“Forgive me if I am forthright”— or, Conversational Freedom

Tobias Menely, Ph.D.

Traveling on a train in the Netherlands this spring, I listened in on a conversation between two biology students at one of Utrecht’s universities. They appeared to be mere acquaintances who had never had a substantive conversation before and who found themselves passing time together on a train ride home. With seriousness and sophistication, they were debating the moral legitimacy of experimentation on animals for medical research. Their discussion was motivated by deep disagreement, which led them to probe each other’s positions even as they acknowledged the insufficiency of their own premises. The tone of their conversation was at once confrontational and amiable, as if a space for friction, for a heated exploration of different opinions, had opened within the everyday codes of politeness. Although it is surely the case that Dutch culture exhibits its own forms of compulsory concord and polite silence, I saw the intensity of their disagreement as striking evidence that I was no longer in the United States. Ian Buruma has observed that such candor is actually an element of the Dutch national character: “The insistence on total frankness, the idea that tact is a form of hypocrisy, and that everything, no matter how sensitive, should be stated openly, with no holds barred, the elevation of bluntness to a kind of moral ideal; this willful lack of delicacy is a common train in Dutch behavior” (Buruma 2006, 94). With its aggressive examination of different points of view, their conversation surprised me, especially when I compared it with the more circumspect chitchat that prevails in American public spaces.

My focus in this essay is not on the clearly liminal examples of expressive freedom, the test cases—a dubiously educative mock lynching on the Willamette campus; Chris Ofili’s infamous Virgin Mary painting splattered with elephant dung, which caused such a furor when it was shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the publication of satirical cartoons featuring Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten—that define which acts of expression may be included and which ought be excluded from the public realm. These limit cases, I believe, distract us from much more complex questions of everyday free expression, questions about the subtle social imperatives that direct conversation toward certain subjects and away from others, about the choice to begin a discussion with a stranger, about the tonal codes that underlie expectations of conviviality and politeness. I am interested in those forms of expression that call forth self-censorship rather than institutional censorship, that offend not only social but also sociable sensibilities. The normative codes of politeness, I suggest, do far more to restrict expression than the threat of institutional censorship or the funding decisions of the National Endowment for the Arts. Censorship, this essay proposes, occurs every day, in every conversation.

In other words, there is an outside to any conversation, an edge beyond which one can or ought not go, and this outside is preserved as such not only for epistemological reasons (it is difficult or impossible to talk about such things within a given idiom) but also for normative reasons (it is uncouth, or uncool, or impolite to talk about such things). These reasons, the vast fabric of conversational norms, comprise a central facet of culture: subtly communicated or implicit rules of discussion, which discipline and delimit what we might say to one another. Culture is lived on this subtle and quotidian plane; culture is lived in conversation, in what we do and do not talk about. Thus one can envisage an anthropological approach to conversation, as is intimated by Buruma’s remark on the Dutch, which would ask: to what extent do given cultural codes permit forthrightness? In a specific social interaction, how much space is there for disagreement? On which subjects might members of a culture politely disagree, and which are altogether taboo?

In American society, breaking these cultural rules—bringing up sensitive subjects or vocally disagreeing in the wrong setting—is an affront to tact. Tact serves a purpose: it softens the edges of our difference, of our diverse motivations and values. After all, a primary role of conversation is maintaining social harmony by cultivating and sustaining relationships. Noticing this function of conversation, the linguist Roman Jakobson defined the phatic as a type of speech act meant to establish or maintain a social connection rather than communicate a particular idea. When a person is asked, “How are you?” and he or she replies, “I’m fine,” the purpose of the dialogue is not to exchange information but to reestablish a relationship, to say, in effect, “I still care about you.” Phatic communication, or small talk, is about connection rather than content. It operates as a kind of social adhesive, and it does so by directing conversation to the least controversial topics: the vicissitudes of weather and season, the minor indignities of institutional life, the fate of favorite sports teams. Only when we are certain that we fully agree on more fraught topics does phatic exchange extend into the realms of politics, religion, and ideas. To break the rules of conversational tact, to veer away from phatic exchange in inappropriate venues, is to risk serious disapprobation.

