Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the ‘manifesto’ of the week — on the ever-elusive idea of ‘freedom of expression.’
Best,
Sam
ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
I’ve found in this Substack that I keep talking about freedom of expression — which sounds like I mean freedom of speech but is in fact a different thing.
‘Freedom of speech’ follows from rights language. It’s basically a protection awarded by the state to its citizens. Every individual has the right to speak freely — which, since we are dealing inherently with a political discourse, means the right to articulate one’s political perspective without interference from the state. And debate follows endlessly from here — about the extent to which freedom of speech applies (does it apply when one shouts ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, does it apply in cases of ‘hate speech’ or active subversion; does it apply when, simply, one has already had one’s fair share of public discourse?).
Freedom of expression follows from a different discourse altogether and asks for a different, subtler sort of protection from freedom of speech. ‘Freedom of expression’ is not inherently political and it is not sufficient to just give somebody the opportunity to speak to satisfy freedom of expression. It has to do with an understanding that what people say is not necessarily their core truth — that speech is composed of exploratory creativity — and that to hear somebody properly requires a concerted act of listening.
In some sense freedom of expression is the opposite of free speech. It is the right to say anything other than ‘fire’ in a crowded theater — and it’s the premise of the whole exercise of a theater, that somebody has something important to say for which a whole group of strangers is willing to gather and to keep quiet while the performer speaks. ‘Freedom of speech’ connects with voting. It envisions a political gathering at which there is ‘a moment of truth,’ in which a citizen declares what they really believe and is free from political repercussions. ‘Freedom of expression’ is closer to the right to lie, to not say what you necessarily really think, to say things that you may take back later on — and to do all that with some reprieve from judgment, which involves some understanding from any spectators that expression exists in a separate domain from material reality, that the ideas expressed by a person are indicative of but not necessarily a referendum on who they are.
If this sounds mysterious, we seem to find it an intuitive process. It’s how we watch movies, take in stories, take in any kind of art — it’s how we understand that the storyteller by the campfire doing the villains’ voices isn’t actually a villain, that the actor who played Hitler in an award-winning film, who spent several months learning to mimic Hitler’s mannerisms, said so many of Hitler’s words, likely inhabited Hitler’s emotional register, isn’t actually Hitler.
This process is so subtle and so intuitive that we rarely discuss it — and then, starting a few years ago, it seemed to come under concerted attack. There was Ian Buruma getting fired as the editor-in-chief of The New York Review of Books for running a ‘men’s issue’ at the height of #MeToo, which included the ruminations of one of the canceled men, Jian Ghomeshi; there was Geoffrey Rush and Frank Langella coming under heightened scrutiny (and Langella losing a role) for behavior during a scene i.e. for overly inhabiting the persona of a character; there was the endless digging up of old tweets and old statements in order to discredit some politician or journalist or public figure.
At the time I wrote a Facebook post defending Buruma and the reaction I got was the argument that if it was so important to Buruma or to Ghomeishi to speak, then they could have written a blog post, but that by writing in The New York Review of Books they trespassed into space run by the magazine’s owners, and mediated by the public, and that it was perfectly within ‘the rights’ of the magazine’s owner to fire Buruma — actually, it was obligatory for them to do so given the extent to which the piece counteracted the prevailing norms of the magazine’s readership.
That struck me as deeply wrong for two reasons. One is that it’s not as if freedom of speech extends only to speaking and that that right basically collapses once anybody is actually listening (the implication of my respondents was that a blog post with nobody reading would have been fine and constitutionally protected but once intruding on the sacred grounds of The New York Review of Books was subject to a different standard of public scrutiny). And the other reason was to treat institutionalized speech as being fundamentally the property of whatever platform is hosting it. That’s obviously true in some legalistic sense — the speech of The New York Review of Books is owned by whoever owns The New York Review of Books, the same as any other company — but for a publication that’s dedicated to artistic freedom and to intellectual exchange, as The New York Review of Books avowedly is, a different standard comes into play, which is a willingness to push the limits of what is socially acceptable and is what I’m thinking of as ‘freedom of expression.’
What I was saying was a difficult argument to make amidst the moral crusade of 2017-18. There were no rules really to this principle of ‘freedom of expression’ — there was no Constitution to cross-reference it against. And what was more difficult, I was contending, is that there was morality within the domain of freedom of expression but that its morality abided by, as it were, a different gravitational field.
