Semiotica , 98, 1994. 73-87. Constituting Silence: Life in the World of Total Meaning Jack Bilmes Department of Anthropology University of Hawaii Honolulu, Hawaii 96822 U.S.A. 1 ABSTRACT Although silence can signify an absolute absence of sound, the term is frequently used in ways that can be understood only by reference to a sociocultural environment. This paper is concerned with silence as the absence of talk. The meaningfulness and multiplicity of silence originate in the fact that any particular silence may "consist of" the relevant absence of some particular item of talk. Thus, for each kind of talk, there is a kind of silence. Silences are made specifically meaningful through what are here called weakly constitutive mechanisms, that is, by conventions which create relevant absence. A conversation analytic methodology is used to illuminate some aspects of the place and meaning of silence in conversation. Finally, the concept of implicit silence is introduced. Implicit silence underlies a flow of speech in which something is deemed to be relevant but unsaid. It is shown that certain types of social analysis proceed by locating implicit silences. 2 Constituting Silence: Life in the World of Total Meaning The Nature of Silence At first thought, it might seem that there is no problem to constituting silence. Silence is what is between sounds and before sound. Everything else, perhaps, had to be created, but silence was there from the beginning. On second thought, though, we realize that silence is not a thing in itself but rather an absence, and its existence therefore depends on the existence of that of which it is an absence, namely sound. There is some paradox to this, as we see if we ask which came first, sound or silence. Silence only comes into existence with the occurrence of the first sound, so we may say that sound precedes silence. On the other hand, on the occurrence of the first sound, we may say that silence is what preceded it. That is, the first sound created the silence that preceded it. This is all too simple, of course. As Bishop Berkeley suggested, neither sound nor silence exists without a hearer. To take a less metaphysical stance, the concept of silence depends on the concept of sound, and both depend on the existence of a conceptualizer. With the addition of a hearer, we get the further possibility that, at any particular moment, only certain sounds will be expected or of interest, that only certain sounds will be relevant. With this possibility comes a most intriguing corollary--that a particular silence may be not simply the absence of sound, but may relevantly be the absence of some particular sound. Thus, for each kind of sound, there may be a kind of silence. In general, for each possibly relevant thing, there is a corresponding "anti-thing," an 3 absence. In its particularity, this anti-thing is not at all equivalent to no-thing, although it may "look" the same. With these observations, we may leave behind our initial concern with cosmic silence. The kind of silence that will interest us here is not absence of sound but absence of particular, relevant kinds of sound. The simple absence of sound, I will call "absolute silence." The relevant absence of a particular kind of sound, I will call "notable silence." The subtype of notable silence that will occupy our attention is "conversational silence"-the absence of talk. (Conversational silence is further subdivided into innumerable kinds of particular silences.) The distinction between absolute and conversational silence is not a social scientific invention but belongs to the layman's conceptual repetoire, at least in English. Sometimes, when we speak of silence (often modified by "total"), we mean that there was no sound; sometimes, though, as when we say "there was an awkward silence," we mean merely that there was no talk--perhaps the sounds of jackhammers and passing airplanes were audible during the silence. These kinds of meaningless, irrelevant sounds we call "noise."i Conversation is a state of talk, that is, it is a situation within which talk is relevant. It is only when talk is relevant that we get conversational silence. (In Heinrich Böll's story, "Murke's Collected Silences," Murke does not indiscriminately record all silence but only the silences within conversation or at least the silence of someone not speaking.) Although talk is relevant in conversation, it is not the case that conversation consists entirely of talk. We will see that (conversational) silence is not necessarily a departure from or a lapse in or the opposite of conversation but rather is a functioning part of it. "Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech" (Sontag 1969: 11).ii The Chinese and Japanese, in particular, seem to have a sharp appreciation for the eloquence of absence. This is evident in their art, with its use of unfilled space. The Chinese, I am told, have a saying that one should speak only if the quality of what one has to say is greater than the quality of the silence that one interrupts. This appreciation 4 of silence seems to be widespread, as evidenced by the English saying that silence is golden and the Thai rhyme phuut paj søøng phay bia / ning sia tamluung thøøng (Speech is small change / Silence is gold). Our discussion so far also suggests a