Reconceptualizing Censorship, or,
Censorship in a Capitalist Egocracy
“…we need once more to revise in depth the way we conceive things. We need to rethink the grammar of our understanding… our conceptual basis must change in order to understand..." – Carlo Rovelli
In order to dissociate yourself from something it’s necessary to recognize it as such. It may even be appropriate to hold a mirror up to it as well as to yourself. Modern capitalist society is clearly egocentric, and can in fact be referred to as an egocracy. According to no less a source than Adam Smith capitalism is founded on self-interest and private property — in the face of this I ask how it’s possible to move away from such a socio-economic structure, from its premises, implicit requirements and unstated demands to the possibility of an expanded conceptual horizon for the consciousness and understanding of subjectivity and for subjectivity itself. I am willing to admit and to address the fact that identity and its concomitant battles do not do this. Stated simply, you are not your identity, identity first and foremost is a discursive fiction, albeit one that you believe in, and, as egocentric, may simply be what capitalism allows for, walking hand-in-hand with its marketing categories. Indeed, it’s worth asking if there isn’t a deeper relationship, if identity isn’t a result, an effect and product of late-stage capitalism. Keep in mind that you retroactively create your suppositions, especially as far as identity is concerned. Now consider that, in the ideological fantasy that is modern U.S. capitalism, to call ego-based identity into question is to question the consistency you create for yourself in the stories you tell yourself about yourself.
This Stuff Isn’t Great But At Least It’s Recognizable And You Know How It Means
What does recognizable mean when applied to prose? What would recognizable prose have to consist of? It would seem to imply a prose that consistently meets your expectations, a prose grounded in conventionality, which means stability, subjectively and in the marketplace. In effect, it constitutes a well-trod pattern of attention. You know how to read fiction and journalism and know well enough how they mean, dependent as they are on convention. Just as you know how to read yourself and you know how you mean, or at least you do well enough to maintain a troubled consistency. There’s really no work to do in either case. It’s a lot like the little electronic devices, the phones and tablets, that both create desire and frustrate it by keeping satisfaction at bay. (There’s not a lot of work to do there either.) I believe that’s how commodities function in capitalism, creating desire and frustrating it, representing, as commodities do, social relations. So you know how it all means, you don’t have to work to figure it out. You know what’s required of you as a reader of fiction, the pattern is familiar, you know how the characters relate to one another, you know how and in what way you can enter into it through image-based identifications, which is a reading based in the mirror, and that means, the ego. You also know how to enter journalism, based as it is on a reduction of language to communication. Roland Barthes once remarked that, “Realism begins with an awareness of language.” Compare that with Jonathan Franzen who proudly declared that in one of his novels, “You can no longer see the language.” I guess that makes it a graphic novel for the mind. I respect Franzen for his honesty, he understands what the reading public, publishers and editors want and require – nothing challenging. And what exactly is being challenged? Or, just what is the adventure of literature, and who seeks to avoid it?
How Are You Supposed To Read This?
“Underdeterminacy means that every utterance in every conversation and every line in every novel and each sentence of any speech contains ‘blank spots’ – unspoken, assumed knowledge, values, roles and emotions…” – Daniel Everett
A common question from those who are faced with any prose that forces them to confront and enter into it in order to determine how it means is simply, “How are you supposed to read this”? This means anything they’re asked to read that they simply don’t recognize, anything unconventional, that ‘takes them out of their comfort zone.’ And just what makes for this comfort zone? What is the familiar pattern which allows for and ultimately insures it? There’s clearly a fear of having to give up or lose pleasure; their resistance is informed by this anxiety, and it’s been said that anxiety is an emotion that doesn’t lie. Such readers aren’t used to having to think about how something means, having been ideologically indoctrinated into thinking of prose in a certain way, and into conceiving of human subjectivity in as much of a like manner. This means indoctrinated (by convention) into expecting a certain style of prose, one which makes meaning in a certain way, one which possesses a certain recognizable pattern for your attention. Since it can be said that the material organization of language implies and reproduces a conception of human subjectivity, a certain way of thinking who and what we are as subjectivities, it can be said to be a kind of mythographic shorthand. This is, simply speaking, the deadening imaginary, the somnolent pleasure of the conventional.
