Silence as a Meaning Framework

Silence is far from being a semantic void, but often has a very specific significance. This article will describe and interpret the meanings that silence may take on in contexts of day-to-day life. It is a specific form of communication, a completely noiseless way of letting others know what we think and what we are. In this light, every silence is actually interpreted and deciphered by those participating in an interaction. The form of the silence leads the social actor to see, recognise and decipher crucial clues. A pause, for example, is a break in the chain of speech, a deliberate period of rest and - as such – it is significant: being empty of spoken words, it becomes a place for unspoken ones; a place for the words of silence which may be expressed by, say, a look or a movement of the head. These signs are, of course, contextual to the spoken discourse, but in unspoken discourse they have a particular semantic value. In analysis of face-to-face interaction, attention must be paid to what is said and what is not said, to spoken discourse and tacit discourse. Communication always consists of what is spoken and what is unspoken, of a series of words and silences which create proximity or distance on the basis of an imagined otherness which is limited to the fragments which can be gathered. So silence is a text which is open to interpretation. It is especially during the other’s silence that a social actor has the opportunity to examine and interpret posture, movement, facial expression; to study the face, the look in the eye, hand movements; to gather, also from dress, make-up and hair style, what the other wants to tell us: how they wish to present their social self, how they wish to be defined and recognised. The first part of the article traces the sociology of communicative interaction which has emphasised the function of non-verbal communication. The work of Simmel is a landmark here. His intuitions concerning human ambivalence and the ambiguity expressed in relational experiences – beginning with the crucial role played by the gaze – make a very interesting key to understanding the complex relationship between humans and culture, between reality and its representations. Simmel maintains that in all relationships between humans, their mutual comprehension and repulsion, their “intimacy” and “coldness”, the foundation lies in the expressive force of the gaze. Erving Goffman too, attributes in all his work great importance to these aspects, which are undoubtedly of marked sociological significance. According to Goffman, by interpreting clues (silence, words, images), the Ego succeeds in (or believes it succeeds in) analysing the Alter; the subjects envisage the relationship and reciprocally give themselves to it or reject it. It must, therefore, be recognised that, when we – as observing subjects – form an idea or impression of the person before us, we are almost involuntarily using a whole series of information which derives from their non-verbal behaviour. If everything can be interpreted, if every movement, every look, every facial expression, falls under the observer’s detached analytical gaze, then does a place or time of silence actually exist? The second part of the article attempts to answer this question by showing how important it is to view silence as a common good to be recovered as an essential value in social bonds. Indeed, silence deserves to be ethically reassessed. Silence is the space that words invade and silence is a perpetual background around words. All conversations inescapably come up against the need for silence between their origin and their conclusion. Knowing how to speak involves knowing how to keep silence. The space for the unspoken becomes, almost by magic, the space for what could be said or, rather : the space for the unspoken, for silence, for not speaking does not belong to the hypothetical silent individual, but, conversely, belongs by right to the listener-interpreter of silences. The various dimensions of silence, the multiplicity of meanings it can acquire in different cultural contexts and the delicate balance which establishes itself between silence and verbal and iconic language, invite reflection on what would be the conditions which enable silence to preserve its power as a high-intensity communication code.