Movement

=Literal and Figurative Movement = “To move” may mean figuratively to alter opinions/actions and is often synonymous with persuasion. St. Augustine, echoing Cicero, explains that eloquence is to inform, delight and move/persuade (to action). He uses the Latin //flecto// which means to bend, turn, curve or to figuratively persuade. The OED traces “movement” back to late Middle English from Old French from medieval Latin //movimentum//, from Latin //movere// (move) not //flecto//.Connections between literal and figurative meanings of “movement” persist today though this entry focuses largely on physical movement.

=Gesture and the Body in Oratory = Today’s public speaking textbooks define Aristotle’s //delivery// (see //style//) in terms of the body’s vocal, nonverbal and otherwise physical presentation though Aristotle’s //delivery// is more about vocal movements than the body (3.1). Roman rhetoricians Cicero and Quintilian addressed the body in oratory more directly (De Oratore) Movement was important to communication from antiquity, as in //mimesis// or imitation which illustrates the bodily nature of Greek rhetoric (Hawhee, 2004), and as seen in Egyptian, Greek, and Hellenistic art (Streeck, 2008). The 18th century Elocution Movement foregrounded gesture but recast movement in terms of //style// instead of //delivery// (Buck and Knapp, 2006). In the vein of Quintilian, elocutionists characterized effective gestures as meaningful, natural and individually styled movements of the body, especially the hands and face (Sheridan (1968), p. 19, 118).

Elocution, as an art and a science (Fenno 1878; Plumptre 1883), gradually waned amidst the 19th century shift to human psyche and by the 20th century to culture (Streeck, 1993; 2009, p. 278). Largely outside of Communication, scholars theorized movement, “gestural theory”, at the center of a scientific account for language’s origin and the theory grew with 20th century primate research (Hewes 1973) and the 1970’s renewed academic interest in language origins (Armstrong 2008). Nonverbal research burgeoned in the 20th century undergirded by rigorous observation and by mid century nonverbal communication was theorized as a complex system like linguistics (Buck and Knapp, 2006). Highlighting a fault line in nonverbal research, Birdwhistell, delinked movement from language systems and theorized //kinesics// as its own contextually specific, learned and patterned system (Birdwhistell, 1952). Nonverbal Studies was rooted by the 1960s and producing courses, textbooks and popular press by the 1970s (Buck and Knapp, 2006). Gesture is still a rich research arena (see journal //Gesture// established in 2001).

=Movement and the Body in Place = Historically, movement has been a means to explore the relationship between self, environments, and boundaries. Clashes in ancient Greek culture between mobile Sophists and the rooted Socrates (Montiglio, 2005, 152; Morgan, 2012, p. 413–37) suggest walking was related to ideas about thinking (Solnit, 2000, 14-16). The practice of walking, or //flâneur//, exemplified in Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, the 19th century “dandys”, and later thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Erving Goffman, developed as a means of inquiry about built and linguistic environments (McLeod Rogers, 2013) and a means of communicating resistance especially amidst the earlier French Revolution and modern Western protests and marches (Solnit, 2000, p. 214-231). Influenced by 1930s-1950s speech act theory, speech-gesture theory, mysticism and music, Kenneth Burke studied language’s edges and relationship to the body’s transformative power and conceptualized the body as “a site of movement and change” (Hawhee, 2009, p. 47). Thus, Hawhee argues, his later Communication contributions are clustered around the body (p. 5-6). Performance art in the 1960s centered process and emphasized walking, again, as a site of inquiry (Solnit, 2002, p. 267-276).

Modernity, frequently deemed "an age of mobility," brought huge technological changes, anxious perceptions of lost stability and uniqueness, and shifts in thinking about chaos and order. Marxism and concerns about "annihilation of space by time" produced by capitalism's drive for productivity laid the ground work for a material sense of movement (Cresswell, 2006 p. 15-21). By the 20th century's end, //movement// is embedded in the work of theorists who posit space and everyday practices as socially produced (Lefebvre, 1991), linked to “speech acts” (de Certeau, 1984 (1988), 97-99) and important to understanding the syntax(es) of power (especially Lefebvre, Foucault, and de Certeau). With particular uptake for Communication, Lefebvre challenges theorists to de-abstract the Cartesian //cogito//, concepts of mental space,with analysis of social space (4-5). With an eye toward the power relations between producers and consumers, de Certeau marries //style// and //use// to argue that quotidian practices are complex and naturalized but may be sites of resistant //tactics// to “make do” against the //strategies// of the more powerful producers. The body’s movements on city streets are key sites for both theories (1984 (1988), 98-102, xiix-xx). Edward Soja and Lefebvre both highlight the dialectical relationship between space and time, and, with Foucault, the means of control (Soja, 1989; Foucault, 1977).

Many disciplines took to the emergence of movement as a generative concept couched in terms of the body and power but especially space and time which are, in terms of the 1990s "mobilities turn" deemed "the context for movement and the product of movement" (Cresswell, 2003, p. 4). James Carey’s work cast new communication technologies as important material concerns for space (Valdivia, 2010) helped ground materialist concerns and mobility studies (Sheller, 2013). The mid-1990s interdisciplinary “mobility turn” (Cresswell, 2006, ix) responded to a largely “a-mobile” sense of social science (Urray, 2008, 479). The concept matured amidst the nexus of space’s materiality, technology, power, and communication. Cultural concerns in communication were taken up early in the turn by Lawrence Grossberg who Rhetoric’s “material turn”, expressed robustly in the 1999 //Rhetorical Bodies// (Selzer and Crowley), spurred many scholars to explore space/place rhetoric. However, Communication, like other fields, may have struggled with, at times, hazy analytical distinctions between metaphorical and material concepts of space (Shome, 2003). Communication has since wrestled with mobility in terms of migration, airports, technology, networks and the virtual world (Packer and Croft Wiley, 2013).  The concept has been generative in terms of emphasizing everyday practices and as a critical framework. Rhetorician Daniel Brouwer uses mobility as a rich “conceptual framework” of “symbolic resource or material possibility” (2007, p. 703).