Two Political Ontologies and Three Models of Silence: Voice, Signal, and Action (original) (raw)
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Towards an Agentive Understanding of Political Silence
KULT_online, 2019
The edited volume Political Silence: Meanings, Functions and Ambiguity (2018) provides a fresh perspective on matters of voice and representation within the realm of International Relations. The publication's focus-silence-is commonly understood as the opposite of voice, and is therefore often interpreted negatively, as a lack of agency, or as the result of exclusion or oppression. Here, a central aim is to create a critical distance to this reductive understanding of silence, and instead to interpret it positively, emancipating it from its subsidiary position vis-à-vis the spoken word, as its own modality of political agency. Although not all individual contributions achieve this ambitious aim to the same extent, the volume generally presents a convincing argumentative direction in which silence is conceptualized not as exclusion from, but rather as constitutive of, political subjectivity. By approaching the concept from different disciplinary groundings, and working from a variety of historical and contemporary case studies, the contributors invite their readers to consider silence as a force of political change.
Contemporary Political Theory, 2003
This article investigates the unfamiliar political implications of silence. Generally regarded as simply a lack of speech imposed upon the powerless, silence is thereby positioned as inimical to politics. In a normatively constituted lingual politics, silence's role can never be more than that of absence. The subsequent understanding that silence can operate as resistance to domination has opened original and ground-breaking treatments of its role in political practice. However, the argument here moves beyond this simple dualism, examining how silence does not merely reinforce or resist power, but can be used to constitute selves and even communities. That silence can operate in such diverse ways, as oppression, resistance, and/or community formation, leads to the recognition that its ultimate politics cannot be fixed and determined.
Communicative Silences in Political Communication
Pathologies and dysfunctions of democracy in the media context - 1st volume, 2020
Traditionally, silence has been related to citizen disengagement and disempowerment. Indeed, at first light, the growth of silence is linked to deficits in democracy since silence is understood as passivity while action and speech are the dominant, and sometimes exclusive, modes of political praxis. But silence can mean different things to politics. It can assume a coercive dimension when it is imposed over marginalized groups (the powerless); nevertheless, it can also assume a form of resistance and empowerment when it condenses self-assertion and becomes a form to navigate relations of power. In this paper, we contribute to a politics of silence by examining how silence can be a factor of empowerment and liberty. Focusing on the notion of "communicative silences", we posit that silence is not a dysfunction of political communication but a significant element of democracy. Far from being a pathology, silence can also be another mode of communication, one that it is separate from speech.
Mind the Gaps: Silences, Political Communication, and the Role of Expectations
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2021
ABSTRACT Predicated on a one-sided focus on political ‘voice’, analyses of political silences traditionally focused almost exclusively on their negative role as the harmful absence of participation or responsibility. More recently, a new appreciation for the wide spectrum of political functions of silence has gained ground, including forms of willful renitence and even active resistance. Yet this thematic expansion has also resulted in a loss of focus. Lacking a common analytical framework, research on political silences risks limiting itself to the purely additive: finding and filling in ever more minute ‘blank spots’ on the periphery of the map of political research. Building on the work of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, this paper proposes a solution to this dilemma by means of a reconsideration of the political role of expectations. In political discourse, the expected distribution of moments of silence and articulation expresses established power structures, while unexpected silences and the breaking of expected silences conversely present a powerful means of calling these into question. Focusing on this ambivalence paves the way to a new systematic typology of political silences as a distinct mode of political communication. But above all, it points to the value of silence as an analytical probe, an instrument to fathom the expectations and constraints structuring political discourse in various contexts and spaces. Besides providing the study of silence with an overarching research focus, such an approach would thus build a bridge between the issue of political silence and wider debates on the structures of the political field as a whole.
Re-examining Political Silence: New Openings for Research and Practice
2020
Political silences are powerful. This much we learned from critical IR theorists, including Cynthia Enloe (2004) who articulated the silences of marginalised women in international relations, Steve Smith (1995) who argued that silences are disciplines’ most important voices, and Ken Booth (2007: 160) who posited that ‘all silences “are against some body and against some thing”’. These key works represent the first generation of inquiry into political silence, particularly as an object of study in International Relations. They established the intellectual foundation for raising questions about the ethics of research, and they disrupted overly descriptive and normative accounts of political silence. Alas, these works are ontologically limited to specific types and registers of political silence(s) themselves. Our concern with them is that they are (inadvertently) foreclosing critical (re)examination of precisely what is meant by ‘political silence’.
Beyond the Ontological Turn: Affirming the Relative Autonomy of Politics
Political Studies Review, 2017
In this article, I critically evaluate a characteristic tendency that is found across the various traditions of poststructuralism, both narrowly and more broadly defined. This is an increasing propensity to be preoccupied with ontological questions and seemingly at the expense of either a refinement of political concepts or a concrete analysis of forms of power and domination. I consider the reasons for this development and stress how this characteristic feature of poststructuralism appears to follow from the very fact of ontological pluralism. What we see in contemporary continental thought is a proliferation of different traditions, and each side seeks to defend their position in ontological terms. Following this, I advance the idea of a relative autonomy between ontology and politics, where the former does not determine the latter in any direct or straightforward fashion. I argue that we need to stress this relative autonomy to open a little space between ontology and politics, s...
Introduction: voice, noise and silence. Resonances of political subjectivities
Critical African Studies
The setting In September 2016 a group of scholars, artists and students gathered in the gallery space of the Stellenbosch University Museum in South Africa for a roundtable on art, activism and social justice. Most of the academics in the room were participants of a workshop on 'Political subjectivity in times of transformation: Classification and belonging in South Africa and beyond'. This was the opening night of our workshopconcurring with the launch of 'Open Forum', an arts initiative that called on students, artists and activists to produce works that would actively intervene in the university space and thereby challenge the stifling status quo (Figures 1-6). At that time, South African students had been out on the streets for more than one year, protesting against the ongoing marginalization of black people on campus and the perpetuation of colonial and neoliberal modes of knowledge production (Booysen and Godsell 2017). Students were demanding profound changesand they wanted to be taken seriously. In that light, Open Forum's call to occupy the spaces of the university and its surroundings in order to make a difference resounded with our academic interest in political subjectivities. This interest stemmed from our shared concern for the manifold processes through which individuals and groups gain or lose their voice, claim positions to speak from, make noise, or become silenced in everyday life and politics. We started from the assumption that becoming 'part of the game' (Frazer 2010, 365) of politics, and thereby becoming positioned as a political subject requires to be recognizable. Such recognition is always closely related to practices of classification, which can be both enabling and hurtful. We consequently asked about the interfaces of mis/recognition through which subjectivities are formed in relation to state institutions, other authorities or alternative modes of belonging. What are the dynamics between the making and marking of differences through which subjects come into being? How do formal categorizations intersect with practices of belonging? How do they impact on both affective and lived experiences of individuals in the everyday? What role do they play in broader political debates and problematics related to citizenship and other forms of entitlement? By engaging the concept of political subjectivity, the workshop aimed to bridge these registers. We interrogated both historical remainders and contemporary forms of the classificatory practices around 'making up people' (Hacking 1986) as well as their formative effects on possibilities of personhood (Krause and Schramm