SPEECH AND OTHER ACTS

Extract

In an article published in 2001, Charles W. Collier raises a number of objections to my article “Speech, Harm, and the Mind-Body Problem in First Amendment Jurisprudence,” beginning with an implicit objection embedded in the subtitle of his article: “Hate Speech and the Mind-Body Problem: A Critique of Postmodern Censorship Theory.” Since I advocate neither postmodernism nor censorship, and since I would have thought that “postmodern censorship” was an oxymoron, I found this characterization of my position surprising, to say the least. Collier does not define “postmodern censorship theory” or even “postmodernism,” but he helpfully includes a note citing Steven Gey's article, “The Case against Postmodern Censorship Theory.” Gey, in turn, claims to have picked up the terminology from an article by Kathleen Sullivan, “Free Speech Wars.” Curiously, though, Sullivan nowhere uses the phrase “postmodern censorship theory” in the article cited, although she does discuss a group of leftist legal theorists she dubs “the new speech regulators,” arguing that they: demand a response from those who would leave speech mostly deregulated; and they deserve a response that goes beyond the rote and reflexive invocation of free speech as an article of faith. The appeal to the First Amendment as self-evident truth may be no more effective, as Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. recently cautioned, than Samuel Johnson's attempt to refute Bishop Berkeley merely by kicking a stone.