{"id":42157,"date":"2018-02-28T01:00:04","date_gmt":"2018-02-28T06:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=42157"},"modified":"2018-02-07T11:31:29","modified_gmt":"2018-02-07T16:31:29","slug":"qotd-words-as-physical-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/02\/28\/qotd-words-as-physical-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Words as “physical violence”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Berkeley. Evergreen. Middlebury. Missou. Yale. Brown. McMasters. Wilfred Laurier. The list goes on. One must wonder where this trend will ultimately take us. There have been several justifications given for this increasing rash of no-platforming, shaming, and at times, physical violence on North American campuses. In essence, these justifications can be distilled into a triad of well-meaning but ultimately flawed theses, namely, 1.) that all discourse is about power and that any speech that renders a listener physiologically uncomfortable therefore rises to the level of a physical attack upon that individual, thereby justifying actual<\/em> physical violence in response, 2.) that for the sake of historically marginalized voices, persons who are members of historically privileged groups should forfeit their right to free speech or ought to remain silent, 3.) that certain assertions, even if possibly true<\/em>, are nonetheless morally impermissible to make since to do so will likely create conditions whereby bad-intentioned persons will inevitably and successfully advance their morally heinous projects.<\/p>\n

This first thesis \u2014 that all discourse is fundamentally about power \u2014 finds its philosophical origins in the likes of post-modernists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. To quote Foucault, \u201cDiscourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations<\/em>.\u201d Thus, on Foucalt\u2019s view, if all discourse is, at heart, really just veiled force relations between competing groups; if language isn\u2019t fundamentally capable of being about objective truth or about the world<\/em> in any meaningful sense, then the ink symbols written on the page and the shaped air admitted from one\u2019s mouth in the forms of \u2018rationality\u2019, \u2018facts\u2019, \u2018knowledge\u2019, and \u2018truth\u2019 are just another set of weapons in a person\u2019s overall arsenal to seize and maintain power, no different in kind<\/em> from weapons of a physical sort. To speak then, on Foucault\u2019s view, is to wield a weapon, albeit a subtler and refined one. The uncomfortable physiological feeling of hearing offensive speech, it would then seem, vindicates this view that one is being attacked. One might thus conclude, \u201cWhy not attack back with heavier, more effective, and more expedient weapons?\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael Robillard, “In Defense of Offense”, Quillette<\/em><\/a>, 2018-02-05.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Berkeley. Evergreen. Middlebury. Missou. Yale. Brown. McMasters. Wilfred Laurier. The list goes on. One must wonder where this trend will ultimately take us. There have been several justifications given for this increasing rash of no-platforming, shaming, and at times, physical violence on North American campuses. In essence, these justifications can be distilled into a triad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,10,53,41],"tags":[459,186,576,1020,764],"class_list":["post-42157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-liberty","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-censorship","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-philosophy","tag-progressives","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-aXX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42157"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42158,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42157\/revisions\/42158"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}