Notes on the shrug
Dear reader,
I shall move homes. Soon. Till then, here goes.
Dear reader,
I hope you never have days when you totter in that half world of sleep and awakening, listing all those things that annoy you about life. It is a long list, and making that list itself is annoying, and so in a sort of self-referential loop, which even Douglas Hofstadter would approve, it unspools seemingly without a halt condition, into the early hours of the morning till you discover that changing your position on the bed does affect your brain’s chatter, for now you are wondering why did you sleep such that your ear folded against your head and now that cartilage is shouting that it should not be mistaken for a flap.
In the meanwhile, I had spent a lot of time thinking about a particular word. I am not sure how this word translates into other languages, such as Hindi and Tamil, which makes me wonder if the ‘shrug’ is a, pardon the thoroughly uninformed and perhaps useless speculation, a Western import. The shrug, or the lift-drop of the shoulders according to a search means ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Don’t care’, but I think the definition is not quite there yet.
Just take the act of lifting your shoulders and letting go; try it, it is a sort of warm-up exercise, which, my yoga teacher usually follows up by rounding your shoulders and rotating it. It is meant to remind you that this muscle is there, tracing a boat between your head and your arms, it needs to move, and in doing so, you let something afloat.
A shrug, I think, is about letting go. It signals that you want out, you want to be let free of expectations of meeting rituals of conversations and the appropriate steps of social dances. Imagine this — you want to signal that you don’t wish to participate in a conversation, and if you explain that, you will end up participating in the conversation, exactly what you wanted to avoid in the first place, which turns into another self-referential loop, and the halting condition here is the wordless shrug.
Image from Open Access collection of Art Institute Chicago: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/81632/male-nude-walking-to-left-carrying-burden-on-his-shoulders
A shrug is less of a ‘I don’t know’, more of a ‘I don’t care if I know, and moreover, I don’t care enough to find out, can I go back to doing the utterly pointless thing I was doing before this whole thing started?’ sentiment. A shrug is not loud. It is not a protest, with your upraised shoulders raising a placard of non-conformity. You don’t even raise your shoulders fully; it s a quick up-down signal. A shrug is perhaps the gestural equivalent of a murmur; you wish to say something without committing enough air to it.
Think of all the people who use the shrug a lot; teenagers, adults who wish to imitate teenagers, old people who decide they are now teenagers. There is a subtle power dynamic that comes into play. The shrug needs an audience; it is a joint action, the way Herbert Clarke described language (unfortunately, these pieces of information get tucked away as references, you can ignore the link without worrying). We have spoken of how the shrug is not a protest, but it is still defiance, a murmur of a demur. The non-commital aspect of the shrug is essential. It is neither I don’t know, or I don’t care, but ‘I don’t want to say’, and any refusal establishes a power dynamic — on the one hand there is someone who wishes for the action, and on the other, someone who refuses. (Perhaps, not refusal, as the shrug signposts ambivalence.) The person doing the shrug is signaling that they are disinterested, and if the immovable object meets an external force, who knows what laws come in to play. The person receiving the shrug could push back, a verbal equivalent of shaking those shoulders to rouse the other person. Or the other person could grumpily walk away; grudgingly. Or the other person could remain unmoved, pretend to be Buddha, change their position on the bed, and go back to sleep.