Freedom to Hate
Heather McRobie, Literary Freedom: A Cultural Right to Literature
Zero Books, 104pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781780998800
reviewed by Katie Da Cunha Lewin
As a resident of Brighton for two years, I had the misfortune to witness the infamous March for England, an ostensibly celebratory event for St. George’s Day organised by the English Defence League (EDL), which was in actuality an excuse for loud racism, left-baiting and violence. As a staunch despiser of the group I, along with most of Brighton, attended the counter-demonstration and witnessed the small collection of (mostly) bald men make their way through the main streets, shouting and gesturing obscenities.
The discourse of anti-EDL groups such as AntiFA incorporates slogans such as ‘Fascist scum off our streets’ and ‘Nazis go home.’ This has always struck me as bizarre: a group that vocalises its inclusion of all, defined by its specific exclusion of one group in particular. In conversation with espousers of this idea, I was always met with confusion or anger, as if I had failed to grasp the correct Brighton zeitgeist and was out of the accepted loop, when my question was really about validity of fighting fire with fire. How do we ban an event like this without running the risk of impinging upon free speech rights and appearing hypocritical? It is this kind of bind that concerns Heather Katharine McRobie, a journalist and PhD candidate at Oxford, as she asks: how can we, as a Western society, both encourage free speech and condemn that which offends our sensibilities? Where do the boundaries lie in the writing and use of ‘hate speech’ in a culture that preaches tolerance and freedom?
Literary Freedom, based on work done by McRobie whilst researching at the University of Sarajevo, posits that literary freedom is a right of each individual in all aspects of life: civil and political but also economic, social and cultural. Censorship, in any form, is a violation of these rights and must be avoided by any state institution. McRobie seeks to justify her identification of an individual’s right to literary freedom through using the ‘capabilities approach’ outlined by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen. This approach argues for the redrawing of freedoms through the acknowledgement of what individuals are capable of achieving. The emphasis is placed upon outcomes, measurable by the extent to which individuals can fulfil their own aims and goals, at a remove from external defining factors. These freedoms ensure ‘true access and participation, not merely through state abstention from persecution and denial of civil and political rights,’ so that ‘the suppression of writers is not only a violation of the civil and political rights of the individual writer, but also a violation of the broader community’s right to fully enjoy and participate in cultural life.’
McRobie’s book first builds the case for literary freedom as a right in all senses, before looking at specific examples of transgressive literature. Her opening chapter outlines several different definitions of culture, invoking the legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron’s idea of ‘liberal cosmopolitanism’ – the mixing of different cultures in a single community that leads to a wider choice of lifestyle for the individual – and considers several responses to it by Homi Bhahba and others. She harnesses Judith Butler and Gayata Spivak’s ideas about the transgressive voice as a way to synthesise differences between individual and group rights, suggesting that the writer of controversial literature is in some way a figure that resides within these two differing positions, and that transgressive literature is integral to culture. She goes on to grapple with the concept of high art, and the vexed question of state funding; confronting the idea of the writer – vis-à-vis Roland Barthes’ conception of the authorless text – and concluding that writers still have an integral role to play in shaping society; her final chapter looks at the work of the ultranationalist poet Radovan Karadzic, both its repercussions and the responses of what she sees as a positive society.
McRobie suggests that high art is crucial to individuals in its redrawing of social boundaries: transgression demonstrates new possibilities for the individual within their society. This is a new kind of positive approach that considers the individual in relation to community, in contrast to the more prevalent ‘negative liberty’ position, which seeks to ensure the achievement of the individual despite restraint, emerging from the individualism of liberal ideology. A writer is indeed metonymic for the individual: the symbiosis of writer and society meaning that self-censorship is detrimental for both. For McRobie, hate speech should be positively countered by those it harms by a process of ‘speaking back.’ Hate speech therefore should not as an impingement on our right to free speech, but as something that can be contained – removed from its dangerous contexts in order to neutralise its danger.
McRobie sets out the gist of her argument very clearly at the outset; it is re-iterated thereafter with tiresome frequency. The book also has a tendency to sound like an extended literature review – referencing a plethora of names, book titles and argument summaries. Some references are more useful than others. For example, remarking on Roland Barthes’s 1967 ‘Death of the Author’ essay McRobie observes that ‘Barthes is not concerned with the “writer”, and does not intend to undertake an analysis of the writer’s role in society; in short, he is addressing a different question.’ Indeed – so why include him at all?
This is not the only time a well-known theorist is invoked only to be countered or nullified to the point that their inclusion appears almost arbitrary. Perhaps the rationale in using big-name theorists is as a sort of holding point for readers who are au fait with critical theory, in a text whose principal points of reference are more obscure. While the scope of her research – which synthesises a number of works of political, anthropological and sociological analysis – is to be admired, the text seems to lose its way in a fog of theoretical name-checking. What appears conspicuously lacking is an actual deep grasp of the topic introduced on the first few pages: hate speech and its effects. There are some references to Karadzic, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and the Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl but the whole study would greatly benefit from further extended examples of literary hate speech and its positioning in the societies it affects.
McRobie says several times that there are some points that cannot be clarified due to the size of this work. And that, perhaps, is the heart of the problem with Literary Freedom. An attempt to theorise the position of transgressive literature is absolutely a worthy and interesting topic of discussion, but this text feels rushed and seems to point to itself as a Masters dissertation-made-book. It needs either more in-depth theoretical discussion, addressing the points McRobie acknowledges she lacks the space to discuss, or further examples of hate speech and less reliance on just one. As an introduction to some of the political philosophy behind free speech, it is a helpful and illuminating read, but it would have needed further fleshing out to do justice to its topic.
