Literatura in cenzura - Društvo za primerjalno književnost - ZRC SAZU

Stephan Packard:A Model of Textual Control: Misrepresenting Censorshipnot exhibited, however, might consider the curator’s decision to be anact of censoring that artist’s message; in doing so, the artist redraws thelines around the communication, defining the curator as external to theprivileged communication between the artist or his art, and the patrons hewishes to address. At the same time, the state-sponsored authority – say,a ministry of art and education that threatens to withhold funds if themuseum does not obey – might well consider its own involvement to beperfectly legitimate if it views itself as an integral part of the communicationin question rather than an external power that intrudes with foreignregulations. Discussing the curator vs. the ministry, Schauer concludesthat we cannot evade censorship, but can only choose our censors, decidingwhom to give power over our communication. However, rather thanchoosing a censor, it might be more proper to say that we choose to distinguishinternal and external players for a communication, and true censorshipshould be recognized only if the censor is emphatically unchosen;that is, observed as external. Thus, one issue in the contest of censorshipis the problematic fixation of externality.Secondly, structuralist and poststructuralist, and not least psychoanalytic,theories of language have emphasized that communication is alwaysalready subject to control. The image of a completely free discourse on theinside of a given act of communication, recognizably opposed to controlthat hails from outside, is difficult to sustain. All communication comeswith a set of regulations in terms of grammar, vocabulary, pragmatic conditionsof felicity, and so on. Acquiring a voice in communication entailslearning and accepting these rules. To choose a simple but central example,the parent that tells the child that it should not use the third personwhen speaking about itself, the parent that tells the child that it shouldnot use foul language, and the parent that tells the child that it should notspeak about private matters to strangers are not easily distinguished alongthe lines of merely grammatical as opposed to fully censorious control.In each of these cases, the regulations are tautological: The third personis nothing but the grammatical form for referring to other people, foullanguage is nothing but the language that a parent forbids, and privacyconsists in nothing but the exclusion of strangers. Each of these categoriesis essentially about textual control. But if control is ubiquitous in language,one will still want to refrain from saying that censorship is everywhere (cf.Freshwater). In order to observe censorship in any emphatic and meaningfulsense of the word, one has to distinguish control from control; censorshipthen is one of many kinds of textual control, and at the same timeone of many kinds of communication. Therefore if the first problem indefining censorship is the externalization of an authority in order to label181