Nothing better illustrates these different attitudes to the word than when modern readers encounter the biblical narrative of Isaac and his two sons, Jacob and Esau. It was powerful and effected irreversible change. Before the introduction of writing, the word was not a thing but an event. When you think of a word as a set of letters, you’re thinking of the word as an inert, lifeless thing. Now ask yourself what would be the answer to that question in the era before writing was invented? Clearly not a set of symbols. When you think of a word, what do you think of? I’d be willing to bet that if you were asked to think of the word “cat,” for example, you would almost certainly think of the three letters C-A-T (or whatever the equivalent might be in your native tongue). What is a word? This is not a trick question or a sophomoric dorm room provocation. In other words, even the plausibility of the claim that you should challenge the ideas and not the person, for example, is sustained by the conditions of print. But, experientially, it is one thing to encounter this content in written form at a temporal and spatial remove from the author, whose very significance becomes dubious, and it is another to encounter these words directly and immediately from the mouth of the speaker, whose personal significance is unavoidable. ![]() It is absolutely true that you can find all manner of vitriolic and combative speech in print, as is evidenced, for example, in the political pamphleteering of the early republic. The difference has less to do with the content of the printed word than with its phenomenology, or how we experience it. ![]() It tames the word in a very specific sense: by removing it from the potentially volatile and emotionally laden context of the face-to-face encounter. In short, writing, and especially print, renders the word seemingly inert and thing-like. Our previously regnant ideals regarding freedom of speech arose in the context of print culture and they are now, for better and for worse, floundering in the context of digital media. It is in this difference that we find the root of our present re-litigation of the nature and value of free speech. And, more to the point for our purposes, print produces an experience of speech distinct from the experience of speech generated by digital media. Speech grounded in the face-to-face encounter is one thing. These two distinct but related developments together generate the conditions driving our seemingly intractable and increasingly acrimonious free speech skirmishes.īy speaking of the re-animated word, I’m thinking in terms of media ecology and the basic premise is that we experience speech differently depending on the medium that bears it. I’ll start the process by distinguishing the two key theoretical components: the re-animated word, on the one hand, and digital re-enchantment on the other. That’s a pretty jargon-heavy claim, so it obviously needs to be unpacked. My overarching thesis regarding free speech crisis discourse, including debates about “cancel culture,” can be put this way: this is what you get when the word is re-animated under the conditions of digital re-enchantment. Rather, I aim to understand the deeper material conditions that generate the context for the debate. In fact, if I’m right, the debate can’t properly be settled at all. Much less do I aim to settle the debate one way or the other. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that I can explain the causes of the debate, they are many and complex. Instead, I’m going to take a path that has been less frequently trod by examining a handful of underlying dynamics driving the controversy. Because this debate is framed by the conditions of the Database -the superabundant, practically infinite assemblage of data in our externalized collective memory, otherwise known as the internet-it is nearly impossible to navigate through every continuously unfolding aspect of even a seemingly narrow and contained instance like the Harper’s letter. When the technological infrastructure sustaining public speech is radically altered, so too is the experience and meaning of speech. It seems that more recent clashes have less to do with specific applications of the principle than with the relative merits of the principle itself. This may be a matter of frequency and intensity, but I suspect that the nature of the debate has shifted substantively as well. While debates about free speech are as old as the idea of free speech, a case could be made that they have taken on a different character in recent years. ![]() We are presently in the midst of another wave of free speech/cancellation discourse, this one prompted by an open letter published in Harper’s warning against a rising tide of illiberal constraints on free expression.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |