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Manufacturing the (In)visible: Power toCommunicate, Power to SilenceSlavko SplichalPublished online: 01 Jul 2006.
To cite this article: Slavko Splichal (2006) Manufacturing the (In)visible: Power to Communicate,Power to Silence, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 3:02, 95-115, DOI:10.1080/14791420600632974
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Manufacturing the (In)visible: Powerto Communicate, Power to SilenceSlavko Splichal
The paper develops the argument of two faces of censorship as a form of symbolic violence
over individuals directed either inward or outward. In both instances, the resistance to
disclosure and an effort to keep things hidden are normally complemented by strategic
control over the process of making things visible. Silence is usually considered a sign of
censorship, but in reality it can indicate not only the suppression of, but also a resistance
to, communication. Despite the changes leading toward the ‘‘structural censorship’’ in
modern complex societies, the essential questions remain: What are the strategies to
confront the (hidden) forces of censorship, and how successful can they be?
Keywords: Censorship; Self-Censorship; Silence; Publicity; Freedom; Control
Visibility and Power
Changes in communication technology and its social uses shape, often in
controversial ways, the diffusion of power and power relationships in society.1
Communication makes power immediately sensible, experiential to the general
populace, and thus operational. It makes actors and their actions seeable in public,
which helps make the execution of power more effective. In the opposite direction*/
in a kind of disciplinary strategy*/communication makes others’ behavior survey-
able and seeable to those in power. Eventually, it is also a condition and means of
execution of control over power. ‘‘Making visible’’ is thus instrumental to any kind of
purposive influence on behavior that may include a wide range of different forms and
degrees from open threatening with negative, or providing major positive, social
sanctions to insignificant, probabilistic practices that may influence only a very
narrow segment of the targeted ‘‘addressees.’’
Slavko Splichal is Professor of Communication and Public Opinion at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University
of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and associate member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His recent books in
English include Public Opinion: Developments and Controversies in the 20th Century (1999); Tonnies on Public
Opinion: Selections and Analyses (co-authored with Hanno Hardt, 2001), and Principles of Publicity and Press
Freedom (2002). Correspondence to: Slavko Splichal, Faculty of Social Science, University of Ljubljana, P.O. Box
2547, 1001 Ljubljana, Slovenia. E-mail: [email protected]
ISSN 1479-1420 (print)/ISSN 1479-4233 (online) # 2006 National Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/14791420600632974
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies
Vol. 3, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 95�/115
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In contrast to the ‘‘invisible’’ private sphere, in which mutual trust, dependency,
and benevolence in family and among friends may dominate, the public sphere as an
open space in which ‘‘public persons’’ appear to (re)present their power or to
participate in public discourse involves more risks for participants. As Hegel
suggested, ‘‘What a man fancies when he is at home with his wife and friends is
one thing, and quite another thing what occurs in a great gathering where one clever
stroke annihilates the preceding.’’2 Public appearance implies more or less formalized
accountability, and the implementation of personal accountability may take rather
annoying forms of public exposure which those acting in public would rather avoid.
Bentham once compared the risk of being exposed to public defamation taken by civil
functionaries in democratic societies with that of military functionaries in war: the
latter are paid for being shot at, and the former are paid for being criticized and even
unjustly defamed.3 Even in totalitarian systems, some forms of public representation
of power may have negative consequences for power actors. Thus, Machiavelli
suggested that while there is nothing wrong if a prince presents himself in a way
that would make him feared (it may be even preferable because making people fear
him is under his own control in contrast to love that is not achievable by external
force), he should prudently use his power to avoid and conceal anything that makes
him hated.4
We carefully and sometimes unconsciously select what and how we will reveal and
what we want to conceal, even in our everyday, not-entirely private interpersonal
communication in which we are accountable to a rather limited extent.5
All we communicate to another individual by means of words or perhaps in
another fashion*/even the most subjective, impulsive, intimate matters*/is a
selection from the psychological-real whole whose absolutely exact report
(absolutely exact in terms of content and sequence) would drive everybody into
the insane asylum.6
This selection is determined in two ways: (1) it may be primarily internally (by our
inner motives) or primarily externally (by group or social expectations) determined;
(2) in either case, it may be either instrumentally or communicatively motivated. It
relates not only to what we communicate but also to how we communicate*/which
specific code of communication we choose. For example, linguistic minorities are
often forced to use majority language in public.
Attempts at strategic control through ‘‘making visible’’ are complemented by
resistance to disclosure and efforts to keep things hidden. The ambivalent potential of
communication*/to reveal and to conceal*/makes communication contingent on
external factors and circumstances within which it occurs. According to Nagel, ‘‘What
is allowed to become public and what is kept private in any given transaction will
depend on what needs to be taken into collective consideration for the purposes of
transaction and what would on the contrary disrupt it if introduced into the public
space.’’7 Which of the two moments of the ambivalent potential will prevail in
communication primarily depends on its social use(r)s rather than the ‘‘inner’’
developments of communication forms and technologies. A trade-off between
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‘‘making visible’’ and ‘‘making/keeping invisible’’ is made relative to specific goals and
circumstances in the strategic process of strengthening power.
As we all know, making/keeping things invisible is a most common practice in our
everyday life. We are rarely concerned over what people may say about us in their
privacy and our absence, since we also say things ‘‘in confidence’’ that we would not
say in public or to someone’s face. This reticence is a kind of politeness we practice
every day. In Sigmund Freud’s metaphor comparing dream-distortion and political
censorship, the politeness of a dream interpreter talking to his patients also applies to
‘‘the political writer who has unpleasant truths to tell to those in power.’’ In order
to avoid censorship, the author is compelled ‘‘to express himself in allusions instead
of by direct assertions; or he must conceal his objectionable statement in an
apparently innocent disguise.’’8 Machiavelli went even further, suggesting to his
Prince not to hesitate to play the hypocrite if needed to keep himself in popular favor:
‘‘It is good to appear merciful, truthful, humane, sincere, and religious; it is good to
be so in reality. But you must keep your mind so disposed that, in case of need, you
can turn to exact contrary.’’9
Not everyone would agree with Machiavelli. Whether the quandary of making
things visible or making/keeping them invisible is merely a matter of politeness or,
perhaps, of deception and even tyranny may turn out to be a far more complex issue
than Machiavelli has thought of it. Concealment and secrecy may be effectively used
to deceive publics, which unavoidably generates a system of censorship, particularly
in a world of oligopolized mass media. But it is another matter if one takes a
preference for secrecy as a sign of guilt, as for example Bentham did*/‘‘Why should
we hide ourselves if we do not dread being seen? [. . .] Suspicion [. . .] thinks it sees a
crime where it beholds an affectation of secresy; and it is rarely deceived.’’10 Not
everyone would agree with Bentham either. If one is tempted to consent to his
mischievous concept of hiding, however, one should at least consider such instances
of hiding as ‘‘a public sphere still existing largely behind closed doors ’’ of salons or
coffee houses where private people came together to be in hiding from the absolutist
regime and thus made secrecy a condition of the publicity of reason, and Freud’s
analysis of censorship in dreams as a ‘‘guardian of our psychic life,’’ which indicates
that the hidden does not necessarily prove corruption.11
Visibility is not exclusively instrumental and oriented to an external*/either
intentional or imposed*/goal. At least in a normative perspective, visibility may be
also purely communicative, thus stimulating freedom of thought and expression as a
personal right and social need. Aristotle, for example, made the quality of being
synoptikos */affording a general view of a whole*/a condition for democracy. For
Kant, visibility qua publicity was a normative criterion and practical assurance of
universal justice; reason accords ‘‘sincere respect [. . .] only to that which has stood
the test of a free and public examination.’’12 As Bentham believed, visibility in the
sphere of politics should help achieve people’s pleasure and happiness. Both Kant and
Bentham believed that authoritarian rulers could do anything they want only as long
as their actions are not disclosed to the public. In fact, even today the view commonly
prevails that, to the detriment of democratic polity, more is concealed than revealed
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in politics. But this does not imply that anything that is not publicly visible is
immoral or unlawful.
