DISCLOSURES OF SILENCE

Salvator Rosa, Self Portrait, c. 1645.

Research Synopsis

In her important essay, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’ (1967), Susan Sontag introduced the concept of silence as a language – one crucial to the aesthetics and politics of cultural production in the twentieth century. This research project will investigate the significance of silence across a variety of aesthetic systems and cultural practices, mainly in Europe and America.

As a strategy, silence has registered variously; in fine art, but also in architecture, literature, cinema, experimental music practices and elsewhere. Its purposes and philosophical groundings have been similarly diverse. The research will assess the impact of Western and non-Western philosophies and theologies on the aesthetic predisposition of such moments in order to develop a history and a critical framework for the understanding of canonical instances of silence in art practices during this period.

The literature on the cultural importance of ‘silence’ is large. Theoretical contributions from Susan Sontag (1967), George Steiner (1966) have been paralleled in the works of composers like John Cage (1952), Reynols (1978-99) and others. Recent re-evaluations of the act of listening have also focused on the history of noise abatement campaigns and the social role of the control and absence of sound (Bijsterveld, 2003). Silence has been examined as a metonymic notion within the history of philosophy and critical thought (e.g. Bindeman, 1983) and been conceived as a modality for political, legal and ethical acts (eg. Roland Barthes, 2004). Silence has also been traced in theologically oriented examinations of spirituality, negation and transcendence (David Jaspers, 2004).

However, such commentaries have often been partial, contributing only facets to a more general understanding. In recognition of this insufficiency, this research project will address the possibility of silence as a primary, transdisciplinary term that underscores important aspects of culture and the spaces of its formation, critically reviewing such observations and vocabularies as those detailed above.

Prologic Preamble

The area of this proposed research in cultural history, critical theory and art, sonic and architectural practises is denoted by the term silence. Etymologically, the noun ‘silence’ echoes the absence not just of sound, but also of movement, of action, as it is related to the Latin verb silere: ‘to be quiet or still’. It therefore appears to be tracing the actions of something that is static; only to find itself there, as the verb ‘to silence’, the term signifying the action – or lack of it. To silence is to make silence. And already we find ourselves amidst an enigmatic presence of a word, amidst the presence of an absence.

Silence, then, as that which is ‘no’ – which is not to say ‘nothing’- that which is still or null, which has a presence of not-being present, an absence made present. Silence, unpacked, akin to a ghost, a spectre, veiled, concealed, undisclosed yet at the same time disclosed, unveiled, a presence not just etymologically or linguistically – just because we talk about it, or even see it; nothing ‘ready-to-hand’. Silence, appears to be a possible impossibility, a presence beyond presence and an absence beyond absence, beyond bounds and limits, of language, of action, of visuality, of description, describing nevertheless, that which is at the limits, the end, the boundaries. Still. Silence, as metaphor, a practise, and an agent, as the beyond the static. A being-not-static, an ecstatic potentiality, beyond bounds.

This indeterminacy of silence, a characteristic also pointed out by Sontag in her 1967 text, in relation to an understanding of silence as a promise, bring forth a breadth of readings of absence and its variants (nothingness, nihil, απουσια). Heidegger of Being and Tim_e understands anxiety as a state of mind in which one does not encounter the object of ones anxiety, – and thus it is _found nowhere, and it is nothing. Anxiety which with its “completely indefinite” character, discloses Dasein’s “ownmost potentiality”, the promise of pure “authentic” being, as an anticipatory Being towards a possibility “free as possibility”, beyond its ‘concernful’ ‘oppressive’ presence as a Being-in-the-world, beyond the ‘they’ and the possibility of the ready-to-hand; as Being-towards- death. Where death as something possible is “the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all” setting the possible possibility of impossibility, one with nothing to be “actualised”, to be expected, or fulfilled, “free as possibility”.

