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- [00:04]
Whitney Lamley
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone.
- [00:27]
Lee Vincel
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- [01:00]
Whitney Lamley
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- [01:29]
Lee Vincel
More welcome to the New Books Network welcome to Peoples and Things where we explore human life with technology. I'm Lee Vincel. Is the human body technology? I've had people, especially students, ask me that over the years and usually after asking that question, they go on to have reveries like well, we use our hands just like we use tools, and we use our feet and legs just like we use skateboards, bicycles and cars and so on. Now I think this is a pretty good example of why trying to define the word technology gets us nowhere fast. And you may know that I think we are way better off just specifying that we are interested in how humans and other animals manipulate material in the world in order to achieve their ends. If we need a concept to act as our foundation, I think we can really do no better than psychologist James J. Gibson's notion of affordances, which leads us to focus on how a combination of physical things like gadgets, for instance, and knowledge open up possible courses of action. But there's also a fascinating topic to explore of how people have viewed humans as akin to technologies in various ways, and how they have created techniques for picturing and notating the human form over time. On that first topic, how people have pictured humans as technology like, we can think of Anson Rabbenbach's the Human Motor Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity. Johnny Bunning's very interesting dissertation. Maybe I should have him on titled Life as Investment how humans became capital, 1890 to 1980, as well as all kinds of reflections out of several fields on how the human mind mostly isn't like a computer when it comes to studying how people have created systems for accounting for and representing the human body. The best work I have encountered so far is the forthcoming book Making Movement, Modern Science, Politics and the Body in Motion by Whitney Lamley, an assistant professor in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute. A blurb describes the book as exploring how researchers use systems for recording human movement to navigate the relationship between mind and body, freedom and control, and the individual and the state. Whitney examines this theme by zeroing in on a form of bodily movement notation that started in the world of expressionist dance before diffusing out into all kinds of areas of culture, many of them unexpected and surprising. Now I must say that Whitney is one of these very annoying people who wrote a seminar, maybe as a first year graduate student and and then turned it into a successful and in some fields famous journal article. In Whitney's case, it is an article titled A Case in Romance and Regimentation at the New York City Ballet, which is a history of the ballet pointe shoe, in the article's words, as a technology of artistic production and bodily discipline. In this article and her forthcoming book, you can see Whitney using historical method to explore the world of dance, a world she was very much a part of as a youth. As you will hear, she has deep personal first person experience in this world, but then she uses the historian's tools and craft to examine it in fresh ways. In the interview we also talk about one of Whitney's new projects, which examines the history of ideas about memory being stored in the body, which is an idea you often hear, for example, in talk of trauma, like that famous book the Body Keeps the Score. I hope Whitney keeps going on that line of work. I'm really pumped about it. Whitney is one of these people, like some other guests on this show, who, when I have a chance to talk with her, I feel like I'm being taken on an adventure. I'm never sure where we're headed, but it is always somewhere fascinating, even beautiful. Does it get any better than that? It does not. Which is why I say to you folks, hey, get excited. Whitney, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
- [06:31]
Whitney Lamley
Thanks for having me, Lee.
- [06:33]
Lee Vincel
So you recently moved to the Pratt Institute and I Suspect not everyone will know what the Pratt Institute is. So can you just give a little introduction?
- [06:42]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, absolutely. So the Pratt Institute is actually a very old institute focused now on art and design. So students are coming from all over and actually studying a pretty wide range of things from painting and sculpture to industrial design and user interface. We also have a school of information, so it's a really interesting mix of students, but they're also getting a pretty significant liberal arts education. And so we have a couple of different interesting interdisciplinary departments. And so that's where I come in, teaching the history of science, technology and medicine to these future artists and designers.
- [07:31]
Lee Vincel
Very cool. Making Movement Modern is a neat book when you're in the process of building a spiel for it that you'll have to tell like strangers, if you're talking to just like strangers, maybe non academic strangers especially. What do you say the book's about and what were you trying to do with it?
- [07:50]
Whitney Lamley
I say generally that it's about human movement. So bodily movement I usually have to specify not the movement of people across places, but are the kind of physical movements we make every day and how in the 20th century a bunch of different groups of people, so scientists, politicians and just everyday people became interested in movement as an object of study, why they did so and what the results of that renewed interest were.
- [08:23]
Lee Vincel
That's very cool. And do I remember correctly that you're one of these annoying people who published like a highly regarded history article that started as like a seminar paper? Was it like a, was it even a first year seminar paper?
- [08:36]
Whitney Lamley
It is possible, yes. I, my, my first publication was in Technology and Culture and it was a history of the ballet pointe shoe through the lens of the history of technology. And that did come out of a first semester seminar paper. I took a wonderful course, a research seminar, the History of Technology with Ruth Schwartz Cowan, who encouraged us, as she does in her work, to think broadly about technology. I chose the subject in part because I have a background in ballet. I was a serious dancer for many years and I thought it would be interesting to apply the lens of the history of technology to something that is very rarely thought of within that frame. You know, it's this romantic object, little girls have it on their wall. But I said, what happens if we look at this as a tool that shapes people's bodies? That's a workplace technology. How can we situate the kind of aesthetic oeuvre of George Balanchine in particular in relationship to this tool? Yes, and I was very gratified that it took off and got some attention.
