Expressive Free Speech, the State and the Public Sphere: A Bakhtinian–Deleuzian Analysis of ‘Public Address’ at Hyde Park

Abstract

In this paper I explore how struggles around free speech between social movements and the state are often underpinned by a deeper struggle around expressive images of what counts as either 'decent' or 'indecent' discussion. These points are developed by exploring what is arguably the most famous populist place for free speech in Britain, namely Hyde Park. In 1872 the state introduced the Parks Regulation Act in order to regulate, amongst other things, populist uses of free speech at Hyde Park. However, although the 1872 Act designated a site in Hyde Park for public meetings, it did not mention 'free speech'. Rather, the 1872 Act legally enforced the liberty to make a 'public address' and this was implicitly contrasted by the state of an expressive image of 'indecent' speakers exercising their 'right' of free speech at Hyde Park. Once constructed, the humiliating image of 'indecent' free speech could then be used by the state to regulate actual utterances of public speakers at Hyde Park. But the paper shows how in the years immediately following 1872 a battle was fought out in Hyde Park over the expressive image of public address between the state and regulars using Hyde Park as a public sphere to exercise free speech. For its part the state had to engage in meaningful deliberative forms of discussion within its own regulatory framework and with the public sphere at Hyde Park in order to maintain the legal form, content and expression of the 1872 Act. To draw out the implications of these points I employ some of the theoretical ideas of the Bakhtin Circle and Gilles Deleuze. Each set of thinkers in their own way make valuable contributions for understanding the relationship between the state, public sphere and expressive images.

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“…Ward (2019) started with the importance of the Socratic reason in the Philosophy of History and proposed to flourish the freedom in the modern, liberal democratic order. Two thousand years later British empire and civilization voted the 1872 Act, giving the right to free speech in Hyde Park (Roberts 2008).…”

Geographies of public space: Variegated publicness, variegated epistemologies

“…The English coffee houses, for example, were far from adhering to rational-critical principles of the bourgeoisie class, but punctuated by vastly diverse and unpredictable rhythms, discursive styles, and praxis of conversing (Laurier and Philo, 2007). Similarly, the Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, which, in addition to the fact that it was heavily regulated by legal codes enforcing the distinction between 'decent' and 'indecent' speeches (Roberts, 2008), was carnivalesque and comic, fraught with proselytising, political ranting, verbal nonsense, personal insults, play combats, and unanticipated encounters with strangers not included in the same political community (Cooper, 2006).…”

Public Spaces of Dissent

“…While discussion of this sort is tinged with an air of sociability between all concerned, it can also be passionate and heated because entwined in such debate are often other disagreements about (e.g.) what constitutes a fair and just society (see Crossley and Roberts 2004; Dryzek 2006; Eley 2002; Habermas 1989, 1996; Howell 1993; Keane 1998; Roberts 2003, 2008a; Weintraub 1997). The ‘public’ can therefore be theorised as containing a number of ‘counterpublic spheres’ existing in a variety of public spaces ‘where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs’ (Fraser 1992, 123) against mechanisms of governance and/or types of grievances.…”