Free speech, and It,s. shrinking limits

Free Speech, and its Shrinking Limits. Thomas Docherty Last Night. by cobrunstrom Last night, I was privileged, excited, frightened and a lot of other things to hear Professor Thomas Docherty give a talk at our gaff.  Thomas Docherty is a cause celebre for academic freedom having been notoriously suspended from work at Warwick University for "inappropriate sighing".  He's also, of course, an eminent scholar who has managed, among many other things, to wrote two books about the accelerating battle to defend and destroy the idea of the university as any kind of cherisher of the creative life of the mind and/or bastion of free speech. His talk last night was called "On Free Speech and Academic Freedom: Responsibilities and Complicities" He was charming, gracious, and light on his feet.  Not tied too closely to any script, he demonstrated an intellectual need to live in the moment and engage real people in a real place. Professor Docherty opened last night by describing how the attack on free speech in universities has become brazen as well as subtle and electronic possibilities of surveillance have eroded the conditions of "privacy" required for free assembly.  He then outlined Stanley Fish's notorious schema of "5 Schools of Academic Freedom", before dissenting quite loudly and inevitably from Fish's narrow preference. Thomas Docherty proposed that that freedom is always about some version of authority, or a relation to authority.  In a useful formulation he asked the question - is it the function of the university of the university to be "Responsible" or "Pro-Active"?  If a university is "responsible" to something external or pre-existing, then freedom is compromised.  If a university if "pro-active" then it has the freedom to express itself in a way that might impact on something larger than itself. Freedom of expression can only be defined as the ability to speak "against" some authority.  Fish's narrow disciplinary definition of academic freedom presupposes that he (and others) already know what the limits of his discipline are.  Yet so-called "literature"  constantly invites extra-literary questions.  The question of what is and is not "academic" also defies any simple categorisation. Reflecting on his own suspension for "sighing" during a meeting, Thomas Docherty recalled Hannah Arendt on "Bureaucracy" which she defines as "rule of nobody" and thus the cruelest form of rulership.  Agency is dissipated to the point where nobody in governance is really responsible for anything while others are accountable for every little thing they do and say. This bureaucratisation of universities is a slow business.  Time was, universities founded their authority on sacred/canonical texts such as the Bible and Aristotle.  With the collapse of theocracy, dialogue became possible, of a kind that is only possible when certain forms of authority can no longer be appealed to to shut down an argument. Thomas Docherty wandered from topic to topic quite a bit, a decision (or lack of decision) that actually seemed to reflect a wish to ventilate his talk, to offer spaces for people to plot their own subsequent interventions. Eisenhower's 'military industrial complex' and Clausewitz and psychological warfare were referenced, before launching into a discussion of "managerialism" and the ideological conviction that anything and everything can be "managed" - a process that culminates in "self-management", where one is encouraged to police one's very thoughts in the name of some orthodox entrepreneurial project. Unsurprisingly, we heard a lot of Orwell.  More imaginatively, we heard much from Othello about "free speech".  The jargon of the neoliberal university was duly interrogated.  "Smooth operation" is managerialese for "univocality".  "Civility" or the demand for "civility" can actually be translated as "obsequious courtship of power".  Every time someone says "I demand free speech BUT...." that "but" is invariably a qualification that destroys the entire basis of any free speech entitlement.  Real free speech is obligated to create doubt and sponsor democratic dialogue. Are their justifiable limits to free speech?  Thomas Docherty proposed "lying" as a test case.  I am not free to "lie" as a form of free speech, because lying destroys the basis of further conversational exchange. Some of the best stuff in the talk involved the concept of privacy.   Social networking of course problematises the very concept of a "private life".  Bentham's panopticon was invoked, illustrating how the subject is atomised without privacy.  Within any form of university discipline or suspension, isolation becomes a key concept - with "no contact with students or colleagues" being a key aspect of the disciplinary procedure. As the speech rolled towards a conclusion, the references accelerated... Erving Goffman (a favourite of mine) was cited in terms of "backstage language" - the need for irregular unpoliced language to build bonds of sociality.  Of course, this opens a big can of worms labelled "Casually Phobic Language".  