- [09:42]
Lee Vincel
Yes, it definitely did. A lot of people were talking about it and still do. One of the reasons I wanted to ask you about that early is that I wanted to talk a bit about your life and dance, which you talk about in the acknowledgments and elsewhere in the book. And so talk about the process for you of turning your kind of professional lens to this thing that you had really been deeply involved in for so much of your young life. What was it like? And what was the process of exploration was an obvious thing to do. Yeah, just talk to us about that.
- [10:18]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, it wasn't at all obvious to me. I had been a very serious dancer through high school. And then there comes a moment where you in general either go to university or pursue a career in dance. And I went to college. I continued dancing. I kind of took some undergraduate courses in dance history. I had a brief career in academic publishing. But when I came back to graduate school to a department of the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, it was not what I was planning to write about at all. I knew I had interests in the body, I had interest in gender. I had interest in representations of science and kind of art and design generally. But I really didn't think it would be dance. I came in interested, perhaps doing something in kind of the history of biology writ large. So it actually came out of this seminar paper called that. I started thinking about dance as one way into these other questions that interested me. Again, it was just supposed to be a one off. But as I was doing the research for the pointe shoe paper, I came across references to this system of notation. I knew a little bit about it from my past as a dancer, but really not much. But there are basically all these claims that it originated in dance, but it ended up in all of these other places in rope and anthropology and psychiatry, human resources management. And I thought, well, if this. If this in fact is true, it's absolutely fascinating. And looking at it would allow me to get to all these other questions. I'm interested about information about bodily control and about kind of, you know, embodiment politics and culture more generally.
- [12:15]
Lee Vincel
Yeah.
- [12:15]
Whitney Lamley
And so I started poking around and it just led me down the path. It turns out there was a. They're there and that's where I ended up.
- [12:24]
Lee Vincel
So. And tell us about. Is it. I think you've said it to me before, but I can't remember. How is it Laban notation or how is it. How is it pronounced?
- [12:33]
Whitney Lamley
It varies. It's Laban notation. I will say my own Midwestern accent does sometimes flatten it and there are different pronunciations, but usually laban notation. Okay. Yeah, so it's. It's originally called kinetography, but its name, which enters general use and it's actually what I'm talking about is a complex of notational systems that are all related to this early work of a guy named Rudolf Lavan, who's an avant garde choreographer and dancer working in Central Europe and then eventually in Weimar Germany, who comes up in 1928. He's really concerned with the ephemerality of dance. And so he wants to create a system for recording it in the same way that you would record music, to make it permanent and preservable. And so he comes up with this system. It's complicated, it's a little bit unwieldy, but people are really excited about it as a tool for preservation. Now, that's usually how it's been talked about in the history of dance, but part of my project was to see how this tool that is usually cast is just about preserving, is also becomes a tool in other realms for. For creating.
- [13:55]
Lee Vincel
Yeah, nice.
- [13:56]
Whitney Lamley
Creating different kinds of communities and futures.
- [13:58]
Lee Vincel
Cool. And we'll explore that, that big theme a bit more in a moment. I wanted to, like, one thing I wanted to ask you about. I thought it was neat how you kind of did a history of social scientists thinking about movement and you went back to like, Marcel Mouse and other people, like, where do you see this kind of, you know, in some ways, like, it's weird. Movement is so obviously an important part of human life, and yet it is also kind of shunted or not looked at. And so where did you find it in the past?
- [14:30]
Whitney Lamley
So I guess, yeah, I mean, it's true. Once you start looking, movement is everywhere. We're constantly moving and people have written about it in the past. So there are, you know, there are military manuals, there are guides for manners. I think any period in history you look at movement has been used as a, you know, a tool of self fashioning, of social differentiation, but it really hasn't been studied by historians very much at all. One of the things going back whenever I started this project, people would say, have you read Techniques of the Body by Marcel Moss? And I would say, absolutely. But, you know, that's a text from the early 20th century and that was kind of the reference point. So I find. I love that piece. I think it's just kind of beautifully and wonderfully descriptive. So I think of it as a model, but also as A primary source.
- [15:30]
Lee Vincel
That's right. Yeah.
- [15:31]
Whitney Lamley
Thinking about when was this moment that people did start to think about it. And even Malz says, you know, we should start to think about it. People. People seem to be doing it, but even he says it get relegated to this kind of realm of facts called miscellaneous. And so what I want to look at is the processes by which that changes. Though I think still, even today, people don't think about it very much as something that can't be studied.
- [16:03]
Lee Vincel
Yeah. One of the things. It's been a while since I can't remember if it's that mouse essay or another one related to it, but one of my favorite kind of philosophers of social science, Stephen Turner, had this bit about Maus reflecting on, like, how movement gets learned and talking about, like, movie theaters and, like, this way of walking that became really hip. And I think in France, which he hypothesized was them, like, young people learning it from a movie, basically, which I always just thought was an incredible kind of social science picture.
