Manufacturing the (In)visible: Power to Communicate, Power to Silence

Abstract

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

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. Niccolò 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.

9. Machiavelli, The Prince, 48.

10. Jeremy Bentham, “Of Publicity,” 1791; Reprint, Public Culture, 6, no. 3 (1994): 582.

11. Jürgen 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 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’édition Sanofi-Synthélabo, 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: Über der Nachrichtenverkehr überhaupt (1857; reprint, Munich: Verlag Reinhard Fischer, 1996), 4.

34. Tönnies 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 Tönnies, “Macht und Wert der Öffentlichen Meinung,” Die Dioskuren: Jahrbuch für Geisteswissenschaften 2 (1923): 98.

35. Tönnies, “Macht und Wert der Öffentlichen 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.

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 über Pressefreiheit und Publikation der Landständischen 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. Jürgen Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 440.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Slavko Splichal

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); Tönnies on Public Opinion: Selections and Analyses (co-authored with Hanno Hardt, 2001), and Principles of Publicity and Press Freedom (2002)