Robert Atkins in conversation with Ewa Majewska
March - May 2010


Globalisation and the New International Culture of Censorship

Ewa Majewska (Indeks73): I would like to open our conversation with some questions about the book you co-edited with Svetlana Mintcheva, “Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression”, since it has been particularly important for creating the Indeks 73 anti-censorship network in Poland in 2008. Your book offers a very inspiring proposition for analyzing the economic censorship dictated by the market (some authors talk about “market censorship”) and among its nearly 40 essays includes a very interesting set of texts on censorship in the context of technology, pornography, “protection of children” and self-censorship.
Let’s start with economy. One of the main inspirations coming from Censoring Culture was the ability of talking about censorship from the economic point of view. In Poland people mostly thought, that censorship was gone with the closure of the office of the state censor back in 1990. It was really difficult even to suggest, that censorship is still present now and how it works, apart from church censorship, which was really obvious.

Robert Atkins: Until the church started censoring itself when it came to the matter of priests and pedophilia.

EW: Yes. Tell me what you think about the possibility of combining or translating the “religious censorship” into the “economic” one –as unspoken or even unconscious rationales for censorship at both the levels of production and distribution/consumption of culture. Do you think it is translatable? and do you think it would be clearer if we speak of one main category (like economic or neoliberal censorship) instead of a series of categories (like economic, religious, self censorship )?

RA: Hmm…I don’t understand what might be gained in simplifying a half-dozen different kinds or styles of censorship into a single “main” impulse or rationale for censoring. Are meta-theories so useful? And if you recall, we never talk about the church as an agent of censorship, although we talk about conventional morality in the form of sometimes church- (and state-) sponsored initiatives to protect children from exposure to pornography or child pornographers. We take it for granted that like most governments, most churches have long been in the censorship business; they see it as part of their role and a source of power. I understand the parallel you’re making about the consumption of powerful world views such as capitalism and religion—we may need to start talking about Foucault here—but there are also psychological realities that account for sexual panics and their roots in homophobia or fears of childhood sexuality that are easily manipulated and very complex. Perhaps you can say more about what you mean?

EM: I think that your proposal of rethinking the psychological level or kind of censorship is very interesting – we tend to think so much in the structuralist and poststructuralist terms about censorship that we forget about individual agency, individual experience of censoring and being censored. Although I would stress the necessity of understanding this agency as socially and culturally constructed, I agree with you that there is a whole affective and unconscious production of the abject, which later on fuels or maybe even constitutes the practice of censorship, especially in cases of homophobia and also charges of children pornography...

RA: I’m very concerned about language – I have written books called ArtSpeak and ArtSpoke... Svetlana and I point out in our introduction to Censoring Culture, that we’re uncomfortable even proceeding from the idea of the existence of the so-called Culture Wars, at least as the media defines them. 125 years ago US Postmaster General Anthony Comstock successfully made birth control information and so-called “indecency” in art his twin targets. This sort of puritanism is very Anglo-Saxon, very American. So I have to reject the linkage between what you call “culture wars” and “economic wars” as a-historical. I first should ask you to define the neoliberal project.

EM: While developing the Indeks 73 network, we noticed, that there is a risk for us of „policing the censor” (I would refer to Jacques Ranciere here and his concept of “internalized police”) or of using „our enemies' tools” (As Audre Lorde put it in one of her texts). We decided also to think about our own position in the cultural production – to see and understand the power we suddenly acquire when situating ourselves on the side of „the just” and the „legally informed”.
My question would be: did you ever have an impression of becoming quite powerful while criticizing/ acting against censorship? If so, how did it affect your work/ writing?

