Politics and Silence: Žižek’s Bartleby Politics II
In a recent post, I discussed Žižek’s concept of Bartleby politics and the meaning of “I would prefer not to”. I highly recommend reading that one before this post, since, here, I’m going to presuppose the reader already understands this Žižekian concept. I want to supplement that post with what follows. I will restate the main point, however. The power of preferring not to resides in how it brings the subject into a proper relation to the current state of capitalism. It shatters the simulations of doing something and gets at the Real (the parallax gap) of our situation. It doesn’t give us the answers to our problems but it does position us in such a way as to be able to effectively question and engage with them by revealing how the game (of simulatory resistance) is rigged. It places us at the right subjective distance from our capitalist fuckery (the circular trap that is the play of power and resistance). The power of preferring not to lies in how the subject subtracts its libidinal investment from the game as a whole. “Preferring not to” or simply “Bartleby” means being unwilling to compromise with the system in any way, shape or form. It means the refusal to take a bribe (especially of the libidinal sort). It is an absolute negation. It will not argue with the system. It will not argue with it in ways that conform to its own terms. It will not simulate resistance at the cost of real change. In Baudrillardian terms, “I would prefer not to” involves a pure and enduring form of symbolic exchange. The system does not have scripted, readymade strategies for how to cope with this pure negativity precisely because it is indeterminate — Bartleby is the gift that keeps on giving. Bartleby’s actions, his moments of doing nothing, posed a very strong challenge to the power structure.
At the end of Violence, Žižek adds another layer to Bartleby politics by situating it in relation to the power of silence. I want to explore what he and others have to say about silence and its possible political significance. From our everyday perspective, it seems very counterintuitive that silence could have any impact on politics, but this is precisely why we should reflect on it. Perhaps our silence is far more powerful than we know. Žižek begins his discussion of silence and its violent potential by making an analogy to quantum physics, i.e., the Higgs field. The point of the analogy is that it takes a bunch of effort, activity, chatter and energy to maintain the “nothingness” of the system. The trick is to turn this “nothingness” into less than nothing by subtracting the frantic commotion that perpetuates its zero degree. He’ll argue that silence is a form of doing nothing that actually challenges society’s inertia (capitalist realism). Doing nothing disrupts the nothing.
“Last but not least, the lesson of the intricate relationship between subjective and systemic violence is that violence is not a direct property of some acts, but is distributed between acts and their contexts, between activity and inactivity. The same act can count as violent or non-violent, depending on its context; some times a polite smile can be more violent than a brutal outburst. A brief reference to quantum physics might be of some help here; one of the most unsettling notions in quantum physics is that of the Higgs field. Left to their own devices in an environment to which they can pass their energy, all physical systems will eventually assume a state of lowest energy. To put it in another way, the more mass we take from a system, the more we lower its energy, till we reach the vacuum state at which the energy is zero. There are, however, phenomena which compel us to posit the hypothesis that there has to be something (some substance) that we cannot take away from a given system without RAISING that system’s energy — this “something” is called the Higgs field: once this field appears in a vessel that has been pumped empty and whose temperature has been lowered as much as possible, its energy will be further lowered. The “something” which thus appears is a something that contains less energy than nothing. In short, sometimes zero is not the “cheapest” state of a system, so that, paradoxically, “nothing” costs more than “something.” In a crude analogy, the social “nothing” (the stasis of a system, its mere reproduction without any changes) “costs more than something” (a change), that is, it demands a lot of energy, so that the first gesture to provoke a change in the system is to withdraw activity, to do nothing.”
(Violence, pp. 213–4)
Silence, sometimes, is totally harmless, peaceful and gentle. At other times and in different contexts, it can be extremely violent and disruptive. Do we live in a geopolitical scenario in which various modes of shutting the fuck up could actually function to challenge our zombified capitalism system? Rule #2! Can silence be a double tap? Can quietude devastatingly wound our undead society? Is silence a necessary condition for the emergence of a new Symbolic order? Žižek suggests this much. Perhaps what we need is a very specific form of violence. Not violent acts against this or that person or group, but, instead, violence towards the matrix of capital.
Žižek finds in the novel Seeing a wonderful example of Bartlebian politics. Here, we get a clear vision of the potency of silence, withdrawal, subtraction, etc. It makes it easy to envision the effects silence could have on our global circumstances. His thoughts on the book are worth quoting at length.
