|
| Censorship is a Necessay and Constitutive Part of Culture |
| For most of human history, there has been little admiration for those who speak freely: propriety and morality demanded that speakers show respect for one's "betters." Socrates discovered the danger of teachings that cast doubt upon authorized religion. Within pre-modern cultures, censorship of deviant expression seldom needed to be conceptualized since it was pervasive and implicit. Only with the relatively recent assertion of a right to free expression, and only within the public discourse of the modern democracies, has "censorship" has become a pejorative term--the C-word. How dare you censor me! This post-Enlightenment condemnation of censorship usually assumes a conspiracy against expression directed by a small and secretive group: like the Star Chamber of the Tudor and Stuart monarchies, or the Inquisition of the 17th Century Catholic Church. Yet, the liberal crusade against this restricted form of censorship does not seem very pertinent to the more general forms of censorship which appear to be a pervasive part of culture. Thus, is there any expression of meaning that does not entail selection and holding back... and thus a kind of censorship? Is there an occasion for communication--for example a classroom, a court room, or a church--that does not presuppose a complex structure of enabling constraints? Even in our most intimate moment of expression, when we articulate our desires in dreams as we sleep, Freud found a struggle between an impulse to express and a counterveiling need to distort expression with censorship: "...the phenomena of censorshp and of dream-distortion correspond down to their smallest details... " (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 177). Censorship is also indepensable to good manners: only in moments of the most extravagant love do intimates imagine they can say everything to one another. Censorship amplifies the range of our art by pushing speakers and writers into that satiric indirection to express that which none are permitted to say openly. Finally, censorship may be the handmaden of the erotic. Roland Barthes has suggested that the eye is drawn to the margin between what is revealed and concealed, to that artful gap which becomes the site for the erotic elaboration. Any analysis of censorship will need to balance ethical complaints against censorship with an apprehension of the inevitability of censorship as the ground of any expression. Rather than being antithetical opposites, censorship and free speech sustain a complex dialectical relationship: the whole vast realm of the unsayable carves out a space within which free speech becomes possible.(Fish) Any astute, and historically attuned, discussion of policy for new media like the Web needs to grasp the necessary and inevitable role for both free speech and censorship. |
This page created by William B.Warner
for the Transcriptions
Team
7/12/99 (Last Revised 7/21/99 )