Enlarged version: challenges to comprehension
Home/Search
Articles >>
Themes >>
Visuals >>
Context >>
FAQ/Contact >>

Joy in the Present
      

14th December 2003 | Draft

Varieties of the "Unsaid"

in sustaining psycho-social community

- / -

The "unsaid" in politics and international relations
The "unsaid" in social systems
The "unsaid" in security and the "war against terrorism"
The "unsaid" in business and the corporate world
The "unsaid" in the legal system
The "unsaid" in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy
The "unsaid" in personal relationships
The "unsaid" in the arts and aesthetics
The "unsaid" in philosophy and theology
The "unsaid" in research
Variants of the "unsaid" from other cultures
Non-verbal knowledge
Implicit and unstated obligations
Implicit requirements for respect
Conversational implicature
Hidden agendas and conspiracy theories
Deception and lies
Secrecy and codes of slence
Ignorance, unknowing and nescience
Via negativa and mysticism
The unmentionable and the unsayable
Unasked and unanswered questions
Repression of memory
Open secret: partial acknowledgement of the "unsaid"
Denial of the "unsaid"

References

The following sections explore various threads relating to the "unsaid" that might be usefully interwoven.

The "unsaid" in politics and international relations

The term is frequently applied in evaluating an address by a politician -- and most notably in relation to any justification for the war on terrorism (for example, E J Dionne's commentary, President's speech on Iraq left too much unsaid: Little candor about who will pay. Concord Monitor, 10 September 2003).

The term may be used with reference to a highly asymmetric relationship between political factions or governments, such as the assumption of the equality of the largest and smaller member states of the United Nations.

With respect to the major UNCED Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 1992, one critique was expressed under the heading of the Unsaid Summit. To what extent are intergovernmental initiatives systematically undermined by the unpublicized creation of bodies like the secret "Brussels group" of governments (Belgium, Germany, Italy, UK, USA) in 1971, with the objective of limiting the effectiveness of the UN environment conference that created UNEP (New Scientist, 5 January 2002) (more)?

There is an extensive literature on the "implicit assumptions" associated with international relations (see K.M. Fierke. Links Across the Abyss: Language and Logic in International Relations. International Studies Quarterly, Volume 46, Issue 3, September 2002; Thinking About Thinking. Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency 1999 ). Implicit assumptions undergird the different ways in which peace is conceptualized, and these assumptions impact on the effectiveness of various strategies developed for realizing peace [more].

Iver B. Neumann (The Double Arrival of Russia in International Society International Studies Association, New Orleans 2002) has explored the role of the "implicit" in relation to the corps diplomatique:

The area of the corps diplomatique or society of diplomats at the court of a specific sovereign may serve as an example. It is true and central that, with the institutional breakthrough of the doyen, the representatives of sovereigns no longer needed to bustle for pride of place at every single function that they attended. Instead, one agreed on a technical solution to the question of precedence, so that pride of place was given to the longest-serving diplomat. But this, of course, in no way implied that questions of prestige emerged altogether. They were still tangible though often implicit facts of the informal social life of the corps diplomatique. To pick another example, with the expansion of international society, the question of a ‘standard of civilisation’ quickly gained a central place in international law as a prerequisite of rights. Of course, the fact that it had not been formally central to international law before that time, did not mean that it had not been implicitly present.

The "unsaid" is often articulated in the political sphere in terms of "silence":

Johan Galtung (US "Negotiation" Style -- and the six-party talks over over Korea, 2007) clearly identifies a policy of secrecy in diplomacy:

So there has to be a back channel. And it has to be secret that The Extraordinary One engages in such ordinary activities as negotiations; willingness to meet, yes, but with no details. The extent to which this happens is unknown. But some rules can be surmised from the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam war, Iran-hostages, Iraq I-Kuwait, Iraq II-Saddam and Iran-nuclear:

-- keep negotiations secret, not necessarily that they take place but what is on the table;
-- give the impression that the talks are about face-to-face communication of the US stand, supplemented by threat and possibly "incentives", little or no mention of any quid pro quo;
-- keep what the Other demands and/or offers secret or general, referred to as rhetorical, efforts to deflect the issue, etc;
-- present agreement and compliance by Other as a triumph for US diplomacy, keep any quid pro quo secret;
-- present non-agreement and non-compliance by Other as proof that Other does not want any agreement = peace;-- conceal, play down US non-compliance, put all burden on Other;
-- make the media willing parties through access to sources, stories and embedded journalism, and censorship if needed.

