The Global Politics of Silence and Sound: From Metaphor to Metonymy

Draft Chapter prepared for the collective project Political Silence: Meanings, Functions and Ambiguity, co-lead by Sophia Dingli and Thomas N. Cooke. The Global Politics of Silence and Sound: From Metaphor to Metonymy Noé Cornago University of the Basque Country Abstract: To fully understand the global politics of silence, a move is needed from the prevailing metaphorical understanding of the politics of silence as sign - based in the idea of similarity-, towards a metonymical one, better equipped to capture the ontological continuity between the forms of silence inscribed in political discourse and life-histories and the wider experience of sound and silence in the global fabric of real life. Only through the movement referred above, the existing continuity between different regimes of silence and sound reveals its ultimate unity. Otherwise it would be impossible to understand the complex relationship between the wider technological and economic transformations that are shaping the new global soundscape, and the multiple institutional mediations, competing interests and diverse normative expectations, through which the global politics of silence and sound emerge all over the world emerge. More than a celebratory account of the transformative potential of some modest forms of sonic agency, this work aims to enhance current approaches to the global politics of silence. For so doing, we examined the modes of existence of ‘silence’ in three apparently well differentiated domains, namely organizational studies, sound engineering, and musical aesthetics, showing their hidden continuities and suggesting potential venues for further research. Introduction Recent efforts to examine 'silence' as a meaningful concept for global politics were generally grounded in a fruitful, albeit mainly metaphorical and ideational, understanding of its possible value as political sign. Silence may be – in the most disparate fields- a telling expression of political repression, censorship, concealment, debasement, denial or ignorance. But also, conversely, the exact opposite, namely a form of conscious political agency, through which the politics of social resistance, dissent and contestation extends its semiotic repertoire (Hansen, 2000; Bhambra and Shilliam 2009; Dingli 2015). That line of research convincingly underlines, through different analytical prisms, that the power of silence resides surely in its ‘inherent ambiguity’, as a form of simultaneous absence and presence through which power is exercised in all its modalities ‘whether for purposes of domination or of resistance’ (Achino-Loeb 2006, p.3). This ambivalence of silence have been consistently examined in the most diverse fields of knowledge within social sciences and humanities, such as political philosophy (Le Breton 1997), social history (Aminzade 2001; Ben-Ze’ev 2010; Corbin 2016), sociology (Beck 2002; Ferguson 2003; Parpart 2010; Wagner 2012; Sue 2015); gender studies (Ryan-Flood and Gill 2010), literary studies (Boldt et al 2013), social anthropology (Achino-Loeb 2006), social psychology (Zielinski 1975), or communication (Noelle-Neumann, 1985). The ambiguity of silence can be in addition examined not only in terms of the pragmatics of everyday language (Jaworski 1992; Tannen and Saville-Troike 1987; Thiesmayer 2003; Nakane 2007), political discourse (Schröter and Taylor 2018), its rhetoric (Glenn 2004; Glenn and Ratcliffe 2011), or its emotional aspects (Thompson and Biddle 2013), but also in terms of the ethical challenges it entails (Billias and Vemuri 2017). For instance, a path-breaking study on sexual harassment published two decades ago explained not only how dominant groups silence marginalized members of society, but also how sometimes marginalized groups themselves privilege or abandon another as well (Clair 1998). Seeking to shed light to silence’s recurrent moral ambivalence Billias and Vemuri (2017) have recently explored in depth seven modes of silence with their corresponding ethical correlates, confronting later their ideal types with a selection of equivalent number of empirical cases, ranging from the politics of Jim Crow in the USA to the traumas indicted by dictatorship in Argentina, passing through the Aboriginal peoples’ fights for securing the validity of their traditional forms of land property in Australia. These seven types of silence are: first, the silence of those that display an empty rhetoric without real engagement with others; second, the insolent silence cultivated by those who consider speech unjustified or unnecessary; third, the silence of hopelessness that denotes exhaustion and despair; fourth, the silence of the oppressed that seek to find a better way to deal with the everyday reality of oppression they still are unable to escape from; fifth, the silence of those afraid of the serious implications of breaking the regime of silence in which they are immersed; sixth, the silence of those that reveal real engagement and attentive listening to otherness; and finally, seventh, the reflective silence that seeks to create space for dialogue, without anticipating its possible outcome (Billias and Vemuri 2017, p. 17-34). This latter mode of silence, they contend, entails the ‘suspending of judgment’, a genuine attempt to listen to others without imposing a ‘value bias’ or ‘insistence on a particular outcome’, so that ‘new and as-yet- unknown options may emerge’, making room to discover what the process ‘is or could be’ (Billias and Vemuri 2017, p. 174). Reasonable as they sound, this type of normative predicaments shall not be idealized, for it cannot be ignored that there are countless critical situations in which to ascertain the