Jose Saramago’s novel Seeing (the literal translation of the original title is An Essay on Lucidity) can effectively be perceived as a mental experiment in Bartlebian politics. It tells the story of the strange events in the unnamed capital city of an unidentified democratic country. When the election day morning is marred by torrential rain, voter turnout is disturbingly low, but the weather breaks by mid-afternoon and the population heads en masse to their voting stations. The government’s relief is short lived, however, when vote counting reveals that over 70 per cent of the ballots cast in the capital have been left blank. Baffled by this apparent civic lapse, the government gives the citizenry a chance to make amends just one week later with another election day. The results are worse: now 83 per cent of the ballots are blank. The two major political parties — the ruling party of the right (p.o.t.r.) and their chief adversary, the party of the middle (p.o.t.m.) — are in a panic, while the haplessly marginalised party of the left (p.o.t.l.) produces an analysis claiming that the blank ballots are essentially a vote for their progressive agenda.
Is this an organised conspiracy to overthrow not just the ruling government but the entire democratic system? If so, who is behind it, and how did they manage to organise hundreds of thousands of people into such subversion without being noticed? When asked how they voted, ordinary citizens simply respond that such information is private, and besides, is not leaving the ballot blank their right? Unsure how to respond to a benign protest but certain that an anti-democratic conspiracy exists, the government quickly labels the movement “terrorism, pure and unadulterated” and declares a state of emergency, allowing the government to suspend all constitutional guarantees.
Five hundred citizens are seized at random and disappear into secret interrogation sites, and their status is coded red for secrecy. Their families are informed in Orwellian style not to worry about the lack of information concerning their loved ones, since “in that very silence lay the key that could guarantee their personal safety.” When these moves bear no fruit, the right-wing government adopts a series of increasingly drastic steps, from declaring a state of siege and concocting plots to create disorder to withdrawing the police and seat of government from the capital, sealing all the city’s entrances and exits, and finally manufacturing its own terrorist ringleader. The city continues to function near-normally throughout, the people parrying each of the government’s thrusts in inexplicable unison and with a truly Gandhian level of non-violent resistance.
In his perspicacious review of the novel, Michael Wood noted a Brechtian parallel: “In a famous poem, written in East Germany in 1953, Brecht quotes a contemporary as saying that the people have lost the trust of the government. Would it not therefore be easier, Brecht slyly asks, to dissolve the people and have the government elect another one? Saramago’s novel is a parable of what happens when neither government nor people can be dissolved.”
While the parallel holds, the concluding characterisation seems to fall short: the unsettling message of Seeing is not so much the indissolubility of both people and government as the compulsive nature of democratic rituals of freedom. What happens is that by abstaining from voting, people effectively dissolve the government — not only in the limited sense of overthrowing the existing government, but more radically. Why is the government thrown into such a panic by the voters’ abstention? It is compelled to confront the fact that it exists, that it exerts power, only insofar as it is accepted as such by its subjects — accepted even in the mode of rejection. The voters’ abstention goes further than the intra-political negation, the vote of no confidence: it rejects the very frame of decision.(Violence, pp. 214–6)
A lot has been said in this citation, but its central insight is rather simple. Our current capitalist system cannot function properly without the simulation of our participation and our active resistance. To do nothing, e.g., not voice our opinions, is laced with a devastating effect. On the one hand, it reveals that our “resistance” or doing “something” is just part of the plan, that it is comprised of coded, scripted and staged forms of “opposition”, “expression” and “freedom” that oil the very machine “resistance” claims to defy. Resistance is just another instrument utilized by power in its mechanistic reproduction of itself. On the other, paradoxically, silence (doing nothing) serves as a quiet scream that cracks foundations. It noiselessly yells, “I would prefer not to”, which means that it fully rejects all of those modes of “resistance” the system accommodates us with for its own purposes. Doing nothing altogether disregards and repudiates the simulatory game of political struggle. This is what it means to say that it “rejects the very frame of decision”. True, authentic resistance involves rejecting the very rules, protocols and parameters of “resistance” — rules established by the system itself.
