Thoughts…

What does your Silence sound like?

July ‘26

Silence, typically recognised as the absence of sound, speech, and communication, manifests and functions in so many fathomable and unconscious ways. Yet we mistaken it for emptiness, a void, gaps, a state of nothingness. Perhaps silence is louder than speech, perhaps it’s another language entirely, a language of the invisible observed in systematic codes. If so, what does your silence sound like, who are you in your invisibility, and what identity does your silence invoke?

Scanning through variations of silence, we see how it takes shape in all things. Silence can be pain or grief, a coping mechanism for the thoughts and feelings too complicated to put into words. It can signify a lack of knowledge in one breath while establishing a domain of cognitive processing in another. Silence powerfully relays disapproval, judgment, and disappointment, leaving lasting imprints of shame and guilt. It serves at the pleasure of avoidance and indifference, abandoning its subjects in the depths of confusion. Silence in its deception, can give off the illusion of stability and awareness, the illusion of control. It can be manipulative, steering narratives constructed by truths concealed in lies, meticulously penetrating our consciousness. Silence, being situational and quietly violent, is explicit in its intentionality, it’s subtle and seamless, yet blatantly obvious within the realm of its code.

Like anything in life, we become what we do, what we perform, and what that performance produces. In using Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, silence is brought into effect with respects to identification, which is achieved through the invocation of the “I”. Perhaps the secret to our identities lies within the silences that we practice, or the silences practiced on us. That would mean that we come into existence through recognition within these situational subject identities, identities dependent on the element that is silence.

Incorporating this with Michel Foucault’s theory on discipline and power, as subjects of silence, we move through a world organised by signifiers of power – language, norms, identities, and social meanings that shape how we understand ourselves and others. Signifiers such as gender, race, and class, are reproduced, legitimised, and sustained through institutions such as education, law, religion, the workplace, and the media. In turn, said institutions organise what can be spoken of, what remains unsaid, whose voices are afforded legitimacy, and whose voices get erased. We become reliant on these said signifiers as they anchor us within the symbolic social order of things – offering recognition, belonging, and purpose. However, our position within that order is only as secure as the meanings attached to those signifiers. Silence, then becomes the active force that both sustains and unsettles the symbolic structures through which we exist.

Ultimately, a world is created. A world of the silent, the silenced, and the silencers – objects and subjects of silence – feeding off each other in this unavoidable network that governs the growingly fractured orchestra of life. On one hand, to lose your silence, is to lose yourself, to lose your control, to lose your composure, to go against the natural order of things – to be non-confirmative, abnormal, an outsider to society. It is disobedience. While on the other hand, the morbidity of silence has a silver lining – it’s protection and security. The safe space we retreat to, to find peace, solitude, comfort, understanding, and creation. A place of disappearance where the world need not make sense to all but to you alone.

After all that has been said, the true power of silence lies in its ambiguity. For its function can only be illuminated once we recognise it, claim it, and practice it. It has no absolute truth, and goes against our understanding of reality, going against knowledge itself. Silence can never be fixed in time or space. Thus, the schemas of silence transcends temporality, while existing within every interaction of our identities. It answers to no power, yet is utilised by all powers, it constitutes communities and identities, while deconstructing hegemonic realities.

As we experience silence before we understand it, we shift through perspectives in attempts to decode realities. It makes me wonder…how much power do you give silence? What happens when silence begins to disrupt the very order that gives your world meaning – be it good or bad?