The alternative is to refuse to comment on the 1AC. Voting for the 1AC subjects their speech act to unitary discourses of power—only silence can preserve your freedom as an ethical actor.

The paradoxical capacity of silence to engage opposites with regard to power— both to shelter power and to serve as a barrier against power— is rarely accented in Foucault’s thinking as a consequence of his emphasis (elsewhere) on discourse as a vehicle of power. In casting silence as a potential refuge from power, I do not think he is reneging on this emphasis or suggesting a prediscursive existence to things. Critical here is the difference between what Foucault calls unitary discourses, which regulate and colonize, and those that do not perform these functions with the same social pervasiveness, even while they do not escape the tendency of all discourse to establish norms by which it regulates and excludes. Through this distinction one can make sense of Foucault’s otherwise inexplicable reference to sex in the eighteenth century as being “driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence,” or his troubling example of the village simpleton whose “inconsequential” sexual game with a little girl was suddenly subjected to medical, judicial, and popular scrutiny and condemnation. 9 Neither in these cases nor in others where Foucault seems to imply a “freer,” because prediscursive, existence to certain practices does he appear to mean that they really occurred “outside” discourse; the point is rather that they had not yet been brought into the pervasive disciplinary or biopolitical discourses of the age— science, psychiatry, medicine, law, pedagogy. 10 Silence, as Foucault affirms it, is then identical neither with secrecy nor with not speaking. It instead signifies a particular relation to regulatory discourses, as well as a possible niche for the practice of freedom within those discourses.

Put differently, if discourses posit and organize silences, then silences themselves must be understood as discursively produced, as part of discourse, rather than as its opposite. Hence silences are no more free of organization by power than speech is, nor are they any more inventable or protectable by us than speech is. Yet, and paradoxically, silence— even that produced within discourse— may also function as that which discourse has not penetrated, as a scene of practices that escape the regulatory functions of discourse. It is this latter function that renders silence itself a source of protection and potentially even a source of power. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution may be understood as mobilizing precisely this power against discourse, even as the amendment itself functions discursively and leads a distinctly discursive life.

If, as Foucault insists, freedom is a practice (rather than an achievement, condition, or institution), then the possibility of practicing freedom in the context of regulatory discourses occurs in the interstices of a given discourse as well as in resistance to the discourse. 11 In other words, the possibility can occur either within or against the discourse but is produced by the discourse in either case. Silence can function as speech in both kinds of practices of freedom, as becomes clear in the following anecdote offered by Foucault:

Maybe another feature of [my] appreciation of silence is related to the obligation of speaking. I lived as a child in a petit bourgeois, provincial milieu in France and the obligation of speaking, of making conversation with visitors, was for me something both very strange and very boring. I often wondered why people had to speak. 12

In a lecture at the Swedish Academy on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison also resets the conventional antinomy between silence and speech. Dwelling on the ambiguity of the power of language, she argues that certain kinds of language are themselves silencing, capable of violence and even murder, as well as themselves “susceptible to death, erasure”:

A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than to maintain the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect, for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheried to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor, polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago.

While Morrison is here concerned primarily with bureaucratic and other official languages, any language of regulation, including those originally designed on behalf of emancipation, has the potential to become official in the sense she describes. Indeed, language that cannot form or tolerate new ideas, language that cannot tell another story or fill baffling silences, language that functions as a suit of armor— such language would seem to characterize a number of progressive political discourses that have retreated from emancipatory aims and consolidated into institutional ones. Consider how both the discourses of liberalism and of Marxism came to function in this fashion, notwithstanding their original liberatory promise. Consider as well how often the language of political identity is today experienced as a policing language, even and especially by those whom the language intended to figure for emancipation. “A husk from which the knight departed long ago...”

Silence can be an effect of discourse; it can also function as resistance to regulatory discourse. And just as silenced discourses may contain elements of freedom, places unnoticed and hence unregulated by powerful interests, so their disinterring, even by the well-intentioned genealogist, can signal the end of their existence as a preserve for freedom. The latter is the subject of an extended meditation by Foucault about the problem of excavating subjugated knowledges:

is it not perhaps the case that these fragments of genealogies are no sooner brought to light, that the particular elements of the knowledge that one seeks to disinter are no sooner accredited and put into circulation, than they run the risk of re-codification, recolonisation? In fact, those unitary discourses, which first disqualified and then ignored them when they made their appearance, are, it seems, quite ready now to annex them, to take them back within the fold of their own discourse and to invest them with everything this implies in terms of their effects of knowledge and power.14