«CULTURE OF SILENCE» AS A TOOL «POLITICS OF THE VOICE»

Abstract

The «culture of silence», as well as the «politics of the voice», are interpreted differently in the Eastern and Western traditions. For example, in Japanese culture, silence acts as a spiritual practice and is evidence of a person's level of education. In archaic cultures, silence was also part of a person's spiritual path, his formation, and his search for himself. It is characteristic of a Western person to consider silence in a slightly different way. For her, silence, first of all, is a sign of inability to express oneself, one's position, etc. That is why in Western culture preference is given to the voice as a confirmation of one's will. The key opposition underlying European culture is the binary of sound and its absence. European culture attached great importance to the word. Speaking for a European means, first of all, self-defense and self-affirmation, defending oneself and one's place in the social structure, and accordingly silence is perceived, as a rule, in three modes: or as something abnormal; or as a sign of surrender; or as an attack on another person expressed in a certain way. For Europeans, a person who does not give voice, a will that is not expressed by voice, in the social sense is equal to zero. Precisely because of this, power structures that operate only by voice, on the one hand, do not perceive gestures of silence, or if they do, it is only as a sign of consent, and on the other hand, they are the voice they fear, bow to and which admit. That is precisely why, based on the analyzed material, we come to the conclusion that silence is not always golden. For a government that only pursues the «politics of the voice» a person's silence indicates nothing but consent and submission. Silent resistance means absolutely nothing to the power structures. And in a person who gradually gets used to only perceiving the voice of the conditionally stronger, the experience of resistance, the experience of expressing personal will gradually atrophies, he is drawn into a paranoid tendency and fear of being revealed or visible.