Despite the ubiquity of small talk, its opposite, free conversation, has inspired great optimism among intellectuals, who contrast the harmonizing role of phatic exchange with the salutary effects of open debate among the diverse constituents of the body politic. In his sixteenth-century essay “On the Art of Conversation,” Michel de Montaigne writes confidently about conversation’s dynamic potential. Humans are social animals, he observes, which is why conversation is “the most delightful activity in our lives” (Montaigne 1991, 1045). Talking with others is so satisfying that Montaigne claims he would prefer to lose his eyesight than his ability to speak and to listen. While he defends conversational conviviality, he is no apologist for politeness, reticence, and small talk. He conceives of conversation as an intersubjective, reciprocal space in which differing opinions may be explored: “In conversation, the most painful quality is perfect harmony.” Conversation must boldly examine, rather than simply express, difference—testing, probing, and unsettling instead of confirming. “Contradictory judgments neither offend me nor irritate me,” he writes, “they merely wake me up and provide me with exercise” (1046). For Montaigne, politeness is the enemy of open conversation. Because of the danger that we will be lulled into mental sleep by the pleasantries and ease of social harmony, we must “fortify our ears against being seduced by the sound of polite words.” Considering that Montaigne wrote in the absolutist society of ancien-régime France, his defense of free conversation, his argument that society’s well-being is generated “by discord not by harmony, by being different not by being like,” is particularly significant as an anticipation of Enlightenment ideals.

Two centuries after Montaigne, the Scottish philosopher David Hume proposed a significant role for conversation in a free society, suggesting, rather hopefully, that people experience “an increase in humanity, from the very habit of conversing together” (Hume 1985, 271). For Hume and other Enlightenment intellectuals, the “conversible world” was a place where people could debate, learn about one another, and examine their differences. These thinkers saw conversation as one of the foundations of civil society, the collective realm wherein private citizens come together to constitute a public. Following this model on a conceptual level, philosophers of the period often presented their ideas in the form of the Platonic dialogue. Hume himself wrote a scandalous work on theism, Dialogues on Natural Religion, which features a three-way debate on the knowability of God; such was Hume’s commitment to serious, open-ended conversation as an ideal that commentators have never been absolutely certain which voice in the Dialogues represents the philosopher’s own beliefs. In our own time, the German political philosopher JŸrgen Habermas has argued that rationality—humanity’s capacity to know something of the truth about itself and the world—comes about not so much through a single mind’s cogitations as through continuous and fallible dialogue with others. In his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas looks back to the coffee houses of Hume’s era as the first modern fora for free conversation, public spaces in which individuals could come together to talk openly on the subjects of the day, to test ideas, and contest each other’s beliefs. By participating in reasoned, open-ended conversations in public space, Habermas writes, “private people” came “together to form a public,” and so “readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion” (Habermas 1993, 25-6). Democratic society begins with free conversation—“rational-critical debate”—the aim of which is neither simple consensus nor fragmented multiplicity (51). In Habermas’s idealized realm of open communication, participants aim toward, and yet never fully achieve, total agreement. They participate in a dialogue assuming the possibility of mutual intelligibility and of mutually valid claims at the same time that they remain skeptical about the truth or justice of any specific claim. In present-day America, dialogue is a much invoked and celebrated panacea for intolerance and injustice. We often imagine that conversation will generate inclusivity and understanding, even that conversation will bring about concrete social change. This faith in the power of dialogue surely explains our enshrinement of the First Amendment as the sine qua non of American democracy.

