Introduction

The papers we are presenting here constitute a record of what we and most of those present considered to be a major intellectual event. The conference on Social Control and the Arts, held at Harvard University on April 21, 1990, provided a forum for discussion of some of the most important issues facing artists, writers, and intellectuals working in the United States today; and the international scope of the conference not only introduced diverse perspectives and contexts, it also helped us to see the North American situation in a more complex way.

We began planning this conference in the fall of 1989, but the groundwork was laid for it earlier, when Alice Jardine and Susan Suleiman co-directed a six-week Institute for college and university teachers at Harvard, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and devoted to “The Future of the Avant-Garde in Postmodern Culture.” During all of July and part of August 1989, in intense discussions lasting several hours a day, we debated the subject of the “Future of the Avant-Garde” with twenty-five colleagues from all over the United States, as well as with various guest lecturers who came to talk with us about cultural theory, literature, film and video studies, art and architecture, music, dance and theater. The question that we returned to again and again in those discussions concerned the political possibilities (or impossibilities) of contemporary experimental work in the arts. Did this work—which we were calling, at least provisionally, postmodern—have, or aspire to have, a political edge, the way the work of the so-called historical avant-gardes, done chiefly in Europe before and after the First World War, had aspired to be political? Or was postmodern art condemned to be no more than an expensive item in the increasingly international cultural marketplace? Obviously, there could be no simple consensus on these questions; but the intensity of the arguments they provoked indicated just how important and timely they were.

Then, somewhere around the middle of the Institute, the Mapplethorpe affair at the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington hit the nation—and we were offered, courtesy of Senator Jesse Helms, a made-to-order political/artistic issue to grapple with. On the last day of the Institute, we decided to draft a collective declaration on the value, for a democratic society, of politically disturbing art. We composed and sent off to Washington a letter addressed to various Congressmen involved in discussions of the Helms Amendment, which stated: “Art has always had a social function. Experimental and provocative work in the arts is essential to democracy. In a free society the government can and should support experimental artistic work.”

By the beginning of Fall term, a series of yet other events (including the attempted withdrawal, by the National Endowment for the Arts, of a subsidy it had made to a New York exhibition of art around AIDS, on the grounds that the catalogue essays were “political”), had made it clear that this whole issue was far larger, with wider implications and ramifications, than a single Congressional amendment in the United States. Discussions with colleagues and other members of the Executive committee of the Harvard Center for Literary and Cultural Studies led to a proposal for a major conference, to be organized by the three of us. We met several times during the fall to talk about the broad, international aspects of the question of censorship—and again, our discussions were fueled by immediate political events, notably the astonishing historical events taking place in Eastern Europe. The question we finally formulated as an overarching question for the conference was the following: “How do different forms of social control—ranging from direct state repression and censorship to more indirect forms of ideological, cultural and financial pressures—affect the production of literary and artistic works in various countries around the world?”

Living and working in the United States, it seemed to us appropriate that we should devote the bulk of the conference to issues in this country; not only issues raised by the Helms Amendment, but other, longer-standing issues as well, which often have worldwide repercussions—for example, the nature and influence of the market. We therefore planned the day according to the program reprinted here: the afternoon sessions devoted to the United States, the morning sessions devoted to a necessarily limited range of “international perspectives.” In an almost arbitrary way, we divided the field into authoritarian regimes—which we defined as regimes where social control takes the form of overt state repression and censorship—and “free-market” regimes, where more indirect forms of control predominate.

Even as we generated the categories for the conference—authoritarian vs. non-authoritarian and United States vs. the-rest-of-the-world—we knew how problematic our categories were. The post-colonial world in which we live is marked by large and small-scale migrations and immigrant populations; most of us have compound national identities. And then, to disentangle the forces that constrain artistic production in the United States from those exercised in other cultural contexts is an impossible undertaking. Nevertheless, we decided to concentrate on the situation in the United States in the second half of the conference because, as American intellectuals, we must take responsibility primarily for what goes on in this country as opposed to elsewhere in the world. To be sure, we recognize that cultural production in the United States influences other national cultures and that the production of art in this country is affected by what happens in the rest of the world. United States films, videos, and popular music are exported globally. Disney cartoons, with their crude cat-and-mouse violence, play daily on Chinese television stations, dubbed into Chinese. Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse are drawn by Chinese children in kindergarten, along with the more traditional birds and plum blossoms. But the soap operas that they watch in Beijing come from Mexico.

Hollywood-produced television series and films and exported to Japan, where they are closely imitated. Indeed, the Japanese have adopted our English terms “cut” and “close-up” in the vocabulary of their film industry. But Japan manufactures the equipment that makes the United States productions possible, and may even own the companies that produce “U.S. made” films. Nor can one even claim that the process of cultural exportation by the United States simply and inevitably imposes our cultural hegemony on the countries that take in our artifacts. Australian aboriginals, for example, involved in their own struggles for land rights and sovereignty, are apparently fond of United States westerns, which they watch enthusiastically rooting for the Indians.

Processes of cultural domination can operate in very complicated ways. Not many understand, for instance, how the United States is implicated in the production of art in other countries through trade imbalances, as an international creditor. Jamaica’s ever-expanding debt to the United States apparently makes it impossible for cultural workers in that country to produce art that does not have a product to sell—like handicrafts or paintings. Dance and theater are seriously jeopardized by the national need to manufacture exports to service this debt, and to make a stab at evening out the balance of payments. Thus, cultural workers who do not make objects to sell are discouraged by the national government—a situation that must be true all over the Caribbean and Latin America.

