City College News

Issue date: 4/3/07 Section: Opinion

In the “free” market, free speech has become a commodity like everything else—justice, human rights, drinking water, clean air. It’s available only to those who can afford it. And naturally, those who can afford it use free speech to manufacture the kind of product, confect the kind of public opinion, that best suits their purpose.

--Arundhati Roy, War Talk  (on “The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky”)

On October 11^th, 1980, Noam Chomsky’s preface to Robert Faurisson’s memoir appeared, to the chagrin of a great many French intellectuals. The “Faurisson affair” stemmed from a controversy created by Chomsky’s defense of Faurisson’s rights to express and publish his view that the holocaust was largely a historical fabrication, and that such things as the gas chambers did not, in fact, exist. The preface, entitled “Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression,” elaborates the point that Chomsky was adamantly defending not Faurisson’s historical revisionist viewpoints, but his “right” to express himself in a free, unobstructed manner.

What, it has been argued, is the point of running a cartoon that could potentially be offensive if, in the wake of this offense, there is no subsequent enlightenment on the subject of censorship and free speech? Those that are not offended gain nothing that wasn’t otherwise already known, and those that are offended are simply hurt and affronted by its publication. Corresponding to the Faurisson debacle, what is the point of allowing this crackpot the right to publish anything under such deep dementia? And more importantly, what’s the point of defending this guy’s “rights” as Chomsky has done, when his revelations can only foster hostile sentiments and profoundly reactionary insurgency?

Chomsky states in his “Elementary Comments” preface that “it is a truism, hardly deserving discussion, that the defense of the right of free expression is not restricted to ideas one approves of, and that it is precisely in the case of ideas found most offensive that these rights must be most vigorously defended.”

Catharine MacKinnon has written similarly in “Only Words” that “The more you disagree with content, the more important it becomes to protect it. You can tell you are being principled by the degree to which you abhor what you allow. The worse the speech protected, the more principled the result.”

There is little ambiguity in either of these remarks. And it is only too clear that they apply directly to our newspaper’s status and philosophy on the handling of free speech and censorship, particularly in terms of Mr. Goebel’s (text only) cartoon. The “point” of running the Muhammad cartoon may not be about free speech or censorship at all, but its explanatory justification need not be given immediately, either. I doubt there has ever been much point in Faurisson’s possibly anti-Semitic ranting (Faurisson was more of, in Chomsky’s words, an “apolitical liberal” than he was an anti-Semite), and yet, according to one of our world’s leading intellectual thinkers, he most definitely deserves to be heard.

I am behind this sort of philosophy 100 percent; that what is most difficult to allow, condone, publish, etc. ought, for these reasons, to take precedence over everything else deemed more fit to print, in the battle to get it most boldly and defiantly into our shambles of a so-called “free” society. Following this logic, the free expression which seems most ethically averse to a person’s sense of ‘right’ should be the very expression that transforms the individual’s thinking into one of radical acceptance of ethics’ toughest case: freedom and the individual in society.

Unfortunately, as Foucault has observed, relationships of power grow out of social structures as inevitably and relentlessly as laissez faire systems have out of classical liberalism and enlightenment thought since the days Adam Smith. The consequence of this being, that in theory, our newspaper should have autonomy equivalent in influence and extent to that of a collection of individuals who share a commonly understood ideology of the preeminent importance of free speech, but that in practice, open dialogue and debate (such as the case of the town hall forum) will inevitably succumb to some form of institutional interplay between one outgrowth of power and another. This, I reluctantly admit, is exactly what occurred throughout the newspaper staff over the issue of the cartoon, and also following the colloquium in the Helland Center.

Throughout the internal editorial strife that has continued to manifest itself in hideous ways, I have asked myself: what is the societal expectation of a cartoon in today’s world? What is the function of this medium of art? Does a cartoon cause one to laugh, to cry, to be insulted? Why, I would like to inquire, should a cartoon be funny? I wasn’t exactly chuckling when I read the “Maus” series of cartoons, know what I mean? If I were to pass aesthetic judgment on the “quality” of Mr. Goebel’s cartoons, I would appraise them, not at all on their artistic merit, nor even for their political relevancy (they’re actually somewhat muddled and cryptically composed), but as one student’s amateur artwork that happens to contribute to political thought and discussion by way of a marginal channel of satire and hyperbolic sarcasm--in other words, hardly on the basis of any sort of aesthetic grounding at all.

The fact is, that I consider Mr. Goebel, however naïve of various consequences and social reality-oriented rationales, an unyielding genius of our present age, and an artist who will become more and more sought-after, as our society continues to alienate those who do not abide by certain “p.c.” rules and regulations of thought and conduct. Freedom of thought is still very much debatable, not self-evident. In “Minima Moralia,” Adorno reflects that, “The ideas one has are just good enough to allow experts to decide whether their originator is a compulsive character, an oral type, or a hysteric. Thanks to the diminished responsibility that lies in its severance from reflection, from rational control, speculation is itself handed over as an object to science, whose subjectivity is extinguished with it.”

In City College News’s case, we, as an editorial staff comprise the “science” Adorno speaks of, and in the case of the cartoon, have usurped speculation on its possible nature by selecting not to run it. We have set the heuristic standard that only certain interpretations, and not others, have ideological validity, and that no amount of contrary interpretation can alter this fact.

“Social reality is generally concealed by the intelligentsia,” remarks Chomsky in “Language and Responsibility.” The irony in making a comparison between City College News and the intelligentsia is, in one sense, enhanced by the fact that the social reality imported by the Muhammad cartoon was in no way concealed by our editorial staff, as the forum attests to. The import of the social reality reflected in the cartoon is open to interpretation, but I can say conclusively that I find in it a very real indictment of what is and is not permissible in both the U.S. and throughout the rest of the world right now.

In another sense, our editorial staff realizes perfectly well that we have created news, and then attempted to recant the source of the news, the source being Mr. Goebel’s abominable creation. The irony here is arguably more flagrant because City College News has managed to scandalize itself on behalf of something it purportedly doesn’t believe in. If reality is a social construction (as I believe it is), our editorial board has done something quite spectacular: we have tried to reconstruct an aspect of this reality, using the same ingredients that originally composed it, i.e. ethics, rationality, freedom of the press, aesthetics, etc.

Does Mr. Goebel’s cartoon have newsworthiness? It unquestionably has newsworthiness, and it would of course be ludicrous to continue discussion on this point. Does a cartoon that appears in a newspaper have to have newsworthiness? Of course not. Mr. Goebel’s cartoon is also, in the topical sense, an evergreen piece, because it professes to be about religion and censorship, both issues of perennial significance. Should we, as a newspaper, publish everything indiscriminately? Absolutely not, and we certainly don’t.

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