To believe that free conversation functions as a motor of historical progress requires a great deal of idealism—in both the philosophical and psychological senses of the term. Most of us have only to consider our own family in order to realize how often relationships are built on strategic silences, implicit agreements not to discuss certain subjects. In a family, as in society, taking advantage of one’s freedom to say anything is usually a recipe for bitterness. In practice, actual dialogue is difficult. Even Montaigne remarks on the numerous impediments to free conversations. We fear correction and insult, and we worry about being wrong. We speak with little self-knowledge, and we often aim only to coerce. We argue for the sake of arguing, losing sight of truth. Our interlocutor may be an idiot, or may speak in bad faith. We tend toward solipsism, an inability to consider any ideas beyond our own. Piercing conversation inspires a melancholic doubt and fallibility in its participants, whereas untested “stubbornness and foolhardiness fill their hosts with joy” (1063). We are considered rude and indecorous when we articulate our opinions too loudly, or question another’s beliefs too severely. Modesty is valued more highly than outspokenness. Simply to celebrate free expression is to overlook such difficulties. To casually defend expressive freedom is to ignore the extent to which we live in a culture defined by tacitly agreed upon silences and, thus, the costs of speaking up, the way in which making noise may produce hostility and resentment. Speaking freely requires determination and self-consciousness, as well as a willingness to offend others.

The hazards and the rewards of communicative freedom become clearer when we consider conversation in the place of expression. As a term, expression puts the emphasis on the speaker, whereas conversation reminds us that speech acts have an audience, indeed they become meaningful only insofar as they are interpreted by another. To speak of free expression is to abstract communication from its reception, to imagine that we speak in a vacuum. Conversation aims toward the reciprocal transformation of belief, as Habermas suggests, while expression merely announces belief. It takes an individual to express; it takes two to converse. Along these lines, the political philosopher Carl Schmitt defines discussion as “an exchange of opinion that is governed by the purpose of persuading one’s opponent through argument of the truth or justice of something, or allowing oneself to be persuaded of something as true and just” (Schmitt 1985, 5).¹ Discussion produces change in its participants, and it aims toward a never-realized horizon of mutuality. Expression does little more than broadcast the status quo, which is why “express yourself ” remains the crucial catchphrase of American popular culture and advertising.

My case study for thinking with more specificity about the problem of conversational freedom is a philosophical novel, J.M. Coetzee’s 2003 Elizabeth Costello, which explores the pitfalls and prospects of open conversation. Coetzee’s novel interests me because it avoids a facile celebration of communicative freedom at the same time that it defends the imperative to talk on difficult and discomforting subjects. The novel’s eponymous protagonist is an Australian writer who earned international repute for her fourth book, The House on Eccles Street, a rewriting of Joyce’s Ulysses from the perspective of Molly Bloom. Over the course of the novel, Elizabeth Costello—a stand-in, on some level, for Coetzee himself—travels around the world, accepting an award from a college in Pennsylvania, lecturing on a cruise ship, visiting her sister, a nun, in South Africa, and delivering speeches on animal rights and censorship. The novel is a recounting of difficult conversations and intellectual disputation. It is rife with debate and contention. Characters in Elizabeth Costello argue about human nature and racial difference, about the origin of human cruelty, about our ethical duties toward others, including animals, and about censorship. They debate whether religious faith or humanistic skepticism is a better source of existential guidance, and whether literature has any redeeming value in the modern world. As the instigator of many of these disputes, Costello does not come across as a likeable character. She is terribly serious, often astringent, and entirely unafraid to articulate her own moral discomfort even as she challenges the beliefs held by others. According to her son, John, her novels reveal cruel truths about human desire and motivation. Rather than comforting their readers, her books tend to unsettle, and in her public talks and private conversations, Costello is a discomforting presence. She has a habit of asking the “odd question, presumptuous in its intimacy, even rude” (Coetzee 2003, 56). The word she uses to describe herself is “acidulous”: sharp in speech (37).