There is a kind of sacred space that’s created within artistic realms. This is obvious enough for anybody who does theater, for instance—theater is intimately connected with pagan rites; hardcore theater types are always going on about the theater as ‘a temple.’ And when I’ve been in rehearsal spaces—I’m thinking in particular of an improv class that I used to do and that I loved (the goal in it being to be truthful as opposed to funny)—there is a very clear code of conduct i.e. you must risk, you must go for it. I remember how impatient the audience would get in my improv class whenever actors held back. The opening exercise was to imagine that you were speaking truthfully to a person from your life — saying what you deep down want to say. And everybody would be polite and kind of hem and haw and talk around things and at the moment when a person fully gave into a feeling, however ugly the feeling, we were there. I remember a guy trying everything he could think of to not start insulting a woman who had recently broken up with him— he was a very nice guy — and by the end of the monologue he couldn’t hold it in, he called her a ‘bitch’ and we were right there with him, we knew that what he was saying did not make him misogynistic or vile, that this was just one aspect of him, and that theater provided a ‘safe space’ (a very ironic phrase) for him to express it.
There are rogues within the realm of freedom of expression, just as there are rogues anywhere else. The story of Bernardo Bertolucci encouraging Marlon Brando to rape Maris Schneider in Last Tango in Paris is really a horrible story. So is the way Gabriel Matzneff manipulated the domain of ‘art’ to seduce teenagers, as recounted by Vanessa Springora in Consent. There are rules in rehearsal and performance spaces — ordinary laws of morality just as there are anywhere else. It’s perfectly possible that Rush and Langella, for instance, crossed certain lines and deserved some degree of social punishment. I don’t know. But what goes into their defense — and Langella’s was particularly eloquent —is the understanding that expression has its own code, and that once you are within its domain you must follow your impulses, you must dive into your subconscious. Stella Adler — Brando’s teacher — said that “in your choices lies your talent,” which is one of the best lines anybody has ever said about art in general, not just acting. Becoming a skilled reader — an activity that I’ve dedicated years of my life to — is largely a matter of knowing when a writer is holding back, when a writer is lying to themselves and to the reader for the sake of being polite. And, for me as a reader (and, actually, for most readers), that’s the unforgivable sin, and the degree of courage is the difference between a book that’s good and a book that isn’t. Buruma as an editor seems to have been inhabiting a similar mindset. He felt that there was a disbalance in the public discourse between the perspectives of women who were wronged and of men who were in the wrong; and as someone with editorial control over a prestigious public magazine, Buruma felt a certain obligation to correct for that, to do the difficult, risky thing, and to hear from the vilified.
Everybody has the peculiar hill they die on, and for me, as I get older, this idiosyncratic freedom of expression seems more and more to be my hill. Are there other values — other ‘goods’ — that are more important? Yeah, sure, probably. But freedom of expression strikes me as one of the least-well-understood and most poorly-defended domains that we have. Take it away — or just let it atrophy — and what we’re left with is really terrible art and an anemic public discourse.
Completely agree. At the same time, if you want to read a characteristically bracing meditation on free speech somewhat at the expense of free expression, I recommend this old one from Harvey Mansfield: https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-value-of-free-speech. Still find myself going back to it from time to time.
Appreciating you. If we were to talk in person i wld want Marshal Mcluhan off the table. Politically we cannot do without policing , except in defined public spaces, where now in Am'rica we in fact have semi trained gaurds posing as police. Right there we have a masqierade of the deepest consequence totheir shooting victims. But nevermind that. Because precisely living in the present is where our debates in public breakdown. I am studying where the lines are in a book Concordance by Susan Howe. I am in her regiment i whistfilly identify as the used to be 14 poets taking a couole years out of the acadamy to live off the "land". But you see
That was where anarchists go off into weeds and the wealthier and deadlier propertarians enjoy their countersupport. I will use John Waters as my whole instance. His Cecille Demented is armed and a kidnapper. I am stuck in middle of Waters second book because people are knives out. Susan Howe states the problem 8-11 differing ways. Tonight i will send of 3 . Let me exceed my private parts by saying i lost social currency with my (bentham's democratic regiments) tribe while doing my Scandal sheet, and one of those 14 of my poetic Lammas sabancthi sent me a gift subscription later after appreciating i was being more productive than destructive. Isnot that for the short present where who gets to commit public love lies? I see a darkness in love real love when it is exactly designed to provoke. The ending of everything everywhere all at once violated my ghost anus. But i acquitted myself by screaming. Susan Howe will be right en pointe, here she is quoting Justice Holmes in his diary (why do they need me for oracles? Is implied) "genius used to be health. But now it is time". Right? Count on him to perceive change in terms of responsibility. And of course the terms have all shifted....