possible answer to the most famous of Zen koans: What is the sound of one hand clapping? One might risk a blow from the Zen master and venture that the sound of one hand clapping is the silence which is the absence of clapping. Weakly Constitutive Mechanisms Silence, it turns out, is quite an interesting object for social analysis. Silence is interesting because somehow we have made nothing, an absence, a void, mean something. (There is nothing like this in nature, where that which isn't simply isn't, and only that which is counts.) Social interaction inseminates our silences with meaning, impregnating our pauses. The questions before us, then, are what does silence mean, and how is it possible in the first place for silence to mean anything? We begin with the second question. (Searle 1969) has made a well-known distinction between regulative rules, rules that "regulate antecedently or independently existing forms of behavior," and constitutive rules, which "create or define new forms of behavior." Rules about proper dress in class might be said to be regulative, whereas the rules of chess or of English grammar are constitutive in that to play chess consists precisely in following the rules of chess and to speak English is to follow the grammatical rules of the language. It may be an error to think of rules as being, immutably and unambiguously, either regulative or constitutive. Whether a rule is to be considered regulative or constitutive is relative to the way people speak. A rule such as "Don't use rough language" is regulative when it is applied to the activity "conversation." Thus, we may say that certain conversations are governed by this rule, but that the activity is recognizably conversation 5 whether or not the rule is obeyed. On the other hand, if we are speaking of an activity called "polite conversation," the rule "Don't use rough language" is constitutive. If the participants are not obeying the rule, it simply is not polite conversation. We cannot abstract the rule from the context in which it is invoked and say whether it is regulative or constitutive. Furthermore, to deliberately violate a constitutive rule may have normative implications, as when a baseball player refuses to leave the batter's box after a called third strike. For these and other reasons, rather than speaking of regulative and constitutive rules, I prefer to talk about the regulative and constitutive aspects of rules. In what follows, when I mention regulative and constitutive rules, the reader should understand that I am referring to regulative and constitutive aspects of rules. The standard, Parsonian sociology focusses on norms in explaining the order in human social action. Norms, in the Parsonian usage, appear to be identical with Searle's regulative rules. Social actors obey the rules because they have internalized them and because, if they don't, they may be punished. By obeying and sanctioning the rules, actors produce social order. Linguistics and certain schools of anthropology, on the other hand, are concerned primarily with constitutive rules. The linguist's question is not "Why do people say what they do?" but rather "How does one construct well-formed utterances in the language?" Anthropologists, especially so-called cognitive anthropologists, have taken a similar approach to culture. They ask what it is that one needs to know in order to perform culturally recognizable activities (Goodenough 1957), to "appropriately anticipate" native events (Frake 1964), and to be able to identify two occurrences as being instances of either "the same" or "different" activities (Frake 1969). These sorts of knowledge are constitutive of "being a native." Ethnomethodologists have drawn attention to another function of rules, which might be called "proconstitutive" and "retroconstitutive." Whereas chess is constituted by following rules, human action, the ethnomethodologists point out, may be constituted by 6 citing rules. That is, I identify behavior as social action by mentioning the rules under which it was (or will be), supposedly, produced. The behavior is just behavior; its status as social action is produced in the account. Rules in their pro and retroconstitutive uses identify, rather than regulate or give recipes for, forms of action. If one, for example, is taken to task for getting in the way of some activity, one might say "I was just trying to help." This displays the nature of one's action by referring it to a normative standard for producing action, that is, by showing the rule under which it was produced. Whether one was actually trying to help or not is not in question (for the analyst). Social action is produced by getting people to see behavior in particular ways. Social order, in this view, is created by our practices of seeing and accounting. Lawrence Wieder (1974) mentions that on one occasion he heard an inmate in a halfway house reply to a staff member's question by saying "You know I won't snitch." In saying this, the inmate was citing a rule of the convict code, "Don't snitch," to display the nature of his action. In fact, in this case, the citation of the rule was the action itself, as well as the definition of the action. It was both a reply to the staff member's question and a self-referring commentary on the reply (and a refusal to