RA: The term power makes me feel a little queasy. There were moments I’ve felt that I could influence particular events, most frequently when I was a columnist for the Village Voice during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The power, of course, partly came from the stature of the publication, which once was quite progressive—did you know that Norman Mailer helped found it?--at an historical moment when there seemed to be more room than now for expressing unorthodox views.
I was privileged to be a columnist, which meant that I was paid well to do research that’s no longer supported, to follow my instincts, to write in any voice I chose, to develop a persona as an ongoing public figure empowered to intervene in the New York art scene, rather than assume the ersatz neutrality of “the journalist.” When it came to censorship per se I once pressured a curator at the Brooklyn Museum to reinstate information about the gay identity of an early 20th century French painter that she’d removed from the wall-label-texts of a traveling museum exhibition devoted to this long dead artist. Or during the so-called Culture Wars I did things like leak accounts of private meetings between the National Endowment for the Arts chairman and artist-activists about possible medical insurance reform to assist art workers with HIV/AIDS, despite the confidentiality agreements the activist-participants in these meetings were unexpectedly forced to sign about their conversations. This was in the context of controversial AIDS-themed exhibitions during the late 80s that led to the near dissolution of the agency, rather than just its emasculation..
But it’s difficult to evaluate the significance of these actions. (I’m a historian and tend to take the long view.) What’s pleasurable about such gestures is that you get lots of feedback when you enact and describe them for a popular weekly publication. But there are other less public sorts of power. I also teach and you can influence students, obviously a kind of power—and responsibility. With them, there’s immediate feedback in the form of student performance and teacher-student relationships that sometimes develop, as well as the long-term effects we all recall from our own schooling. That is, the much-delayed realization of just how influential some teacher turned out to be. So teaching is a bit like scattering seeds and later learning that some took root.

EM: I am a philosopher, and tend to (over)estimate the power of naming... But – did it ever happen, that you called something “a censorship” and this forced change simply by making people look at it differently? How did that work? and – where the queasiness comes from?

RA: I agree with you about the power of naming a phenomenon, whether to actually identify something previously unnamed, as with gentrification, or to clarify something’s true nature, say, by observing that rape is a crime of violence and not sex. To name something is to give it a context, to control the conversation and the terms of the debate. This was our—Svetlana’s and my--number one priority in putting together Censoring Culture: That we enlarge the definition of censorship and censorious activities from only aggressive acts by public officials to include all sort of social conditions. Such intellectual pursuits constitute theory: that is the analysis or re-definition of reality, perhaps even its re-imagination.
Activism is something different, though. You know how obstreperous and cranky American culture is. Svetlana and I also observed that no censor ever believes s/he is censoring: instead they trot out rationales supposedly superseding the importance of censorship, such as protecting children. In the art realm, if we’re talking about traditional censorship, the censor never imagines her/himself as such. Instead s/he asserts, “This is America, you can show that blasphemous painting of Jesus in drag at any commercial gallery you want. Just don’t expect public funding for it.” So from a strategic perspective, simply identifying or naming something isn’t enough, if everybody isn’t—or won’t—operate from shared assumptions or language. Education and institutionalizing progressive change becomes vital.

EM: I would like to ask you about the problem of the protection of children and its relation to the contemporary censorship. First – how did it happen, that you were able to collect four stories from four female artists, who were accused of producing child pornography? Were they willing to contribute to the book? How did they receive your invite?

RA: This grew out of my reporting on the arts and politics, so I knew two of the four women. I think they were not just willing, but delighted, long after the fact, to be able to tell their own stories, in their own words because they were so viciously exploited by the media, politicians, the legal system etc. We obviously had no exploitive, ulterior motives.

EM: My next question is about the current law about child pornography – it bans production and possession of images including images of children in sexual situations including those where no children participated in their production. What do you think about this?

RA: It’s absurd. Congress clearly intended the law against the production of kiddie porn to protect children from abuse, which I think most of us would find a legitimate rationale for such legislation, although the notion of some epidemic of child pornography was completely trumped up as a distraction, a politicized sexual panic. With the digital era came the capacity to produce kiddie porn without models and actors, we might call it via “photo-shopping.” Thus the law became directed to punishing both consumers and producers of those images, rather than protecting children as congress had clearly intended.

EM: The focus on conservative values is usually accompanied with economic crisis, and might be perceived as a way of distracting the attention from what actually constitutes the problem. As Lisa Duggan suggests, in the case of neoliberalism the worsening of economic conditions is quickly followed and replaced by thinking in terms of “protection”, especially – protection of children.

RA: Well yes, although some might argue that Reaganism and Thatcherism improved economic conditions, which is doubtless true if you only look at some small percentage of people at the top of the economic pile. But it’s not just economics. These highly-mediated tempests-in-teapots are simply distractions from the material conditions of the majority of people’s lives. They also mask such real problems as those related to race, which we see played out in the immigration dramas going on in virtually every first- and second-world country. How else do you get working people to vote against their material interests and support the elite and unholy trinity of church, state and capital? Not to mention the irony of the same moralists advocating the protection of children’s morals never standing up for ameliorating children’s lives through programs of medical care, nutrition, etc.