In terms of action orientation, instrumental visibility not only contradicts
normative visibility, but also is ambivalent in itself. On the one hand, instrumental
visibility manifests and amplifies power that may also be executed secretly. On the
other hand*/since visibility is also a condition of the execution of control and
limitation of power*/it makes the execution of power more vulnerable and thus
brings about attempts by agents of power to control and narrow their visibility, and
to introduce censorship. In all manifestations of power, censorship occurs to some
degree. That was why Bentham, for example, fought for visibility of all actions of the
parliament (which the members of the parliament might want to conceal) and
considered visibility necessary for the functioning of newspapers as the most
important and ‘‘the only constantly acting visible organs’’ of public opinion.
In a way, Bentham’s and Kant’s claim for visibility of the institutionalized
(political) power to limit its arcana confronts with empirical evidence that any
execution of power is inseparable from the pretension ‘‘to make something invisible
visible through the public presence.’’13 The aim of political communication is
primarily to make others accept expressed views rather than to express oneself.
Machiavelli advised his prince never to forget to give to his subjects ‘‘the impression
of being a great man’’ and to seek popularity and reputation among them, ‘‘yet
avoiding any compromise to his dignity, for that must be preserved at all costs.’’14 We
may speak of ‘‘the invisible hand of the marketplace’’ that harmonizes self-interest
with the general welfare, but not of ‘‘the invisible hand of politics’’ in the sense that
political actors are invisible to the general population ruled by their power. The body
politic always needs a form of commonly visible representation, but the essential
questions are: Who is in control of ‘‘politics’’ of visibility? Who decides on what has
to be seen and what has to be put out of public sight?
There always exists a compromise between showing and hiding, and a culturally,
morally, and politically defined boundary between the visible and invisible, between
external and internal, between public and private, between disclosure and discretion
or reticence.15 It may be a personal or collective compromise. In medieval Europe, for
example, the king, or the feudal lord, was the only ‘‘public person’’ worthy of
visibility.16 The natural body of the king was the only form of public representation
of the body politic, and it was represented before the people present in the ceremonies
and festivities organized to celebrate the king and the court. With the gradual
expansion of suffrage and general political democratization, both representation and
visibility substantially changed: the former princely ‘‘representative publicity’’ was
replaced by discursive forms of public-ness and a more ‘‘realistic’’ political (in
contrast to the former purely symbolic) representation ‘‘of the people, by the people,
for the people.’’
Not only restriction of visibility by censorship but also the imposition of visibility
is repressive in the sense that the execution of power provokes fear of power, thus
deterring individuals from any action against authorities. Individuals can be made
to fear not only by a Machiavellian visible omnipresence of the rulers (in contrast to
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Bentham’s apparent, invisible omnipresence of the inspector in the panopticon), but
also by a panopticon gaze to which common citizens are exposed. According to
Foucault, generating permanent visibility of individuals and preventing them from
hiding assure the automatic functioning of power in society.17 Visibility, as it is
generated for example in contemporary systems of video surveillance and electronic
remote sensing, may develop into tyranny over private citizens and their normatively
assured privacy. In such cases, visibility enforcement by surveillance goes beyond the
execution of power and deteriorates into the misuse of power (the very concept of
the misuse of power presupposes the normative concept of visibility). The historical
irony of surveillance by either restriction of visibility (as in censorship) or generating
visibility by power (panopticon gaze) is that it is at the same time often a sign of
significant changes in power to come: surveillance is generated by power actors to
prevent their loss of power for the benefit of potentially more powerful competitors
who are likely to prevail, and, therefore, as an absolutist policy it is ultimately
subversive and self-destructive.
Surveillance is always confronted with resistance and attempts to trick the
custodians or censors, regardless of who the controller and the controlled may be,
and what amount of power they may have. This was clearly observed already by
Bentham. In Panopticon, he designed a system of control over a certain number of
ordinary persons*/applicable to institutions such as prisons, factories, hospitals, and
schools*/that would avert all persons from the mere thought of evasion of
responsibility or escape they would otherwise certainly try to carry out. Similarly,
he argued in his pleading for public control over parliament:
such is the nature of man when clothed with power*/in that part of the field of
government which is here in question, whatever mischief has not yet been actually
done by him to-day, he is sure to be meditating to-day, and unless restrained by
the fear of what the public may think and do, it may actually be done by him
to-morrow.18
Censorship helps organize and protect the discourse of power, and resistance tends to
undermine and disrupt it by producing ‘‘discourse dislocations,’’ i.e., those sites and
moments where and when strategic organization of resistance to dominant discourses
can take place, which is essential for a democratic society.19
While censorship is aimed at making the physically visible socially invisible, the
manufacturing of visibility is aimed at making the physically invisible or less visible
(or even nonexistent) socially (more) visible. They are both engaged in the execution
of power. We can identify two main kinds of strategic manufacturing of visibility:
intentional, actively promoted visibility displays or rather propagates specificity,
difference, uniqueness and thus power of the visible, while disciplinary visibility in
surveillance is aimed at suppression of diversity, forced compliance, and conformity,
which ultimately makes the visible invisible.
Intentional or calculated visibility is representative by its very nature; it is a sort of
spectacle. It keeps up appearances*/promoting what one should esteem rather than
reflecting what one would like to see (e.g., in an artistic expression) or what one
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should think and believe exists rather than reporting what actually exists (e.g., in
news reporting). Disciplinary visibility is repressive: it restricts individual autonomy
in defining the borderline between the visible and concealed and strips away the
appearances one wants to keep up either privately or publicly.
