Syndicate: symposium in vienna: the price of liberty

["f," <ft@gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at>]

sorry for cross-postings!

The Price of Liberty
On the political economy of censorship

Symposium
curated by Helmut Draxler und Hedwig Saxenhuber
Secession, Vienna, 23 - 25 February 2001

Details: http://www.secession.at/symposium/


Although censorship as a state institution seems largely to have
disappeared in the neo-liberal structure of the world, it has indeed
survived not only as a buzz word: this is evident in the discussions
about cutbacks in public funding for institutions critical of the
government, just as it is evident in controversies involving
anti-Semitic and pornographic web sites. Thus there are various
practices for regulating the public sphere, which may be assembled under
the term censorship. Yet these practices can no longer be circumvented
with unambiguously moral valuations - "good" freedom versus "evil"
censorship. The major revisionist debates of the past two decades in
particular, which the New Right have set off, show the great extent to
which the political "keys" of freedom and oppression have changed, and
that these terms cannot be discussed apart from political contents. So
which oppression is opposed in the name of which freedom and truth?

The Secession, programmatically dedicated to the freedom of art, has
lost the final appeal against a lawsuit brought against them by an FP?
politician because of a picture by Otto M?hl. In addition to this
concrete reason, the symposium "The Price of Freedom" is intended to
address legal and economic intimidation policies in the context of the
right-wing "Kulturkampf" on the one hand, and on the other to formulate
political positions in the controversies surrounding censorship.
Starting from the question of how claims for freedom and prohibitive
actions are negotiated within quickly changing regimes of truth and
policies of visibility, concrete options for action are to be reflected
without recourse to moral indignation. This will focus on anti-national
perspectives, since a great deal of implicit complicity between
social-democratic, "josefinist" and right-wing cultural policies may be
discerned particularly in the construction of a specifically Austrian
"cultural nation." The consequent difficulties and ambivalences still
characterize the debates of "cultural resistance" between or beyond
boycott and normalization after a year of black-blue government.


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