It’s like resistance and power are in a heated competition. Imagine they’re playing an aggressive game of football. While each tries to win the game and while they may injure each other in the process, both sides ultimately play within a shared set of arbitrary rules. However, authentic resistance would not merely oppose power — it would reject the rules of the game as such. This is Symbolic violence or violence against the Symbolic order itself. This is the power Žižek sees in political silence or in preferring not to. This is a true political act that can drastically alter the given configuration of the Symbolic order (social space). In view of the voter silence in Seeing, Žižek likens the difference between resistance (doing “something”) and silence (doing nothing) to that of foreclosure and repression. Simply put, if x is repressed, then it has been integrated into the system but in a way that conceals it and places it at a dissociative distance. If x is foreclosed, then it is kept completely out of the system — there is no integration whatsoever.
In psychoanalytic terms, the voters’ abstention is something like the psychotic Verwerfung (foreclosure, rejection/repudiation), which is a more radical move than repression (Verdrängung). According to Freud, the repressed is intellectually accepted by the subject, since it is named, and at the same time is negated because the subject refuses to recognise it, refuses to recognise him or herself in it. In contrast to this, foreclosure rejects the term from the symbolic tout court. To circumscribe the contours of this radical rejection, one is tempted to evoke Badiou’s provocative thesis: “It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.’’ Better to do nothing than to engage in localised acts the ultimate function of which is to make the system run more smoothly (acts such as providing space for the multitude of new subjectivities). The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to “be active,” to “participate,” to mask the nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, “do something”; academics participate in meaningless debates, and so on. The truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw. Those in power often prefer even a “critical” participation, a dialogue, to silence — just to engage us in “dialogue,” to make sure our ominous passivity is broken. The voters’ abstention is thus a true political act: it forcefully confronts us with the vacuity of today’s democracies.
If one means by violence a radical upheaval of the basic social relations, then, crazy and tasteless as it may sound, the problem with historical monsters who slaughtered millions was that they were not violent enough. Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.
(Violence, pp. 216–7)
Žižek highlights the political significance of silence. He made a similar point to the protestors of the Occupy movement when he warned them, “All we say now can be taken (recuperated) from us–everything except our silence. This silence, this rejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is our “terror”, ominous and threatening as it should be” (Less Than Nothing, p. 1006). Resistance or pseudo-activity is one of power’s strategies. Our passivity is truly ominous and threatening to power. Our silence is a weapon. What Žižek tells us in Violence has much in common with some of Baudrillard’s thoughts from In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities.
Bombarded with stimuli, messages and tests, the masses are simply an opaque, blind stratum, like those clusters of stellar gas known only through analysis of their light spectrum — radiation spectrum equivalent to statistics and surveys — but precisely: it can no longer be a question of expression or representation, but only of the simulation of an ever inexpressible and unexpressed social. This is the meaning of their silence. But this silence is paradoxical — it isn’t a silence which does not speak, it is a silence which refuses to be spoken for in its name. And in this sense, far from being a form of alienation, it is an absolute weapon.
(In the Shadow of the Silent Majority, pp. 48–9)
According to Baudrillard, the masses or silent majorities are not determinate, specific groups, that is, they have no concrete referents, e.g., this class, those people, these material conditions, etc. The masses are both everyone and no one at all (this concept is very similar to Heidegger’s das Man). The only “referent” is the non-referent of the masses. Socially speaking, as he puts it, “The only referent that still functions is that of the silent majority” (In the Shadow of the Silent Majority, p. 47). However, it’s a non-referential “referent” because it’s an abstract fabrication constructed out of opinion polls, statistical data, surveys, tests, mass media reports and online information gathering. This is crucial insofar as it means that political representation is no longer possible. If there is no social referent, if we have arrived at the end of the social, if the social has imploded into the masses, then politics is dead. Baudrillard notes that politics was originally a type of strategy in manipulation. An art is the usage of signs. In other words, it was a way for a ruler to get what he wanted. Machiavelli’s The Prince is a great example of this sort of thing.
