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Susan Sontag - The Aesthetics of Silence
http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#sontag
Given these perils to the authenticity of language (which doesn't depend on the character of any isolated statement or even group of statements, but on the relation of speaker, speech, and situation), the hypothetical project of saying clearly "everything that can be said" suggested by Wittgenstein's remarks looks fearfully complicated. (How much time would one have? Would one have to speak quickly?) The philosopher's hypothetical universe of clear speech (which assigns to silence only "that whereof one cannot speak") would seem to be a moralists, or a psychiatrist's, nightmare — at the least, a place no one should lightheartedly enter. Is there anyone who wants to say "everything that could be said"? The psychologically plausible answer would seem to be no. But yes is plausible, too — as a rising ideal of modern culture. Isn't that what many people do want today — to say everything that can be said? But this aim cannot be maintained without inner conflict, in part inspired by the spread of the ideals of psychotherapy, people are yearning to say "everything" (thereby, among other results, further undermining the crumbling distinction between public and private endeavors, between information and secrets). But, in an overpopulated world being connected by global electronic communication and jet travel at a pace too rapid and violent for an organically sound person to assimilate without shock, people are also suffering from a revulsion at any further proliferation of speech and images. Such different factors as the unlimited "technological reproduction" and near-universal diffusion of both printed language and speech as well as images (from "news" to "art objects"), and the degenerations of public language within the realms of politics and advertising and entertainment, have produced, especially among the better educated inhabitants of what sociologists call "modern mass society," a devaluation of language. (I should argue, contrary to McLuhan, that a devaluation of the power and credibility of images has taken place that's no less profound than. and essentially similar to, that afflicting language.) And, as the prestige of language falls, that of silence rises.
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Given these perils to the authenticity of language (which doesn't depend on the character of any isolated statement or even group of statements, but on the relation of speaker, speech, and situation), the hypothetical project of saying clearly "everything that can be said" suggested by Wittgenstein's remarks looks fearfully complicated. (How much time would one have? Would one have to speak quickly?) The philosopher's hypothetical universe of clear speech (which assigns to silence only "that whereof one cannot speak") would seem to be a moralists, or a psychiatrist's, nightmare — at the least, a place no one should lightheartedly enter. Is there anyone who wants to say "everything that could be said"? The psychologically plausible answer would seem to be no. But yes is plausible, too — as a rising ideal of modern culture. Isn't that what many people do want today — to say everything that can be said? But this aim cannot be maintained without inner conflict, in part inspired by the spread of the ideals of psychotherapy, people are yearning to say "everything" (thereby, among other results, further undermining the crumbling distinction between public and private endeavors, between information and secrets). But, in an overpopulated world being connected by global electronic communication and jet travel at a pace too rapid and violent for an organically sound person to assimilate without shock, people are also suffering from a revulsion at any further proliferation of speech and images. Such different factors as the unlimited "technological reproduction" and near-universal diffusion of both printed language and speech as well as images (from "news" to "art objects"), and the degenerations of public language within the realms of politics and advertising and entertainment, have produced, especially among the better educated inhabitants of what sociologists call "modern mass society," a devaluation of language. (I should argue, contrary to McLuhan, that a devaluation of the power and credibility of images has taken place that's no less profound than. and essentially similar to, that afflicting language.) And, as the prestige of language falls, that of silence rises.
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If anything, the volume of discontent has been turned up since the arts inherited the problem of language from religious discourse. It's not just that words, ultimately, won't do for the highest aims of consciousness; or even that they get in the way. Art expresses a double discontent. We lack words, and we have too many of them. It reflects a double complaint. Words are crude, and they're also too busy — inviting a hyperactivity of consciousness which is not only dysfunctional, in terms of human capacities of feeling and acting, but which actively deadens the mind and blunts the senses.
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In the end, the radical critique of consciousness (first delineated by the mystical tradition, now administered by unorthodox psychotherapy and high modernist art) always lays the blame on language. Consciousness, experienced as a burden, is conceived of as the memory of all the words that have ever been said.
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This tenacious concept of art as "expression" is what gives rise to one common, but dubious, version of the notion of silence, which invokes the idea of "the ineffable." The theory supposes that the province of art is "the beautiful," which implies effects of unspeakableness, indescribability, ineffability. Indeed, the search to express the inexpressible is taken as the very criterion of art; and sometimes, for instance, in several essays of Valery, becomes the occasion for a strict — and to my mind untenable — distinction between prose literature and poetry. It is from this basis that Valery advanced his famous argument (repeated in a quite different context by Sartre) that the novel is not, strictly speaking, an art form at all. His reason is that since the aim of prose is to communicate, the use of language in prose is perfectly straightforward. Poetry, being an art, should have quite different aims: to express an experience which is essentially ineffable; using language to express muteness. In contrast to prose writers, poets are engaged in subverting their own instrument: and seeking to pass beyond it.
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