specific mode of silence we are facing will be impossible, or even worst, in which due to existing power relations no substantial transformative options may actually emerge. In sum, and beyond any well-intended normative efforts, it seems that we shall perhaps accept that ‘a degree of silence will be a necessary part of any political order’ to exist (Dingli 2015, p. 739). This additionally explains that grasping the ‘politics of silence’ surely demands a more comprehensive and realistic approach than those offered by strictly linguistic or ethical approaches. After all, silence awakes, more holistically, our ‘anthropological imagination, interrogating the causes that produced the origins of language, with its silences and utterances, before human consciousness emerged and evolved’ (Achino-Loeb 2006: p. 1). There is however an assumption that all the contributions referred above apparently share, namely the idea that any political alternative to politically meaningful silences should necessarily be expressed through the utterances of human language: Lacking interpreters, experience cannot be parsed into selective absences, rather it collapses into absolute simultaneity; presence and absence become one. Only when ouch became phonemic could it have pierced the silence, morphing a sonorous universe into discrete items of significance (Achino-Loeb 2006,1). It can be arguably said that perhaps the paragraph reproduced above opens and closes too fast the implications of its own and valuable insights. Firstly, because, against the common assumption that human speech is the sole alternative to political silence, it can be arguably said that there are, all over the world and surely more than ever in history, countless sonic cultures that, through multiple forms of technological and communicative mediation ‘utilize and deploy sound and listening to address social conflicts’, fostering new transformations of the public sphere, thus performing a sort of poltical albeit sonic political agency (LaBelle 2018). And secondly, because the articulation between human consciousness, silence and political agency is today, under current technological conditions, much more complex than ever was in any remote past. Sound world includes today not only the sounds of nature, as ancestrally understood, or the sounds of human sociability, but also an immense variety of technical objects that, overwhelmingly, also produce silence and sounds that are deeply integrated in our wider ecology and political life. For that reason, this chapter contends that to fully understand the global politics of silence, a move is needed from the prevailing metaphorical understanding of the politics of silence as sign - based in the idea of similarity-, towards a metonymical one based in the idea of continuity-. Metaphor is a ‘cognitive mechanism whereby one experiential domain is partially projected onto a different experiential domain’, so that the latter is partially understood in terms of the first one, without ‘violating the basic structure of the target domain’ whose ontological status is only referred by analogy. Metonymy instead, is a conceptual projection whereby one experiential domain is partially understood in terms of another one, which is included in a wider ‘common experiential domain’ (Barcelona 2012, 4). For instance, a metaphorical approach to the ‘silence of diplomats’ can be understood not as the absence of any audible noise but as absence of any relevant speech on some particular issue. In contrast, the ‘silence of diplomats’ would be approached metonymically when understood not as the omission of relevant speech but as the acoustic result of fear to eavesdropping, or the utilization of sound-sensing and noise reduction devices, within a particular organizational domain. In other words, only through metonymy we capture the continuity between the forms of silence inscribed in political discourse, life-histories and organizational rules, and the wider experience of sound and silence in real life. Bearing these reflections in mind, more than a celebratory account of the transformative potential of some modest forms sonic agency, such as those recently examined by LaBelle (2018), this work prefers to suggest a reconsideration of current approaches to the global politics of silence starting from the possibilities drawn out by examining the modes of existence of ‘silence’ in three different domains, namely those of organizational studies, sound engineering, and musical aesthetics, that have been sofar largely ignored by the otherwise valuable contributions referred above. Rather than establishing a simple parallelism, our purpose is to demonstrate, in a metonymical way, the hidden continuities existing amongst these three orders of reality, apparently so-well differentiated, and thus their potential relevance, in combination with other insights, for the study of global politics. Additionally, the final section will provide some critical reflections about an increasingly influential popular philosophy trend that seeks to reformulate the politics of silence and sound with the grammars of a new soteriology based in an idealized understanding of silence as a venue for the salvation of humanity. Organizational silence, sound surveillance and administered life Less inclined to adopt normative approaches than other fields in the social sciences, organizational studies is arguably the discipline in which the examination of the functional dimensions silence has advanced more consistently. Well informed theoretically and empirically grounded, and always close to the practitioners’ world, this field of study has the dubious virtue of serving to decipher the concerns of those placed at the bottom of any organization, whilst