A moral panic is afoot in contemporary France surrounding what place French-Muslim youth hold within the national identity. The French state, in particular, is actively engaged in regimenting what it means to be a young Muslim person from France. This article examines how, during Marseille’s year (2013) as the European Capital of Culture, the municipal government and the local branch of the Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale spearheaded several initiatives, a number of which focused on Arabic-language education, with the aim of transforming French-Muslim youth from Marseille’s housing projects into secular, upwardly mobile individuals. Ethnographic inquiry with the youth targeted by such “linguistic gentrification” programs reveals that the state’s reimagining of them in these terms remained largely at odds with how they themselves understood their identities. This article, as such, illustrates the analytical importance of attending to people’s uptake when evaluating the eventual scope of top-down discourses and projects, while also offering an example of how the label “Mediterranean” functions as a spatiotemporal shifter, deployed by different groups to activate alternative accounts of history, the present, and the future.
{"title":"Not Citizens of a Classical Mediterranean: Muslim Youth from Marseille Elude a Linguistic Gentrification by the French State","authors":"C. Evers","doi":"10.1086/696933","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/696933","url":null,"abstract":"A moral panic is afoot in contemporary France surrounding what place French-Muslim youth hold within the national identity. The French state, in particular, is actively engaged in regimenting what it means to be a young Muslim person from France. This article examines how, during Marseille’s year (2013) as the European Capital of Culture, the municipal government and the local branch of the Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale spearheaded several initiatives, a number of which focused on Arabic-language education, with the aim of transforming French-Muslim youth from Marseille’s housing projects into secular, upwardly mobile individuals. Ethnographic inquiry with the youth targeted by such “linguistic gentrification” programs reveals that the state’s reimagining of them in these terms remained largely at odds with how they themselves understood their identities. This article, as such, illustrates the analytical importance of attending to people’s uptake when evaluating the eventual scope of top-down discourses and projects, while also offering an example of how the label “Mediterranean” functions as a spatiotemporal shifter, deployed by different groups to activate alternative accounts of history, the present, and the future.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/696933","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46831530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The resolution of publicly available satellite photography is limited to 50 cm a pixel. Every pixel in a satellite image is a single, solid color. The reasons for the resolution limit are tactical as well as protective: according to forensic architect Eyal Weizman, it maintains the privacy of individuals on the ground as well as makes the consequences of state violence harder to investigate. A uniformly colored pixel can be evidence of a drone attack or proof that it never happened. The indexical evidence ambivalently sustains both interpretations. If camouflage has been traditionally thought of as a blending into the contiguous environment, often geared toward a camera’s gaze, in this essay I look to the reorientation of camouflage away from the adjacent surroundings and toward the mediating structures of the interface and database. The objective of camouflage is now to merge into arrays of information and to slip below the threshold of detectability. This essay examines the work of artists and activists, such as Hito Steyerl, Zach Blas, and Adam Harvey, who strategize ways of becoming “rogue pixels” hiding in “the cracks of our standards of resolution,” resisting the means by which our bodies are indexed on virtual interfaces and algorithmically parsed as data.