answer). It defined as well what the staff member had done in asking the question. Although one can identify a behavior as a certain kind of action without citing a rule, reference to rules is of special interest because, not only does it identify the behavior, but it is also used simultaneously to explain the behavior: "I did this because there is a rule." There is yet another way in which rules may be constitutive, and this is the one that is crucial for our present purposes. I will say that Searle was talking about the "strongly constitutive" aspect of rules. If you follow the rules, you are doing the activity; if you do not follow the rules, you are simply not doing the activity. By "simply," I mean to suggest that, from this perspective, it is only by obeying the rules that one manages to perform an activity. To fail to perform according to the rules is to fall off the edge, to be incompetent, to behave but not to act. To follow the rules is to do something meaningful; 7 to not follow the rules is to do something meaningless, or, at best, to do something to which the rules are irrelevant. If you follow the rules of chess, you are playing chess. If not, all that can be said (in terms of the rules) is that you are not playing chess. The rules (or this way of thinking about rules) do not provide for violation as a socially meaningful act. Whereas strongly constitutive rules may be said to set the parameters of meaning, what I will call "weakly constitutive rules" (or, rather, the weakly constitutive aspects of rules) slice up a meaningful domain. Like the strongly constitutive rule, the weak variety tells you what you must do to create a certain effect, or how to interpret what has been done. But the weakly constitutive rule does not define an inside (performing an activity) versus an outside (not performing the activity). Rather, both "sides" of the weakly constitutive rule, following it or violating it, are "inside," they are both meaningful. If you "obey" the weakly constitutive rule, you get this meaning, and, if you don't, you get, by virtue of the violation, that meaning. The rule against taking another's property without permission is clearly regulative, but it is also constitutive. To obey the rule constitutes (in part, at least) being an honest citizen. Giddens (1979:66-67) uses this very example to attack the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules. But, it is not enough to note how this (or perhaps any) regulative rule can be constitutive. We must note further that violation of the rule is constitutive of the activity "stealing." If there were no such rule, stealing would not be a possible social action. (In fact, it is honesty (in a limited sense) that corresponds to silence or absence, stealing being what the honest citizen does not do.) Rule violations may be passive as well as active. Where the rule is "In situation X, do action A," failure to do A is, in situation X, a violation. As such, it is noticeable and meaningful, an occasion for inference. Rules that may be claimed to be strongly constitutive almost inevitably have a weakly constitutive aspect. Thus, if we are playing chess and, at some point well into the 8 game I move a pawn entirely across the board and take your king with it, it would be somewhat obtuse of you to explain that that is not chess. Rather, you would look for the meaning of the violation, finding in it perhaps pique or perhaps a joking concession of defeat or perhaps boredom with the game. Or, if a lecturer were to stop in midsentence and take a seat in the audience, your speculations would probably go beyond "He's not lecturing anymore" or "That's no way to lecture." If you can reject incompetence and inadvertance as explanations, that is, if you conclude that he did it knowledgeably and deliberately, you will ask, "What did he mean by that?"iii Rules are not the only means through which actions are made relevant and absences or violations thereby noticeable and meaningful. Expectation of an action will make its absence noticeable and an occasion for inference. Furthermore, one can make a case for the relevance of an action, and, if "plausible relevance" of the action can be established, the absence of the action will also be relevant. That is, silences and other absences can be created. (This is an example of retroconstitution as well as weak constitution.) Anything which produces meaning by creating relevant absence or negative contrast, by creating the sense of "notness," I will call a weakly constitutive mechanism. When some action (or nonaction) has meaning by virtue of not being some other particular action (or nonaction), that meaning has been produced by weak constitution. Weakly constitutive rules, however, have some properties that other weakly constitutive mechanisms do not have. First, the accepted existence of a rule, and the acceptance that the situation in question falls under the rule, provides immediate plausibility to the claim that the called for (or proscribed) action is relevant and that therefore its absence calls for interpretation. Secondly, such claims frequently are unnecessary for an absence or violation to be noticeable. People will often notice simultaneously that a rule has been broken, so that there is no need for anyone to explicitly invoke the rule and argue for its applicability. Not responding to a question is (ordinarily) immediately noticeable and interpretable to those present as a violation. 