Silence and Society addresses the reality that social sciences have ignored the importance of silence in human communication. Without communication, there is no community and thus no society. Yet, as classic communication theory explains, communication must always deal with noise. Increasingly, as cyber-technologies and media have gained the upper hand in social life, so have they become purveyors of empty noisefrom mindless sitcom television to uninformed talk radio to cable news blather and more.
The book is organized into three sections, each corresponding to a level of social order. Each bears a distinctive relation to the general problem of silence and noise in human community. Part One: Social Facts of Silence presents examples of the ways silence intrudes on vital aspects of human life: in personal self-understanding, in the irony that direction communication requires a third absent party (such as Goffmans ego identity), in the fact that personal identity is the challenge of dealing with the trouble of deciding who we are in a given social setting. Part Two: Noise, Dreams, and Identity Confusions considers a range of community issues from the strange noises of quiet neighborhoods to the way the necessity of social conformity silences individual autonomy, to the fact that the dead are ever present in daily language and behavior, especially in common religious practices. Finally, Part Three: Waste, Death, and the Beyond of Time suggests the principal ways the growing global environment aggravates human inequalityby forcing the poor into zones of exclusion, by increasing the mountain of human waste that in turn wastes human lives, by the extent to which global theories and programs for economic development are little more
PrefaceAcknowledgments
Part One: Social Facts of Silence
1. Silence and Society: Below the Bottom Turtle
2. The Dead, the Living, and the Yet to Be BornNever-ending Social Things
3. 1950Conformity and the Crisis of the Idealized Individual
4. Westward Journeys: Searching for Silence
5. Clamorous Global Development Democracy, Health, and Suicide in Silent
India, with Vani Kulkarni
6. Slouching Toward InequalityEntropic Inequality and the Death of
Societies
Part Two: Noise, Dreams, and Identity Confusions
7. Bad Noise Disturbs the Collective Mind
8. Historys Failed Search for IdentitiesThe Silent Self
9. Fuckin Old ManNoise and Silence in Analytic Talk
10. The Silent Third: Augustine of Hippo, Charles Sanders Pierce, Erving
Goffman
11. Icons and Social FictionsObject Lessons/Many Kinds
Part Three: Waste, Death, and the Beyond of Time
12. Shit and other Fecal Matters at the Tail End of the Modern Era
13. Zygmunt Bauman on Liquid Waste, Being Human, and Bodily Death, with
Makenna Goodman
14. What Would the Dead Have SaidDurkheims Ghost, A Century Later
15. Father is Gone: The Dead Who Never Stop Talking
16. And Thats Not All: Last Words from the Ashes, by Noah Lemert
Charles Lemert is University Professor and John C. Andrus Professor of Social Theory Emeritus at Wesleyan University, USA. He has written extensively on social theory, globalization, and culture. He is author of Globalization: An Introduction to the End of the Known World (Routledge, 2015), Why Niebuhr Matters (Yale University Press, 2011), Structural Lie: Small Clues to Global Things (Routledge, 2008), Thinking the Unthinkable: The Riddles of Classical Social Theories (Routledge, 2007), Postmodernism is Not What You Think: Why Globalization Threatens Modernity (Routledge, 2005), and Muhammad Ali: Trickster in the Culture of Irony (Polity Press, 2003). He is also co-author of Introduction to Contemporary Social Theory (Second Edition, Routledge, 2022) and Capitalism and Its Uncertain Future (Routledge, 2021), editor of Social Theory: The Multicultural, Global, and Classic Readings (Seventh Edition, Routledge, 2021), and co-editor of Globalization: A Reader (Routledge, 2010).
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