{"title":"Rogue Pixels: Indexicality and Algorithmic Camouflage","authors":"Kris Paulsen","doi":"10.1086/696932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/696932","url":null,"abstract":"The resolution of publicly available satellite photography is limited to 50 cm a pixel. Every pixel in a satellite image is a single, solid color. The reasons for the resolution limit are tactical as well as protective: according to forensic architect Eyal Weizman, it maintains the privacy of individuals on the ground as well as makes the consequences of state violence harder to investigate. A uniformly colored pixel can be evidence of a drone attack or proof that it never happened. The indexical evidence ambivalently sustains both interpretations. If camouflage has been traditionally thought of as a blending into the contiguous environment, often geared toward a camera’s gaze, in this essay I look to the reorientation of camouflage away from the adjacent surroundings and toward the mediating structures of the interface and database. The objective of camouflage is now to merge into arrays of information and to slip below the threshold of detectability. This essay examines the work of artists and activists, such as Hito Steyerl, Zach Blas, and Adam Harvey, who strategize ways of becoming “rogue pixels” hiding in “the cracks of our standards of resolution,” resisting the means by which our bodies are indexed on virtual interfaces and algorithmically parsed as data.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/696932","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45029712","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Exploring interactions among the forces (inertia, entropy, interest, and metaculture) that affect the motion of culture generally, this article focuses on metapragmatic indexicals as well as denotationally explicit metapragmatic signs, whose effects Silverstein dubbed “metaforce.” Pitch raising, as a metapragmatic indexical employed in narration, builds excitement in relationship to an unfolding stretch of mythic discourse, thereby contributing to the interest in that discourse that also impels its future replication. The interest in learning something new that drives the processes of replication underlying ordinary conversation can be aided by questions, as explicit metapragmatic formulations projecting the discourse shape of the desired response, just as explicit metapragmatic statements can be used to block expected replication processes in the flow of conversation, exerting a resistance. Interest can also be channeled from one discursive arena (such as wine talk) to another (such as coffee talk) through the process Silverstein calls “emanation,” based on similarities in the discourse form and content, a kind of metapragmatic iconicity. The article concludes by suggesting that similar processes are at work in disciplinary arenas, where Silverstein’s term “metapragmatics” itself has come to shape the entire field of linguistic anthropology and to be widely replicated elsewhere.
{"title":"The Role of Metaforces in Cultural Motion","authors":"Greg Urban","doi":"10.1086/694550","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/694550","url":null,"abstract":"Exploring interactions among the forces (inertia, entropy, interest, and metaculture) that affect the motion of culture generally, this article focuses on metapragmatic indexicals as well as denotationally explicit metapragmatic signs, whose effects Silverstein dubbed “metaforce.” Pitch raising, as a metapragmatic indexical employed in narration, builds excitement in relationship to an unfolding stretch of mythic discourse, thereby contributing to the interest in that discourse that also impels its future replication. The interest in learning something new that drives the processes of replication underlying ordinary conversation can be aided by questions, as explicit metapragmatic formulations projecting the discourse shape of the desired response, just as explicit metapragmatic statements can be used to block expected replication processes in the flow of conversation, exerting a resistance. Interest can also be channeled from one discursive arena (such as wine talk) to another (such as coffee talk) through the process Silverstein calls “emanation,” based on similarities in the discourse form and content, a kind of metapragmatic iconicity. The article concludes by suggesting that similar processes are at work in disciplinary arenas, where Silverstein’s term “metapragmatics” itself has come to shape the entire field of linguistic anthropology and to be widely replicated elsewhere.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/694550","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43545221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The anthropology of finance has been dominated by ethnographic field research and the performativity thesis advanced by Donald Mackenzie and Michel Callon. This essay takes a different tack and proposes a semiotic framework to look at the central concept in derivative finance, that of volatility. Volatility has also been increasingly important in our contemporary culture and politics of volatility, suggesting that the implications of the concept touch upon far more than just finance. I trace the development of the Black-Scholes model for pricing options from its initial use as a foundation for a “physics of finance” to its current use to calculate the “implied volatility” of trillions of dollars of derivative contracts on a daily basis. At the same time, the use of Black-Scholes to calculate implied volatility violates one of the fundamental presuppositions of the model, and I argue that instead of being part of a “physics of finance,” Black-Scholes now functions more like the discourse-indexical component of a “leaky grammar of prices.”