It was only later on that politics shifted into the mode of representation. This is where politicians took on the role of being representatives of the will and interest of the people. This was politics proper (exemplified by representative democracy and the electoral system). Due to the fact that there really were different social groups with different wills, interests, needs, desires, and so on, politics was actually about representatives fighting for actual, determinate, concrete referents (different groups). For Baudrillard, this representational politics begins to implode in the postwar consumer society. As he sees it, one group, e.g., a political party, can no longer represent another one, e.g., a class. Why? Because the concrete differences and determinations of groups have been sucked into the consumeristic black hole we call the masses. Everything in society has become so homogeneous, programmed, functional, amorphous and indeterminate that it is now impossible to talk about real differences that can be accurately and meaningfully represented. Marxists speak of these real, oppositional tensions as “dialectical relations”. These relations, for Baudrillard, are a thing of the past. Do svidaniya, dialectics! Since there are no determinate groups left to represent, representation can now only be simulated, that is, signs or indicators of representation serve to merely conceal its profound absence. And what is the most vital part of the simulation of representation, of the hyperreality of politics? Our “resistance”, our modes of “expressing” ourselves, our ways making noise. Nowadays, this primarily occurs through the collection of our online information. Online shitstorms or outrage cycles are now the prevailing form of “expression” of the masses. We see it in the call-out culture of the left and the trolling of the right. This phenomenon was wonderfully detailed by Byung-Chul Han.
The new mass is the digital swarm. Its features distinguish it radically from the crowd — the classical form that the many assumed. The digital swarm does not constitute a mass because no soul — no spirit — dwells within it. The soul gathers and unites. In contrast, the digital swarm comprises isolated individuals. The mass is structured along different lines: its features cannot be traced back to individuals. But now, individuals are melting into a new unit; its members no longer have a profile of their own. For a crowd to emerge, a chance gathering of human beings is not enough. It takes a soul, a common spirit, to fuse people into a crowd. The digital swarm lacks the soul or spirit of the masses. Individuals who come together as a swarm do not develop a we. No harmony prevails — which is what welds the crowd together into an active entity. Unlike the crowd, the swarm demonstrates no internal coherence. It does not speak with a voice. The shitstorm lacks a voice, too. Accordingly, it is perceived as noise.
(In the Swarm, p. 10)
Baudrillard didn’t live to see the internet as we know it with all its hysterical reactions to current scandals. Nevertheless, it’s pretty clear that he’d say that the online shitstorms are simulations even though they contain certain marginal differences from other forms of mass “expression”. Han is correct in claiming that the “noise” of these swarms “lacks a voice”, that is, a coherent, real, social, representational determinacy. This digital din, this atomized static, simulates “social” feedback and “political” activity better than anything that’s come before. Pure hyperreality! From a Baudrillardian perspective, the online noise generated by the masses can be seen as a self-inflected wound. The masses greatly serve the system with their simulatory “participation”. What the masses need to do is shut the fuck up. They need to brandish their silence. Again, Baudrillard wasn’t here for the age of social media, but his later writings have a prophetic dimension to them. It’s almost as if the global capitalist system itself sat down in 1978 and read In the Shadow of the Silent Majority and, then, concocted a brilliant plan to negate this deathly silence by way of advancements in communication technology. “Let’s make these fuckers keep talking!”
The strategy of power has long seemed founded on the apathy of the masses. The more passive they were, the more secure it was. But this logic is only characteristic of the bureaucratic and centralist phase of power. And it is this which today turns against it: the inertia it has fostered becomes the sign of its own death. That is why it seeks to reverse its strategies: from passivity to participation, from silence to speech. But it is too late. The threshold of the “critical mass,” that of the involution of the social through inertia, is exceeded. Everywhere the masses are encouraged to speak, they are urged to live socially, electorally, organisationally, sexually, in participation, in festival, in free speech, etc. The spectre must be exorcised, it must pronounce its name. Nothing shows more dramatically that the only genuine problem today is the silence of the mass, the silence of the silent majority.
(In the Shadow of the Silent Majority, pp. 49–50)
For both Baudrillard and Žižek, counterintuitively speaking, it’s through the “ominous passivity” of the masses (us, you, everybody) that power implodes, since it collapses into the void where the simulation or ideological disidentification of “resistance” once was. Silence would render transparent just how hyperrepresentaional, hyperpolitical, hypersocial and hyperreal our situation truly is. At one point in the past, power may have very well accumulated through widespread passivity, but not anymore. In postmodernity, power functions by keeping us busy simulating resistance, but the game is over as soon as we silently and calmly do nothing — the violent inertia. This is how we do violence to the system itself. Just imagine what would happen if we all quit social media today, if we all went quietly into the void. Silent violence, violent silence.