simultaneously provides advice to organizational managers placed at its top. In fact, more than a critique or the organizational cage as the quintessential expression of administered life, this body of literature aims simply to better know its profiles for the sake of securing a good and efficient organizational climate. Ryan and Oestreich, authors of one of the most influential works in this field, introduced their research subject in telling words: This book explore why people are afraid to speak up at work and what they're not talking about; demonstrate the high price organizations pay—in reduced productivity, low morale, and creative paralysis—when people feel it's too risky to talk about critical issues (Ryan and Oestreich 1991, p.3). Afterwards they examine some managerial fear-producing behaviours such as the adoption of critical decisions without the due care, sending of ambiguous messages to staff that undermine employees' confidence and willingness to adopt any innovative or risky move (Ryan and Oestreich 1991, p.3-16). In a similar vein, Morrison and Milliken approach organizational silence as a collective tendency by the side of staff members to misrepresent or hide their true opinions and feelings about a variety of issues, resulting in ‘decreasing satisfaction, commitment and motivation’. Experiencing organizational atmosphere from within, they contend that staff members sooner or later learn whether speaking and expressing their opinions may be risky or even dangerous, acting consequently (Morrison and Milliken 2000). Another highly quoted article in this research field contends, in a rather audacious move, that the key feature that differentiates organizational silence and voice is ‘not the presence or absence of speaking up, but the actor’s motivation to withhold versus express ideas, information, and opinions about work-related improvements’ (Dyne et al 2003, p.1360). More specifically they identify three differentiated motives behind employees’ choice of silence or voice: acquiescent or ‘disengaged behaviour ‘based on resignation’, defensive or ‘self-protective behaviour based on fear’, and pro-social behaviour ‘based on cooperation’, resulting in three types of silence and three types of voice”. However, after the corresponding empirical research, Dyne and collaborators conclude rather intriguingly that beyond employees’ specific motives to remain silent or not, external observers are ‘more likely to misattribute employee motives for silence than for voice’ (Dyne et al 2003, p.1360). More valuable in the context of this book are those approaches to organizational silence inspired by critical management studies (Grey and Willmott 2005; Alversson et al 2009). Less concerned about the implications of staffs’ silence for organizational performance, they concentrate instead on both its causes and negative effects upon workers subjective experiences (Vakola and Bouradas 2005; Kish-Gephart et al 2009). Moving beyond the simple taxonomy of the diverse modalities of organizational silence, the aim of these critical studies is ‘to unpack fear as a discrete emotion’ and to elucidate its effects on organizational life (Kish-Gephart et at 2009, p.163). This approach looks as particularly promising for the study of global politics, where highly demanding regimes of silence are the rule within some crucial organizational settings, such as military forces, intelligence agencies, transnational corporations, refugee camps, diplomatic services, epistemic communities influential in critical global decisionmaking processes, or international courts. Interestingly enough, each of these organizational realities produces its own forms of silence, and their corresponding forms of contestation: military desertion (McLaughin 2014; Pelts et al 2015; Koehler at al 2016), intelligence and corporate whistleblowing (Perry 2014; Monk 2015; Vandekerckhove 2017; Walsh 2017), fleeing refugees (Puvimanasinghe et al 2014), diplomatic (Kiesling 2006; Gurman 2011) and scientific dissent (Delborne 2008; Aklin & Urpelainen 2014; Melo-Martín & Intemann 2013), or conversely the right to silence in transnational criminal proceedings (Billing 2016). In these cases, the regime of silence and its negation refer so clearly to each other that they reveal their co-produced nature: The collective possibilities that break into silence are the singular condition of possibility for silence as such; it is therefore the case that the impossibility of silence and the regime of silence are one and the same thing (Brinkema 2011, p.212). In other words, it can be arguably said that every relevant organizational setting in global politics entails a complex regime in which organizational silence and its contestation are mutually dependent. A good illustration of this can be found in the case of diplomatic dissent within U.S. Department of State. In 1971, an official dissent Channel was created, seeking to mediate the various forms of estrangement within foreign service professionals, whose paradoxical effects have been formulated in simple but convincing words: ‘the more tolerant an administration is of dissent, the less need there is for the dissent Channel, and the more intolerant it is, the greater may be the reluctance to use it’ (Smith 2011, p. 126). Similar paradoxical effects explain the rise and fall, within the U.S. Military, of the so-called ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy (DADT), through which the Department of Defence responded to congressional legislation in 1993, allowing homosexual members to serve in the forces, so long as they showed no evidence of their sexual orientation. This policy remained in force until Congress passed the DADT Repeal Act of 2010 and finally, only in September 