Paradoxically, "silence" has come to express many of the concerns of modernity writ large. In Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream, for example, we experience - if not necessarily hear - the alienation, anomie, solitude, and social fragmentation associated with the modern world. Indeed, scholars of modern art such as Frederic Jameson have traced the development of this paradoxical expression with great care and eloquence. Amplifying this speaking silence, it has now long been noted, constitutes a crucial element in what many refer to as our 'postmodern' condition. John Cage's notorious musical composition (4'33"), with its long stretches of "rhythmic" silence, for example, made clear to a general public that silence, in some sense, sings. The challenge, in other words, to addressing the condition of silence imposed on us by alienating effects of modernity was not to plumb the depth's of Munch's distorted subject and translate the scream of silence into recognizable language but to let silence speak for itself. Of course, the paradox of silence is not contained by the realm of art. The political, historical, sociological aim of much scholarly work in the late twentieth century was to allow marginalized or silenced groups to speak, and speak for themselves. Psychiatry, psychology, and social work, for example, became much more attuned to the violence a therapeutic voice could do to a silent subject. But what does it really mean to let silence or the silenced speak? Are we really hearing the sounds of silence more distinctly now? Or is this a postmodern illusion (is 'postmodern' an illusion)? Are we simply hearing more noise? "Babel" - an Oscar nominated film this year about globalization - seems to make a distinct artistic contrast to The Scream - or does it? Have we really been translating and representing silence as sound? That is, have we really been mistranslating and misrepresenting silence and sound? Our government is listening to us certainly, but not always when and where we would like. What does the law have to say about "silence"? And silencing? Anglo-American analytic philosophy has long resisted the notion that silence 'speaks' as nonsense; if silence speaks, it is not 'silence'! Have they been right? Perhaps the problem in understanding silence is tied to our concentration on modernism, our attempt to understand the problem purely in a modernist context at the expense of pre-modern history in our fast paced world. Saying the unsayable and, in turn, listening to what does not correspond to language has a long, long history, dating back to the ancient world and its apophatic, religious discourses ("Babel" indeed!).
Speakers
and Abstracts
Keynote
Speaker:
Kevin Hart,
Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia,
Author of: The Trespass of the Sign (Cambridge UP); A.D.
Hope (Oxford UP); and Samuel Johnson and the Culture
of Property (Cambridge UP)
"The Experience of Silence"
In what ways does silence give itself? This simple question
ramifies endlessly, and it turns out that experience presumes
silence and, more, presumes different shadings of silence. For
on the one hand, silence is a means of manifestation while, on
the other hand, it is sometimes what is made manifest. Similarly,
there is a “silence of” and a “silence for,”
and, perhaps most interestingly, silence can be construed negatively
and affirmatively. The poets and mystics tell us a great deal
about silence, and some of their ideas will be brought into the
conversation and analyzed.
Wayne
State Speakers include:
Lisabeth
Hock, Assistant Professor of Classical and Modern Languages,
Literatures and Cultures
"Giving Voice to the Silence of Melancholoy: The Friendship
of Bettina von Arnim and Karoline von Günderode"
Throughout its long history, melancholy has been associated
with both artistic productivity and withdrawn silence. This paradoxical
relationship is expressed in Nietzsche’s 1871 poem, “To
Melancholy,” in which, under melancholy’s shadow,
the lyrical voice finds redemption in the depths of despair by
turning its gaze ever deeper inward, in order to brilliantly illuminate
within itself the abyss of existence.” In the case of women,
however, the balance historically has seemed tipped in favor of
silence. In their respective readings of Freud’s understanding
of depression as a form of loss, for example, Julia Kristeva and
Judith Butler interpret women’s depression as stemming from
a loss of, or lack of access to, language. My paper will explore
the depiction of melancholy as both a source of poetic expression
and as a form of silence in Bettina von Arnim’s 1840 epistolary
novel, Günderode. The novel is based on the letters that
Arnim exchanged with the poet Karoline von Günderode (1780–1806)
before the latter committed suicide in 1806.