There is also a case for recognizing the extent to which relations within the international system are based on patterns of agreement and understanding -- the "giving of one's word". Reneging on such agreements, and derogating from treaties, may be seen as a form of "unsaying" of what has been said and agreed. The "unsaid" may then be seen as the result of the increasing practice of governments, notably the USA, to set aside international treaty provisions.

A related phenomenon of "unspeak" -- a mode of speech that "persuades by stealth" -- has been documented by Steven Poole (Unspeak, 2006), notably as a means whereby government its policy behind its language:

What is unspeak? It represents an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself. At the same time, it tries to unspeak - in the sense of erasing, or silencing - any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one way of looking at a problem.(War of the words, The Guardian, 18 February 2006)

The Unconscious Civilization
Who among the leaders of our elites does not fear living with the conscious realization that they do not know? John Ralston Saul, 1995

The "unsaid" in social systems

Aspects of the "unsaid", as experienced by many in social and political relations, have been usefully characterized by Johan Galtung under the term structural violence -- an unacknowledged form of violence that harms through social structures that produce poverty, death and enormous suffering. Structural violence may be political, repressive, economic and exploitative, it occurs when the social order directly or indirectly causes human suffering and death. [more | more]. It is the causing of harm by inflexibility and rigidity of the rules of the structure in dealing with difference -- without any given perpetrator, by the holding do rules that do not allow for differences [more]. For Susan James (Structural violence: the invisible violence in our communities, 2001) structural violence differs from the other types of violence in that power relations within structural violence are less visible and exist in various forms infused in the existing social hierarchies. For Robert Gilman (Structural Violence Can we find genuine peace in a world with inequitable distribution of wealth among nations?, 1983) its essence lies in the "the ease with which we acquiesce in injustice -- the way we all too easily look in the other direction and disclaim "response ability."

With respect to politicized issues, for example, Dave Duffy (Something unsaid about Timothy McVeigh's execution, 1998) writes:

Now that McVeigh is about to be executed on closed-circuit TV in the first federal execution in 38 years, there is relative silence on the Internet. Very little e-mail, very little discussion pro or con. Why is that? We can't quite put our finger on it, can we, or we dare not express the horror in our heart at the coming moment, and the implications for freedom in this country.

The notion in some countries, especially the USA, of the "silent majority" may reflect an unexpressed aspect of public opinion. The voices of women may often be seen as smothered behind a wall of silence, even in industrialized countries (see Sandra Buckley Broken Silence: Voices of Japanese Feminism. 1997). A culture of silence at work, whereby conflicts are effectively silenced, can prove highly destructive to the organization (see The trouble with silence at work. Christian Science Monitor, 14 October 2003; In business, silence is not golden. Harvard Business Review, 3 September 2003).

Perhaps the most problematic forms of the "unsaid" arise from the fundamental arrogance with which some people, groups, nations or cultures view themselves as inherently and unquestionably superior to others -- as übermensch of some kind -- notably from a genetic, spiritual, or aesthetic perspective. Under the guise of human equality this cannot be "said", but this innate arrogance is a prime determining factor in social relations. This was the case with Nazi Germany, it remains the case for those peoples who consider themselves specially chosen by God (as repeatedly articulated by Johan Galtung). Any challenge to this is immediately conflated with a direct attack on their human rights -- to be resisted violently. Thus even the nature of this dynamic is absorbed into the zone of the "unsaid". Such attitudes underlie the persistence of the class system, notably governing selection of marriage partners. They underlie relations between government representatives and those of nongovernmental bodies. They ensure the marginalization of certain peoples such as the gypsies, indigenous groups, and the Ainu.

