Adrien Meguerditchian emailed me some recent articles to allay my skepticism about evidence of handedness in nonhuman primates. One is in press, Meguerditchian et al., "Captive chimpanzees use their right hand to communicate with each other: Implications for the origin of the cerebral substrate for language," Cortex (2009), doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2009.02.013. The other one is Adrien Meguerditchian and Jacques Vauclair, "Contrast of hand preferences between communicative gestures and non-communicative actions in baboons: Implications for the origins of hemispheric specialization for language," Brain & Language (2008), doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2008.10.004. Meguerditchian's case is bolstered by the recent research. Longtime readers of this blog, nevertheless, will suspect that my skepticism is not easily shaken. In fact, however, I am leaning away from the belief that handedness is uniquely tied to human vocal speech. I remain uncertain about it. My skepticism in no way presupposes any closure on the question of evolutionary substrates for the pattern of lateralization evident in sapiens.
Despite retaining a healthy level of skepticism, I post these findings because I am sure they merit some serious attention:
Humans are mainly right-handed for many actions including gestures. This bias is strongly linked to a left cerebral hemispheric dominance for language functions. Whether similar lateralized systems for communicative behaviors are present in other animals is unclear. Here we report the first evidence of strong population-level right-handedness in 60 captive baboons for a species-specific communicative manual gesture. Our findings support the view that lateralization for language may have evolved from a gestural system of communication controlled by the left hemisphere.
Adrien Meguerditchian and Jacques Vauclair, "Baboons communicate with their right hand," Behavioural Brain Research 171 (2006) 170–174.
The hand may be too rough an instrument to measure the space between the abstractness of a posing of the question and the concreteness of a posing of the question.
Our results show that nearly identical patterns of left hemisphere activity are present while deaf signers generate verbs (compared to repetition of nouns) independently with their right (dominant) and left (nondominant) hands. The pattern of activation observed under these conditions is consistent with patterns reported for spoken languages. Importantly, the present data concur with delineation of functions within the left frontal region related to lexical–semantic, phonological, and search and retrieval processes. The results also provide important evidence for a nonmotoric role of the right lateral cerebellum activation during a language task, as well as additional support for a cerebellar contribution to cognitive behaviors. The data indicate activation of the left ventral fusiform, a region typically associated with form properties of written words. These data suggest this region may be responsive to visual properties of word forms that are not strictly tied to written languages. Finally, the patterns of activity observed in this study are more consistent with studies of linguistic processing rather than movement execution and perception.
In summary, these data indicate that linguistic–semantic processing relies upon left-hemisphere regions regardless of the modality in which a language is realized and that linguistic programming of non-dominant-hand use in signing arises from the same left-hemisphere regions responsible for dominant-hand use. These data provide new insights into the characterization of the neural systems underlying human languages and the articulatory motor system characteristic of signed languages of the deaf.
—Corina et al., "Language Lateralization in a Bimanual Language," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol. 15, Issue 5 (2003), pp. 718-730.
Does making a gesture towards speech in the throat feel like gesturing with the hand? I'm grasping. I must slowly come to grips with the possibility that the question has precious little to do with movement, or that it resides so deeply in the phenomena of surfaces that it must be understood as a superficial.
Imagine the motionless question, if you will. It is a question without style, destined to a perdurance—anything as existential as a per-durance of the motionless question would open an aporia, one that we will pass over for the moment, for the even the motionless question exists here in the nowish, be it irreal and provisional, existing so nonetheless—outside of speech, or, better, indifferent to speech, indifferent to expression. There is no enthusiasm for the motionless question. One simply doesn't approach it that way, the way of for. It is cold, yet curiously it corresponds to a resonance, a flow of blood. It itself doesn't inhabit space, but occupies space (or its simulacrum, a parallel spatiality).
Does one properly ask the motionless question? Does the motionless question transcend asking? Does it follow asking like a shadow?
The motionless question, unlike other objects of linguistic study, cannot directly coincide with its saying, better, its implementation. Indirectly, and most paradoxically, it exposes a hereness of the question. Does the moving question, the question in the hand, have this very same hereness? Is there any hereness besides existential hereness, hereness that is?
Could the hereness of the motionless question approach the absolute? To be a question it must have space for answers, must have answers wrapped inside it, and at the same time open itself to other heres, unforeseen heres of answerability, a cunicular substratum of response—how could the motionless question possibly be involved in a movement from one here to another here? If there is only one here given with the motionless question there is no space for answers, and "additionally," no space for motionlessness. Everything is crowded out except its own motionlessness. If the motionless question is without place there is no gap between it and the concrete question in the hand. It becomes any question and every question. It loses its sense of being the motionless question.