2011, the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the US armed forces officially came to an end (Parco and Levy 2016). Sometimes however, those who experienced from the inside the burden of organizational silence can eventually voice their discontent afterwards. In an insightful study Lebaron (2018) examines some prominent cases in which their protagonists, seek to justify, more or less convincingly, the reasons of their silence, rehabilitating themselves either as credible critics of organizational silence – e.g. Varoufakis’ disclosure of confidential minutes and documents related to the delicate negotiations on the Greek bailout (Varoufakis 2017)- or, conversely, as defenders of organizational silence for the sake of public interest, such as Bernanke’s vindication of his role as President of the U.S. Federal Reserve in the financial crisis from 2006 to 2014 (Bernanke 2015). Unfortunately, however, for ordinary people all over the world, organizational silence, as experienced in their daily life, is an almost insurmountable rock. A rock that is sometimes monitored with sophisticated surveillance systems (Sewell and Barker 2006; Spitzmúller and Stanton 2006; Iedema and Rhodes 2009), including indeed sound sensors, voice recognition devices, and systematic electronic eavesdropping of employees (Schwarz 1969; Regan 2014; Hurst 2015; Gregory 2016). After all, drawing on Horkheimer and Adorno critique of ‘administered life’ (1959), it can be arguably said that only imposing organizational silence, political and corporate elites, even in those organizations that pretend to be virtuous and pleasant, are able to exploit ‘nature and other men’ in order to preserve the unity of their self from its potential disintegration’ as Kataway (2017) aptly express. That ‘self’ acquires in global politics many organizational incarnations, such as the ‘nation’, the ‘party’, the ‘state’, the ‘corporation’, the ‘army’, the ‘foreign service’, the ‘refugee camp’, the ‘international commission’, the ‘terrorist group’, the ‘NGO’, and so on. Each of them designs and implements its own regime of silence, to secure the type of organizational soundness they seek. But in so doing they also invariably prepare the ground for the coming contestation, with its corresponding political agency, through which the multitudes attempt to escape from their ‘suffocating routines’ of everyday life (Cohen and Taylor 1976). However, as the Oxfam sexual scandal has recently demonstrated (Khan 2018), for being effective, these forms of insurrection shall go far beyond any ‘sonic agency’ (LaBelle 2018), trespassing not only the boundaries of ‘silence’, but also those that present organizational silence as something completely isolated from the wider socioeconomic, political, environmental and technological realm in which it is embedded. Noise abatement, signal enhancement, silent weapons Despite their undisputable value, most of the approaches to the politics of silence discussed above can be considered anthropocentric, not in these sense of being focused exclusively on human agency and subjectivity, but on the extent that, for them, the very existence of silence only acquires relevance in a soundscape formed exclusively by the combination human silence and oral or written speech. For the purposes of a better understanding of the global politics of silence and sound however, we need to consider also the immense variety of technical objects and mediations through which the modern experience of sound also forged a distinctively modern political subjectivity (Erlmann 2014). In his contribution to this book, Ramel traces back in history the emergence of silence as a meaningful modern social and political category. Drawing on Elias (1982) understanding of the civilizing process, he underlines the importance of silence as an ordering principle of modernization, both in terms of everyday life and social organization. This understanding of silence in social life is historically observable in early-modern policy-making and diplomacy and for sure it remains relevant today (Ramel 2018). From the perspective adopted in this chapter it entails however an important limitation that need to be pointed out. Elias’ stylized understanding of modernization, takes culturally framed relations of force rather than relations of production as the focus of his theorizing (Powell 2013), and thus it hardly captures the way in which modernization was also abruptly impulsed by the rise of modern capitalism, with its corresponding technologies, that rapidly transformed the world, and more specially the soundworld. As early as in 1921, pioneering sound scientist and Nobel Prize, William H. Bragg, published a fascinating book entitled The World of Sound (1921) offering the first late-modern account of the complexities of the sound world, in the age of electronic sounds and other extraordinary technologies. In that book Bragg included, amongst others, specific chapters about the sounds of town, country, seas and war. In so doing he anticipated in almost a century the current agenda of sound ecology and environmental engineering (Cohen and Berdugo, 2001; Chambers 2005; Chambers and Jensen, 2005; Griffin et al., 2005; Kotzen and English 2009; Stocker, 2013). Despite their technical nature, these disciplinary fields bring to the fore the otherwise hidden connection, at both micro and macro levels, between the global fabric of noise - as represented by factories, vociferant media, military technology and transportation engines- and the human beings – and other species- within the wider global ecological context. Following Simondon’s (1958) path-breaking explorations on the modes of existence of technical objects, these technical objects – such as