At the center of the book are two chapters describing Costello’s visit to the small college, Appleton, where her son is a professor. There she is expected to lecture on literature but instead animadverts on humanity’s mistreatment of animals. This is a sensitive topic, of course, and the acrimony it inspires is thematized through Costello’s relation with her daughter-in-law, Norma, a scholar of the philosophy of mind, who considers Costello’s opinions on animals to be maudlin. Their disagreement only rarely percolates to the surface, to the domain of conversation; it tends to manifest, rather, in rude asides and subtly dismissive gestures. The familial disharmony is felt mainly by John, the novel’s representative of polite discretion. During Costello’s visit to Appleton, the novel’s readers are positioned nearest to John, who is embarrassed by his mother’s upsetting “death talk.” He wishes only to “keep the peace,” which he does by steering conversations toward “appropriate,” which is to say, non-controversial, topics (Coetzee 2003, 82). Throughout Costello’s lecture, John is discomforted equally by his mother’s disturbing subject matter and by his wife’s skeptical sighs and snorts. Easily mortified, he is divided between respect for his mother and anxiety about the way her polemic disturbs the peace.

When she lectures before the college, Costello is explicit about her position as one who says what ought not be said. She acknowledges that her address is an affront to tact, that her topic is one about which it is generally thought best to disagree in silence. (I personally have found that just mentioning that I am a vegetarian at a dinner table, if only to explain a selection from a menu, may be taken as a hostile comment; such is the power of anthropocentric ideology.) She begins her talk by comparing herself with Red Peter, an educated ape in a short story written by Franz Kafka, who lectures before a learned academy, and she remarks that the comparison is not meant to be taken as a light-hearted aside, an opening anecdote to put her listeners at ease. “I say what I mean,” she tells the audience. “I am an old woman. I do not have the time any longer to say things I do not mean” (Coetzee 2003, 62). At the heart of the lecture is a notorious and yet still startling comparison. Costello argues that our exploitation of nonhuman animals, above all through experimentation on living creatures and industrial meat-production, comprises an ongoing Holocaust, different only from the Nazi death camps in its extensive scale and duration. In proposing this likeness, she calls attention to her own explicitness, to the fact that such an analogy is unseemly: “Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of ” (65, my emphasis). Allowing that such talk “polarizes people,” she returns, not only in her lectures but also at a convivial campus dinner and in her tense interactions with her skeptical daughter-in-law, to a subject that provokes “acrimony, hostility, [and] bitterness.”

John is grievously afraid that someone at the faculty dinner following Costello’s lecture will ask his mother about her vegetarianism, prompting her to respond with memorized lines from Plutarch’s essay “On the Eating of Flesh,” as she has in the past: “You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death-wounds” (Coetzee 2003, 83). Always attentive to the economy of conversational decorum, John observes that this quote “is a real conversation-stopper: it is the word juices that does it. Producing Plutarch is like throwing down a gauntlet; after that, there is no knowing what will happen.” The actual dinner party conversation never reaches such a boiling point. It is at once polite and substantive, as if Costello’s polemical lecture produced a space for an unusually frank discussion. The conversation continues amiably even after Costello proposes, provocatively, that human beings invented religion so as to justify their instrumental use of other animals (in fact, a reading of Genesis substantiates her point). John’s colleagues seem to find the conversation interesting and worthwhile, making the reader momentarily respect Costello’s outspokenness and wonder whether John’s discretion is overzealous and weak-kneed, if not a kind of censorship. This formal and still somewhat cautious dinner table conversation presents conversational freedom at its most ideal, even when Norma challenges her mother-in-law, calling vegetarianism a form of elitism. Norma’s frank comment precipitates a “certain amount of shuffling, … unease in the air,” and the debate turns prickly, although never quite hostile (87). A signal from John keeps Norma from asking a final provoking question. Even as this scene reveals the possibility and productivity of conversational openness, it also shows how challenging it is for intellectually serious and ethically selfconscious people to comprehend each other, even to hear each other.

