Dans cet hommage à Dominique Boutet et à l’approche kinésiologique qu’il a fondée, Aliyah Morgenstern tente de faire résonner ses souvenirs des duos scientifiques qu’ils ont joué ensemble avec l’œuvre écrite de ce partenaire scientifique hors du commun rassemblée dans les articles publiés et le document de synthèse d’Habilitation (Boutet, 2018). Cette approche fondée sur une connaissance intime de la biomécanique du corps humain est centrée sur le rôle structurant du corps dans les gestes (et les langues signées). L’article présente les fondements de l’approche, une description synoptique et deux exemples d’application. Il porte essentiellement sur l’analyse des gestes interactionnels produits en conversation qui ont fait l’objet de plusieurs travaux collectifs menés en France et en Russie.
In this tribute to Dominique Boutet and the kinesiological approach he founded, Aliyah Morgenstern tries to make her memories of the scientific duets they played together resonate with the written work of this extraordinary scientific partner, gathered in his published articles and his habilitation document (Boutet, 2018). This approach based on an intimate knowledge of the biomechanics of the human body is centered on the structuring role of the body in gestures (and signed languages). The article presents the foundations of the approach, a synoptic description and two examples of application. It mainly relates to the analysis of interactive gestures produced in conversation which have been the subject of several collective studies carried out in France and Russia.The originality of the kinesiological approach (from the Greek kinësis, movement and logos, speech, science) lies in the double revolution that it allows us to operate: on the one hand gesture is not simply an appendix of speech; on the other hand, it is shaped by bodily physiology. The approach is based on the movements of the human body analyzed from a biomechanical point of view. The meaning of our gestural productions is the produce of our body, as it is naturally articulated, imprinted as it is by our past experiences. The analysis of "co-verbal" gestures (but we could also describe verbal production as being co-gestural) which we will call expressive and interactional, is often "contaminated" (Boutet, 2010: 77) by co-occurring speech. It is however important to make multimodal or plurisemiotic analyses without being influenced by the linearity of the verbal flow. Indeed, gestures are compositional. We do not only refer to its co-articulation with speech (in the case of subjects producing a vocal language and without speaking of signed productions, which are themselves compositional), nor even to its co-articulation with gaze, facial expressions, postures, but to the fact that each gesture produced with one of the upper limbs is potentially composed of movements of the shoulder, arms, forearms, hands, fingers and that this is often coordinated with the movements of the other upper limb. There is therefore a fine and complex orchestration to study in gestures which opens onto a multilinear path of meaning (Boutet, 2010: 77). In order to capture the entirety of this dynamic orchestration, we need to understand that the body does not only transport gesture, it informs it. More than a support, it is a substrate (Boutet & Cuxac, 2008) (Boutet, 2010: 78).The kinesiological approach to gesture is formal (the form of gestures shapes their meaning or function). It allows us to integrate gestures into what we call language and to capture how the body structures our language practices. The materiality of the body has the potential to shape our environment, our tools, our objects, the spaces we inhabit (Leroi-Gourhan, 1993). For Boutet (2018), the structuring of these artefacts is closely linked to praxic gestures, themselves in full continuity with symbolic gestures. Referents are not considered to be mainly associated with gestures through the human capacity to build analogies, but their meaning is directly shaped by the gestures produced and their dynamics. Gestural units are described on the basis of their formal characteristics and physiological constraints rather than their imagistic iconicity.Boutet’s work mostly focused on the upper limbs for which several segments can be set in motion during a gestural excursion. Movement and flow are at the core of the kinesiological approach. The flow links one segment to the next and either spreads from the shoulder to the fingertips, and is called "proximal-distal", or it spreads from the hands to the shoulders, and it is called "distal-proximal". If the movement is only localized in one segment of the body (the hand, the shoulder, the head ...), then there will be no apparent flow. In addition, the inertias of each segment must be taken into account in the analysis of gestures and the proximal-distal flow will be impacted by gravity and will therefore require less energy than the distal-proximal flow for which it will be necessary to go against gravity.Thanks to a method that combines manual corpus annotations, motion capture and perception tests, Boutet analyzes and isolates gestures that seem formally very similar and seeks to clarify a network of relationships that are based on the constraints and affordances of the body and that inform their semantic links.By applying a kinesiological approach and by combining the possibilities offered by new technologies and the collective skills of multidisciplinary teams of researchers, it will be possible to put movement at the heart of our analyses of gestures and to change paradigm.Boutet responded in his own way to the call launched in 1998 by Cornelia Müller to make gestural studies a discipline in its own right. In his research, he combined a wide variety of scientific and artistic domains which put the body at the center of their analysis. By bringing together several communities and disciplines and by recreating the synergies that he was able to form on his own, we hope to be able to implement his research program collectively.
