Masses stay silent because speech is taken away, not because of emptiness

Evidence

I would say quite the opposite. The silent majorities do think; if they do not speak, it may be because we have taken their speech away from them, deprived them of the means of enunciation, not because they have nothing to say. I would argue that, in spite of the fact that the popular masses have never been able to become in any complete sense the subject-authors of the cultural practices in the twentieth century, their continuing presence, as a kind of passive historical-cultural force, has constantly interrupted, limited, and disrupted everything else. It is as if the masses have kept a secret to themselves while the intellectuals keep running around in circles trying to make out what it is, what is going on. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 732

Categorization

• QUESTION: This reverses the postmodernist ‘silent majority’ trope — worth chasing how Hall’s enunciation-deprivation framing connects to articulation theory in his own work.
• XREF: Connects directly to Gramsci’s hegemony and to the Frankfurt School debates over passive mass culture described elsewhere in the reader’s library. — connects to: Silent majorities think but have been deprived of the means of speaking; Free expression is meaningless without the social power to be heard — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 355; Masses’ silence functions as counterstrategy against power — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 288 (+1 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 732