The "unsaid" in security and the "war against terrorism"

The challenge of the "unsaid" in relation to security lies in how to prove or disprove any assertion or claim in a context of secrecy and deniable culpability (see Mapping the Network of Terror, 2002). How, for example, is it to be proven whether a sequence of events (such as the following) is the responsibility of an independent "terrorist group" such as "al-Qaida"? There is a demonstrated willingness of governments to act through subterfuge in defiance of international law (as conceded by Richard Perle with regard to Iraq, or in the case of the Anglo-French Suez invasion) to the point of planning for the loss of life of their own citizens (as in the proposal by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff for Operation Northwoods to engage in activities such as assassination, hijacking airplanes, blowing up ships, orchestrating violent terrorism in cities of the USA -- in order to pin the blame on opponents). In such a context, who could demonstrate that the following sequence had not been masterminded by a (rogue) security agency of a government whose strategic interests would be protected or advanced by focusing attention on such events (and away from other situations)?:

  • detect strategic opportunity (or threat)
  • manipulate pro-terrorist group or rogue security unit
  • explode bomb or take advantage of any disastrous incident
  • claim to detect that the incident has "all the markings of al-Qaida"
  • attribute incident to "al-Qaida" in official public announcements and encourage such attributions by the media (omitting any use of pre-trial precautions such as "allegedly", ignoring accusations of "contempt of court") [more | more]
  • arrange for possible claim/endorsement for the attack over phone/video from "al-Qaida" or a "pro-terrorist movement" (or from "Osama bin Laden" or "Saddam Hussein" ("former" CIA agents))
  • whip up media on issue of loyalty and "fighting terror to the end"
  • arrest "terrorist suspects" for interrogation (including those it is politically convenient to frame as "terrorists")
  • ensure robust "interrogations" to produce appropriate "confessions", possibly with the assistance of false memory implantation (ignoring claims of duress)
  • fail to release any hard evidence obtained from suspects -- "because of the grave threat to national security"
  • seclude suspects indefinitely beyond reach of judicial due process -- whilst claiming to be acting in defence of human rights
  • prevent access of defence lawyers to other suspects potentially able to offer exonerating evidence -- claiming that such rights "hinder ongoing interrogation efforts of other suspects"
  • discredit independent critics as misguided (or traitors) -- perhaps later to be reframed as "terrorist suspects" and kidnapped for interrogation
  • use confusion to justify and ensure greater control of resources (such as oil)
  • promote more repressive legislation
  • frame any collateral damage as "destruction of terrorist strongholds" and "response to terrorist suspects resisting arrest"
  • await (or provoke) next strategic opportunity

In this context the nature of the shadowy "al-Qaida" itself becomes the "unsaid". As with any bogeyman, maintaining its shadowy, menacing nature in the eyes of public opinion may serve both its adherents and those whose position is reinforced by fear-mongering. Substantive proof cannot be credibly supplied -- only devastating bombs whose purpose can be variously interpreted, irrespective of the specific false "claims" of responsibility (typical of many crimes). Even professionals in the intelligence community may be confused by the shadowy quality of the evidence on offer and may mistakenly infer the existence of "missing links" to complete the desired chain of evidence (see also Groupthink: the Search for Archaeoraptor as a Metaphoric Tale: missing the link between "freedom fighters" and "terrorists", 2002)

The status of the "unsaid" has also been admirably illustrated by US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld (DoD News, 12 February 2002):

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones

This much-cited remark has been reviewed in the light of its inadvertent wisdom (see Philip Stephens. The unwitting wisdom of Rumsfeld's unknowns. Financial Times, 12 December 2003). Whilst acknowledging that "The chaos in Iraq testifies to what happens when politicians substitute hubris for intelligent thought" he acknowledges the merits of Rumsfeld's statement: "Sometimes we can be certain about things; sometimes we know the direction to take but are aware of gaps in our knowledge; and sometimes we just stumble around in the dark". According to Stephens, compounding Rumsfeld's error in ignoring his own advice, his unstated error is his assumption that the present can be readily projected into the future.