- [16:36]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, yeah. That is from that piece. And it's just. It's such a clear and, again, visceral example of how this kind of learning and transmission can occur.
- [16:47]
Lee Vincel
Yes. How cool. So, I mean, another thing that you do in the introduction is talk about how, to the degree that people do write about movement and the politics of movement, it's so often in kind of an industrial setting about kind of work, Taylorism and the kind of control of the body, which, you know, part of what the story of Laban and this, you know, system gets us is that it ends up in so many more varied places than that. So. Yeah, tell us a bit about, like, what broadening the kind of lens out kind of allows us to see.
- [17:29]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, absolutely. Well, so the other thing that people would mention when I told them I was working on this project was obviously Taylorism. It was the first thing they'd say, oh, so it's kind of industrial factory movement. And I would say, you know, yes, but it's much bigger than that. And I actually. I have a chapter specifically on the factory, though it's a very different iteration of Taylorism. And I actually resisted writing that chapter for a long time because I wanted to write a book that was. That was broader than the factory. But of course, it is still an important part of the story. I think, you know, historians of science and technology in particular, you know, we love the factory, we love the history of industrialization. These are incredibly important things for shaping modern life. I love Anson Rappenbach's book On the human motor. I mean, just like foundational work and thinking about this one very powerful mode of understanding the human body. But I think in focusing there, we've missed a lot. We miss the fact that not all 20th century bodily movement is about control, at least in this kind of very narrowly circumscribed way. There's always control, but it's not necessarily top down control by a factory manager. It's not only for the purposes of profit or efficiency. It actually functions in all these different ways, in these different projects of self fashioning, of making political communities. And so for me, looking at this technology that crosses all of these boundaries was a way of showing that very vividly and saying, well, what happens if we look elsewhere? Does movement in the 20th century look different? And the fact is there's, there is probably more movement outside of the factory than within it. So I think we miss out on if we just confine our setting.
- [19:36]
Lee Vincel
Yeah, you had this great line you write. The cultural historian Hillel Schwartz argued in a provocative 1992 essay that an entirely new kinesthetic centered around rhythm, wholeness, fluidity, in the belief in a direct connection between the inner self and the outward expression, emerged in decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century. And it connects to, you know, stuff, you know, that's in the book, but that you and I have also talked about and is related to your newer work on kind of like yoga, Alexander technique, all these kind of mystical strands that are a part of this movement stuff. So I mean that is a really a, you know, that's a whole other side to thinking about movement that's not so well replaced, presented in the kind of industrial picture.
- [20:19]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, exactly.
- [20:21]
Lee Vincel
Yeah, I was almost thinking about it. I mean, I think that I've been writing about this slowly in like the last year or so, but I've been writing about what I call like cultural pessimist technology criticism, which is, I use that term because it goes back to Germany. And like it's like culture pessimism in Germany, but it's like Otto Oswald Spengler, Nietzsche's in there, the Frankfurt School eventually. And it's this whole line of thinking that kind of industrialism is the downfall of culture. You know, it's like the decline of the west is attributable to this business and industry and technology. And I think that so often these movement studies have been caught up in that kind of critique of Taylorism, you know, and that as like kind of a very negative thing in our culture. And I think that, you know, an Irony is that, you know, there's a huge literature that has this kind of flavor to it, and it's like the cultural pessimists don't want to see themselves as a kind of romantic, often mystical stream that is a part of our culture too. I mean, they're. They're there in this stuff too, you know, and so I thought your book was. Just really brought that out nicely, that, you know, that it's kind of a very partial viewpoint we get on this stuff sometimes.
- [21:36]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, absolutely. Like, the reason we can see that this is a problematic way of controlling movement is because, you know, we ourselves are actually inhabiting. At least we can see a different way.
- [21:49]
Lee Vincel
Yeah, exactly.
- [21:50]
Whitney Lamley
Thinking about it, we can see a different world.
- [21:51]
Lee Vincel
Yeah, yeah. So. So tell us a bit. I'm sorry, is it Laban? Is that how you say Laban?
- [21:58]
Whitney Lamley
Laban.
- [21:58]
Lee Vincel
Laban. Say it one more time, Lavan. Okay, can you tell us a bit about him? And, you know, I would say, like, if you were introducing an undergraduate student you were hanging out with and liked to this guy, what would you say about him? Who was he and why did he come to develop this system?
- [22:19]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, so he's. He's an absolutely fascinating character. He's born in 1879 in the Austro Hungarian Empire. His father is a military general who eventually becomes the military governor of Bak and Herzegovina in his childhood. So he spends a lot of time moving around the Empire. His dad wants him to become. To go into the military. He sends him to military school. This doesn't work out too well for young Rudolph. He has a great kind of absurd, probably largely invented autobiography where he talks about this. He says he got kicked out of military school for shooting his superior officer's cap off his head with a revolver.