{"title":"Deriving the Derivative","authors":"Benjamin Lee","doi":"10.1086/695408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/695408","url":null,"abstract":"The anthropology of finance has been dominated by ethnographic field research and the performativity thesis advanced by Donald Mackenzie and Michel Callon. This essay takes a different tack and proposes a semiotic framework to look at the central concept in derivative finance, that of volatility. Volatility has also been increasingly important in our contemporary culture and politics of volatility, suggesting that the implications of the concept touch upon far more than just finance. I trace the development of the Black-Scholes model for pricing options from its initial use as a foundation for a “physics of finance” to its current use to calculate the “implied volatility” of trillions of dollars of derivative contracts on a daily basis. At the same time, the use of Black-Scholes to calculate implied volatility violates one of the fundamental presuppositions of the model, and I argue that instead of being part of a “physics of finance,” Black-Scholes now functions more like the discourse-indexical component of a “leaky grammar of prices.”","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/695408","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49452697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The commonplace division of labor between linguistics and linguistic anthropology, on the one hand, and sociology and social anthropology, on the other, is predicated on a nominalist error, the belief that institutionally embedded and named fields denote discrete phenomena. An influential and much-cited twentieth-century bellwether of this division was Susanne Langer’s distinction between “discursive” and “presentational” form, a polythetic distinction that tacitly constructed a metaphysic. An examination of social interaction in its most elementary form suggests that no such distinction is warranted and that, instead, a systematic account of social interaction transcends the boundaries of these and several additional “preliminary disciplines.”
{"title":"Preliminary Disciplines","authors":"Bruce Mannheim","doi":"10.1086/694552","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/694552","url":null,"abstract":"The commonplace division of labor between linguistics and linguistic anthropology, on the one hand, and sociology and social anthropology, on the other, is predicated on a nominalist error, the belief that institutionally embedded and named fields denote discrete phenomena. An influential and much-cited twentieth-century bellwether of this division was Susanne Langer’s distinction between “discursive” and “presentational” form, a polythetic distinction that tacitly constructed a metaphysic. An examination of social interaction in its most elementary form suggests that no such distinction is warranted and that, instead, a systematic account of social interaction transcends the boundaries of these and several additional “preliminary disciplines.”","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/694552","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44756996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
“Linguistic ideology,” a field of inquiry opened by Michael Silverstein, has become a major topic in semiotically oriented disciplines. This article focuses on an important aspect of ideology (linguistic or otherwise): its connection with social positioning, point of view, and differentiation. Two sets of examples, mainly from fieldwork in Senegal, are drawn upon to illustrate that connection. One set concerns people living in the same community but differing in the ideologized values and projects through which they interpret linguistic practices. The other set concerns people who are relative strangers, speaking languages that are not their native tongues—in ways that can reveal Whorfian effects from the native language that rests in the background. Although these two sets of examples are initially drawn upon to emphasize different points, the article argues that they differ more in degree than in kind. Both illustrate how social positioning is tied to differences in ideologized interpretation and, more generally, that where there is ideology, there is differentiation.
{"title":"Divided Values, Shadow Languages: Positioning and Perspective in Linguistic Ideologies","authors":"J. T. Irvine","doi":"10.1086/695142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/695142","url":null,"abstract":"“Linguistic ideology,” a field of inquiry opened by Michael Silverstein, has become a major topic in semiotically oriented disciplines. This article focuses on an important aspect of ideology (linguistic or otherwise): its connection with social positioning, point of view, and differentiation. Two sets of examples, mainly from fieldwork in Senegal, are drawn upon to illustrate that connection. One set concerns people living in the same community but differing in the ideologized values and projects through which they interpret linguistic practices. The other set concerns people who are relative strangers, speaking languages that are not their native tongues—in ways that can reveal Whorfian effects from the native language that rests in the background. Although these two sets of examples are initially drawn upon to emphasize different points, the article argues that they differ more in degree than in kind. Both illustrate how social positioning is tied to differences in ideologized interpretation and, more generally, that where there is ideology, there is differentiation.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/695142","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41732139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Through its theorization and elaboration in the path-breaking work of Michael Silverstein, indexicality has served as a foundational analytic category for linguistic anthropology, both in its ethnographic analyses as well as in its theoretical interventions into key issues in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and sociocultural anthropology. The working out of indexicality’s implications for the study of semiosis—and more particularly, language in culture—has and continues to produce a vital and dynamic theoretical field of scholarly activity. This vitality, I argue, emerges from a foundational ambivalence within the category of indexicality: between, on the one hand, immediacy and presence and, on the other hand, mediation and representation. Productively unresolved, this ambivalence is less a problem than an opportunity and invitation for further ethnographic and analytic refinement of our accounts of (meta)semiosis and social life. A reflexive and deconstructive turn to indexicality’s ambivalent ground, then, is implied and necessitated by the category itself, though this in no way obviates its utility for semiotic and ethnographic theory and analysis; indeed, as I argue, such a turn is critical to indexicality’s ongoing utility to both.
