<nettime> silence on the lam(bs)

[Ted Byfield via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Reading through this thread on the silence of fascism (or at least trying to), I see this is the second, arguably third recent thread that begins by noting a "silence on" some subject: 8 Oct from Andrew Ross, 30 Oct from Allan Siegel, and now 14 Dec from pod. OK, sure, it's partly a riff: Allan was referring to Andrew, and pod may be referring to the earlier threads. But only partly.

Decrying collective silence on this or that issue is a long-established trope on the left (I'd argue we can even hear a faint echo of it in the famous question "what is to be done?"). But the idea of a "trope" is a bit reified and alienated, innit? — as if it were an object rather than a series of actions. So maybe *pathology* would be more accurate than trope? After all, more and more of the left's attention (and, indeed, self-definition) has focused on prescribing what people should say and proscribing what they shouldn't. It seems like "turns" are everywhere these days, so let's call this the "rhetorical turn."

On one level, this rhetorical turn has been tremendous — a continuation and elaboration of the New Left's "cultural turn," with its shift away from impersonal categories like class and labor, toward more personal questions of perspective, dignity, lived experience, and so on. And it isn't just *what* is being acknowledged or asserted, but also how, when, where, to whom, why: this turn has also taught us to find new ways to understand things — to listen to quiet, to look for complexities, to see the potentials in exceptions and ephemera. People joke that "it's a great time to be alive," but I don't think it's a joke: to live in a time when we're asked to retrain our senses and rethink our assumptions is an real privilege.

But, on another level, this rhetorical turn also something between a farce and a tragedy. As legitimate demands multiply and expand, the systemic results can be catastrophic: pro-forma "acknowledgments," armor-plated cant, virtue-signaling, circular shooting squads, micro-policing, etc. Names like those are all pretty problematic, sure, but most of you will understand what I mean when I say the obvious: navigating this pile-up can be really difficult, and often it isn't the most fruitful way to spend our time, energy, attention. We've all seen people, processes, and institutions get lost in supposedly "progressive" bureaucratic symbolism.

A major driver for this rhetorical turn is the internet and, in particular, the web — for what we could almost call mechanical reasons. The rise of these ~media has pushed a HUGE amount of sociability into the realm of textuality — not just writing and reading in the moment, but also the longer-term accumulation of versions, archives, snapshots, retentions, etc, etc. As my former comrade in moderating, Felix Stalder, noted a decade or so ago, the much-touted communications revolution was followed by the barely recognized data *counterrevolution*. That counterrevolution has all kinds of effects, but surely one of them is self-censorship, on every level from the individual to the institutional to the national. Self-censorship isn't new, but nor is it old, because the factors and forms that drive it often are new.

As always, it's worth noting that these effects can play out very differently from across different age groups. People who have deep memories of a pre-internet world are probably around a minimum age of 40 by now; for most people younger than that, the pre-internet world might as well have been a world of horse-drawn carriages and silent movies. There was a time when all movies were silent, and it was only with the advent of synced sound recordings that we had to retroactively describe the early ones as "silent."

If it wasn't obvious, it should be by now: the meanings of silence have changed over time. Silence isn't one thing, it's multitudes; and it doesn't mean one thing, it's polysemic, polyvalent, polyeverything. As Andreas pointed out, it also changes across space — for example, in debates about the rise of neofascism within Germany versus those outside of it. I'd much rather learn from people with a more direct understanding of German cultural politics than jump in with some half-baked opinion, and I'm far from the only one who feels that way.

When someone decries the "silence on" some issue, it isn't just a demand that people *say something*: it's also a normative claim, a demand that others redraw their concerns and priorities in order to make some subject relevant. But, for me at least, one of the big lessons from the rising tide of liberationist movements over the last decade is that we should think twice before chiming in with our opinions of anything and everything. Many LGBTQers would *love* not to hear others' views on their identities, lives, feelings. A lot of women would love to go for a day, or even just a few hours, without having personal and impersonal judgments forced on them. That list could go on and on, but the common point is simple: often it's best to just STFU. Let people be, do, live, and feel on their own terms without constantly being objectified and alienated — and to learn from and through that.

There's never been a shortage of people with something to say about Israel and Palestine. If anything, the superabundance of people talking about it *is the problem*. If the situation were understood mainly in terms of concrete, specific conflicts, it would probably have been much more amenable to constructive resolutions. Instead, *everyone* — Great Powers, ambitious and often cynical regional players, zionists (certainly not limited to Jews), non-zionists, communists and socialists (religious and not), national liberationists, committed antifascists, Evangelical Christians, and countless more — has something to say about it. The systemic result has been to strip debates of their specificity and manufacture a totalizing generality — which, in practical terms, often becomes a quasi-manichean conflict between, basically, the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. When most of the debate boils down to which side "we" think is light and which is dark, it's small wonder how little progress has been made or even unmade.

The implication: silence isn't always and only a failure or an absence, it can also be a positive contribution. That isn't a complicated idea: nettime is smaller than it used to be, but in its heyday it had around 5000 people on it. If everyone on the list spoke up about everything, the result would be a properly exponential nightmare — and EVERYONE WOULD IMMEDIATELY UNSUBSCRIBE. The same would be true on the smaller list even now, just as it's true in EVERY other context you can think of.

"Lurking" isn't a bad thing, in fact it's often a *good* thing: listening more than speaking, attending more than "performing," considering rather than deciding, deferring rather than asserting. I think it's high time the left recognized that traditional notions of "solidarity" aren't always and only an unalloyed good.

I suppose I need to add: I'm not saying people shouldn't talk, debate, whatever. I *am* saying that, when they don't, it can mean many things — and learning to listen for those subtleties and ambiguities can itself be a positive contribution — if not for now then maybe for the day after.

Ted
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