- [23:10]
Lee Vincel
Sounds funny.
- [23:11]
Whitney Lamley
I think this is unlikely. But anyway, he leaves. He becomes an artist. He participates in all of these interesting artistic currents kind of buffeting Central Europe. But eventually he gets particularly interested in dance. He becomes an important figure in what's often known as the new German Expressionism. It's a pretty diverse kind of movement, but it's basically anti. Ballet is the easiest way to think about it. So it's about personal expression, it's about groundedness, it's about tackling difficult political subjects, about freedom. So he becomes a leader in this movement and then eventually gets interested in writing movement down, in part because there's no vocabulary for this new kind of movement. Ballet is a lexicon. It has vocabulary. It's still hard to preserve. But this new kind of modern dance is in some ways even harder. And so he says, what can we do? We'll come up with this elaborate system of lines and shapes and shading so that we can write dance down and keep it forever. The reasons why he does this, there are lots of them. The first is that he's trying in part just to make dance respectable. Music, he says, has a place in the university. People care about it. Dance has always been thought of, at least in the west, broadly construed as something a little bit primitive. It's often feminized, it's often racialized. And so it seems like making it written is one way of that and making it more academically and culturally respectable. But the other reason he's interested in writing down movement, and this is where I think the real important thing lies, is that he's also been reading a lot of 9th, 20th century physiology and physics. And he has a theory of the body and the mind in which the kind of external bodily movements exert a powerful influence on the mind and the personality. He believes that by carefully controlling the movements of the body, you can control how the person feels, how they relate to others. From the beginning, for him, this is a very political project, in particular, because he's interested not just in movements that occur alone, but in movements that occur in groups. And so he very quickly starts using the notation not to record dances that already exist, but to create new forms of movement, particularly movement that's performed in groups, that he hopes will remedy some of the problems, you know, then plaguing Weimar Germany. It will create new sense of community. It will free people from the kind of feeling downtrodden, from the excessive control of exactly the factory. It will allow them to relate to one another also. This, as did many kind of initially ostensibly left wing projects in the Weimar era, turns rightward. He gets interested in not just creating community, but creating Aryan community in the ways in which certain movements can be racialized. And so to get back to your original question with an undergraduate, I often say, Rudolf Lavan was the Nazi minister, right? And they often, you know, step back and kind of laugh and say, I didn't know such a position existed. But this is eventually the position he moves into in the 1930s. And so I kind of. I follow the story of this notation in these couple of different political contexts.
- [27:13]
Lee Vincel
That's great. And I think the way you described it there, you can see these kind of romantic, quasi mystical ideas hanging in the background of so much of this, which. And it was a part of the Nazi movement itself. I mean, George Moss has this great book, the Intellectual Origins of Nazism or whatever it's called, that really gets at exactly this issue. So then you do have a chapter on the kind of industrial start of the story. So he moves to the UK and ends up involved in factory work. Right. And yet this kind of romantic idealism is very much a part of what he and his collaborator are trying to do. So tell us a bit about that story, like how he ends up there. And you know, it's a different kind of flavor than Taylorism. Is that fair?
- [28:04]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, absolutely. So in many ways it's surprising that he ends up where he does. He's a, you know, a relatively high ranking member of the Nazi government. He eventually, essentially gets fired. Many of his followers say it's because he's refusing to toe the party line. But really he's mostly bad at his job.
- [28:28]
Lee Vincel
You told me this before.
- [28:29]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, ineptitude, ineptitude. He's terrible at managing budgets, constantly getting sick and, you know, taking a six week vacation. There are also, of course, as there were in Germany in this time, lots of internecine fights within. And so, you know, for complicated reasons I don't go into, he gets pushed out of his job, he tries to get back into the party's good graces, but when it's clear that this isn't going to happen, he leaves the country and goes to England where he finds a spot at Dartington Hall. There's actually this very interesting progressive institution that's supposed a kind of a new kind of school that merges artistic expression kind of work in the outdoors. It attracts a lot of, you know, children of famous British progressives. Aldous Huxley gives lectures there. Ernst Freud sends his kid. Babin ends up there in part because one of his former students becomes one of the members of the kind of resident dance company. So he gets Laban a place and Laban gets interested in the working procedures because the children at the school are also being asked to work in basically like a working farm and they have some light industry. So he begins using the notation system to track working movements. He eventually hooks up with One of the UK's first industrial consultants, this guy named FC Lawrence, who is interested in Taylorist or Gilbrethian methods for control, but is uncomfortable with them. He says this seems like it's suppressing the whole person a little bit too much. Is there any way we can have both efficiency but something that's better for workers? And Laban says, of course, he says, I understand how movement affects the mind and the Spirit. And so we're going to come up with movements for workers that are both maximally efficient and spiritually fulfilling. That if we do this right, the process of working on an assembly line is going to be something much more akin to the process of dancing or the processes of, like, going to church. It will become ritualized, it will kind of elevate the soul, and thereby we will have solved all the contradictions and all the problems of modern capitalism. We can continue to have no big structural change. We can have maximal production for the war effort. But we don't have to have all of these dissatisfied workers who may be agitating. We won't have them forming unions. They will just kind of be inherently happy. So it's a Taylorish story, but one with a very different twist and very different aims.