{"title":"Indexicality’s Ambivalent Ground","authors":"C. Nakassis","doi":"10.1086/694753","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/694753","url":null,"abstract":"Through its theorization and elaboration in the path-breaking work of Michael Silverstein, indexicality has served as a foundational analytic category for linguistic anthropology, both in its ethnographic analyses as well as in its theoretical interventions into key issues in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and sociocultural anthropology. The working out of indexicality’s implications for the study of semiosis—and more particularly, language in culture—has and continues to produce a vital and dynamic theoretical field of scholarly activity. This vitality, I argue, emerges from a foundational ambivalence within the category of indexicality: between, on the one hand, immediacy and presence and, on the other hand, mediation and representation. Productively unresolved, this ambivalence is less a problem than an opportunity and invitation for further ethnographic and analytic refinement of our accounts of (meta)semiosis and social life. A reflexive and deconstructive turn to indexicality’s ambivalent ground, then, is implied and necessitated by the category itself, though this in no way obviates its utility for semiotic and ethnographic theory and analysis; indeed, as I argue, such a turn is critical to indexicality’s ongoing utility to both.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/694753","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43058904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Focusing on Michael Silverstein’s account of relationships between “microcontexts of interaction” and the “macrosociological,” this article takes up his suggestion that news reporting provides particularly clear examples of such links. Examining a mundane ABC World News report on changing recommendations for vitamin intake, it analyzes how leading physician-journalist Richard Besser constructs a ritual center of medical semiosis, projects it as inaccessible to laypersons, and models a circulatory process that requires highly constrained forms of communication. Ethnography in newsrooms, clinical spaces, public health offices, and elsewhere suggests how notions of (1) a ritual center that produces medical knowledge, (2) a primordial space of doctor-patient interaction that affords limited, highly regulated access to laypersons, and (3) what are construed as processes of communication require the continual making of communicable models that attempt to separate projected first and second indexical orders and, just as importantly, generate indexical disorders that create anxiety and seem to require assistance from physician-journalist guides.
本文聚焦于迈克尔·西尔弗斯坦对“互动的微观语境”和“宏观社会学”之间关系的描述，采纳了他的建议，即新闻报道提供了这种联系的特别明确的例子。美国广播公司世界新闻频道（ABC World News）的一篇关于改变维生素摄入建议的平凡报道分析了著名医生记者理查德·贝瑟（Richard Besser。新闻编辑室、临床空间、公共卫生办公室和其他地方的人种学表明，（1）一个产生医学知识的仪式中心，（2）一个医患互动的原始空间，为非专业人员提供有限、高度规范的接触，以及（3）被解释为沟通过程的过程需要不断建立可传播的模型，试图将预测的第一和第二指数顺序分开，同样重要的是，产生指数障碍，产生焦虑，似乎需要医生和记者指南的帮助。
{"title":"Indexical Disorders and Ritual (De)Centers of Semiosis","authors":"C. Briggs","doi":"10.1086/694754","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/694754","url":null,"abstract":"Focusing on Michael Silverstein’s account of relationships between “microcontexts of interaction” and the “macrosociological,” this article takes up his suggestion that news reporting provides particularly clear examples of such links. Examining a mundane ABC World News report on changing recommendations for vitamin intake, it analyzes how leading physician-journalist Richard Besser constructs a ritual center of medical semiosis, projects it as inaccessible to laypersons, and models a circulatory process that requires highly constrained forms of communication. Ethnography in newsrooms, clinical spaces, public health offices, and elsewhere suggests how notions of (1) a ritual center that produces medical knowledge, (2) a primordial space of doctor-patient interaction that affords limited, highly regulated access to laypersons, and (3) what are construed as processes of communication require the continual making of communicable models that attempt to separate projected first and second indexical orders and, just as importantly, generate indexical disorders that create anxiety and seem to require assistance from physician-journalist guides.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/694754","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49650305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ancient ideas about the limits of what can be put into words demonstrate the popularity of the notion that language is a guide to truth, even if that truth is defined by the limits of language. Two ancient and one modern example all locate truth in a reality that can be tracked both by the possibility of and the inherent failure of definition. Ancient exegetes started with the basic concept that words were both names for objects and the best formal representations of divinity. Yet names were not capable of fully defining ineffable divinity. These two ideologies—that names formally represent divinity and yet fail to completely describe divinity—coexisted in a delicate balance. The theme of divine ineffability, first articulated as part of a theology emphasizing the complete power of the deity over matter, has been adopted by modern scholars and converted to a theory to locate reality in hard-to-define personal experiences. The ineffable as what cannot be spoken about shifts focus from divinity to the self (the locus of modern experience).
