From Keywords in Sound, Chapter on "Silence" (original) (raw)
silence "Silence does not exist," says a character in Andrés Neuman's 2010 novel El Viajero del Siglo (Traveler of the century). He was perhaps echoing, in literary rendition, John Cage's famous words on the impossibility of perceiving silence. Yet silence is lived as one of the most intense experiences across cultures. On the one hand, silence invokes a type of plenitude most commonly associated with contemplative techniques of quietness as a means to bring about a transformation of the self Corbin 1997). On the other, silence is often associated with a "sinister resonance" (Toop 2010) that invokes a haunting; the dangers and fear of the unknown; the insecurities produced by the ungraspable and by the profound irreversibility of death. We also find this sinister dimension in the constitution of silence as a means of torture, in practices such as extreme isolation, where the sense of self is lost due to sensory deprivation, or in kidnapping, whose expediency depends on the efficacy of silencing techniques as a tortuous means of emotional manipulation. Between these experiential extremes, silence appears as a term "by which we understand our existence as beings in a world larger than ourselves, a world not entirely of our making, whose limits and constraints provide the very limits and constraints of thought itself " (Grosz 2011: 99).
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in P. Corcoran & V. Spencer eds, Disclosures, pp. 172-201, 2000