However, when the making of deliberate visibility is monopolized, the differences
between intentional and disciplinary visibility disappear. If only a few have the power
to decide what can or has to be seen or heard, any form of visibility acts as a pressure
toward conformity. Whether monopoly is secured by the majority or by some
powerful minorities*/monopolized visibility always manufactures silence, or even a
silent consent among the rest, as the critics of the ‘‘tyranny of majority’’ and
‘‘collective mediocrity’’ (e.g., Tocqueville, Mill, and Bryce) argued. In the most radical
(though also prejudiced) social-psychological version of this paradigm, Tom
Harrisson formulated the iron law of public consent*/‘‘At all ordinary times and
places, there is a tendency for most ordinary people to follow what they believe to be
the majority, to voice in public mainly those sentiments and opinions which are
generally acceptable and respectable.’’20 This was later named by Noelle-Neumann
‘‘the spiral of silence.’’21 Indeed, the very act of communication may also silence as
effectively as censorship in the narrow sense.
Censors as Moral Authorities
The difference between intentional and disciplinary visibility, between propaganda
and surveillance, and between prevention (censorship) and promotion of visibility
could only have been established when the means of communication were alienated
from communicating individuals*/a process that coincided with the establishment
of class society (see Figure 1). Biological organs of verbal communication (organs of
speech, sight and hearing) were complemented and extended with external corporeal
means that one can freely dispose of in order to communicate more effectively*/but
one can also be deprived of them. Those who are effectively in possession of such
means can also define the borderline between the visible and invisible in specific
situations since they have control over their constitutive conditions.
Censorship has long been regarded primarily as an (exclusively) authoritative
interference with communication aimed at the suspension of communication*/
essentially a remnant of unenlightened, authoritarian, pre-modern, pre-liberal ages,
or ‘‘an act of external interference with the internally generated communicative,
expressive, artistic, or informational preferences of some agent.’’22 Today, it is not
limited any more to state interference but includes diverse actors and their activities
that may oppress or marginalize others and limit their access to the communication
means. Nevertheless, ‘‘when government capitulates to private groups and commits
speech-stifling acts, the acts are described as ‘censorship.’ When private entities
commit the same acts, they are described as exercises in ‘property rights,’ ‘editorial
control,’ or simply ‘business policies.’’’23 I do not intend to minimize the repressive
power of ‘‘classical’’ political or state censorship, yet contemporary censorship is far
more complex and goes beyond state censorship; it is manifested in a variety of subtle
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ways in which different institutions enforce or legitimate rules of public discourse,
although they disavow their censorial nature.
The customary view that dominated until not long ago was narrow and dogmatic,
for it limited censorship to direct communicative interference resulting in ‘‘non-
communication’’ (i.e., preventing something from being viewed or heard) but
neglected structurally set boundaries and distortions in communication as irrelevant
for the conceptualization of censorship. One reason for such a narrow conceptualiza-
tion of censorship may be found in its etymology, which does not seem to include
structural restraints to communication.
In Latin, censeo (inf. censere, part. fut. censurus, -a, -um) stands for giving one’s
opinion or judgment; assess. In early Rome, censor was one of two magistrates who
supervised public morals and conducted the census to count and classify citizens. In
order to count citizens, they had to define criteria for citizenship that included moral
standards. It was censors’ immediate duty to censure immoral behavior, which may
have had annoying political consequences for the person in question who could have
been deprived of citizenship. The privileged position of censors to judge on matters
of public morals reflected the general belief that censorship was no less a value and no
less needed than freedom of speech*/an attitude that actually prevailed even during
the Enlightenment.
EXERCISINGSURVEILLANCE
IMPOSINGVISIBILITY
»INNER«CENSORSHIPSILENCE
CENSORSHIP
SPECTACLEPROPAGANDA
EXPOSURE TOSURVEILLANCE
SUPPRESSINGVISIBILITY
INTRUSIONOF PRIVACY
MASSMEDIA
SOCIALEXCLUSION
Figure 1. Visibility and surveillance under conditions of structural censorship.
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Censorial work was not considered oppressive at that time; quite the contrary,
censors were the most honorable public officers. We can find eulogies on censorship,
such as that by Plato in The Republic, on the ground of the prevention of storytellers
and poets like Homer and Hesiod from making ‘‘an erroneous representation [. . .] of
the nature of gods and heroes’’ that young people would not be capable of
understanding:
Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let
the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will
desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only. Let them
fashion the mind with such tales, even more fondly than they mould the body with
their hands; but most of those which are now in use must be discarded.24
Indeed, Plato was the great founder of the aristocratic idea of censorship that was
resonating for more than 2,000 years. Yet, Plato refused the responsibility of
the authorities for the production of the ‘‘correct representations’’ suggesting that the
task of the ‘‘founders of a State’’ is to lay down the principles according to which poets
should cast their tales; to make the tales is the duty of storytellers.
The concept of censorship constructed in the Enlightenment retained parts of its
ancient pedagogical connotation. ‘‘Every one knows the wonderful effects of the
censorship among the Romans,’’ Montesquieu still believed.25 Rousseau was no less in
favor of it: ‘‘As the law is the declaration of the general will, the censorship is the
declaration of the public judgment.’’ Plato remained the great paragon: ‘‘Plato
banished Homer from his republic and we will tolerate Moliere in ours?’’26 Both
Rousseau and Montesquieu saw the main beneficial role of censorship in fighting
against the corruption of manners and believed that:
[. . .] censors are necessary [. . .] in a republic, where the principle of government is
virtue. We must not imagine that criminal actions only are destructive of virtue; it
is destroyed also by omissions, by neglects, by a certain coolness in the love of our
country, by bad examples, and by the seeds of corruption: whatever does not openly
violate but elude the laws, does not subvert but weaken them, ought to fall under
the inquiry and correction of the censors.27
The Enlightenment was loud in praising Greek and Roman humanism and
aristocratic republicanism but closed the eyes to its intolerance of adversary ideas. In
contrast to a widespread libertarian picture of intellectual life in ancient Greece and
Rome, a closer historical look reveals that suppression and prohibition of speech
and writing condemned as subversive of the common good was actually a regular
practice. ‘‘Athenian censorship was so extensive that a hierarchy of sanctions ranging
from prohibition of public speech (banning) through denial of civil rights, exile,
imprisonment, and execution was routinely invoked to suppress dangerous ideas.’’28
Among famous victims of censorship, we find Socrates who paid with his life for
‘‘corrupting the young,’’ and Aristotle and Euripides who fled from Athens to evade
charges of impiety and died in exile.
