THE ACOUSTIC SPACE OF WAR: THE HOLISTIC DIMENSION OF SILENCE

Abstract

The article examines the silence of war as a specific phenomenon of acoustic space that cannot be adequately described within the limits of any single discipline. War is traditionally conceptualized in visual and political registers, yet for those who inhabit its space, hearing rather than seeing becomes the primary organ of orientation and survival. Within this acoustic dimension, silence – and not the explosion – emerges as the most challenging phenomenon for philosophical description: it is neither absence of sound, nor pause in communication, nor recuperative quiet of a peaceful landscape, but rather the saturated presence of a threat that has not yet sounded. The paper argues that such silence should be understood holistically – as the implicate (enfolded) order of the belliphonic, in which future sounds are potentially present. The argument proceeds through three steps. First, the phenomenology of embodied listening (Merleau-Ponty, Ihde, Nancy), together with Daughtry’s concept of the belliphonic, is shown to capture the experiential structure of war silence yet to reach its limits when describing the presence of the not-yet-sounded. Second, Bohm’s distinction between implicate and explicate orders, supported by Tsekhmistro’s relational holism and Goodman’s notion of unsound, provides the ontological apparatus required to think this presence as enfolded rather than actual; the contrast between «lens» and «hologram» models of acoustic space clarifies why classical soundscape theory falls short for war acoustics. Third, Bohr’s principle of complementarity, read through Nicolescu’s logic of transdisciplinarity and the included middle, protects the holistic reading from reductionism in both directions: physical and phenomenological descriptions of silence belong to different levels of reality and are complementary rather than competing. The article concludes that the silence of war is at once a physical state, a phenomenon of consciousness, and an ontological structure, and that its adequate description therefore requires a transdisciplinary approach not as eclectic mixing but as a methodological necessity stemming from the nature of the object itself. Concrete examples from the ongoing war in Ukraine – the air-raid siren, the falling silence of a strike drone – illustrate the model and outline directions for further research on the ethics of sound as a weapon.