ORIGINAL ARTICLE Silence as Gesture: Rethinking the Nature of Communicative Silences Kris Acheson Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-1205 Silence and speech are often defined in relation to each other. In much scholarship, the two are perceived as polar opposites; speech enjoys primacy in this dichotomy, with silence negatively perceived as a lack of speech. As a consequence of this binary think- ing, scholars remain unable to study the full range of the meanings and uses of silence in human interactions or even to fully recognize its communicative power. Merleau- Ponty described language as a gesture, made possible by the fact that we are bodies in a physical world. Language does not envelop or clothe thought; ideas materialize as embodied language, whether spoken or written. If silence is, as I argue here, as like speech as it is different, perhaps silence, too, can be a gesture. Rather than simply a background for expressed thought, if we considered silence to be embodied, to be a mat- ing of the phenomenal and existential bodies, how might that affect current misconcep- tions of silence and subsequent limitations on the study of communicative silences? doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2008.00333.x Silence as gesture Silence and speech are inseparable, inescapably intertwined. The two ‘‘belong together’’ (Picard, 1952, p. 16). Like silence and music, we 1 recognize each only because it is framed by the other (Boykan, 2004; Edgar, 1997). We perceive a tune only when silences, however short, mark the beginning and the end; we hear the silence after the last note dies away only because that song has ended and the next has not yet begun. So it is, too, with silence and speech. Each delineates the other not only in use, but also in study, as in Cappella’s (1979) research on talk–silence sequences. Although various scholars define silence and speech in myriad ways, 2 the one constant seems to be that each is described in relation to the other. Thus, did Derrida (1978) equate silence and madness, incompatible with language (which Corresponding author: Kris Acheson; e-mail: Kris.Acheson@gmail.com Communication Theory ISSN 1050-3293 Communication Theory 18 (2008) 535–555 ª 2008 International Communication Association 535 COMMUNICATION THEORY