In praise of censorship - government and the arts

Public Interest, Wntr, 1994 by Stanley C. Brubaker

That concept has its origins in Lionel Trilling's famous collection of essays entitled Beyond Culture. There he spoke of the "adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing." "|I~ts clear purpose," he continued, is that of "detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise the culture that produced him." It becomes then the "primary function of art and thought ... to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture ... to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment." Liberation, detachment, and autonomy from the traditional culture can be desirable, of course, only if the latter's "habits of thought and feeling" are oppressive or arbitrary. And that, Trilling suggests, is exactly the point that the art and literature of adversary culture seek to make. Trilling identified as the "shaping and controlling idea of our epoch" the "disenchantment of our culture with culture itself." This disenchantment gives to our art and literature "the bitter line of hostility which runs through it." And so we end up with the "culture war."

In this sense postmodernism rebels against both the bourgeois society of enlightenment liberalism and the remnants of classicism. But in another sense, postmodernism merely extends, or radicalizes, liberalism. For the "disenchantment with culture," of which Trilling wrote, derives from the disenchantment of nature on which modern science and liberalism are built. These posit a nature devoid of purpose, holding no support for man's conceits of nobility and excellence. In their search for a solution to the problem of political authority, Locke and other liberals still looked to nature. If nature failed to provide aspirations, it could provide a floor, and seemingly a sturdy one. Yet to later thinkers, this solution seemed rather half-baked. How could liberals derive the apparent "ought" of natural rights from the "is" of self-preservation? How could a natural universe, determined by mechanical forces, account for freedom, a presupposition of moral action? How could a mind know nature, if it were merely a part of its mechanistic forces?

The solution--begun by Rousseau and Kant--was to posit new dimensions of reality untouched by nature. The result of this further rejection of nature, however, was to knock out the floor that early liberals had established. Morality became not what is given by nature, but what is chosen by man. It is in this world of postmodernism that the artist assumes the special role that Trilling outlines for him in Beyond Culture. The function of the artist is to disturb and offend, to epater la bourgeoisie--to reveal to liberals the shallowness of their existence, to show that the floor on which they stand, their so-called natural rights, is a figment of their imagination.

Even more interesting than this adversarial role is the artist's new constructive role. The artist does not merely criticize life according to laws of truth and beauty, as Arnold would have him do. He creates those laws as well, which is to say that they are not in fact laws at all. Instead of being an imitator of a beautiful cosmos, whose inner harmony he divines, the artist becomes the creator--and a creator ex nihilo, previously the province of God. In fact, in this philosophy, the artist becomes the creator of God. Prophet and philosopher are unmasked and revealed as species of artists. They made it all up about God and Nature. In this world, the artist assumes a sort of sacrosanct position--he is the creator of meaning. So here we find support for the position adopted by contemporary liberals. "Yes" to funding of the arts. "No" to censorship and restrictions. To interfere with the work of the creative artist, the provider of meaning, is not merely to impose a groundless value judgment, but to commit sacrilege.