The delicate space between freedom of expression and hate speech
Anthony Julius, the British barrister best known for representing Princess Diana, is also the author of a handful of books that have been described as “clever ... in a sort of abstract Cambridge-graduate way”.
His forays into literary criticism, art history and cultural studies tend to echo the themes of his work as a litigator, where he specialises in defamation and media law.
A central question in Julius’s work is thus what constitutes an acceptable or at least tolerable speech act (verbal, visual, textual or otherwise) in legal and ethical terms. What do we do with art that offends?
There is TS Eliot’s antiSemitism, for instance — offensive, Julius insists, but also integral to the poetry, which is “animated” by it and thus benefits from it. If you want to read Eliot, goes the argument, you have to accept and even appreciate his bigotry.
Yet elsewhere Julius bemoans the ways in which “transgressive” contemporary art “celebrates and practises cruelty”. Somewhere between Marcel Duchamp and Damien Hirst, “shock value” lost the moral value it may once have had — challenging the constraining mores of polite society. When breaking taboos is the artistic norm, Julius proposes, “antitransgressive art” is needed.
Now he is at it again, this time writing a book (due out under the title
Shameless
Authors in 2020) about the rise of arts censorship in liberal democracies. In a recently published extract from the book, the author can’t quite seem to decide where his field of enquiry begins and ends.
He alludes to present-day China — “the state most ardent in its advocacy of unfree speech is now the second-largest economy in the world ”— and also mentions an apparent concatenation of events in 1989: the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie, the murder of Indian theatre maker Safdar Hashmi, the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The latter at least has to do with liberal democracies. Yet it is curious that Julius presents the end of communism in Eastern Europe as marking the emergence of a new era of censorship. He is nostalgic for the 60s, 70s and 80s, when “life was good for the arts” (at least, presumably, in the liberal democracies he has in mind).
So we are left asking, after some rather turgid prose: what exactly has led to the climate of increased censorship since the end of the Cold War?
You can tell which way Julius’ thoughts are tending from his listing of the “new vocabulary” associated with the “reach and range of censoring practices”: “cyber sovereignty”, “respect”, “trigger warning”, “safe spaces”. Yup: he is going to say that technologically sophisticated measures of statelevel repression are an equivalent threat to artistic freedom as “identity politics” and “grievance studies”.
Readers of this column will know how I feel about the argument that “the tyranny of political correctness” (these are not Julius’s words, but the inference is there) contributes to “the pervasiveness of selfcensorship”, which in turn is “testament to a broad, creativity-stymying fearfulness”.
In short: I don’t buy it. If the language and imagery we use to engage with race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality and other facets of individual or collective identities is changing — becoming less lazy, demanding more care and complexity of the language-user or the imagemaker, making recourse to stereotypes and the shorthand of bigotry more difficult — this is not a social form of censorship but holding writers and artists to a higher standard.
And what of the legalities of free speech and hate speech? The obvious current example in SA is the so-called debate about
WHEN BREAKING TABOOS IS THE ARTISTIC NORM, ANTHONY JULIUS PROPOSES, ANTITRANSGRESSIVE ART IS NEEDED
the hate-promoting symbol of the old national flag. “Freedom of expression!” is a common but false rallying cry here.
I wonder what Julius would say about this. After all, another of his well-known court cases was defending historian Deborah Lipstadt against Holocaust denier David Irving. You know what eventually got Irving to change his tune? He was arrested in Austria for the crime of “minimising the atrocities of the Third Reich”.
In Germany it is illegal to display Nazi symbols outside an artistic or historiographical context. Of all the liberal democracies Julius might identify, Germany is a prime example of how the advocacy of freedom of speech and the criminalising of hate speech can be mutually reinforcing.
That’s not censorship — it’s just sensible.