FREE SPEECH: OR, WHY EVERYONE SHOULD SHUT UP. posted by Richard Seymour

Stanley Fish tells us that there's no such thing as free speech, "and its a good thing too". All freedoms are, of course, in some sense relative. We relish our autonomy, but only insofar as this respects the autonomy of others. We leftists want the worker to be free from exploitation, which is obviously incommensurable with the capitalist freedom to exploit. We want women to be free to walk the streets at night which, even more obviously, is incompatible with the freedom to rape, rob or murder. And so it is, perhaps, that we have reached the stage where incitement to racial hatred is regarded as a crime under bourgeois law. The freedom of black people to live their lives without being harrassed and abused and their right to be free from fear and intimidation is of course impossible to square with the right of racists and fascists to bully and intimidate them.

So, freedoms are relative. But aside from being relative, they also have their determinacy. At some point, we prioritise the rights of one group over another. The right to live is more important than the right to murder - so much so that killing is the single most prevalent taboo in all human societies. Circumfluent issues such as abortion and the right to die obviously constitute some pretty horrendous grey areas, particularly for those who are obsessed with "the beginning of life and the very end of life" as the fictitious child of Sidney Poitier in Six Degrees of Seperation has it. He continues: "What about the eighty years we have to live between those two inexorable bookends?" Nevertheless, a sense of which freedoms to prioritise is easily intuited by most, presumably based on an understanding of our nature as aliens on this planet, the only creatures on it who are not only interactive, but also interdependent, not only changed by the world, but enforcing change on it.

The consequences of such a priori reasoning are as follows: 1) Freedom of speech is relative, not an absolute, 2) When two freedoms appear to conflict, it is not always possible to reconcile them. 3) The standard prescriptions from postmodern liberals on freedom of speech are therefore inadequate for the purpose of making the necessary distinction to prioritise one freedom over another.

The typical postmodern gesture is to say 'look, noone really knows what is going on, human beings are too fragile, our perceptions too fragmentary and our lives too short for anyone to say their view is decisively the best. The fundamental ability of the human being is to suffer, our fundamental right is to narrate that suffering. Therefore, must we not devise a neutral framework in which we you can tell your story, I can tell mine, the Jew and Nazi can tell theirs. . . ?" All narratives are equal under this view. And it is only a short step from this logic to the one which Slavoj Zizek narrates in his reaction to 9/11, "Welcome to the Desert of the Real!". He tells of a song sung in the popular animated series "Land Before Time" , a show in which all the little dinosaurs are bullied by the big dinosaurs and they sing songs about it "narrating their suffering". Among various excerpts from the songs, he includes (and I paraphrase from a hungover memory):

"It takes all sorts to make this world of ours,
Short sorts, tall sorts
Big sorts, small sorts
All sorts to fill this pretty world of ours with laughter" etc.

Other songs feature small dinosaurs saying of the big dinosaurs "they stamp around and make a noise, and make a bigger fuss, but deep inside each one of them, I think they are kids like us".

The significance of the latter quote is obviated by a consideration of the former. As Zizek says, "why stop at these differences? Why not oppressors and oppressed, rich and poor, torturer and victim etc etc." Our attitude to difference is often contiguous with our attitude to our rulers. Apologists, and postmodernists (if that is a distinction with any meaning) conflate horizontal differences with vertical differences. Not everyone's narrative has equal validity. The narrative of the torturer is not valid in the same way that the narrative of the victim is. (There are, of course, other forms of validity. The imprecations of a witch doctor, are not as scientifically valid as the results of your laboratory experiment with peptic acids and glycogen; comminutions are of a different order to comminations. But this has no obvious effect on our attitude to free speech).

If all of what I have said so far is obvious to you, I apologise. Call it my freedom to narrate. I've suffered for my hangover, now its your turn.

If it is obvious enough that some freedoms of speech could in principle be suspended for the sake of another's well-being, it isn't quite so clear where to draw the aclinic line. One might agree with the ACLU that it is permissible for someone to write revisionist accounts of the Nazi holocaust, but disagree with their defense of far right marches through black or Jewish areas. And this, perhaps, indicates some of the difficulty. Political speech is by its very nature conative. It is a call to action, or it is nothing. It says something about the world, and either calls for its defense or its overthrow, or its fundamental reform. To write a revisionist account of the Nazi holocaust might seem harmless enough, if disreputable and revolting. But I claim there is a limit to this logic. Would we, for instance, think it permissible for a television show to be openly racist in this day and age? We have not come so very far from the Seventies, where comedies depicted white people reacting with fear and loathing to the presence of a black person. The black and white minstrel show isn't so far back in our history. And Jim Davidson still gets stand-up jobs for the BBC even though he isn't really funny and can't do most of his obscene racist material because it would put the BBC in breach of the law. So, the question is by no means an academic one. Could we countenance an openly racist television show? Most of us find it contemptible enough that Hollywood produces torrents of subtly poisoned garbage for us to digest. Should the BBC transmit live broadcasts from Abu Hamza to counter-balance Songs on Sunday?

The answers to these questions will be framed by context, of course. Nevertheless, it seems obvious to me from the preceeding that most of us under certain limited circumstances would be willing to perform certain abscissions on the body politic and curtail free speech. I would emphasise that this is not an argument for prohibitory laws or legally enforced censorship. In class societies, censorship laws (such as privacy laws for the media) are almost always used to advantage of the powerful, to protect them and provide the means to bludgeon their critics. Even a ban on far right groups whose organising principle is one of violence inflicted upon their opponents, while in my view entirely defensible, would be inadequate. For one thing because such groups would find their abreactively nurturing space in the criminal underground, but also because states which are enabled to proscribe certain organisations usually do so to the detriment of those resisting oppression - for example, why are the PKK banned in this country, but the National Front are not? Therefore, if we agree that some speech is not free, we should not count on the state to determine the cost. Organised resistance is the only democratic way to irrupt the speciously pristine philosophy of a soap-box for all. Those who pelt the Miss World organisers with eggs are a perfect example of such resistance. Those who wave yellow lollipop sticks outside Oldham town hall when the BNP pretend to represent the white working class are another.

For those of you eager to begin this populist censorship, I have one immediate and urgent project. We must get that bloody fool Blunkett off the air and prevent him from squeezing out any more nuggets on the matter of asylum seekers. If a New Labour minister lies to the public about asylum seekers shitting on shop doorways or acquiesces in the terror of 'bogus migrants', then I say its Fatwa time! Picket their press conferences, pelt them with fridge freezers, push squidgy things through their letter-boxes. Your freedom depends upon it.