On the Pragmatic Poetry of Pose: Gesture, Parallelism, Politics

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.”