The simple distinction between authoritarian methods of controlling art and non-authoritarian methods of controlling art is, of course, another false dichotomy. Free market forms of control operate in authoritarian regimes, just as repressive measures control the production and distribution of art in so-called free market countries. The black market, which thrives in every planned economy, often has unpredictable and complicated effects on the production of culture. The underground presses turned out hundreds of contraband books in Poland before the recent liberation; now these underground publishers, as Grzegorz Boguta showed in his remarks at the conference, are going out of business. The avalanche of propagandistic socialist realism in so-called authoritarian regimes has “swamping” effects similar to those of any capitalist advertising blitz—numbing the minds of the audience and wearing down their ability to judge.

Authoritarian forms of social control certainly exist in free market societies. Section 28 in Thatcher’s England, making illegal the “promotion of homosexuality” (discussed at the conference by William Marshall), and the Helms Amendment in the United States are two overt instances of censorship legislation passed in presumably free countries. Only a few days before this conference, the Supreme Court upheld the arrest of a man in Ohio for possessing nude photographs of children. He was not charged with producing, selling, or distributing them—but simply with privately possessing them in his own home. Nor do national boundaries guarantee protection from methods of control employed elsewhere in the world. The Rushdie affair demonstrates how small the world is, how difficult it is to disentangle the affairs of one country from another, and how immediate and powerful is the impact of authoritarian strategies on someone living even in a “free” society.

Finally, we were very much aware in setting up the program that we could not help participating, whether we liked it or not, in a certain logic of exclusion: we would necessarily end up omitting problems and points of view, which would then appear as the “excluded,” the unrepresented. Even as we acknowledge our blind spots (it would be too easy to lay the blame exclusively on the traditionally invoked “time constraints”), we would argue that the logic of exclusion is in some sense inevitable, part of a dialectic from which even the most radical attempts at deconstruction have not managed completely to break away. For example, literary critics who have spent considerable time and energy attempting to re-vision the standard literary canon must inevitably face up to their own participation in the process of canonization, even if what they are canonizing is an “anti-canon.” The dialectic works in such a way that at some point one finds oneself (usually to one’s dismay) engaged in both a theoretical and a practical mimicry of the very process one is critiquing.

This conference was no exception: there were obviously many exclusions for each inclusion, near and far. We will simply mention two.

First, a very specific case, which was called to our attention by the artists involved: a curated show of video-art, organized by New York video artists Elia Suleiman and Dan Walworth, was showing downstairs at the same time as the now famous AIDS show at Artists Space, bur received no coverage from the media. The show, “Uprising: Videotapes on the Palestinian Resistance,” consists of videotapes made by Palestinians and Americans on various topics related to the intifada and to the representation and misrepresentation of Arabs in the Western media. The fact that the show received little or no formal attention was, as the organizers pointed out to us, a form of censorship. By the time we heard about it, it was too late to change the program; nevertheless, the end result was that we too excluded it, other than to mention it in our introductory remarks—and indeed, it is true that the conference was sorely lacking in representation of a Muslim or Arab point of view.

Second, a more general kind of exclusion, which one sees rather frequently at conferences in North America, is the exclusion brought about through the use of the questionable, now perhaps historical, category of East and West. Leaving aside for the moment the increasingly confusing question of where the “West” is at this point in history, we note that for most Americans the “East” still signifies primarily China and Japan. A few days before the conference, we were reminded by Goenawan Mohamad, an Indonesian journalist and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard this year, that there would be a great deal indeed to say at a conference on forms of censorship about state repression in Indonesia—a very large country with a thriving cultural life virtually ignored in the United States.

One way in which we tried to compensate for these (and no doubt other) exclusions was to leave ample time for discussion after every panel, inviting all those present to address these and other issues from the floor; we also scheduled a long, unstructured wrap-up discussion at the end of the conference. Although we are not able to reproduce here the full version of the very lively and engaging debates that took place throughout the day, we have included Carla Mazzio’s and Jill Berson’s detailed summary of the concluding discussion, together with the papers presented by the panelists (which we are reproducing here with minor editing by the authors, with the exception of Alicia Borinsky who preferred not to publish hers).

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The written record, however informative and significant it may be, cannot fully render some of the intensely moving moments that made this, according to many, one of the most unusual and most compelling conferences they had experienced. The moment when Ruth Perry, introducing Liu Bin-Yan, mentioned that this distinguished journalist’s resume included one line summing up a twenty-year period, 1958-1978, as “reform through labor,” was one such moment; Grzegorz Boguta’s wistful remark that, having come out of the Stalinist dark ages, the publishing world in Poland now risked falling victim to the “wild capitalism” of the free market which it had struggled so long and hard to establish, was another.

However incomplete, this record nonetheless constitutes an important first step in what will certainly become an increasingly widespread debate in our universities on the relation between government, economics, and the arts in the United States. And it suggests some of the complexities involved in any attempt to understand the agencies, agendas and strategies, both conscious and unconscious, of social control over the arts.

It remains but for us to thank those who helped make this conference a success. For financial support, in addition to the funds provided by the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, which sponsored the conference, we thank Radcliffe College and the Departments of English, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Comparative Literature at Harvard. The conference could not have happened without the devoted and efficient work of the Center’s administrator, Rebecca Novak, and of our conference coordinator, Carla Mazzio, who also contributed invaluably to the editing of the papers. We thank, in addition, Askold Melnyczuk and the staff at Agni for their work in bringing the manuscript to publication.