ON CANCEL CULTURE
INTRODUCTION
They are not artists. They are something else. They are anti-Artists.
What is anti-Art? Or a better question might be what isn’t art?
In the course of my research, I was enormously fortunate to come across a mention in Baudrillard’s writing of Anti-art. It was in a collection of essays The Conspiracy of Art, from Art… Contemporary of Itself. Baudrillard writes:
“Anti-art strives, in all its forms, to escape the aesthetic dimension. But since the ‘ready-made’ has annexed banality itself, all that is finished. The innocence of non-meaning, of the non-figurative, of abjection and dissidence, is finished. All these things, which contemporary art would like to be, or return to, merely reinforce the inexorably aesthetic character of this anti-art.”
I do not claim that I am the first person to coin the term anti-Art, though I spell it uniquely, like it is javascript rather than common grammar. anti-Art, if I were to use it at the beginning of a sentence would look very strange following this code.
My purpose in writing this essay is that I find myself regularly pitted against my friends and colleagues on cancel culture. It has always been my intuition that cancel culture is a good thing. One of the great themes of our time is the conflict between freedom and morality. I am on the side of morality. Not as a matter of principle. Perhaps as a matter of disposition. But my highest aim in advocating for morality is to advocate for balance. So allow me to return to Baudrillard’s statement and allow me to point you to where he related morality and art.
“The innocence of non-meaning.” There are two morally related terms in this easy-to-miss statement: innocence and meaning. If one is innocent they are morally absolved due to their inability to distinguish right from wrong. Baudrillard claims this is finished. If meaning is intentional then non-meaning is understood as unintentional.
Cancel culture is a movement that has mobilized to challenge the innocence of non-meaning in popular culture. An artist would love to say they had no intention of offending or they had no awareness of changing moral norms, but this is finished.
The abstract solution is obvious. So obvious that it is more appropriate for an introduction than a conclusion. The problem of non-meaning is solved by complete intentionality.
No artist can say they will be canceled for something they didn’t mean, if everything they do and say happens with intention. Therefore, if celebrities would like to remain employed in the spectacle of popular culture, I recommend they always act with intention and then they will never be innocent of non-meaning. They will instead be mature of their meanings. Taken further, assuming politicians or business leaders do something terrible, their resignation will be proof of their maturity of meanings and their denial and indignation proof that their innocence of non-meanings should be rejected.
The only reason cancel culture exists is because people in power have largely learned that there is no upside in resigning, so they don’t. Resignation as an expression of dignity meant something. But in a pornographically power-driven world, where power is acquired for the pleasure of its use, rationality now dictates one should never resign. There is no reward for having dignity anymore. If there is no dignity, then we must invent a new mechanism to enforce resignation.
While cancel culture may not be the most efficient or best-designed mechanism, it is a necessary step. We have to whack this mole, but we don’t have to whack the mole forever. Eventually a new mole pops up and we can hope and plan for our strategy at acquiring resignations to improve.
So why is cancel culture so punitive and unforgiving? In what manner do we distinguish cancel culture from a legal proceeding? Because we do not need to have a trial every time we give a child a time-out. Cancel culture is not meant to mimic the legal system and it does not aim for justice. It is a punishment like for a child which helps them realize not necessarily that what they did is wrong, but their behavior has consequences. A punishment for a child is meant to dispel innocence. Children are punished so they will remember and if they remember they will not be innocent.
For Baudrillard, this innocence of non-meaning can advance a concept which he explores in The Ecstasy of Communication: transparency. The world is so transparent that he compares all communication to pornography and it is pornographic because we so love communication that we express everything and because we express everything we are naked.
As I prescribed above for a celebrity with total intention, the fact is that people, especially those who exist in the spectacle, must always be talking. This transparency is not so much because everything is there to be seen, but there is no ecstasy in withholding communication, so we withhold nothing. We empty ourselves of meaning and non-meaning, so that everything we are is transparent, visible, and there to be seen. How can we be innocent of what our eyes show us? That is not innocence it is blindness and it is ignorance. Ignorance is therefore not a state of non-knowing it is a state of non-seeing. Do not tell racists to think, tell them to look and see what their eyes are showing them.
This kind of exhaustive communication naturally emphasizes in the popular culture what is vulgar, what is controversial, and what is mature, because for so long we had censored these things from our communication. Not only are we naked, but this nakedness is intentional. We are naked because we give the world our clothes when we give the world our words.
Communication after the rise of social media is so pornographic that it is pornography with an X-Ray. It is so pornographic that we cannot even hide anything we would like to keep under our skin.
For all the people who bemoan cancel culture as an assault on the freedom of speech or the freedom of expression, I will simply ask what is more free? Being naked or being clothed? Being naked must be more free because we only have one way to be naked. Clothing is a freedom of options, but nakedness is a freedom of being. We cannot change our nakedness. We cannot change the size of our genitals, the length of our bones, or the color of our skin. If we are not free when we are naked, we are not free when we are clothed.
For most of human history, freedom has been hard-earned and precious. Yet now we have an abundance of it. We have an excess of freedom. We have freedoms we do not need. Political factions with no freedoms left to acquire can only bicker about which freedoms they do not like and if they try to remove these freedoms they do not like, they will only end up making those freedoms necessary and therefore not excessive.
In hating the freedoms of others, we liberate those we hate. In loving the freedoms of others, we replace their freedom with joy. One is not less free because their freedom is loved, one is only more joyful. One is not less free because their freedom is hated, they are in fact more free, but much less joyful.
Freedom ought to arise in part due to necessity. Without necessity then the act of dying for freedom would be entirely irrational. We do not die for things that are desires or whims. We do not wage wars over inessentials, but essentials like water, food, and growth. To die for freedom is made noble by the necessity of having the freedom.
To have freedom with no desire to die is anti-Freedom. The same can be said of art. To have art that has no desire to die is anti-Art.