Before speech can be determined to be free or not, it first must be recognized as speech. For speech to be recognized as such, it has to be uttered by political beings.
In a well-known passage, Aristotle says that “humans are political animals” because they possess the power of speech, which puts into common issues of justice and injustice. Animals, by contrast, can only express pleasure or pain. But how do we tell whether the person speaking is discussing matters of justice rather than just expressing their private pain?
In The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière argues in that there is a crucial question that precedes the problem of recognition. It is a properly political question: Who has the power to decide what counts as a voice, and what is mere noise? Rancière argues that politics is primarily the configuration of a space as political: “Politics first is the conflict about the very existence of that sphere of experience, the reality of those common objects and the capacity of those subjects.”
Plato argued that artisans, who were low on the social scale in his era, had no time for politics because they were to busy with their work. Obviously, this “lack of time” was not an empirical matter, but rather a naturalization of artisans’ subordinate status. For Rancière, politics begins when those who have “no time” make themselves heard, when they prove that they can indeed utter proper speech instead of merely voicing pleasure or pain.
Hannah Arendt, for her part, wrote about the “rightless.” She claimed that rather than being unequal before the law, for the rightless no law exists at all. It is not that they are oppressed, but rather that nobody wants to oppress them. They fall outside the regime of justice, and thus, outside the freedom of speech. They are guilty of not even being worthy of oppression.
Nonpolitical beings can thus practice absolute freedom of speech because their utterances aren’t recognized as speech in the first place—they’re just noise, in the eyes of the ruling political structure. Therefore, discussions about whether the speech of nonpolitical beings is “free” or not are meaningless. Their expressions of pain or pleasure can’t be suppressed, because freedom-of-speech ideology doesn’t regard the silencing of nonpolitical beings as suppression at all. This ideology rests on a universal distinction between what is speech and what isn’t—what is human and civilized, and what isn’t.
Freedom of speech is the structure that either allows or censors speech—but this comes after that same structure recognizes what is speech and what isn’t. Censorship, then, is a mechanism used by the freedom-of-speech structure to maintain its power to define what counts as speech. In this sense, political struggle isn’t about overturning censorship, but rather about expanding the limits of freedom of speech to recognize what isn’t currently regarded as speech.
An artist whose work was censored by the Israeli authorities once gleefully whispered to me: “Finally, they have taken my work seriously!” This is essential for understanding how censorship works. The dilemma of the speechless is that in order to have their speech recognized as speech, they have to accept the possibility of it being muted. Being censored becomes a sign that your utterances are recognized as speech, and therefore heard as political. The speechless kneel before the power structure, accepting its oppression in order to have their speech recognized as speech and then censored.
The power structure nowadays knows that by censoring an artwork, it doesn’t stop it from spreading, but rather makes it better known to the public with the attention that the act of censorship produces. What censorship does is take away the multilayered connections between its aesthetics and its political agenda, and leaves it only to be read through the lens of censorship. Censorship tries to speak louder than the artwork, using the artwork as the medium for speech.
Censorship isn’t only about prohibition. It also works to divert and reshape meaning. It operates not only by preventing, but also by permitting, by opening up the political structure to works that are fighting against it, in an attempt to corrupt the work by diluting and undermining its political agenda. This was the problem faced by the Russian art collective Chto Delat when they decided to withdraw from Manifesta 10 in 2014, hosted in St. Petersburg. In a statement they said: “Manifesta has shown that it can respond with little more than bureaucratic injunctions to respect law and order in a situation where any and all law has gone to the wind. For that reason, any participation in the Manifesta 10 exhibition loses its initial meaning.” Chto Delat’s withdrawal sheds light on how freedom of speech, as a structure, creates situations in which participation corrupts speech by making it complicit with power, even if the work itself aims to expose the limits of speech.
Boris Groys has written that art activists do not want to merely criticize the art system or the general political and social conditions under which this system functions. Rather, they aim to change these conditions by means of art, in spaces outside of art.
In his time, Walter Benjamin urged “advanced” artists to intervene, like revolutionary workers, in the means of artistic production, to change the “techniques” of traditional media, to transform the “apparatus” of bourgeois culture. The engaged artists of today can also find in art the means to subvert the ruling power structure, by interlacing a work’s aesthetics, its political agenda, and its means of production. But the engaged artist also faces a double challenge: avoiding censorship and freedom of speech. This is the paradox that political artists must deal with today when exposing the power structure of freedom of speech.
Notes
Coco Fusco, “The State of Detention: Performance, Politics, and the Cuban Public,” e-flux journal, no. 6 (December 2014).
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (Bloomsbury, 2013).
Summarized in Jacques Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2–3 (Spring–Summer 2004).
Mostafa Heddaya, “Collective Withdraws from Manifesta,” Hyperallergic, March 17, 2014.
Dave Beech, “To Boycott or not to Boycott?,” Art Monthly, no. 380 (October 2014).
Boris Groys, “On Art Activism,” e-flux journal, no. 56 (June 2014). As Eyal Weizman commented during a panel discussion at the e-flux space in New York: “At a time when there are so many images and so much testimonial footage coming out of war zones, the work of the image practitioners on our team—the filmmakers, photographers, and artists—is evidently essential.”.
Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” trans. John Heckman, New Left Review 1, no 62 (July–August 1970).