Ben Shapiro will speak at Yale. He is hosted by the Buckley Institute. The topic: “How October 7 Broke America’s Colleges.” This is how I think it will go. Eager undergraduates spill out of Sheffield-Sterling Strathcona Hall, as a voice of unruly petulance echoes into the tense space. Inflammatory speech prompts impassioned questions with even more incendiary responses––looped into a destructive cycle of inflammation. Screams are heard. A performative stoicism marks the face of one of America’s venerated voices on the far right. In the following days, a flurry of writers launch critiques on Ben Shapiro’s arrival. A single man alters discourse with a few hundred breaths. The topic: “How October 7 Was the Turning Point for My Continued Political Relevance.” Ben Shapiro leaves the Omni, or the Graduate, or another hotel enraptured by worker organizing. He makes his way to another college—an itinerant preacher of the more modern kind. In the tour bus, his team clips, splices, and blends the media he generates from his “encounter with woke Yale students,” published on his social media accounts. Every view, every comment, every like, every slur, every defense, every attack, and every mode of engagement are tools for his survival. Ben Shapiro speaks at Yale for his survival.
Ben Shapiro’s speech is not the worst of failed speech. It is, rather, the quintessence of a contemporary approach to speech. And it is successful. When every letter is accountable for and accompanied by capital, this era of speech inaugurates a more efficient media operation, inscribing every form of agreement and dissent into itself. Shapiro represents the new media personality insofar as he, implicitly, rejects control over the narrative. Regardless of the diverse reception, the world listens to him, and him alone.
I am tired of implosive speech. It engenders the same, violent repetitions of our dispossessed state and the broken means by which we foolishly repair them. Implosive speech is the AI-generated, SEO-optimal Instagram page of the climate activist-turned-influencer; the mansion molded from George Floyd’s last breath-turned-sampling material by entrepreneurial activists; and the gunfights whose bullets are not made of metal but the material produced by those who call themselves “the master race” in hidden Reddit servers. Implosive speech is always accounted for. It captures the algorithm with masterful “engagement,” achieving a social existence measured in the movements of vectors in computer code. The deathly inflammation of implosive speech has already happened, and its spirited representations, e.g., Ben Shapiro, return again and again.
The solution isn’t to author a better version of totalizing speech. The left (and the right) invoke counter-readings to the dominant speakers in public discourse. Discourse becomes a battle to write the better take; to reclaim Archimedes’ Eureka!; to systematically account for the world and its failings, or at least to imagine something different. There is no end to this project. The limits of speech force the world to offer itself up again, anew. In expressing its incompleteness, a freer speech never stagnates. It stirs, provokes, disrupts, and demands—demands for, hopefully, better.
Speech is, by nature, limited. Use it. Turn the limits of speech from sites of pure anxiety to sites of generativity. Its existence as a partial object only demands its continued survival—its reverberations into the thoughts of listeners force them to decide on what to do with speech. Speech can only be poetic if it is to resist its subjection to algorithmic death. It must violate the normative rules placed upon itself with unexpected syntax, unreal metaphor, and unseen metonyms. It destroys its own architecture and builds a shantytown of alternative futures—one that will, inevitably, fail but soon demands a better one, made right in its wake. It explodes the algorithm so that we begin to see the distortions of our social life.
Abandon the halls of SSS to imagine what a better life could be beyond Beinecke; to recite the living lyric of the dead Palestinian poet; to perform the obeah rituals of the Haitian Revolution; to replay the harmonics of We Shall Overcome; to greet the woman whose plate you laded at the Community Soup Kitchen.
Make each syllable a seed for more life.