9 Thirdly, the existence of the rule seems to offer some initial guidance as to what an act which is a violation might possibly mean. For example, it would be difficult to interpret failure to reply to a question as an affiliative act. It is not simply that one might have answered but didn't; it is that not answering was a violation of a conversational rule. Or, again, in the absence of a rule, taking off one's clothes in public might simply mean that one is warm. But in the late 60's, in America, publicly removing one's clothes constituted a form of political protest. It is because of this weakly constitutive aspect of rules, and because of weakly constitutive mechanisms in general, that we live in what I called in the title of this paper "the world of total meaning." We cannot, as Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson (1967) observed, not communicate. In a world that is preconstituted as meaningful, whatever one does or refrains from doing is presumed to have meaning. When a rule is relevantly applicable, you can break it, but you cannot escape it. Where the rule is "Speak," not speaking is communicative. Weakly constitutive mechanisms give us the unique and rather peculiar ability to communicate through and find meaning in absences, in that which is not. Which brings us back to silence. The Place of Silence Let us start by observing silence. If I record an angry silence, an embarrassed silence, and a confused, hesitant silence, you could not tell one from the other. It is not that all silences sound exactly the same. Conversational silences may include background noises, whereas absolute silence does not. But the background noise is irrelevant. So, if we consider only relevant sound, one silence sounds like the next, except for duration. Moreover, silence has no internal structure. (This does not follow from the fact that all silences sound the same, since they might all have the same internal structure.) Perhaps that is why silence has seemed rather uninteresting as an object of 10 study see, e.g., Brenneis 1988: 226). One cannot see it or hear it (although it can be deafening), and it has no features, no components. But, as we have already noted, the sameness of silence is superficial. There are as many kinds of silence as there are of relevant sounds. In the realm of talk, for each possible utterance, there is a corresponding silence. And there is, in addition, the silence which is the absence of talk itself. We have some data about the preferences and habits of different cultural groups regarding silence. For example, what is a comfortable conversation for a Finn (Lehtonen and Sajavaara 1985) or an Athabaskan (Scollon 1985) may seem to a New Yorker to be full of uncomfortable silences. When people from different speech communities, such as North American Whites and Chippawa Indians, or even New Yorkers and Californians (Tannen 1985), interact, their different standards in relation to conversational silences may cause interactional disfluencies and cultural misunderstandings. Also, silence may have different meanings for members of different cultures. Saville-Troike (1985) tells of an incident in which Egyptian pilots radioed their intention to land at an airbase on Cypress. When the Greek traffic controllers responded with silence, intending to indicate refusal, the Egyptians interpreted the silence as assent. This resulted ultimately in some loss of life. I don't know whether the Egyptian pilots' reaction was typical, but the story illustrates at least the potential for cross-cultural miscommunication. I want to focus here, though, on the interactional uses of silence in native-speaker English discourse. I have mentioned two kinds of silence--absolute or objective silence and notable silence, of which conversational silence is a major subtype. Conversational silence is the absence of talk (or of particular kinds of talk) where talk might relevantly occur. We do not ordinarily say of one who is sitting alone on a park bench that he is silent. On the contrary, we may find it noticeable and mentionable that he is talking. And we do not say, when it is B's turn at talk in a conversation, that A is silent, even though A is indeed not speaking at the moment. And, as Schegloff and Sacks (1974) 11 have noted, even though a silence in a conversation is a moment when no one is speaking, the silence may be assignable to one or another of the interactants. One article on silence in interaction (Crown and Feldstein 1985) began by describing the methodology used. The data on silence was computer analyzed. The first definition used in dealing with this data was "A speaking turn begins the instant one of the speakers in an interaction begins talking alone and ends immediately prior to the instant the other speaker starts talking alone" (33). In other words, if I come to the end of my utterance and there is a silence, the silence is counted as part of my turn. The authors failed to recognize that silences may belong to specific participants and so misconstrued the idea of a conversational turn at talk. Consider: A: When will he arrive? (2) B: About noon, I think. The two second pause is B's