2009, p. 1). 7. While digitally mediated textual gestures, like their physical nonverbal analogues, may sometimes lack “content” (Golder et al 2007) they do not lack meaning. The logic of technological gestures, according to Rotman “is not one of representation but of enactment: they ‘mean’ not positively in themselves, nor relationally as elements of a signifying code, but through their execution, through the effects that ensue from their having taken place” (2008, p. 81‐2); emblematic gestures, specifically, “have meaning—better: they have force, affect, point—through the fact of their taking place, in the effect they help bring about, in the affectual matrices they support, in all that they induce by virtue of their occurrence as events” (p. 19). As I have tried to demonstrate, even fully textual messages can serve such deictic functions. This is so because of the indexicality that forms the fundamental basis of human communication‐ cognition: not only do we rely on implicit and explicit deixis in our intra‐ and interpersonal interactions, but deictic, spatial metaphors orient our entire conceptual system. The analogical and metaphorical nature of human cognition has been thoroughly elucidated by cognitive linguists over the past three decades (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson 1980, Lakoff 1987, Lakoff & Turner 1989, Lakoff & Nuñez 2000, Fauconnier & Turner 2002, Goatly 2007, Johnson 2007). An overview of this literature is beyond the scope of the present (likely already over‐extended) argument, but suffice it to say that deictic orientation is built into the foundations our intersemiotic system of conceptualization, the most important unifying aspect of which is symbolic representation in language. It is no surprise that we tend to understand any set of relations in spatial terms, or that we immediately understand digitally mediated interactions in terms of online ‘spaces’. But as Baym cogently reminds us, “mediated communication is not a space, it is an additional tool people use to connect, one which can only be understood as deeply embedded in and influenced by the daily realities of embodied life” (2011, p. 152, italics added). As our physical and cultural spaces are oriented by our nonverbal patterns of implicit deixis, our patterns of online connection are oriented—generate meaning—through the shared, gestural and phatic forms that metaphorically map mediated interactions onto intersemiotic nonverbal forms of culturally conditioned embodied interaction. We instantiate our online “spaces” in embodied social interactions. “Cyberspace” is a metaphor; the online ‘spaces’ in which we interact are the products of, are dependent upon, and only have meaning in relation to our embodied, culturally situated cognitive systems. In Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being, Brian Rotman (2008), makes a series of arguments related to those I have made here. In his introduction to the book, 14: Timothy Lenoir writes, “Not only is thinking always social, culturally situated, and technologically mediated, but individual cognition requires symbiosis with cognitive collectivities and external memory systems to happen in the first place” (p. xxvii). Just as social context is a requirement for individual identity, individual cognition requires a cultural context and a cultural memory system – an implicit spatiotemporal social deixis – in which to arise and function. For Rotman, the multimodal communicative acts performed with digital media technologies are understood as gestures of the distributed human being within a digitally mediated social and cultural context. Drawing on earlier media ecology theorists and Deleuze and Guattari (1988), Rotman examines the implications of digital media, and implicitly online “spaces” of interaction, for the individual but necessarily culturally situated human agency. “[A]ny change in the way information gets processed and represented,” explains Lenoir, “ inevitably constitutes a change in the cognitive economy of the subject, a difference in psychic architecture and ultimately of consciousness itself” (Rotman 2008, p. xxvi). In the terms of the present argument, a new form of communication, a new medium, instantiates a new set of intersemiotic relations metaphorically anchored to known forms and ultimately to physical and implicit deixis. As communication becomes a cognitive process through the phatic functions of implicit deixis, mediated social interaction, limited by the possibilities of interaction afforded by the specific technology, “projects a specific configuration of the subject and a horizon of agency” (p.xvi). Each online ‘space’ or ‘environment’ affords a specific set of deictic relations offering a specific set of interactional and cognitive possibilities – with important implications for individual agency. Technologies… impinge on the body and its psychic envelope along specific channels: conventionally either as prosthetic extensions of physical, cognitive, and perceptual powers… or, as media, through the corporeal changes of affect and subjectivity wrought by the cultural products they make possible… [N]o less interesting… are the non‐ explicit, pre‐cultural and corporeal effects of technologies: their recalibration of time and space, their facilitations of new modalities of self, and the work they do behind or beneath or despite the explicitly instrumental or signifying functions they are known by and are introduced to discharge. (Rotman 2008, p. 53) The appearance of new ‘spaces’ of interaction, new