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I think the best way of understanding "cancel culture" is by invoking the Lacanian distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic. Being "against" cancel culture immediately cancels itself, because it is a call to cancel cancel culture. In order to stake...
…this position, it has to contradict itself and in fact become a form of what it denounces. It is impossible for any denunciation of cancel culture to escape this mirroring relation with its supposed other because it cannot possibly raise itself to a statement of law…
… Any law that we shouldn’t cancel, that everyone should be able to speak freely, would have to support precisely the forms of canceling that anti-cancel culture claims to abhor...
...While people often look for other actions taken by anti-CC people to accuse them of self-contradiction (times when they supported canceling or silencing someone), really one only needs to quote any anti-CC statement itself….
…to break this mirroring symmetry and posit a law that isn’t self-defeating one must invoke some sort of position (which people making these statements always implicitly have, often a sinister one). We should have our arguments over those values, instead of the red herring of CC
It's probably equally valid to understand this as Kantian (opposing "cancel culture" can't be made into a universal principle, it violates the categorical imperative) or dialectical, which Lacan is ultimately coherent with. I've just been reading too much Lacan lately
