No. 4 (2021): Which silence? Presence and meaning

Silence is a complex phenomenon. Its ambiguity - or polysemy, depending on how you look at it - and its strong dependence on the context that produces it, makes silence a communicative matter that is difficult to analyze, understand and explain. A concrete silence is never repeated, even if it is an audiovisual silence, planned and configured in a fixed audiovisual product, which can be reproduced several times: the silences are unique for each present moment. As linguist Michal Ephratt, a constant researcher of silence, states, silence is difficult to define, but easy to recognize. For all these obstacles and obstacles, added difficulties in their conception, the mentions of silence in scientific articles can be counted on the fingers of a hand, the academic literature on silence as an object of study is very scarce or, when there are, they are very specialized or very limited to an extremely limited field of knowledge or discipline (so much so that sometimes it is already considerably away from silence as a psychoacoustic phenomenon).

In the last fifteen or twenty years it has been possible to observe a timid change of trend in the academy where, apart from more contributions and considerations on the phenomenon we are dealing with, there has also been more open-mindedness, the inclusion of more transversal perspectives and the approach of new fields of knowledge in which, obviously, the analysis and theorizing on silence can also have a place, from fields such as audiovisual, persuasion, psychology, to areas such as human resource management or pedagogy.

In this line, if any idea can be extracted from this proposal for a monograph, it is transversality and diversity. The organization of this issue covers very different topics such as photography or everyday life during the pandemic, cinema and science, and indirectly shows how silence, as a cultural substrate of humankind, is everywhere, somehow as a ubiquitous phenomenon that only needs to be heard or addressed. Silence is within us. This is how the philosopher Michele Federico Sciacca put it: nothing of me is far from me in the moment of silence. And this need to listen to us and even to understand silence has been fostered, often unconsciously, in times of confinement and uncertainty and at the same time from various means and media, even not audiovisual ones.