After briefly dwelling on the relationship between art and nothing(ness), the essay interprets John Cage's so-called silent piece, his much-commented 4'33'', in the context of today's semiotic overproduction. It posits a twofold way of listening to the piece, insofar as silence may be conceived either as the (impossible) aim to be reached by listening, or as a means to interrupt the continuous blabbering of things. Underlying these two possibilities there are different dispositions of means and ends, namely a concentrated search for something and an aggressive passivity. These two postures are related in the text to the current state of capitalism, characterized as it is by a commodified overproduction of signs.
Silence; Nothing(ness); Semiotic Overproduction; Capitalism