The discourse of anti-EDL groups such as AntiFA incorporates slogans such as ‘Fascist scum off our streets’ and ‘Nazis go home.’ This has always struck me as bizarre: a group that vocalises its inclusion of all, defined by its specific exclusion of one group in particular. In conversation with espousers of this idea, I was always met with confusion or anger, as if I had failed to grasp the correct Brighton zeitgeist and was out of the accepted loop, when my question was really about validity of fighting fire with fire. How do we ban an event like this without running the risk of impinging upon free speech rights and appearing hypocritical? It is this kind of bind that concerns Heather Katharine McRobie, a journalist and PhD candidate at Oxford, as she asks: how can we, as a Western society, both encourage free speech and condemn that which offends our sensibilities? Where do the boundaries lie in the writing and use of ‘hate speech’ in a culture that preaches tolerance and freedom?
Literary Freedom, based on work done by McRobie whilst researching at the University of Sarajevo, posits that literary freedom is a right of each individual in all aspects of life: civil and political but also economic, social and cultural. Censorship, in any form, is a violation of these rights and must be avoided by any state institution. McRobie seeks to justify her identification of an individual’s right to literary freedom through using the ‘capabilities approach’ outlined by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen. This approach argues for the redrawing of freedoms through the acknowledgement of what individuals are capable of achieving. The emphasis is placed upon outcomes, measurable by the extent to which individuals can fulfil their own aims and goals, at a remove from external defining factors. These freedoms ensure ‘true access and participation, not merely through state abstention from persecution and denial of civil and political rights,’ so that ‘the suppression of writers is not only a violation of the civil and political rights of the individual writer, but also a violation of the broader community’s right to fully enjoy and participate in cultural life.’
McRobie’s book first builds the case for literary freedom as a right in all senses, before looking at specific examples of transgressive literature. Her opening chapter outlines several different definitions of culture, invoking the legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron’s idea of ‘liberal cosmopolitanism’ – the mixing of different cultures in a single community that leads to a wider choice of lifestyle for the individual – and considers several responses to it by Homi Bhahba and others. She harnesses Judith Butler and Gayata Spivak’s ideas about the transgressive voice as a way to synthesise differences between individual and group rights, suggesting that the writer of controversial literature is in some way a figure that resides within these two differing positions, and that transgressive literature is integral to culture. She goes on to grapple with the concept of high art, and the vexed question of state funding; confronting the idea of the writer – vis-à-vis Roland Barthes’ conception of the authorless text – and concluding that writers still have an integral role to play in shaping society; her final chapter looks at the work of the ultranationalist poet Radovan Karadzic, both its repercussions and the responses of what she sees as a positive society.
McRobie suggests that high art is crucial to individuals in its redrawing of social boundaries: transgression demonstrates new possibilities for the individual within their society. This is a new kind of positive approach that considers the individual in relation to community, in contrast to the more prevalent ‘negative liberty’ position, which seeks to ensure the achievement of the individual despite restraint, emerging from the individualism of liberal ideology. A writer is indeed metonymic for the individual: the symbiosis of writer and society meaning that self-censorship is detrimental for both. For McRobie, hate speech should be positively countered by those it harms by a process of ‘speaking back.’ Hate speech therefore should not as an impingement on our right to free speech, but as something that can be contained – removed from its dangerous contexts in order to neutralise its danger.
McRobie sets out the gist of her argument very clearly at the outset; it is re-iterated thereafter with tiresome frequency. The book also has a tendency to sound like an extended literature review – referencing a plethora of names, book titles and argument summaries. Some references are more useful than others. For example, remarking on Roland Barthes’s 1967 ‘Death of the Author’ essay McRobie observes that ‘Barthes is not concerned with the “writer”, and does not intend to undertake an analysis of the writer’s role in society; in short, he is addressing a different question.’ Indeed – so why include him at all?
This is not the only time a well-known theorist is invoked only to be countered or nullified to the point that their inclusion appears almost arbitrary. Perhaps the rationale in using big-name theorists is as a sort of holding point for readers who are au fait with critical theory, in a text whose principal points of reference are more obscure. While the scope of her research – which synthesises a number of works of political, anthropological and sociological analysis – is to be admired, the text seems to lose its way in a fog of theoretical name-checking. What appears conspicuously lacking is an actual deep grasp of the topic introduced on the first few pages: hate speech and its effects. There are some references to Karadzic, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and the Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl but the whole study would greatly benefit from further extended examples of literary hate speech and its positioning in the societies it affects.
McRobie says several times that there are some points that cannot be clarified due to the size of this work. And that, perhaps, is the heart of the problem with Literary Freedom. An attempt to theorise the position of transgressive literature is absolutely a worthy and interesting topic of discussion, but this text feels rushed and seems to point to itself as a Masters dissertation-made-book. It needs either more in-depth theoretical discussion, addressing the points McRobie acknowledges she lacks the space to discuss, or further examples of hate speech and less reliance on just one. As an introduction to some of the political philosophy behind free speech, it is a helpful and illuminating read, but it would have needed further fleshing out to do justice to its topic.