Document Type

Article

Publication Title

California Law Review

Abstract

In Part I of this review, I elaborate on the parallel stories that can be told about changing conceptions of subjects and speech: stories of error (the classical model's sentimental conception), overcorrection (the Foucaultian model's skeptical conception), and equilibration (the contemporary model's comprehensive conception). I argue that despite postmodern encouragement to view all censorship as arising from norms, the contemporary model has retained a partially sentimental conception (which could also be called a partially skeptical conception) of both subjects and speech as discrete agents of censorship. I call the contemporary model the "eclectic" model of censorship, drawing on the historical use of that word to denominate the class of philosophers who adopted whatever philosophical doctrines pleased them without much attention to the distinctions between the schools from which the doctrines emanated? The contemporary model is eclectic in its embrace of the classical model, the Foucaultian model, and other models of censorship without regard to the tensions between them. I wish to argue that while the eclectic model therefore risks incoherence, it also powerfully captures the way many of us think about censorship today. I demonstrate this in Part II by diagramming the eclectic model more formally as a censorship matrix that contains nine different models of censorship. I briefly discuss each of these models, drawing where possible on the collection for my examples. By so doing, I hope to show that the practice we call "censorship" actually denominates a family of very different sub-practices which it is useful - however incoherently - to disaggregate.

First Page

1635

DOI

https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38QT41

Volume

88

Publication Date

2000

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