“True silence is the rest of the mind.” — Max Picard

In a world increasingly saturated with language, content, and noise, the question is no longer how to speak, but how to remain silent without disappearing. Silence, when understood not as absence but as presence, might offer one of the most radical editorial gestures of our time.

Publishing, conventionally understood, is an act of amplification — a means of giving voice, of making public. But what if we began to imagine publishing not only as dissemination, but also as withholding? What if to publish was not to add, but to attune?

In the emergent discourse around Publishing Futures — especially within the lenses of transition design, pluriversal editorial practices, and ecologies of care — silence becomes a crucial medium. It is not the negation of editorial work, but its deepest listening.

Silence is not empty

John Cage, in his seminal 1951 experience inside an anechoic chamber, discovered that true silence is impossible: he could still hear the sound of his heartbeat and his nervous system. This led to his assertion that “There is no such thing as silence” (Cage, 1961). But rather than dismissing silence, Cage reframes it as a space of heightened awareness — of listening without control.

In this sense, to cultivate silence in publishing is not to remove content, but to invite other forms of presence. It is to leave space for what cannot be said — the interstitial, the poetic, the contemplative.

This recalls Roland Barthes’ notion of the neutral: a zone of suspension, where language hesitates. In Camera Lucida, he writes not about photography per se, but about what escapes representation — that which resists articulation. For Barthes, silence is not dumbness, but resonance.

Similarly, Édouard Glissant’s call for the “right to opacity” (Poetics of Relation, 1990) deepens this ethical understanding: opacity is not a lack of communication, but a protection of alterity. In the editorial realm, choosing opacity — refusing complete exposure — can be an act of solidarity with the unspeakable, the incommensurable, the vulnerable.

Editorial care as restraint

Ivan Illich’s critique of institutionalization in Shadow Work offers a potent framework for thinking about editorial excess. Just as the professionalization of care distances us from each other, the commodification of language distances us from silence.

To publish less — or to publish differently — becomes an act of editorial care. A book that offers space rather than clutter, that invites stillness rather than stimulation, is a book that trusts its reader.

Publishing silence is also an act of temporal care: of not overwhelming already saturated fields of attention. Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), writes of the tactics of the everyday as minor resistances to dominant systems. A silent editorial gesture can be understood as one such tactic: minor, discreet, yet potent.

In the context of the pluriverse (Escobar, 2018), where multiple ways of knowing and sensing coexist, silence becomes a vital editorial gesture. It allows the unsaid to coexist with the said. It makes room for those who speak in other tempos, textures, and traditions.

Publishing as Concealment: Rossellini’s Slow Publishing

Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) offers a radical alternative to the dominant editorial logic of narration, explanation, and visibility. The film, structured as a series of loosely connected vignettes, dwells not on grand historical moments but on the quiet, almost invisible gestures of everyday sanctity.
There is no climax, no plot-driven necessity — only the slow, porous unfolding of life. This cinematic quietness is not emptiness; it is a mode of presence without domination.

Rossellini’s editing choices — long takes, unhurried framings, non-professional actors — create a rhythm of accompaniment rather than appropriation. He does not instrumentalize the world into narrative; he shares space with it.
This practice can be seen as a form of editorial concealment: choosing not to frame events for maximum impact, choosing not to clarify every action, choosing not to dramatize existence for consumption.

In editorial terms, Rossellini’s ethic invites us to publish in a way that withholds, to create works that trust the reader to dwell within opacity, ambiguity, and mystery.

António Guerreiro, in his essay “O mundo é um filme” (Público, 2017), deepens this reading: Guerreiro suggests that the world has become a film not because it is merely captured, but because it has been structurally reconfigured into an imagetic continuum — a stream of fragmented, instantaneous, spectacular perceptions.

This transformation affects our very relationship with time, with experience, and with attention: we live less and less within the temporality of waiting and duration, and more and more within the logic of the immediate visible event.

Rossellini, by contrast, resists this spectacularization of experience. His film is a gesture of deceleration, a return of the world to its opacity and visible insignificance.
The kind of attention Rossellini proposes is an attention without capture, an attention without projection of meaning.

To publish today in the spirit of Rossellini is to create editorials that reject the excess of visibility and, as Guerreiro suggests, return to the reader the experience of the opaque presence of the world — a world that does not exhaust itself in the images that represent it.

