Unspoken Insurgencies: Interpretive Publics in Contentious Politics

This essay uses the 2014 protests in Thailand in which demonstrators silently brandished The Hunger Games's three-fingered salute as a lens through which to analyze nonverbal communication in contentious politics. Drawing on and extending J.L. Austin's speech act theory, I explore the conditions of legibility of nonverbal language such as bodily gesture, signs and symbols. While neither verbal nor nonverbal speech guarantees an exact translation between intention and reception, nonverbal utterances operate along a looser terrain of legibility. I contend that the attribution of meaning and intention to the speaker's nonverbal utterance demands a reflexive consideration from the listener, founding a new community of meaning oriented around a shared context. This interpretive public, with its ambivalent emancipatory potential, is the space of politics.