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Studies into Darkness: The Perils and Promise of Freedom of Speech
There have been few times in US American history when the very concept of freedom of speech—its promise and its contradictions—has been under greater scrutiny. Guided by acclaimed artist, filmmaker, and activist Amar Kanwar, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School convened a series of public seminars on freedom of speech with the participation of some of the most original thinkers and artists on the topic. Structured as an open curriculum, each seminar examined a particular aspect of freedom of speech, reflecting on and informed by recent debates around hate speech, censorship, sexism, and racism in the US and elsewhere. Studies into Darkness emerges from these seminars as a collection of newly commissioned texts, artist projects, and resources that delve into the intricacies of free speech. Providing a practical and historical guide to free speech discourse and in-depth investigations that extend far beyond the current moment, and featuring poetic responses to the crises present in contemporary culture and society around expression, this publication provocatively questions whether true communication is ever attainable.
Contributions by Zach Blas, Mark Bray, Natalie Diaz, Aruna D’Souza, Silvia Federici and Gabriela López Dena, Jeanne van Heeswijk, shawné michaelain holloway, Prathibha Kanakamedala and Obden Mondésir, Amar Kanwar, Carin Kuoni, Lyndon, Debora, and Abou, Svetlana Mintcheva, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Vanessa Place, Laura Raicovich, Michael Rakowitz, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Nabiha Syed.
Contributions by Zach Blas, Mark Bray, Natalie Diaz, Aruna D’Souza, Silvia Federici and Gabriela López Dena, Jeanne van Heeswijk, shawné michaelain holloway, Prathibha Kanakamedala and Obden Mondésir, Amar Kanwar, Carin Kuoni, Lyndon, Debora, and Abou, Svetlana Mintcheva, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Vanessa Place, Laura Raicovich, Michael Rakowitz, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Nabiha Syed.
- GenresEssaysNonfiction
390 pages, Paperback
Published October 3, 2022
1 person is currently reading
1297 people want to read
About the author
Carin Kuoni
19 books16 followersCarin Kuoni is a curator and editor whose work examines how contemporary artistic practices reflect and inform social, political and cultural conditions. She is Director/Curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and teaches there. A founding member of the artists’ collective REPOhistory, Kuoni has curated and co-curated numerous transdisciplinary exhibitions, and edited and co-edited several books, among them Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America; Words of Wisdom: A Curator’s Vademecum; Speculation, Now; and Entry Points: The Vera List Center Field Guide on Art and Social Justice. She is the recipient of a 2014 Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship, directed “SITAC XII: Arte, justamente” in Mexico City in 2015, and is a Travel Companion for the 57th Carnegie International in 2018.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 13, 2022
Disclaimer: I won an ARC in a Librarything giveaway.
Unless you’ve been living in a hole, you know that Musk has taken over Twitter. Musk supposedly brought the platform to bring back freedom of speech, but, of course, immediately went after parody accounts. Which wouldn’t really matter because it is a private company, but like the essay “Sade Avec Spinoza” by Vanessa Place discusses if social media is where the talk happens isn’t any limits on speech censorship?
So this collection couldn’t be more tomorrow.
The collection raises questions about freedom of speech - not always for complete freedom of speech. It raises the question of whether or not we can have complete freedom of speech – don’t we gibe up some of our rights to that for some protections? Is curating your feed a form of censorship (but don’t we all censored by choosing what we consume?).
The collection isn’t just essay, but includes art, interviews, and places where speech and feminism, and speech and antiracism intersect. The inclusion of the various manifestos, such as the Wages for Housework - is also particularly interesting.
I will admit that the quasi positive mention of Edward Snowden considering his recent expression of support for Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine was a bit straining. But in general, the essays are extremely thought provoking. If you are interested in Freedom of Speech and its various intersections, this book is a great read.
Unless you’ve been living in a hole, you know that Musk has taken over Twitter. Musk supposedly brought the platform to bring back freedom of speech, but, of course, immediately went after parody accounts. Which wouldn’t really matter because it is a private company, but like the essay “Sade Avec Spinoza” by Vanessa Place discusses if social media is where the talk happens isn’t any limits on speech censorship?