The "unsaid" in business and the corporate world

John Ralston Saul (The Unconscious Civilization, 1995) provides a classic example:

Criticism is perhaps the citizen's primary werapon in the exercise of her legitimacy. That is why, in this corporatist society, conformism, loyalty and silence are so admired and rewarded; why criticism is so punished or marginalized.... In one eloquent example which has recently come to light, the executives of a major American tobacco company debated among themselves at great length, in the 1960s, whether they should inform the U.S. Surgeon General of the results of their own corporate research, which confirmed the health hazards of smoking. They decided, eventually, to say nothing and to stop work on a safer cigarette. After all, to develop a safer cigarette would compromise their silence by suggesting the need for one. Instead, they initiated a legal and public relations strategy of admitting nothing.

The "unsaid" in the legal system

Democratic countries pride themselves on their legal systems and consider that any miscarriages of justice are merely unfortunate exceptions. The systemic defects pass unnoticed -- except by those difectly exposed to them -- and are not a matter of public debate. The extent to which this situation has gone unacknowledged in an industrialized country such as the UK, for example, has been usefully and extensively analyzed by Nick Davies (How a judge's death in country garden exposed fatal flaws in system, Guardian, 13 December 2003):

The Guardian's investigation into the criminal justice system has shown how the policing of volume crime is failing on a spectacular scale -- bringing to justice only 3% of offences -- fundamentally because it relies on the antique and failed tools of arrest and trial and punishment....

Each of these failures has its own detail and yet all of them spring from a common source: our systems for detecting and dealing with serious crime are unreliable. Sometimes they succeed but then again they fail, because, oddly, we do not train our detectives to detect; or because we now filter our forensic science through a privatised marketplace; or because we have left the most important decisions about death in the hands of coroners with ancient and arbitrary powers; or because, when things go wrong, we still rely on some of the most powerful institutions in the country to arbitrate on their own behaviour. Systems like these invite the manufacture of false evidence, they provoke guesswork and phoney logic, they stimulate the crudest of prejudices, because they fail consistently to deliver the most important element in any criminal justice system, which is the truth. It can happen even to a judge. [emphasis added]

The prevailing situation in many other countries falls within the zone of the "unsaid". In the same period the unacknowledged pattern of treatment accorded prisoners in the UK by prison officers was the subject of a further report by Vikram Dodd (Brutality of prison officers exposed, Guardian, 11 December 2003):

The Prison Service has admitted that its officers subjected inmates to sustained beatings, mock executions, death threats, choking and torrents of racist abuse, the Guardian has learned....The Prison Service has also admitted that senior officials in the jail and in management failed to investigate the assaults properly. Inmates who tried to complain were threatened and beaten to keep them silent.

The "unsaid" in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy

In many respects, psychoanalysis is primarily concerned with the "unsaid" and the silences of discourse (for example, H Levitt. The unsaid in the narrative: Understanding silences in psychotherapy. 1997). As noted by Alfred Margulies (Commentary on Poland's "The Analyst's Witnessing And Otherness". Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 48/1)

We are, of course, constantly up against our limits of articulation: Gadamer referred to "the infinity of the unsaid" surrounding our words; Hans Lipps to the "the circle of the unexpressed" (Gadamer 1976, p. xxxii). Moreover, this circle of the unsaid compounds itself relationally, in discourse: Gadamer (1976, p. 17) calls it the "infinity of the dialogue"-- the ongoing conversation that is only interrupted, never concluded. And so too with the psychoanalytic situation: both analyst and analysand actively engage their inarticulateness, ask themselves to express not-fully-known experience in an attempt that can only partially succeed, and one that never really stops. The psychoanalytic witness, then, functions as a special, designated Other, a bearer of, a placeholder for, that which is not fully speakable.

The secret quality of the preoccupations of psychoanalysis are reflected in interesting ways in the institutional secrecy of its origins, as explored by Paulo Soroka. (The said and the unsaid: Secret structures and ideology in psychoanalytic institutions. Revista Brasileira de Psicanalise, 5, 2001, 4), notably its "Secret Committee".

