I feel compelled to wade in here. I’ve been a lurker on this mailing list since 2011 but never quite felt the need to jump into a thread.
I’m a queer person who has spent the last 15 years working in art, design and publishing—fields that hinge on freedom of _expression_—and I do not support cancel culture.
There is good reason that Gary brought up the work of Chantal Mouffe and her nuanced concept of antagonism as it relates to the body politic. Her work reveals that there can be no true democracy without continual conflict, without sustained argument and the heteroglossia of diverse interests and perspectives competing in a shared space. The thrust of this is that no one perspective is ever considered sacred or untouchable.
While I believe that systemic racism is real and braided with technocapitalism at nearly every level, and that queer and BIPOC people deserve much much better from governments and corporations, the “disastrous consequence” of cancel culture is that we abandon the notion of debate as a cornerstone of democracy.
Unfortunately, if we silence even one perspective, as misguided and uninformed as it may be (with the exception of hate speech [which has jurisdictional differences in scope and definition]) then we have already moved away from democracy at its core.
There is also a real chilling effect that comes with cancel culture. Personally, I have known artists and authors that feel certain ideas are becoming too risky or radical to express in their creative practices, even when they come from a place of critical inquiry and research. Because the cancel culture axiom is either to embrace something or get rid of it, the spectrum of an idea's merit is reduced to a binary moral judgment that insipidly reinscribes the very same phallogocentrism I can only assume many of those in favour of cancel culture oppose.
Nettime is a left-leaning mailing list precisely because debates about the merit of cancel culture can take place here. Anything else is antithetical to the democratic society that marginalized people seek to manifest every time they take to the streets.
Z
Are we really comparing “cancel culture” which is usually associated with bipoc and queer people raising red flags over violent behavior with...Nazis? People have talked about cancel culture as having “disastrous consequences”? Can someone provide an example of how exactly cancel culture has rivaled the state’s monopoly on violence or are we just going to sit here and use vague/coded language such as “populism” to reinforce racial capitalism? I thought net-time was a leftist mailing list? A On Aug 14, 2020, at 12:07 PM, Gary Hall <mail@garyhall.info> wrote:
David,
Thanks for your post on William Davies’s recent contributions to the London Review of Books. Enjoyed it.
The mention of Carl Schmitt brings to mind another critic of liberalism, Chantal Mouffe, and her philosophy of hegemony and antagonism, itself greatly influenced by Schmitt’s account of the friend/enemy relation. For Mouffe, the political is a decision that is always ‘taken in an undecidable terrain’. This is because social relations are not fixed or natural, but rather the product of hegemonic articulations: that is, of contingent yet temporary decisions involving power and conflict. (Which has the advantage that these hegemonic articulations can be disarticulated, transformed and rearticulated as a result of struggle between opponents.)
Now, I realize this may seem a rather counter-intuitive question to ask - particularly for readers of the London Review of Books! But I do worry, is there a risk that using terms and concepts like ‘argument’, ‘careful judgement’, ‘knowledge’, ‘democracy’, ‘public’ as datum points in this way is itself a form of affective politics that ‘“precedes debate, precedes argument, precedes speech”’? Might it, too, be a ‘decisionism’, “an acting out or performance of some prior act of identification”’ - one in which the question of what it is to be political, especially in relation to ‘cancel culture’, is not taken in an undecidable terrain, but is rather decided in advance of intellectual questioning?
Here’s a less subtle (and less philosophical) version of the concern that’s troubling me and that I'm not expressing as well as I'd like: How do we as ‘net critics’ avoid coming across - especially to certain of those progressive or marginalized voices who may have found themselves associated with cancel culture - as merely activist/artist/geek versions of the liberal signatories to the Letter on Justice and Open Debate that appeared in Harper’s Magazine at the beginning of July and that Geert also refers to in his piece on cancel culture?
Cheers, Gary
On 14/08/2020 13:24, David Garcia wrote:
The whole world Cancel culture gets an even more sinister twist than usual when put through the filter
of the title of a recent article by William Davies entitled “Who am I Prepared to Kill? In which he explores aspects
of Nazi Jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt influential reduction of politics down to the base distinction between
friend and enemy and ultimately realised in the grim question "who am I prepared to kill and who am i prepared to
die for?”. Some see this distinction as the foundation of populism.
In a podcast (link below) Davies further develops this theme describing a politics that is worse than simple
‘factionalism’ which he characterises in terms of extreme forms of cultural identification where existential identification becomes
the very foundation of political difference. "And this political difference is expressed through an acting out or performance
of some prior act of identification”.
An affective politics of this kind that "precedes debate, precedes argument, precedes speech” In this extreme Schmittian landscape
cancel culture is the only logical outcome. In this world in which politics has no space left for the epistemic, in place of argument we are
reduced to the decisionism of picking a side. Not much space left for the careful judgement between rival truth claims.
Given this reality I am puzzled that the extensive knowledge and work and examples of successful forms of experimental
inclusive deliberative democracy such as citizens assemblies and sortition has gained such little interest or traction. Why is
that?
Without such formations there is no possibility of a knowledge democracy in which citizens, stake holders and experts deliberate
on the issues of public concern..And all we are left with is a slide towards a Hobbsian war of all against all. Maybe politics like journalism
now finds itself unable to shake off the old adage ‘if it bleeds it leads’. Is there democratic life beyond the fog of war?
I am imagining some kind of curatorial landing zone in which Evidential Realists join forces with Dialogical artists of the "social
turn” to forge some kind of transitional bridge to a less toxic public sphere. Any thoughts?
David Garcia
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/lrb-conversations/press-the-red-button?utm_source=LRB+icymi&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20200802+icymi&utm_content=ukrw_subs_icymi
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