Understanding a literary text or a work of art depends to a large extent on our ability to harness our kinesic intelligence. Kinesic intelligence is the faculty that enables us to elaborate motor images and kinesic narratives to understand an action verb or movement trope, the description of a gesture or sensorimotor event.
In real-life situations, we recognize both similarities and nuances between postures and gestures. These nuances are effectively perceived through dynamic cognitive acts based on embodied cognition. One facet of this bodily knowledge is kinesic intelligence, by which we generate meaning from perceived movements.
Neuronal activation of motor areas enables the extremely rapid elaboration of a visuomotor configuration, leading to our understanding of movements. This act of motor cognition is not linguistic. It can, of course, rapidly lead to conceptualization and verbalization. But this verbalization takes place at a later stage, on the basis of the act of motor cognition.
What's more, kinesic events can be translated into words, and in variable ways, but they are accompanied by certain determining parameters that language obliterates. What interests me is the hiatus that exists between non-language narration, induced by acts of motor cognition, and language narration, particularly literary fiction, which in some cases succeeds in compensating for the deficiencies of language in other ways.
Certain works of art induce in the viewer the anticipation of movement andperceptual simulations that are essential to understanding the image. These works call on a kinesthetic and visuomotor memory that enables us to semantize particular gestures or differentiate between postures that are almost identical. Similarly, certain literary texts have the narratological specificity of basing their meaning on the demanding elaboration of sensorimotor perceptual simulations, enabling the capture of fine kinesic nuances.
