Censorship & Permission

We live in a time of unprecedented strain on the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. But we also live in a time with an unprecedented amount of speech. After the rise of blogs in the early 2000s, Facebook and Twitter came along and made publishing so simple and fast that everyone with an account is now a publisher of their own uncensored thoughts and ideas. Or are they?

A recent study commissioned by Facebook found that, out of a sample of 3.9 million users, 71% deleted a post that they had previously written, indicating a high level of self-censorship on a platform where the "self" is as much a performance commodity as it is a subjectivity in search of expression. While posts can certainly be deleted, online speech can be hard to retract once published. Screen grabs can quickly become evidence in call-outs as users and "friends" police one another in ways that have been likened to a digital version of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon — the circular prison design in which all the jail cells face inward toward a central watchtower with one-way mirrors, so that no one can ever be sure but must presume that they’re being watched at all times.

For philosopher and theorist Michel Foucault, "the major effect of the Panopticon [is] to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power." When we post on Facebook or Twitter, we now presume that we’re being watched and that our speech is being policed by others.

Many would argue that this level of visibility and freedom to publish is a good thing. There are no longer gatekeepers guarding the doors to publication (online, at least). Anyone with something powerful to say and an understanding of the currency and algorithms of social media can speak and be heard. Those who express hate, bigotry, racism, sexism, etc. can now be held accountable for their words. As the conceptual poet/artist Kenneth Goldsmith found out in 2015 when he read Michael Brown’s autopsy report as a performance piece at Brown University, the internet was not going to sit by and allow him to co-opt a slain African-American’s body for what they saw as a minstrel-like performance. The calling-out of Goldsmith’s actions was a preview of the recent uproar over Dana Schutz’s painting, "Open Casket" in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, in which Schutz came under fire for her use of a murdered and disfigured black body (Emmett Till) as subject matter. But when do such call-outs and interventions qualify as censorship? Many of Goldsmith’s and Schutz’s defenders felt they were being censored, and claimed that their intentions were not racist. But do intentions matter where privilege and voice are concerned? And are cries of censorship or political correctness just red herrings when white artists don’t want to face criticism? Writers Shannon Barber and Sarah Schulman assert that these arguments are just smokescreens that allow even white liberals to avoid the discomfort of facing systemic problems in the art world.

Journalists seem to be taking the piss from all sides. The Trump administration has ripped a well-worn page from the authoritarian playbook in his non-stop denigration of the media and his cudgel of "fake news." Meanwhile, both the White House propaganda makers and the journalists who suck up to them get their asses handed to them by comedian Michelle Wolf as the main course at the White House Correspondents dinner. But what good will speaking truth to power do when we live in a country of divided realities created by ultra-partisan, choose-your-own-adventure news?

Gun violence seems to have become a form of protected speech (never mind corporate personhood and money-as-speech) by way of the first and second amendments combined. The white power movement is out of the closet, and we must now consider how far we’re willing, as a culture, to protect freedom of speech when that speech celebrates a political philosophy that has led to the extermination of 6 million Jews. Should we be looking to Germany’s restrictions on hate speech, or are the seeds of the destruction of the Constitution itself protected by the Constitution?