Free speech requires being heard, not just the right to speak.

Evidence

Another way of putting it is this. The enjoyment of free speech presupposes not merely the physical ability to speak but to be heard, a condition without which speaking to some effect is not possible. If one’s speech has no effect whatever it can hardly be said to be in the public sphere, no matter how loudly one shouts. To make others listen even if they would prefer not to hear, to speak to some consequence so that something in the political world is affected, to come to a conclusion, to have the authority to make practical decisions on the basis of that conclusion—these are all presupposed in the idea of free public debate as a liberal virtue. But these performatives are not open equally to everyone because the domain of free speech is always shaped by preestablished limits. These include formal legal limitations to free speech in liberal democracies (libel, slander, copyright, patent, and so forth), as well as conventional practices of secrecy (confidentiality) without which politics, business, and morality would collapse in any society. But these examples do not exhaust the limits I have in mind. The limits to free speech aren’t merely those imposed by law and convention—that is, by an external power. They are also intrinsic to the time and space it takes to build and demonstrate a particular argument, to understand a particular experience—and more broadly, to become particular speaking and listening subjects. The investment people have in particular arguments is not simply a matter of abstract, timeless logic. It relates to the kind of person one has become, and wants to continue to be. In other words, there is no public sphere of free speech at an instant. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 898

Categorization

• DEFINE: Redefines free speech as a performative dependent on listeners and time, not merely a legal right.
• XREF: Directly parallels the secularism critique that formal liberal neutrality hides constitutive exclusions based on subject formation. — connects to: A diversity of listeners enables speakers to voice public-spirited ideas they otherwise suppress — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1472; Speech acts require being heard, not merely uttering — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2309; General speech and assembly rights both enable and are shaped by demonstrations — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1199
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 898