- [31:46]
Lee Vincel
Yep. So I want you to tell us a bit about the Dance Notation Bureau. And just, you know, before we get there, your book, parts of your book reminded me of Beth Linker's slouch. And I know that she was on your dissertation committee. Is that right?
- [32:05]
Whitney Lamley
She was, yeah.
- [32:06]
Lee Vincel
So that my interview with Beth will come out before yours. And it just. The structure that reminded me is just finding these following an object and then finding it in all these different worlds, which is just a structure, a book structure, I love, I think. And so, you know, she has this beautiful thing, the American Posture League, which was formed in 1914, which is just like, it's too great. And I've had a similar kind of reaction when you started writing about the Dance Notation Bureau, which is just like, I needed that phrase to exist in my life, I think. Yeah. So tell us a bit about this thing, what it was, how it came to be and what it got up to.
- [32:50]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah. So I actually started my research with the Dance Notation Bureau.
- [32:54]
Lee Vincel
That makes sense to me.
- [32:56]
Whitney Lamley
They were in New York. They actually still exist. They're still functioning. They were founded in 1940. And so they became a central location for diffusing Laban based technologies of movement recording in the United States. And so I knew this. I reached out to them, I said, do you have any archives that I could look at? And they said, no, but we do have old file cabinets and your walls. Look around.
- [33:25]
Lee Vincel
That is such hot language for a historian.
- [33:28]
Whitney Lamley
And I said, terrific, I'm getting on the next train. And they were really generous with, with, you know, just letting me look through their files and get a sense of their history and all of these places that they touched and that the notation touched. But. But the short version is they were founded in 1940 by a group of four women, led by a woman named Ann Hutchinson Guest, who had been a dancer, who had trained a bit with Laban at the Darlington Hall School, but ended up back in the US and decided it was really important to disseminate this system beyond Europe. And so she. And there are these incredibly interesting group of women. I see them very much as akin to, you know, these other kind of women, information workers of the early mid 20th century, like typo typists, stenographers, computers and they. Computers, exactly. And a lot of them are coming from, you know, other kinds. Some. Many of them are dancers, but they also have experience in information work. And so they decide they are going to. They're really interested in the system for its. What they call its objectivity. That this is something they start moving away from some of the mystical language. It's still there, but they say, this is wonderful. We can record dance, actually, we can record all kinds of movement. And this can be. They call it a new Esperanto, an objective language that can be used across the world that is scientific. And they too are trying to craft a new identity for dance as something modern and scientific. They're using the kind of masculinity of this dance notation system to make a place for themselves in the world of dance, which is, you know, at its highest level, still very male dominated. And so their initial work is about just, you know, writing, writing down dances. They record the dances of a lot of major figures, George Balanchine, Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham. A lot of these huge leading lights in American dance have their pieces notated.
- [35:59]
Lee Vincel
And was that a fee for service or were they just doing it as like. Yeah, how did it work?
- [36:05]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, so there was a fee for service. They're contracted to do this. It's actually quite a bit of money. And one of the reasons why, because it's quite a bit of labor. And so one of the reasons why it's these kind of big, important choreographers and companies having their work notated is they're the ones who can afford. Can take hundreds of hours to notate a 20 minute piece of dance and then to have it, to write it out, to recopy it. They sometimes refer to themselves as monks. And it really is this tradition of the scriptorium. So they are paying to have it notated. Eventually. One of the impulses for having it notated is that notation is also central to making dance, something that's copyrightable in the United States. So in the early 1950s, a bunch of the women from the Dance Notation Bureau and a bunch of the choreographers whose work they've notated go to the copyright bureau and petition to have dance for the first time included as something you can copyright. And you know, this is a, you know, a slow process, but they eventually succeed. Attempts in the past had failed in part because the copyright bureau said, well, what are we going to copyright? Like, there's nothing. What do we put in our files?
- [37:38]
Lee Vincel
Yep.
- [37:40]
Whitney Lamley
So they succeeded and that allows these choreographers to control the dissemination of their work and make money off of it.
- [37:48]
Lee Vincel
That's fascinating. Yeah. And I mean, I think that's something, you know, we could have touched on or I should have brought up with the introduction too, is just how your story fits into this kind of broader literature as we have on kind of modernization and standardization and why you might want that to happen in various spaces. Right.
- [38:06]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, with.
