The tangled web you weave

 

River Man

 

 

Free Speech

Free speech has become the last thing western civilisation can believe in now that religious redemption is a distant dream, and now that climate catastrophe and economic stagnation loom on the horizon. It’s threatened by wokesters, Muslims, a cancel culture, the enemies of liberty...

The last convulsions of a dying man. Free, free at last.

It takes a long time to find your own voice.

Miles Davis said that.

Can you think about ‘free speech’ without talking about the meaning of freedom under late capitalism? Freedom as being ‘free from’..a lonely kind of freedom, negative liberty. 

I have nothing to say and I don’t know how to say it.

What matters is the abstract right to say whatever one wants. Freedom here is not related to restraint, obligations, society, silence, truth. The freedom to not always say what is on one’s mind, in one’s heart. Austerity, techniques of ‘right-speaking’, ‘right-seeing’. A kind of austerity that is kind. Reserve, reticence, speaking in turn, at the right moment.

In paradise there is no idle chatter.

—-The Qur’an.

To speak freely with a loved one is not the same as speaking in public, which is subject to all kinds of norms and disciplines. Twitter-speak is free in a limited sense of the term...free to say whatever comes to mind, free to spontaneously react to any provocation. 

Even in intimate situations do we speak freely or is there always an element of formality? Does care-feee speech become careless? And who is it that is speaking? The empirical self? Are you talking to me? Can we imagine speech without listeners, without conversation? We tend to think of free speech in individualistic terms.