Why is Cancel Culture So Confusing?
Certainly I’m not the only who’s grown beyond tired of hearing the magical and devastating word that is “cancelled.” This word has simultaneously become the calling card of the alt right dude protecting his livelihood of abusing women as well as the self righteous stan overly invested in their unhealthy parasocial relationships. It goes without saying that being stuck in an elevator with either of this people would result in my immediate combustion.
Yet despite my better judgement, I have not stopped pondering over cancel culture, not conceptually, but grammatically. Specifically, I’ve become fascinated with the way the grammar of being cancelled lends to an ambiguous cancellation. I have two leading theories on how this works grammatically. To be cancelled either means:
This person was spurned.
We should spurn this person.
For example, the tag #NatalieIsCancelled seems to imply an encouragement to exclude me, given what we know about hashtags and how they operate. However, “is” being present tense, this proclaims that I’ve been excluded already, not that I need excluding.
Whenever we talk about cancel culture, we necessarily do it in the passive voice, but cancellation doesn’t appear to have a strong past participle. We don’t see a lot of “has been cancelled” or even “was cancelled.” I’m curious about what this construction does for the meaning here. If “is” has become the operating word for cancel culture does that make for a present and ongoing cancellation?
The fundamental problem here, of course, is that English is a language not made for the passive voice. #NatalieIsCancelled simply doesn’t have the same ring or clear meaning as #IHerebyCancelNatalie. Granted, I’m not advocating for cancellation in the active voice, because it would lose what’s meaningful about this concept in the first place. Cancelling someone was built for the explicit purpose of acknowledging harm and ensuring a specific person could no longer do that harm to a greater community. Putting cancellation in the active voice loses the power that a community can hold. Urging strong writing at the expense of strong action would be pretty hollow.
Frankly then, the only recourse is elaboration. Cancelling people lacks the urgency and intent that comes with outlining specific actions to take in light of our cancellee’s apparent poor behavior. If a notable artist is outed as a bigot then that should become a conversation about no longer supporting that artist and reflecting on their past work with new light. #NatalieIsCancelled tells me absolutely nothing about my shortcomings as a human being (all of the empty water cups I leave in my room).
I keep coming back to the OED listing for cancel. Like many of the OED variety, it’s a long list of definitions. I’ve become caught between two apt meanings. I feel that “To obliterate, blot out, delete from sight or memory” accurately describes what cancel has come to mean, but I can’t help but yearn for the musical definition, “To remove the effect of.” The way we hold public figures accountable for their actions has become so wrapped up in a present tense signaling of failure that it fails to make good on any promise of improving the community at large. Here’s to hoping we will remove that effect.