- [38:07]
Lee Vincel
With IP being like a clear example. Yeah. So I think the, the kind of industrial movement stuff prov. Is a very handy kind of foil for you to kind of prod at the literatures that exist. And another way that it is kind of useful is that so much of that is really about the factory heavy industry and not so much like white collar work, as if, like, movement wasn't also like, being observed and thought about in those worlds. And, and so you find this system getting into like the worlds of consulting, which is fascinating. And then the, you know, the part that really blew me away is how it became connected to like the whole idea of body language, which is a phrase we have in our vocabulary. But I think not very many people have thought about, like, where does that come from and what was it caught up in? So tell us a bit about how that connection gets made and how this kind of thing kind of moves into the world of white collar work.
- [39:05]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah. So the move into white collar work is largely spearheaded by a guy named Warren Lamb, who is a student of Laban and worked with Laban and Lawrence in industrial consulting. He begins to think, however, that movement is not just useful to kind of control people's bodies and mental states, but that if we look at it, it can be a reflection of what's going on inside. And he thinks that this is going to be. This could be really useful for basically personality testing and fitting people to the right jobs. And so he creates a system, it changes its name, but I'll refer to it here as movement pattern analysis that he sells to a bunch of huge corporations. Kodak, Monsanto, bp, IBM, General Electric. General. Yeah, yeah. So it, you know, a Lot of places are eager to adopt it. This is of course a moment where personality testing more generally is also ascendant. But the way it works is that he says, you know, you, you interview a potential candidate for a job, you're talking to them, or ideally in fact someone else is talking to them. But their, their verbal answers don't matter at all. You have a notator sitting in the middle corner of room notating every significant body movement they make. And after that's done, they create a profile and that's the only thing that counts. And he says again, this is a way of making sure. He says people can game personality tests, they can kind of fake enthusiasm, but the only thing you can't alter are your unconscious bodily movements. And so it's a way of just kind of seeing through the facade.
- [40:59]
Lee Vincel
Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah. And I have a friend and colleague here at Virginia Tech who actually builds AI interviewing tools and they have retried these kinds of things in recent years with AI. And it actually, for him, I mean, I'm sure this is the kind of thing that goes back and forth all the time, but he and his near network of people I think have decided that the physical stuff is worthless basically for this kind of stuff. But it's just interesting because I'm sure in 10 years it'll be the opposite. Someone will have some kind of new phrenological interview based tool. So I don't know.
- [41:39]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, I know. I mean I learned about some of these platforms talking to former students of mine who said, yeah, it's, it's horrifying. And they, they were evaluating things like body language, facial movement, particularly this company Hirevue. They actually were sued to stop using it.
- [41:59]
Lee Vincel
Right.
- [42:00]
Whitney Lamley
In 2021. But, but it's, it still comes up in, in lots of places and it's still very, it's very tempting.
- [42:07]
Lee Vincel
Yeah.
- [42:08]
Whitney Lamley
Especially when it, you know, when it can be automated.
- [42:12]
Lee Vincel
Yeah, no, totally. I mean, if only. Right. But my friend Lewis says it doesn't work, so we'll see. I mean these things keep coming back around. As I kind of said, another kind of fascinating story I really liked is how this, and it totally made sense to me of how this system ends up in kind of like folklore studies and particularly with Alan Lomax. And is it Choreometrics is the system he's working with. So I mean again, what you do so beautifully is show how this kind of standardized system gets kind of picked up in all these different places. So what was it appealing to it about it to folklorists yeah.
- [42:53]
Whitney Lamley
So people probably know Alan Lomax for his work with folk music, just a towering figure in that field. But very few people know that he became interested, very interested in dance in the 1960s and actually spent. Spent a huge amount of his time trying in part to do what he did with folk music, with dance, so just kind of recover and capture movement. But he became incredibly ambitious. And what he wanted to do with choreometrics was to get at least one sample of dance from literally every cultural group on the planet.
- [43:32]
Lee Vincel
So him.
- [43:33]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, yeah, it's just to analyze all of them using techniques derived from Laban's notation systems. And he was assisted by two Laban trained notators, Irmgaard Bartinius and Forrestine Paulet, and then used that information to do a couple of things. First to kind of advance theories about the relationship between movement and climate, or movement and systems of labor or production, and then to kind of disseminate the movement back to the public. He was really worried about the graying of culture, and he was worried about the graying of movement culture. So this homogenization of movement across the globe, which he thought was one. Both. Both bad for literal cultural survival because he thinks you need to learn these techniques of movement that are appropriate to the place where you live and also just a bad thing for, you know, multicultural diversity and the planet. So. And he's. He's actually worried about the thing that most writes about when he says these French nurses are suddenly moving like Americans because they're watching movies.
- [44:48]
Lee Vincel
Yep, yep, yep.
- [44:49]
Whitney Lamley
And so Lomax thinks that by. By gathering all of this, by analyzing it, and then by disseminating back into the public through films or he, he really wants to publish this, this massive, essentially atlas of movement that would teach people also to analyze movements themselves. So you would become a movement analyst. You would kind of walk down the street, you would see this diversity, you would come to appreciate it, and you would kind of reorient your perceptual apparatus to understand different kinds of movement. So very ambitious. It doesn't entirely come to pass. He makes some films that do get, you know, widely seen, his book project, because he keeps submitting things that are 1200 pages long with lots and lots of images. And I have, so I looked so many articles, you know, letters in the archives of publishers just saying, you know, it's great, but we just, we. Yeah, we can't do it.