generators, aircrafts, microchips, machine tools, weapons, and even noise reduction devices - shall be reconsidered, beyond their apparent and utilitarian finality, in terms of its actual operational functioning in the wider global context. For it is through their multiple interactions with human agency, in the wider environmental and institutional context in which these uncountable objects are placed, from which the global politics of sound and silence emerges. As absolute silence does not exist in strictly acoustical terms, these technical disciplines approach it obliquely, namely in terms of its unavoidable relationship with noise, reluctantly recognizing the social and political implications of that relationship. An introductory text written by a leading global expert candidly refers to this, apparently recognizing the limits of environmental engineering in front of the complexities of human subjectivity and social life. First, the author explains that our growing exposure to noise has ‘created a gradual acceptance of noise as a natural byproduct of progress’. Then he didactically asserts that noise pollution is genuine threat to human health and the quality of life, but one that presents a particular difficulty. Attempting to quantify ambient noise levels can be a tedious and frustrating undertaking. Unlike air and water pollution measurements, noise measurements must include subjective as well as objective factors (Chambers 2005, p.446) In other words, physical measurement of noise magnitude requires to be augmented with subjective loudness and other annoyance-related social factors that are more difficult to establish, particularly for engineers. There is a clear division of labour within this huge research field. On the one hand, sound ecology concentrates in different interventions aiming first mapping sound pollution, and then to provide policy recommendations able to reduce the negative impacts of noise pollution over human and other species (Stocker 2013; Farina 2013; Murphy and King 2014; Farina and Gage 2017). A particularly valuable introductory handbook to this field summarizes its rationale as follows: Environmental noise has traditionally been dismissed as an inevitable fact of life and has not been targeted and controlled to the same extent as other health risks. A growing body of research linking noise to adverse health effects coupled with proactive legislation, primarily in the EU, is now driving change... For some people, noise is nothing more than a minor inconvenience, but for others noise exposure can lead to negative health effects varying from annoyance and sleep deprivation to more serious issues… (Murphy and King 2014, p.xi) On the other hand, sound engineering concentrates in the specific development of new technologies for ‘noise abatement and speech enhancement’, in which any possible achievement in whatever field it may be applied, is assessed in terms of both its ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ dimensions of its potential improvement of ‘signal processing’: It is well known that any speech communication system suffers from the ubiquitous presence of additive noise. Typical examples of such products are cellular phones and hearing aids. In these systems, the noise degrades the perceptual quality of the speech and will impair the speech intelligibility when the signal-to-noise ratio comes down to a certain level. Therefore, the objective of noise reduction is to suppress such additive noise for purposes of speech enhancement (Benesty and Chen 2015, p.1). Even formulated in such a technical mode, the challenge of noise reduction inevitably resonates in other dimensions that sound ecology and engineering rarely address directly: namely the wider political economy of noise in which the physical and even the aesthetics dimensions of noise reduction techniques and devices converge with political decisions and market forces. Two experts in noise barriers, recognize that in recent years ‘demand for a quieter environment has caused the noise barrier market to grow considerably across Europe and around the world’, and that project designers will need to comply with ‘improved noise attenuation guidelines and more demanding legislation’ (Kotzen and English, 2009, p.1). Reflecting on the near future they offer nonetheless a far more intriguing forecast: It is conceivable that many barriers designed in the near future will have a number of design functions apart from mitigating noise. Perhaps the most exciting development that we encountered was the integration of noise barriers with non-noise-sensitive buildings. All communities need a range of shops, sports facilities and workplaces that can be used as a buffer zone between the road and the residential area. It is puzzling that it has taken so long for the idea to become a reality, where economic as well as environmental positives may be achieved… (Kotzen and English, 2009; xi) For sure, there is nothing fearful in the optimistic paragraph reproduced above, but its potential adaptation to other more delicate geopolitical contexts produces trembling, as it makes easy to imagine a dystopian near future, in which the politics of silence and sound, through technologically sophisticated and differentiated regimes of silence, expanded intrawall and extrawall organizational boundaries, accentuating social divides. Echoing Attali (1977) path-breaking contribution to a critical political economy of music, it shall never be forgotten that: Modern state is a gigantic, monopolizing noise emitter, and at the same time, a generalized eavesdropping device. Eavesdropping on what? Aiming to silence whom? … Everywhere we look, the monopolization of the broadcast of messages, the control of noise, and