EM: We have known this “paternal”, protective version of power, governing the life of the population, at least since Foucault, maybe even since Walter Benjamin (see the ending sentences in The Critique of Violence) … and – I am really curious about China, where you have been working on a wiki-project that you’ve told me sometimes challenges the state’s monopoly on the production of information or knowledge. Aren’t the authorities in China, by practically shutting down companies such as Google, acting in similar manner? There is, of course, a whole set of disciplinary powers at stake here, but I do not believe that we should think about power in “either/ or” terms—a suggestion Foucault made, too, So in the case of China, which is particularly interesting, we have both – the disciplinary and the pastoral powers incorporated into the same, supposedly secular, state apparatus. What would you say about this kind of interpretation? And – would you like to elaborate a bit more on Chinese forms of censorship?

RA: The PRC is so hybrid a pastiche of government, economy and religion it defies analysis and simultaneously, it is so crude it doesn’t really require it. This is precisely why the Falun Gung and the Dalai Lama are relegated to a similar miscellaneous category for non-economic and non-military powers whose authority—even existence—needs to be denied. (The Falun Gung has to be repressed and the Dallai Lamair appropriated, in the Politburo’s collective wisdom.) The brutal exercise of power to keep this system in place requires a predictibly large amount of labor and offers predictably tremendous opportunities for corruption. When I recently worked on creating ArtSpeak China, this bilingual wiki about Chinese art, we had to employ damas –that is, free-lance censors formerly in the employ of the government—who would tell us which terms and words and ideas weren’t acceptable at any given moment. (Dama by the way, is colloquial for maiden aunt or in English we’d call it something like busy body.) Google had to hire the same damas. By failing to codify the objectionable or censorable, the system keeps citizens on their toes. But it’s really no different than the Moscow Show Trials or the East German Stasi collecting too much data to be analyzed. These rituals seem more Borgesian and improbable than in the former Eastern bloc. One’s instinct though is that the PRC can’t continue to work for much longer in this way, the contradictions stagger the mind.

EM: Coming back to your book, I would assume that after Censoring Culture, you had a lot of impact and information about people inspired by the narrative you proposed? Because as far as Indeks 73 is concerned, that book was totally inspiring.

RA: These days books like Censoring Culture—that is, anthologies of any kind—almost never get reviewed in the US. Scant attention gets paid to serious writing. I was—probably naively—surprised that we weren’t taken up by National Public Radio or asked to write Op Ed pieces for liberal newspapers regarding some censorship incident or another What was the problem? Did the book reveive poor publicity from its New Press publishers? Did newspaper editors regard its thesis as overly complex and left-wing? Did the so-called Culture Wars succeed by making everyone sick and tired of hearing about such matters? Is their no longer any new in news about censorship? I’m delighted—and surprised--to hear that you and other members of the Indeks 73 circle found it inspiring. But this is typical of globalized culture—you’re accessible everywhere, thanks to the Internet, and then you can be well-known in Barcelona and unknown in Madrid. I speak from experience on this last one.

EM: One more thing on economy: I would suggest that we try to think about economic censorship as basic form of contemporary censorship at least in the Western world, and discover what we can see by that. I would not like to neglect everything else, I just would like to see how big the power of this particular word is, and in order to do it I need to use it in some situations. As a definition, I would say, that neoliberal means following the Chicago school model in economy, the neoconservative cultural turn since the late 70s and getting this to work on a global level. I would refer to Naomi Klein and say, that it means a focus on profit-generating and privatization. All together – it would mean a new version of market liberalization, conservative cultural backlash and profit orientation. By the way – there is another quite important author for me writing about censorship, who I already mentioned in connection with protecting children from pornography, Lisa Duggan. She explicitly mentions the necessity of connecting the conservative turn with the market liberalization. So – how about „neoliberal censorship”? Do you find it interesting as a notion?