- [45:52]
Lee Vincel
Right. Even academic presses wouldn't go for it. Huh?
- [45:56]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, they just said, we don't have the money, Alan.
- [46:00]
Lee Vincel
It's oh man, it's a bad scene when academic presses won't publish your thing says something. So in your epilogue, you kind of, you go from the seventies to the present and kind of look at kind of different strands of where this has gone. But one of them is that computer scientists end up interested in it and then do I have it right that it ends up in kind of animation systems we have today? Like, how does that play out?
- [46:28]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, so one of the ways I think about the book as a whole is as a history of information and a history of information technology. As it turns out, notation is good for computing and robotics and animation in part because of the, in part because it's flattened things. And so actually, particularly in the 1970s, computer scientists who are interested in replicating movement on the screen get interested in labanotation because it actually removes a lot of the unnecessary information, like the computer memory system, basically something like a video. So it's one of these flattening technologies. It's an immutable mobile. It's already basically it's a ready made system that has already broken the body up into its component parts. It's basically always been kind of digital. It's easily adapted to the computer. And so people start experimenting with it. IBM and the Dance Notation Bureau have contact in the early 1970s. They end up doing not a computer program but a typewriter for the notation. But this kind of starts these ties. And so there are a number of people who get interested again as a system that's easily adapted to the computer, where the body is a set of interacting parts that can be individually specified. You can specify directions and angle. You can also, through this related system of Laban Movement analysis, specify kinds of movement. So Laban had an idea, for example, that a rising posture and kind of a body moving outward is symptomatic of someone experiencing, say, pride. Warren Lamb takes this up in his evaluations of middle managers in the 1960s. And then in the 1980s and 90s and even today, computer scientists take this up and they basically write an algorithm for this kind of movement and just adapt, just kind of adopt wholesale. Essentially Laban's idea of what it means. So animators say, well, how are we going to create these background characters? We want them to look afraid, we want them to look excited. They say, here's a system that already exists that tells us that these movements are what excited looks like, these movements are what fearful looks like. They program it in. One of my favorite recent projects is actually a bunch of engineers and I believe Canada Wanted to program just a quadrotor drone to evoke emotions so it has no human form, no face. And they say, how can we just use these movement dynamics to make it look friendly or aggressive? And they, again, rely wholesale on this blend of ideas that actually comes from this weird blend of German romanticism and mysticism and 19th century physiology and, you know, politics and kind of just adopt it.
- [50:12]
Lee Vincel
That's amazing. So I wanted to kind of, you know, now that we've kind of stepped through most of the structure of the book, and listeners should know that there's at least one chapter I kind of passed over just for the sake of time. But I wanted to hear you kind of talk through how you think about the politics of this thing. Because in part, what you're. As we've already discussed, you're going beyond the factory, beyond industry as the site of it. And you're like, this stuff is always political in one way or another. Right. Including. Because the reason it's. It diffuses out is because it's useful. It's seen as useful to people who have different things they want to accomplish in the world. So kind of. Yeah, just kind of tell us how you end up thinking about the politics of this system when we move beyond just industrialism.
- [51:03]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah. So in certain ways, the politics of it change over time. I think, for example, Rudolf Laban's politics when he's working for the Nazis are very different from Alan Lomax's, though they do share a sense that the body really matters. And that by paying attention to the body, by deciding which kinds of movements are normal and which are abnormal, that we are making a decision about who belongs to our political community. So that's part of it. I think what ties all of these different groups together and why they find it also appealing is it actually seems to provide a really useful fusion of control and release. So because of all of movement's associations with freedom, with the primitive, with the feminine, with the romantic, you're telling people that you can free your move. Even the corporate setting. Warren Lamb is saying, if you find the thing that is right for your body, you will love your boring office job. If you find the thing that is right for you. Working in a factory, the factory will become a dance.
- [52:27]
Lee Vincel
Yeah, it's this. You talked about expressionism as the movement. It's like this very deep notion of expression, expression as freedom that's in our culture and goes back to that period. Yeah, yeah.
- [52:40]
Whitney Lamley
And so for people feeling, yeah, in many ways, like oppressed by these increasingly bureaucratic systems, by Industrialization by a feeling of control and a lack of space to express themselves. It's incredibly appealing. At the same time, though, and this is where the notation itself is so important. The notation itself makes sure that that expression is still controlled and channeled and used for something like it's still being used to make productive factories or productive white collar employees. It's still being used to copyright to control in the German context. You know, it's. Laban talks about it as, you know, we're freeing these streams of energy. We're going to have these group, wonderful, group communal experiences. And then he says, but the wonderful thing is it's not just free. And he says, you know, imagine, you know, if free movement is powerful, how much more powerful is the measured gesture? And he says again and again, we wouldn't do any of this without notation because without it, movement is too powerful. But with it we can essentially have our cake and eat it too. We can have self expression and control. And I think that's where the politics of it really emerge.
