freedoms

I'm taking a 3-day seminar on the new Russian constitution. Sounds pretty weird for a writer, right? But that strangeness is really just a measure of how much writers take freedom of expression for granted in the West. There's plenty of lip service paid to specific things like the general and undeniable badness of censorship and the various restrictions that intellectual property regimes place on writers (once it's sold, you don't have control over your expression any more). But the whole problem of freedom in relation to this thing called "expression" could use more elaboration.

Looking at constitutions reveals certain things about both freedom and expression, the meaning of these ideas in different national and political contexts. Where is freedom situated in a society? It makes a difference where and what one is free to express in different places. For instance, behind the Iron Curtain the private, domestic sphere was the only site for truly free sexual expression, which is one reason why there's so much sex in the intensely private worlds of Kundera, and also why this kind of sexual expression is so relentlessly theorized in those books as well -- it stands in for the writer's freedom, which has been cut off by a repressive regime.

A question: Who is more free, the dissident whose authentic, free expression might land her in jail or worse, or the writer in a free society whose audience is profoundly distracted and uninterested in hearing what free and authentic expression might sound like?

There's a relation between writing & publishing here, too -- some connection beneath the surface. I wish I had more time to articulate it. I think of Chapbooks.com, of how their model of "personal publishing" really does somehow open a space where a writer's exercise of free expression could find a non-distracted, non-alienated audience. In other words, it's even more revolutionary than I thought. Need to think more about this...