Sontag

This weeks theme was Silence by Susan Sontag, the first female writer studied in the lecture series. She considers silence in relation to the artist. Artists often use silence to give their work more power, they become hermits or simply stop making work. This serves to highlight and contrast the work that they made before. Of course art cannot be truly silent as it is not Art if there is no audience being communicated with. There are some similarities to Deleuze here. The hermit lives on the outside of society like Deleuze's sorcerer. They both recognise that the outsider  has a great impact on the inner society. They show the limits of what we can do and they define our culture.

These outsiders use myths in order to survive, they place meaning onto things to give them value they otherwise would not have had. Its a form of mysticism again with strong links to Deleuzes sorcerers. This applicable immediately when we look at how we sell products. Giving something a Prada label immediately gives it a high price tag. High class brands often to use silence to sell their products. This is particularly evident in the way that designer clothes are visually merchandised. Expensive shops have emptier windows, they have fewer clothes on the rail and often they do not display the price. As you look at it you know if you need to ask how much it is you can't afford it.

The notion of giving things space to increase its value and impact can also be applied to typography.  Having one small piece of type in a page highlights the space round it as well as the text. The silence needs some noise to make it visible. Silence in terms of reading is a relatively new phenomenon. Books have been traditionally read out loud for hundreds of years and was a primarily social object. Last year I looked at how modern readers read silently creating a very private world and that in this others do not know what we are thinking. It is interesting that reading aloud for some can be a way of creating silence. It helps them to concentrate upon the meaning of the text. It blocks out exterior noises and stops interior thoughts from distracting them.

This is very quickly applied to academic practice as reading back an essay aloud has many benefits. It helps you find the places where the semantics of the work are not working. It also helps find the natural pauses where punctuation should be. Overall silence when considered more closely quickly becomes integral to the way we perceive and interact with the world.