‘Don’t look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences’: a conceptual framework for silence as a medium for power in the Arts

Abstract

The concept of silence is somewhat mercurial. Far from an absence of sound, various artists have explored the nuances of its construction, perhaps most famously by the composer John Cage in his seminal composition “4”33”. Despite this artistic exploration, examinations of silence as a feature of expression are scarce, as is an apt theorisation of what remains unspoken, and how this may be more powerful an expression than speech. By conceptualising silence through a political theory lens of power as social action upon boundaries, I argue that silence is used to establish, negotiate, and trouble social and political boundaries and as a vehicle for power as social action. Drawing upon Seamus Heaney’s poems “Whatever you say, say nothing” and “Clearances”, I apply a four-part framework to conceptualise silence as linguistic, epistemic, rhetoric and symbolic, concluding that silence is the conceptual glue that unites manifestations of power and demarcates action upon boundaries.