RA: I’m a fan of Lisa Duggan’s. But connecting cultural conservatives with economic conservatives isn’t exactly new. In our life times let’s just mention Reagan and Thatcher. And it seems to me that today’s neo-liberal are yesterday’s conservatives, of the non-libertarian, activist wing of the group. But more important language has to clarify and illuminate. If art is the filter through which we’re engaging the world, and we think that the art industry is a global one then we need language that accounts for experience everywhere. By sheer economic value, more contemporary art is produced in Asia than on any other continent now. So to term economic liberalization in China—the biggest art producer and the biggest censor today--neoliberal seems nonsensical. The Chinese pattern is economic liberalization and social rigidity punctuated by seemingly liberal intervals, as with the Olympics, that tend to prove short-lived. Today avant-garde art in China is seen as a source of prestige and revenue and global élan. The PRC has gone precisely the opposite direction vis-à-vis the Soviet movement nearly a century ago from post-Bolshevik-revolution, Lenin-era avant-gardism and the linkage of artistic and social ferment, to the stultifying propaganda of socialist realism. But perhaps this manageability only attests to the larger irrelevance of “advanced” contemporary art to the Chinese social body. As in the US.
If neo-liberal is defined (reasonably) as the move toward generating profit and privatizing virtually everything, than it’s obvious that these trends are nearly ubiquitous. So in this sense neo-liberal and economic are virtual synonyms.
But your definition breaks down if you try to apply the notion of a “neoconservative cultural turn” not just to China but to Southeast Asia, the most rapidly developing and perhaps most diverse part of the world. South Korea and Singapore have grown infinitely more liberal—in the old fashioned sense—over the past two decades. And China, which constitutes nearly 20% of the world’s population, is a complete mind fuck as it works to balance statism and neo-liberalism, cultural freedom based on consumerism, and rampant oppression and censorship. Once again, the cultural turn there from the late 70s, can hardly be called neo-conservative. Or conservative at all. The Cultural Revolution had barely ended then. Now the drab, militaristic clothing of that day is total kitsch collected by ultrahip Chinese wearing fabulous clothes from Shanghai Tang. Do you have this boutique in Warsaw? It’s opening of a new flagship store in Hong Kong in July, 2010 was the biggest fireworks display anywhere since the Olympics opened in Beijing.

EM: I have not seen this boutique yet. As a rather peripheral market, also in terms of clothing, Warsaw usually gets the new fashions with a small delay... I think you are right when you criticize the efforts of analyzing censorship globally and/or in China, South Korea and Southeastern Asia solely from the perspective of neoliberalism. But – since neoliberalism is a globally operating economic system, we might want to try to keep it in our descriptions of cultural production in various places in the world ... and remember, that it does produce different effects in China, in Singapore, USA, Poland or Great Britain...

RA: Let me suggest a historical context with which to look at censorship in China. To vastly oversimplify, repression and restriction of non-imperial viewpoints has been the more or less prevailing modus operandi within the statist tradition of China and its massive, aristocratic, government infrastructure and ethnically diverse populations for thousands of years. But I’m not just talking about China. You say neoliberalism and I think could just as easily be talking about capitalism as I tried to explain above. The drastic and unexpected changes in the economic behavior of South Korea and Singapore belie the notions of universal patterns and parallel directions.
I’m also a little surprised that the economic perspective almost always ensures a relentless focus on the distribution of art. What about it production? Is it censorship that artists from Asian and African cultures regularly produce installations—the lingua franca of the Westernized art world. And that if you or I wrote about this we might well be regarded, at this moment in history, as anti-multiculturalists?

EM: I think you mentioned two very important problems here: the understanding of cultural production and the ways of restraining it prior to it's distribution. Let me start with the first one. Back in Poland we tend to use the notion of “participation” while speaking about cultural production – it is a post-Benjamin inspiration, but since we cooperate with people working on open source and CC (Creative Commons), we need such a definition of cultural production which does not artificially distinguish the production and consumption of culture. What do you think about it?

RA: I simultaneously agree and disagree. I disagree because I think this formulation has nothing to do with the medieval-style production and distribution of a painting, some of whose fetishistic charms again are psychological, the last redoubt of romantic ideas about individualism, which aren’t dying fast enough. I, too, love open source everything and I think digital life will force the issue, I hope in our lifetimes. Viva Larry Lessig!

