What does cancel culture stand for? S'inspirer, respirer
“Tyranny of minorities, call for censorship, intolerance, ostracism, culture of elimination”: what haven’t we heard for months now about the liberticidal drifts in the American and French public debate? The drift that some people attribute to a certain radical left lies in a fetish expression, much like the image of the hell of political correctness: “cancel culture”, which perpetuates the quarrel over cultural appropriation in the creative field.
Imported from the United States –the chosen land of a new wave of combative thinkers, belonging to various movements (anti-colonialists, anti-racists, feminists, anti-homophobes, anti-appropriationists…)– the term “cancel culture” also has resonance in France. Hystericized by comparable modes of conflict, albeit on different scales, such as the police, and racist and sexist violence, the two countries experience a political fracture reflecting a certain ethic of the public conversation and debate. “Cancel culture” would thus be the name of a new battlefield where the fighters confront each other as much on the form of the disagreements as on the substance that underlies them.
A new cultural war would then be at work, with a wide spectrum of actions –from criticism to insults, from cyberbullying to boycotts, from sit-ins to the dismantling of statues– reflecting the violence of a fractured and unbreathable moment in civic life. This culture of cancellation has thus become the active tool of political contestation arising from minorities, “overwhelmed by the impunity of power and the passivity of institutions in the face of racism, social injustice, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, among others”, as the French historian based in Los Angeles, Laure Murat, reiterated this summer. Black Lives Matter and #metoo are the two major social movements that draw on “cancel culture” for rhetorical resources in order to denounce iniquitous situations and demand that institutions take responsibility by no longer honouring personalities accused of sexual assault or racist artworks.
American museums have not been spared by cancel culture, which over the last year have become a symbolic space where directors are now forced to resign – mirroring the statues that some want to dismantle in the name of a missing history, waiting to be rewritten.
It is the complexity of this hype around one word –“cancel”– that in itself disqualifies the values it embodies: censorship, wherever it comes from, is not defendable, and freedom of speech is an inalienable democratic principle. What the American writer Philip Roth called the “tyranny of propriety” obviously hardens the tone of public conversation. But this tension is inevitably intertwined with another tension, which refers to the blind spots and the “unthought” of a violent social history, of which the current anger of Black Americans is a strong sign.
Against inflexible and sectarian attitudes, one would obviously prefer public debate to take place within a framework open to nuance, flexibility, dialectics, respect for others, and disagreements bound up with a taste for discussion. Making conversation “a way of life”, in the words of the philosopher Ali Benmakhlouf, remains an ethical requirement. But this ideal of well-reasoned confrontation can only be achieved by rethinking the relationship between justice and freedom, between history and current events.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is an American essayist and journalist, contributor to The New York Times Magazine, author of Losing My Cool: Love, Literature, and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd (Penguin Books). He is one of five American intellectuals who wrote a column in Harper’s magazine against cancel culture and some aspects of today’s anti-racism.
Catherine Grenier is a French heritage curator and art historian. After working as deputy director of the Musée national d’art moderne, she has been the director of the Fondation Giacometti in Paris since 2014. She has notably published La fin des Musées ? a study on the museum of the 21st century, open to artworks from all over the world.
Sandra Laugier is a philosopher attentive to the forms of public debate in today’s democracies. She is a specialist in North American contemporary philosophy, ordinary language, ethics of care, gender, democracy and modes of disobedience. Her research on the work of Stanley Cavell and the question of the ordinary led her to investigate popular culture.
