I read Sean Gray’s article on silence in the political sphere with
interest, both in the middle of a busy US election season and as a
prompt to think about silence and community in the context of the monastic sisters in the Early Modern period. This post is both a summary of Gray’s ideas and a
first-pass response to them.
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| CJC's visual representation of Gray's typology (compares Disempowered and Communicative silences) |
CITATION:
Gray, Sean W. “Towards a Democratic Theory of Silence.” Political Studies, 71 (2023): 815-834. https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217211043433
GRAY'S ARGUMENT:
“The opposite of voice is silence,” asserts Sean Gray in the context of democratic theory. The large-scale self-muting of members of the community has historically been read as “civic disengagement and disempowerment” – of stepping away from participatory democracy. Gray, on the other hand, thinks that silence can be a net positive, a form of political expression. Silence, he argues, is a form of political communication.
(As someone who tends to keep my politics to myself, Gray’s evocation of self-censorship resonates. For me, that can be bound up with questions of intimacy and trust; I may not choose to trust pollsters with my beliefs, but I will vote the heck out of them!)
Gray identifies the “the communicative dimension of silence,” but reads silence as “not voting,” whereas those of us in a world of social-media cesspits tend to think of silence as “avoiding trolls.” He does ask the important question, however, of “how silence can communicate across a whole range of cases.”
He posits different kinds of silence:
disempowered silence – a barrier-driven silence; the silence of lack of (perceived) access; being silenced, and/or being unheard.
communicative silence – e.g. choosing to disengage out of frustration
silent resistance – perhaps a subclass of communicative silence; a significant effort to withhold verbal support or recognition. This can be read as demonstrative silence and the audience may infer the silent party’s opinion (rightly or wrongly)
affective silence – the silence out of fear of the cost of speaking; can push an agenda of shame since the resistance asks for a change in the behavior of its audience.
compliative silence – a rule-following silence; going along with norms; the silence of libraries
facilitative communicative silence – which can focus on listening or civility – turn-taking in conversation
Gray believes that “By definition, to be silent is to hold back—or be held back—from speech or utterance.” In this context, silence should be understood as “a social artifact.” It’s not the natural world’s silence in the pre-dawn world of silent birds and sleeping community, but instead an absence of expected (or even demanded) engagement. Failure to respond to polls? Silence… This is silence as a failure to comply with external demands.
Disempowered silences occur because of direct silencing (infrastructure access and its many, many costs) or the indirect silencing of not being heard (think: woman offering opinion in a board meeting: this is [too often] identity-based; a lack of being heard more than an absence of expression).
The idea of communicative silence is perhaps more powerful. Our voice should neither be coerced nor compelled. “You have the right to remain silent” is an adjudicated right within US culture.
Silent resistance: consider the blank paper protest. Chinese Covid protests in 2022 and Russian protests of the Ukraine invasion (also 2022) both sought to message through the absence of a message. But, Gray argues, speech-acts (throwing a tomato, burning a flag, carrying a blank piece of paper) have more content than the silence itself:
Silence doesn’t give us a vocabulary to make political claims or to provide reasons for them. Silence on its own (and unlike language) cannot be used to reference ideas, to test assertions, to debate, to deliberate, or to explain and justify collective decisions and actions, and revise them as necessary
Silence, in other words, is still a failure to comply with external demands, a refusal to (publicly) “play the game.”
Importantly, though, Gray offers a shift of perspective to the question of the audience’s perception of silence. He does point out that politicians routinely misconstrue the silence of constituents in ways at odds with actual political beliefs, and tries to provide a framework in which such misreadings might be minimized.
My biggest concern is that not voting and not speaking up publicly are actually different things, and carry different moral valences. To me, I see a duty to vote, but a right to keep silent on issues for any of a variety of personal reasons. But the effort to understand the meanings of these two acts of silence is certainly not without merit.
APPLYING GRAY’S MODEL TO EARLY MODERN MONASTICS:
To my eye, Gray's typology of silence also resonates (pardon the pun) beyond the political sphere. For early modern monastics, silence—whether as a form of compliance or resistance—played a crucial role in shaping religious and communal life. I decided to play a bit with his ideas and see how (and whether) they applied to my data. It seems like a pretty good fit:
disempowered silence – a barrier-driven silence; the silence of lack of (perceived) access
This might be the silence of the sisters in the face of rules imposed through Visitation; there are internal signals of resistance to particularly momentous changes (the adoption of the Roman Breviary in Thalbach in 1594) but the demand is expected to result in a “Yes Sir, How High?” kind of response.
communicative silence – e.g. choosing to disengage out of frustration
silent resistance – perhaps a subclass of communicative silence; a significant effort to withhold verbal support or recognition. This can be read as demonstrative silence and the audience may infer the silent party’s opinion (rightly or wrongly)
A silence of “forgetting” to impose a change or a duty; or the silence of Thalbach sisters omitting the identities of your peers at St Anna’s in your prayer-list since you’d really rather they didn’t exist at all. In any way, shape, or form. Those nasty gits.
affective silence – the silence out of fear of the cost of speaking; Gray observes that this kind of silence can push an agenda of shame since the resistance asks for a change in the behavior of its audience.
This is harder. Perhaps taking prayers private? And in Bregenz overall post-Reformation, the silence about beliefs that might be at odds with the heightened Catholic narrative of town. Moving away – as several reformed families did, rather than stay in Catholic Bregenz -- could be a larger form of affective silence.
compliative silence – a rule-following silence; going along with norms; the silence of libraries
An easy one! The silence within the cloister during set hours; the silence of church preparing for prayer; these are silences of CHOICE.
facilitative communicative silence – which can focus on listening or civility – turn-taking in conversation
The silence of waiting -- for the correspondent to write back, for the Chapter to make decisions, perhaps even the silence of contemplation, as one waits for the spark of divine wisdom to arrive.
IN CONCLUSION... SILENCE AS A TOOL:
Gray’s exploration of silence reminds us that what we don’t say can carry as much weight as what we do. Whether in modern political contexts or early modern monastic communities, silence takes many forms—sometimes disempowering, sometimes resistant, and sometimes entirely intentional. (These are rather different kinds of silence than those of Rossetti’s poems, which are more personal silences; I shall have to think more on that topic later). For Gray, silence can come as a reflection of external forces or as a personal choice, can be read as a way to quietly dissent or to cultivate thoughtfulness.
In our current political climate, where loud, shouty voices often dominate the discourse, understanding silence as more than disengagement seems to me crucial (and rather missing from the conversation). Silence can be a tool of agency, whether one is acting to protect oneself, to resist “the thing,” or to create a space for listening and thereby create connection and community. By recognizing the complexities of silence, we challenge the assumption that only vocal participation matters in civic life.
Gray’s framework, in other words, offers a vital reminder that silence is not neutral. It carries meaning, whether in political arenas or in historical settings, and invites us to question not just what is said, but what is left unsaid and why (Trouillot’s Silencing the Past comes to mind). For communities, both those of the past and our many disparate communities of the present day, silence may communicate as effectively as words—and sometimes, perhaps, even more so.
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