Despite the advocacy of ‘‘enlightening’’ forms of censorship, the Enlightenment’s
liberal views on censorship substantially deviated from its former meaning in
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confronting the royal and ecclesiastic suppression of civil liberties and religious
intolerance. The Enlightenment brought about such writers as John Locke and
Voltaire who fought for personal right to free expression as a natural right and saw
criticism as a tool of ‘‘moral censorship,’’ or Kant and Bentham who significantly
contributed to one of its greatest achievements*/the substitution of the rule of
reason for the rules of repressive censorial power. Yet, like Milton, who did not
demand a general ‘‘liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to
conscience, above all liberties’’ but mainly claimed freedoms for himself (‘‘Give me
the liberty . . .’’ begins Milton’s demand in Areopagitica), the enthusiastic idealism of
the Enlightenment’s writers was essentially an aristocratic doctrine*/full
of admiration for ancient aristocratic ideals but not at all a universal affirmation
of human rights. The great harbingers of the Enlightenment did not even see any
contradiction between the principle of freedom of expression and authoritative
suppression of opinions contrary to*/according to Locke*/‘‘those moral rules which
are necessary to the preservation of civil society.’’ In the last instance, their defense in
favor of free publication rested on moral and intellectual superiority of the elite
organized in a kind of Court of Honor as conceived by Rousseau in his Letter to
d’Alembert. They might have fought for freedom of intellectuals to express their
ideas, but at the same time they also advocated more subtle forms of non-state
censorship that would set norms of public discourse and, again, differentiate between
the authorized and unauthorized writings and writers.29
The most sacrosanct institutions of knowledge, academies of science, were not
immune to imposing censorship, as in the famous case of the French Academy of
Science vs. Mesmer in 1784.30 Academies and similar institutions considered
themselves the instantiation of reason, and therefore ‘‘anything or anyone unwilling
to be subjected to their critical gaze [. . .] was automatically suspect.’’31 Their
censorship had primarily a legitimating effect: they conferred legitimacy only to those
authors who deferred to internal hierarchies and demonstrated respect. Censors
compared themselves with the Academy*/not enforcing superior authority of the
crown against the writers or repressing authors’ liberty but reproducing ‘‘the basis for
legitimacy in public speech, by enabling aspiring gens de letters [. . .] to conform their
personal comportment and speech to the deferential norms they would be expected
to observe when entering literary institutions.’’32 Similarly to Plato, not only censors
but also some writers of that period saw censors acting in the interest of the
community. Ironically, many writings of the most prominent writers of
the Enlightenment advocating some ‘‘enlightening’’ form of censorship*/like
Voltaire, d’Alembert, and Rousseau*/were banned due to the state censorship
laws, and the authors forced to go into exile or to write anonymously.
‘‘Invisible Hands’’ of Censorship and ‘‘Self-Censorship’’
At the same time, the Enlightenment opened the door to new forms of less visible
structural censorship that exists in all societies even if they offer constitutional
guarantees of freedom of expression and press freedom. The Enlightenment
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conceptualized ‘‘publicity’’*/most visibly ‘‘institutionalized’’ in the press*/as an
instrument of reason and public control over government. However, no other
resources than personal intellectual capacities were stipulated as conditions for a free
use of reason, and no reasons were seen that the press, like any other power, could be
used as an instrument of misrule. Until the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers were
still largely believed to have merely ‘‘ephemeral existence’’ unable ‘‘to continually
satisfy enduring needs, unlike that of the written instruction through the book,’’ and
the financial or business side of publication seemed irrelevant.33
But as newspapers were supplied to an ever-larger readership, their influence was
less and less based on the personal point of view presented in the newspapers, or
respect for the authors. Rather, the development of the press from an intimate
‘‘companion’’ to an industrial corporation took place since the mid-1800s. The
metaphors of the press as ‘‘the fourth power’’ and ‘‘the free marketplace of ideas’’ that
took root in that period obscured the facts that neither the ‘‘fourth power’’ was ever
an autonomous power separated from other powers nor in ‘‘the free marketplace of
ideas’’ everyone had an equal opportunity to make their voice heard.
As Tonnies suggested, although the ‘‘power of the press’’ had first developed as an
instrument of the liberal enlightenment, it was soon corrupted by private interests
and capital.34
The powers of capital are intent not only to bring about a favorable opinionconcerning their products, and unfavorable one concerning those of theircompetitors, but also to promote a generalized public opinion which is designedto serve their business interests, for instance, regarding a policy of protective tariffsor of free trade, favoring a political movement or party, supporting or opposing anexisting government.35
Thus, we arrived to the second reason for a rather narrow conceptualization of
censorship as a direct authoritative interference with communication: to keep hidden
the power that appropriated the media after they have been released from the state
control*/the capital. The first and perhaps still most comprehensive critique of
commercial censorship was published by Karl Marx.36
The commercial development of mass media has radically transformed the
meaning of publicity. Dewey was among the first who noticed significant changes
in the meaning of the concept ‘‘publicity.’’ In contrast to Bentham’s and Kant’s ideas
of publicity that prevailed in the beginning of the nineteenth century, in Dewey’s time
publicity was not related to the core of intellectual freedom. Rather it denoted
‘‘advertising, propaganda, invasion of private life, the ‘featuring’ of passing incidents
in a way which violates all the moving logic of continuity.’’37
The ‘‘structural censorship’’ now prevailing does not imply any direct ‘‘authoritative
intervention’’ but rather a personal fear of being disapproved, criticized, ridiculed,
belittled, discriminated, or simply unnoticed when speaking in public. The idea of
silence caused by ‘‘fear of isolation’’ (Noelle-Neumann) is an adoption of Festinger’s
model of cognitive dissonance, which predicts ‘‘a priori self-protective behavior,’’ that
is, that a fear of dissonance leads to a reluctance to take action or commit oneself in
order to avoid possible unpleasant consequences in the future.38 This ‘‘self-protective ’’
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communicative behavior is commonly named ‘‘self-censorship ,’’ but the concept of
self-censorship is misleading inasmuch as it suggests that one is censoring his or her
own (communicative) action as if (1) it were an act of solitary personal decision rather
than a socially constructed (actually imposed) act, and (2) other forms of censorship
would involve no personal decisions on the part of the censored.
The concept of self-censorship is even deceiving because it suggests that speakers
willingly refrain from their opinion or action, or moderate it while in fact they stand
in fear of external censorship or negative sanctions. Even if the fear of sanctions were
the main mechanism regulating individual opinion expression, it cannot be an
idiosyncratic trait of the individual without being at the same time also characteristic
of the social structure and social will (e.g., the definition of ‘‘normality’’ and
‘‘tolerable’’). Every single act of (non-) communication, including the so-called self-
censorship, is a social act if communication is conceived of as a socio-cultural
process*/conditioned by social ‘‘externalities’’ such as specificities of languages,
traditions, experiences, and interests*/and not as ‘‘an operation as simple as the
transportation of a commodity like bricks.’’39
Censorship as ‘‘the Guardian of Our Psychic Life’’
Freud compared political censorship with censorship acting in dreams and identified
similar conditions for both. According to Freud, censorship is the opposing force to
‘‘the psychic energy of the unconscious wish forming the dream,’’ which exercises its
authority in our waking state but does not completely disappear during sleep. On the
other hand, ‘‘the task of dream-formation is, above all, to overcome the inhibition of
the censorship.’’40
Freud uses the metaphor of censorship to suggest that the contents of the
unconscious gain access to the preconscious in a disguised form*/in order to
outsmart the censor (normality). In a similar way, the transition from the
preconscious to the conscious is associated with censorship.41 ‘‘The dream is the
(disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish.’’42 This does not contradict
the fact that dreams often have painful contents. In other words, ‘‘even our painful
and terrifying dreams may, upon interpretation, prove to be wish-fulfilments.’’43 Yet,
only a careful analysis of the manifest dream-content may reveal a wish-fulfillment as
its latent thought-content.