the institutionalization of the silence of the others assure the durability of power (Attali 1977, p.7) Admittedly, the rise of transnational corporate power, global broadcasting and connectivity, and the deterritorializing effects of new digital media, gives Attali’s perspective a little bit old-fashioned look, but even so it remains relevant. Illustrations of this abound in the most diverse domains, with undeniable relevance for global politics. Let´s take for instance the global military sector. Whilst some sound engineers try to find how to reduce soldiers’ exposure to noise levels that seriously affect human physical and mental health, seeking for them more affordable and less harmful military soundscapes (Humes et al 2006), other perseverate in the development of silent weapons and sound deprivation dispositifs, susceptible to be used with different applications not only in battlefields but in urban riots as well (Zubek et al 1961; Rose 1989; Goodman 2011; Voclar 2011). But there are many other cases in which the politics of silence and sound reveal not only a displacement of relevance from state power to corporate power, but also a promising emergence of political agency with a progressive transformational potential. Such is the case of current efforts to focus on, and appropriately regulate, the multiple causes and consequences of noise pollution on the oceans (McCarthy 2016). These legal and political efforts, frequently impulse by environmental and legal activists reaction against developments in high, medium and low frequencies active sonar technologies for military, commercial and recreational purposes registered in past decades, whose negative effects of marine life are becoming increasingly observable across the seas (Hildebrand 2006). Sound, Silence, Immersion, Salvation The aesthetics of music offers undisputable potential for a disimpassioned and nuanced understanding of silence, and musicians themselves have produced insightful reflections that beyond their merely aesthetic dimension acquire political relevance. The political dimension of silence in music can be expressed as follows: All musics stand in specific relationships to silence. Silence is as much the material of composition and performance as is sound. Yet musics are further defined in terms of potential sound and combinations of sound that are prohibited and thus silenced (Edgar 1997, p. 323). However, this is a field which escapes nonetheless from easy generalizations, as even within the field of musical thought there are extremely contrasting positions (Cage, 1961; Takemitsu 1995; Lossef and Doctor 2007; Gann 2010; Vogelin 2010). However, with the purpose of approaching this particular subject in the context of this book, attention will be given first to those more analytical in content (Beeman 2016), and then it will be displaced towards those of a more open and speculative philosophical inspiration (Sontag 1969; Jankélévitch 1974; Nancy 2007). To begin with, let’s say that the compositional gesture can be intuitively seen as an intervention over silence from which the musical creation emerges. From this widely spread point of view, silence is a function of information, that can be understood in terms of figure-ground relationship. Drawing on Shannon and Weaver (1949) influential communication theory, Beeman explains that ‘silence in music has a dual function both as high information content and as low information content, depending on context.’ (Beeman 2016:25). Following his well-articulated insights, it can be said that music has high information content compared with the ambient sound where it emerges, the latter being designated consequently as ‘silence’. This is the case of the traditional understanding of concert music, in which the orchestra begins to play only when the concert-hall hurly-burly fades into a respectful silence. Conversely, a pause of silence in the curse of music has a high information content, for it becomes a ‘figure’ against the ‘ground’ (Beeman 2006, p.25). Despite its simplicity, this understanding of the place of silence in music undoubtedly has potential and pertinence for any reflective understanding of the politics of silence and sound. The various audible reactions to the official statements pronounced at the UN General Assembly annual special session, looks as a particularly suitable for this approach. After all, only a few speakers enjoy the feeling they are the sounding ‘figure’ against a silent ‘ground’. Similarly, #MeToo campaign about sexual harassment in the film industry emerged as ‘figure’ against a ‘ground’ of silence in Hollywood, but its silence about the sexual exploitation in prostitution and porn industry keeps it within the ‘ground’ in front of which other less influential campaigns fight to emerge as ‘figure’ to be heard (Farley 2018). But convincing as it sounds, this is not certainly the sole understanding of silence and music we should pay attention to. Beeman (2006, p. 28) adds to this understanding of music two others equally relevant. First, he contends that silence in music has also a boundary function. The principal one is that which marks the beginning and the end of a particular musical piece, that audiences generally recognized with a sonorous applause. But there are silences as well marking section within the same musical composition such as those indicating the movements of a symphony, during which no experienced listener would be expected to applaud. Finally, silence has also a boundary function when marking changes within musical statements even when the partition does not indicate pauses or rests. In that case the figure-ground relationship is marked through the intensity of musical sound, such as it happens also when a particular