Myth, censorship

The rhetoric of censorship presumes that news reporting has self evident content. If something gets censored, there is pregiven content that gets blocked or diverted. This ignores the productive nature of language, as well as the shifts in meaning and content defined by the context and purpose of speaking. Even if there was a predetermined reality that would be reported on, what gets blocked out can never be known.

Doors of perception – the reality that people experience through drugs – “opening the doors of perception” – is no less constructed and arbitrary than the real that we experience without drugs. Both are equally partial and incomplete in that they represent one experience, but a different perception under different conditions. Neither can be considered authoritative because neither state can make any conclusive, material, claim to authoritative experience that is grounded in the different mediums by which reality is experienced. Nothing about one chemical process implies a realer experience than the other.

Unmasking oppression – exposes of oppression, seeing the reality of ‘the system,’ and to some degree consciousness raising all rely on the fact that the context and overall meaning of communication can be controlled by the people ‘sending’ the message. These tactics pay too little heed to the slipperiness of description, as well as the physical/corporeal stuff I wrote about before.

Duncan