- [54:14]
Lee Vincel
Yeah, that's a kind of delicious tension there. It reminds me of our mutual colleague and friend Henry Cowles talking about behaviorism and how it's become evolved in like child rearing and animal, you know, working with dogs and stuff in ways that we totally don't understand. And this is kind of like that tension that we want to use it, but we're also kind of afraid of it. And you know, where we end up in that is always kind of delicious in that way. And then I think, you know, I think the way you just talked through, I mean, well, I want to ask you about what you're onto next. And if I think that what you're onto next is very related to what you were just talking about, if you're still working on the same thing and if I remember correctly, what you've been looking at is kind of Western traditions in the 20th century, maybe back to 19. Can you tell us the timeline about kind of like the relationship between kind of stress and the body and trauma and all these things? Right. Do I have that right?
- [55:12]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the next project, which is in the process of coming into being, takes a while, buddy.
- [55:19]
Lee Vincel
It's taken me like four years, so strap in.
- [55:23]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, is about. I think that the broadest gloss is like again, ideas in the Western tradition about feelings, memories being embedded in the body or accessible through the body in places other than the brain. So it's going to bring together again a bunch of a few different case studies. One I've been working on is the history of the technique of progressive relaxation, which some viewers may be familiar with. I was actually taught as a kid it's just kind of the tensing and relaxing of various parts of your body. But it has this kind of fascinating history that is about the treatment of trauma, that is about the ways in which it's actually employed by the US Navy for a number of years to teach aviators in particular, how to develop a new kind of bodily habitus, how to control themselves, how to, like, you know, accesses. Access their emotions, but from a physical place. So I'm working a bit on that. I'm working on ideas about chemical memory and the kind of worm biologist James McConnell, who theorized that memories could be transmitted through worm cannibalism.
- [56:53]
Lee Vincel
Okay. Yeah.
- [56:54]
Whitney Lamley
And becomes a really interesting cultural figure as a target of the Unabomber. So, again, thinking of, like, what are the political stakes of thinking about memory in the body? And then another way I pitch it is essentially like a more. A longer, more serious history of Bethel van der Kolk's the Body Keeps the Score, which I think a lot of people are familiar with. But say, where does this come from? And how does it connect to other attempts in the west scientific community to make sense of this kind of body, mind, emotion, connection over the past 80.
- [57:34]
Lee Vincel
Years, as we've talked about. I mean, I travel in these kind of meditation and spirituality circles. Where that book is is fucking huge. But so often the claim that's made around it is like, of its novelty, as if this is like.
- [57:48]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah.
- [57:48]
Lee Vincel
And you're saying it's. I mean, all things are novel in some ways, but you're saying there's a much deeper tradition here that this is kind of coming out of, huh?
- [57:57]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, absolutely. And I address it a little bit in the first book in the chapter we didn't talk about. About movement therapy. And I mention that in part because over the weekend, I was actually at an event for the opening of a new archive at the Library of Congress for one of these movement therapists.
- [58:16]
Lee Vincel
Cool.
- [58:17]
Whitney Lamley
And so there are a bunch of kind of short talks by some of her students, in fact. And this is what the students were saying. They were saying, everybody knows Bessel van der Kolk, but nobody knows Judith Kestenberg, and no one knows this much larger, longer traditional. And so that's one of the things I'm hoping to get at.
- [58:38]
Lee Vincel
That's great. I'm really looking forward to it. I think it sounds fascinating. And actually, I think this angle you're taking has, I think, the potential to really appeal to all these kind of woo woo worlds that I travel in. I'm not making fun of it as an outsider where this stuff is popular. I think that you'll show them that this has been a part of Western traditions for much longer than they might so well thank you so much for coming on, Whitney. This has been a real blast as I knew it would be.
- [59:07]
Whitney Lamley
Yeah, thank you Lee. It's been great.
- [59:16]
Lee Vincel
I hope you enjoyed this episode of our podcast. You can reach us with questions, comments and suggestions@leevinselmail.com or by following me on Twitter tsnews or on YouTube. Peoples things our podcast is distributed by the New Books Network, the leading platform for academic podcasts. So that you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Peoples and Things, like most things in this world, depends on the work of many people. I want to thank my brother Jake Vincl for writing the music for the show. I want to thank my buddy Juliana Castro for designing the logos for the podcast. You can check out her work at julianacastro co. Joe Fort is the producer for the podcast and Mandy Lam is the Production assistant. This podcast and other Peoples and Things programming are produced in affiliation with Virginia Tech Publishing and supported by the center for Humanities and the University Libraries at Virginia Tech. For information about other podcasts from Virginia Tech publishing, visit publishing Vt.edu. for the entire Peoples and Things team, I am Lee Vincel and most importantly, I want to thank you for listening. Thanks Sam.
- [61:15]
Whitney Lamley
Foreign.
- [61:28]
Lee Vincel
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