GDRI CNRS “LITERATURE AND DEMOCRACY (19th- 21st CENTURIES):
THEORETICAL, HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE
APPROACHES”
INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
Literary “freedom of expression” and
democratic regimes
Censorship and self-censorship today
20-21 April 2017
Salle Athéna
Maison de la recherche de l’Université
Paris Sorbonne nouvelle
4 rue des Irlandais
75005 Paris
Freedom of expression and democracy are
two distinct, albeit related, concepts. Under the prevailing liberal definition
of democracy, however, they would appear to have merged. Ideas and texts should
be allowed to circulate without constraint - this is the narrative which
Liberalism has developed since the European Enlightenment.
Even though censorship did affect
"classic" works, the struggle against censorship has typically
featured at the heart of the glorified story of modernism to describe the fates
of
works such as those by Sade, Joyce, D.H.
Lawrence, Céline or William Burroughs… It is a narrative which liberal
democracies have also held up in contrast with conditions for making art in
totalitarian regimes during the Cold War (USSR) or in China today. Few in the
West would argue that censorship makes a positive contribution to the arts,
even involuntarily or indirectly; few would make the case for censorship like
Mo Yan, the Nobel Laureate in Literature, did in 2012; few see in censorship a
field of aesthetic enquiry rather than a practice to be denounced.
In Giving
Offense. Essays on Censorship (1996), Coetzee noted that the liberal consensus
around freedom of expression which has prevailed among Western intellectuals
since the end of the 18th century had done much to define them as a
community, and that this era had come to a close. Faith in the virtues and
social benefits of free speech has been widely challenged since. A feminist
critique has, for example, attacked the liberal position on pornography and its
right to protection under free speech.
At the beginning of the 1970s, when he was
defending one of the last books to be banned
in France (Eden Eden Eden, Pierre Guyotat, 1970), Barthes explained that
"true censorship does not involve banning" but "stifling,
saturating with stereotypes": "social censorship is not when speech
is banned, but when it is forced upon us" (Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 1971). In this way, he developed a broader
conception of censorship: not only institutional bans enforced by such
authorities as the Church or the State, but a continual social process of
filtering acceptable opinions leading to ideological and artistic conformism.
Bourdieu then showed that "structural censorship" determines both
access to expression and the form of that expression, thus linking censorship
not only to the law but to discursive norms. He described the discursive
exclusion of certain groups as a type of pre-emptive censorship, "one of
the most efficient and best hidden types" (What Speaking Means, 1982). This broader understanding of
censorship takes into account the disappearance of censorship as enshrined in
law and its subsequent developments. Meanwhile, the attention of censors has
shifted from media in decline, such as print, to the more popular visual media
and the internet. If recent investigations conducted by PEN are to be believed
(Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance
drives US Writers to Self Censor, November 2013), the age of censorship has
given way to an age of surveillance. States, be they old, recent, or fragile
democracies, are no longer the only, or even the main, instigators of
censorship. Globalisation has become the new framework for relationships
between censorship, freedom of expression and democracy. The Satanic Verses episode showed us as much thirty years ago. The
20th century understanding of freedom of expression no
longer maps onto reality. Major international mass media groups and
post-Gutenberg era corporations would seem to hold more sway, in terms of
censorship, than most states: the population of Facebook is greater than that
of China (Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech,
2016).
With the state adopting a neutral position
in relation to public mores, "civil society" has
also emerged as a critical and potentially
normative source, changing the face of censorship by privatising it. There have
been many instances of pressure being applied from these quarters over the past
few years, as well as campaigns led by various charitable organisations or
church groups. These new forms of pressure bear witness to tensions between
literature, culture and societal or religious norms. This brings us back to
questions about the status of literature and fiction, of the relationship
between texts and the real, of the fragility of fictional communication and the
historical variability of fictional frameworks.
Defining the nature and the function of
literature taking freedom of speech and expression as a starting point, rather
than engaging with it as art, is a complex task. If censorship now takes the
form of a tyranny of the majority, what becomes of literature? Is it censored
by literary gatekeepers, self-censored, or liberated because it falls outside
the sphere of the "majority"? What is the relationship between
censorship and artistic practice, between self-censorship and artistic
practice? What is the aesthetic import of censorship and self-censorship? What
are the current objects of censorship and self-censorship in literature? What
forms does this type of censorship take? Has self-censorship almost completely
taken over from censorship? Is this the form censorship takes in the neoliberal
era? Is it more appropriate to speak of self-regulation rather than
self-censorship, a sign that literature (writers and editors) in the age of
globalisation subscribes to the logic of the film entertainment industry, which
has long since internalised criticism in the form of self-regulatory processes?
If all societies, even those regarded as democratic, harbour a system of
censorship, it becomes necessary to analyse democratic censorship regimes in
tandem with the democratisation of literary expression in the contemporary era.
Presentations may be delivered in French,
in English or in Spanish
Organisers: Catherine Brun, Professor of
French Language Literatures (PSN); Philippe
Daros, Professor of General and
Comparative Literature (PSN), Philippe Roussin Director of Research at the CNRS
(CRAL, CNRS-EHESS)
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