Günderode offers a debate between two women
about the nature of melancholy. Karoline von Günderode is
the archetypical melancholic romantic poet, whose poetry grows
out of deep sadness and lack of connectedness with life. She considers
her melancholy a form of existential boredom that serves as an
impetus for her artistic production, and she therefore views her
melancholic state and her poetic talents as being of a piece.
In contrast, Bettine (as the name of Arnim’s literary persona
is spelled) views melancholy as a silencing force. She believes
that Günderode is melancholy because she is prevented from
achieving her potential, and Bettine insists, “Melancholy
flows out of the source of a desire for life, which has no outlet.”
Here, she echoes the words of psychiatrist Karl Wilhelm Ideler
in his Outline of Psychiatry from 1835-38: “The pain and
suffering of the soul indicates an inhibited emotional drive,
which has either been deprived of its object or of the means to
achieve its object.” Melancholy is thus a sign of a desire
for life that is trapped in a world of philistines. While Günderode
sees death as the only escape from this suffering (and writes
of this frequently), Bettine responds to her own experience of
(and fear of) the nihilistic aspects of melancholy by emphasizing
the concept of youth, Jugend, which for her represents both resistance
to the conservative nature of middle class society and the appropriation
of her own voice. Die Günderode thus becomes a criticism
of a society that silences the female artist and a depiction of
Bettine’s strate¬gies for resisting and/or overcoming
melancholic silence.
Ken Jackson Associate Professor of English
"Kierkegaard and Silence in the "trial" of Shylock"
This essay on The Merchant of Venice and, in particular, the famous
“trial” scene and the so called “forced conversion”
of Shylock to Christianity, is part of a larger project on the
vexed question of Shakespeare’s religion. My intent is to
illuminate for the first time Shakespeare’s fascination
with the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis
22, a fascination that when complexly mediated on the stage ultimately
addresses -- not the God of Renaissance Christianity -- but a
radical Otherness beyond or distinct from that particular onto-theological
concept. My claim is that Shakespeare identifies something like
what Jacques Derrida has identified in his philosophical explorations
of the “Abrahamic” gift: a messianic structure and
desire determining, but not necessarily equivalent to Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam, a structure that demands an openness
to the wholly other or a willingness to give oneself up to the
absolutely other in a manner that defies reason or self interest.
This desire to give oneself absolutely to the other that cannot
be known is inextricably intertwined with a secular or existential
worldview. The inability of scholarship to locate Shakespearean
drama precisely on the Christian spectrum stems, then, not from
a secular tendency in the playwright, but from an almost hyper-religious
one, one that pushes back to the ancient mystery of Genesis 22,
a “hyper-religious” passion that presses very close
to our own (supposedly) secular ethics grounded in a respect or
openness to the “other.”
I want to test this hypothesis here on the play that seems the
most at odds with both any pre-Christian “Abram/Abraham”
and our current secular ethics: The Merchant of Venice. In many
ways, the play engages the most violent forms of Christian typology,
rereading Judaism in general and certain figures in particular,
like Abraham, from the Hebrew bible simply as prefiguring Christian
salvation. Correspondingly, the play’s treatment of Shylock
the Jew and, in particular, the forced conversion to Christianity
he experiences, directly contradicts the prime directive of our
ethics: you must respect the difference of the “other.”
The play’s profound religious desire for the Abrahamic gift
interrupts its own, often violent and hypocritical early modern
Christian allegorizing in a way that simultaneously turns us back
to the ancient mystery of Abraham and Isaac, and points forward
-- albeit briefly -- to a postmodern desire for alterity, a postmodern
respect for the individual subject that is not subsumed entirely
by dominant political and cultural forces. This reading is possible,
however, only if we attend to an extraordinary moment of silence
and hesitation in the famous trial scene, a moment of silence
that throws the otherwise horrifically anti-semitic play back
to Genesis 22.
