Silence Revisited

Susan Sontag is inadvertently extending aesthetic thought from the modern world into the postmodern. In her early writings, she makes the following point about how humans perceive art: “Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind’s need or capacity for self-estrangement” (182). The “later myth” is development of the modernist concept into the postmodern, inasmuch as Sontag is attempting to do so. The angst of the artist creates a modern world that is constantly evolving. She calls this state of evolution “the paradoxes involved in attaining an absolute state of being described by the great religious mystics,” or more poetically, “a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, so art must tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the ‘subject’…, the pursuit of silence.” The modern movement had moved into art for art’s sake. Now aesthetic thinking by perceivers of art had reached a state where it desired that beyond what art could enunciate. No wonder that Sontag titles her essay, originally published in 1967,  “The Aesthetics of Silence.”  

The composer John Cage had famously creates a “Silence” that passed as musical art in his 1964 piece “4’23” of Silence” wherein the performer(s) begin the piece of music by being silent and continue the silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The point of the performance of such a piece is that the “music” comes from the sounds which surround the performer. The art is constructed by the listener. Yet the title of the piece directs the listener to a search for a nothingness, a Silence.

The New York intellectuals Sontag and Cage reflect a movement in modernism away from the subject of the artistry, whether that subject be aural or not. The responsibility of defining the art falls on the perceiver. Andy Warhol’s infamous painting “Campbell’s Tomato Soup Can” does the same thing. The initial response of any perceiver, I believe, is to feel uncomfortable that they are having to create the art rather than the artist. But the artist asks the perceiver to do more than that. The perceiver needs to be a mystic, to travel into the “cloud of unknowing,” to search for the silence.

John Cage performs “4’ 33” of Silence” in Harvard Square, 1973.

Since the early 1960s, aesthetes have tried to decode the search for silence that Sontag and Cage promote. In the late 1970s, Lyotard looked back on the previous decades in philosophy as a “postmodernism,” not a new term, but one set down with an evolutionary meaning beyond the fragmented modernism of the early twentieth century. Lyotard’s silences were fragmented natures of what once had been grandiose ideas, now shattered and containing cracks. Our job as perceivers has become to look between the cracks, or perhaps beyond them.

I am betraying a simplistic version of the “Silence” of art as these people – Sontag, Cage, Warhol, Lyotard – are defining it within the boundaries of aesthetics. But these are ideas that still mystify people in 2024, half a century later. Humanity’s movement into postmodernism has now turned into a post-postmodernism that reflects on the entire evolution of aesthetic philosophy in the past century and a half. In the face of AI formulating our current speech patterns and devalued humanistic thought amongst the educated populace, we are forced to confront the question of what good is it all, this thinking about art, anti-art, and beyond. The simple is not so simple after all. But neither is it worth throwing away.

 

Nicholas Harris, Jan. 2024. This essay contains my thoughts on

Sontag, Susan. “The Aesthetics of Silence,” reprinted in The Susan Sontag Reader, Elizabeth Hardwick editor, Farrar/Strauss/Giroux, 1982.