Arguing for a Zone
Posted by Martha Lavey on 5/29/2007I’ve been thinking a lot lately about art and free speech. My thoughts have been influenced by recent events–some profound, some less so.
The profound: the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech. A student at the university murders 32 of his fellow students and kills himself. It is discovered that the young man had depicted disturbingly violent acts in writings he produced in his creative writing class–writing so disturbing that his professors brought the work to the attention of officials at the university.
The less profound: the city council of Chicago determines that the smoking ban it has enacted for restaurants and other public spaces should extend to the city’s stages. Lou Raizin, producer of Broadway in Chicago, appears before the City Council to argue for the exemption of our stage spaces in the no-smoking ban, citing freedom of speech as the more significant protection in the zone of artistic expression.
And then there’s Don Imus, radio host and provocateur, issuing racist and sexist speech in the service of “humor.”
It’s not particularly FUN to find one’s self arguing for a zone of free speech when there are so many dangerous and/or bone-headed practitioners exercising their right to free speech. Who wants to fall on her sword protecting the right to smoke cigarettes on stage? Well, I do. Who wants to assert that inviting the thought-police into the classrooms of our creative writing classes (when the evidence is in–tragically so–that sometimes those writers are dangerous and insane) is a pernicious encroachment on the well-being of our body politic? Well. actually, I do. As for Don Imus? A) the guy isn’t funny and b) fortunately, he’s operating in a commercial sphere that produces its corrections according to market share. That Don Imus was canned is evidence that his parent companies (whose motives are profit) realized that it was economically undesirable to keep him around. Done and done. No fools they, the companies mouthed their indignation about lines crossed, etc. but in the end of all, racist and sexist humor has been Imus’ stock and trade–he just outlived his welcome. All hail the protesters–they played by the rules, indicating that they would encourage a boycott of Imus’ sponsors, and the sponsors, following their self-interest, recognized that the protesters (and those they would influence) were a market share they didn’t want to give up.
We need to ask ourselves what we want our art to do, what we want the space that art clears in the public discourse, to permit. To me, it gets down to: how much do we trust ourselves and each other? Can we tolerate listening to language we do not choose to practice ourselves in the service of ideas not our own? Do we trust that our community will continue to shape a shared environment of values that will generously and wisely offer correctives to the excesses that cause damage and threaten our collective well-being? Do we assert this trust with the confidence that hearing the voice of another is, finally, a test of our own democratic convictions and well-being? Can we tolerate the representation of behaviors on stage that we disdain in our immediate sphere of life?
I think it all gets down to the confidence we have–or do not have–in the teller, not the tale. If we believe that the theater, that the artist is serious, is rigorous, is honest, we go on the ride with them (even when it take us into neighborhoods of human experience and behavior not our own). To legislate that speech–to decide, prempitively, that we will not permit the words, and by extension, the ideas, that our artists profer for our collective negotiation– is, in my view, a violation of our democratic process. We rob ourselves of the wild zone–the arena that art carves out for us to experience, in the safe remove of “what if”–the extremes of our human nature.
The stage is an especially sacred zone for this “what if/as if” display of human behavior and speech. At the end of a play, the actors return to the stage to take their bows–acknowledging the fictive discourse of the play. They recover themselves after having served the demands of the play. Maybe the actor’s character was slain in the course of the play. No harm done. At curtain call, the actor returns to the stage, smiling in appreciation of your congratulations for a job well done. This is a redemptive act–one that acknowledges that both the actor, and YOU, the audience member, can endure the rigor and extremity of the “as if” world. You can endure the extremity of your imagination–and survive. Having inhabited (like the actor), the imagination of another, you survive and return to your own being, changed, perhaps, by the journey. Enlightened, perhaps. Or, perhaps, convinced that the fictive journey of the play is not one with which you empathize, not one you value. But you went somewhere, you lived outside of yourself (as did the actor)–you occupied the realm of your imagination (where every journey of our lives resides, finally).
Free speech in a democracy is vexing, knotty, sometimes appalling, sometimes liberating. But it is the fundament of our democratic process and character. To honor freedom of speech in the realm of our art-making means we will encounter images and language that will offend. To honor that freedom also opens up the possibility of an encounter with beauty, with the awesome, with worlds beyond our own. It is a risk. Do we trust ourselves to negotiate the risk in the service of an enlightened citizenship? Do we trust our human freedom?