Paul Goodman—Communication and Censorship

Paul Goodman
Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals
(1962)

"Pornography and the sexual revolution"
(pp. 49-69)

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...a philosophical question..., which is, in my opinion, even more important for our society than the sexual matter: What is the nature of speech and art? To protect their "serious" books, the courts attempt to distinguish speech as communication of an idea or even as talking about a subject, from speech as an action that does something to its speaker, subject, and hearer. ...

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... The judges reason that if something like this can be established, a book can be protected under the Bill of Rights' guarantee of freedom to communicate opinion. Yet, although this is a useful distinction for some kinds of speech—e.g., scientific reporting and conscientious journalism—it simply does not apply to common speech, and it is necessarily irrelevant to art, for one essential function of art is to move the audience. If Joyce and Lawrence felt that all they had done was to convey ideas, they would have considered themselves failures.

Naturally the decisions themselves, based on an unphilosophical distinction, have been notoriously inconsistent. For example, The Well of Loneliness was banned because "it seeks to justify the right of a pervert . . . it does not argue for repression of insidious impulses . . . it seeks to justify and idealize perverted ideas." Yet these are merely the ideas of the author. But contrariwise, Justice Stewart defended the film of Lady Chatterley by saying, "The picture advocated an idea—that adultery under certain circumstances may be proper behavior. The First Amendment guarantee is freedom to advocate ideas." Jerome Frank has wryly commented that if an "idea" is eloquently argued, it is in danger; if it is dully argued, it is safe.

Here is an example of the legal doctrine at work. At Marble Arch in London, crowds gather to listen to popular orators vent their grievances and longings on every topic under the sun:... Like Bernard Shaw, the orators test their repartee against a powerfully insolent audience. All is strictly legal. But if a man comes within twenty-four inches of the speaker, he is at once hauled off by a guardian bobby! A man can say anything, but he mustn't do anything;...

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Freedom of speech means freedom to talk about. Speech is not saying-as-an-action. The limitations are clear. If there were incitement to riot, the freedom would cease. "Fighting words" are forbidden because they lead to fights. ...there are even particular topics...where merely to treat them at all in some public way is tantamount to sanctioning their existence in the universe. Here speech becomes magic, to name the Name creates the thing.

Jefferson and other revolutionaries who insisted on the Bill of Rights probably had a more risky notion of freedom of speech than our courts, as they did of political action in general. But if to them freedom of speech meant merely freedom to communicate opinions, they could not have intended the First Amendment to apply to belles-lettres at all, for the neoclassical esthetic doctrine of their time held that the function of art was to move and instruct, to instruct by moving. In our modern esthetics, the legal embarrassment is extreme; we pay less attention to imitating reality and lay all the more emphasis on speech as action. ... In advance-guard art, where the artist is reacting to and vomiting up something intolerable in society, the art-act cannot help being offensive. Since the nineteenth century, the naturalists have meant to defy and shame when they stripped away the mask of hypocrisy. The primary aim of Dada is to shock. In his Theater of Violence, Antonin Artaud declares that theater is precisely not communicating ideas but acting

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on the community... The "poetry readings" of the Beats try to give us their "existent situation," usually drunken, and the audience copes with it as best it can. I could continue a long list.

To these facts of modern art, the doctrine of Woolsey, Brennan, and van Pelt Bryan is not adequate. Such art cannot be defended as communicating ideas, and anything objectionable in it (there is much) must condemn it. Indeed, the arguments of the censoring customs officer or postmaster betoken a more genuine art-response, for they have been directly moved , although in an ignorant way, by the excitement and inner conflict of Joyce and Lawrence. Their experience is ignorant and low-grade because they are unwilling to let the sexual excitement belong to a larger world of experience , and this is why they excerpt passages. But at least they have been made to feel that the world is threateningly sexual. As the British Magistrate Mead said, on paintings by Lawrence, "Art is immaterial . . . Obscene pictures should be put an end to like any wild animal which may be dangerous." And so Justice Manton, in his dissent on Ulysses, "Obscenity is not rendered less by the statement of truthful fact," for it is precisely the fact, the nature of things, that is obscene to the censor .

