Concealed silences in politics

Abstract

Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking, by Michael Freeden. Oxford University Press. 295 pp. £ 83.00 What does it mean when analyses of contemporary right-wing politicians emphasise how they give voice to radical views that were previously ‘unspeakable’? What does ‘unspeakable’ mean and why should politicians not give voice to their radical views? Why consider these radical views unspeakable in the past and how were they silenced? Which political dynamics do politicians bring into play when saying the unspeakable in the present? An interpretation of the silences involved could point at how the ‘unspeakable’ is culturally and ethically constructed as a norm in order to prevent harm, establish social and political order, and guide public discourse. Furthermore, the ‘unspeakable’ indicates that the radical views are known, but suppressed, because of their destabilising and disruptive potential. This is the self-same potential that contemporary right-wing politicians give voice, claiming to represent the silent majority of the people not represented by the political elites, who have suppressed the views of the silent majority in their political discourse. These considerations illustrate the motivation Michael Freeden has in his Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking. Silences play a crucial role in shaping and guiding political life and political thinking, but the field of political theory has not paid sufficient attention to the role of silences. Freeden addresses this gap in the political theory literature and sketches a map showing various ways of approaching silences in political life and political thinking. The book falls into two parts. The first consists of general conceptualisations and approaches to the study and understanding of silence, while the second gives examples of interpretations and case studies of silence in the lived political world and practices of political thought. It operates at both macro- and micro-political levels, highlighting ‘the multiplicity of silences, we experience’ in the world. Concealed Silences & Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking adds a new chapter to Michael Freeden's former work on political theory and the practice of political thinking and the morphological study of political ideologies. Silence is an integral part of everyday language, human expression and signification, emotions and experiences and, as claimed, silence plays a constitutive role in the political domain. Freeden's past work has examined the main features of politics: how it is formed by patterns of thinking and thought-practices driven by the quest for finality and fixing of meaning, distributing ethical and ideological signification, mobilising support, articulating and implementing cooperation or conflict, exercising power and laying out future plans. The aim of the new book is to connect the study of silence with these main features and extend the understanding of the political domain by interpreting multiple silences at various layers of political signification. As the title indicates, the focus is ‘concealed silences’, understood as unacknowledged and hidden political features, in contrast to known silences and explicit political strategies of silencing. The task of political theory is then to articulate epistemic frameworks and methodological tools for excavating silences buried at a deeper level and constituting them as objects for interpretation and analysis based on the assumption that there are no other silences than those conceived and detected. In that sense, the book is broadening the field of political theory. At the beginning, it sets conceptual marks for manoeuvring the interpretative focal point in terms of the distinction between intentional and unintentional silences, and agentic and non-agentic silences, with priority given to the latter. Freeden then lays the ground for interpreting silences and understanding silences in political thinking by a cross-disciplinary mapping of various approaches and conceptualisations—from political theory, linguistics, psychology, sociology, comparative literature, theology and the arts. The distinction between the macro- and micro-political is crucial. At the macro-political level, an example is the conceptual cluster of differences and nuances between silence, absence and lack, where absence stands in a primitive binary relationship to presence, while lack is in contrast to abundance both understood on a temporal scale as movement in time. An additional concept within this cluster is removal, characterised as ‘the ultimate triumph of the political’, as removal indicates a replacement of one finality with a new finality, eliminating controversy and contestation. Another example paid attention to is the conceptual cluster consisting of silence, stillness and solitude. At the micro-political level, Freeden emphasises seven modalities of concealed silences, some integral to human expressiveness: the unthinkable, the unspeakable, the ineffable, the inarticulate; and some beyond human awareness, the unnoticeable, the unknowable and the unconceptualisable. These seven micro-modalities constitute the heart of the conceptual framework for interpreting silences: when there is silence, ‘something goes on’ rather than ‘nothing goes on’. The question is how to train the interpreter to ‘listen for silence’ by imagination and interpretative judgment, rather than just ‘listening to silence’ by applying auditory senses. In the second part of the book, these general conceptualisations constitute the analytical framework for approaching various cases and examples of silences in political thinking and political life. Since silences are an integral part of a plurality of political processes and public discourses, questions about the various effects of silences in political life have both scholarly and common public interest. One example is what Freeden names superimposition of voice, in contrast to the explicit exercise of power by suppressing voices. Superimposition gives no room for other voices and crowds them out. Claiming to represent the will of the people as a coherent and undifferentiated totality, for example, in populist discourse or in the name of the national interest, is at the same time a way to silence a plurality of other voices and opinions. Another example is the invention of voices in public discourse, either by speaking in the name of the dead or of the not-yet born. The justification for representing these voices unable to speak for themselves is that present political language and imagination is unrepresentative of what past or future voices would say and imagine. In other words, this is an exercise of power by controlling silence. A third example is how silence operates as a significant feature of political ideologies, and especially how concealed silences are integral parts of ideological patterns and modes of political thinking. Political ideologies play a silencing role when, for instance, a nationalist narrative reiterates and remembers some historical trajectories and forgets others and, thus, emphasises some national characteristics at a discursive level and some practised in everyday life, confirming a national belonging without conscious awareness. With Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking, Michael Freeden has set the stage for extending the field of political theory with cross-disciplinary insights into the ambiguous role of silence in political life. He does this in a way that challenges the conventional understanding of the field, training us in reading and analysing texts with a focus on utterances and arguments. The broad and broad-minded presentation of this new disciplinary pathway is more comprehensive and detailed than Freeden's own, modest description of the framework as tentative. It is an invitation to deeper scholarly interpretations of silences in concrete political case studies as well as an invitation to ordinary citizens to reflect critically on silences in public discourses and political processes. Københavns Universitet (University of Copenhagen)