silence. We would say that B hesitated. There are structural units in conversation that conversation analysts have called adjacency pairs. In general, as soon as a speaker completes a first pair-part (e.g., a question, request, invitation, etc.), the turn passes to the second speaker, whose job it is to provide an appropriate second pair-part. To say that the first speaker's turn at talk ends when the second begins to speak is to misunderstand the structure of conversation. Schegloff and Sacks (1974) have noted that when we open a conversation we invoke a turn-taking machinery that provides for the conversational relevance of both talk and silence. Any silence within conversation may be accorded significance. This creates a need for closing devices. The problem of closing is "how to organize the simultaneous arrival of the co-conversationalists at a point where one speaker's completion will not occasion another speaker's talk, and that will not be heard as someone's silence" (237). In 12 other words, how to leave the state of conversation. If one were to attempt to close by simply falling silent, this "would be interpretable as an 'event-in-the-conversation', rather than as outside, or marking, its boundaries, and would be analyzed for actions being accomplished in the conversation, for example, anger, brusqueness, pique, etc." (238). They go on to describe the devices used by conversationalists for arriving at and achieving closings, a matter which need not concern us here. Response Priority Silence is an integral part of the meaning-producing machinery of conversation. Sometimes we listen for a response, X, and, if X is not forthcoming, we assume that notX is the case. A: So I was wondering would you be in your office on Monday (.) by any chance? (2) A: Probably not (Levinson 1983: 320) This is an example of what I will call "response priority."iv Response priority is a weakly constitutive device that helps to give silence a specific meaning. Certain actions permit two or more alternative relevant responses. For example, an invitation calls for either acceptance or refusal. I will say that acceptance is the first priority response because, in the absence of any reply, we presume refusal. We do not think, "he hasn't refused, therefore he must be accepting"; we think, "he hasn't accepted, therefore he must be refusing." The general rule is: Where X and Y are alternate relevant responses, and N is no response, if N implies Y, then X is the first priority response. And, if X is the first 13 priority response, then N implies Y.v In the case of requests, compliance is the first priority response. In the Levinson example, A produces a recognizable preliminary to a request. The first priority response to such a preliminary is clearance. Silence implies nonclearance, and A draws the appropriate conclusion. (Sometimes pauses are followed by the first priority response. When that happens, the pause conveys reluctance or some other sort of problem.) The following example comes from a mediation session: Mediator: Wull hhhh (2) like I- (.) said to you both privately: (1) u:m (1.5) Joan's: not willing to return: (.5) any of the money an': (.) what (.) Arnold would like is: a hundred dollars an' f'r (.) you to keep fifty dollars (.5) f'r the electric. (3) Arnold: ^kay Mediator: Ah mean ahhh Arnold: Th't's- that's where we stand. hh Mediator: Th't's- that's: (.5) where we stand. An': The mediator, in her first turn, makes attributions about Joan and Arnold. This is followed by a three second silence, and then, after Arnold's muted "okay" and the mediator's "I mean," Arnold says, "That's where we stand." In saying this, he both confirms the mediator's attributions about him and expresses his presumption that her attributions about Joan were also correct. It is important to note that the confirmation follows an extended silence. The silence is a space in which the disputants might have contradicted the mediator, either by saying that she had misunderstood or by modifying their previous positions. Because there was no contradiction, Arnold is able to conclude that "That's where we stand." Notice that it is contradiction and not confirmation (nor 14 joking nor anything else) that is relevantly absent in this silence. That is, contradiction is the first priority response, and response priorities structure the meaning of silence. Because of mechanisms such as weakly constitutive rules and response priorities, silence is not merely an alternative to talk, but an alternative to some specific kind of talk, and is thereby made meaningful.vi Implicit Silence We need now to make a further distinction between kinds of silence. I will say that there are two kinds of conversational silence, explicit and implicit. Suppose that I show you a picture that I drew. First priority response in such a situation is some sort of praise. If you hand the picture back to me without a word, I will conclude that you didn't care for it. We will call your response "explicit silence." On the other hand, if you give it back to me with some irrelevant remark, about the weather or somesuch, first priority response will still be missing, and I will draw the same conclusion as I would in the case of explicit silence. We will call this latter mode of response "implicit silence." Perhaps this