This reading of Rossellini, through Guerreiro, prepares the ground for thinking the necessity of editorial practices that resist contemporary forms of systematic attention production and distraction.

The Quiet Book as Editorial Practice

What might a book look like if it followed the logic of Rossellini’s film, of Cage’s music, of Picard’s silence?

It would not seek to inform, but to transform.
It would prioritise rhythm over quantity.
It would invite slowness, humility, repetition.

Sara Maitland (2008) writes of silence as a form of resistance — a “refusal of the speed and noise of modern life.” In the same way, a quiet book resists the pressure to perform.

Craig Mod’s concept of the quiet book — beautifully expanded in his essay The Future Book is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected (2019) — echoes this idea. Mod envisions books not as information containers, but as zones of experiencerequiring slow and careful attention. Publishing quiet books means designing for encounter, not just for transmission.

A quiet book becomes a companion, not a container. It preserves opacity and invites attentive, relational forms of reading.

This ethic of quiet publishing finds a profound resonance in Joseph Beuys’s installation Plight (1985).
In this experiential work, Beuys covered the walls and floor of the gallery space entirely with thick rolls of felt — his signature material, dense with symbolic meaning. Felt, for Beuys, was not just a medium but a carrier of myth: during the Second World War, after crashing as an aviator in Crimea, Beuys claimed to have been rescued by nomadic Tatars who wrapped his injured body in layers of felt and fat to preserve his life.

In Plight, this material mythology becomes an environment. Visitors enter a closed, almost hermetically sealed space where felt absorbs sound and warmth alike. A closed grand piano, a blackboard marked with an empty musical staff, and a silent thermometer are the only symbolic instruments present — alluding to music, learning, and measurement, but emptied of active function.

In this space, all the senses are called upon: the muffled acoustics, the heavy scent of felt, the subdued lighting, the constriction of the body in relation to the soft mass of the material.
The environment simultaneously suggests warmth and protection, and isolation and muteness.
Silence here is not absence, but an atmospheric density — a tangible presence that shapes perception and movement.

Plight enacts an editorial logic of withdrawal and insulation.
It invites us into a world where meaning is not transmitted through articulation, but through presence; where communication does not happen through information, but through affective, tactile, and temporal immersion.

To publish like Plight would mean creating editorial spaces that, rather than broadcasting meaning, cultivate environments where meaning can be felt, dwelled in, and slowly unfolded without urgency.

Beuys shows that silence, when curated with care, can become a total sensorium — a place where the visitor-reader becomes not a passive consumer of content, but a participant in a shared condition of vulnerability, insulation, and attention.

A quiet editorial practice, then, aspires to the condition of Plight:

• not to explain,
• not to perform,
• but to hold, to shelter, to resonate.

The strategic opacity: Édouard Glissant and publishing the unknowable

Édouard Glissant’s demand for the right to opacity offers a vital philosophical grounding for editorial silence. Opacity is not a failure of communication, but the very condition for an ethical encounter between differences.

Publishing silence, then, is not an act of negation but of affirmation:

• Affirming the dignity of what remains unsaid.
• Affirming the relational without demanding transparency.
• Affirming presence without performance.

Achille Mbembe’s reflections on invisibility and necropolitics further frame editorial opacity as a mode of safeguarding life from systems of commodification.

Opacity becomes the terrain on which an ethical, future-facing publishing practice can grow.

Futures of Publishing as Futures of Attention

The future of publishing is not about scale.
It is about sensing.

It is about creating conditions where words — and silences — matter again, not because they are amplified, but because they are held, cared for, and allowed to resonate beyond immediacy.

David Abram reminds us that the world is already speaking — in rustle, shadow, and gesture.
A publishing practice rooted in silence would listen first. It would tune itself to these ambient expressions. It would be less concerned with occupying space and more concerned with opening space.

In this sense, publishing becomes less a project of transmission, and more an ecology of relation.
Following Anna Tsing’s idea of the arts of noticing (The Mushroom at the End of the World, 2015), future editorial practices would cultivate attentiveness to the marginal, the overlooked, the ephemeral.
Publishing becomes an act of paying attention to what resists attention — to the slow, the modest, the partially hidden.

