A project in postmodernism perforce deals with the avalanche of talk that constitutes the ongoing critical and creative enterprise of the culture. The dogmas, isms, theories, beliefs that have come and gone since the Enlightenment make up the subject matter of the talk around the fire. As thinking has become professionalized in the academic disciplines and professionals have come to be producers of visible objects representing their thoughts, this avalanche has intensified exponentially. The idea of silence itself is surrounded by a large bibliography. In the spirit of THE PROGRAMME, a quiet small reminder that silence can be a behavior and not an idea is fitting. Is a silent human being existing? We want to believe so.
Silence, of course, has other functions unrelated to the issue here.
Talk involves the choice of words for each utterance. When talkers choose a set of words, they choose not to use other sets of words in utterances. Those other utterances are destroyed by the utterance that is chosen. That makes talk a kind of violence. Lyotard thinks of it as a system of political terror. He says, "You don't play around with language. And in this sense, there are no language games. There are stakes tied to genres of discourse. When these stakes are attained, we talk about success. There is conflict, therefore, [and this] results from phrases." [JUST GAMING. Tr. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 137.]
Lyotard thus reminds us of the ancient power of disciplined silence. As we come to grips with the futility of linguistic solutions in the postmodern situation, we hold out the possibilities for silence.
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