One of the three projects I outlined for 2011 concerns the study of textual control. As a collection of hypotheses to be tested, for future reference as well as immediate discussion, here are some basic suggestions on what that might mean.
What I mean by the term ‘textual control’ is most easily explained by pre-fixing it with ‘censorship and other types of’. Think of censorship; think of some examples. Consider that many of the examples you’re thinking of might be disputed as cases of actual censorship (“Ownership is not censorship!”), and that some others recall still other cases that clearly lack any trace of actual censorship, and yet seem similar in certain ways (“I reserve the right not to listen to you.”). This consideration places censorship in a larger field of kindred phenomena, and I suggest we might refer to that field as textual control.
However, this is more than a case of common hyperonymy. The attribution of the censorship label to individual instances, at least for Western-style free democracies, is significantly embattled. For the discourse we are used to, censorship is evil; and because accusing an institutional power of censorship amounts to serious criticism, the concept of censorship is at the same time often restricted to seriously powerful institutions. In as much as censorship requires an institution, it needs authority; in as much as the powers that be are not supposed to implement censorship, they overstep their authority when they do.
In short, censorship is contentiously marked as authorized and unauthorized, and that conflict describes the whole field of textual control. For as issues of control, any issues in the field of textual control can be projected onto a question of contested authority. Each case of textual control can be and usually is discussed in terms of whether or not its control amounts to censorship.
This suggests that the study of textual control has especially good reasons to look at the active discourse of textual control, the set of possible enunciations that maintain and implement the knowledge of textual control. Discourse analysis has always been concerned with implicit forms of censorship, investigating any discourse for the powers that control it; but we also need an analysis of that discourse that treats explicit textual control specifically.
Building on a few preliminary case studies from Galileo to Dawkins (*), and a few shorter looks at some examples noted on this blog (China and Google, Apple and journalism, the webcomic Zahra’s Paradise, and the deliberately misnamed German Gesellschaft zur Verfolgung von Urheberrechtsverletzungen), I want to suggest a polarity of two concepts that might be useful in describing the contentious treatment of authority in the discourse of textual control. Those two concepts are exteriority and ubiquity.
Exteriority examines the question of authority by assuming that communication happens in a closed sphere, and that the contentious authority to exert control refers to the contested right to violate its borders.
In an extension and variation of an example made famous by Frederick Schauer (**), the curator of a museum might accuse a political office of censorship if that office removed paintings from the museum’s wall. But the same curator might reserve the right to remove paintings from his museum himself, on the basis that not only is the museum his, but the intellectual and institutional authority to do this is his as well. An artist whose paintings are removed or never shown by the curator might draw that line differently, if he chooses to claim that his communication with an audience is being censored by ignorant curators; on the other hand, a political officer might consider himself a steward of the arts, involved in its sphere, and therefore entitled to function as its arbiter.
The claim to exteriority, then, changes a description of conscious but free communication (the curator controls his venue from the inside) to a description and eventually accusation of misplaced authority (the venue should not be controlled from its outside).
But what happens in the interior of that sphere might be considered in two ways. In terms of personal agents, societal systems, or established media, it might be described as self-control, i.e. autonomy. Its auto-referential structure oscillates between the inside and the outside by inviting the autonomous subject to take a step back and consider its actions in order to judge and modify them. However, in terms of signs, of the ongoing production of semiosis, control seems either non-existent, as only the produced and transmitted signs can be observed, or ubiquitous, as only signs that accord to some syntactic and semantic standards allow interpretation.
Ubiquity thus functions as exteriority’s complement. If there is no inside sufficiently interior to work without any kind of control, if signs themselves imply control, then control is everywhere. Exteriority becomes ubiquity when the parent tells the child not to discuss private matters with strangers, not to use foul language, and not to confuse the first and the third person singular, all in the same tone.
On top of exteriority’s sliding scale of boundaries between the inside and the outside of communication, ubiquity introduces the sliding scale between the necessity of controlled sign usage, and the interruptions of autonomy that it entails. Now the curator is no longer arguing with the officer or the artist, but about the definition and value of art. Now the editor does not refer to his sovereign power, but to the given quality of a submission.
I have tried to justify these terms in various ways elsewhere (*). For now, I suggest only to keep the two concepts in mind, and to experiment with its applications to issues of textual control and to the contentious matters of censorship. I will try to do so here over the next few weeks and months, perhaps building up a showcase of examples, but definitely testing and, I hope, correcting the basic ideas I just outlined.
Meanwhile, that’s one attempted description of the discourse of textual control: A discourse that argues about authority by switching between concepts of exteriority and ubiquity. What do you think? And how would you describe censorship?
(*) Cf. »Aesopic Transformation in Scientific Discourse. Observations on Galileo and a Perspective on Dawkins«, in: Gert Reifarth et al. (eds.): Aesopic Voices (forthcoming). »Copyright und Superhelden. Über die Prägung populärer Mythologie durch textuelle Kontrolle«, in: Claude D. Conter (ed.): Justitiabilität und Rechtmäßigkeit. Verrechtlichungsprozesse von Literatur und Film in der Moderne, Amsterdam: Rodopi 2010, pp. 109-126. »A Model of Textual Control: Misrepresenting Censorship«, in: Marijan Dović (ed.): Literature and Censorship. Who is Afraid of the Truth in Literature?, (= Primerjalna književnost 31), Ljubljana 2008, pp. 179-191. »Das unsichtbare Raubtier und das unfaßbare Ferkel. Sammelrezension zu einem Kinderbuch, einer Strafanzeige und einem Indizierungsverfahren«, in: Medienobservationen (August 2008). Back.
(**) Schauer, Frederick. “The Ontology of Censorship”, in: Robert C. Post (ed.): Censorship and Silencing. Practices of Cultural Regulation, Los Angeles: Getty Research Inst. 1998, pp. 147-168. Back.
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