John Michael Roberts: The Aesthetics of Free Speech: Rethinking the Public Sphere.

John Michael Roberts The Aesthetics of Free Speech: Rethinking the Public Sphere. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 288 pp. ISBN 1-403-90566-5 (hbk) 52.50 [pounds sterling]

This is a book about people speaking to one another in public spaces. In particular, it is about the ways in which people speak to one another politically: how they speak about rights, liberties and freedoms. The book therefore isolates one form of freedom, namely free speech, as one of the determining moments of the capitalist public sphere. At the same time, however, the book also aims to identify and examine a judgemental aesthetic about what counts as 'good' or 'reasonable' discussion, therefore appropriate for expression in the public sphere. In doing so, the book contains an engaging reading of several key thinkers who have grappled with questions of free speech; offers a Marxist argument concerning the public sphere and free speech; and suggests ways in which we might go about thinking through the idea of a proletarian public sphere.

Roberts seeks to abstract the capitalist form of free speech and the public sphere. This amounts to a critical interrogation of several related themes and tendencies, which merge into one another. The argument is that the public sphere under capitalism assumes a particular ideological form unique to capitalism. In so doing, the public sphere internalises both the identity of the reproduction of capitalism--by refracting the reproduction of capitalism--and the contradictions of capitalism, in its own unique way. The contradictions of the capitalist public sphere reproduce themselves at various levels of abstraction, one of which is the alienated form of free speech that it generates. Finally, attached to the contradictions internalised by free speech and the public sphere is an 'aesthetic' of what counts as reasonable discussion.

In part, Roberts's counter-example is historical: he has in mind the kind of public sphere invoked by many of the Levellers, in which one of the main objects for discussion was a radical reconceptualisation of the state form. In other words, it was a conception of a public sphere founded on an inclusive democracy, and thus a democratisation of state power. Thus the Putney Debates tell us something about the conflicting demands of liberty found within both proletarian and bourgeois public spheres. This conflict takes up the bulk of the book. As is well known, the classic ploy in liberal theory is to denigrate popular arguments for an extension of democratic rights, and Roberts explores the way that this denigration functions as an integral ideological form of the bourgeois public sphere. He does so via a critique of liberal political thinking on the public sphere, in the writings of Kant, Mill and Habermas.

Each of these writers, although in different ways, contributes to the defence of a certain aesthetic form of the public sphere--a defence that both explicitly and implicitly suggests that only those who have a 'cultivated', 'competent' and 'educated' grasp of the issues up for discussion should have the freedom to be heard. Certain 'accents' cannot be heard; certain voices must remain silent; the mob needs to be quelled. Thus Roberts examines the way in which liberal theory simultaneously argues for the inclusion of each person into the public sphere, and yet pushes for the exclusion of certain people from that same sphere. Kant does this at an abstract level, declaring that those who engage in the lawless use of reason will forfeit their freedom of thought, and thereby encouraging an outlook that denigrates and humiliates everyday popular sensibility. Mill does this at a concrete level, extending Kant's exclusionary tactics into a defence of the regulatory form of the liberal capitalist state. And Habermas manages to synthesise both through an abstract and concrete discussion of the 'cultivated personality'.

Each of these discussions is interesting; and through the discussions, Roberts builds a convincing critique of the liberal aesthetics of free speech. There are some peculiarities of the critique with which one might quibble--indeed, working through these peculiarities might have made the critique even more successful. For example, Roberts claims that Mill is not interested in setting out an argument for democracy per se, but rather is interested in setting out the prerequisites for a robust liberal democracy. But Roberts might have made his argument stronger by arguing that Mill is not engaged in a defence of any kind of democracy--even a liberal one. On a number of grounds, Mill is clearly an anti-democrat: on the grounds that the liberty of individuals overrides the demands of the majority; on the grounds that the poor should have things regulated for them but not by them; through his argument that a system of plural voting is necessary in order to ensure that the cultivated elite retains power; and through his argument for representative government rather than representative democracy. All told, however, Roberts convincingly draws out and challenges the liberal aesthetics of free speech.

The argument might perhaps have been more convincing with more concrete applications. The book takes interesting turns here and there, for example in the discussion of public-private partnerships, but these are few and far between. I also have the sense that, for strategic reasons, the Bakhtinian mode of analysis should perhaps have been played mezzo rather than forte. The extended discussions of Bakhtin in the earlier chapters might well have the effect of turning away some of the nonMarxists who really could do with reading this book; and the ammunition taken from Bakhtin might have been more effective had it been introduced gradually and more subtly. (There's almost a sense in which Roberts's use of Bakhtin seeks to replicate the openness of the bourgeois public sphere, in a kind of 'I must be open and honest about where this argument is coming from'. It might have been more fun--both to write and to read--if Bakhtin had been made to perform more of an underground role, underpinning the argument and appearing on a few rare but telling occasions.)

I also found some aspects of the final chapter, in which the distinction between the proletarian public sphere and the bourgeois public sphere is argued for at length, rather unconvincing. In an interesting argu-ment, Roberts seeks to derive the capitalist form of free speech from the commodity form. All well and good. But his argument concerning the proletarian public sphere turns into an account of the 'proletarian-personality'. The proletarian public sphere seems to rest on this proletarian-personality, and is a sphere that reaches out to a 'communist-personality'. But this argument really isn't fleshed out in a convincing way and, perhaps surprisingly, rests on a decidedly uncritical appropriation of the term 'personality'. I doubt whether the proletarian public sphere really needs to be founded on an idea that is so central to bourgeois law and ideology.