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What's Better Than Silence?
🕑 Added 2019-04-03 20:04:43 +0000 UTC
In "A Lecture," Hollis Frampton turns on the projector and begins with the basics. He allows the projector light to simply cast itself at the screen without any piece of celluloid blocking the way. The result is a white incandescent rectangle of illumination, the most elemental thing a film projector can do. Frampton writes, "we must agree that this [film] is, from an aesthetic point of view, incomparably superior to a large proportion of all films that have ever been made." He has a point, and it is twofold. First, the screen itself is a beautiful object, and what one chooses to bombard it with should be at least as pleasing and worthwhile as the screen in its nakedness. Second, the world would be no poorer if a great number of films had never been made.
I think about this a lot as a writer. Not in the same way, obviously, since I do not write on a typewriter, and however clean and fresh and appealing a piece of white paper may be, it is not really where my words originate. The genesis of my words occurs on a computer screen, and there are few objects in the world uglier than that. Aside from the regrettable, and fully preventable, damage that such screens cause to the environment, it is perfectly fitting from an aesthetic point of view that so many of these things end up in landfills.
But I tend to think of this problem, as a writer, from a more social and philosophical standpoint. We live in an age of total saturation, of information overload. Those ideas have become buzzwords, but what do they really mean? It means that any given statement has less weight because it is entering a field teeming with noise. It means it is harder for anyone to actually get heard.
So when I write, I have to ask myself, is what I am producing actually preferable to silence?
I think about this as a matter of privilege. Regardless of my intentions, my cis white maleness codes my words in a particular way. In some contexts, unfortunately, it allows my words to be heard more easily, and it means that in writing or speaking, I am taking up room, crowding out other voices. There is a particular way of thinking, one that I do not entirely subscribe to but that I take very seriously, that believes that I and subjects like me could contribute the most to society by being silent and producing nothing at all. I think about this all the time as a producer of text. Do I really have a reason to take up space for myself? Is my writing a value-add, and if so, for whom?
I am thinking about this right now because I recently got into a spat with an acquaintance on Twitter. She did not approve of something I tweeted, and felt it was offensive. I do accept that by trying to make an intervention into a collective discussion, one that kind of offended me, and by doing so within the limited, snark-driven vernacular of Twitter, I did not do a good job of making my objections clear. I could go into the whole thing, but it really doesn't matter.
What came out of it, though, was very positive. I realized that for me, Twitter is not a value-add discourse. I do not really like who I am, or who I am forced to be, on Twitter, and I do not like how the format has molded my ideas into pithy quips and asides. I look back and realize just how much space I took up, how much text I generated, and how little of it has any value. If anything, it stares back at me as an externalized waxworks of "me," lumbering around the virtual universe, being mistaken for my actual self.
I have quit Twitter in the past, mostly in a huff. But now I believe I have quit for good. Other times I left because my feelings were hurt or because I wanted out of a particular thread of "the discourse." But this time is different. Feeling the absence of that external, performative demand, I genuinely feel free. And I can devote more time to writing that is less hair-triggered, more comprehensive, and more fully confident in its worth.
The rest is silence.
