The Nature of Silence and Its Democratic Possibilities (original) (raw)
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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’.
Silence and concealment in political discourse
2013
This book constitutes a significant contribution to political discourse analysis and to the study of silence, both from the point of view of discourse analysis as well as pragmatics, and it is also relevant for those interested in politics and media studies. It promotes the empirical study of silence by analysing metadiscourse about politicians’ silence and by systematically conceptualising the communicativeness of silence in the interplay between intention (to be silent), expectation (of speech) and relevance (of the unsaid). Three cases of sustained metadiscourse about silent politicians from Germany are analysed to exemplify this approach, based on media texts and protocols of parliamentary inquiries. Ideals of political transparency and communicative openness are identified as a basis for (disappointed) expectations of speech which trigger and determine metadiscourse about politicians’ silences. Finally, the book deals critically with the role of those who act as advocates of ‘the public’s’ demand to speak out.
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.
Beyond Political Silence: Reviving Democratic Legitimacy
This dissertation is an endeavour to bring together and discuss literary works about deliberative democratic theory that are occupied with the rules, pathologies and possible moderations of deliberative systems, in order to examine the function of democratic legitimacy. The main argument presented is that the rules of the democratic public sphere, proposed by Habermas, can assure democratic legitimacy. Unfortunately, the rules are not applied in western deliberative democratic systems, since market-based groups’ interests dominate the deliberative discussions and silence the general public. Thus, there is a need for the reorganisation of the deliberative democratic systems’ public sphere, so that the general public can gain their voice and secure democratic legitimacy.
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.
Melanie Schröter’s Silence and concealment in political discourse provides an insightful discus- sion about the phenomenon of silence and concealment in political discourse. The book offers a detailed look at three particular cases from German political context where there is a conspicuous failure to meet publicly voiced demands to speak out on the part of politicians. Crucially, Schröter’s analysis does not involve a detective’s work to find and identify explicit examples of silences. Instead, the author focuses on silences in political discourse that ‘are identified, named and criticised as cases of silence and concealment by and in public discourse’ (p. 1). In this regard, the metadiscourse serves as the tool to overcome the methodological challenge of examining what remains hidden and/or unsaid. Therefore, it functions as the reference point to establish and analyse each case as an example of silence and/or concealment in pol- itical discourse. This focus on the metadiscursive-level references allows for a nuanced approach in the interpretation of silence as it shifts the attention away from the identification of silences in political discourse to the discourses triggered by them. In other words, Schröter refrains from passing any moral judgement on behaviour of politicians or regarding their silence as the failure to speak out as in the metadiscourse. Instead, she attempts to critically assess the nature of the criticisms against the acts of silence and concealment by outlining the justifications provided and values promoted in the statements of commentators.
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.
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.
Two Political Ontologies and Three Models of Silence: Voice, Signal, and Action
In this contribution I will describe three models of political agency and silence – voice, signal, and action – which, I argue, are predicated on two distinct and oppositional presuppositions about politics or political ontologies. Part of the value of exploring silence, I suggest, is its potential to bring to light more inclusive frameworks of political agency. We can evaluate models of silence and the ontologies that subtend them according to their propensities to exclude any of the diverse forms of everyday agency exercised by political actors.