gives the lie to my earlier claim that all silences sound alike. Some silences are obscured by words. At this point, we are talking not only about the meaning of pre-existing silence, but about the constitution of silence where no silence is hearable.vii Constituting silence has become a major occupation of social scientists. We find topics or points that the speaker or author might have mentioned, things that he might have said, but didn't, and we note his silence. We create silence by creating relevance. These are analyst-constituted silences. Not only are these silences covered by words; they are also unnoticed by participants and are not working parts of the inferential machinery of interaction. They are silences by reference to the analyst's sensitivities or theoretical system. The 15 following example is from Sacks (1984: 420). Ellen has called Jean to tell her of an event that she has witnessed: Jean: Hello, (.4) Ellen: Jean. Jean: Yeah, (.4) Ellen: Well I just thought I'd re-better report to you what's happened at Cromwell's toda:y= Jean: =What in the world's ha:ppened. // hhh Ellen: Did you have the day o:ff? Jean: Ya:h? (.3) Ellen: Well I: got out to my car at fi:ve thirty I: drove arou:nd and of course I had to go by the front of the sto:re,= Jean: =Yeah?= Ellen: And there were two (.2) police cars across the street and leh-e colored lady wanted to go in the main entrance there where the si:lver is and all the // ( ), (things). Jean: Yeah, (.4) Ellen: A:nd, they wouldn't let her go i:n, and he, had a gu:n, (.2) Ellen: He was holding a gun in his hand a great big lo:ng gu::n? Jean: Yea:h? 16 Ellen: And then over on the other si:de, I mean to the right.of there, where the (.2) employees come ou:t, there was a who:le, oh:: must have been ten uh eight or ten employees standing there, because there must have been a:, it seemed like they had every entrance ba:rred. I don't know what was goin//g o:n Jean: Oh my God, Sacks notes that, by virtue of having described this scene in the way that she has, Ellen has failed to describe it in another possible way. "Others might see the same scene with the same parties taking it that the police were doing something that they had no business doing. That is, if this action took place in a black neighborhood, watched by black people, then 'the very same scene' would perhaps turn into, for the perception of the parties, an altogether different phenomenon.... [They might] look to see what kind of bother the police, by being on the scene, are producing, as compared to what kind of bother they are properly responding to" (Sacks 1984: 421). This second possible description is relevant precisely because there are others who might typically use it. In Ellen's description, there is a kind of silence, in that she has failed to say what might relevantly be said, and this silence, as much as what she actually said, constitutes her as white, middle class. Sacks does not actually describe the above case in terms of silence. In some modern political theory, though, certain kinds of talk are described as in effect being or creating silences. I will draw here on the work of Neubauer and Shapiro (1985) and Neubauer (1987), whose work on silence is influenced by Foucault. Their notion is that any actually existing form of discourse monopolizes the field of talk and so displaces, or "silences," other possible discourses. A functionalist discourse of culture as shared values, for example, "suppresses a history of struggle" (Neubauer and Shapiro 1985). 17 Power is invested in language not so much by limiting what can be said as it is by enforcing a garrulousness, by proliferating forms of social knowledge which each of us tends to reinforce to the extent that we use the prevailing, institutionalized discursive practices conveying these forms of knowledge. Where, then, are the silences amidst all this garrulousness? ... Conceiving discourse as a practice helps us to think a political question which can be posed to any discourse: why this practice rather than another, why these statements rather than others? ... As practices, they have the effect of administering silences (Neubauer and Shapiro 1985). The actual talk does not merely conceal or overlay a silence; rather, it constitutes the silence. The silences of which Neubauer and Shapiro speak are not "hearable" to the member; they must be discovered--or, rather, created--by the analyst. Neubauer (1987) recommends that the analyst "ask relentlessly: What is not being said here?" Conclusion In these final examples, it is the social scientist who has become the agent of weak constitution. It is he who "hears" the silence, by virtue of positing alternatives that are relevant to him, or to someone else, rather than to the participants. In the Sacks example, the alternative is relevant by virtue of its relevance to another social group. In the Neubauer and Shapiro example, it is relevant because, in the authors' view, it should be relevant, because it embodies some hidden truth, or at least some suppressed possibility. The concept of implicit silence is a powerful tool of retroconstitution; it allows the social scientist to create the very world that he is describing, that is, to give it a meaning that is not available to the participants themselves. 