We are provided with delightful example of the power of silence in Yasujirō Ozu’s comedy Good Morning (1959). In suburban Tokyo, two young brothers have their hearts set on a TV set so they can watch sumo wrestling matches. No matter how much they bug their parents, how much they resist them, the parents won’t budge and continuously refuse to purchase it for them. The two decide to take a vow of silence until the parents give in. And this silent protest aimed not only at their parents but at all adults. If this silence were to speak, it would whisper the words “I would prefer not to”. This silence proves to be an unbearable nuisance to their mom, dad, neighbor and teachers, which, of course, causes the parents to buckle and buy the TV. Silence won. Think about it, what were they to do? Punish their sons for not speaking? Refusing to speak, in this context, is not immoral, the boys are not guilty of some reprehensible act, so how can you possibly justify disciplining someone for it? Punishment would be immoral. Politically speaking, this film has a lot to teach us.
Another important reflection on silence and how it relates to ethics and individuality, society and subjectivity, is presented in the third chapter of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. This book is a meditation on Abraham and the sacrifice of his son Isaac (Genesis 22). Kierkegaard shows that there is something quite interesting and unnerving about Abraham’s silence. God commands him to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. Abraham decides to go through with it but never discloses his plan to his son nor to his wife Sarah. He completely withholds his intention to kill Isaac. How can such a silence be ethically justified? It cannot be! At least, not from within the parameters of the ethical perspective.
The ethical as such is the universal; as the universal it is in turn the disclosed. The single individual, qualified as immediate, sensate, and psychical, is the hidden. Thus his ethical task is to work himself out of his hiddenness and to become disclosed in the universal. Every time he desires to remain in the hidden, he trespasses and is immersed in spiritual trial from which he can emerge only by disclosing himself.
(Fear and Trembling/Repetition, pp. 113, 115)
Communication is one of the very pillars of ethics. Explaining oneself, attempting to rationally articulate the motivations behind one’s actions, is a condition of sociality. In Lacanian terms, every Symbolic order necessitates certain ethical standards and procedures if it is to be operative. For Kierkegaard, however, Abraham’s faith creates an unbridgeable gap between his subjectivity, his inwardness, and his society or ethical tradition (Hegel’s concept of Sittlichkeit). The faith of Abraham, his willingness to perform a teleological suspension of the ethical, is a subjective state reached by an absurd leap (we get our notion of a leap of faith from Kierkegaard). Since this leap is totally private and singular, it cannot be rationally explained in social discourse. Trying to express one’s singular faith in the universal matrix of language is like squaring the circle. Abraham’s silence was, therefore, a necessity.
Abraham remains silent — but he cannot speak. Therein lies the distress and anxiety. Even though I go on talking night and day without interruption, if I cannot make myself understood when I speak, then I am not speaking. This is the case with Abraham. He can say everything, but one thing he cannot say, and if he cannot say that — that is, say it in such a way that the other understands it — then he is not speaking. The relief provided by speaking is that it translates me into the universal. Now, Abraham can describe his love for Isaac in the most beautiful words to be found in any language. But this is not what is on his mind; it is something deeper, that he is going to sacrifice him because it is an ordeal. No one can understand the latter, and thus everyone can only misunderstand the former. . . . Abraham cannot speak, because he cannot say that which would explain everything (that is, so it is understandable): that it is an ordeal such that, please note, the ethical is the temptation. Anyone placed in such a position is an emigrant from the sphere of the universal. But even less can he say the next thing. To repeat what was sufficiently developed earlier, Abraham makes two movements. He makes the infinite movement of resignation and gives up Isaac, which no one can understand because it is a private venture; but next, at every moment, he makes the movement of faith. This is his consolation. In other words, he is saying: But it will not happen, or if it does, the Lord will give me a new Isaac, that is, by virtue of the absurd.
