Asad, Talal. Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. California: The Townsend Center for the Humanities University of California Berkeley, 2009.
So it is quite understandable that there might be a strong group of sexual progressives who maintain that freedom of expression is essential to the movement, that the lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, intersex movement is not possible without freedom of expression and without recourse to freedom itself as a guiding value and norm. Of course, to posit such a principle of freedom does not answer the questions of whether and how that norm is to be reconciled with other norms, nor does it tell us precisely what is meant by “freedom.”
We have to be clear about what we mean by freedom, since from the beginning freedom has been, not the same as the liberty that belongs to the individual, but something socially conditioned and socially shared. No one person is free when others are not, since freedom is achieved as a consequence of a certain social and political organization of life. The queer movement, conceived transnationally, has also sought to fight homophobia, misogyny, and racism, and it has operated as part of an alliance with struggles against discrimination and hatreds of all kinds. The emergence of a queer politics was meant to confirm the importance of battling homophobia no matter what your identity was. But it was also a signal of the importance of alliance; an attunement to minoritization in its various forms; a struggle against precarious conditions, regardless of “identity”; and a battle against racism and social exclusion.
Of course there is also a now-entrenched tension between identity-based and alliance-based sexual minority politics, and my affiliation with “queer” is meant to affirm the politics of alliance across difference. Broadly put, a strong alliance on the left requires, minimally, a commitment to combating both racism and homophobia, combating both anti-immigrant politics and various forms of misogyny and induced poverty. Why would any of us be willing to participate in an alliance that does not keep all of these forms of discrimination clearly in mind, and that does not also attend to the matters of economic justice that afflict sexual minorities, women, and racial and religious minorities as well?
So let us consider more carefully, then, how the politics of speech enters into this situation and how we might try to think about hate speech in light of a commitment to a left alliance that refuses to sacrifice one minority for another (which does not mean there may not be some serious antagonisms that remain essential to the articulation of this alliance). It is perhaps important to remember the importance of the critique of state coercion and state violence for a robust left political movement, even as we recognize that transnational economic institutions are responsible for differential poverty levels. Can we even think, though, about a politics of the speech act without noting how the state speaks, and what force it exercises when it speaks? Why is there a righteous defense of the political right to insult Muslim minorities at the same time that insults to the Dutch government, any critique of state coercion, constitutes an unacceptable assault on civilization, modernity, or reason itself? When this kind of split thinking happens, freedom of speech not only depends on protection by the state but empowers that state; this, in turn, leads to the situation in which speech against the state is effectively or implicitly censored. Hence, the freedom we think belongs to the individual is actually conferred by the state, so we misunderstand its origin and its meaning.
This is also why, if we want to develop a critical conception of freedom of speech, it will have to be one that legitimates itself outside of state power, that is able to criticize state power as part of its free expression. We have to ask whether “relying on the state” leads to the “augmentation of state power.” If Islam is figured as the religion or the name of the population who will do violence to Dutch civilizational values, then that gives the Dutch state a certain license to do violence to what seems to threaten its own values. That also logically means that “doing violence” becomes a Dutch value. We see the intensification of anti-immigrant activities, the base ideological implementation of the Civic Integration exam, the overt celebration of hateful speech of the so-called autochthonic Dutch against religious minorities as a sign of freedom itself.
The question is not whether hateful speech is part of free speech, but rather, why has freedom in certain European contexts come to define itself as the freedom to hate? What does it mean when the notion of freedom has been twisted to ratify discrimination, xenophobia, racism, and nationalism? The Dutch Civic Integration Examination was one case in point. In 2006, immigrants were required to take an examination that included the mandatory viewing of images of two gay men kissing as a way to test their “tolerance” and, hence, capacity to assimilate to Dutch liberalism.23 Do I want this test administered in my name and for my benefit? Do I want the state to take up its defense of my sexual freedom in an effort to restrict immigration on racist grounds? What happens when seeking recourse to the protective actions of the state in turn augments and fortifies the state’s own power, including its power to articulate a racist national identity? And what happens when lesbian and gay freedoms are instrumentalized to harass religious minorities or to ensure that new immigrants can be denied entry on religious, ethnic, or racial grounds? Under these circumstances, sexual progressives must become “critical” of the state that appears so enthusiastically to be supporting our freedoms. What precisely is it doing with our freedoms? And are we willing to have our claims to freedom instrumentalized for the purposes of a racist reproduction of Dutch national identity through restrictive and coercive immigration policies?
Let me make the point even more precisely, if I can. It is one thing for the state to value freedom of expression and to protect expression, but it is quite another for the state to be the agent who decides whose freedom of expression will be protected and whose will not. Under what conditions does the state decide that a minority is threatened by certain kinds of aggressive speech, and under what other conditions does the state decide that a minority must tolerate being targeted by aggressive speech as a sign that we live in a democracy that savors freedom of speech? Perhaps this is the new meaning for Dutch tolerance: you must tolerate the pain and abuse we will deal you, and that is the proof that you can “integrate” and become part of Dutch citizenship. We have to ask why the state gives free reign to racist speech at the same time that it demands respect for sexual minorities. Is the latter being played against the former? And what would happen if sexual and religious minorities refused to be pitted against each other in this way? What would happen if both of them turned against the nationalist and racist strategies of the state as a joint strategy? If, following gay conservatives, we understand freedom as personal liberty and then base a politics on a libertarian notion of freedom, we sacrifice an important social dimension to the left understanding of freedom. If freedom belongs to the individual, then we can surely ask: which individuals are recognized as individuals?
