This extract is taken from an essay, Some Points About Pointing by Raymond Tallis in the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of Philosophy Now. It’s about how we humans point with our hand; the index finger, in particular. I think that it is loosely relevant to photography, which, of all the arts, is closest to finger-pointing.
The frustration in trying to show a dog where its ball has gone by pointing in the direction of its disappearance is enough to demonstrate the conventional nature of pointing. The dog just doesn’t get the point and you end up retrieving the ball yourself. In fact, no animals point as humans do. Primatologists used to think that chimpanzees understood pointing and that they used this gesture to communicate the whereabouts of objects. More recently, observers such as Daniel Povinelli have shown that chimps’ apparent comprehension of pointing is due to poor experiment design. If a chimp goes to an object that is pointed to, it does so not because it understands the referential nature of pointing but because it goes to the object nearest the experimenter’s finger-tip.
We are the sole pointing animal because of profound differences between us and all other sentient creatures. Firstly, the use of the index finger to point presupposes a special relationship to a part of one’s body. This deliberate use of the finger builds upon the sense of one’s self as an agent, and the parts of one’s body as explicit tools, which ultimately originates from the sense of the hand as a tool. It is tempting to conflate pointing with forms of behaviour that are widely distributed through the animal kingdom and which seem to involve communication through display of part of the body. But this would be mistaken. Unlike these other communicative modes of bodily display, pointing is discretionary, and, being conventional, has to be learned. (Humans, by the way, are the only animals who explicitly teach their young: who demonstrate and point out things to their offspring.) This sense of a piece of one’s body as an object, as a sign, and as a means of signification which will focus the attention of another on something or other is remarkable, and says a lot about our complex consciousness of our bodies. But utilising one’s body in this self-conscious way is built on something else: the sense of others as self-conscious creatures like one’s self.
My pointing something out to you is a request for joint visual attention to the same object. It is based on a highly explicit general sense of the kind of creature you are: unlike other creatures, (most) humans have an unequivocal sense that others have minds. On top of this, there is a specific sense of your knowledge being defective compared with mine, based on my observation of your (literal) point of view. We are reminded just how remarkable this is when we encounter human beings who lack this sense: people with autism who have no integrated sense of themselves, and no sense of other’s sense of themselves. A poignant early sign of autism is the failure to point – a gesture which usually appears towards the end of the first year of life, before the emergence of language. Pointing, in short, is a potent testimony to the infant’s sense (again unique to human beings) of living in a shared, common world, a public reality, and of its communicative urge.
There’s quite a bit more to the essay. Recommended. [ link ]
-Julie