“…the role of ideology, of ideological illusions: an ‘alienated’ society can reproduce itself (in its actuality) only through its illusory/false self-appearance or self-perception – the moment it appears to itself the way it actually is, this actuality disintegrates…” – Slavoj Zizek
Most humans are passionate about such states of ignorance, the states that convention provides. Most readers just want to dream. And just what is the function of the dream? To allow you to continue sleeping. The style of prose that makes for such a practice I refer to as Capitalist Realism (with nods to Abram Tertz/Andrei Sinyavsky and to Mark K.), and it can be considered to be a formulaic template for thinking in the same way that ideology is. It can perhaps be described as a kind of ideological algorithm. The prose itself is descriptive, egocentric, univocal, ‘journalistic’. Formulaic in that you know how it means, how it represents you or some mirror-image that you identify with, and the other…
Capitalist Realism, or journalistic commodity-form prose, is itself properly formulaic. In that sense it’s mythographic, conventional. Commodity-form prose in all its expressions involves a sameness – univocity, egocentrism, a reduction of language to communication among other characteristics. The language is invisible, in an attempt to facilitate stable, univocal meaning. In our society, in order for potential readers to recognize and grasp it, any prose has to mirror journalistic commodity-form prose. Such prose fills you with a warm feeling, a familiarity, a consistency, something recognizable. Humans seek comfort in the familiar. Freud referred to this as the repetition compulsion, which he defined as “the desire to return to an earlier state.” Ideological indoctrination and assimilation animate this desire for the familiar. In the U.S. literature has clearly been coopted by the characteristics of journalism in the service of capitalism.
If It Doesn’t Sell Is It Still A Commodity?
“(Marshall) McLuhan says: Don’t just look at what’s being expressed. Look at the ways it’s being expressed. And then (Neil) Postman says: Don’t just look at the way things are being expressed, look at how the way things are expressed determines what’s actually expressible. In other words the medium blocks certain messages.” – Ezra Klein
What makes something a commodity is not whether it sells or not, but how it’s conceived. A prose commodity, whether fiction or journalism, and the prose employed in each is similar, possesses a certain style related to form, and as such shares a limited conceptual horizon and dimension of experience. One of the most important aspects that makes any writing a commodity is that the prose, as it relates to narrative, has to be of a certain style, possess a certain form, commodity-form, or else, as they say, it’s not recognizable, it doesn’t sell, which is its purpose. And this prose is journalistic in its essence, employing psychologically based characterizations, with a clear, distinct ‘voice,’ a way of adding color but staying within the lines; a mold, a template in other words. Capitalist Realism is a form shaped by the template employed.
“The fact is that in one’s work, one has only two choices – either to reproduce existing forms or to create new ones. There is no other.” – Monique Wittig
Must We Be Unsettled?
Literature by its very nature is a scandal, an assault on society’s modes of conception and understanding. Not to mention its morals. Literature in its effects must unsettle. It disrupts and unsettles the ego and its reflections/projections, showing it to be unstable, just as puns and homonyms reveal the inherent instability of language, and with it meaning. As such it does nothing to reinforce the ego or identity – there is no stable, unchanging self contrary to what the ego wants to believe, it’s as unstable as any meaning.
“The ego has a horror of the letter as such.” – Jean-Claude Milner
The ego resists literature, which is de-centering, de-basing. Capitalist Realism in its consistency is a form of narcissistic fixity, a question of a status quo in the service of the ego and its empire. It’s not a state-apparatus, it’s more invisible than that. It’s part of a socio-economic system designed to reproduce subjects who can contribute to that system and its perpetuation. It seeks and serves to stabilize and reproduce that system. This is called an egocracy, how the U.S. capitalist ethos is used to structure subjectivity – the ego-based subjectivity it requires, and along with it conceptual and perceptual limitations, to reproduce a system of production pretentious enough to believe it sits atop history. We have in this society the equivalent of cultural commissars, and this is where censorial power is situated – writing programs, editors, universities, publishing houses, all are willing to accommodate economic strictures, to toe the line of market discipline, producing commodities for their economic inducements, searching for that best-seller. And writers are eager to embrace the rewards, both monetary and narcissistic. There is indeed a grammar and logic to commodity-form prose, enforced both by internal culture and sales reports. The state is not needed to be heavy-handed as in classical censorship, the determination of capitalist economics and its minions do the censoring, constituting a bottle-neck limiting expression and understanding; in short, limiting knowledge. Literature is a fundamental way of human knowing, a means of expanding rationality. But what can you know when everything looks the same? When the prose is the same all the time? When it continues to embrace the same limitations? Commodity-form prose in all its expressions carries a sameness – you don’t need to ban books, you don’t need book burnings, this is the dumbing down of America, it accomplishes all that and more – while still allowing for business.
“Capitalism has even succeeded in industrializing fantasy.” – Colette Soler
Must We Be De-Centered?