As much as they are about forthrightness, these chapters depict the strain and circuitousness that underlie uninhibited dialogue. At the faculty dinner party, John noticed an empty place-setting, and the next morning they discover that a poet, Abraham Stern, skipped the dinner after hearing Costello’s lecture. Learning this, Norma—somewhat disingenuously, given her own argumentative nature—observes that Costello crossed a line in her talk, that she should have censored herself: “She should have thought twice before bringing up the Holocaust. I could feel hackles rising all around me” (93). Stern writes Costello a note explaining his absence from the faculty dinner as a protest against what he considers to be an outrageous and morally offensive comparison between animal slaughter and the slaughter of Jews. Like Costello, Stern observes, and seeks to explain, the explicitness of his letter: “Forgive me if I am forthright. You said you were old enough not to have time to waste on niceties, and I am an old man too” (94, my emphasis). Forthrightness appears obliquely, in an impolite absence and in a letter justifying that absence. It even seeks to excuse itself.

A similar case of indirect directness characterizes Costello’s final activity at Appleton College, a formal debate with a philosophy professor named Thomas O’Hearne. Costello fails to answer O’Hearne’s questions with any sort of directness. Conversation, even when formalized as debate, is imprecise and disjointed. Like most of the conversations depicted in the novel, Costello’s debate with O’Hearne appears closer to what the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin describes as polyphony: a “plurality of independent and unmerged voices,” which articulate incommensurate positions and immutable differences, than to Habermas’s idealized public sphere, in which rational discourse negotiates and even aims to overcomes difference (Bakhtin 1984, 4). In a world of polyphony, we each speak a different language. Costello herself seems to recognize such fundamental difference, difference incapable of being diminished or even fully recognized, when, near the end of the debate, she describes reading the work of an analytic philosopher (not O’Hearne, but perhaps a surrogate for him) who argues that animals, lacking concepts, lack meaningful experience. Outraged by such “reasoning,” Costello observes that “[d]iscussion is possible only when there is common ground,” and, noting the obvious absence of such shared assumptions, Costello says that she would choose not to talk with this philosopher. She ends the debate, then, by marking the limits of debate, by conjuring up an interlocutor with whom she would refuse to converse. The narrator remarks that it is on this note that the college dean “has to bring the proceedings to a close: acrimony, hostility, bitterness” (67).

In the novel’s fifth chapter, Costello visits South Africa, where her sister Blanche, a nun, is set to receive an honorary degree for her care of children with AIDS. They first meet in a hotel lobby, where they make “small talk,” an “exchange of tired words” (118). Small talk in this novel is always a form of evasion, a way of not saying something. Later, Blanche delivers a short speech to the university graduates. No more circumspect than her sister, she argues that humanistic learning represents a falling away from God’s Word and, thus, from the concerns of “ultimate” importance (123). It should be no surprise that the luncheon following the ceremonies is contentious, particularly when Elizabeth and her sister begin to argue. Costello remarks that literature rather than religion provides her with solace and counsel, and, before retorting, Blanche asks whether the rules of politeness have been suspended: “Is this just a conversation over luncheon . . . or are we being serious?” (128). The dean responds, “We are serious,” leading Costello to revise her opinion of him and his colleagues, to see them as “hungering souls” rather than obsequious academics. A sophisticated conversation follows, moving from the history of religion and its place in a new multicultural world to the infallible Word and intellectual relativism. Notably, the two most successful conversations in the novel take place over meals; breaking bread seems conducive to interesting talk. The next day, Blanche brings Elizabeth to her mission hospital in the hinterlands, where their quarrel continues, a debate between a humanist and a missionary, a writer of novels and a nun who cares for dying children. In her “unrelenting” sister, who continues the argument even as they exchange what will likely be their final goodbye, Costello has met her match in gravity and candidness (144).

An episode later in the novel tests Costello’s commitment to forthrightness. Her talk at Appleton College—specifically, her comparison between the killing of animals and the Holocaust—led to an uproar in the press, accusations of anti-Semitism, and hostile crank calls. Now she has been invited to a conference in Amsterdam to lecture on censorship. The controversy over her remarks at Appleton has diminished “what appetite she ever had for disputation,” and she wonders if the problem of evil, the subject of the conference, “will be solved by more talk” (157). What compels her to lecture again, to reenter the volatile world of conversational freedom, is a novel she has just read, The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, a mercilessly vivid, even nauseating, recounting of the torture and execution of the failed plotters of an attempt to assassinate Hitler. The novel has provoked Costello to wonder about the limits of free expression, whether or not there are certain subjects that “ought not to be brought into the light” (159). There is significant irony in the fact that her lecture in Amsterdam—in the Netherlands, possibly the world’s most open society—ponders whether or not speech ought to be limited. Though an executive of PEN, the international association of writers dedicated to preserving expressive freedom, and a longtime critic of censorship, Costello has begun to wonder if certain subjects should be hidden behind a veil, The Very Rich Hours being her primary example.

