Censorship silences discourse judged unacceptable by different mechanisms and different kinds of power. It is the suppression of speech or other public communication that may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, subversive, or inconvenient to the general body of people as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body. The rationale for censorship is different for various types of information censored. They will be read, assessed, judged and cleaned up or condemned by men in power (as individuals, organizations, church and government bodies), on religious, state, social, and moral grounds.
Repressive censorship: the silencing of discourse judged inacceptable by different mechanisms and kinds of power. Censorship is generally defined as ‘the repressive intervention of authority,’ traced most notably through the operations of law. It is also used as a collective term for all offences that concern the publication of some prohibited matter in a libel: blasphemous, seditious, and obscene.
Purposes (justification): to protect the interests and status quo of the power structure, national security, to promote or restrict religious or political views, and/or to protect children and vulnerable groups (child pornography, hate speech).
Censorship has greatly fluctuated throughout history because it depends on the nature of the power that censors, its interests, etc. Thus, the identity and degree of power of each censoring body will dictate the authority and degree of accusation and punishment. An absolute state or religion will control absolutely and has a right over an individual’s life.
Types of censorship
Ecclesiastical, political, military, moral, corporate, internet, educational, artistic and creative (literary)
Literary censorship is the suppression of works either in pre- or post-publication or the modification of their text by an outside body to suit the requirements of censors
Hard censorship (external and obvious): prison or death
Soft censorship (implicit, preventative, exclusionary): literary criticism, pornography silences women
A-priori or a-posteriori (before or after)
A-priori: a preventive measure (vetting)
A) By the state: Scrutiny of work before allowing printing. Submission of work for authorization.
B) End of 15th papal authority decreed that all books should be submitted for approval before publication. According to canon law,
Preventing publication altogether (refusal of permission, destruction of original or jailing of author)
C) Self-censorship: By the author, editor, publisher etc.: Scrutiny of the work and purging (expurgating) the text of material deemed unsuitable in order to avoid a court case.
A-posteriori: a punitive measure
A) By the state: Suppressing further printing and dissemination; Burning all known copies, usually in public.
Taking the author, printer, publisher, and distributors to court and punishing them.
B) Religion: Putting the book on the Catholic Index
C) Publisher: full withdrawal of a publication.
Foucault and Bourdieu
Censorship is productive and distributive, rather than primarily repressive.
Multiple permitted discourses, institutional (medicine, psychiatry, criminal justice, and demography), and social controls feed it and are in fact productive, since they contribute to making the object they constrain.
Restrictive economy: expurgation of authorized vocabulary, relations of discretion between parents and children, teachers and students. Good manners and political correctness, etc. are forms of censorship.
“Censorship has thus become viewed as a technique through which discursive practices are maintained; as Pierre Bourdieu argues, censorship is ‘constituted by the very structure of the field in which the discourse is produced and circulated’” (Heath 511).
Obscenity
Obscenity and indecency are socially determined, and thus change according to the body in power and who is reading or viewing the work in question.
“The corruptible subject is conceived as being inherently different from both the author and its target audience” (Ladenson 171).
“Obscenity law thus first emerged ‘in a complex technical environment formed by the overlap of a new governmental distinction between public and private spheres and the spread of a specific cultural technology and competence’” (Hunter et at 1993: 51) (Heath 511).
“pornography is the representation of sexuality so as to make its obscenity conspicuous, to the point of evoking its transgression of conventional taboos” (Heath 513)
Obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences’ (women, children, working class, colonial subjects) (1868) (Heath 511)
Obscenity is described as “bringing onstage what is customarily kept offstage” or “which is beyond the accepted codes of public visibility”; also”defined in terms of excess, as form beyond limit, beyond the frame and representation” (Health 513).
“Obscenity is not … inherently intrinsic to an object: an object becomes obscene, in part, by virtue of the response of the viewing subject. How an individual responds to a given object, as Pierre Bourdieu (1984) has argued, is dependent on the cultural capital of the viewer, which is largely contingent on class” (Heath 514).
“In the West, the censorship of obscenity evolved in the context of social and cultural transformations such as the industrial and French revolutions, secularization, urbanization, class formation, nationalism, women’s emancipation, and the professionalization of medicine (Heath 514).
Since in an increasingly egalitarian society the acquisition of civil liberty was equated with self-control, the loss of self-control threatened, quite literally, the body politic (Heath 514).
Bibliography
Heath, Deana. “Obscenity, Censorship, and Modernity.” Companion, 508-517.
Ladenson, Elisabeth. “Censorship.” The Book: A Global History. 169-182.