Silence as Resistance to Analysis: Or, on Not Opening One’s Mouth Properly

Abstract

The article engages with the problematic nature of silence and its tendency to trouble qualitative inquiry. Silence is frequently read as resistance—as an impediment to analysis or the emergence of an authentic voice. Rather than seeking methodological remedies for such impediments, the article dwells on, and in, the recalcitrance of silence. The authors read silence, via Derrida and Freud, as the trace of something Other at the heart of utterance—something intractable, unspeakable, unreasonable, unanalyzable. Silence confounds interpretation and manifests, intolerably, the illusory status of speech as full “presence” or living voice. Yet it also incites the search for meaning and is therefore productive. How might Method work with the alterity of silence, rather than seeking to cure or compensate for its necessary insufficiencies? The article is organized around three examples or parables of silence. Humor gets tangled up in the text further on.

Listening differently: A pedagogy for expanded listening

“…The voice, for instance, listened to as communication, is forced to make sense; if it cannot be comprehended, it is disregarded as noise. Yet children's voices constantly express themselves extra‐linguistically, through cries, shouts, screams, laughter, babble and silence (MacLure et al., ; Rosen, )—the significance of the non‐semantic. With young children what is often so fascinating is how language emerges from these unruly flows and then dissolves back into them, in a to‐and‐fro movement.…”

Free the sheep: improvised song and performance in and around a minecraft community

“…it ' s Christmas time ”), there was a humorous absurdity inherent in this mismatch of themes. As Maclure et al () suggest, humour relies on “the ability to see the absurdity, irony or double meanings in social situations” (p. 9); this singer seemed to be in possession of this ‘double vision’ (p. 9). Here, however, it was not only the words that were adapted; at the end of this episode, another player took the boys' words, attached them to a different melody at a higher pitch, adding a single, repeated word: ‘ Boogie !’ There was a final, polyrhythmic performance of both versions of the melody until the song's progress was abruptly halted by Callum's firm request to ‘ Stop it !’ Like elements of the text of Minecraft itself, the song was constantly under construction, never complete (Burnett and Bailey, ) and, once it had served its purpose, it was abandoned before a definitive version was formed.…”

“…it's Christmas time"), there was a humorous absurdity inherent in this mismatch of themes. As Maclure et al (2010) suggest, humour relies on "the ability to see the absurdity, irony or double meanings in social situations" (p. 9); this singer seemed to be in possession of this 'double vision' (p. 9). Here, however, it was not only the words that were adapted; at the end of this episode, another player took the boys' words, attached them to a different melody at a higher pitch, adding a single, repeated word: 'Boogie!'…”

“…Here, the performance itself was seen to have a recruiting power, encouraging others to join in with the singing. This can be partially attributed to the humorous nature of the song, reflecting Maclure et al's (2010) assertion that humour has a "productive role in maintaining solidarity and identity." (p. 9).…”

Down the methodological rabbit hole: thinking diffractively with resistant data

“…The children had all been willing participants and generally forthcoming during interviews. We wondered, however, whether or not the data might have been successfully resisting our efforts to decode, unravel, and make them meaningful, in the same way that silence has been recognised as a form of resistance to analysis (MacLure, Holmes, Jones and MacRae, 2010). Our ways of seeing and attempting to understand the data were confounded, and the transcript data on which we had fixed our gaze were proving recalcitrant.…”