Here I am being asked to comment on cancel culture. Thus I will comply (cum p lie). At the time of writing this text I felt I was past the moment of the “call out” and skirting around an embrace of the “call in.” Now we’re all the more in the moment of cancel culture. I have been trained to say yes to things I should say no to. I fight against that training every single fucking day. This text I am writing is about what we continue to contend with after we’ve said everything must go. My impulse is to do away with the terminology all together so as to not be bound to it. Cancel cancel culture. In the past I have addressed how the “call out” can be perceived as too angry, it’s too loud, there isn’t enough thought behind a quick all-capitalized screed. In 2016 many cis white male poets complained about a lack of critical nuance. I disagreed. Often, those crying over a perceived shift toward an illiberal democracy are actually crying over their irrelevance to would-be supporters, those whom they might have previously used to consolidate and maintain their privilege.
What and whom are being cancelled? Who’s calling it cancel culture? They call it cancel culture, we call it abolitionism. One recuperates those who have been systemically canceled and one does not. Cancel culture is what those who have been called out have weaponized against those telling them reality and the language that shapes reality are changing.
The difference between the “call out/in” and cancel culture is illuminated by how they relate to one another: the former are components or features of the latter. Cancel culture is the structure and the call out is the apparatus. We have to understand, both by knowing and feeling, the consequences of our structures and the ones we intentionally subscribe to, even when subscribed to temporarily. The consequence of cancel culture is not that a precinct burns. The consequence of cancel culture is that it can replicate a carceral model, a model that is one of the violent apparatuses of white supremacy, the structure that needs to go. If it does not matter at all what someone says or does to attempt to remedy a wrong, because they are wrong regardless of the most well-written and intended apology, it points to a kind of systemic and structural damage that is irreparable. What complicates things is how immediate recourse gets caught up in all of this. If we’re at all looking to tend to broken relations with care through online platforms or through text(s), then expect perpetual disappointment and stress.
Just as I wrote above that the ground is uneven for “we” so too is what we aim at. We are damaged in different ways by structures and systems, and disproportionately more than others. Disproportionality is the word of the pandemic. It is almost impossible to ask what is needed in order for those of us harmed to be made whole when the damage is already done. Particularly when the harm is repeated upon repetition. The call out, cancelling, whatever they want to call it, it’s merely the first beautiful and ugly defiant step in collectively saying no to defunct legacies.
However, we must be vigilante with our aim. Post less algorithmically generated social capital.
On my part, I feel it necessary to believe people and structures, and our relationships to both, are capable of transformation. Not transcendence. That would deny a history of violence and its current cuts. I believe in bell hooks' writing on the will to change only so far as change will only happen when willed and wielded. Not coerced. Some of us have already voluntarily complied to the new regulations of our COVID 19 times. What about the will to change a structure we have relied on to hurt us and others?