{"title":"Ancient Ideologies of Ineffability and Their Echoes","authors":"Naomi Janowitz","doi":"10.1086/695143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/695143","url":null,"abstract":"Ancient ideas about the limits of what can be put into words demonstrate the popularity of the notion that language is a guide to truth, even if that truth is defined by the limits of language. Two ancient and one modern example all locate truth in a reality that can be tracked both by the possibility of and the inherent failure of definition. Ancient exegetes started with the basic concept that words were both names for objects and the best formal representations of divinity. Yet names were not capable of fully defining ineffable divinity. These two ideologies—that names formally represent divinity and yet fail to completely describe divinity—coexisted in a delicate balance. The theme of divine ineffability, first articulated as part of a theology emphasizing the complete power of the deity over matter, has been adopted by modern scholars and converted to a theory to locate reality in hard-to-define personal experiences. The ineffable as what cannot be spoken about shifts focus from divinity to the self (the locus of modern experience).","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/695143","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45270716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Poetics matters in gestural pragmatics. The recurrent returns of cospeech manual gesture, which appear as “repetitions” and “parallelisms” of handshape and movement pattern, deserve close attention for their pragmatic potential. To appreciate how poetically dimensionalized gestures can contribute to everything from cohesion to speech-act performativity, we need a turn akin to what Michael Silverstein once called a “pragmatic-poetic turn” for discursive interaction. In domains of sociocultural life where persuasion is self-consciously instrumentalized, the poetics of manual gesture can assume additional significance. In the mass mediatized debates and speeches of presidential campaign politics, poetically dimensionalized manual gesture is not only pronounced but has become a basis for enregisterment, for constituting political gesture as a distinct mode of persuasive, embodied communication: the “political” in political gesture is constituted in part by a reflexive, aesthetico-pragmatic sourcing of poetics as a (if not the) measure of rhetorical “effectiveness” and “eloquence.”
{"title":"On the Pragmatic Poetry of Pose: Gesture, Parallelism, Politics","authors":"Michael P. Lempert","doi":"10.1086/695425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/695425","url":null,"abstract":"Poetics matters in gestural pragmatics. The recurrent returns of cospeech manual gesture, which appear as “repetitions” and “parallelisms” of handshape and movement pattern, deserve close attention for their pragmatic potential. To appreciate how poetically dimensionalized gestures can contribute to everything from cohesion to speech-act performativity, we need a turn akin to what Michael Silverstein once called a “pragmatic-poetic turn” for discursive interaction. In domains of sociocultural life where persuasion is self-consciously instrumentalized, the poetics of manual gesture can assume additional significance. In the mass mediatized debates and speeches of presidential campaign politics, poetically dimensionalized manual gesture is not only pronounced but has become a basis for enregisterment, for constituting political gesture as a distinct mode of persuasive, embodied communication: the “political” in political gesture is constituted in part by a reflexive, aesthetico-pragmatic sourcing of poetics as a (if not the) measure of rhetorical “effectiveness” and “eloquence.”","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/695425","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42255793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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