The detention from (pre)consciousness is indeed the most idiosyncratic form of
censorship where the process of censoring only rarely becomes visible to the external
world; its results*/e.g., the contents of dreams or pathological behavior*/are not
communicated to others except in a therapeutic communication. Yet, Freud named
this suppression censorship rather than self-censorship (in contrast to, for example,
‘‘self-control’’ by which one can master inner resistances), and he did so for good
reasons*/because it is always a resistance to a certain external power.
Wherever a wish-fulfilment is unrecognizable and disguised there must be present atendency to defend oneself against this wish, and in consequence of this defence thewish is unable to express itself save in a distorted form. [. . .] Where in social life
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can a similar misrepresentation be found? Only where two persons are concernedone of whom possesses a certain power while the other has to act with certainconsideration on account of this power.44
In Freud’s conceptualization, censor(ship) is a kind of gatekeeper controlling the
admission from the unconscious system to the preconscious system in dream
formation. It always serves the resistance to the emergence of some thoughts into a
system, medium, or circumstances different from those in which they originated.45
Thus ‘‘in the censorship between Ucs. [the unconciousness] and Pcs. [the
preconsciousness] [. . .] we must recognize and respect the guardian of our psychic
life.’’ The disguised mode of expression of one’s wishes in dreams, which Freud
explains as a compromise between the striving of the unconscious to reach the
preconscious and the control of censorship*/between making visible and hiding*/is
the way we normally operate not only in dreams but also when we are awake,
although it may lose part of its force in certain circumstances. For example, the
‘‘endopsychic censorship’’ is reduced in the dormant state of psyche, and the power of
censorship increases when we are awake.46
On the one hand, Freud considers censorship ‘‘the guardian of our psychic life’’
and its absence or ineffectiveness ‘‘pathological enfeeblement of censorship’’; for
example, ‘‘The deliria are the work of a censorship which no longer makes any effort
to conceal its sway.’’47 On the other hand, he compares the compromise between
showing and hiding in dreams, for which he uses the metaphor of censorship, with
‘‘the Russian censorship on the frontier, which allows only those foreign journals
which have had certain passages blacked out to fall into the hands of the readers to be
protected.’’ While Freud clearly opposes the literal or political censorship of speech
(such as that in Russia), his ‘‘preferred’’ personal strategy in public discourse is still
that of ‘‘politeness,’’ which is the disguised mode of expression.
Censorship may be conceived as a gate-keeping formation located on any
between-system boundary, for example between ‘‘the inner self ’’ and ‘‘the
social self,’’ between ‘‘the private’’ and ‘‘the public,’’ between ‘‘the hidden’’ and ‘‘the
visible,’’ between the personal and mass mediated communication, or, as it were, on
the physical border between two countries. Such an analogy with Freud’s
psychotherapeutic conceptualization of censorship is perfectly justified since, as
Freud argues, the inner nature of ‘‘the true psychic reality’’ is just as much (un)known
as the reality of the ‘‘external world,’’ and they are both*/either ‘‘by the data of
consciousness’’ or ‘‘by the reports of our sense-organs’’*/only imperfectly commu-
nicated or made visible to us. Censorship results as a compromise of the struggle
between the two opposing forces*/showing and hiding*/which tend to outwit
each other.
Is Censorship Voiceless?
While authoritative communicative intervention is aimed at silencing interlocutors,
not every silence (absence of linguistic signals) is a sign or consequence of
authoritative intervention or censorship. The relation is similar to that between the
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hidden and the visible where not all of what is hidden may be taken as a sign of the
absence of justice, although it results from inner censorial acts (hiding). Generally,
silence has an interactive character when participants perceive or expect commu-
nication process to take place, and is interpreted by them as a communicative act.48
In this sense, silence and speech are two extremes on the communication continuum.
The master’s silence may show his disapproval of his subordinates. Such is the case
when a teacher in the classroom becomes silent to restore order in it. Students’
silence, on the other hand, may indicate their unwillingness to submit to the teacher’s
authority, as in the case when no student wants to answer the teacher’s question in
the class. Similar would be the case of the defendant standing mute of malice in court.
Both the dominating and oppositional silence in these cases represent active
interventions into communication to negotiate power, rather than consequences of
censorship.
The ambivalent nature of silence that is reflected in different dimensions*/e.g.,
the controlling vs. submissive silence, submissive vs. resisting silence, active vs.
passive silence*/makes the relationship between silence and censorship very tricky.
Not every silence results from oppressive acts! Silence is a sign of censorship only as
the absence or breakdown of communication, but as a nonverbal communicative
behavior it may also indicate deep affection or admiration (‘‘making words
superfluous’’) or a powerful resistance (e.g., ‘‘cultural silence’’ of artists in
some European countries under the Nazi-fascists occupation in the Second
World War). Silence may be even threatening: ‘‘One fears that if a man is silent
he will retain his aversion to an object; but reasoning upon it furnishes a safety-valve
and brings satisfaction, while the object, in the mean time, pursues its way
unmolested.’’49
Even if silence results from a censorial intervention, it carries communication by
reporting what is forbidden to communicate in public; on this basis, it may also breed
social (communicative) action (e.g., ‘‘alternative’’ or ‘‘underground’’ media). Like
Freud’s ‘‘pathological enfeeblement of censorship,’’ it may help the oppressed groups
to gain access to the public sphere and the media. ‘‘The stricter the domination of the
censorship, the more thorough becomes the disguise, and, often enough, the more
ingenious the means employed to put the reader on the track of the actual
meaning.’’50
On the other hand, the absence of silence is not a positive proof of free
communication. Communication freedom is limited not only by attempts to obstruct
communication but also by those
who have ability to manipulate social relations for their own advantage [. . .] Theyhave an uncanny instinct for detecting whatever intellectual tendencies evenremotely threaten to encroach upon their control. They have developed anextraordinary facility in enlisting upon their side the inertia, prejudices andemotional partisanship of the masses by use of a technique which impedes freeinquiry and expression.51
Elimination of formal or legal limitations to communication does not provide yet
freedom of communication; it is only its necessary condition. Removal of such
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limitations may create a wrong impression that intellectual freedom exists while in
fact it does not, which generates ‘‘complacency in virtual enslavement.’’ People
exercise incomplete control over persuasive communication they encounter, and they
are often unaware of its implications. On the other hand, as Dewey suggested,
awareness of external oppression may awaken intellectual energy that could break
censorship.