Woolsey's doctrine is insulting to the artist. He says that the book did "not tend to excite lustful thoughts, but the net effect was a tragic and powerful commentary" (italics mine). Surely the author wants to say, "It is lustful among other things, and therefore its net effect is tragic."

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In our culture an artist is expected to move the reader; he is supposed to move him to tears, to laughter, to indignation, to compassion, even to hatred; but he may not move him to have an erection or to mockery of public figures making a spectacle of themselves. Why not? By these restrictions we doom ourselves to a passionless and conformist community. Instead of bracketing off the "classics," as especially the British courts do—indeed, the legal definition of a classic seems to be a "nonactionable obscenity"—let us pay attention to the classical pornography and we shall see that it is not the case, as the court feels obliged to prove, that a work has a "net" social use despite its sexual effect, but rather that the pornography, in a great context and spoken by a great soul, is the social use.

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[66] ...I do not think that moral problems are private problems and can be left alone. Here I must dissent from my bold and honest classmate, Judge Murtagh, who wants to leave most such issues to a person's conscience before God. On the contrary, it is because moral problems are so publicly important—sexual practice is crucial for family, courting, friendship, education, and culture—that they must be ongoingly decided by all groups, as well as individuals; and they are so subtle that only the manifold mind of all the institutions of society, skirmishing and experimenting, can figure them out and invent right solutions.

This is clear and thoughtful, but the rejoinders are obvious:

(1) if moral problems are just this publicly important and subtle, there is as good a case against art as the ideal (or even adequate) vehicle for figuring them out; this on account of the irreducible aesthetic impulse which is always already a distorting impulse.

If Joyce and Lawrence felt that
all they had done was to convey ideas,
they would have considered themselves failures.

This says nothing about the wisdom or folly of censorship, but it certainly undercuts one of the above pillars of art's defense as speech.

(2) Goodman writes here as if there has not already been a long recorded history of eminently subtle and manifold thought-and-action on such matters. The notion that all of this is in constant need of decision by all groups, as well as individuals is faintly ridiculous. Posing the need for constant (re)discovery against the idea that moral problems are private problems preempts the solution, which can be a public solution but is also, in an unfortunate word, a conservative solution.

Goodman himself elsewhere says as much:

Modern times have been characterized by fundamental changes occurring with unusual rapidity. These have shattered tradition but often have not succeeded in creating a new whole community. We have no recourse to going back, there is nothing to go back to. If we are to have a stable and whole community in which the young can grow to manhood, we must painfully perfect the revolutionary modern tradition we have.

This stoical resolve is, paradoxially, a conservative proposition, aiming at stability and social balance. For often it is not a question of making innovation, but of catching up and restoring the right proportions. But no doubt, in our runaway, one-sided way of life, the proposal to conserve human resources and develop human capacities has become a radical innovation.

(Growing Up Absurd, 231-232)

If the perfect ignorance of history and precedent is what everyone would rather do with their individualist "freedom," then the point of that freedom has been missed. And of course our point in choosing to remount the great struggle as our struggle, to perform struggle rather than holing up with a book or a trusted mentor, the point of this is unmistakable. (See Ernest Becker et al.)

"Designing pacifist films"
(pp. 70-79)

[71] What a theater audience experiences most vividly is how it has, anonymously, shared in breaking a taboo, in witnessing with accomplices the forbidden and shocking. The "message" of the spectacle is then employed as a rationalization. Of course it is only the rationalization that is mentioned outside the theater or in the reviews, though the advertising hints at the shocking.

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[72] bad audiences cannot be relied on to respond to a whole work of art; they will select from it what suits their own repressions and interpret according to their own prejudices the very fact that they have been moved despite themselves. The lovely is taken as dirty, the horrible as sadistically thrilling. The derogation is partly revenge against the artist. Bad audiences follow the plot as a story; they do not identify with the whole work as the soul of the poet, but they identify with the actors of the story and take sides. Given a film about capital punishment, for instance, a Camus will notice, and be steeled in revulsion by, the mechanism of execution: he will deny the whole thing the right to exist because it is not like us (this is the reaction-formation, denial, that is characteristic of active compassion); but a vulgar audience will identify with the victim, get involved in the suspense, thrill to the horror, and weep with pity. The effect is entertainment, not teaching or therapy; and to be entertained by such a theme is itself damaging.