(Fear and Trembling/Repetition, pp. 113, 115)
For our purposes, the big takeaway from Fear and Trembling is that silence can put us at a distance from our Symbolic order. Abraham defied Sittlichkeit by not making himself understood. If our problem is our very social formation (capitalism) and the ethical tradition (liberalism) that underpins it, then mass silence can destabilize it. Now, we may feel compelled like accelerationists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams to make certain demands. Demands that are understandable. We demand full automation! We demand universal basic income! These are leftist policies that we can express in very intelligible terms. But when it comes to demanding the future, the demand for the end of the hauntology of lost futures (as Mark Fisher put it), for its fleshly incarnation, we are really demanding an x. Sure, we can envision aspects of an ideal future, but what we cannot see is the sprawling network in which these aspects are mere nodal points. Put differently, we cannot detailedly articulate the fullness of a new Symbolic order at both its micro and macro levels. In a sense, when it comes to demanding the future, our silence, like Abraham’s, is a necessity, but it is only in this faithful silence that the future has a chance. Our silence says, “I would prefer not to”, which means we affirm an indeterminate future — this is our not to. With this precise meaning in mind, we should make ourselves imperceptible and camouflaged through silence. Both Abraham and Bartleby hid themselves. Is there a connection between Abraham and Bartleby? Can the former’s silence be seen as an instance of the latter’s “I would prefer not to”? Derrida thought so. In The Gift of Death, he explains this relation with great attention.
In Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” the narrator, a lawyer, cites Job (“with kings and counselors”). Beyond what is a tempting and obvious comparison, the figure of Bartleby could be compared to Job — not to him who hoped to join the kings and counselors one day after his death, but to him who dreamed of not being born. Here, instead of the test God makes Job submit to, one could think of that of Abraham. Just as Abraham doesn’t speak a human language, just as he speaks in tongues or in a language that is foreign to every other human language, and in order to do that responds without responding, speaks without saying anything either true or false, says nothing determinate that would be equivalent to a statement, a promise or a lie, in the same way Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” takes on the responsibility of a response without response. It evokes the future without either predicting or promising; it utters nothing fixed, determinable, positive, or negative. The modality of this repeated utterance that says nothing, promises nothing, neither refuses or accepts anything, the tense of this singularly insignificant statement reminds one of a nonlanguage or a secret language. Is it not as if Bartleby were also speaking “in tongues”?
But in saying nothing general or determinable, Bartleby doesn’t say absolutely nothing. I would prefer not to looks like an incomplete sentence. Its indeterminacy creates a tension: it opens onto a sort of reserve of incompleteness; it announces a temporary or provisional reserve, one involving a proviso. Can we not find there the secret of a hypothetical reference to some indecipherable providence or prudence? We don’t know what he wants or means to say, or what he doesn’t want to do or say, but we are given to understand quite dearly that he would prefer not to. The silhouette of a content haunts this response. If Abraham has already consented to make a gift of death, and to give to God the death that he is going to put his son to, if he knows that he will do it unless God stops him, can we not say that his disposition is such that he would, precisely, prefer not to, without being able to say to the world what is involved? Because he loves his son, he would prefer that God hadn’t asked him anything. He would prefer that God didn’t let him do it, that he would hold back his hand, that he would provide a lamb for the holocaust, that the moment of this mad decision would lean on the side of nonsacrifice, once the sacrifice were to be accepted. He will not decide not to, he has decided to, but he would prefer not to. He can say nothing more and will do nothing more if God, if the Other, continues to lead him towards death, to the death that is offered as a gift. And Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” is also a sacrificial passion that will lead him to death, a death given by the law, by a society that doesn’t even know why it acts the way it does.
(The Gift of Death, pp. 74–5)
The insight we gain from Derrida is that silence is the only way for us to speak the indeterminacy of our predicament. It is by not communicating that we are able to communicate. We cannot speak but we can speak without speaking. This “secret language” is that of Bartleby, Abraham and the masses. In Baudrillardian terms, this silence is our symbolic exchange with the system. It is through silence that we actually put forth a challenge to the Symbolic order that it cannot immediately neutralize with a coded response. Why? Because our silence is, in Derrida’s words, a “response without response”. We challenge the system but with an indeterminacy that “evokes the future without either predicting or promising”. It cannot determinately respond to our indeterminate non-response. All it can do is attempt to punish us like the government in Seeing. However, this would just bring the violence of the system into clear view. It would de-simulate all the liberal simulations of justice, freedom, liberty, etc. If the system does not respond to our silence, then it symbolically loses the exchange insofar as it unconceals just how non-representative it really is. To ignore our silence is to validate it. If it does respond in the only way it can, i.e., with violence, then, again, it suffers the symbolic loss. Either way, silence violently wins in this “potlatch”. The system does not escape unscathed. To quote Žižek again, “Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do” (Violence, p. 217).
None of this is guaranteed. What happens if we keep on “expressing” ourselves? What if the noise just goes on getting noisier and noisier? What if the masses fail to use their secret weapon to bring about revolution? Well, Virilio offers us something to consider in his reflection on silence. He writes, “No one is waiting any more for the REVOLUTION, only for the ACCIDENT, the breakdown, that will reduce this unbearable chatter to silence” (Art and Fear, p. 38). The idea is that our global techno-system contains within itself myriad potential accidents. Every technological achievement brings with it all sorts of new accidents. What if our global communication network was to break down due to unforeseeable events? This could literally bring about the silence of the masses. If such an event was to occur, then it could fundamentally morph the structure of the existing order. To use Bernard Williams’ distinction, it could turn oughts (abstract moral imperatives) into musts (concrete necessities). The accident is the revolution.
In Art and Fear, Virilio’s thoughts on silence are framed in relation to art. He explores the interconnected history between the two phenomena. Throughout the 20th century, art was forced into sacrificing its silence. With the rise of the seventh art (cinema), images were made to speak. We all know that as far as pop culture goes, the visual (silent) arts of painting, sculpture and architecture have little to no influence on our daily lives when compared to the massive impact of cinema, TV, laptops and smartphones with all their audio-visual effects. We live the electric life of noisy images. What has been silenced is silence itself. Virilio says, “Silence no longer has a voice. It LOST ITS VOICE half a century ago. But this mutism has now come to a head . . . The voices of silence have been silenced; what is now regarded as obscene is not so much the image as the sound — or, rather, the lack of sound” (Art and Fear, p. 36). In our postmodern society, it is not a matter of specific instances of uncomfortable silence — silence in and of itself is uncomfortable. Something is revealed here. Why must there always be noise? What does the obligatory status of sound, chatter, “expression”, etc., conceal and/or indicate about our world? What void, what deadlock, in the capitalist order is hidden by the ubiquitous blah? Could it be that all this noise serves to simulate communication where there really is none? That seems right. The logic of this strategy would be to compensate for the enforced absence of authentic, meaningful expression by creating a bogus “reality” that assails us with the omnipresence of the simulacrum of the communication of all people and all times. If we are always already “expressing” ourselves, then we cannot access our lack of expression. As highlighted by Virilio, this repression of silence goes to comically ridiculous extremes.
Last autumn, the BBC began broadcasting recordings of murmurs and conversation noises destined for the offices at the big end of town where employees complain about the reigning deathly silence.
‘We’re trying to get a background of ambient sound’, explains a spokesman for the British station. These offices are so quiet that the slightest noise, such as the phone ringing, disturbs people’s concentration which, of course, can lead to stuff-ups.’
Following the muzak that is piped through shops and supermarkets, let’s hear it for AMBIENT MURMURING, the voice of the voiceless! After the promotion of domestic consumerism via the euphoria of radiophony, it is now production that finds itself beefed up with a sound backdrop designed to improve office life . . .
(Art and Fear, p. 41)
The secret to be disclosed is that the network of global consumerism relies on the silence of silence, the neutralization of silence. I’ve known it my entire life — elevator music is the true enemy! As Virilio points out, our murmuring chitchat plays an essential role in the simulation of expression. Whether at work, at the mall, at the coffee shop, or on social media, all we experience is people talking without saying anything. If the consumer has one duty, then it’s the duty to talk at length about nothing. Small talk has a very powerful and elusive normative dimension. It functions to keep us asking certain questions. Heidegger knew this all too well: “Idle talk discourages any new inquiry and disputation, and in a peculiar way suppresses them and holds them back.” (Being and Time, p. 213). The constant gossip that permeates our environment regulates what one talks about and what one does not (idle talk is crucial mechanism of in the regulation of das Man). But what of chitchat or “talkativeness” and silence? Back to Kierkegaard.
“What is talkativeness? It is the result of doing away with the vital distinction between talking and keeping silent. Only one who knows how to remain essentially silent can really talk — and act essentially. Silence is the essence of inwardness, of the inner life. Mere gossip anticipates real talk, and to express what is still in thought weakens action by forestalling it. But some one who can really talk, because he knows how to remain silent, will not talk about a variety of things but about one thing only, and he will know when to talk and when to remain silent. Where mere scope is concerned, talkativeness wins the day, it jabbers on incessantly about everything and nothing. When people’s attention is no longer turned inwards, when they are no longer satisfied with their own inner religious lives, but turn to others and to things outside themselves, where the relation is intellectual, in search of that satisfaction, when nothing important ever happens to gather the threads of life together with the finality of a catastrophe: that is the time for talkativeness. In a passionate age great events (for they correspond to each other) give people something to talk about. Talkativeness, on the contrary, has, in quite another sense, plenty to talk about. And when the event is over, and silence follows, there is still something to remember and to think while one remains silent. But talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness.”
