censorship: 1. the act, system, or practice of censoring. 2. The office or term of a Roman censor. 3. The agency by which unpleasant ideas, memories, etc are kept from entering consciousness, except symbolically as in dreams.
censor: 1. one of two magistrates in Ancient Rome appointed to take the census, and later, to supervise public morals. 2. an offical with the power to examine publications, movies, television programs, etc and to remove or prohibit anything considered obscene, libelous, politically objectionable, etc. 3. an offical in time of war who reads publications, mail, etc, to remove information that might be useful to the enemy.
I needed a little inspiration to address this large and daunting issue. And it (believe it or not) came from my alter ego Michel Foucault. Foucault talked about censorship a lot - usually this censorship was related to sex (as we have been debating over e-journal). Foucault says that in the seventeenth century (the period of Incitement to Discourse - the root of the sexual explosion problem prevalent in the Victorian Era) "calling sex by its name thereafter became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery over it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibily present...Censorship" (17). Foucault argues that while we do not speak directly of sex, we have enlarged our language of innuendo and we have morphed components of society in order to talk more about sex. Sex became a medical problem, an economic problem, a political problem, a religious problem, and now sex has become a television show (hello, reality tv anyone???). So, in turn, all of these branches of society had to turn and monitor sex and sexual activities because sex had a direct influence on what happened in these branches of society. "It may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else; we set our minds to the task; we convince ourselves that we have never said enough on the subject" (33). I believe that we are sort of doing this by having a debate about censorship in the first place. We're talking about sex because we need to get rid of it or because it's influencing our children. We don't tak about censorship in terms of how texts are censored because of violence (as much anyway) because we are obsessed with sex. The problem with our view of sex is that - a problem. We have associated sex with immorality and deviance. It's our attitudes that are the problem. As long as we make sex taboo - so we can only speak of it in allusions and metaphors - as long as we censor nudity and objectify sex, we will have a problem with deviants like Ted Bundy and Jeffery Daumer. I do not believe that we have to censor everything. In fact, I hope that we shouldn't have to censor anything. Where can we draw the line? Our nation is populated by people who have very different views and values dealing with just about everything. And this brings me to my next point.
"Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere" (93).
"Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it" (101). This quote reminded me of Cindy's speech the other day in class. By speaking about her feelings and emotions, she was questioning power and in turn reinforcing her own power.
""Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy" (102). Literary criticism anyone??