So this collection couldn’t be more tomorrow.
The collection raises questions about freedom of speech - not always for complete freedom of speech. It raises the question of whether or not we can have complete freedom of speech – don’t we gibe up some of our rights to that for some protections? Is curating your feed a form of censorship (but don’t we all censored by choosing what we consume?).
The collection isn’t just essay, but includes art, interviews, and places where speech and feminism, and speech and antiracism intersect. The inclusion of the various manifestos, such as the Wages for Housework - is also particularly interesting.
I will admit that the quasi positive mention of Edward Snowden considering his recent expression of support for Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine was a bit straining. But in general, the essays are extremely thought provoking. If you are interested in Freedom of Speech and its various intersections, this book is a great read.
January 7, 2023
Studies into Darkness is a fascinating but uneven collection of essays, poems, manifestos, and even speeches that provide a robust inquiry into the “perils and promise of free speech.” There are a few real gems to uncover in this collection, but I was mostly disappointed by the relative uniformity of voices. This project strongly favors a specific type of progressive viewpoint, which I happen to share in many instances, but it comes at the expense of other potentially illuminating arguments.
The volume starts out reasonably strong. An early essay about free speech on campus written by Mark Bray, an actual historian on human rights and politics from Rutgers, questions the very notion of confronting error with truth. Although I think the subject deserves far more depth and treatment than it’s given here, he does make the compelling case that opinions are generally formulated by economic and social factors, not by a “rational process of self-analysis” arrived at through a reasoned weighing of two sides. Another early highlight is an essay by lawyer Nabiha Sayed about the uneven evolution of free speech in the United States. But the quality of the essays and manifestos starts to diminish about a hundred pages into the book and become laden with a prolixity of ineffectual symbolism and arcane jargon, which are often intrinsic to this genre of writing. The authors and artists have a lot to say about capitalism (as if there’s only one kind) but never engage very deeply with the problem of economics.
One of the more confounding essays, in which the artist Shawne Michaelain Holloway argues that the openness of the internet has been “throttled by colonial, capitalist regimes,” obscures the issue more than it illuminates. Set aside for a moment that unlike land, space on the internet is nearly infinite. The essay attempts to draw a strange parallel between “digital colonialism” and the triumph of the World Wide Web over the original Xanadu hyperlink system. But according to computer science philosopher Jaron Lanier, Xanadu was perfectly compatible with capitalist enterprises for those who wished to pursue profits. It was rejected, ironically, because the earliest progenitors of the World Wide Web wanted information to be free and not shackled by context. The problem wasn’t so much the original design of the internet (though that did come with its own set of problems), but rather the attention economy that flowed from it.
The collection finishes on a strong note with an essay about the value of anonymity and darkness – hiding from the judgmental gaze of others. “Sanctuary is not just a place,” the essay says, “it is a politics and a practice of refusal…. [It’s] the refusal to distinguish between good and bad…as the grid of intelligibility through which lives are judged, rewarded, and punished. Sanctuary means that struggle and solidarity precede the demand for a story.” Essays like this inspire moments of serious contemplation. And yet strangely, for a collection about free speech, all of the essays sound remarkably similar, like the writers are using the same limited vocabulary to describe every single problem. The lack of alternate viewpoints here is an issue. I think the solution would have been to bring on more philosophers who specialize in freedom of speech. Instead, the only contributors are associates of the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics.
My copy of the book comes courtesy of a Goodreads giveaway.
The volume starts out reasonably strong. An early essay about free speech on campus written by Mark Bray, an actual historian on human rights and politics from Rutgers, questions the very notion of confronting error with truth. Although I think the subject deserves far more depth and treatment than it’s given here, he does make the compelling case that opinions are generally formulated by economic and social factors, not by a “rational process of self-analysis” arrived at through a reasoned weighing of two sides. Another early highlight is an essay by lawyer Nabiha Sayed about the uneven evolution of free speech in the United States. But the quality of the essays and manifestos starts to diminish about a hundred pages into the book and become laden with a prolixity of ineffectual symbolism and arcane jargon, which are often intrinsic to this genre of writing. The authors and artists have a lot to say about capitalism (as if there’s only one kind) but never engage very deeply with the problem of economics.