(The Present Age, p. 69)
In an almost prophetic manner, Kierkegaard described the trajectory of mass culture, its increasing volume and our need for proper silence with profound acuity.
“If, in observing the present state of the world and life in general, from a Christian point of view one had to say (and from a Christian point of view with complete justification): It is a disease. And if I were a physician and someone asked me “What do you think should be done?” I would answer, “The first thing, the unconditional condition for anything to be done, consequently the very first thing that must be done is: create silence, bring about silence; God’s Word cannot be heard, and if in order to be heard in the hullabaloo it must be shouted deafeningly with noisy instruments, then it is not God’s Word; create silence! Ah, everything is noisy; and just as a strong drink is said to stir the blood, so everything in our day, even the most insignificant project, even the most empty communication, is designed merely to jolt the senses or to stir up the masses, the crowd, the public, noise! And man, this clever fellow, seems to have become sleepless in order to invent ever new instruments to increase noise, to spread noise and insignificance with the greatest possible haste and on the greatest possible scale. Yes, everything is soon turned upside down: communication is indeed soon brought to its lowest point with regard to meaning, and simultaneously the means of communication are indeed brought to their highest with regard to speedy and overall circulation; for what is publicized with such hot haste and, on the other hand, what has greater circulation than — rubbish! Oh, create silence!””
(For Self-Examination/Judge for Yourselves, pp. 47–8)
Heidegger is also very helpful here:
Keeping silent is another essential possibility of discourse, and it has the same existential foundation. In talking with one another, the person who keeps silent can ‘make one understand’ (that is, he can develop an understanding), and he can do so more authentically than the person who is never short of words. Speaking at length [Viel-sprechen] about something does not offer the slightest guarantee that thereby understanding is advanced. On the contrary, talking extensively about something, covers it up and brings what is understood to a sham clarity — the unintelligibility of the trivial. But to keep silent does not mean to be dumb. On the contrary, if a man is dumb, he still has a tendency to ‘speak’. Such a person has not proved that he can keep silence; indeed, he entirely lacks the possibility of proving anything of the sort. And the person who is accustomed by Nature to speak little is no better able to show that he is keeping silent or that he is the sort of person who can do so. He who never says anything cannot keep silent at any given moment. Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing. To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say — that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. In that case one’s reticence [Verschwiegenheit] makes something manifest, and does away with ‘idle talk’ [“Gerede”]. As a mode of discoursing, reticence Articulates the intelligibility ofDasein in so primordial a manner that it gives rise to a potentiality-for-hearing which is genuine, and to a Being-with-one-another which is transparent.
(Being and Time, p. 208)
To conclude, Bartleby politics does not provide us with a specific praxis. Instead, it shows us the condition of any meaningful alternative or political agenda. So long as we are libidinally invested in simulatory acts of “resistance”, in loudly “expressing” our “truth”, we perpetuate the system. For Žižek, the fundamental shift we must make is denying ourselves the enjoyment we get from resisting power and “speaking” out. Bartleby is an example of this negative disposition. Preferring not to is simply about putting ourselves in the proper subjective position or state of mind. Cultivating the ability to be silent may be of help. We can start by simply making room for silence in our days even if it’s just for five or ten minutes. According to Žižek, if real change is to come, then it will grow from pure negativity and its correlative silence. In other words, preferring not to is about not playing the game of scripted and integrated “resistance”. But, yes, capitalism is certainly antifragile and can integrate many disparate forms of “resistance”. This is why a form of “resistance” might challenge the system for a brief moment, but is quickly incorporated into it in the simulatory form of a sign (simulacrum). Žižek views Bartleby’s disposition as a kind of permanent No! This means a pure, indeterminate negativity. The system can never get hold of it precisely because it broods in silence and it doesn’t demand anything in particular. Silent violence, violent silence.
