Disturbing Binaries in Political Thought: Silence as Political Activism

Abstract

‘Keeping silent’ can be a meaningful political event, a form of political activism that generates new political subjectivities and alters existing realities by reconfiguring power relations. To flesh out this argument, this paper attends to a particular silent protest and affirms it as a tactic employed by an emergent political collectivity to make itself perceptible, declare an injustice and challenge institutional power. As such, the silent event under scrutiny does not merely invite a turning of our attention to a practice that breaks the association of the political subject with the speaking subject; it also invites a reconsideration of what we are accustomed to accept as political activism. ‘Keeping silent’ is a critical practice, indeed, because it manifests an alternative possibility of being and acting; in so doing, it disrupts established patterns of thought and practice, and more specifically the rigid distinction between speech and silence.

Keywords:

• Dualism
• de Certeau
• activism
• non-violent movements
• democracy

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sam Chambers and Alan Finlayson for their comments on an earlier draft of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. The event quickly went viral and can be watched on popular sites like YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmfIuKelOt4) and Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/60599729).

^2. This is one dimension presented in several blogs, for example http://thesecondalarm.com/2011/11/20/ucdavis-chancellor-video/

^3. The diverse network of the Women In Black, with its members occasionally organizing silent protests or vigils, would be a notable example here. ‘Women in Black is a world-wide network of women committed to peace with justice and actively opposed to injustice, war, militarism and other forms of violence’, from the movement's official website http://www.womeninblack.org. See also Göker (2011) who offers a gendered analysis of the silent vigils organized by mothers of Turkey every Saturday.

^4. Following the students' protest, the judicial settlement of the pepper-spray case ordered that victims should receive $1 million compensation, whereas Katehi herself was asked to provide written apology.

^5. For an analysis of the relationship between freedom and silence from a Foucauldian perspective, see Wendy Brown (2005) ‘Freedom's silences’, in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 83–97.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sophia Hatzisavvidou

Sophia Hatzisavvidou holds a PhD in Political Theory from Swansea University. She currently teaches political theory and political communication at the Department of Politics, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is working on a book project about the interplay between ethos and practical reason in political life. Her other research interests include non-violent forms of political engagement, rhetoric and forms of political agency.