Rhetorical Silence, Part 1: The Pledge of Allegiance

Part way through high school, I stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance during the morning announcements. I chose silence. I didn’t explain this choice to anyone. No one asked about why I stopped saying the Pledge and I doubt anyone even noticed. I did not initiate any conversations about why I stopped. Still, the silence was intentional and had a communicative purpose.

In Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, author Cheryl Glenn examines silence as a rhetorical move with as much potential nuance and complexity as speech. Silence is not the absence of discourse; rather, silence is part of discourse. She stated, “Rhetorical power is not limited to words alone, and for this reason the study of silence has much to offer the powerful and disempowered alike. J.L Austin’s theory of speech acts (from How to Do Things with Words) taken in combination with Glenn’s theory of silence as rhetorically productive lends to some interesting theorizing about silences that replace communal or ritual speech acts.

Austin writes that a speech act occurs when “the uttering of the sentences is, or is part of, the doing of the action, which again would not normally be described as just saying something” (682). In saying the Pledge, a person isn’t reporting on patriotism or country allegiance, he or she is engaging in it. While whether this applies well to every saying the Pledge of Allegiance is somewhat debatable – is the five year old who isn’t aware of what the Pledge means also engaging in patriotism? – looking at the reciting of these words as a speech act leads to questioning what sort of act occurs when a person doesn’t say the Pledge. I would argue that in this case, staying silent is similar to making a speech act.

My form of silence, the refusal to perform a certain speech-act and to instead substitute silence, was a quiet way of taking power, a way of stating, without words, “I do not wish to make that particular speech act.” I did not have to state why I disagreed with the Pledge. I did not replace the Pledge with a speech act that fit my beliefs. The inverse of a speech act – what we might call a silence act – simply communicated that I did not take the action of the speech act. To clarify, a ‘silence act’ does not mean that I do a task (say, wash the dishes) without speaking. Rather, I mean that a ‘silence act’ is an intended use of silence in place of a speech act.

This idea of a ‘silence act,’ or a speech act without words is intriguing, especially when considered while studying a religious group. Prayer can certainly be a speech act. In the case of spoken prayer, the act of speaking the words is prayer. Communal forms of worship contain speech acts or may be speech act in and of themselves. But, praying silently and staying silent during part of corporal worship contain as much possibility of rhetorical action as does praying out loud. Examining certain silences as “acts” lends a new understanding of the possible agencies the silence reflects in a discourse situation. (Watch for a further blog post to unpack this…)

Austin, J.L. “From How to Do Things with Words.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2007. 679-690.

Glenn, Cheryl. Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP. 2004.