This transcendentalism of Heidegger’s thought – crudely summarised here – is, historically, one that often can be traced behind practises of silence, where silence discloses from within its presence as absence, the promise of ‘pure’ or ‘full’ presence. From the use of silence by hermetic and religious monastic communities, either as a personal or as an architectonic element, to the campaigns for noise abatements and the preservation of the countryside, tto he slashes of Lucio Fontana, the Cageian Zen influenced composition techniques and the metonymic employment of silence by dramatists. Such practises have furnished cultural history with openings, spaces beyond limits and boundaries, novel possibilites; spaces that criticism adores. Within them what is best described as a metaphysical positive nihilism marks its path. A nihilism which takes into consideration a possibility of emancipation as being within that which poses as the heaviest burden on being. There are of course various decrees of such nihilistic approaches: from the ironic to the engaged, from the romantic to the dematerialised and from the ascetic to the politically polemic. Such distinctions are helpful in illustrating the differences between silence as a decisive gesture by which what is communicated is the reluctance to communicate – and ‘communication’ is here in close alliance with ‘community’ and consensus- and silence as an act and description of the non-rational, the unintelligible. However at the core of positive nihilism is the praxis and the essence of an indeterminacy, of a possibility ‘free as possibility’, of the silence of positive nihilism leaving things open. This open-endedness, the fundamental indeterminacy does not exclude such practises of silence from playing a part within the structures of language and speech. Within the fora of the utterance the unutterable. Once again silence comes to appear as a ghost – neither present nor absent. Silence is there. Or there is silence.

But where?

Silence, and its practises, have predominantly been registered as aural and auditary phenomena. As such are pivotal in the contest for the ear in a variety of critical and cultural loci. If silence is to be somewhere it could as well be there: in the space of (non)audition. The space of the listened-not. A loan from the Derridean terminology, listening-not, is a term attempting to desribe an apophatic aporia. Such an aporia has historically been, as mentioned above, central in the definition of novel cultural spaces but also a political and historic paradigm. These research project starts, therefore, here.

Skeletal Schema (Subject to additions and alterations)

By examining the ear’s ambiquous and contested postion in culture – from Althusser to Barthes and from Heidegger to Derrida and more rcently to Jean-Luc Nancy – and via a thorough, comparative and analytic overview of the different manifestations of the ear as indeed the space of listening, I will atempt to inaugurate a theoretical possibility of the ear’s relationship to silence as that which is listened-not.

Such an acoustic sphere and its political and social dimensions, as for example legal issues around the right to silence and the act of overhearing – will theb be reviewd under the light of a multifaceted bibliography ranging from Marxian understandings of nature to contemporary debates on privacy. Understanding politics as “an interrption to the distribution of the sesible” (Ranciere) I wll furthermore attempt to assess the act of overhearing the private as this is diclosed acorss aesthetic and artistic praxis. This will focus on the figure of the nightingale, a bird which presents itself as very fertile space to examine notions of listening and conceptualisations of nature as a topos of various silences vis-a-vis the articulation of established societal orders, transchronologically from Euripides to Messiaen.

Having established a critical-political terrain for the aesthetic disclosures of silence, I will examine how silence registers in radiophonic practises apropos public aurality and ideological dissemination. What does the broadcasting of silence entail? What is the role of overdetermination and interruption in public aurality? How does silence figure in radio’s cultural historiographies (i.e. Adorno, Fanon, Khan)?

The radio is a technology that allows an ease of crossing from the public to the domestic. Beyond therefore the public political and aethetic diclosures of silence how does this apophatic aporia figures in domestic – and domesticated – spaces. Following after the recent upsurge in noise abatement and architectonic silencing, this project will research the theological aspect of silence domesticity through social and religious practises such as is the prayer, hermeticism and confession, and also whistiling, sighing and murmur. This will allow for a probable reconfiguration of the theology of domesticity in areas as is the kitchen – or the telephone booth (see Rondell, ) – which in turn will bring into consideration silence’s theological aspect away from a near-archeologiucal chartography.

Other spaces to trace silence as the listening-not will be a variety of ‘twinklings’ of themes mentioned above. These will include Van Gogh’s ‘ear’ self-portraits, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Karel Kachyna’s The Ear, commemorative silences, enforced silences, echoes and others.

Demetris Taliotis 2007

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