Cancel Culture, or the Realpolitik of the Participatory Turn

https://folyoirat.ludovika.hu/index.php/kome/article/view/7621

My cancellers had not been cancellers for years. I would say they were mostly just frustrated and annoying. For years, (some of them for over ten years) had been assuming a non-authoritarian character, from the resources (ideas, connections, enthusiasm) of many. Initially, I was unable to comprehend why they had turned on me. I reasoned with myself that they had got a bigger share of resources than they merited, so it could not have been envy. I had never hurt them. In fact, the illusion of real collaboration and co-creation was so perfect that once, when I dared utter “not everyone is an artist”, my friend and actual collaborator (to whom I referred to in the beginning of this section) gave my lunch to a dog. This was at the core of participatory formats, an end-of-history ethos. As someone expressed it at that time “we should just party on until the end of times”. It failed, as it assumed human nature is constructivist and performative. Finally, I realised why my cancellers took revenge – I contributed to them getting into roles in life they were unable to really adapt to. I also elicited their envy, since I actually had that (autonomy and creativity), which they supposedly possessed, but actually lacked. Cancellations happen in the gap between opportunities and abilities. If we connect cancellations (mob behaviour) to authoritarianism (at the core of the authoritarian personality lies the lack of autonomy), and read it like an extended Milgram Experiment, we could argue that social media activated dormant authoritarian tendencies. In the same manner, arts-based participation and establishing an identity as creatives and thinkers failed to establish a really autonomous self in people who turned into cancellers. I emphasise again that most people did not become cancellers, and again stressing the limitations of autoethnography, I described these cases because they reveal the underlying logic connecting participatory arts formats to cancellations

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