Post-censorship

In the liberal definition of democracy that prevails today, freedom of expression and democracy seem to merge: ideas and writings must be able to circulate without hindrance. Since the Enlightenment, this has been the story of liberalism, which has often placed the fight against censorship at the heart of the history of artistic and literary modernism. It is this tale that liberal democracies have opposed to the situation of the creation and the art of totalitarian regimes during the Cold War as today.

For several decades, faith in the virtues and benefits of freedom of expression has, however, been widely questioned while the concept of censorship has itself considerably expanded: it no longer refers only to the prohibitions pronounced by the Church or the State but a continuous social process of filtering opinions leading to ideological and artistic conformity. The attention of censors has also shifted from print to visual media and the internet. Furthermore, governments are no longer the only or even the primary actors in censorship. Finally, in liberal societies, where the state displays its neutrality in matters of morals, “civil society” has emerged as a potential critical and normative source, changing the face of censorship by privatizing it. Examples of pressure abound in recent years, as have trials instituted by various associations or communities.

There is no doubt that we are now living in the age of “post-censorship” – that of civil, media, digital, multinational operations of recovery or neutralization of creative gestures, of statements (even if they are hateful), information or images deemed disruptive and therefore “offensive.”