Kathryne Lindberg,
Professor of English & Thomas Featherstone,
Archivist III, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs
"Shot in Silence: Labor Photography and Commentary in Black
and Red, 1932-1934"
A paper and presentation on the photo albums (some of which
carry commentary) of Walter and Victor Reuther. These books, one
of which was a project for a course at Wayne, were made at virtually
the same time as the Ford Hunger March and initial union and unemployed
organizing efforts in Detroit; while silent about these events,
these amateur photographers and future labor professionals shot
films of Detroit's Black Bottom and the Gorky Ford Motor Plant
in USSR that cry out to be brought into interdisciplinary discussions
that can take them diacritically outside the normative interrogations
of labor history and aesthetics. Official labor history, including
that of the UAW, has been virtually silent about the Soviet and
domestic, youthful political affiliations and artistic adventures
of these labor leaders; not for this reason alone, the interest
that this research can now excite cannot be over-estimated. Part
of what is new and different is that the work of these young activists,
barely in their 20s in the 30s, is that 'the work of art [and
activism] in the age of digital reproduction' allows one to see
so much more of the eyes and "I's" behind the camera
than ever before.
Professor Lindberg of English and Africana Studies and Thomas
Featherstone Graphics Archivist at Reuther Library will collaborate
on a presentation, both visual and critical, that will introduce
this virtually material and show its importance to the continuing
struggle for human and labor rights against the changing urgencies
of globalization.
Caroline Maun,
Assistant Professor of English
"Shattering Silence in The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. Du Bois”"
In describing the level of public discourse that was devoted
to African Americans at the end of 19th century and early 20th
century, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about a "conspiracy of silence."
He opens his famous book, The Souls of Black Folk, with a scene
of a hypothetical, polite exchange between him and presumably
well-meaning and typically liberal white people who can't bring
themselves to voice the question that Du Bois himself opens this
book with, "How does it feel to be a problem?" In this
way, he implicates all people of good will who do not act on their
good will. One way of understanding the life and work of W.E.B.
Du Bois is to see his main project as shattering silences: silences
about the real plight of African Americans, about the racial injustices
that permeated throughout the U.S. largely unchecked and the deathly
silence about blackness in general. His work forces an ethical
imperative that all people who have a stake in the American project
must work together toward racial justice. I will follow this theme
of the breaking of silence in The Souls of Black Folk, a work
intended to start a national conversation.
Jennifer Sheridan Moss, Associate Professor of Classical
and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures
"The Silence of the Queen: How Plutarch and a Bunch
of Others Silence Cleopatra"
The written history of Cleopatra begins in earnest with the Greek
author Plutarch, who in his Life of Antony, written around a century
after the death of the famous Roman, details how the Queen of
Egypt lead to the downfall of her Roman lover. On the eve of the
battle of Actium, which would lead to their ultimate defeat, Plutarch
describes Antony as “an appendage of the woman” (Antony
62.1); the Life of Antony in general ascribes much of Antony’s
fall from grace and power to his unnatural, and un-Roman, attachment
to Cleopatra.
That Plutarch’s Antony should become the basis,
and even the model, for all subsequent histories of Cleopatra
is something that Plutarch himself would have found laughable.
First, Plutarch never intended to write history. He himself states
“For it is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives”
(Alexander 1.2); his focus was on certain events in the lives
of his subjects that illustrated their morality. Furthermore,
this is not a biography of Cleopatra at all, but one of Antony.
Thus the history of Cleopatra becomes an appendage of the history
of Antony, this story of the fall of a great man.
Roslyn
Abt Schindler, Associate Professor of Classical and Modern
Languages, Literatures and Cultures
"The 'Unsilencing' of Holocaust Survivors: Voices of
Rebirth"
“We
cannot live without words
but let us not imagine that words are sufficient.”
-----------------------------------
- Rami M. Shapiro
The 1893 painting by Edvard Munch, “The
Scream," can well represent the absolute horror of the Jewish
Holocaust survivor. Holocaust survivors were silenced fundamentally
and profoundly: their identity, their citizenship, and their humanity
were taken from them, leaving them only with a silent scream.