Upon her arrival in Amsterdam, she discovers that Paul West, the author of the novel she is set to discuss, is among the conference’s attendees.² The difficult irony of her situation is compounded. She must decide whether she should, in an act of utter candor, denounce a fellow author for his outspokenness, and do so with him in the audience. As she debates her course of action, she wonders what “in the greater scheme of things . . . a moment’s embarrassment amount[s] to?” (163). Even as she begins to efface West’s presence from her lecture, she asks why she feels a “reluctance to offend” (164). Yet she also remains troubled by her argument. It may be too easy to defend free speech as a categorical good, but she wonders if she really ought position herself as a censor. Finally, she decides to give her talk, in its original form, and risk offending Paul West, in order to argue that some things are obscene and thus ought to “remain off-stage” (169). Her talk, of course, is a failure. As we might expect, the liberal Dutch audience argues for West’s right to represent evil in its most acute forms, and the chapter ends with Costello, in a corridor, at a loss, hoping to bump into West, to converse, to argue. Instead, Coetzee leaves her silent, alone, and uncertain. Forthrightness (both West’s and Costello’s), Coetzee reminds us, has its costs, and conversation and confrontation do not necessarily bring resolution.

Before her speech in Amsterdam, Costello locates West in the lecture hall, and, apologetically, apprises him of her intentions. He sits silent, icily, barely acknowledging her presence. When she speaks, Costello is often greeted with such silence, by neighbors at the dinner table, even by the guard at the gates of the afterlife (the book’s final episode finds Costello, in a sort of purgatory, before a Kafkaesque tribunal, defending her writerly suspension of certainty). Costello notices these silences and wonders what they conceal. She is equally troubled by the limits of language, by all that is unsayable. As an author, an artificer of language, she is struck by the extent to which “words É lack É power” (111), by what we are unable to convey. In an early lecture on the death of literary realism, Costello proposes that the “word-mirror is broken,” that modern readers and writers have lost faith in the promise that words will deliver meaning (19). And yet, Costello also asserts that it is the writer’s job to imagine the multiplicity of existences, to use language to transport her readers into the lives of others. This ambivalence about language underlies her ambivalence about conversation. In the novel, conversation is beset by numerous difficulties: over-wrought sensitivity as much as insensitivity, mixed motivations, the incomprehensibility of the other, the incommensurability of worldviews. Yet conversation is also represented as an ethical imperative, the responsibility of anyone who decides to believe or to care, because conversation is what allows us to shape the world in common, to share responsibility. To hold a belief or feel a concern, the novel suggests, requires one to accept the duty of challenging others who think and feel differently.

We often pathologize the sort of moral seriousness embodied by Costello. In polite conversation, ethical disagreement—a challenge to another’s beliefs and behavior, a questioning of the principles and motivations that underlie their existence—is profoundly unsettling. Moreover, in contemporary America, we tend to hold that one’s significant beliefs—religious, ethical, aesthetic, and political—are one’s own, a kind of property, and are, thus, not subject to challenge. People, like Costello, who initiate uncomfortable and probing conversations appear out of place and threatening. They seem to violate the principle of freedom of conscience, a central plank of classical liberal thought, which is shared by Democrats and Republicans alike. Perhaps this principle explains why we emphasize expressive rather than conversational freedom, why we are welcome to express our own beliefs, just not to challenge anyone else’s. Liberal society, in this sense, tends toward what I have referred to as polyphony: multiple, fragmented voices, speaking not to but past one another. Liberal culture teaches us how to leave each other alone, to mind our own business, and, on a related note, to trust our own beliefs precisely (if only) because they are our own. A society that understands itself in terms of polyphony must stress tolerance and tact. There is surely much to be said for freedom of conscience, for the preservation of personal space, and for the pleasures of sociability. Yet, the normative pluralism facilitated by taciturnity and politeness, such as that embodied by Costello’s son John, may itself silence valuable forms of inquiry, expression, and disagreement. Difficult conversations, Coetzee seems to say, may have social costs, but so does vapid and anodyne small talk.