18 In looking at social scientific practices in this way, I am treating them as just one more way that we have of constituting silence and making it meaningful. My claim from the beginning is that to hear silence it is not enough to have functioning ears. One has, first of all, to make culturally learned and contextually conditioned distinctions between noise and relevant sound. Moreover, silence can be very particular; we learn not only to hear silence but to hear it as the silence which is the absence of some particular sound or talk, and to draw appropriate inferences. The conventions which allow us to hear silence as particular, and to extract meaning from it, I have called weakly constitutive mechanisms. Furthermore, it is possible to hear silence even where there is talk by noticing that that which could or should have been said was not said. This kind of silence is, in some cases noticeable to whoever looks with a competent eye. In other cases, it is created by arguing plausibly that something is missing. I have suggested that social scientists sometimes use this member's practice to produce their analyses. 19 notes i"The occurrence or nonoccurrence of passively or spontaneously encountered noise, of itself, can neither prevent nor produce silence" (Dauenhauer 1980: 4). Dauenhauer insists that silence is a conscious activity and so, presumably, would not accept my distinction between absolute and notable silence. ii The notion of silence may even become entirely separated from its connection with sound. Thus, we may speak of a silence in a conversation carried out in sign language. In this sense, even the deaf experience silence. iii In this paper, I am following the convention that the unmarked pronoun accords with the sex of the writer. iv The general idea of what I am calling response priority was introduced by Harvey Sacks in his lectures and given the name "preference." Since that time, the notion of preference has evolved in the conversation analytic literature. It now, in its most widely-used formulation, comprises a number of criteria, of which response priority is only one. In another article (Bilmes 1988), I argued that the most common usage of "preference" in conversation analysis is inconsistent and that we should use the word as Sacks originally defined it. Since I wrote that article, however, I have reached the conclusion that "preference" is a needlessly confusing label for the phenomenon which I am now calling response priority. I reserve the term "preference" for other uses (Bilmes, 1991). v This is the definition that I used in my 1988 paper. I have since proposed an expanded concept of response priority: if X is the first priority response, then any response other than X (including N) implies the withholding or nonavailability of X (Bilmes 1991). vi Gulliver (1979: 86) writes that "in some societies silence has a particular significance. For example, among the Arusha it unequivocally means agreement with the last message 20 received, since it is assumed that a party would otherwise express his disagreement." In a fictional setting, Rushdie (1988/1992) writes: "He had not given an answer; and silence denotes assent" (248). That Westerners are well aware of this function of silence is attested in the following two quotations from The Bangkok Secret, a novel by Anthony Grey (1990): "Jutulak served as a novice in your temple. Later, he told me, you hid him here when he was in grave danger. He saw something very important at the Grand Palace.... Do you remember Jutulak?" The acharn did not speak or move a muscle. He continued to sit perfectly still, giving me his full attention, signalling his affirmation, I assumed, by his lack of protest (225). She did not reply but her silence seemed to indicate that she found no fault with his deduction (282). Again, in a newpaper article during the 1984 presidential campaign, a Reagan official was quoted as saying that Hispanics might prefer overcrowded conditions. Walter Mondale, Reagan's chief opponent, was reported by UPI to have commented that "The president should take immediate action when such things are said. I think silence means assent." A final example: The implicational power of silence is such that it has been countered by an explicit principle in American law to the effect that a defendent's refusal to testify should not be taken as an indication of guilt. On the other hand, once the defendent is on the stand, failure to respond to an accusation "may constitute a type of demeanor from which guilt may be inferred" (O'Barr and Atkins 1978: 15-16). 21 vii Of course, we have been talking about socially constituted rather than objectively determined silence almost since the beginning of this paper, since the identification of irrelevant background noise is a social and not an objective operation. The distinction to be made here, then, is between the (socially constituted) "hearable" silence that results from ignoring irrelevant background noise, and the "inaudible" silence, the sense of something absent, that may underlie a flow of speech. 22 References Bilmes, Jack (1988). The concept of preference in conversation analysis. Language in Society, 17, 161-181. -(1991). Two conversational phenomena and their interaction: Preference and response priority. 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