The voice of the muse comes to realization in and through the limits of the body. Look at your hand. Turn it over. Stretch it. Point it. Thump it. For a musician, of all the structures that impose their discipline on us, the most ubiquitous and marvellous is the human hand. Beginning with the fact that the hand has five digits and not six or four, the hand predisposes our work toward particular conformations because it itself has a shape. The kind of music you play on the violin or piano, the kind of painting that comes from your handling of the brush, the pottery you turn on the wheel, is intimately influenced by the shape of your hands, by the way they move, by their resistances. The structure of the hand is not (once again) "just anything"; the fingers have certain characteristic relationships, certain ranges of relative movement, certain kinds of crossing, torquing jumping, sliding, pressing, releasing movements that guide the music to come out in a certain way. Graceful work uses those patterns and instinctively moves through them and out as we find ever-fresh combinations. The shape and size of the human hand brings powerful but subtle laws into every kind of art, craftsmanship, mechanical work, and into our ideas and feelings as well. There is a continuous dialogue between hand and instrument, hand and culture. Artwork is not thought up in consciousness and then, as a separate phase, executed by the hand. The hand surprises us, creates and solves problems on its own. Often enigmas that baffle our brains are dealt with easily, unconsciously, by the hand.
(Free Play, pp. 81-82, my bold)
Terpsichore represents the apotheosis of the muse—the prism through which the full spectrum of musicality becomes spectral—because of this emancipating limitation of the hand. Does improvisation have as a deep structure the morphology of the hand? A human hand? Why not two hands? Is the breach shaped or directed by hands? Are apparition and depth on par, a par shaped by the hands?
Forget propositional knowledge for a moment. Feel your hands from the inside. Does this describe a real feeling: feeling your hands from the inside? Where does "from the inside" find its place in the full spectrum of musicality?
"A misleading philosophical education," Corradi Fiumara warns, "silently assumes the task of curing students of unprofessional ways of thinking, of that vital epistemophily which is conducive to asking unfamiliar questions" (Metaphoric, p. 39). Surely she is not alone in placing value on the expedition into the unfamiliar, or in holding that in the course of inquiry our reach must regularly exceed our grasp. How could such a regularity be established except through a method of learning—a learnt method, it might go without saying, that is, a method of learning that emerges from learning, an inculcative materialization decidedly from a praxis of curiosity?
Our institutional instructors are in general critical of overreach. The criticism of overreach may appear to be criticism of reach itself, as if grasping could be accomplished without any reaching. "That's reaching" or "that's a reach" mean effectively "you don't get it," there is no grasping nor very much hope of grasping in that direction, the direction indicated by the reach. "That's a leap" functions as a similar criticism, though it may be specifically intended to teach syllogistic thinking, and it may be a stretch to say that syllogism is hostile to epistemophily. If setting off into the unfamiliar necessarily involves a leap, it doesn't follow that a leap necessarily sets off into the unfamiliar. Nonetheless I value the leap. Does this placement of value represent a harmonic of the value placed on the expedition, or on the unfamiliar? Would it be consummately displacement, or a displacement by reverberation? Can we disentangle all these values and still understand what they do as values? Would a deterritorialization of values be of values in any localizable sense? Must there be an integrability of values? Of questions?
The question as question is—inherently, transmogrificationally—metaphoric. Corradi Fiumara advances the idea, intelligently, that metaphor transforms not merely belief, that is, the mind's perdurable sifting of its noetic objects, its schemes and manners of classification, but rather perception and also therefore chthonic as well as metachthonic interrelation, suggesting that perhaps relation itself is malleable. (*Re- represents the breach of malleability, the setting off of tractability.) She says, "Heterogeneous as they may be, even stimuli deriving from external sources and images emerging from our psychic depths are commonly thought to interdigitate in our different ways of shaping reality" (p. 30). Is heterogeneity any less a quality of relation than it is of stimuli or of physis?
In reaching do we forget grasping? Must we? Or does there effectually exist a cheirokinesthetic memory, an indelible or more or less persistent knowledge of the grasp, intrinsic to the reach? As handmade, the question would be privileged. Would this be a privilege we knowingly afford, or does it appear to come as if by nature from its being handmade. Is the reach handmade? The leap? A coordination of stereoscopic vision and the reach? What color is the reach? What color is coordination of hand and eye? What can't metaphor *re-member?
"Hand positions antcipate habitual possibilities of movement and prevention of movement," Morris writes. Not merely positions of the body, they "already anticipate their crossing into the world" (Sense, p. 50). Morris' discussion of the body schema as developed from Merleau-Ponty's philosophy focuses on this crossing of body and world. At one point he defines the body schema as being in "body-world movement itself" (p. 45). It is an emergent phenomenon, perhaps neither transcendent nor imminent in any complete and proper sense. I find Morris's discussion quite engaging. However, I am beginning to question whether an equality of body and world is implied in the chiasm, or in the co-arising of body and world. Perhaps embodiment means something like a lived instability, a disequilibrium that can't be shaken from what it is to execute a style of movement, or to "sculpt perception from the given," (p. 43), an act that, according to Morris, requires a dynamic crossing and a prior shaping. Is this prior shaping governed by the world? By the chiasm? Morris rightly explains that phenomenology teaches that any relation between what is visited upon the body and what is experienced has to do with meaning of the lived body, and this meaning is necessarily both habitual and anticipatory (p. 49). Does the world construct meaning just as I do, or am I, animal that I am, privileged in some way in the field of meaning? (One tends not to notice one's own privilege, and not to want to.) Is touching on par with being touched? Does the dynamism of a rock deserve a different name from the dynamism of animals, or from the dynamism of speech? Is any "physical" reality marked by a heterogeneity of forces?