soloist instrument emerges from the ground and then disappears or when these silences are the vehicle for a sort of conversation between interpreters (Beeman 2006, p.28-29). The potential application of this to the audible dimensions of multilateral diplomatic summits is easy to imagine. Interestingly, French experimental composer Pierre Schaeffer (1952), the creator of concrete music, compared his experiences as the official representative, from 1943 to 1949, of the French Protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia, in a number of multilateral diplomatic conferences on various technical issues – such as the distribution of wavelengths for radio and television broadcasting – with a concert of musique concrète. In so doing, he offers an illustration about how to extend his method for music listening to the diplomatic realm: These delegates...were going to share wavelengths among ninety countries on the planet. Months, years were going by without the slightest chance of agreement. In short, I was going from a difficult technique to an insoluble policy. Sometimes, in the course of endless sessions, I would listen to the delegates’ pronouncements with a concrète ear and perceive all the better their perfectly illogical workings. No argument could convince anybody, and other laws governed persuasion: the patience of some, the violence of others, the endurance of the group, the cleverness of another; it was all about who could get the last quarter of an hour. Four booths of interpreters laboured away completely pointlessly translating the speeches… They too made a great noise in which, as in the case of the railway, variety had to be sought out amid endless monotony (Schaeffer 1952, p. 21-22). However, beyond the valuable analytical clarifications summarized above, the aesthetics of silence has been also approached in a more speculative mode by outstanding philosophers such as Sontag (1969), Jankélévitch (1974), or Nancy (2007) and prominent composers, such as Cage (1961) and Takemitsu (1995). After all, once Cage established authoritatively, after his famous immersion in Harvard’s anechoic chamber in 1951, that ‘there is no such thing as silence’, philosophical reflections on silence turned towards a renewed understanding of the experience of listening as a proper venue for grasping the ultimate meaning of silence in performing arts. This realization, including its consequences for contemporary music, was later formulated by Cage himself in rather abrupt terms: For in this new music nothing takes place but sound. Those that are notated and those that are not. Those that are not notated appear in the written music as silence, opening the doors of the music to the sounds that happened to be in the environment. There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot … Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death” (Cage 1961, p.8) Cage’s subsequent work, life and writings confirmed, how deeply affected he was by his discovery, and how it led him to follow a Zen inspired meditative path whose démarche was the premiere, in 1952, of his singular piece “4,33” where the interpreter/performer is instructed to adopt a few gestures marking the different parts of the performance, without producing any sound with the instrument, hence forcing the audience to discover the meaning of that particular event through the unexpected listening of the surrounding sounds in which they are also immersed (Gann 2010, p. 131). For the purposes of this chapter, it is particularly important to underline, that despite some interpretations that misleadingly portray this composition as merely a boutade, Cage was absolutely serious with his proposal, seeking to increase the awareness of the public through an audacious immersive experience. Cage´s pioneering experimentations with silence thus opened the door to a new understanding of music that a few decades later catalysed as sound-art. Vogelin has captured in precise words the most distinctive implications of this new sound-art in which silence provides the condition to practise a signifying language that takes account of its sonic base: it embraces the body of the listener in its solitude and invites him to listen to himself amidst the soundscape that he inhabits. In this sense, silence is no longer the absence of sound but the beginning of listening as communication (Vogelin 2010, p. xv) A slightly different understanding, expressed more poetically, is shared by contemporary composer Toru Takemitsu, when he contends that ‘confronting silence by uttering a sound is nothing but verifying one’s own existence’ (Takemitsu 1995, p. 57). His reflections however express a somewhat aestheticized concern, not only about the greatness of nature, but also about the human makings and even social struggles that transformed the landscapes he contemplates: I found Chikuhō had become an area of abandoned mines. An earlier vivid image of it as a place of bitter labour disputes was now replaced by the reality of abandoned miners’ shacks standing pitifully weathering in the wind. An algaeladen crater lake and a tailings pile were only a pattern of deserted ruins. I stood there uneasily taking in the scenery as everything merged into a lyrical landscape… layers upon layers of heavy silence and I was beginning to feel that it was fruitless to resist it … (Takemitsu 1995, p.30-31). Although more sensitive with the social and political struggles that forged contemporary soundscapes, Takemitsu’s Zen inspired attitude places him closer to Cage, but distant from other philosophical understandings of silence, such as those represented by Sontag (1967) and Jankélévitch (1961; 1971). These philosophers were more inclined to interrogate directly the connection