For L A Kirshner (The concept of the self in psychoanalytic theory and its philosophical foundations. Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Assocation, 39, 1991, 181):

…for the psychoanalyst, the sense of self – subjectivity – does not derive from a hidden inner structure or entity but is constructed in an ongoing dialogue with otherness, including both the unsymbolized unconscious within, and other subjects who listen or speak… The speaking subject… always overflows his immediate constructions of self, which as ‘incomplete texts’ constantly refer to what is unsaid or unthought. It is as if the speaking analysand constantly attempts to enlarge and reestablish his ‘I’… While the analyst cannot restore or bestow this virtual ‘self,’ by his nonobjectifying stance, he recognizes the desire ‘where id was, there ego shall be’ (Freud, 1933)…

The "unsaid" may also be understood from the perspective of depth psychology as the "shadow". This is the archetypal scapegoat present in everyone -- that unacknowledgedf part of the psyche normally the focus of blame or attack when the individual feels it necessary to vindicate some action or behaviour. It is not normally recognized as part of the self and thus the blame or attack is usually received by someone else who has sparked off the disquieting view of the shadow. It is postulated that the inability to accept that the "enemy" is in fact one's own lower nature is the cause of all bias, discrimination and conflict. Acknowledgement of the collective shadow might well prevent nationalistic or racialistic over-reactions to atrocities and barbarism which effectively are merely responding in kind. By accepting that everyone, as a human being, holds within a collective responsibility for every development may well be the key to the next stage in human evolution

Recalling Donald Rumsfeld's insight (above), psychotherapist R. D. Laing (Knots, 1970) made a strong point about the experience of the "unsaid" in the form of a much-cited poem which included the lines:

If I don’t know I don’t know
I think I know
If I don’t know I know
I think I don’t know

The "unsaid" in personal relationships

The notion of the "unsaid" may be applied to relationships, especially those that stretch the conventions of a particular society. Thus it may apply to cases where people have a romantic "understanding" that is not expressed in words. This may also apply in the case of homosexual relationships (for example, in Duy Nguyen's play Things Unsaid). Sensitive issues may be avoided for years. Silence of one form of another may undermine relationships (see Silence about sexual problems can hurt relationships, 1999) or be significant in defining a relationship (see Arad Nir. Relationships as commitment devices: Strategic silence, 2002). It is a major issue in relationship to undisclosed domestic violence [more]. Silence may then itself be a form of abuse according to Paul Brandis (Silence: Is It Abuse?).

Studies of communication have established that a very significant proportion of meaning is conveyed non-verbally, notably through body language (for example John Bittleston: What's left unsaid: Body language says a lot about a person if you know how to read it properly. 4 July 2003).

The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski distinguished phatic communication from ideational communication, although their respective success may be mutually dependent. Phatic communication makes use of conventional messages (notably at the beginning and the end of a conversation) to establish rapport and community. This may include hugging, kissing, shaking hands, bowing, smiling, making eye contact, and facing one another. Cliches may be used to exchange pleasantries -- having essentially lost their content they take on new relational meanings. In such communication, what is important is not what is said. (see V Zegarac, 1998, 1999).

At a particular moment in group processes, something may best be left unsaid knowing that later it will be said. In group creativity processes, if an idea is criticized too early it will be suppressed and often all new ideas will become unmentionable. Although the criticism may be valid -- the idea may be worth pursuing for a while before it is criticized.

The "unsaid" in the arts and aesthetics

By leaving things unsaid or unseen in art the hearer or viewer must construct their own reality creating a richness far beyond what the artist could do. The process of artistic creativity is often accompanied by a marked reluctance to discuss or show the work before its completion.

(a) Poetry: The "unsaid" features in a number of titles of poems (for example, Dana Gioia, Beverly Bremers and Rick Paul, Emily Guenther, Michaelette L. Romano). For Louise Glück (Disruption, Hesitation, Silence, In: Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry, 1994) aesthetics is rooted in a sense of a work of art as provocatively unfinished. Poets including Rilke, Berryman, Oppen and Eliot can then be understood as practitioners of "not saying," of leaving out so as to suggest:

I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. … It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries. The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power. (more)

The "unsaid" has a special relationship to what is "said" through a poem. There is a sense in which significance remains unexpressed or "unsaid" until it can be expressed aesthetically in poetic form. It then "makes no sense" and remains "unsaid" until it rhymes within an appropriate metric. The higher orders of significance-- or wisdom -- appears to call for aesthetic expression and require it for successful communication. Rather than rhyme, the emphasis may be on respecting a particular metric (as in haiku) to render it memorable. In this sense the unmemorable effectively remains "unsaid".

