(via Ellis Sharp)

The student charged with “disorderly conduct” for handing in a creative writing piece including fantasies about shooting (and then, um, tampering with the bodies of) fellow students, clearly did not understand what was really at stake in his teacher’s exhortation to write whatever came into his head without “judging” or “censoring” it.

Specifically, he missed the implicit injunction: “at all costs, do not write anything that the Big Other would judge to be offensive, or wish to censor”. One does not write lurid fantasies about school shootings in America; or, at least, one does not show them to one’s teachers.

“Do not judge or censor” means, in this context, “accept only the Big Other’s standards of judgement and rules of acceptable expression, and do so tacitly and completely; do not attempt to appropriate for yourself the position of judge and censor, in order to interrogate that position or use it to produce new constraints and new values”.