Rhizome.org
de 2010
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Talk a little bit about silence. That's another one of those slippery subjects that you assess in your book. There's this one interesting part of your book where you talk to a deaf woman who is very angry with John Cage, because Cage didn't take deaf people into consideration in his ideas about silence. In Sinister Resonance, you talk a lot about silence.
It’s the complexity of silence, isn’t it. We have this orthodoxy now that stems partly from Cage. I suppose mostly from Cage - though as I point out in my book, other people like Virginia Woolf had explored these ideas before Cage had come to them. But we have this orthodoxy that there's no such thing as silence. In one sense I think that’s right; silence is just a word for many states, which are complex states, of noise in fact. Low-level noise. But then on the other hand we have the importance of silence as a metaphor - for example, silence used in talking about the Holocaust or genocide, or environmental destruction and so on. In that sense, silence is a very powerful metaphor. I don’t think we should lose that in this finessing of the real experience of listening to silence, but they’re different modalities in a way. Again, going back to these early modernists, the way Beckett wrote about silence, or Faulkner, or Virginia Woolf - silence could continually change in relation to beings and relation to context. So there was no such thing as absolute silence. It was this very complex property that shifted according to situation and according to the approach of the listener.
My feeling about silence is that the closer you focus down on it, to use a visual metaphor, the more you discover. There’s this paradox - the deeper you get into silence, the noisier it becomes. I was fascinated by these scenes of silence, which were so important to painters. Particularly from the 16th century on, I suppose, and many examples in 17th century painting. All these paintings in Dutch painting from Rembrandt and through to Vermeer, these paintings of people sleeping or reading. The fascination of that simple situation - that ordinary situation of life - somebody sleeping. But what does it mean? How do we engage with that? And some of our engagement is of course auditory. And again it comes back to this theme. There's a narrowing, isn't there, there's the idea that the visual aspect of the scene is what’s truly important, is what’s central. Truthfully our engagement is a much more complex, interlinked engagement. If we're with a person who's sleeping, we're hearing and seeing simultaneously. You can't really separate them out.(...)
It’s the complexity of silence, isn’t it. We have this orthodoxy now that stems partly from Cage. I suppose mostly from Cage - though as I point out in my book, other people like Virginia Woolf had explored these ideas before Cage had come to them. But we have this orthodoxy that there's no such thing as silence. In one sense I think that’s right; silence is just a word for many states, which are complex states, of noise in fact. Low-level noise. But then on the other hand we have the importance of silence as a metaphor - for example, silence used in talking about the Holocaust or genocide, or environmental destruction and so on. In that sense, silence is a very powerful metaphor. I don’t think we should lose that in this finessing of the real experience of listening to silence, but they’re different modalities in a way. Again, going back to these early modernists, the way Beckett wrote about silence, or Faulkner, or Virginia Woolf - silence could continually change in relation to beings and relation to context. So there was no such thing as absolute silence. It was this very complex property that shifted according to situation and according to the approach of the listener.
My feeling about silence is that the closer you focus down on it, to use a visual metaphor, the more you discover. There’s this paradox - the deeper you get into silence, the noisier it becomes. I was fascinated by these scenes of silence, which were so important to painters. Particularly from the 16th century on, I suppose, and many examples in 17th century painting. All these paintings in Dutch painting from Rembrandt and through to Vermeer, these paintings of people sleeping or reading. The fascination of that simple situation - that ordinary situation of life - somebody sleeping. But what does it mean? How do we engage with that? And some of our engagement is of course auditory. And again it comes back to this theme. There's a narrowing, isn't there, there's the idea that the visual aspect of the scene is what’s truly important, is what’s central. Truthfully our engagement is a much more complex, interlinked engagement. If we're with a person who's sleeping, we're hearing and seeing simultaneously. You can't really separate them out.(...)
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