The notion of speech designates "not someone who was speaking about a mute thing, but an impediment, a difficulty, a gamut of possible positions, a profound uncertainty." Neither humans nor nonhumans "speak on their own," as traditional epistemology suggests, but only through various mediators. These words from the French science studies scholar Bruno Latour’s book Politics of Nature ring especially true this evening, after a marathon day at the IHEST summer school, with presentations and discussion from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. My ears are sore from the wireless headphones I’ve been wearing much of the day. The headphones link me to the earnest voices of the interpreters in their booth, and they in turn link me to everything that’s going on here, where I regretfully don’t speak the language. As an American whose native tongue is becoming the linga franca of international conferences, it’s not often that I’m so forcefully reminded that a simple conversation can require a lot of assistance.
Today during the discussion following my talk, one of the summer school participants asked me what I meant by deliberation. I had been talking about citizen juries, which are small groups of randomly selected citizens who meet to deliberate on sociotechnical controversies. Citizen juries usually provide recommendations to policy makers, but generally they are not authorized to make legally binding decisions. They deliberate but do not decide. Yesterday two French scholars, Loïc Blondiaux and Philippe Breton, gave very thoughtful talks on the role of deliberation in democratic politics, and I assumed my use of the term matched theirs. It turns out, however, that in French politics the word déliberation denotes a process that includes both discussion and decisionmaking. I was told that when referring to deliberation without decision making, the French use either discussion or débat public. And they refer to citizen juries and similar forums as concertation, which translates roughly as consultation or cooperation. The words themselves suggest that such efforts should go beyond mere talk, which may help explain the frustration expressed by many participants when their recommendations are not implemented. The frustration is understandable, but representative democracy requires that public officials consider many other factors beyond the deliberative recommendations of citizen juries.
So even after getting past the difficulties of wireless headphones, linguistic differences, and all the other “speech impediments” that arise in public deliberation, one might discover that someone else has the (legitimate?) power to decide.
About the Author: Mark Brown is a CSPO affiliate and is an associate professor in the Department of Government at California State University, Sacramento. He is the author of Science in Democracy.