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Factual and analytic handling of images of war can neutralize their pornographic effect . My bias is that even the exemplary images of pacifist action are best handled in a documentary fashion, avoiding audience identification with their heroes and keeping the real situation in the foreground. The purpose of the film is not so much inspiration as to point to opportunities in the audience's real environment. It is better to err on the side of dryness. The heart is already enlisted. Emphasis on the pacifist "movement" with its charismatic symbols and "leaders" betrays us into the field of public relations, where we are swamped. The charismatic excitement that gives courage and solidarity must emerge in each concrete occasion of pacifist action, and it will emerge, if it is really a man's own occasion. We are in the tradition of bearing witness. It was just the genius of Gandhi to notice faultless occasions.

"Advance-guard writing in America: 1900-1950"
(pp. 191-216)

[215] From the point of view of society, again, it is certainly no advantage to be manipulated "for its own good" by artists, and it is even worse when the aim is to make society into a work of art. Yet there is, in life, an important factor that can be called "the art of life"—concern and distress for the style we live—and in a disintegrated culture like our own, very few are busy with it, and among these is the advance-guard artist. And from the point of view of the artist, again, in a shell-shocked society like ours there is a general estrangement, and the artist is estranged, in the sense especially that he feels helplessly without status. But being more conscious of his estrangement, he is really less estranged than the others, and he is used to inventing means of communication, patters, irritants, bridges; this is his forte.

"Underground writing—1960"
(pp. 222-235)

[229] ...another motive for writing up the underworld... By making all scenes equal, by writing one's situation as it is, whatever it is, writers might hope to get rid of "standards" altogether and perhaps of "writing" altogether. (Unfortunately, the writers who seem to have this motive...are both so ignorant and so hopped up, that they don't know what they're after and sell themselves short.)

This is to revive old-fashioned nihilism, to clear the decks. In the nineteenth century, in a scarcity economy, nihilism was more politically revolutionary and religiously Christian; in the "affluent society" it consists of quitting and being religiously Taoist and pacifist. The aim is certainly not to substitute the underground as a new power, but to form a new community from scratch. I have shown elsewhere that this is a happy direction for an advance-guard.

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[231] Culturally, they [the Beats], and we, are not up to this nihilism. Those who abdicate from the economy and university of the big society become a sect rather than a universal solvent. The "scene" soon becomes a stereotyped subject matter, with monotonous repetition of jejune experiences and standard props, rather than a modest account of just where one happens to be thrown, with its materiality and wonder. Public readings become boringly drunken rituals. And to one's astonishment, the creative community spits with envy at proper writers. ...

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[233] To one with any memory or history, it is evident that the need for prejudice, for inner boundaries, goes deeper than the particular content people are prejudiced against at any time. Right-thinking people were just as upset by tobacco as they are now by marijuana. Reading in popular novels of 1880, one eerily senses the same dismay about marriage across class lines that is now felt about marriage across color lines; and, especially among Jews, marriage across religious lines used to be mourned like death. It is as if people cannot feel they exist except by affirming, with a shudder, that they are different from something they are against.

See again Becker.

But to be rid of it, we must indeed do without the boundaries. This might mean, for instance, taking it for granted that a chap (like young Freud), busy with God's work and touchingly in love with a well-bred girl, is also sending himself on cocaine, and that's just how it is; or to give a common example, that a splendid teacher is naturally queer for his students.

Hmm.

As might be expected, it is just this matter-of-fact attitude that is shocking to the audience and unacceptable to the publishers, whereas any kind of "underground" writing has become perfectly acceptable. The problem for modern writing is not treating some "underground" property, but simply coping with the facts of life with reason compassion, learning, and imagination.