Indeed, the goal of the Nazi regime was not just "to build
a society in which there simply would be no room for Jews";
it was "to leave behind a world in ruins in which Jews would
seem never to have existed" (Elie Wiesel). This would have
been the ultimate silencing: eradication from the world, from
the universe, from memory.
What is the significance, then, of encouraging
a whole group of silenced individuals--the survivors--"to
speak, and to speak for themselves"? Their words--their individual
voices--are profoundly important: for them as a form of rebirth
and for future generations, the most precious preservation of
the full range and depth of memory. A plethora of Holocaust memoirs
is testimony to this rebirth, which comes from discharging a burden
unimaginable to anyone who did not experience these crimes against
humanity. "If in my lifetime I was to write only one book,
this would be the one," Elie Wiesel said of Night. Wiesel,
an extraordinarily prolific writer, uttered these powerful words
about the one work that "unsilenced" him. Even more
recently, there has been an avalanche of memoirs written by the
second generation, the daughters and sons of survivors, as the
survivor generation ages and dies.
This presentation, then, will focus on the "unsilencing"
of Holocaust survivors. We will hear their voices directly or
through their children. We will witness their rebirth.
Bob
Sedler, Distinguished Professor of Law
"The First Amendment Right of Silence"
In a number of respects, the First Amendment recognizes that the
values embodied in the constitutional protection of freedom of
speech and freedom of association mandate a right of silence.
Thus, in answer to the question, "What does the law have
to say about silence?" I would say that the law of the First
Amendment recognizes a right of silence. Recognition of a right
of silence under the First Amendment appears in the following
contexts:
(1) The right to refuse to disclose one s beliefs
and associations to the government. This right was first recognized
in the 1950's when the state government in some southern states
tried to obtain lists of members of the NAACP and other civil
rights organizations. It received further impetus when witnesses
before Congressional investigating committees refused to answer
questions about their beliefs and associations, such as, "Are
you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"
It has also been held unconstitutional for a state to require
that a small political party report the names and addresses of
campaign contributors and recipients of campaign disbursements.
(2) The right to speak anonymously without disclosing
one’s identity. Because there is a right to speak anonymously,
it is unconstitutional for the government to prohibit the distribution
of anonymous pamphlets or the distribution of anonymous campaign
literature.
(3) The right not to be compelled to speak in
conformity with the government’s message, such as the right
of schoolchildren to refuse to pledge allegiance to the flag,
and the right of government employees to refuse to take an oath
disavowing particular beliefs and associations.
(4) The right not to be associated with particular
ideas. This right has been broadly construed. Examples of the
recognition of this right include the following: It is unconstitutional
for a state to require people to display an automobile license
plate carrying an ideological message with which the owner of
the automobile disagrees. While non-union members may be compelled
to service fees to the union that is their collective bargaining
representative, rebates must be provided if they object to the
union's support of political candidates or political views unrelated
to the union's duties as collective bargaining representative.
Where lawyers are required to pay dues to state bar association,
there must be a rebate for any portion of dues used for political
or ideological purposes. Objecting growers of agricultural products
could not be compelled by the government to fund generic advertisements
supporting sales of the product. Organization sponsoring a parade
could not be compelled to permit a group with those philosophy
it disagreed to participate in the parade.
Anca
Vlasopolos, Professor of English
"How to Silence Non-Commercial Writers: The Publishing
Business in the 21st Century"
I propose to present on the subject of the various
types of silencing in the contemporary publishing business, from
the demise of independent presses to the demands for huge profit
margins by corporate publishers; from the depression of the market
caused by academic incorporation of creative writing and writers
in curriculum and faculty to the proliferation of magazines that
not only do not pay but solicit funding from contributors, to
reading fees, and to the well-documented corruption of literary
contests; from the necessity of “agenting” to the
requirement of subventions by academic as well as small presses.
I will speak to the topography of silencing: the “coastal”
monopoly in publishing and the dearth of middle-of-the-country
and southern publishing houses. I will finally address the post-publication
quick silencing of books in terms of the politics of reviewing.
