“I feel like I need to edit myself.” Imagine the context where you might say this about your speech. Then imagine when you might say it about your writing. Do you note a difference? Tomorrow I am beginning a new semester, teaching both a writing and a speech composition class. Thinking about these modes of communication together, our inherited assumptions about the purpose of editing becomes clearer. Here is a summary of the standard attitude: to edit writing is to make it better; to edit speech is to make it false.
The exceptions to this are many, but they too illuminate the same nexus of ideas. Note, in the video below, how this attitude plays out. Here, the police chief is purportedly not willing to speak because of the lack of preparation his answers may show. He wants to read the written questions in advance. We may not accept this excuse as more than a tactic, but the tactic is frequently effective. It is broadly if not universally accepted that a speaker, especially one who represents the views of an institution or a collective, should be permitted some time to formulate a response. Speech, once we see it as something elicited rather than already possessed, is in need of an editing process.
A great deal of the consternation about free speech circulates around a different image, one where my speech originates from myself and clearly represents my opinions and attitudes. The anticipation that speech may not have its desired effect becomes a feeling of caution. Choose your words carefully can sound like a threat, as well as good advice. When it is understood as a threat it is given the weighty-sounding name of “self-censorship.” There are some obvious motives for the social scientific research being conducted on it, but only one constant seems to emerge. Reports of “self-censorship” are highly correlated with education level. Perhaps this comes as a surprise because of the commonly circulated fantasy of campus cancel culture in the United States. The pressure to edit one’s speech comes from an intolerant environment of radicalized youths whose refusal to hear argument leads to silencing. Perhaps instead it may be that through education one recognizes a greater plurality of meaning in one’s own speech. Rhetorical capacity is a kind of discernment of potential meanings, and this could certainly be understood (at least in part) as the refinement of social fears.
I wonder how different the fear experienced by those “self-censoring” is from the fear most of us have when speaking in front of a large group. Perhaps the difference is one of emphasis: in the public speaking anxiety dream, we all know what we don’t want people to understand or see about us. The intensity of the fear eclipses any desire to communicate. Those who feel they are self-censoring are anticipating a reaction to a specific desire of their own. They wish to see their words and their effect as one moment: what I say is what I mean, and what I mean should be well-received. A whole repertoire of attitudes reside here: that speech is always at the ready, that I know what I mean, that my thoughts and opinions are distorted if their expression considers the interpretation of others. Speech is only artful if it is deceitful or self-involved. In speech, to consider what others may think is no longer thoughtfulness but manipulation. If I am editing my speech, it is because you are manipulating me.
I think this fantasy of speech emerges from a long tradition—one much more interesting than its residues—that blended an individualized epistemology with a liberalist politics. Its most famous thinker is John Locke. In his famous Essay on Human Understanding, Locke described “the end of speech in general” as “a very short and expedite way of conveying their thoughts one to another.” Words are “the marks of the ideas of the speaker.”1 But this makes words little shipping containers that have to pass through the depot of the mind, collecting ideas inside them. What, then, are we to make of the delivery of all the beetles in these boxes when they are delivered to us? Locke did make a brilliant departure here: ideas don’t begin as ideas, but as sensible impressions. It is communicating them that makes them ideas. But in spite of this insight Locke (like almost all early modern speech theory) has difficulty accounting for what Talcott Parsons and later Niklas Luhmann called “double contingency.”2 The meaning of all communicative interaction depends upon the awareness that “both know that both know that one could also act differently.” One of the things that perhaps most commonly leads to the feeling of self-censorship is that the other party responds to some feature of your speech that did not appear to you as a choice from among alternatives. "That's just what it's called." "That's just how I feel." "That's just the way it is." When we take recourse into the apparent naturalness of our own speech we are most vulnerable to responses of others. I am not choosing to say it “that way” — you are choosing to hear it that way.
This attitude detaches speech from thinking. One of the joys of speaking is that precisely by attending to others around us, seeing their reactions and hearing their responses, we discover new thoughts, ideas we did not realize were implications of our positions. We are editing ourselves not only out of fear of how our ideas will be received but in an attempt to better refine them, to have them understood by others more readily, and so often better understood by ourselves. We find this expressed in one of Montaigne’s earliest essays, “On Ready or Hesitant Delivery,”
The occasion, the company, the very act of my using my voice, draw from my mind more than what I can find there when I exercise it and try it out all by myself. And that is why the spoken word is worth more than the written—if a choice can be made between things of no value.
Kleist’s short essay, “On the Gradual Production of Thought During Speech,” pursues this point even more closely. He describes how, when working on a particularly difficult problem in mathematics, he can find the solution just by speaking his mind to someone:
During this process nothing is more helpful to me than a sudden movement on my sister’s part, as if she were about to interrupt me; for my mind, already tense, becomes even more excited by this attempt to deprive it of the speech of which it enjoys the possession and, like a great general in an awkward position, reaches an even higher tension and increases in capacity.
Here the mind’s freedom is only discovered by the anticipation of that interruption of speech. The spontaneity so valued in speech, as opposed to “prepared statements,” is an effect of a lightning-fast editing of speech before its audience. In writing, it is easy to accept that editing brings us closer to our meaning. In speaking, the very readiness of a delivery that may be the unique practice of “editing” an idea in company can also become the false seal of self-authorship. We more easily forget when speaking that language is never fully ours, that we are all inheritors of an estate forever in probate, being claimed for a thousand different purposes. There is no meaningful speech without an audience: it is the constraints placed upon speech by an audience that give meaning to speech’s freedom.
This is not to say that we should not be concerned with those who fear speaking out. On the contrary, we should take this fear as a more serious subject of study, one that cannot be captured in a single journalistic concept like “self-censorship.” There is no pure conceptual test that will delimit an instance of the chilling effect from the fear that is a normal part of the deliberation involved in forming speech. Judgment is never purely conceptual. It involves the recognition of particular circumstances that may not be translated into universal laws or principles. But this is also why justice can never be fully secured through law. There must always be an equitable recourse to judgment because the law is unable, on its own principles, to recognize mitigating or complicating factors. The discourse of law cannot describe in its own discourse the basis of its authority, and so cannot inscribe into itself a procedure for achieving equity. It must mark only a place for judgment to adjust the law so as to make it a response to the facts. Which facts, as ever, is a matter of judgment as well, and someone must step forward to speak for them.
Essay, 3.2.2.
“There is a double contingency inherent in interaction. On the one hand, ego’s gratifications are contingent on his selection among available alternatives. But in turn, alter’s reaction will be contingent on ego’s selection and will result from a complementary selection on alter’s part.” ‘Some Fundamental Categories of the Theory of Action: A General Statement’, pp. 3–29 in Toward a General Theory of Action.