[silence] Silenceme and absential quantifier

[Rob Haskins]

For me, I don't really perceive a duality between Cage's sound and silence in the sense of presence or absence.  The more I listen to his music I find the two come to form a totality--in particular, I begin to perceive his silences as a kind of sound (rarely the other way around).  I wonder how others react to the silences in Cage's music, and if there are other ways of theorizing or describing them.
Rob
 
  Rob Haskins
Assistant Professor of Music
University of New Hampshire
rob_haskins@yahoo.com
http://robhaskins.net
 "Heroism doesn't consist in brilliantly combatting someone else. . . .  What is heroic is to accept the situation in which you find yourself."  -- John Cage




----- Original Message ----
From: Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay <anekanta01@yahoo.com>
To: silence@list.mail.virginia.edu
Sent: Friday, August 11, 2006 7:53:44 AM
Subject: [silence] Silenceme and absential quantifier

  
   
   
  Silence itself is defined in relationship to words, as the pause in music receives its meaning from the group of notes round it. The silence is a moment of language; being silent is not being dumb; it is refuse to speak, and therefore keep on speaking.  Jean Paul Sartre.  1948. What is Literature? 
    
The act of speaking (non-silence) is constrained, appropriated, approximated by the unspeakable/ unspoken spacesso-called blank spaces are controlling the revealed speech. These blank spaces are emitting different meanings in different situations and non-signs were endowed with the supposed sign-ness. That is the de-sign of silenceme as it is de-sign-ated within the sign-ness.
 Silenceme is not absence of speaking, but it is a subjective perception of absence of speaking in relation to non-speaking.      
  Now I am trying to understand the ontology as well as phenomenology of silence as elaborated by cage by deploying an Indian philosophical tool called abhava or absence. In the Nyaya-Vaiseska (henceforth NV, Indian Logic) tradition, categories are distinguished based on their presence (bhava) and absence(abhava). They considered both the existence and non-existence as categories, which are subject to the knowledge or  cognition by means of generic perception. 
    
  Generally, in the English translations of the NV-literature, this category comes under the notion of negation and its subdivisions are translated as relational absence and mutual absence or difference (anyonyabhava). In the context of silence,  I will mainly concentrate on the relational absence or simply absence rather than that of difference. 
    
  All relations are regarded in  Navyanyaya as dyadic relations between two terms: anuyogin (referend, qualificand, locus X) and pratiyogin (counterpositive, referent, qualifier, located Y). Relation (R) is always a property resident in the residence or referend. Thus, one can say  X (R-Y) where X is the locus of absence of Y where R is a relata.  
  In case of relational absence, a qualifier qualifies a qualificand and by negating it we get an absence of that qualifier (which is another qualifier) qualifying the same qualificand, this silent-space X is qualified by speaking-absence Y. On the other hand, difference referred to this is not silence type of negation. Thus, absence of non-speaking-ness and difference from a silence are two distinguishable sub-categories of abhava.  
    
  These blank spaces may be perceived /cognized as a category called absence (absence is always designated in relation to something). One could perceive absence by assigning the absential qualifier/ counterpositive to the locus of empty locus/ referend, qualificand. Thus, the absence of speaking means perceiving the dyadic relations between two constructs: speaking and non-speaking in a certain locus. There is no absolute non-speaking silent zone---all silent zones are pervaded by the non-silence and vise versa, however, when, speaking/listening subject is perceiving something as silence is actually cognizing absence of stipulated non-silence in a locus. Thus, in the terminologies of NV, the  speaking/listening subject perceives the absence of  couterpositive (stipulated non-silence) in the locus of supposed/stipulated silence. And it is a case of Absential relation.  
    
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