Seven Stories of Threatening Speech by Miller Ruth A.;

Author:Miller, Ruth A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Conclusion

Rereading stories of Singleton’s insanity and cure alongside stories of the suffragists’ insanity and cure thus provides an alternative way of thinking more generally about insane speech, voices heard, and their remedies. When separated from the realm of human identity or agency, speaking chaotically and hearing nonhuman voices need not necessarily be pitied, attacked, or held up as cautionary tales—indeed, they need not be understood as symptomatic of an illness or a disease at all. Rather, insane speech and voices heard can be read in these narratives as perfectly functional and effective variations on computational speech—sorting and reproducing information as a means of executing widespread systemic change. As such, these linguistic activities are without question threatening and potentially harmful: like the other aspects of suffragists’ speech as computational language that appear in this book, they also replace the transmission of messages and meaning with the production of noise and the shifting of systems, they disperse language over environments rather than situating it in speakers, and they thereby privilege changes to physical spaces over actions on the part of human subjects.

But, as these stories also make clear, the medical, legal, or political cure for this speech is just as potentially damaging as insane speech itself. Translating this nonhuman linguistic activity for human consumption, and trapping it within the realm of human subjectivity, these remedies by no means alter its fundamental character. Both the speech and the voices remain nonhuman, remain physical, and remain dispersed throughout smart environments. Both continue to alter, transform, or assault systems even as they succeed in communicating messages. Like the speech of the disembodied brain that was both physical itself and a physical operation—both speaking to humans in binary and, in the process, altering networks—cured speech continued to transform environments even as it became relevant to human communication.

Or, to put it another way, those whose insane linguistic activity was ostensibly cured were operating as much in the fourth category of Aristotelian linguistic existence—where rational speech can be possessed but never recognized—as those whose insane linguistic activity remained unchanged. Both had more affinity to machines running code than to humans doing things with words.

And indeed, this methodological shift makes it possible to reread a variety of takes on threatening speech and its remedies. In 1927, for instance, the same year that Helen Gardener willed her brain to Cornell University, the Supreme Court issued an influential decision—Whitney v. California—that addressed precisely this sort of curative or remedial speech. As Justice Louis Brandeis argued in his opinion in this case, advocating (good) speech as the remedy for (bad) speech,

Those who won our independence… believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth… that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.…[B]elieving in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they eschewed silence coerced by law.

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