So far, this essay has focused primarily on conversation, but its subject is equally “freedom.” The trouble with this term, and thus with any defense of freedom of expression, is its profound vagueness, the fact that it has come, in contemporary parlance, to mean everything—and so nothing. Just observe the way that our current president invokes freedom in every imaginable context; at his second inauguration, he used the term twenty-six times in his twentyminute address (add “free” and “liberty,” and the number is forty-nine).³ In post-9/11 America, the term functions as what Slavoj Zizek refers to as a point de capiton, a quilting point of ideology, an undefined and yet absolute term that holds a worldview—in this case, American nationalism and the absolute faith in free markets—in place.⁴ Given this complex ideological purpose— given the way that, in the contemporary lexicon, ‘freedom’ obscures as much as it reveals—it is reasonable to wonder why we privilege expressive freedom to the extent that we do, why the First Amendment is the most cherished, why freedom of expression should be the subject of this collection of essays. Is free expression necessarily more valuable than honest expression, felicitous expression, reassuring expression, beautiful expression, or logical expression? Is freedom of expression so unequivocally good that it is, in all cases, preferable to social harmony?

Focusing on conversation in the place of expression, I suggest, better equips us to answer these questions, however provisionally, because an emphasis on conversation reminds us that all speech acts have an audience. Speech acts are meaningful only in a particular communicative context, a context defined by the relations among speakers, by venue (a comment that means one thing at a public lecture may mean something else in a conversation over drinks), by a multitude of idiomatic and cultural factors. Conversation is never free in an absolute sense, which is why free speech is not simply something that must be protected, an abstract space of pure potentiality. Rather, free speech is something that must be continually tended to, generated, and imagined, within the concrete domain of actual dialogue. Freedom, in this sense, is best described by the French philosopher Michel Foucault as a “conscious practice,” one that is intimately linked with ethics, a reflexive relation to our self and to others (Foucault 2000, 284). Freedom, Foucault proposes, ought to be understood as a kind of active and ongoing practice, not simply as an empty and open space defined by the lack of restriction. In other terms, we might think of conversation as an instance of positive freedom, whereas freedom of expression is a kind of negative freedom.⁵ Negative freedom is defined by an absence of extrinsic constraint (such as, in the case of expressive freedom, laws permitting censorship). Positive freedom, by contrast, is contextually determined and interdependent. It is facilitated not by a lack of restraint but by the presence of particular constitutive elements. In the case of free conversation, these elements include multiple participants (though Montaigne notes that the most scintillating conversations are often those that take place among the different voices in a single mind), each manifesting some degree of self-awareness, as well as a collective will to seek justice or truth or some other value that transcends the individual.

It is, I have been arguing, primarily a cultural logic that precludes us from free conversation: the imperative to remain in the safe domains of phatic engagement. We are, however, no less constrained by our own mental indolence, by the pleasures of passivity and a casual acceptance of habit, the well-carved ruts of our mental pathways. Two even more powerful impediments to free conversation are solipsism, the intellectual incapacity to transcend the self, and narcissism, the psychological incapacity to transcend the self. Conversation requires us to recognize the other, which in turn requires us to recognize ourselves more carefully and completely. In conversation, we are held responsible for what we say, required to defend our position, even to change our point of view. When we converse, we open ourselves to scrutiny, which is why the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas describes the act of “offering a word” as an instance of “the subject putting himself forward,” opening himself to the other. “To speak,” he writes, “is to interrupt [one’s] existence as a subject and a master” (Levinas 1997, 149).⁶ It is hard to notice the particular position one occupies when one’s only aim is to express oneself; it is hard not to notice such positionality when one is conversing. Conversational freedom is more focused, more limited, more circumscribed than free expression, because in conversation another holds us responsible for what we say.