Aren't we obligated to police our own speech out of respect for others?  When does care and consideration stop being respectful civility and become symptomatic of a larger Foucauldian nightmare? Interestingly, Thomas Docherty remarked on the similarity between displays of hyper-catholicity at processions at the shrine in Knock and the kind of ultra-Marxist jostling he experienced as everyone struggled to reinforce their place on a secure extreme edge of the spectrum.  Lefties, he recalled, have their own version of self-surveillance in the name of orthodoxy. Talking of surveillance, he began his peroration by citing Wolfgang Sofsky's formulation that "the past suffocates the present in a surveillance society".  A society burdened by the recording and replaying of all past exchanges is unable to live in the moment.  Predictably, we heard Milton, quoting Euripides in Areopagitica.  Less predictably, we concluded with Othello and Iago's "I will say nothing" presented as an example of Managerial refusal to offer accounts or explanation.  It is Emilia who represents the voice of heroic expression in the play, the one who is determined to tell the truth no matter what the cost. The talk concluded with plenty of time for questions and discussion, fittingly for a speech that attacked univocality.  Professor Docherty fielded questions and prompted conversations of a wide-ranging nature. We considered the implications of university "branding", with its etymological echoes of searing hot metal burning into flesh (bovine or human) to proclaim irreversible ownership.  There's the paradox that the more a university talks about its "unique and distinct brand" as a selling point in the "global market place" - the more it clamps down on internal distinctiveness and uniqueness.  "Uniqueness" implies "univocality" in branding terms because erasure of difference is central to the kind of instant recognisability that branded identity implies. Indeed "univocality" has been even further enforced by a recent directive recorded at the University of Warwick which has suggested that a distinctive "Warwick tone of voice" should be cultivated by all academics employed there. Thomas Docherty also noted that he now regrets the extent of his earlier investment in critical theory.  It's always seemed to me that the difference between old fashioned canonicity and new fashioned critical theory is that the crusty old tweedies told you what to read but not how to read it whereas the new-fangled critical theorists didn't tell you what to read but how to read it.  The problem is, remarked Professor Docherty, that much of this "how to read" has now been appropriated into a utilitarian and managerial "Skills Agenda". The issue of the academy and academic orthodoxy was brought up.  Many of us were reminded that the few economists who challenged the sustainability of the boom during the noughties were accused of being "wreckers", talking down "brand Ireland".  Dissent can become figured as disloyalty, even vandalism, within and without an academy governed by managerial newspeak. The UK REF exercise was also treated in terms of its role in reinforcing inequality.  The sheer bulk of reading that the reviewers are supposed to do means that publications are not read at all, but merely weighed and measured against prevalent metrics.  To those that hath, more shall be given... etc. etc.  Of course, in the UK, sky high fees mean that universities are already committed to the exclusionary accreditation of young people with inherited wealth and, by implication, to kicking poor people in the head.  Professor Docherty waxed lyrically and terrifyingly on the intergenerational injustice that this implies. We then got into the difficult stuff.  How does "free speech" guarantee multi-orality rather than the oppression of mere verbosity?  Professor Docherty proposed a need for a democracy of "listening", a need to privilege listening and the welcoming of otherness.  Then we got on to Charlie Hebdo.  A number of people asserted the need to unequivocally condemn the murder of journalists and to champion free speech everywhere without having to be "branded" by the "Je Suis Charlie" logo.  It should be important and necessary for people to be able to say "I am not Charlie Hebdo.  I didn't even like him much.  But I'm in favour of people I don't like being able to breath and speak."   Thomas Docherty, who was happy to be described as a "free speech fundamentalist" described his own unhappiness with the defence of free speech becoming branded and therefore appropriated in terms of identification with a particular "cause". Much else was said about the illusion of freedom, freedom which is nothing more than formalised ritualised freedom, which merely parrots and inflates a governing discourse.  Much else was said that was funny and wise.  Wise because funny and funny because wise. But things were curtailed because we all needed to go to the pub.  We needed to go to the pub because we needed to indulge "backstage discourse".  Scurrilous, unbuttoned, uncensored.  Liberatingly private