An Aggregations of PJ's Blog Posts

President Obama recieves the script from his recent Mic Checking

This text was posted to Sociology Lens on December 10th. On December 13th, the piece was temporarily removed and I was asked to make revisions to make more explicit the conventional sociological themes in this piece. This request was made as the result of pressure from a senior professor who deemed this piece too “polemical” and not “sociological.” While I and many others in the discipline have epistemological objections to very concept of value-free social science, and thus view with suspicion any implication that sociology can be separated from politics, I agreed to make revisions, because I think that argument in this piece important and can only be strengthened by further reference to the social theory canon. The new version is now on Sociology Lens and archived on my personal blog.

A recent news piece for Inside Higher Ed reports on several instances where students have disrupted public presentations by conservative academics, activists, or politicians. The students used “the human microphone”—i.e., a practice of amplifying a speaker’s voice by having many people repeat the speaker’s words in unison—to offer counterpoints to the arguments being made by the presenter. The article’s author, Allie Grasgreen, asserts that the mic checking the conservative presenters is tantamount to “censorship.” This assertion shares the logic of what Karl Rove demanded when he was mic checked at John Hopkins:

If you believe in free speech and you have a chance to show it… if you believe in the right of the First Amendment to free speech… then you demonstrate it by shutting up and waiting until the Q&A session… line up behind the mic…

But Grasgreen and Rove both miss the point. Occupiers are trying to demonstrate—through the very performance of this act—that “free speech” is not evenly distributed. The point is that only the 1% ever find themselves at the podium. The 99% are left to fill the seats in the audience, and, if they are lucky, they may have the chance to do as Rove commands and line up behind the mic for a few brief seconds in the spotlight. This is, of course, because the opportunity to speak and to be heard is inextricable from issues of wealth and power. The few who hold these assets in abundance have more purchasing power in the attention economy. K Street is nothing if not an industrialized machine for converting money and power into speech that will be heard. Even more concerning is the Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United decision that makes the linkage between access to money and access to speech de jure and not merely de facto. Sure, we all may have “free speech,” but as George Orwell quipped in Animal Farm “some animals are more equal than others.”

The problem with the current discourse surrounding “free speech,” as it pertains to the Occupy movement, is that it has been cast in a radically conservative tone—it is backward looking, towards the white, male, and aristocratic thinkers of the Enlightenment who did not have to worry about power because they already had it. The tendency is to assume that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, we all somehow have equal access to the public sphere. Without such access, free speech is meaningless. What we need is a notion of free speech that accounts not only for negative freedom (i.e., freedom from) but also for positive freedom (i.e., freedom to) as well. That is to say, for the right to free (political) speech to have a practical significance, it must also imply a right of equal access to the public sphere. Of course, there are practical limits to equal access. Attention given to one individual or group comes at the expense of attention to others. But what the Occupy movement seems to be rejecting is the current (arguably anti-democratic) reality where distribution of access is left to be determined by market forces. The primary purpose of Occupy’s use of the human microphone at public speaking events is not to disrupt, but to be heard. It is not an assault on free speech but a tactic for obtaining it.

It is also important to examine the justifications used when suppressing these actions. The police who interrupt these mic checks are valorized as protecting free speech. Such claims are naïve, if not outright deceptive. The reason why universities break up these actions is because they want to preserve and protect the routine operation of the bureaucracy; it has little to do with freedom and is, instead, about rationalization (what sociologist Max Weber described as the tendency of Modern bureaucratic institutions to value efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control above all else). We should not conflate the maintenance of order and the protection of institutional reputation (zwecktrational action) with struggles motivated by the pursuit of an abstract ideal of freedom (wertrational action).

This debate over access and control extends beyond issues of free speech and the human microphone. Commentators have made similar criticisms of the Occupy movement’s tactic of indefinite encampment on (often privately-owned) public spaces. Opponents have argued that by camping in a public space, Occupiers are, simultaneously, denying others the freedom to use that space. Again, this concept of freedom is blind to power. Like speech, space is not evenly distributed. Occupiers are protesting a society in which the town square has given way to the shopping mall. The encampments are, in part, a statement about the forfeiture of public space to the private sector—that is, out of the hands of the 99% and into the hands of the 1%. When articulated by those who already control the vast majority of the space, claims that the encampments constitute a denial of their freedom to assemble ring hollow.

Both critics and journalists will sound hopelessly out of touch so long as they continue to apply to Occupy the very concept of freedom that the movement is criticizing. Occupy believes in what Cicero observed long ago: “Freedom is participation in power.” While this aphorism may be a bit simplistic, it is certainly true that a concept of freedom that is blind to power merely serves to reinforce it.

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