Talking about cultural debate today means above all talking about access to and exclusion from the debate itself. The reference is to the composite reflection that has been taking place around the CD for years cancel cultureor that phenomenon of ostracization from public discussion of individuals who have expressed positions in contrast with certain social values.
The theme, which initially developed in the US academic and media context, had as its cultural reference point the whole political universe linked to the conservative right wokewith the aim of putting the spotlight on the exclusive effects caused by the hegemony of values liberal. This group includes, for example, the events linked to the removal of the statue of Thomas Jefferson from the New York City Hall as, in his time, the owner of slaves; as well as HBO’s decision to remove the film Gone with the Wind from its catalog because it was deemed racist; or again the report by journalist Bari Weiss of having been forced to resign from the New York Times due to her own conservative political positions.
The Old Continent and Italy together have certainly not been immune to the phenomenon, so that we too have begun to speak of cancel culture, often in its form of “politically correct dictatorship”. In short, the complaint is that – just like overseas – in Italy too, access to the cultural debate would be conditional on compliance with an inadmissible label, namely the one according to which “one can no longer say anything”, on pain of be definitively excluded from the cultural forum.
If this is not the place to fully retrace all the events related to the debate on cancel culture in Italy, however, it seems the right context to raise some questions which, although not decisive, could help to set up the analysis in a more appropriate way.
The point is that the concept of cancellation appears to be abused, thus compromising all the necessary operations of distinction which must be carried out to judge individual cases and thereby allow for an overall balance. This abuse is to be found in the circumstance whereby, by means of the category of cancellation, an undue overlap is rather reached between the concept of censorship and that of legitimation.
In fact, almost always the subject who believes he was deleted intends to denounce an alleged case of censorship, whereas instead – on closer inspection – we are simply faced with a case of loss of legitimacy. The two phenomena, although possibly similar, are ultimately radically different. To give a clarifying example: the scientist who, by advertising eccentric and unfounded theses on a virus, loses access to certain communication channels is simply a scientist who has lost his public legitimacy, not a victim of censorship.
This argument appears relevant to the extent that it allows highlighting the relational element of the public debate, in which legitimacy and mutual recognition appear to be two fundamental requirements. When these assumptions are rejected, public exposure – and consequently the denunciation of the loss of its possibility – abandons its communicative intent and becomes exclusively self-referential action, aimed at hoarding followers e reactionscompletely detached from understanding the other, even where this implies a political conflict.
This is why the abuse of the concept of cancellation appears to be a mystifying factor which – in the long run – proves to be more useful to the presumed oppressed than to the alleged oppressor, to the extent that the denunciation is capable of attracting media attention and increasing the following of the deleted. On the subject, the post published by Prof. Alessandro Orsini on his profile comes to mind Facebook with which he announced his abandonment of the newspaper The messengersuggesting that it was an obligatory choice due to conflicts between the editorial line of the newspaper and the positions publicly expressed by the sociologist regarding the war in Ukraine: “Today I left Il Messaggero. I apologize to all those who had subscribed only to read my articles”. Cancellation complaint, therefore; except that the exclusion from the public debate only lasted a couple of days, the time to announce the start of a collaboration with il Fatto Quotidiano.
All this to say that, too often, under the umbrella of an allegedly recent concept (that of cancel culture) include phenomena which, in reality, have little or nothing new (on this point see a recent contribution by Raffaele Alberto Ventura); and that, above all, the complaint of having been canceled frequently comes from cultural actors who, on the other hand, have free access to public debate.
This downsizing certainly does not eliminate the critical issues linked to a dangerous contemporary hypersensitivity – of which the cancel culture it is expression – which pushes to flatten the historical dimension of social and human events (think of what happened to Paolo Nori’s university course on Dostoevsky, canceled by the Bicocca University of Milan due to the Russian origins of the writer under study).
However, it helps to understand that the cultural and political debate needs mutual recognition and that this recognition cannot be separated from the sharing, in the present, of some fundamental values, especially by those who – for various reasons – believe they are carrying out a job intellectual type. Apart from this sharing, the impossibility of any dialogue or, if we like, cancellation appears inevitable.