Abstract

This entry explores the affective potential of silence. Arriving from Sheena Malhotra and Aimee Carrillo Rowe’s conceptualization of silence as a place of embodied and political possibility, it questions the affects and agencies that might be discovered by tuning in to the full spectrum of silence. As an attempt to break away from political discourses of Western culture that align silence with powerlessness, disembodiment and inaction, the entry reconsiders the term as transformative and integral to our embodied life and its affective contours. Using an analysis of Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditation (1971) works, it explores how bodily and environmental silences may serve as a ‘threshold between presence and absence that is tied to both agency and resistance’, where cathartic, intense, restorative, healing and connecting affects may be unearthed.