quiet as – A new issue of Czas Kultury follows silence from the attention economy to military research, then to feminist utopias and contemporary performance—arguing that the hush many people buy rarely frees them. It often asks them to reset, adapt, and keep producing.
For a lot of people, “hush” doesn’t arrive as a spiritual breakthrough anymore. It comes as a service: an app, noise-canceling earphones, a retreat, a therapy promise. And the moment it works. the market quickly teaches you the next lesson—calm is something you can purchase. download. curate. and measure.
In an issue of Czas Kultury devoted to the socio-political implications of hush. Patryk Lichota writes that silence has always carried multiple meanings—exploratory. protest-like. even tied to higher states of consciousness. But today. serenity is found less in cultural or spiritual practices that consolidate communities than in the logic of free enterprise. Calm, in this telling, has been commodified: distributed digitally and online, curated by algorithms and managed by the wellness industry.
Lichota argues that “quiet is not an alternative to the noise generated by the system. but its sublimated continuation.” Silence. he writes. has lost the social and symbolic potential it once held. Now it functions as “a resource within the attention economy. ” where “the consumer pays for a temporary ‘reset’.” Stillness—traditionally contemplation or resistance—gets absorbed by the logic of productivity.
The late capitalist world. in Lichota’s frame. runs on an internal imperative of individual self-improvement: you learn to function successfully within the structures that stress you out. Mobile apps, ANC earphones, retreats and therapies offering relief and regeneration are presented not as remedies but as symptoms. They don’t question capitalist values; they recycle them into an infrastructure designed to encourage adaptation and manage the effects of stress on productivity. In that landscape. market-regulated forms of silence promote separation. exclusion and class distinction. tightening the relationship between the social order and the acoustic environment.
Burnt out individuals, Lichota writes, then buy techniques of silence to isolate and shield themselves from an excess of stimuli generated by a system that remains unchallenged.
That tension—between the language of healing and the reality of control—runs through the rest of the issue. Katarzyna Szafranowska looks back to the 1950s and 1960s. when CIA-financed investigations into mind control included sensory deprivation. hypnosis and hallucinogenic drugs. Parallel projects financed by the Canadian Defence Research Board initiated work on the potential of auditory and visual deprivation for military and intelligence purposes. including interrogation.
Szafranowska outlines early research into isolation tanks and how human perceptions changed when deprived of sensory stimuli. The noted effects included a slowed awareness of time, calming sensations, and the opening up of new dimensions of experience.
By the 1980s, flotation tanks became commercially available as therapy for stress and fatigue. But critics compared their use to solitary confinement or torture. Szafranowska writes: “Deprivation combined relaxation and cruelty, freedom and coercion, autonomy and subordination.”
Even so, the “escape” promised by flotation therapy remains widespread in spas today. Yet the issue notes the pressure to “rest productively and quickly. ” turning the experience into what is described as an “active enterprise.” That framing links the practice back to the neo-liberal ideal of workers who are effectual. industrious and wholly self-sufficient.
Deprivation chambers may promise relaxation and control over auditory stimuli, but the piece insists the control is illusory. “The control is illusory. just as silence is an illusion broken by sounds inscribed into the body.” Quiet can heighten awareness of breath. digestion. heartbeat—or tinnitus. “Flotation offers an unattainable ideal. a fantasy about happiness. peace and harmony. ” Szafranowska writes. “whereas it is a strategy for survival… a symptom of the way societal issues remain inadequately addressed. further straining the relationship between the human body and its auditory location.”.
The issue then pivots from coercive experiments and wellness marketing to questions of freedom and language—especially what silence can do when it isn’t bought, managed, or optimized.
Magdalena Dziurzyńska considers how speculative feminist fiction written between the 1960s and the 1980s can act as “a laboratory for the political imagination” today. In her account. writing from that period becomes an experimental space in which notions of power. language and communication are radically reformulated. She focuses on two utopian novels where women build communities outside the patriarchal norm. using silence to create alternative communicative landscapes in which awareness. intuition. community and non-domineering forms of expression take precedence.
Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1979) and Diana Rivers’ Journey to Zelindar (1987) depict communities of women that overstep boundaries of language to form egalitarian and integrated groups. living in tune with the natural environment. Dziurzyńska writes that their muteness represents a symbolic discarding of linguistic constraints in favor of authentic and inclusive articulation.
She also acknowledges the danger in that utopian vision: the model of “true” and harmonised womanhood created in the novels has been exploited to justify stifling women’s political agency and diversity. Still, Dziurzyńska argues that the texts propose untried possibilities for exploring feminine autonomy, communality and ecological balance. Late twentieth-century feminist writing. she says. creates space for strategies to resist the revival of patriarchal rhetoric and build new codes and connections in times of climate crisis. identity-based exclusion and growing brutality.
Silence, in this issue, is never one thing. Monika Bakke frames it differently again—insisting that silence isn’t realized by withdrawing from the external world. but by participation in its immanent reality. Maintaining stillness. Bakke suggests. can challenge ingrained thought patterns. pave the way to re-evaluating values. and offer a secular re-articulation of established spiritual practices. Eastern and Western.
In performance art. with an attentive participating audience. stillness can subvert the tendency to grant language disproportionate power in deciding what is real or desirable. Bakke looks at two performance artists—Marina Abramović and Amrit Karki—whose work draws on traditional quietist and meditative techniques.
Abramović’s approach is described in a line from the artist: “an artist has to create space for silence to enter their work.” Her practice of silence. as the issue presents it. forms a bridge between material experience and her art. which explores the exchange of energy between living bodies and inorganic material. In Abramović’s ‘Transitory Objects’ cycle. audiences are encouraged to interact with sculptures made from mineral blocks like amethyst. quartz or copper. entering a direct relationship with the inanimate world.
The work, the issue says, helps reconfigure psychological states, emotions and levels of physical energy. The intent is to dismantle “the binary divide between subject and object, matter and consciousness, animate and inanimate.”
Amrit Karki’s work—‘What You Have Given Me. I Set Free Forever’—is inspired by Abramović’s Method for accessing higher states of consciousness. but it also invokes cleansing rituals in Nepalese Hindu traditions of worship. Those rituals are performed on objects including the four-faced Chaturmukha Linga. Karki’s filmed performance. exhibited at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York (2024). asks the public to pour a stream of water over his head and body.
In the symbolism described here. the water represents washing away impurities and surrender to the divine. part of daily religious practice in Nepal. Even with its sacred imagery. the performance is framed as reaching beyond religious tradition: “While remaining in the sphere of silent. open and inclusive spirituality. it embraces an ordinary. universal desire for renewal… a new beginning in the domains of perception and culture.”.
That’s where the issue lands. not with a single conclusion about silence. but with a clear unease about what “hush” becomes when it travels through institutions. technologies and markets. In one world, quiet is sold as a reset for people pushed to exhaustion. In another, it can be a tool for building communities beyond coercive norms. And onstage, it can be a method for changing perception without relying on words to tell us what is real.
Review by Irena Maryniak
silence hush Czas Kultury Patryk Lichota quiet attention economy wellness industry sensory deprivation CIA Canadian Defence Research Board flotation tanks feminist fiction The Wanderground Journey to Zelindar Marina Abramović Transitory Objects Amrit Karki Rubin Museum of Art 2024 cultural identity
So basically silence is just another app now? Cool.
I read the headline and I’m like wow of course, everything is monetized. If “quiet” is being sold then why am I paying for noise cancelling just to hear my neighbors less? Feels backwards.
Wait so this is about the military using “silence” or whatever? I’m confused. Like are they saying the Army made meditation apps now? Cuz that’s what it sounds like to me and that seems kinda crazy.
This is long and I might be missing it, but it kinda feels like they’re blaming wellness for stress like… people are tired, not buying serenity? I get the point about algorithms, but also therapy and retreats are literally helpful for some folks. “Quiet isn’t a breakthrough anymore” but it’s still quiet, right? Idk I’m just saying not everything that costs money is automatically evil.