Towards a Pragmatic Censorship?

Dan Steward, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

There is an ancient Censorship institution as well as a modern Censorship institution, but the modern sensibility has been to censor the censors. The modern era is ushered into being, in part, by turning away from licensing regimes (the modern Censorship) and towards other modes of regulating communications. And yet our communications about communications are replete with claims of (contemporary) 'censorship'. Over the years, the meanings of this term have morphed and multiplied. Technological transformations and other social forces prompt claimants to use 'censorship' to decry an ever more varied array of practices and institutions--not only prior restraint but also legal liability, editorial policy, or even information overload. We have, it seems, a surfeit of censorship in a modernity based in part on its negation. In addition, recent scholarship regarding censorship has emphasized that it is not merely a matter of negation. Censorship is constitutive and productive. Indeed, communications may depend upon censorship in order to function at all. So we are invited to desist from using this sign in an exclusively pejorative way. Moreover, the political valence of 'censorship' claims may have shifted in recent years. Social actors in positions of greater power make claims of 'censorship' against social actors in weaker positions, and these claims are often cynical, disingenuous, or hypocritical. Perhaps the term has ceased to be useful at all? This paper turns back to the ancient Censorship of the Roman Republic to find some inspiration for a constitutive censorship promoting the critical curation of claims-making within and between publics as they address shared problems in a highly contingent and pluralistic world.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 194. Thematizing Social Things: Heretical Literatures, Curricula, and Institutional Memories