Tara, but on what level are we arguing? It seems we go everywhere...

 

The whole debate is kind of false. To say that speech should or could be limited in some ways is to deny the power of self-determination and critical self-interpretation, self-questioning so to speak.

 

The whole debate on free speech can be illustrated with the Foucault 's concept of governmentality. The dismantling of welfare-state forms of intervention is accompanied by a restructuring of techniques of governing, which transfer the leadership capacity of state apparatuses and instances to the population, to "responsible", "prudent" and "rational" individuals. This development relates primarily to the self-government, self-discipline and self-controlling individuals. So, if we self-govern ourselves, obviously we cannot allow this critical self-questioning such as free speech..

 

The problem of the concept of governmentality in this context lies primarily in the appearance of an inescapable totality, which seems to leave a defeatist withdrawal and individual exodus (Bartleby) as the only "forms of action" possible. Foucault, however, also sees a possibility specifically in the indissoluble linking of power and self-techniques. This possibility is developed in his Berkeley lectures from 1983 in the genealogy of a critical stance in western philosophy within the framework of the problematization of a term that played a central role in ancient philosophy: (parrhesia means in Greek roughly the activity of a person "saying everything"), freely speaking truth without rhetorical games, even when this is hazardous. The parrhesiastes speaks the truth, not because they are in possession of the truth, which he makes public in a certain situation, but because they are taking a risk. The clearest indication for the truth of the parrhesia consists in the "fact that a speaker says something dangerous - something other than what the majority believes." According to Foucault's interpretation, though, it is never a matter of revealing a secret that must be pulled out of the depths of the soul. Here truth consists less in opposition to the lie or to something "false", but rather in the verbal activity of speaking truth: "the function of parrhesia is not to demonstrate the truth to someone else, but has the function of criticism: criticism of the interlocutor or of the speaker himself."

 

Michel Foucault, Diskurs und Wahrheit, Berlin 1996, p.14 (discussion of parrhesia)

 

http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/) – very revealing  ]

 

 

Best, Julia