sets of deictic relations, create new options for social interaction and therefore new possibilities of thought, new horizons of conceptualization: “any act of self‐enunciation is medium‐specific” (Rotman 2008, p. xxxiii). The capacity for indexicality enabled a theory of mind, a set of deictic relations, that differentiated self from other: the gestural self‐pointing ‘I’. Spoken language, an extension of gesture, enabled an expanded intersemiotic capacity for symbolic representation and reference to absent others, objects and ideas (memory): the oral, self‐ declaring ‘I’. Written and, later, printed language, while stripping much of orality’s direct, gestural, affective affordances, expanded affordances of (external) memory and spatiotemporal cultural coherence, as well as deictic and symbolic possibilities: the inscribed ‘I’. The expansion of digital communications technologies, argues Rotman, is heralding the appearance of a new form of agency, a new form of self enabled by the expanded opportunities and affordances of multiple, spatiotemporally coexistent sets of deictic relations: the distributed ‘I’. 15: This new agency, the networked self, recovers the gestural, phatic roots of symbolic interaction masked by the written word, as Baym indicates when she identifies CMC as an embodied combination of the written and spoken. Acts of digitally mediated communication become the kinesis of the networked self, gestures of the distributed body: “…within the contemporary digitally enabled scene, a network ‘I’ is being heralded. …a third self‐enunciating agency, differentiat[ed] from the oral and scriptive ‘I’s, …an ‘I’ [that] is immersive and gesture‐haptic, understanding itself as meaningful from without, an embodied agent increasingly defined by the networks threading through it, and experiencing itself (notwithstanding the ubiquitous computer screen interface) as much through touch as vision, through tactile, gestural and haptic means as it navigates itself through informational space, traversing a ‘world of proximity’ whose ‘dominant sense…is touch’ (de Kerckchove 2006, 8). Such an ‘I’ is porous, spilling out of itself, traversed by other ‘I’s networked to it, permeated by the collectives of other selves and avatars via apparatuses (mobile phone or email, ambient interactive devices, Web pages, apparatuses of surveillance, GPS systems) that form its techno‐cultural environment and increasingly break down self‐other boundaries thought previously to be uncrossable: what was private exfoliates (is blogged, Webcammed, posted) directly into the social at the same time as the social is introjected into the interior of the self, making it ‘harder and harder to say where the world stops and the person begins’ (Clark 2006, 1).” (Rotman, 2008, p. 8) Cyberspace is not a ‘space’, but it is more and more impinging upon our physical social spaces as it opens new conceptual ‘spaces’. If we return to Noland’s graffiti artist, we may take a firmer grasp of the implications. In her conclusion to Agency & Embodiment, Noland (2009) references Derrida’s “illegible graffiti” and the writer’s submission to space. In new media ‘environments’ the writer submits not merely to space, but to deixes – deixis multiplied and compounded. Today’s graffiti artist makes a digital image of his work – or a video of the production of the work – and immediately posts it online. The physical space of the work is set into a new relation with other physical spaces, other works of art, other artists, and other sets of relations some of which exist only as digital images and mediated relations. The art work, the inscription, is no longer merely an enunciation (a linguistic ‘tag’); it is a nexus of deictic relations, a confluence of cultural relationships, whose meaning resides in that nexus, that confluence of interrelations. This is the nature of Rotman’s description of the distributed self as “tactile, gestural and haptic”: the mediated ‘touch’ through ‘space’ in the manner of Buckminster Fuller who reminded us that there is no ‘space’, there are only relationships. 8. We are born into specific communities with specific physical ways of being that condition our possibilities of habitus. We learn language in a specific cultural context, and the accent of our community indelibly accentuates our speech forever after. The writer inscribes her words and the 16: learned, repetitive gestures of writing inscribe her body, which responds and adapts to the physical activity. Our bodies and brains learn through repetition and practice: muscles strengthen and weaken in response to activity, and brains learn through Hebbeian neurological activity. And through all of this, the implicit deixis of culture provides a horizon of possibility that we are each more or less free to explore and transgress depending upon the specific social and cultural contexts available to us. Digital communications technologies do not depart from this pattern. Digital media provide new and continuously evolving sets of deictic relations, new and constantly shifting possible patterns of behavior and conceptualization, all rooted inescapably in physical and emotional processes of cognition and social interaction. Online interaction is in no way 'disembodied' and it is in no way separate from the ‘real’. To understand it as such is to reify the spatial metaphors that the human conceptual apparatus naturally uses to make sense of deictic relations. And it is precisely in those relations that we make sense. 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