Recent additions to the social fabric notwithstanding, the fundamental fact is that human subjectivity is still seen through the ‘centered’ lens of identity, through the ego and its mirror-based fictions. Understand that you re-write your memories every time you remember in order to produce a centered consistency, and to re-establish a social link based on consistency and coherence. You retell your memories in the same way and for the same reason you tell yourself stories about yourself – to maintain consistency and coherence, that is, an illusory actuality.
Centered Art = Culturally Virtuous Art
We live in a social and cultural environment that seems intent on making the world safe for Jane Austen and her two-hundred year old prose – which is basically the same prose style employed today as standard. It constitutes what can be called high bourgeois style. Its imitators’ prose can be referred to as petty-bourgeois. What does it mean when those who claim to exist outside of past prejudices employ the same prose and its conceptual biases as those of the past they denounce and/or judge? Do they share the same fundaments? The same conventions? The same underdeterminacies? Can it possibly be said that their conception of human subjectivity is the same, a centered unary conception, just being a like-content shaded a bit differently? Identity, not just stereotypes, should be seen as means of control and capitalist marketing tools. Identities, as categories, are what capitalism, what capitalist society, allows for – each identity is a marketing category, now especially with targeted ads atomizing society. Segregation is always a question of identity; you can’t celebrate one identity while ignoring an other, even though everyone seems to want to. Identity as a meaning effect, that is, as an effect of language, is always differential, and the binary is always the matrix of differentiality. Identarian categories can be said to mimic the structural logic of the camps; the essence of Nazism, and fascist logic, is always identarian. It’s clear that identity is part of a cosmetic revolution, it employs the same egocentric conception, based on the mirror. It’s a celebration of the capitalist system and what it allows, compromises, and co-opts. Now more than ever it’s necessary to advocate for a true universalism, beginning perhaps with the internal void that identity is a response to and cover for…And where is the individual in all of this, that lonely basis of the universal?
“No identity is universal, only what goes beyond identity toward a generic multiplicity is… The future belongs to generic human groups, to the acceptance of many different identities everywhere, given that, as compared with the universal, generic norm conveyed… by a genuine politics, these identities are irrelevant.” – Alain Badiou
There is great social value in the telling and inclusion of untold stories, especially those of underrepresented groups, and there is a name for that – journalism. The problem is simply that the prose of the vast majority of published fiction is journalistic, and journalistic fiction is a reductive betrayal of the promise and potential of literature. U.S. literature has walked hand-in-hand with journalism since Twain to Hemingway to Vonnegut to Wolfe – and the story of how capitalism has shaped and affected publishing and literature has yet to be explored.
“Writing is not telling stories. It’s the opposite of telling stories. It’s to tell everything at once. It’s to tell a story and the absence of that story. It’s to tell a story which proceeds through its absence.” – Marguerite Duras
We live in an era where people seem to have strange ideas about literature. It’s more than just telling your, or another’s story in the interests of social justice and inclusive fairness. This new committed literature betrays a journalistic prejudice founded on content, and not, say, the disruptive intricacies of form and how meaning is produced. We’ve been taught that form is neutral, that content is everything. It’s a conception of literature that does nothing to alter the structure of language and/or of culture, and offers no new dimensions of knowledge or knowing. It seems to imply that this culture and its society has reached the summit of a final perfect form – the end of history if you will – and your ego is the crown you wear as you sit atop it all telling yours or another’s unique story in a wholly conventional manner, in wholly conventional prose, the petty bourgeois victory of the ego tucked into its cave of appearances.
“McLuhan’s view is that mediums matter more than content; it’s the common rules that govern all creation and consumption across a medium that change people and society…Oral culture teaches us to think one way, written culture another." – Ezra Klein
I advocate for a form of literature that’s unique as regards its relation to language and what it can reveal about us. A form of literature in which language is the reality expressed, not that which is described and represented by and through language. This is literature that has historically been relegated to such terms as ‘experimental,’ ‘non-traditional,’ ‘unintelligible,’ ‘exotic,’ ‘foreign,’ etc., all well tested forms of dismissal.