In other words, what social forms of individuality establish the recognizability of some persons as individuals and others not? If such an individual liberty exists only to the extent that it is protected by the state, then the state exercises its prerogative to protect in some instances and to withdraw all protection in others. Let’s remember, then, that the libertarian notion of the individual corresponds to a certain version of state power and economic property, and, whereas in early versions of libertarianism the state is supposed to remain minimal (or privative) in order to maximize economic freedom, that is surely not the case in the present instance in which the state differentially protects rights depending on whether that protection suits its national aspirations, even its national self-understanding as “European,” against the new immigrant communities from North Africa, Turkey, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
In the context in which the state makes use of liberties in this way (differentially exercises its prerogative to protect or retract individual liberties, decides who will count as an individual whose rights are worth protecting, and who will not), we have a different situation. In such a case, “freedom of speech” presupposes that there will be no open public criticism of the state or its inconsistent and racist actions (after all, the state is the protector and the adjudicator in this scene). This means, implicitly, that only those modes of freedom of expression will be protected that in turn protect the state, unless also protected is the open criticism of the state’s racist speech. If the fortification of the state against established and new immigrant communities involves depriving them of freedom, questioning their own rights of assembly and expression, if it casts its own Muslim population as a threat to the value of freedom, then it protects one claim of freedom only through the intensification of unfreedom, through the augmentation of the state’s own coercive mechanisms. If independent filmmaking is to remain a critical practice, separate from and willing to criticize state power, then one has to analyze closely the situation in which film becomes the cultural means through which the state’s anti-immigrant practices are implemented and rationalized. The film industry then becomes the culture industry for the state, and it loses its standing as “independent” or, indeed, as “critical.” Under these conditions, we lose the independence from state authority implied in the term “independent film,” and that medium becomes a form of embedded reporting, taking on, even ratifying, the perspective of the state. As such, it becomes another visual instrument, like the cameras in Abu Ghraib, which stage and fortify the vicious embodied action of the civilizational mission, linking its propaganda against Islam with the torture and human rights violations in Iraq and Guantánamo. Of course, the right to insult and the right to produce provocative art become rights that the state defends, but when it defends those rights differentially and for specific policy purposes, those rights become suspect. If those rights are to have legitimacy, they cannot be justified through recourse to their utility in rationalizing a the deprivation of certain rights to religious practice and belief, in other words, certain rights of expression. There may be no legal way to “manage this risk,” but that is no reason why this instrumentalization should not become the focus of critical analysis and political opposition. To understand when and where the claim of free speech is robust, we have to ask, “If we point this out, and maintain a critical and public relation to this particular prerogative of state power, is our speech still protected?” If it is still protected, then free speech is an active part of democratic contestations and political struggles. If it is not, we must militate against its restriction, differential application, and instrumentalization for nondemocratic ends. If the prerequisites of a European polity (and this could be either the nation-state or the European Union) require either cultural homogeneity or a model of cultural pluralism, then, either way, the solution is figured as assimilation or integration into a set of cultural norms that are understood as internally already established, self-sufficient and self-standing. These norms are not considered changeable according to new demographic shifts, and they do not seek to respond to new populations and new claims to belonging. Indeed, if the core norms are already established, then one already knows what Dutch culture is, and one is closed to the idea that it may become something else, something different; indeed, one refuses the recognition that it already has become something different and that the change is, in fact, irreversible.
When freedom of expression comes to mean “the freedom to express an unwillingness to undergo change in light of contact with cultural difference,” then freedom of expression becomes the means through which a dogmatic and inflexible concept of culture becomes the precondition of citizenship itself. The state to which we appeal to protect the freedom of expression is the state that will close its doors to whomever it does not want to hear, whose speech is unwelcome within its borders. Within this framework, the freedom of personal expression, broadly construed, relies upon the suppression of a mobile and contestatory understanding of cultural difference. Such suppression makes clear how state violence invests in cultural homogeneity as it applies its exclusionary policies to rationalize coercive and discriminatory state policies toward Muslim immigrants. When the acts of one member of a group or some small number of members of a group are taken to be the defining actions and beliefs of the group itself, then that is not only an unjustified generalization but also racism, and it must also be opposed. Surely, there is an ongoing clash or antagonism between those who feel that their values of sexual freedom or freedom of expression are threatened by some minority religious beliefs and ways of life, but these are differences to be worked out through cohabitation and struggle, through participation in public discourse, through cultural and educational projects, allowing modes of separateness to coincide with modes of belonging (and not trying to close the fissure between the two). These are surely better strategies than appealing to a state that makes use of the defense of “freedom” to reassert its national purity—its racist conception of culture—as the precondition of reason, modernity, and civilization, and to halt all public criticism of the way it polices its borders and patrols its minority populations. A racist discourse can recast itself as the necessary groundwork of morality, reformulating its own hatred as moral virtue. Some crucial part of freedom of speech involves “speaking out,” which means, invariably, speaking out within specific scenes of address: speaking with and from and to one another. This implicit sociality in all address demands the recognition of freedom as a condition of social life, one that depends upon equality for its actualization. At stake is a rethinking of the processes of minoritization under new global conditions, asking what alliances are possible between religious, racial, and sexual minorities (when these “positions” are less identities than modes of living in relation to others and to guiding ideals). Then perhaps we can find constellations where the opposition to racism, to discrimination, to precarity, and to state violence remain the clear goals of political mobilization.