In this context it is intriguing how socio-political reality is made and unmade by rhyme. The challenge is most readily seen in the use of rap as a form of coherent expression emerging from the slums of the most industrialized country. Political protest is frequently articulated through rhyming slogans, chants and song -- as was the case with Vietnam, and now with Iraq. War chants have a long tradition. The political will is in this sense unexpressed -- "unsaid" -- until it takes rhyming form.

Given the importance of this form to cultural identity in the case of epic poems (Ramayana, Mahabarata, Odyssey, Edda, Nibelungenlied, La Divina Commedia, Kalevala, etc), it is surprising how fundamentally unaesthetic are the major strategic constructions of modern civilization: political manifestos, constitutions of nations, charters of intergovernmental organizations, universal declarations, and global plans of action. It is no wonder that statements such as the Earth Summit's Agenda 21 do not engender the political will to change. The intentionality they seek to express remains effectively "unsaid". It can be argued that until political action can be articulated through rhyme and metre it will remain incoherent, unmemorable and ineffectual (see Structuring Mnemonic Encoding of Development Plans and Ethical Charters using Musical Leitmotivs, 2001; also Knowledge Gardening through Music: patterns of coherence for future African management as an alternative to Project Logic, 2000).

In the light of this claim, it might be useful to explore questionable cases where some attempt has been made towards coopting aesthetic expression to articulate values and a sense of direction: political parties, communist regimes, national socialist regimes (notably Goebbels), and other national movements. Poems have been used at the inauguration of some US presidents: Robert Frost (The Gift Outright) at the 1961 inauguration of John Kennedy; Maya Angelou (The Rock Cries Out To Us Today) at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993; Miller Williams (Of History and Hope) at Clinton's 1997 inaugural. What remains "unsaid" in these cases might be contrasted with what is "said" at events such as the Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Frenhinol Cymru (Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales) [more] with its explicit druidic traditions [more] -- and the socio-political significance that carries.

Such ceremonies are valued when they are aesthetically "magical". But they may also be understood as modern echoes of traditional magical operations. They are in part designed to "cast a spell" -- now known in its most degraded form in the commercial advertising jingle. Inauguration, or explication, of a pattern of action through a manifesto, declaration or legal constitution can be understood as the grounding "Word" articulating a new reality -- but as such it is also a "spell", a "making", and a drive to action. In this sense, the "unsaid" is both the strategic intent and potential, which has not yet been given appropriate form -- as well as any form which has effectively been displaced or "unmade". In some cultures, such as that of the Australian Aborigines, psycho-social reality is "sung" into being and sustained through such "song". But it can also be "unsung" and "unmade". Historically recent efforts by colonial powers and their religions to suppress systematically the traditional modes of aesthetic expression can be seen as efforts to "unmake" traditional cultures and collective identities. They were forbidden from singing their songs.

Individual identity can also be understood as driven to self-expression -- to "make a statement", or to "say" something. Unless that expression has an aesthetic dimension (style, look, etc), the identity may be felt to be unexpressed, unstated, inadequate and "unsaid". It is in this context that character assassination and identity theft can be usefully explored. Whilst personalities may be "built up" and heroes may indeed be "sung", the reputation and integrity of others may be destroyed, "unsung" and "unsaid". They then have no "song".

These aesthetic considerations raise the question of the nature of the higher order of meaning or identity with which they are associated. What is the additional meaning carried by rhyme? Is it an articulation of the semantic links -- the systemic pathways -- that constitute Gregory Bateson's famous "pattern that connects"? This can be explored in relation to the Chinese classical poem the Tao Te Ching (see also Hyperspace Clues to the Psychology of the Pattern that Connects in the light of the 81 Tao Te Ching Insights, 2003). Are rhymes effectively a fundamental feature of patterns of identity in a psycho-cultural pattern language? It would appear that their quality of resonance and aesthetic "goodness of fit" are vital to psycho-social architecture. What then if they are unexpressed -- "unsaid"?

