The Pen is Mightier than the Awl

I would like to correct something I said in class today. While discussing the 1798 Sedition Act, and the "innovative" notion that someone was considered "not guilty" of libel if their claim was true, I suggested this was indicative of a reversal of roles between those who govern and those who are governed. Upon further consideration, I think this view is a bit too rosy. It would be more accurate to say that those who govern and those who are governed come to be held to a congruent standard of truth, or perhaps honesty is a better term.

To begin, I want to pick up on the language of reading introduced in Kurt's post about Foucault in which the punishment for sedition "had to be legible for all," which is to say public, exhibited, displayed. This reminded me of a passage in Starr's book discussing the ways in which centralized state power allowed for improvement monitoring of the populace. This, in conjunction with what Starr calls an inexplicable "decline in the norms of political secrecy," meant that "Society did not just become more legible to the state; the state became more legible to the public" (45). Granted, the term "legible" is not being used in exactly the same way in both instances, but I think its appearance in both texts is more than just coincidence -- or mere playful punnery.

Punishing sedition means punishing behavior that incites discontent or insurrection, but as seen in the Zenger case and the "truth" defense against the Sedition Act, there was a growing sense among the people that discontent and insurrection were valid, and therefore not seditious, if their reasoning was based in fact. The focus of prohibition shifted from incitement to deceit. As a result, we see in the Continental Congress' 1774 "Address to the Inhabitants of Quebec," the assertion that freedom of the press facilitates public  discussion "whereby oppressive officers are shamed or intimidated, into more honourable and just modes of conducting affairs" (76). So in much the same way that the public pillory of seditionists makes their crime "legible" upon their "corrected bodies," freedom of the press literally makes legible the misdeeds of crooked leaders on the pages of newspapers and pamphlets. This is part of the cultural shift away "bodily correction" in the latter half of the seventeenth century and toward punishments of public scrutiny, to which anyone was subject, even oppressive officers.

So I don't want to say that in the two revolutions being discussed (the American and the print) caused a reversal in which the people stopped working for the government and the government started working for the people. Such an argument would be hard to make even today. Rather, I would argue that the two factions -- governors and governed -- found themselves interacting in, or sharing, the same public space, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes adversarially.