Art and Censorship by Kirk Marshall

The act of censorship, like art, has become a process at once indissolubly synonymous with our lives. It has developed its own currency, has consolidated into a sociological virtue and chief cultural export, has supplanted Jacques Derrida’s différance as the intervening tendency determining all pre-linguistic expression – has, in the throng of our teeming contemporary metropolises and the intimacies of all social exchanges, become the primary means of ensuring human survival. Albeit both cavalier and indecorous of me to say, it might be justified to describe censorship as the new universal language: the pidgin of the masses, the new century’s lingua franca. Like artistic practise, censorship too takes the form of both a phenemonological operation of power and a discipline contingent upon stratified methods of expression, and it is this manifestation of the phenomenon that I wish to touch upon. I’m talkin’ personal censorship, baby. The rationale behind the apparatus: why we all feel the compulsion to consciously reconfigure or misrepresent ourselves. What is it about censorship that benefits us? Perhaps with greater clarity, why do we feel excellence is arrived at through inhibition? What dictates this will to omit, edit and excise from view?

Contrary to common consensus opinion, the first thing our minds register when we awake in the morning is not the benign motivational properties of an apple and cinnamon bagel. Nor is it the accelerating alarm produced by not knowing who the pressed butterflies on the wall directly opposite you belong to. In point of fact, we think about censorship: How best to conceal the lipstick on our collar with ceiling bleach. How to de-emphasize the murderous rings conspiring beneath our eyes with a bracing dowse of cold water to the face, primarily for the dignity in it. How we’ll safely avoid making eye contact on the bus with the regularly aggressive and potentially Tourettic commuter, with his unkempt beard and porridge-ripe odour. How we’ll succeed in contributing to the mid-morning workplace patter as we ascend to our offices via elevator, sufficiently enough to simulate an air of general candour without intending to imply that we either like our job or are seeking promotion. How exactly we’ll innovatively remodel the events of our weekend to our colleagues so that they sound neither embellished nor abbreviated, but just on the unenviable side of plausibly curious: ‘And then I said, “How do you like them cannolis?” Booya! Am I right? Booya?’

We censor when we eat (“I hope no-one saw me finish off that entire ginger and brown sugar poundcake”); we censor when we make love (“I hope she doesn’t think I resemble a ginger and brown sugar poundcake”); we censor when we sleep (“I hope I don’t have another recurrent dream involving a sadistic ginger and brown sugar poundcake”). We censor with our body language, we censor when we speak, we censor when we think. (This last refers back to Derrida and his post-structuralist intervention for the linguistic supplementarity of existence, but in an invested effort to make this actually readable through my willingness to censor unnecessary verbiage, I’ll just ask of you to trust me on this one). Although given to scientific arbitrariness, a taxonomy of our species could demonstrate that the act of censorship may very well constitute one of humanity’s overriding, all-defining characteristics. It might even facilitate our cumulative race’s claim to genius. Certainly, in the context of the creative industries, without the autonomous capacity to abridge forms of expression we would not have – could not hope to have – editors, proofreaders, or even writers. Without our fundamental (though not necessarily originary) human appetite for expurgation, we would not have painters: for is not the objective of each deployed brushstroke to conceal the canvas? Is not the corollary function of all visual aesthetics to engineer hue and shape and form through the agency of choice, by initiating the process of what will and won’t be revealed within the frame? Without concepts of transmission or recording, our musicians and sound artists would possess no medium, and correspondingly would no longer exist: but to perform or capture a song or sound, one must disregard – must neglect – the innumerable songs in potentia awaiting to be written, or the multitudinous sounds which obstruct and accentuate the qualities of that single phonic which calls to you to be recorded, looped back, distorted. Without the power of censorship, what would our critics do? All film reviews might mutate into a blow-by-blow account of the piece of cinema with which it strives to encapsulate. As artists, without the ability to choose what we include at the expense of what we exclude – for every creative choice is dictated to by and contingent upon what we censor – we would have nothing: our work would not function as a channel for creative expression, because it would relay in toto rather than reflect the universe.

Recently, whilst exhaustively grappling with my Honours degree in Professional Writing, my supervisor said this of the first draft of my thesis, a 15,000-word fictional novella as retold from the respective perspectives of eleven different character-narrators: ‘Somewhere along the line, an infection has interpenetrated your writing. You clearly love words, but it’s to such a state that your personal stylistic, all noise and clamour, willingly abandons conventional methods of narrative access. This can progress into a dangerous form of literature.’ Three months later, he revised his initial précis: my thesis was actually marked by genius, and had proven one of the rare, pleasurable submissions he had seen to supervising in his long and hallowed career as a professional literary academic. Even having later been designated his good grace, I nonetheless often think about what he meant by the term “dangerous”. Dangerous for whom? Clearly, he intended to refer to a theoretical readership – to alert me to the conceptual possibility of alienating those people who might otherwise embrace my writing without controversy or reservation. But sometimes, I think that maybe I just hadn’t censored myself enough for his specifically-bowdlerized tastes. To apply a sociological understanding to our conversational exchange, his latitude of acceptance simply wasn’t aligned with my own. But that was okay, because I censored myself from retaliating with a reactionary insult. Instead, I balled my fists to my sides, and whistled a dippy ditty.

Eventually, after reading a publically defamatory review of his latest published novel, I won out. ‘It’s best not to listen to critics,’ he told me, repeatedly rapping a tattoo into the glossily-covered edition of his new book. ‘You know, they can’t understand the half of it.’

I wish I could tell him now, a year later, that I don’t think censorship would allow them to.

opinion by Kirk Marshall