Violence, Censorship and the Law

This essay uses certain readings of so-called "violent" texts readings produced in the context of debates around censorship and violence to read both censorship practices and these texts in relation to questions of violence and aesthetics, defining violence as a lack of respect for the other or for alterity and difference as such. By examining the texts of the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification decisions on a number of books and films (and the access to records of oral complaints and the texts of written complaints, as well as to official reports, offers a rare and suggestive opportunity to consider the kinds of criteria evoked in public discussions of violence and obscenity), I wish to raise a number of questions concerning the relationship among censorship, law, and violence in art, and to suggest that certain forms of censorship take their own place in the violence of these texts; in fine to see utilizing concepts adapted from the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard what conceptions of violence inform censorship decisions across a number of literary and cinematic texts. In essence, the argument is that censorship debates are structured by a paradox that may be conceived of as operating between considerations of law and equity.' Equity, that branch of law whose excesses are pilloried by Dickens in Bleak House, developed its influence at the same time as a proliferation of statutory laws and an accompanying increase in the activities of the legal executive: magistracy and prosecution. The 18th century sense of a crime wave was directly related to a legislative wave aimed at swamping the symptoms of civil unrest and large scale social dislocations in the wake of the English bourgeois revolution of 1688. In effect, there was a productive outbreak of criminal law along the lines discerned by Karl Marx in Theon'es of Surplus Value, where he introduces a notion of a productive relationship between criminals and society: