This is a short talk given at Berkeley by Judith Butler in December 2017. An excerpt:
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We have perhaps all tired of the Milo Yiannapolis lecture invitation that was issued by College Republicans last year. I joined a letter calling for the cancellation of that talk, and I asked that the reference to hate speech be struck from the letter. To my surprise, it remained, and so too did my signature. The problem I had with his planned talk was not that he was expressing conservative ideas; the problem was that he brought cameras into his lecture hall on several occasions, and projected images of members of his audience on a screen against their will and then proceeded to shame and berate people for being fat or for being trans or, indeed, for being ugly in his view. Yiannopolis had posted a photo of Adelaide Kramer, a trans student at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, on the backdrop screen of his lecture and then not only jeered at her, but encouraged others to do the same. Perhaps shaming and berating someone against his or her will, however offensive, is protected speech as long as it does not constitute a physical threat to the person shamed and berated. But it surely does constitute harassment of the kind that all faculty and student instructors know about through the obligatory training we take in compliance with Title IX (or what is now left of Title IX). I will take up that point in a moment.
There are at least two noteworthy dimensions of this story. One has to do with the use of cameras and “trigger cams” that project images of audience members against their will and the direct appeal to those watching or present to mock, harass, troll, the person and to flood that person’s email with insult and to hound that person. The other has to do with whether it is right to say that the first amendment came into conflict with anti-harassment protocols that we learned ought to be honored in the classroom and in all forms of social interaction with students. And further, how the invocation of the first amendment also goes against the core values of the university, ones that are time and again invoked to encourage us to engage in thoughtful conversation about controversial issues.
Let me take each of these issues separately, and then make a final remark. The projection of the image of Adelaide Kramer was not done with her consent, and the appeal to audience members and those watching online to flood the email, expose personal information, and invade privacy seemed to many of us a problem. What do we call what happened to Adelaide Kramer at Milwaukee, the trans student who found her image projected on the wall during the event, and then witnessed “in frozen terror” as the speaker incited the audience to harass her. So I use the word “harassment” and so, too, did President Mone of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Maybe we shrug our shoulders and say that this is expressive activity, but arguably it crosses the line between expressive activity and threat; and that line was crossed in a new way because of the way technology is now used tp incite people to engage in forms of cyber-bullying that did not exist before. So the legal vocabulary we have for distinguishing expressive activity from actual threats, or an incitement to engage in illegal activity – those latter two are not protected as expressive freedoms under the first amendment – the way we make that distinction changes when new technologies, or new uses of technology, produce new possibilities for incitement, harassment, and the commission of illegal activities. I am not sure which conservative viewpoints were being expressed at that moment: I could try to find propositional form for those actions, but would I then be generously and speculatively reconstructing the act as an idea, and so drawing attention away from this very specific form of targeting that included screening the image without consent, verbal incitement to harass that person, and calls to invade that person’s privacy.
One reason why in meeting with College Republicans, I and some other signatories of that letter asked whether their group could not invite someone with the same viewpoints but who would neither threaten expose members of the audience against their will through the trigger cam nor incite harassment against targeted members of the audience or the campus community. Although all the signatories opposed the conservative ideas, only some of us opposed the talk on the basis of the ideas expressed, noting the fascism, the racism, the transphobia, even the homophobia – I will return to these. One distinguishing feature of this case, however – and one reason nobody circulated a petition against Ben Shapiro – was the use of invasive visual technology in conjunction with explicit calls to invade privacy. Some of us asked both the student group and the administration to make sure that this technology would not be used by stipulating it as a condition of the contract. Our suggestions were not taken up as far as I know. Given that the university can honor the principle of speech and still regulate the time, place, and manner of the expressive activity in question, can we perhaps understand this form of technology as part of the “manner” and so subject to regulation? Or is it the case that this form of targeting and incitement moves us out of the domain of expressive activity altogether and into a consideration of harms and/or illegal activities.
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