More of a Clarification Than Correction. I was Quoting Stanley Fish

When I said free speech isn't free, months ago, here. But now that the idea is in play based on seeing the very same guy I basically fought against before now defending that idea that free speech has limits, quoting that line, I thought it was a good idea to repost some of Prof. Fish.

I say repost as even if I did some digging around my archives, I do not remember what chunk or bit I published before. Might have been this interview. Might have been directly from his book. In any case, here goes.

Q : You have written that free speech is a conceptual impossibility as the condition of speech being free in the first place is unrealizable. Why is this so?

A : The condition of speech being free is not only unrealizable, it is also undesirable. It would be a condition in which speech was offered for no reason whatsoever. Once speech is offered for a reason it is necessarily, if only silently, negating all of the other reasons for which one might have spoken. Therefore the only condition in which free speech would be realizable is if the speech didn't mean anything. Free speech is speech that doesn't mean anything.

Once meaning, assertion, predication get into the act the condition of freedom has already been lost and, as I would say, well lost because you want speech to mean something; you don't want to live in a world where people's utterances are weightless -- neither commit to anything, nor illuminate or challenge you in any way. The impossibility of free speech is one of the happy facts of our condition and not a fact to be lamented. There's no such thing as free speech and it's a good thing too.

From Here.

This quoted chunk is from the near end of the interview. I recommend anyone not too familiar with Prof. Fish's theories to read it all. And it is not all that long. Rather short. Really.