In terms of Roman Jakobson’s classic definitions of six linguistic functions of
verbal communication, silence represents a specific form of universal speech. It
obviously has a phatic function of maintaining the communication process or
interrupting it without transmitting one single bit of information concerning the
object. It can have an emotive function expressing communicator’s attitude toward
the object of communication (and it is usually accompanied by other nonverbal
behavior expressing the same function). If the communicator’s silence indicates an
aim to elicit a certain reaction from the recipients or mobilize them, it has a conative
or injunctive function. Although silence is not commonly regarded as a medium of
artistic expression, it certainly may be an object of aesthetic satisfaction, and thus it
has a poetic or aesthetic function. Jaworski compares (linguistic and visual) silence as
an artistic activity with the interpersonal silence in the conversation between two
interlocutors. However, since silence hardly has any referential function (it is not a
conventionally defined sign of anything), it always calls for a context that helps define
its ‘‘correct’’ meaning*/the presence of the metalinguistic function performed, for
example, by another form of nonverbal communication, while at the same time
silence may function metalinguistically, too, for example when indicating the need for
an explanation of what has been just said.52
Only when silence implies the absence, the interruption or even suspension of
communication that was assumed to have taken place, is it a symptom of a censorial
intervention. Silence is a sign of censorship when it is imputed to a dominated
group, which is not able or allowed to break the silence by its own choice. Yet even in
this case, when censorship and free expression can be considered formal opposites
(i.e., communication vs. non-communication), they complement each other on a
more abstract level. Gouldner argues that news not only ‘‘reports’’ but also ‘‘censors
and occludes aspects of life; its silences generate a kind of ‘underprivileged’
social reality, a social reality implicitly said (by the silence) to be unworthy of
attention.’’ Reporting in the media not only attracts and frames attention of
audiences but also averts their attention from certain issues. Making things visible (as
in news reporting) may imply censorship just as well as silence. In this sense, as
Gouldner suggests, censorship has a similar meaning as a country’s border: it not only
limits, but also constitutes ‘‘the self and its rationality,’’ just as a country’s border not
only indicates the limit of the sovereign power, but is also constitutive for the
exercising of power, since power can only exist in a collectivity that legitimates it (in
contrast, for example, to violence and force).53 What is not said contributes to the
meaning of what is said*/in this way the said and the unsaid are reflexively
determined.
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‘‘New Publicity’’*/The End of Publicness?
It is impossible to eliminate secrecy from social relations and evade censorship
in communication*/not only because they are deep-rooted and extensively
diffused in all societies but also because they are constitutive of social behavior.
Censorship is a guardianship located on every border between the visible and
the concealed*/between the unconscious and preconscious, between preconscious
and conscious, between the inner self and the social self, between the internal and the
external, between the private and the public, or between the personal and the
mass mediated. In censorship, forces of making visible confront the resistance to
disclosure and efforts to keep things hidden. We carefully select what we will
reveal and what we will conceal due to prospective*/(un)intentional and
(un)anticipated*/consequences of our deliberate decisions and/or because we are
forced to do so.
Censorship operates in two distinct spheres and thus has a double nature. In the
private sphere, it is inward directed; it controls and restricts the emergence of
thoughts and information into circumstances different from those in which they
originated and thus safeguards the creator and their secrecies (against the psychic
energy of the unconscious). In non-private and particularly mass mediated
communication, censorship*/directly or indirectly carried out by the state
authorities, private corporations, and powerful individuals*/is outward directed
and represses ‘‘epistemological criminals’’ who may challenge the premises of the
existing order and threaten the ruling power in society at large or parts of it. ‘‘Their
power (or potential power) derives from their capacity to spoil the terms of the
bargain which has made a viable version of social reality possible.’’54 Thus, censorship
protects the foundations (not necessarily democratic though) of society, and that may
be at the expense of freedoms and rights of individuals.
The more a system of communication is diversified and complex, the more
censorial forces themselves become diversified and complex. As long as the
publication of books and newspapers was essentially based on personal craft and
property, censorship was institutionally personalized, too. Similarly, in ancient Rome,
censors were appointed by the rulers to assess publications and ban ‘‘immoral’’
writings. From ancient Greece until the end of the Middle Ages, the roles of the
censor and the censored were clearly defined and divided. The growth of
communication networks gave rise to more sophisticated, quiet, indirect, informal,
hidden but in a way also more effective, all-embracing and multifaceted forms
of censorship. As the Enlightenment spoiled the former relationship between the
censor and the censored, the post-Enlightenment period spoiled the relationship
between publicity and the public. The marketplace became the most powerful
censorial institution deciding what ought to be made available and what not. At the
same time, ‘‘new publicity’’ became a powerful instrument of making certain that
sufficient attention is devoted to what corporate decision-makers identify as
profitable.
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What are the strategies to confront the hidden forces of censorship? In practical
terms, censorship is determined either primarily internally (by my inner motives) or
primarily externally (by group or social expectations and pressures). On analogy,
individual strategies of avoiding the barriers set by censorship can be aimed at either
(1) reducing one’s needs and desires attainable through public actions or (2)
increasing one’s power relative to others.
Theoretically, two opposing conclusions can be made in view of the conditions of
structural censorship: (1) that ‘‘the public’’ in the strict sense does not, and cannot,
exist because of the persistent presence of censorship; (2) that actions directed
to change these conditions can bring us ever closer to ‘‘the counter-factual ideal of
the public.’’55
Dean argues that current ‘‘Habermasohistic’’ democratic political theory must fail
for it is focused on
revealing, outing, and uncovering what has been concealed or withheld from the
public [. . .]: because the public can never live up [to] its promise (a failure marked
by the secret), a dynamic of suspicion and surveillance (now materialized in
technoculture) is installed as the next best thing.56
The obsession with a permanent revelation of the hidden must fall short of the goal
because we can never know if all the secret has been revealed.
But why would this imply that ‘‘the public sphere cannot acknowledge [. . .] that
the secret marks the constitutive limit of the public’’?57 Why should the concept of
the public (sphere) be only legitimate on condition that it could in due course
materialize in practice?
As I argued earlier following Gouldner, the hidden is co-determinative of the
visible. In this sense, it not only limits but also constitutes publicness. Censorship can
be abolished neither in the formation of dreams nor in social communication but
only interpreted and controlled (and thus delegitimized and limited to some degree).
On the other hand, censorship and forces of hiding do not undermine the very
notions of publicness and the public (sphere) since they do not rest exclusively on the
idea of uncovering the hidden and making accessible what is defended against the
public(ity) by some obscure forces. For Kant, a ‘‘public use of reason’’ also denotes
provision of reasons for one’s judgment. Individual judgments have to be publicly
presented and discussed to become more rational or objectively certain, and
eventually agreed upon. In fact, no opinion is merely an arbitrary fiction, and it
must always be presented and taken up with some knowledge. Although opinions
should have no place in the sphere of science and morals where knowledge ought to
dominate, according to Kant, the entire development of scientific knowledge is
nothing but enduring refutation of erroneous hypotheses and partial explanations.
