ABSTRACT
The Western cultural bias against silence informs a host of logocentrist approaches in social and communication science – from Saussure's theory of the linguistic sign to Habermas' concept of communicative action. From the margins, silent strategies help problematise that order by various transformative means such as absence, disbelief, denial, dissimilation, camouflage, resistance, disruption and so on. From the core, strategic silence naturalises the capitalist order by tacit mechanisms such as automaticity, routine, obviousness, implicitness and other discursive and non-discursive means. The historical and sociocultural system of capitalism produces negative silences – including the silence of public relations on its silences – as necessary condition of its reproduction. The question of how to measure silence is even more vexing than the question of how to measure relations. Measurement effectively deletes both the semiotics of communication and material conditions of its production and dissemination.