How do we call into question what the hand grasps? It could be a tool, it could be apeiron–could the indefinite be a possession? Possession is called into question by the encounter with the Other, Levinas says (Totality, p. 163). We can think of this encounter as transcendence. Not only am I happy to see transcendence defined, I'm happy that Levinas discusses this transcendence with respect to language.
The relationship with the Other is not produced outside of the world, but puts in question the world possessed. The relationship with the Other, transcendence, consists in speaking the world to the Other. But language accomplishes the primordial putting in common–which refers to possession and presupposes economy. The universality a thing receives from the word that extracts it from the hic et nunc loses its mystery in the ethical perspective in which language is situated. The hic et nunc itself issues from possession, in which the thing is grasped, and language, which designates it to the other, is a primordial dispossession, a first donation. The generality of the word institutes a common world. The ethical event at the basis of generalization is the underlying intention of language. The relation with the Other does not only stimulate, provoke generalization, does not only supply it with the pretext and the occasion (this no one has ever contested), but is this generalization itself. Generalization is a universalization–but universalization is not the entry of the sensible thing into a no man's land of the ideal, is not purely negative like a sterile renunciation, but is the offering of the world to the Other. Transcendence is not a vision of the Other, but a primordial donation.
(pp. 173-174, my bold)
The first donation is a question of the hands, in presenting the gift and receiving. Is this business of the hands merely a presupposition, a condition? Would we then say that the hands have been transcended in speech, in the encounter with the Other? If we accept a restricted sense of the hic et nunc as equivalent to the grasped, it does not indubitably follow that the hand well represents the hic et nunc, for hands also open. They relax. Well, what do we think about hands? How do we call them into question? We do things with hands. Levinas says that the hands are "the condition for all technique" (p. 167). He even provides us with a master technique, which is, surprisingly perhaps, not grasping but groping. He says groping is "the work of the hand par excellence, and the work adequate to the apeiron of the element [which] makes possible the whole originality of the final cause" (ibid.). Why isn't giving the work of the hand par excellence? Let's play with an idea of Merleau-Ponty's. We simultaneously grasp and communicate with other people who have hands that grasp and communicate, communicative hands. (Not everybody has hands, of course, but most people have hands that communicate various meanings, enough to give meaning to the phrase "communicative hands.") If communication is the work of the hands, and it occurs simultaneously with grasping, should we, following Levinas for a moment, regard communication as being transcended by giving? Are the two incommensurate in any given hic et nunc? Perhaps we need to grapple with multipurposivity of hands. Levinas' argument, however, is that we can't allow giving to be regarded as one activity among many. Apparently the idea would be that multifunctionality doesn't explain anything. Here we pick up again on the discussion of language.
Language does not exteriorize a representation preexisting in me: it puts in common a world hitherto mine. Language effectuates the entry of things into a new ether in which they receive a name and become concepts. It is a first action over and above labor, an action without action, even though speech involves the effort of labor, even though, as incarnate thought, it inserts us into the world with the risks and hazards of all action. At each instant it exceeds this labor by the generosity of the offer it forthwith makes of this very labor. The analyses of language that tend to present it as one meaningful action among others fail to recognize this offering of the world, this offering of contents which answers to the face of the Other or which questions him, and first opens the perpective of the meaningful.
The "vision" of the face is inseparable from this offering language is. To see the face is to speak of the world. Transcendence is not an optics, but the first ethical gesture.
(p. 174, Levinas' emphases, my bold)
The first ethical gesture is most probably performed with the hands. A gesture without gesture is improbable, and it would smack of mystification were I to impose upon you to seriously think such a thing. (Is that a wink?) The face is emphatically inseparable from the world of the hands, a twilight world as well as a world of days and nights. Has Levinas adequately anticipated these criticisms, for instance by saying that speech "as incarnate thought [. . .] inserts us into the world with the risks and hazards of all action"? Well, on the one hand action means labor, on the other it means any action whatsoever, including action that surpasses action. Furthermore, the latter kind of action, which is the ethical event of the encounter with the Other, is the basis for general meanings, and hence for the meaning of any action. I don't think I'm completely uncharitable, or ungrateful. I'd like to imagine the priority of an ethical event which puts the world into question, so I should be willing to allow my understanding of hands to be put into question, and, of course, my understanding of understanding. I'm groping here. How do I live in this world offered by my encounter with Levinas?