The argumentative turn in policy analysis has led to a reassertion of the role of personal meaning and belief in understanding the discourses of policy. However, renewed focus on emotion as a prism for examining multiple and contested meanings in policy formation and design contains a challenge when used as the principle investigative framework in the field. The cultural category of emotion – embodied, non-rational, non-rationalisable, covert, silent in various ways – may be hard to capture, record and analyse in an academic field that values the verbal, linear and argumentative. In order to fully understand what is being communicated and experienced emotionally in public policy it is necessary to account for not just what is being said, but also what is not being said. How to record this and interpret what is a meaningful or meaningless silence? Put differently, is silence necessarily passive or active?
This paper proposes a set of approaches to the different types of silences encountered in the author’s ethnographic study of policy making in Scotland. It will explore these paths to silence by looking beyond what is conventionally recordable/ recorded as discourse and argument, and experiment with ways of “writing in” what is conventionally not present in the representation of argument in policy making. In particular it will draw upon traditions of “witnessing” and embodiment in the non-representational theory of Thrift (2000) and Dewsbury (2003), and traditions of listening in sound art, anthropology and psychotherapeutic settings. Ultimately it makes the case for regarding silences of various kinds, with their cultural affinities to emotion, as a part of the discourse of policy making as much as speech; that for the word, the form and the argument to be intelligible we need to attend to the blank page, the negative space and the non-rational that surrounds it.
