Media and Psychoanalysis by Johanssen Jacob;Krüger Steffen;

Author:Johanssen, Jacob;Krüger, Steffen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Confer Ltd
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Cancel culture

As a last scenario and exemplary ‘battleground’ of politics online, we want to briefly shed light on what has been called ‘cancel culture’ through the prism of Scott Krzych’s (2021) study on the ‘politics of hysteria’. Analysing contemporary US politics and conservative media, Krzych argues that hysteria plays a key role in it. When he cautions early on in his study that hysteria as an element of contemporary politics is by no means bound to the strategies of only one side of the political spectrum, but ‘may be understood as a common and politically unaffiliated reaction to democratic antagonism’ (2021, p. 18), this becomes highlighted in the continuous debates about the term ‘cancel culture’.

On a basic level, cancel culture refers to the act of uninviting, ‘deplatforming’ or ‘cancelling’ a speaker from an event or agreed book deal, or ceasing to follow them and blocking their posts on social media. Whereas Krzych sees right-wing communication strategies as forcing leftists into the position of an overwhelmed hysteric, the Marxist critic Angela Nagle sees cancel culture as a sure sign that the Left itself had been gravitating towards that position, leaning on the late Mark Fisher, also a Marxist critic, activist and prolific writer, to make this point. In 2013, Fisher had taken issue with the Left for excessive infighting and quarrelling, arguing that it had lost sight of the bigger questions in relation to class and instead focused on identity politics, where certain groups occupy a moral high ground and seek to advance their cause in the endless cycles of self-purification of the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ (Freud, 1930, p. 114). Such processes, as Fisher (2013) wrote, particularly play out on social media and have resulted in a purely self-referential, self-destructive Left.

Both Fisher and Nagle, in their critiques of leftist debate culture, risk falling into the trap of playing out questions of recognition against those of redistribution again, which Fraser and Honneth had previously sought to transcend in their philosophical debates published in 2003. However, their critique holds, we argue, when it focuses on the forms that intra-leftist debates have taken. Although some of those who had been called out and condemned by the Left had often said things that were objectionable, Fisher argues, ‘the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism’ (Fisher, 2013, online, cited in Nagle, 2017, p. 75). Nagle, in turn, illustrates this moralism with the example of the feminist Germaine Greer, whose invitation to speak at Cardiff University triggered an hysteric response from related groups on the Left who petitioned to cancel the event due to Greer’s allegedly ‘misogynistic views towards trans women’ (Nagle, 2017, p. 78, quoting from the petition). ‘As far as this new generation of campus feminists was concerned, Greer may as well have been on the far right,’ judges Nagle (2017, p. 78) dryly. And the pattern of interaction she exemplifies in this way goes to show the extent

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