Abstract

This Essay explores postmodern censorship of pacifist expression. Postmodern censorship is distinguishable from its pre-modern or modern counterparts by its immaterial, seemingly nonviolent ways of watching and influencing of apparently private activity, rather than by using material violence as an ostentatious tyrant would. While still sculpting citizens’ beliefs and behaviors, postmodern power applies itself to private technologies and the enjoyment of what seems to be leisure time or tools such as television or radio. Postmodern regulation directs itself at privatized implementation of governmental objectives, including the lies and crimes of governments. It simulates real events in spectacles of illusion and artifice. In the postmodern era, everything is increasingly artificial, real events are excluded from the public spectacle, and the meaning of words and concepts is lost.