Artribune, M. Faletra
Dialectics of Silence. From Mallarmé to Giacometti, the Rhetoric of Fullness and Emptiness
The politics and poetics of silence have a long history. From Giordano Bruno’s gesture of resistance to Roland Barthes’s Criticism and Truth or Susan Sontag’s renunciation of signs.
Dialectics of Silence. From Mallarmé to Giacometti, the Rhetoric of Fullness and Emptiness
“Everyone knows from experience that words, punctuated by long silences, acquire more weight,” Susan Sontag observed in a memorable 1967 essay titled *The Aesthetics of Silence
In Sontag’s view, silence was a strategy aimed at the “revaluation of art,” that is, a radical overturning of the orgy of signs that occupy and colonize our faculty of imagination. Silence, from this perspective, is a halt in the time of consumption of images, sounds, and words—much as happens with the excessive consumption of other substances in mass rituals.
A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance: from Mallarmé to Dorfles
According to Gillo Dorfles, sign hypertrophy would amount to a “new tribalism,” in which only the impulse or obsession with consumption prevails—that is, a kind of compulsion to repeat. “Beyond the pleasure principle becomes a this-side of the principle in repeating the same thing,” obsessively. But one must never forget political silence: the silence imposed by the power of the moment, to which ranks of mercenaries of every kind conform. It is the most brutal silence, silence without conditions—except at the price of one’s life.
The politics and poetics of silence have a long history. Giordano Bruno’s last word, burned alive for heresy at Campo de’ Fiori in Rome, was to bite off his tongue with his teeth and spit it in the executioner’s face. There are silences that deflect our certainties—like the white spaces in Mallarmé’s poem *Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard*, in which he warns the reader that “it is the ‘whites’ that take on importance.”
The Silence of Whites: Alberto Giacometti
Here the silence of whites takes on the position of unpredictability, where a verse or an image at eye level nullifies the subject who encounters it. One expects something predictable… and instead, nothing—or the opposite. In this scenario, one might add that every epoch does not preexist the silences that express it. Rilke thought that the prerequisite of “emptying” consisted in the capacity to understand what one is “full” of. One could see in the “full” the equivalent of the myth of “development,” a kind of hypergrowth corresponding to a revival of eschatological ideology: prosperity and well-being for all starting from the commercial face of aesthetics. Or one could see in the media saturation of signs (and images) a kind of revolt of appearances. They turn toward us like warriors ready to seize our gaze and take hostage the need for a pause, for an interval… for silence. Yet the din of signs, like a conditioned reflex, only increases the prestige of silence.
The poet Francis Ponge wrote about the “taking the side of things,” that is, giving voice to the silence of objects or to the materialism of objects. And the great playwright Samuel Beckett, when he asked Giacometti to design the set for his masterpiece *Waiting for Godot* (1952), limited himself to almost nothing: a simulacrum of a leafless tree with a few branches. Beckett was pleased. Excessive scenography would have compromised his drama.
Criticism and Truth: Roland Barthes
On the other hand, the joy of indulging in an excess of signs is an objective joy. Who has never experienced the abandonment to the uninterrupted flow of consuming visions of every kind?
In 1965 Roland Barthes published *Criticism and Truth*. He deliberately left blank pages bearing the phrase “page intentionally left blank.” Here the referential indication contradicts the very existence of the blank page. For the subject to be possessed by emptiness or silence, it is necessary to divest oneself of the fullness of signs.
From this perspective, silence appears as an anti-philosophy of the totalitarian pervasiveness of signs. What remains of the subject must rid itself of this compulsion to devour everything like a hungry belly, a leviathan that swallows everything in order to feed and survive its own condition as a slave to consumption.
The Difference between Full and Empty According to Roland Barthes
After a stay in Japan, Barthes notes the difference between full and empty (or between noise and silence) by providing a gastronomic example: “here the lightness of the broth, fluid like water, the dusting of soy or beans floating in it, the scarcity of the two or three solid things (blades of grass, strands, particles of fish) that cut across this small amount of water as they float, give the idea of a clear density, of a fat-free nourishment, of an elixir all the more restorative the purer it is: something aquatic… delicately marine.”
Here, in this simple testimony, is our consumerist “fat,” also equivalent to the “fullness” of information full of images, full of anything else that tolerates no other existence.
The din, the noise, today if it has a meaningis not aesthetic in nature, but political and social.
https://sciami.com/scm-content/uploads/sites/9/2016/11/s-sontag-the-aesthetics-of-silence.pdf
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