One of the more confounding essays, in which the artist Shawne Michaelain Holloway argues that the openness of the internet has been “throttled by colonial, capitalist regimes,” obscures the issue more than it illuminates. Set aside for a moment that unlike land, space on the internet is nearly infinite. The essay attempts to draw a strange parallel between “digital colonialism” and the triumph of the World Wide Web over the original Xanadu hyperlink system. But according to computer science philosopher Jaron Lanier, Xanadu was perfectly compatible with capitalist enterprises for those who wished to pursue profits. It was rejected, ironically, because the earliest progenitors of the World Wide Web wanted information to be free and not shackled by context. The problem wasn’t so much the original design of the internet (though that did come with its own set of problems), but rather the attention economy that flowed from it.
The collection finishes on a strong note with an essay about the value of anonymity and darkness – hiding from the judgmental gaze of others. “Sanctuary is not just a place,” the essay says, “it is a politics and a practice of refusal…. [It’s] the refusal to distinguish between good and bad…as the grid of intelligibility through which lives are judged, rewarded, and punished. Sanctuary means that struggle and solidarity precede the demand for a story.” Essays like this inspire moments of serious contemplation. And yet strangely, for a collection about free speech, all of the essays sound remarkably similar, like the writers are using the same limited vocabulary to describe every single problem. The lack of alternate viewpoints here is an issue. I think the solution would have been to bring on more philosophers who specialize in freedom of speech. Instead, the only contributors are associates of the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics.
My copy of the book comes courtesy of a Goodreads giveaway.
March 5, 2023
Studies Into Darkness, edited by Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich, engages the topic of free speech from a variety of styles, from classic essays to drama and poetry.
This took a little for me to get into, I found some of the color choices bothersome to my eyes which made it that much more difficult to focus on what was being said and, very important in this volume, how it was being said. I did manage to acclimate my eyes and my brain to what was on offer and found it to be well worth the effort.
The voices aren't as monolithic as some seem to think, but I also noticed that the same person seemed to only discuss the essays, so I think a lot of the reception will be based on whether readers will leave their comfort zones and try to engage other forms of expression or just stick to the styles that suit them.
Like any collection, some definitely struck a deeper chord for me than others. I did like the cases as a running theme through a large part of the book, helping, for me, to connect the various styles of presentation and the personal elements with what has passed for legal or (in)justice decisions over time.
I would recommend this to those who might tire of the drier and often more academic discussions of free speech but don't want to lose that grounding of what is theoretical and how it plays out in practice. What may discourage some readers is also what makes this more effective for many, the effort necessary to fully engage with the book. One can't, or at least shouldn't, try to just read through this quickly. By expressing ideas in many forms it makes the reader slow down and become a more active reader, which is a good thing.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via LibraryThing.
This took a little for me to get into, I found some of the color choices bothersome to my eyes which made it that much more difficult to focus on what was being said and, very important in this volume, how it was being said. I did manage to acclimate my eyes and my brain to what was on offer and found it to be well worth the effort.
The voices aren't as monolithic as some seem to think, but I also noticed that the same person seemed to only discuss the essays, so I think a lot of the reception will be based on whether readers will leave their comfort zones and try to engage other forms of expression or just stick to the styles that suit them.
Like any collection, some definitely struck a deeper chord for me than others. I did like the cases as a running theme through a large part of the book, helping, for me, to connect the various styles of presentation and the personal elements with what has passed for legal or (in)justice decisions over time.
I would recommend this to those who might tire of the drier and often more academic discussions of free speech but don't want to lose that grounding of what is theoretical and how it plays out in practice. What may discourage some readers is also what makes this more effective for many, the effort necessary to fully engage with the book. One can't, or at least shouldn't, try to just read through this quickly. By expressing ideas in many forms it makes the reader slow down and become a more active reader, which is a good thing.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via LibraryThing.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews