In Edited Clean Version, Raiford Guins offers a compelling argument: ‘We have entered a new era of media regulation that operates (looks, sounds, and feels) differently from “censorship” that helped constitute electronic media throughout much of the twentieth century’ (p. xvi). Focusing on media regulation in the US, Guins argues that censorial practices have migrated from familiar institutional forms – one imagines a government bureaucrat with a corrective red pen – to less familiar though no less insidious domestic forms, such as television V-chips which allow parents (presumably) to block specific forms of ‘undesirable’ programming from their televisions. Put simply, audiences have willingly become their own censors. While Guins articulates this argument through an examination of a variety of media (mostly film and television), the concerns he addresses and the questions he raises should resonate with scholars and students of popular music, especially those interested in issues of technology and power.
With the exception of the first chapter, which sets in place a theoretical framework, chapters are organised around five censorial practices – ‘blocking’, ‘filtering’, ‘sanitising’, ‘cleaning’ and ‘patching’ – each of which is associated with a particular censorial technology: (respectively) the V-chip, internet filtering software, DVD filtering software, audio/visual ‘masking’ and ‘filling’, and video game patching. The organisation of the book lends itself to selective reading; the chapters on censorial practices could stand well on their own, and each contains sufficient theoretical explication. There is some redundancy across chapters (especially those on ‘blocking’, ‘filtering’ and ‘sanitising’), which spreads the argument a little thin; readers would be wise to pick-and-choose chapters.
Each chapter contains a number of illustrative examples of the censorial practices on which Guins focuses. These form the foundation for an analysis and critique of the rhetoric surrounding censorial technologies. At the heart of Guins' argument is the notion that the so-called freedom of choice offered to consumers through censorial technologies masks underlying and problematic relations of power. Drawing heavily from works by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Nikolas Rose, Guins proposes that censorial technologies do not empower, but rather serve to ‘ensure the productive management of choice as active governance in the administration and instrumentalisation of licensed freedom’ (p. 15). As Guins writes in reference to the V-chip, ‘The question becomes not “what do you want?” but “do you want A or B?” Blocked or unblocked’ (p. 45). This sort of rhetorical twist – you think you're empowered, but you're actually trapped – can come off as paternalistic, but the theoretical nuance and attention to detail in Edited Clean Version helps Guins avoid this.
While scholars familiar with the body of theory Guins references may find little new in Guins' straightforward treatment, the strength of his argument is in its use of this theory to conceptually organise the set of technologies on which he focuses. For scholars unfamiliar with this theory, Edited Clean Version is a good introduction and makes a strong case for the utility of Foucauldian and Deleuzian theories of governance and control in scholarship of media and culture.
The section dedicated specifically to music censorship is relatively brief (17 pages, in the chapter on ‘cleaning’). In this section, Guins weaves musical examples – mostly from hip-hop songs – with an abbreviated and US-focused history of musical censorship, in order to illustrate his point that ‘the onetime creative gestures employed to circumvent, undermine, camouflage and sound out against music censorship circulate today as standard procedure for eliciting clean versions’ (p. 158). These gestures include bleeping, deleting and substituting ‘explicit’ language. While these forms of censorship are hardly new, Guins reveals how they function in a new way in the contemporary media landscape, recasting censorship as a choice: how ‘dirty’ do you want your music?
Overall, Edited Clean Version is provocative, timely and well-written. Furthermore, the argument of Edited Clean Version is compelling enough to suggest that the shift in censorial practices Guins theorises will continue to hold if not intensify in coming years, regardless of the longevity of the V-chip or of any of the specific technologies he addresses.
