Silence as Refusal, Care as Protest: On How to See Utopias

• In Event: Poetics and Politics of Resistance

Abstract

Contemporary scholarship on protest centers collective appearance, by the physical or virtual taking-up of space in public. It elevates speech and action over silence, assuming the latter to be passive, complicit, or cowardly, and therefore politically barren. Against such assumptions, this paper theorizes silence – the refusal of speech and recognition – as a radical form of protest. I argue that by rejecting the predominant grammars of recognition, acceptance, and assimilation, silence is even more radical than traditional protests, because it enacts utopian desires and imaginations in the present.

I interpret silence as the refusal of the expectation that the oppressed account for themselves. In making themselves legible only to members of the oppressed group community, and refusing to account oneself to the society at large, people in the community perform care for each other, and engage in a collective experiment of living well both under and outside real conditions of oppression. Silence in this sense is not a political instrument for recognition. It is firstly a survival strategy for evading surveillance and discipline, secondly a declaration by and for a group of their own dignity, and lastly an articulation of dissatisfaction with the status quo – that is, a testament to their ability to dream, to desire, and to want more.

The paper will mainly read the practices documented in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) and in José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2019). I read both works as theorizing the clandestine experiments in alternative ways of living and being that not only refuse to conform to the existing standards of reasonableness or respectability, but more importantly, reject the grammars of recognition altogether. Firstly, I demonstrate that contemporary scholarship on protest often highlights visibility and recognition, and has thereby neglected a rich landscape of silence as a form of political act. To do so, I also survey other areas of contemporary scholarship that argue against expectations of self-representation. I contend that to understand silence as protest will enable us to recognize a radical form of utopian politics.

Next, I consider Hartman’s two chapters on the stories of Mamie Sharp and Esther Brown, reading their voluntary acts of silence as enacting an imaginative and self-affirming protest. I then turn to two chapters of Muñoz’s work, reading his account of public sex as a framework by which we could see such refusal practices as abolitionist enactment of utopia in the present. Putting Muñoz’s work in conversation with Hartman’s, I highlight how they undermine the binary distinctions between silence and protest, action and passivity, and private and public. In both cases members affirm and sustain the dignity and imaginary capacities of and for one another. They have protected and insisted on their anonymity. Collectively, they sustain spaces of imaginative living through steadfast silence. Their care, in other words, is not only performed in silence; their care is silence. They pronounce that the present is not enough, and better things could be instead. They attest the members’ capacity for imagining different ways of doing, building different space of being, and making different political practices together. They are more radical than protests that emphasize visibility and recognition, for they do not expect to meet the standards of either black respectability or homonormativity. Rather, they enact in the present the alternative futures of sexuality and sociality that they would like to see.

I end with brief reflections about respectively the temporality of utopia, and what it means for political theory as an emancipation-oriented discipline to read silences. On the one hand, the paper invites a dialectical understanding of silence and protest, domination and utopia, as well as of the past and future. Silence is a radical form of protest precisely because of the hegemonic expectation that the marginalized constantly make themselves legible and transparent to the dominant society. In other words, utopias are forever deferred possibilities subsisting in the cracks of the reality of domination which are always unrealizable. They retreat at the exact moment when uttered.

On the other hand, I recognize that the paper ends up in an ethical aporia. If political theory is a discipline of making sense and meaning out of others’ life stories, what does it leave its practitioners if, on the one hand, utopias are inherently ineffable, that they retreat as soon as they are uttered as concrete images, and on the other, experiments at living well are protests in their own right that are directed only at members of one’s communities, and any expectation that they be deciphered for the outgroup always turns hegemonic?

Author

• Amanda Ziyi Fu, Northwestern University