“.. that what makes conversation democratic is not free, equal, and spontaneous expression but equal access to the floor, equal participation in setting the ground rules for discussion, and a set of ground rules designed to encourage pertinent speaking, attentive listening, appropriate simplifications, and widely apportioned speaking rights.”
From Michael Schudson, “Why Conversation is Not the Soul of Democracy,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 14 (1997), 297-300
A(nother) great piece by Michael Schudson, although its title might be a bit misleading. I’d say he’s not necessarily arguing against conversation, but making sure we don’t take its role in democracy for granted. As the quote shows, he insists that for conversation to play an important role in democracy, it has to be worked hard for – there is nothing spontaneous about quality conversation.
I do wonder though – is any conversation that does not necessarily have all the ideal requirements Schudson sets out any less democratic? (equal access to the floor, equal participation in setting the ground rules, attentive listening, etc) We might want to think about what a minimum threshold could be for democratic conversation to be considered as such.
James Bohman stresses the importance of such an exercise. Thinking about what would constitute a minimum threshold for a political system to be considered democratic, just and free from domination, he coins the idea of a “democratic minimum”: the capability to initiate deliberation and thus democratic decision-making processes. But as we see from the above, even Bohman’s absolute minimum requirement to be able to initiate deliberation is not a simple or straightfoward matter.
In practice, no conversation is ever equal, whether it comes to access to the floor, or having a part in determing the rules of conversation. Starting with the simple choice of language. Growing up as a son of Hong Kong immigrant parents in Amsterdam, the Netherlands – I learned the lesson of how undemocratic conversation can be, especially in multicultural societies. Conversations in public were always an away game for me. And again, being an international student in grad school in the United States, I don’t have the luxury of enjoying a home game during discussions and conversations. What often aggravates this is that the opposite side often presumes conversation is equal, unaware that there is a home/away game difference. And therefore not quite capable to “listen to silences”. These are soft, rather than hard, constraints on speech – but unlike hard measures like censorship, they are also harder to spot and less visible. Not only are they undemocratic, to the untrained eye, it is also invisible that they are undemocratic.
What to do? Here Roger Silverstone’s idea of hospitality is useful. Instead of imagining a talk being conducted out in an equal and open field, hospitality signals to us that conversation takes place in the particularity of someone’s home, with a host and a guest. The host, out of hospitality, aware that this is home, becomes temporarily the servant of the guest, in order to make the guest comfortable. What we see here is a situation where the one holding the power, being aware of it, temporarily makes an effort to subvert the power relationship with the other, in order to create a situation where a democratic conversation can take place.
What I am thinking hard about: while the notion of hospitality is universal, the rules of hospitality are not. Each place, each group and each culture has its own specific rules of what constitutes hospitality. What we need in this current day and age is a way of making these rules of hospitality, these protocols, be able to talk to each other, to be interoperable. Ideas, suggestions, known examples and experiments in the broadest sense are welcome.
