Trial by Twitter and Cancel Culture

“Cancel culture” is a new variant of an old phenomenon. When Ben Jonson cautioned his playgoers each to “exercise his own Judgement, and not censure by Contagion” (Bartholomew Fair) he was alerting them to the fact that passing judgment on others can pass from person to person like a plague. If we ask why the infection starts and why it spreads so fast, we will find that the answer to both questions is the same: “everyone’s a critic!”. The growth or spread that we associate with the contagion of cancellation has “making” at its heart. The initial judgment plants the germ in Inventive mode. Causing the judgment to increase in consequence and extent makes it grow in Creative mode. Giving the judgment the air of publicity makes something new of it in Productive and co-Productive mode. Making a mistake triggers a whole series of making processes, and our language reflects this. We talk of a person making a mistake and of others making a judgment; critics make assumptions about the suspect’s character and motive; and seek to make an example of them. In response to all this, the suspect might make an excuse, or make an apology, and might even seek to make amends. The dominance of “making” language in relation to individual errors and collective responses to those errors indicates that in social contexts an individual’s fracture of the social fabric is more than made up for by the fabricating impulses of society at large. The clustering of criticism operates in this sense almost like the cells of a body that rush to heal cuts in skin and breakages of bone – sometimes leaving the re-created tissue stronger than it was to begin with. The instinct to rush to public judgment as a way of recovering from a social breach stands in striking contrast to the alternative instinct which is to rush to hush up the offence in order to maintain the social fabric by patching over the tears and painting over the cracks. Where the latter method prefers to cover up, cancellation prefers a different type of coverage. Despite their different trajectories, both methods have a shared “making” process operating at their core which is the process of making a social mask, or to use Irving Goffman’s language, the process of performing social “front”. Jonah Engel Bromwich, writing for The New York Times, hit the nail on the head when he observed that “an act of cancellation” is “socially performative” (28 June 2018).