between the experiencing of silence and human spirituality. According to Sontag, every historical era tends to reinvent the project of spirituality, and the aesthetics of silence becomes the way of escaping from a world in which communicating with an audience appears as futile. The aesthetics of silence appears thus a viable spiritual project for the artist, but one that in its radical estrangement from the world, offers poor consolation for our societies. In other words, embracing silence can be understood as a form of self-resignation, through which the artist recognizes its political failure, giving up of the potential or art as a venue for collective transcendence (Sontag 2004). It must be said nonetheless that Sontag’s gloomy understanding of the politico-aesthetics of silence is rather singular. In his chapter in this book, Ramel (2018) remarks that the predominant understanding of silence in music differs from the negative conceptions of silence espoused by critical IR theorists because it highlights a more positive meaning. This is particularly true, as Ramel aptly demonstrates, in the case of Jankélévitch, for his philosophy of music (and silence) emerges as a message of hope. Not interested in contemporary music he never refers to atonal music. Despite his conservatism however he offers quite an audacious and counterintuitive understanding of silence, that Ramel aptly discuss in detail. Music, he contends, is in itself a sort of silence, for it imposes silence upon the most unbearable noise, namely words. In so doing, music makes the gravity of logos more bearable and prevents us from identifying with the act of speaking. Music in sum invites our bodies and minds to enhance our wisdom and spirituality through other means, opening up the possibility to imagine, and for a while even experiencing innefable worlds, that means, worlds situated beyond the reach of written and spoken words (Jankélévitch 1961). Conclusion This chapter contends that to fully understand the global politics of silence, a move is needed from the prevailing metaphorical understanding of the politics of silence as sign - based in the idea of similarity-, towards a metonymical one, better equipped to capture the ontological continuity between the forms of silence inscribed in political discourse, life-histories and organizational rules, and the wider experience of sound and silence in the global fabric of real life. Only through the movement referred above, the existing continuity between different regimes of silence and sound is unveiled - such as that existent between war videogames and real battlefields, or between the ‘relaxing natural sounds’ provided by musical apps for smartphones and noise abatement walls in urban spaces-, thus revealing its ultimate unity. Otherwise it would be impossible to understand the complex relationship between the wider technological and economic transformations that are shaping the new global soundscape, and the multiple institutional mediations, competing interests and diverse normative expectations, through which the global politics of silence and sound emerge all over the world. For so doing, we examined consecutively the politics of silence in three different domains, namely organizational studies, sound engineering, and musical aesthetics, showing their hidden continuities. These continuities offer in addition unexplored potential to examine the interplay between power, silence and political agency, in the most diverse context. Before to conclude however, a body of contributions that can reasonably presented as expressive of a new utopian humanism that is rapidly flourishing in recent decades, will be briefly discussed. Its representatives aim to restore the continuity between the material and ideational dimensions of silence adopting a distinctively conservationist narrative (e.g. Campbell 1994; Sim 2007; Maitland 2008; LeClair 2009; Kenny 2011). The dissipation of silence in an increasingly noisy world is for them the ultimate expression of an ecological and civilizational crisis, with important catastrophic implications upon human consciousness and all forms of life. Against this trend, they advocate for the personal cultivation of silence and contemplation, as the sole way to recover the silence lost. This contention is not certainly new. Quite the opposite, its origins can be traced back to the remote foundations of mysticism, meditation and salvific theology. Social anthropologist Achino-Loeb aptly explain why the experience of silence tends to lead to a search for transcendence: Beyond human communication silence is meaningless as a discrete concept, separate from life or from existence, but not meaningless as a metaphor of power for it serves as avenue for giving voice to unencumbered experience… Perhaps that is why some aspects of silence have been used for practices whose goal is to reach beyond human condition (Achino-Loeb 2006:1). In view of this, paraphrasing Jacques Attali, in his political economy of noises, and simply replacing ‘music’ by ‘sound’, and as a way of concluding, we can say, half a century after he wrote this singular book: It is possible to distinguish on our map three zones, three stages, three strategic usages of sound by power…In one of these zones, it seems that sound is used and produced in the ritual, in an attempt to make people forget the general violence; in another, it is employed to make people believe in the harmony of the world, that there is order in exchange and legitimacy in commercial power; and finally, there is one in which it serves to silence, by mass-producing a deafening, syncretic kind of sound, and censoring all other human noises’ (Attali 1977:19). 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