Thus, if the ‘‘obsession’’ with a permanent revelation of the hidden delegitimized the
noble idea of the public (sphere), the ‘‘obsession’’ with errors and inaccuracies would
delegitimize science.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the prevailing concept of ‘‘publicity’’ has
definitely lost its critical sign that it had in the age of Enlightenment and now
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prevalently denotes the promotion of commodities and interests through advertising
and public relations, which has nothing in common with the Benthamian surveillance
of power and Kantian public use of reason. The post-Enlightenment reconceptualiza-
tion of publicity is clearly reflected in the fact that the word ‘‘publicity,’’ which
referred to ‘‘the state of being public or open to the knowledge of a community’’ in
Webster’s Dictionary of 1828 and 1913, has been overshadowed by ‘‘the activity of
making certain that someone or something attracts a lot of interest or attention from
many people, or the attention received as a result of this activity’’ in Cambridge
Advanced Lerner’s Dictionary, and conceived of as ‘‘one of the variables that comprise
the promotional mix’’ in Wikipedia, along with ‘‘other components of promotions
[which] are advertising, sales promotion, and personal selling. [. . .] Publicity is
closely related to public relations.’’
While formerly censorship has been in clear opposition to publicity, and publicity
has been actually ‘‘invented’’ with a view to abolish state censorship and make state
secrets visible to the public, the definition of publicity in ‘‘Newspeak’’ equates it to
what I defined as ‘‘calculated visibility,’’ which by definition includes censorship. In
manufacturing visibility, secrecy may be effectively used to deceive publics.
There is little chance (realistically, no chance) to revive the ‘‘old’’ notion of
publicity. What we should do then is to readdress the conception of ‘‘authoritative
intervention’’ in the definition of censorship*/so that it would refer not only to the
direct (politically and ideologically motivated) restraints of communication acts but
also to a variety of unfavorable circumstances that may avert individuals and groups
from speaking, make them imitate or heed opinions of others, and say things other
than they may say under more favorable conditions.
Alternatively, one could propose to restore the Enlightenment meaning of
censorship to legitimize the moral critique of the ‘‘new publicity,’’ following Marx’s
idea that ‘‘true censorship, rooted in the very essence of freedom of the press, is
criticism.’’58 Unfortunately, such an attempt to the restoration of the original
meaning of publicity would not be viable for practical reasons since ‘‘the lay public’’
may then equate the critique of commercialization of the media with censorship. This
is actually already happening: the critique requesting restrictions on commercial
communication is rebutted by media corporations on the ground that it wants to
introduce censorship.
Nonetheless, new and complex forms of (structural) censorship cannot undermine
the importance of public reasoning as a personal need, duty, and right, and as a
societal need and obligation. It is usually taken for granted that freedom of thought
and opinion is not an intrinsically collective exercise of freedom, and thus it does not
legitimately invite public regulation. Such a belief is essentially delusive. As Kant put
it, ‘‘How much, and how correctly, would we think if we did not think, at the same
time, in community with others? ’’ thus emphasizing the collective nature of the
personal right to use one’s reason in public.59 Social experience, or ‘‘putting ourselves
in the position of everyone else,’’ in Kant’s words, plays a fundamental role in
constructing personal autonomy and the public. Censorship can make the process of
constructing social experience more difficult but it certainly cannot prevent it.
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Censorial forces can only be limited if social communication becomes truly
socialized.
The critique of censorship should be complemented by the critique of ‘‘new
publicity.’’ The task of critical theory is not merely to identify and explain the working
of censorship and new publicity, but to formulate a critique of censorship that may
help overcome the inhibition and expansion of censorship leading to undesired
consequences for the individual and society. In his defense of the concept of the
constitution, Kant concluded that
although a perfect state may never exist, the idea is not on that account the less just,
which holds up this maximum as the archetype or standard of a constitution, in
order to bring legislative government always nearer and nearer to the greatest
possible perfection.60
In a similar way, Habermas conceptualized the unity of public opinion as a
counterfactual entity in democratic theory that ought to enable the distinction
between ‘‘genuine processes of public communication and those that have been
subverted by power.’’61 As both Kant and Habermas and many others claim, neither a
perfect state nor a perfect public can exist, and yet critically theorizing them may
bring us closer to such a counterfactual ideal.
Notes
[1] The concept of power, while widely used in social sciences, has no common definition.
Castells’ essentially Weberian definition that I am adopting here states: ‘‘Power is that
relationship between human subjects which, on the basis of production and experience,
imposes the will of some subjects upon others by the potential or actual use of violence,
physical or symbolic.’’ See Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996), 15. As Buckley states, ‘‘The mechanisms involved may range from naked
force, through manipulation of symbols, information, and other environmental condition, to
the dispensing of conditional rewards.’’ See Walter Buckley, Sociology and Modern Systems
Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 186.
[2] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1820; reprint, Kitchener, Ont.: Batoche,
2001), 252.
[3] Jeremy Bentham, Constitutional Code: Vol. 1, ed. Frederick Rosen and J. H. Burns (1830;
reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 40.
[4] Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. R. M. Adams (1513; reprint, New York: W.W.
Norton, 1992).
[5] It is very difficult to denote any form of communication as strictly private in the sense that
the results of interpersonal transactions are controlled entirely by the people involved and no
(indirect) consequences would appear to the people not directly involved.
[6] Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. K. H. Wolff (1908; reprint, New York: The
Free Press, 1950), 311�/12.
[7] Thomas Nagel, ‘‘Concealment and Exposure,’’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 27, issue 1
(1998): 13. The difference between the private and the public is not conventionally defined.
‘‘Private’’ is for Nagel what people keep for themselves, ‘‘the inner self ’’; and ‘‘public’’ is what
I present to others, ‘‘the external self.’’
[8] Sigmund Freud, ‘‘The Interpretation of Dreams’’ in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud
(1900; reprint, New York: Random House, 1938), 223.
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[9] Machiavelli, The Prince, 48.
[10] Jeremy Bentham, ‘‘Of Publicity,’’ 1791; Reprint, Public Culture, 6, no. 3 (1994): 582.
[11] Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society (1962; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 35; emphasis
added,
[12] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Macmillan Press,
1781, electronic edition available at: http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/ Philosophy/Kant/cpr/
cpr-open.html), 9. Accessed 5 February 2006.
[13] Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere , 7.
[14] Machiavelli, The Prince, 63.
[15] This boundary is, however, permeable: the way I would like to be perceived socially*/my
‘‘social self ’’*/also influences, to some degree, my inner, private self, and vice versa. The two
selves never coincide, but they certainly correlate. The correlation may be either positive (the
two selves being consonant) or negative (denoting dissonance), which depends on the kind
of internal censorship that takes place in the construction of one’s ‘‘social self.’’ As Mead
suggested, ‘‘We are, especially through the use of the vocal gestures, continually arousing in
ourselves the responses which we call out in other persons, so that we are taking the attitudes
of the other persons into our own conduct.’’ See George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and
Society (1934; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 69. See also Nagel,
‘‘Concealment and Exposure,’’ 7.
