New normals, from talk to gesture

ABSTRACT

Despite all the news coverage and online chatter about the repercussions of COVID-19, the pandemic has underscored the material limitations of public discourse to redress a health crisis of such magnitude. No amount of talk or deliberation will cure a virus of this scale. If part of the work of cultural studies is to identify the ways a given conjuncture shapes and delimits the felt experience of everyday life, then one charge of our work now is to examine the emergence of those ‘new normals’ that the novel coronavirus has spawned. One of these emergent new configurations of the everyday has been the spread of concerned gestures as a counterpoint to the usual talk talk talk of communicative capitalism. Gestures of concern, from chalking sidewalks to applauding essential workers, build the affective commonwealths that cultivate solidarity in times of protracted precarity. Exceeding Raymond Williams’s notion of ‘structures of feeling,’ affective commonwealths are a resource built from ordinary people whose gestural rituals enact the sorts of worlds that talk alone just can’t bring about. This essay makes a case for the importance of such gestures and suggests they deserve further attention in and beyond the context of the pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Gestures
• communicative capitalism
• affect
• structures of feeling
• democracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Further information

This Special Issue article has been comprehensively reviewed by the Special Issue editors, Associate Professor Ted Striphas and Professor John Nguyet Erni.

Notes

1 For more, see Marres 2005, p. 213.

2 See, e.g., Hall 1988; Grossberg 2006.

3 James Aune notes on this regard that, ‘The most interesting aspect of studying culture is the most difficult to achieve’ (1994, p. 99).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chris Ingraham

Chris Ingraham is an Assistant Professor of Communication and core faculty member in the Environmental Humanities graduate program at the University of Utah. Alongside various articles in the areas of media, cultural, and rhetorical studies, he is the author of Gestures of Concern (Duke, 2020) and co-editor of LEGOfied: Building Blocks as Media (Bloomsbury, 2020).