EM: I would like to ask you about restrictions of cultural production in the USA, particularly in funding art, which affect its production – in Poland artists often apply for public money distributed from the Ministry of Culture... it is hard to say whether this institution would fund art investigating war in Iraq for example... and – it did fund some critical initiatives only to really make the life of the cultural activists hard (annoying and scary phone calls, controls of finances done 3 times more often than in other organizations etc). Most artists do not even try to challenge that. And – this is about producing, not distributing...

RA: Well it’s a system. Many artists are wimps. This is where self-censorship comes in. This is where the bizarrely infantilizing, highly romantic, contract-free relationship between artists and dealers comes in. The Leo Castelli fantasy is an operative modus operandi for young art school graduates a/k/a newly minted “art professionals” or bar tenders. It comprises a wealthy, understanding gallerist who sets up a talented young artist with a monthly stipend while laboring to find the artist exhibition and other career opportunities. This fantasy is tantamount to the Hollywood notion of happily ever after.

EM: I am very glad you mention this image of artistic production, since – as far as I can see it, when this “café-latte lifestyle” enters, any critical artistic production exits by another door… I think if an artist enters this way of producing, which actually does take place sometimes, although not very often, s/he is already out of any possibility of doing anything creative…

RA: Yes, but this exists apart from the quality or character of the work itself. I mean this as an unconscious state of mind, a neurotic perspective as potent and ingrained as the Hollywood movie view of romance and living happily ever after.

EM: Another thing I would like to more know about is your opinions on the “installation” form artists choose if they are from outside of the West. I would say it allows them to say the most, since it has not been clearly defined .... I would say they perceive it as the least restricted ... does that explain anything? The way many of them uses this form is maybe more complicated, since some probably feel, that it is required to fit in one of the western categories, so they force themselves to fit in this one... Would you say it is one of the effects of colonization? a post-colonial phenomenon? A post-colonial form of censorship?

RA: I wouldn’t necessarily agree that the installation format is not clearly defined, but that’s neither here nor there. What I’m talking about is not a phenomenon limited to installations, in any case: Today Chinese artists predominantly paint in oil or acrylics on canvas or paper; only a few now make traditional brush and ink paintings and only a very few have bent this traditional form to post-modern purposes.
In other words, Western art forms are simply another demand of the global art system. This has to be obvious to any young artist who travels abroad or studies abroad or visits any one of the dozens of biennial exhibitions or art fairs that are staged each year in Dubai, or Taipei, or Perth. It’s like any other sort of globalism in terms of its demands for standardization. I’d definitely call this a post-colonial phenomenon. it didn’t exist at all until 25 years ago when Soviet artists began to achieve success in the West with Western art forms. And sure I’d call it a post-colonial form of censorship in that it limits the possibilities of individuals.

EM: But the problem with Russian art is, that it was actually Russian artists, who constituted one of the main sources of modernist inspiration for the whole XX century up till now. Russian artists by no means did start to work in Western style 20 years ago, they actually shaped the paradigms of this style already 100 years ago and earlier....

RA: Absolutely, but Soviet artists began in the 1970s to smuggle in reproductions of contemporary work from the West and smuggle out their own work. For half a century they were cut off from a Paris-Milan-Munich-(later) New York “conversation” among artists. Perhaps it was this former fluency in that conversation/language that makes it no surprise that they were the first from outside the Western European nexus to crack the monopoly. But the post WWII monopoly belonged to the US. So Soviet art entered this elite inner circle just a decade or two after Italian and German art began to be seen as equally vital as that emanating from NY.
I would prefer to look at this from a slightly different, in some ways less ideological, context: that of globalism rather than colonialism. And perhaps that is indeed the subject for another book….

EM: I think this is indeed a really fascinating new topic for another book or more… Robert, I would like to thank you very much for this conversation, for sharing your observations and experience with me and the readers of this talk, and I hope we will be able to cooperate more in the future. All best for you from Warsaw!

RA: Thank you, too. It’s been a pleasure.


More information about Robert Atkins, including contact information, can be found at www.robertatkins.net

See also:

National Coalition Against Censorship www.ncac.org

ArtSpeak China www.ArtSpeakChina.org

Shanghai Tang www.shanghaitang.com