[16] See John D. Peters, ‘‘Realism in Social Representation and the Fate of the Public’’ in Public
Opinion & Democracy, ed. Slavko Splichal (Creskill, NY: Hampton, 2001), 86.
[17] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977),
201.
[18] Jeremy Bentham, To the Spanish People, Letter I. (1820), http://www.la.utexas.edu/labyrinth/
bsp/bsp.l01.html (accessed 5 February 2006).
[19] See Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990),
43�/44, and Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 40�/45; 62�/67.
[20] Tom Harrisson, ‘‘What Is Public Opinion?’’ The Political Quarterly 11 (1940): 370.
[21] Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, ‘‘The Spiral of Silence: A Theory of Public Opinion,’’ Journal of
Communication 24, issue 2 (1974): 43�/51.
[22] Frederick Schauer, ‘‘The Ontology of Censorship’’ in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of
Cultural Regulation, ed. Robert C. Post (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 1998),
150.
[23] Lawrence Soley, Censorship, Inc.: The Corporate Threat to Free Speech in the United States
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), ix.
[24] Plato. The Republic of Plato, ed. and trans. B. Jowett (360 B.C.E., reprint, New York: P. F.
Collier & Son. 1901), http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html (accessed 5 February 2006).
[25] Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, transl. T. Nugent (rendered
into HTML and text by Jon Roland of the Constitution Society, 1914, orig. pub. 1752),
http://www.constitution.org/cm/sol.htm: book viii, 14 (accessed 5 February 2006).
[26] See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right (1762),
http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon.txt (accessed 5 February 2006), and ‘‘The Letter to
M. d’Alembert on the Theatre’’ in his Politics and the Arts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1960, orig. pub. 1758), 116.
[27] The Spirit of Laws , book v, 19.
[28] Sue Curry Jansen, Censorship: The Knot that Binds Power and Knowledge (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988), 36.
[29] John Milton, Areopagitica, in Areopagitica and other Political Writings (Indianapolis:
Liberty Fund, 1999, orig. pub. 1644), http://www.dartmouth.edu/�/milton/reading_ room/
areopagitica (accessed 5 February 2006), 44; John Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (Internet
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Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1996, orig. pub. 1689), http://www.utm.edu/research/iep
(accessed 5 February 2006).
[30] Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, L’opinion publique et science (Paris: Institut d’edition Sanofi-
Synthelabo, 2000), 24�/25.
[31] Jodi Dean, ‘‘Publicity’s Secret,’’ Political Theory 29, issue 5 (2001): 635.
[32] Gregory S. Brown, ‘‘Reconsidering the Censorship of Writers in Eighteenth-Century France:
Civility, State Power, and the Public Theater in the Enlightenment,’’ Journal of Modern
History 75 (2003): 238, 259.
[33] Karl Knies, Der Telegraph als Verkehrsmittel: Uber der Nachrichtenverkehr uberhaupt (1857;
reprint, Munich: Verlag Reinhard Fischer, 1996), 4.
[34] Tonnies also quoted the American sociologist Edward A. Ross, who maintained that ‘‘the
clandestine prostitution of the newspaper to the business interests has never been so general.’’
Ferdinand Tonnies, ‘‘Macht und Wert der Offentlichen Meinung,’’ Die Dioskuren: Jahrbuch
fur Geisteswissenschaften 2 (1923): 98.
[35] Tonnies, ‘‘Macht und Wert der Offentlichen Meinung,’’ 88.
[36] See Slavko Splichal, Principles of Publicity and Press Freedom (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2002), 124�/28, and Jansen, Censorship, 93.
[37] John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927; reprint, Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1991),
168.
[38] Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957; reprint, Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1962), 31.
[39] Robert Park, ‘‘Reflections on Communication and Culture’’ in Reader in Public Opinion and
Communication, ed. Bernard Berelson and Maurice Janowitz (1939; reprint, New York: Free
Press, 1966), 171�/72.
[40] Freud, ‘‘The Interpretation of Dreams,’’ 750.
[41] Freud draws a distinction between two kinds of unconsciousness: the first kind, ‘‘the
unconscious,’’ is incapable of consciousness; the second kind, ‘‘the preconscious,’’ is able to
reach consciousness. In order to reach consciousness, the preconscious has to undergo
censorship. Thus, the preconscious is like ‘‘a screen’’ between the unconscious and
consciousness. Freud’s censorship metaphor implies that the unconscious and preconscious
relate to each other in a dialectical way which makes it difficult to determine their relative
power, but he is not consistent regarding the degree of power that the unconscious has over
the preconscious, or vice versa. ‘‘The Interpretation of Dreams,’’ 544.
[42] Freud, ‘‘The Interpretation of Dreams,’’ 235.
[43] Freud, ‘‘The Interpretation of Dreams,’’ 218.
[44] Freud, ‘‘The Interpretation of Dreams,’’ 223.
[45] Freud, ‘‘The Interpretation of Dreams,’’ 492�/93. The fact that one can more easily interpret
dreams after a certain period of time than immediately after the time of dreaming them
suggests, according to Freud, that during that time, many of resistances existing at the time of
dreaming were eliminated.
[46] Freud, ‘‘The Interpretation of Dreams,’’ 510.
[47] See Freud, ‘‘The Interpretation of Dreams,’’ 483.
[48] See Adam Jaworski, The Power of Silence: Social and Pragmatic Perspectives (Newbury Park,
CA: Sage, 1993), 34. An interesting case of communicative silence is hesitation when a person
utters another persons’ name (as though one would forget it), which is according to Freud a
clear sign of disparagement. See Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Psychopathology of Everyday Life’’ in The
Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (1901; reprint, New York: Random House, 1938), 80.
[49] Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 253�/54.
[50] ‘‘The Interpretation of Dreams,’’ 223.
[51] Dewey, The Public and Its Problems , 169.
[52] Jaworski, The Power of Silence , 164.
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[53] Alvin W. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology: The Origins, Grammar, and
Future of Ideology (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 107, 126.
[54] Jansen, Censorship, 184.
[55] I assume that there is no need for a theoretical critique of the ‘‘trivial’’ form of censorship as
a direct authoritative intervention, although this assumption might appear unjustified in the
face of recent developments in many countries.
[56] Dean, ‘‘Publicity’s Secret,’’ Political Theory 29, no. 5 (2001): 648.
[57] Dean, ‘‘Publicity’s Secret,’’ 645.
[58] Karl Marx, ‘‘Die Verhandlungen des 6. rheinischen Landtags: Debatten uber Pressefreiheit
und Publikation der Landstandischen Verhandlungen,’’ in Marx-Engels Werke, 1 (1842;
reprint, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1974): 55.
[59] Immanuel Kant, ‘‘Was heisst: sich im Denken orientiren?’’ Berlinische Monatsschrift, 2
(1786): 325.
[60] Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason , 125.
[61] Jurgen Habermas, ‘‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,’’ in Habermas and the Public
Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 440.
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