Facing Up to Modern Censorship

By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet. Posted April 14, 2006.

Just last month, the FCC leveled a record fine against more than 100 television stations. The $3.6 million penalty was based on the FCC's determination that programming violated "decency standards." The orders for the fines were in response to some 300,000 "consumer complaints" -- many of which were lodged by organized groups rather than individual viewers.

No matter where the complaints come from, the end result of such fines is the same: TV networks will shy away from any material that might be deemed objectionable and could therefore cost them money -- eventually trickling down to creators of programming who then self-censor in order to make their material more marketable.

The compulsion to avoid being objectionable has led to a false narrative in which offense is spoken of as an empirically understood term. Whether it's in the art world, publishing or politics, modern censorship has defined the parameters of what we are and are not willing to say.

It is these subtle and insidious forms of censorship that Robert Atkins and Svetlana Mintcheva explore in their new anthology, "Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression." With writings from folks as varied as Lawrence Lessing and Judy Blume, the book articulates new challenges -- from corporate conglomerations to self-censorship -- impeding the freedom of expression.

Robert Atkins spoke with AlterNet to discuss why his work on the book has led him to see modern censorship as the problem of our times.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri: How did this book come about?

Robert Atkins: The book came from a series of public panel censorship discussions that my co-editor Svetlana and the artist Antonia Munta organized at the New School which were titled "Censorship in Camouflage." This was the starting point for the book. There was a great poverty of language. If you think about a term like, say, "gentrification," it describes a phenomenon that seems self-evident once we have the language to talk about it.

Our intention is to broaden the whole discussion about what censorship is, how it operates and who is a censor. We saw that artists were inhibited by so many phenomena, conditions, whether it was copyright laws or whether it was more stringent policing of the internet. We also realized these things were not limited exclusively to artists. Artists are often the canary in the coal mine.

OR: Is this a book about politics as much as it is about art?

RA: You can't have one without the other. Artists are both a reflection and a mirror of the social conditions around them -- which is why there is change in art. You couldn't have an artist like Andy Warhol critiquing consumer culture prior to the late-19th century. As an art historian, I believe that the arts are firmly embedded in their moment, and the possibilities for artists are totally tied to the social conditions around them. The idea that artists are visionaries ahead of their time is silly. When an artist's observations are acute, they may be there before anybody else, but they're limited by social and political phenomena.

OR: If artists are canaries in the mine, what are politicians?

RA: I think politicians are always the slowest to react -- it's the squeaky wheel theory. No politician will go out on a limb for anything unless he feels his constituency is affected. While I don't believe artists are visionaries -- it seems like much too strong a word for me -- it does seem that artists and politicians are at the opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to quick responsiveness.

OR: Can you discuss the standard perception of censors and censorship, and why it's inadequate to discuss the kind of censorship we currently face?

RA: We did informal surveys as we wrote introductions to the various parts of the book, and nobody thinks of themselves as a censor or self-censor. When in fact we censor ourselves all the time, often for logical reasons and to logical ends. Can you imagine if we all spoke our minds all the time? But these have become such nasty words in the language. When people think of a censor, they think of some bureaucrat in a former Soviet bloc country, sitting with a red pen, removing salacious references out of plays. We tend to think of censorship as an official action being done by governmental officials to limit speech. In the U.S., we have such a wall in some areas between public and private that many things that the government are held to, citizens and corporations are not. I think there's such a problem with the language.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri is an assistant editor at AlterNet.

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