(b) Literature: Massimo Lollini (Literature and Testimony in Gramsci's Letters from Prison: The question of Subjectivity) argues that:

The meaning of life can be found in literature, not in life itself. Literature and memory can provide one's own life with a sense of full identity, but Gramsci invites the reader to consider that any narrative, even direct narrative like that provided by his letter writing, always has a highly problematic relationship with real life. Through the very structure of irony the reader is forced to recognize not only the existence of the unsaid within the text, but also to see how the linguistic structure of representation grounds the said in the unsaid, making the unsaid the essential element of discourse.

A critique (In Custody of the Unsaid) of Anita Desai's novel In Custody, suggests that the "unsaid" functions to create meaning in the otherwise meaningless life of her character. By setting up a more concrete binary of meaning and the meaningless, the "unsaid" forces the reader to reevaluate the purpose of communication in an individual context.

(c) Visual arts: The role of the unstated is particularly evident in the use of shadow effects in Japanese interior decoration. Louise Glück also suggests of the "unsaid":

It is analogous to the unseen for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied. There is no moment in which their first home is felt to be the museum.

(d) Media: The term "unsaid" is used as a name for a popular musical group and for a film.

The "unsaid" in philosophy and theology

The "unsaid" in philosophy takes the form of presuppositions, namely whatever hides behind the statements of philosophers or their methods. The greatest "unsaid" is perhaps that in philosophy reason accounts for everything. And yet never is will mentioned as trainable in decision making, although it is the will that makes decisions, not reason. Also "unsaid" is that reason reduces complex situations into veridical ones (of the simplistic form: yes/no, good/bad, true/false, etc.). Also unrecognized is the extent to which human faculties such as remembering and imagining have been systematically suppressed in the educated Westerner, and variously distorted in others through the colonialism of the English language ( see Antonio de Nicolas. Habits of Mind: An Introduction to Clinical Philosophy, 2000).

Daniel Fidel Ferrer (Martin Heidegger and the new other beginning (Anfang), 2003) comments on the thinking of one philosopher who has been very attentive to the nature of the "unsaid":

Thinkers can try to over step their own limitations. Heidegger said, “This again consists in the fact that the thinker can never himself say what is most of all his own. It must remain unsaid, because the sayable (Word, German=Wort) receives its determination from what is not sayable (inexpressible)” (Recollection in Metaphysics, et. p. 77-78)...

What does this mean? Is this some sort of mysticism or it is just another one of those connections between Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Heidegger is driving the point toward the “unsaid” which he uses as a way to get at what thinkers were right on the edge of saying but did not actually say. If we want to say what Heidegger or any other philosopher said, then it is philology and not philosophy. If we want to have a live dialogue with another thinker, another philosopher then we bring them into our thinking, our dialogue, our critical confrontation and encounter with the issues for thinking. Not as what is dead and long dead in a thinker, but rather to bring their thinking in close with us. Heidegger wants us to think about the first beginning and the new, other beginning; but we need to see what is also unsaid in Heidegger’s thinking. Heidegger started a movement away from the first beginning which started with the Greeks and Platonism, and now on to a new and entirely different beginning. How are these two beginnings related? What is unsaid in Heidegger that points to this relationship? We are attempting to bring out the unsaid in Heidegger and to name this relationship. Although Heidegger is hesitant on this point because as he remarks, this is up to Being and not in our “heads”. The unsaid drives us to “speak” but in some ways there are limitations on what we can say, because some part always remains unsaid – we must always attempt to say the unsayable.

Clifton D. Healy (Deconstruction: Derrida, Theology, and John of the Cross, 1994) argues that:

Theology is expressed in fallen language. Philosophy can never attain complete knowledge. Therefore when it comes to God-talk, reverence and humility seem the safest attitudes. Theology needs always to be in encounter with the unsaid, even if only to contradict/correct the said. God is necessarily larger than our understanding of him -- and certainly of our ability to speak accurately of him.

In a remarkable study of silence, Ulrich Schmitz (Eloquent silence, 1994) states:

Symbols can take the place of what is missing. There is even something to take the place of missing symbols: silence becomes their sign. For this reason, there is sometimes something violent about speaking in contrast to silence. ("the said must be torn from the unsaid&qu