At the same time that we open ourselves to the other, conversation requires us to attend to the other. In a conversation, one may generate confusion, anger, or sorrow. To speak simply of expression is to ignore such consequences; when holding a conversation, it is difficult not to notice them. To converse requires us to listen, to sympathize, and to imagine another point of view. Conversation offers a bridge between selves, and it may generate, suddenly and unexpectedly, a disconcerting intimacy, so it should be no surprise that, etymologically, “conversation” refers to lovemaking no less than talking. Walter Ong describes conversation in terms of such intimacy, though in more existential than physical terms, as a kind eros produced by sound and meaning: “the I-thou world where . . . persons commune with persons, reaching one another’s interiors” (Quoted in McWhorter 1 January 2004, 47). Like sex, conversation is as fraught as it is pleasurable. Another person may ask a question that one has carefully avoided asking oneself, or say the name that one has doggedly sought to repress. A comment may draw attention to an unconscious and embarrassing habit or a clearly stupid belief. To converse is to recognize the other as something other than an instrument to our own ends, to recognize the other as capable of calling into question our own beliefs, values, and motivations, which is why good conversation is a form of respect. Conversation produces a collective space between people, a fragile and ephemeral space. The fact that there remain an infinite number of interesting and important conversations to be had does not mean that they will be painless or comforting.

[1] — Schmitt, a fascist, was deeply skeptical of the possibility of politically meaningful discussion in modern liberal democracies, where conversation is channeled through mass media, and actual political decision-making takes place among partisan elites. He referred to “public discussion” in liberal society as an “empty formality,” which justifies a democracy that is never truly achieved (6).

[2] — Paul West is a real person, indeed the author of a book titled The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, not a fictional character like Costello. In The New York Review of Books, the critic David Lodge (in an otherwise positive review) took issue with CoetzeeÕs depiction of West, and his use of the fictional Costello to muster a critique of WestÕs novel, as a “a startling transgression of literary protocol” (Lodge 2003).

[3] — For an analysis of BushÕs rhetoric of freedom, see George LakoffÕs Whose Freedom? The Battle Over AmericaÕs Most Important Idea (2006).

[4] — Zizek writes, “What creates and sustains the identity of a given ideological field beyond all possible variation of its positive content? . . . The multitude of ‘floating signifiers,’ of proto-ideological elements, is structured into a unified field through the intervention of a certain ‘nodal point’ . . . which ‘quilts’ them, stops their sliding and fixes their meaning” (Zizek 1989, 87).

[5] — Isaiah Berlin offers the most significant articulation of this distinction in “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1969).

[6] — Levinas links the difficulty intellectuals have in recognizing conversation as a significant cultural form to the prevalence of inane small talk: “Contemporary philosophy and sociology have accustomed us to underestimating the direct social link between persons who speak, and to prefer silence or the complex relations, such as customs or law or culture, laid down by civilization. This scorn for words certainly has to do with the way language can degenerate into a prattle that reveals nothing but social unease” (148).

References

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Berlin, Isaiah. 1969. Two concepts of liberty. In Four Essays on Liberty. London: Oxford University Press.
Buruma, Ian. 2006. Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance. New York: Penguin.
Coetzee, J.M. 2003. Elizabeth Costello. New York: Penguin.
Foucault, Michel. 2000. The ethics of the concern for self as a practice of freedom. In Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Penguin.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1993. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA:
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Levinas, Emmanuel. 1997. The transcendence of words. In The Levinas Reader. Translated by Se‡n Hand. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lodge, David. 2003. “Disturbing the Peace.” The New York Review of Books 50.18.
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McWhorter, Diana. 1 January 2004. Talk. The American Scholar.
Schmitt, Carl. 1985. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Translated by Ellen Kenney. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Zizek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.