"Some problems of interpretation: silence, and speech as action"
(pp. 236-254)

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...the argumentum e silentio. There may be no text not because speech was irrelevant compared with some other action, but because speech itself was in the situation so powerful an action that it was forbidden or later excised. This is the case with official censorship. The libelous, whether true or not, is censored because it is an act; the pornographic is censored because it leads to likely acts;... In such cases the interpreter will take the known absence of a text or the evident deletion of certain passages as very significant. But we know from overwhelming common experience that the implicit censorship of social condemnation leads to important reticence or various dodges, like esoteric writing, which must then be read as esoteric. ...

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[242] By and large, where censorship of certain ideas is strong, the ideas are taken seriously,... Even if their books appear to be abstractly theoretical, they are implicitly heavy with concrete reference; and the interpreter must explicate this, for it is the meaning that the ideas had in fact for both author and public. On the other hand, the kind of total freedom that we have for such writings may be evidence that reasoned ideas don't much influence our institutions. Indeed, the fact seems to be with us that such ideas can first become effective when they enter the mass media, and it is at this point that they are strictly regulated in style and content. With us it could almost be said that format is the chief meaning to interpret. To break the format is the censorable act.

A notable simultaneity here with McLuhan and Riesman; or perhaps hardly notable given the prevalence among "intellectuals" of both cryptamnesia and simultaneous discovery.

Note well in any case: the properly utilitarian/practical need (as opposed to a recreational, aesthetic or spiritual one) for interpretation is here, once again, an artifact of oppression of the basest kind: authors who are not free to express certain ideas must get at them implicitly . And now the writing can no longer be read literally or read for surfaces; in fact it is taking the side of the oppressors to read it (only) this way!

The point about the freer alternative betokening an ultimate impotence vis-a-vis Western institutions certainly is important in its own right, but it does not in and of itself contradict the point that the necessary concealment of concrete reference beneath theoretical abstractions, though it indeed may be the best among bad options for authors in real danger, transfroms and perpetuates the oppression without (completely) overcoming it.

In historical studies the problems of the absence of texts have risen globally as our focus of interest has shifted away from kings, war, and intellectuals to social conditions and everyday morals. Texts are scarce

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because sometimes such important pervasive matters did not have to be noticed in writing, and sometimes, according to the ideology of the scribes, they were not worthy of being noticed in writing. Historians have then delved manfully for every kind of unlikely laundry list and other relic, and by reasoning, often between the lines, they have made them speak.

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[245] Albert Schweitzer's interpretations of the New Testament depend on the thesis that those people thought they had a real experience of a new heavens and earth, making them believe things senseless to us. But perhaps they did have the experience; then it is we who are thrown off balance. A variant is the method Buber sometimes uses in Moses: the people experienced something so extraordinary that they were threatened with losing their wits; and the texts we have are rationalizing reaction-formations, in order to grip again our common world. This is like Bergson's ingenious theory that the apparent species are not the forms of life but are the negative impressions of the élan vital in inert matter. Using a different metaphor, Karl Barth says that the Bible consists of burnt-out volcanoes from

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which we may guess the fire that was there—the theory of his Dogmatics is that the fire recurs when the preacher ascends the pulpit.

My note says:
*taleb's ice cube, now a volcano*

Paul Goodman
"The Community of Scholars" (1964)
in Compulsory Mis-Education and The Community of Scholars

[254] the American Association of University Professors is a national craft union, largely of entrenched seniors, that copes with distant crises by dilatory committee work. According to its rules, it will not protect freedom in cases of pragmatic action, but only in academic "inquiry" and teaching—but what kind of inquiry is it that is not essentially involved with pragmatic experiment and risk? And it explicitly enjoins against involving the name and strength of the community of scholars in any action that one may take as an "individual." Such limitations would have been unthinkable in the medieval, nonacademic community of scholars.

Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd
(1960)

[xiii] These same Congressmen are concerned "how to discourage low-level programming in private TV stations without censorship." Their question presupposes that in communication the prior thing is the existence of networks and channels, rather than something to communicate that needs diffusing. But the prior thing is the program, and the only grounds for the license to the station is its ability to transmit it. Nothing could be more stupid than for the communications commission to give to people who handle the means of broadcasting the inventing of what to broadcast, and then, disturbed at the poor quality, to worry about censorship.