Tim Ingold, in his anthropology of perception, proposes that knowing the world is not a matter of representing it but of corresponding with it — moving alongside it, responding to its rhythms rather than capturing it. Publishing, in this light, would not seek to fix meaning but to correspond with meanings as they emerge, unfold, and transform.

This redefinition of publishing is also an ethical reorientation.
It refuses the instrumentalization of language as mere information transfer.
It embraces Jane Bennett’s call for a vibrant materialism — an acknowledgment that words, like all matter, have a life beyond human use, a vibrancy that exceeds function.

In practical terms, the futures of publishing would imply:

• Designing texts that invite pauses, hesitations, and detours rather than seamless consumption;
• Creating editorial forms that value opacity and ambiguity as invitations to linger, rather than obstacles to comprehension;
• Curating experiences that foster care for the unsaid as much as for the said.

Such futures will not be driven by metrics of reach or speed.
They will be guided by new metrics: depth of attention, relational thickness, ecological resonance.

The publishing studio of the future might look less like a production line and more like a garden — a space of tending, listening, and slow emergence.
To publish like a friar walks: slowly, barefoot, attentive.

Not to speak louder.
But to speak less.
And in doing so, to allow more to be heard — to allow more to be.

Publishing Against the Economy of Attention

Contemporary publishing unfolds within a saturated field shaped by the extractive logics of the attention economy.
Jonathan Crary (2013) shows how late capitalism seeks to colonize even sleep, while Yves Citton (2017) urges us to defend attention as a fragile ecological good. Publishing silence becomes an act of preserving attentional environments — resisting architectures of distraction.

António Guerreiro, both in his article “O mundo é um filme” (2017) and in other essays, warns that we are not merely losing attention, but that the very structure of what is perceptible and experienceable has been redesigned to maximize visibility and empty presence.
The attention economy does not merely distract: it fabricates modes of being and seeing.

An editorial practice that cultivates silence, opacity, and slowness resists this industrialized transformation of experience.
It proposes another way of inhabiting the visible: a way that recognizes the value of what does not immediately surrender itself to vision, of what requires time, of what remains irreducible to the rapid circulation of images.

To publish silence today is not only to cultivate another aesthetic, but another ethic of attention — an ethic that protects experience against visual exhaustion and contemporary hyperexposure.

Epilogue: Toward a Quiet Imagination

Silence is not the end of publishing.
It is its deepening.

To publish without shouting. To share without explaining. To reveal without exposing. These are the gestures of a publishing practice attuned not to the market of attention, but to the ecology of relation.

In a time when information flows without pause, to make a pause is itself a kind of editorial act.
In a time when visibility is coerced, to remain opaque is an act of resistance.
In a time when every word is monetized, to cultivate quiet is to reclaim the dignity of meaning.

Publishing silence is not a withdrawal from the world, but a way of being in it otherwise: slowly, vulnerably, attentively.

Perhaps the future of publishing is not only a future of books, images, or data.
Perhaps it is a future of attentions — small, stubborn, luminous.

A future where silence is not absence.
Where opacity is not a failure.
Where to withhold is to care.

A future, above all, where to publish is to listen.

References

Abram, D. (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Vintage.

Barthes, R. (1980). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Hill and Wang.

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.

Blanchot, M. (1980). The Writing of the Disaster. University of Nebraska Press.

Cage, J. (1961). Silence: Lectures and Writings. Wesleyan University Press.

Citton, Y. (2017). The Ecology of Attention. Polity Press.

Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso.

Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press.

Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press.

Guerreiro, A. (2016). O Demónio das Imagens. Documenta.

Guerreiro, A. (2017, January 1). O mundo é um filme. Público. https://www.publico.pt/2017/01/01/culturaipsilon/opiniao/o-mundo-e-um-filme-1755946

Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press.

Illich, I. (1981). Shadow Work. Marion Boyars.

Ingold, T. (2011). Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge.

Maitland, S. (2008). A Book of Silence. Granta.

Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.

Mod, C. (2019). The Future Book is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected. Retrieved from https://craigmod.com/

Picard, M. (1948). The World of Silence. Regnery.

Rossellini, R. (Director). (1950). The Flowers of St. Francis [Film]. Produzioni San Nazzaro.

Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.