It may indeed be necessary to think of identity as a form of bourgeois mythologizing. Roland Barthes furnished a key in his characterization of ‘identification’ – one of the seven rhetorical figures which distinguish bourgeois mythology. He characterizes the petty-bourgeois as someone “unable to imagine the Other; the Other is a scandal which threatens his existence. Two basic strategies have been evolved for dealing with this threat. The Other can be trivialized, naturalized, domesticated (cf. appropriation by capitalism and its categories). Here, the difference is simply denied (Otherness is reduced to sameness). Or, the Other can be transformed into meaningless exotica, a ‘pure object,’ a spectacle. In this case the difference is simply consigned to a place beyond analysis.” Consider that in our case the Other could as well be literature, or any literature worthy of the name. The petty-bourgeoisie needs consistency, which any literature worthy of the name unsettles. So the petty-bourgeoisie embraces journalistic commodity-form prose, or Capitalist Realism. It sells, it’s good for business, it doesn’t trouble in any constitutional manner, it goes down easy, it’s even less filling! Consistency allows for sales and sameness, not understanding – and certainly not an expansion of rationality. There is a grammar and logic to such ossified forms. Capitalist Realism or journalistic commodity-form prose is a bourgeois creation and literature is the Other that must be denied, controlled, or otherwise neutered – because it threatens stability and consistency, which are the capital and coherence producing attributes which must be protected and ensured. Any literature worthy of the name exists to unsettle the ego and its reflections, and this means that it unsettles memory and identity, it doesn’t partake of the consistency of identity forms – univocity, egocentrism, descriptive/imagistic bias, journalistic reduction of language to communication…
Capitalist Realism or journalistic commodity-form prose functions as a de facto form of censorship. This censorship is societal, the undisturbed sleep of convention, the pleasure of somnolent inebriation, the accession of spectacle, all with narcissistic and economic rewards. This is the prose that meets the demands of the marketplace. In order to sell it has to be a recognizable form of prose, so that no one has to figure out how to read it or how it means. Any ego-based concept of human subjectivity also has to be conceived in a certain, particular way and has certain invariable effects. Both journalism and commodity-form fiction are built on directed patterns of attention. True censorship, in a Barthesian definition, is not what prevents you from saying or writing something but what forces you to speak or write in a certain way.
There are so many voices that have not been heard, and literature as a story of identarian inclusion can be seen as a subset of journalism, a type of committed literature – in it you can’t see beyond the communicative aspects of language, those aspects that reinforce your conception and sense of self, your identity, your image, in the terms of spectacle and commodity. You know how it means because it still exists in the mirror, it’s still a representation of things and not of language. And like the mirror, you know what to identify with, you know where your pleasure comes from. Any literature worthy of the name challenges you to think, to think about what it means to be a human subjectivity, a sexed speaking being, in a different way, using prose to do so, to represent a new conceiving.
“You should look beyond what’s being expressed to see the way it’s being expressed and then try to see how the way things are expressed determines what’s actually expressible – see how the medium and the form the medium takes limits (certain messages) the conceptual horizon available.” – Ezra Klein
Known Commodities
Who is seeking to preserve and perpetuate this world and the ideological biases without which it would/could not exist? A socio-economic system replete with all its rewards? Capitalism is a discourse of mastery and of the ego. And university discourse can be said to be ‘a perverted Master’s discourse’ that perpetuates the transfer of such knowledge as capitalist biases are based on.
“… every established system – seeks its own continued existence and issues an imprecise demand for discourses that can serve that continued existence.” – Jean-Claude Milner
It’s the case that your reality, supported by Capitalist Realism, is an ideological fantasy protecting you from an unsettling real…You are truly a plurality of voices, some of which differ from and unsettle you.
If We Change The Way We Think Of Human Subjectivity Will Human Subjectivity Itself Change?
Capitalist Realism or journalistic commodity-form prose is a misrepresentation of the human subject, indeed it can be called a form of ideological shaping. It’s an appearance of subjectivity – unary, psychological, univocal, founded on language as communication. It’s a notion of subjectivity that, since Freud and Lacan, is no longer adequate. Contradiction, self-difference, and antagonism are internal to the notion of subjectivity as such, but they are not necessarily part of the Capitalist Realist conception; Capitalist Realism or journalistic commodity-form prose is a form of narcissistic fixity. This is language use adapted to a socio-economic system, a kind of subjective modeling.
If You Traverse The Capitalist Reality Do You Take Away Its Magic Like Any Other Fantasy?
More than anything literature is a fundamental way of human knowing. It’s without question a fundamental way that humans create and know themselves and their world, their most basic knowledge of themselves and of their world, and how both are possible. Our possibilities come from literature – our ways of thinking, our means of investigating, our modes of questioning…
It’s in this way that Giorgio Agamben can refer to Dostoevsky as the greatest theologian of the 19th c., and Harold Bloom can refer to Shakespeare as having created the modern mind. Literature involves explorations in human consciousness and in expanding rationality, knowledge, the possibilities of language, in exploring the possibilities of human subjectivity. Capitalist Realism or journalistic commodity-form prose foments its own predetermined model of and for human subjectivity.
If you’re blinded by convention, if you always see the same thing what does it matter where you look?
