Silence as a Method

 I found this snippet cut out from the newspaper Clarín, from the early 2000s. It contains an error: the author is not Manni, but Nanni. Nanni Moretti is an Italian film director and actor. The quote comes from an interview conducted in March 2002 for the Argentine newspaper Página/12 (in its Radar supplement), in the context of the release of The Son's Room (La stanza del figlio). https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/radar/9-138-2002-03-31.html

Silence as a Method: Why Not Sharing the Plan Might Be the Smartest Strategy

"It’s not a strategy: when I work, I don’t want to talk about my intentions, because they might change along the way."

There is something that sounds almost like an excuse in this statement by Moretti. Leading with a denial—"it’s not a strategy"—functions as a gesture of humility, as if silence were merely a personal preference, a personality trait rather than a method. But one ought to be wary of such modesty. When someone takes the trouble to clarify that something is not a strategy, it is usually because they sense that it actually is, and prefer not to bear the rhetorical weight of claiming it as such. Read with a touch of suspicion, the statement describes the exact opposite of what it says: a deliberate methodological stance whose function is to preserve the tactical and conceptual flexibility of the creative process against two very concrete threats—the trap of premature commitment and the friction of external judgment.
Working in silence, then, is not the absence of a plan. It is the active protection of a plan that has not yet finished deciding what it is.

The Trap of Premature Commitment

The first danger is internal, almost intimate: the moment an intention, barely uttered aloud, begins to behave as though it were already a settled decision. Verbalizing a project—saying "I’m going to do this," "the point of this is that"—has a fixing effect that far exceeds the literal content of the phrase. What is said acquires an inertia of its own. Defending it in public, even if only to oneself, begins to cost more than abandoning it, and that asymmetrical cost—cheap to declare, expensive to recant—is precisely the kind of trap a creative process needs to avoid if it wants to remain a process rather than the execution of a script.

The Friction of External Judgment

The second danger is relational: once an intention circulates, it no longer belongs solely to the one who voiced it. It becomes an object of opinion, of expectation, of comparison with what is ultimately delivered. Every third party who weighs in on an ongoing project introduces a noise variable that the process must absorb or discard, and that additional effort—managing others' expectations about something still being formed—consumes energy that should be reserved for the work itself. Silence, in this sense, is not secrecy: it is bandwidth management.
What is interesting about Moretti's stance is not that he identifies these two risks—any experienced craftsman knows them by instinct—but that he resolves them with the exact same tool: not talking. And that economy of means is, coincidentally, the same logic that appears, formalized with much greater precision, in intellectual traditions that have nothing to do with each other or with art.

Von Foerster: To Talk Is to Prune the Decision Tree

Heinz von Foerster, one of the founding fathers of second-order cybernetics, formulated what he called the Ethical Imperative: Act always as to increase the number of choices. The idea, stripped of its systemic jargon, is strikingly simple: in any system operating under uncertainty, value lies not in the decision made right now, but in the variety of decisions that remain possible afterward. A rigid system that commits prematurely to a single course of action loses its adaptive capacity precisely when it needs it most—when the environment has not yet finished revealing all relevant information.
Here lies the intersection with Moretti: verbalizing an intention is not a neutral act of communication; it is an act of reduction. Every time an ongoing project is translated into a public statement—"this will be about X," "the goal is Y"—the tree of future decisions is pruned in advance. Not because the statement creates any legal obligation, but because it establishes a frame of reference that the work itself, and the author, begin to use (consciously or unconsciously) to evaluate every subsequent step. Keeping intentions in reserve is not indecisiveness: it is an active cybernetic feedback mechanism that preserves the system's maximum variety—in von Foerster's terms, its requisite variety—until the moment execution, rather than discourse, forces resolution.

The Collapse of the Wave Function as a Metaphor of Precision

The second tradition is even further removed from the realm of creation, yet it fits with almost uncomfortable precision. In quantum mechanics, prior to measurement, a particle is not in an undetermined state due to a lack of information: it is genuinely in superposition, occupying multiple possible states simultaneously. Measurement does not reveal a pre-existing state; it produces it. The act of observation collapses the wave function into a single, definite outcome, and that collapse is irreversible.
Applied to creative work, the metaphor is more than decorative analogy. Explaining a project to the press, to a third party, or even to a collaborator too soon acts as a premature measurement: it forces an idea that until then contained multiple superimposed trajectories—multiple possible versions of itself coexisting without needing to resolve—to collapse prematurely into a single verbal interpretation. The grave issue is not that this interpretation is necessarily wrong, but that, once stated, it begins to operate retroactively as though it had been the correct interpretation all along. Quantum collapse cannot be undone; discursively, neither can this: it is remarkably difficult to unsay an intention once it has circulated.

The Same Logic, Three Different Vocabularies

What connects Moretti with von Foerster and quantum physics is not a forced analogy between unrelated disciplines, but the independent discovery of the exact same logical structure in completely different domains: preserving optionality has inherent value, and that value is destroyed—not reduced, destroyed—the moment a system (a particle, an organization, a creative project) is forced to resolve itself before its time. Nassim Taleb would call this, in his own vocabulary, an asymmetry: the cost of closing options prematurely is systematically greater than the benefit of early clarity gained by declaring them. Remaining silent about a project is not, then, a temperamental quirk of elusive artists. It is the application—perhaps intuitive, but no less rigorous—of a principle that cybernetics formalized as ethics and quantum physics formalized as a fundamental property of matter: any system that can afford to remain undetermined should do so for as long as possible.

Understood this way, Moretti’s silence ceases to be a mere anecdote about a particular artist's temperament. It becomes one more instance—modest, almost domestic—of a principle spanning information thermodynamics, cybernetic ethics, and quantum mechanics: reticence is not the absence of a stance; it is the most sophisticated way to sustain one.

AI provided the words; I provided the criteria.