While Milkman defiantly targets at what initially appears to be sexual harassment, resonating with the #MeToo movement and female consent, it further discloses layers and layers of more subtle mechanisms of sociopolitical (self-)control and surveillance. And this form of political control, mainly exerted by means of surveillance, of oneself and of others, regulates individual and societal behaviour through the discipline of silence. According to Foucault, power is then wielded by society in ways that exceed the apparatus of the state, surfacing, not as the result of punishment, but of control. In these groundbreaking volumes, he introduced the concept of biopower, which he defined as a “technology of power centred on life” that operates at the level of the body and can potentially exert a regulatory control on the people.īiopower thus acts on two spheres: the disciplines on the body, which mould the individual to make him/her fit into society and the control of population. From the Orwellian apparatus devised in the classic 1984, which threatened the population with the warning, “Big Brother is watching you”, to more modern and sophisticated forms of surveillance (or, more precisely, dataveillance and biometrics), privacy concerns, freedom and truth are urgent issues in our contemporary global world dominated by information technology.Ĭoncerns of this kind were raised already in the 1970s by Michel Foucault in his influential works Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality. Put at the service of power, silence can be a potent device to control society, becoming a means for disempowerment as much as a strategy for survival. Yet, its primary function goes beyond being a mere vehicle for expression, as it can turn into an effective tool to regulate the dynamics of dominance and submission. Unquestionably, silence is an indispensable resource for communication human interaction is not possible without it. Listen to silences,” Samuel Beckett once said.

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