Anthology on Cancel Culture: The Arguments of Others

Hanser Verlag collects articles on the subject of cancellation. The current anthology tries honestly to leave the Kulturkampf.

A literary figure worthy of preservation or racist stereotypes – there are cancellation debates about Jim Button Photo: Bernd Feil/imago

It is ironic that canceling regularly has the opposite effect. The public attempt to prevent a book, a film or the appearance of a person reliably leads to an increase in prominence, to more contributions to debates, events and books.

With its anthology “Canceln – A Necessary Controversy”, Hanser Verlag now removes the stimulus term from close combat. The volume clearly wants to help to calm the heated spirits, or at least credits the supporters of one camp with the task of acknowledging the arguments of the other side over several pages. Get started Time-Editor Ijoma Mangold by clarifying the fronts.

Mangold is known as a good-humoured intellectual who tends towards conservatism because of his love of contradiction in the left-liberal environment of the feuilleton. He was particularly bothered by the unequal conditions in the conflict. For a long time, leftists committed to identity politics claimed that there was no such thing as a cancel culture, and that the statements so denigrated were nothing more than civil society commitment.

This is now over, since the actors in this culture war have also been named. If unpleasant people are shouted down as rights, as TERFs or as old white men, the canceling people now also have to live with being seen as “Woke”. With the statement of this “equality of arms”, Mangold also bids farewell to the debate and even concedes: “Perhaps in the end the representatives of identity politics are right with their positions and views, who can know, we will be able to do that in twenty years in retrospect see clearer.”

The political public sphere would then be functional again, since a balance between antagonistic forces would now be established. However, this analysis presupposes that the intensification of dealings with each other, especially in social networks, does not cause any major damage, i.e. that in the end all those involved bow to Habermas’ “informal compulsion of the better argument”.

Like fighting barbarians

The philosopher Konrad Paul Liessmann would probably disagree here, he sees culture as a whole in danger, namely through ignorance. His defense based on racist passages by incriminated thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Ernst Moritz Arndt or Hannah Arendt culminates in the counter-accusation that the critics are only interested in intoxicating themselves with their own violence over the discourse.

“Cancel Culture all too often proves to be resentment disguised as morality, complacent and lazy to think, but aware of power.” To put it bluntly, Liessmann is shooting at a horde of barbarians who are unable to classify certain sentences in relation to a complete work.

But is there really laziness behind it? It is more likely that Liessmann got caught up in a misunderstanding, while the critics used their indignation quite consciously and strategically. If students refuse to read Kant because they have discovered screenshots of racist passages from his work on Twitter, then they do not see the Königsberger as a philosopher and pioneer of modernism, but as a very concrete political figure.

And of course this figure cannot be reconciled in a fair way with the Kant of Konrad Paul Liessmann. To overstate this incongruity is beside the point. It is precisely due to a politicization that does not stop at formerly well-protected institutions such as academic philosophy.

The silverware of thinking

From an intellectual point of view, no less disappointing than intentionally shortened readings is the aggressive vehemence of highly educated Cancel critics like Liessmann, provided they only insinuate the most obvious and worst, that is, personal motives. Even if these are true in many cases, there is still something more to be discovered than egocentric querulousness.

If young identity politicians use dishonest means on the scene, it may be because they know very well that their mothers and fathers, with their brilliantly polished silverware of thought (universalism, constructivism, postmodern theory), were unable to counteract racism, colonialism, or sexism.

However, whether the furor is actually effective is another matter entirely. John Schneider, too Time-Editor, brings his field research into the debate in beer tents. There he noticed that the scandalization of the misogynist party hit “Layla” had changed the behavior of the assembled festival community. Before that, the song had been sung ironically, “with a keen awareness of the fact that you’re pulling the bottom drawer here, also to be able to observe yourself as a ridiculously contorted figure”.

After that, “Layla” degenerated into a freedom anthem. “How loud it got in the tents, each of the countless times that the supposedly forbidden song was played, there was something uncanny about it, because it was agitated.” Here you can see how easily the call for decency turns into the bawled opposite.

Consequences of aggressive rhetoric

The speech is often more decisive than the arguments. It is not just talk that many people who have seen themselves as liberal or even left-wing all their lives quickly feel patronized and misunderstood if they fail to meet the standards of a contemporary identity politics that is young in contemporary history. Instead of engaging in dialogue, activists risk alienating these milieus with their aggressive rhetoric.

Some of the contributions in the volume attempt to interest both camps in one another again. With undeniable interest in Michael Ende, Asal Dardan explains why his stories about Jim Button no longer convey contemporary messages to children today. Mithu Sanyal, on the other hand, who is indispensable in such questions because of her humorous prudence, defends her favorite author Enid Blyton despite all the political anachronisms in her work.

And the science journalist Anna-Lena Scholz even gives tips on how to continue dealing with cancel culture. She recapitulates the scandal surrounding Dieter Nuhr and the German Research Foundation (DFG). This had hired the comedian as the protagonist of a marketing campaign, but deleted his statement immediately after a shitstorm.

Scheme of the balance of power

Scholz criticizes the hasty reaction of the DFG and its unprofessional communication. In this case, however, she also recognizes great social appreciation for science and a willingness to exchange information about its conditions and goals. Above all, however, she emphasizes that canceling is only an option for hard-pressed publishers, organizers or institutions. “Wherever cancel culture is diagnosed, a fear of this possibility is articulated.”

The scheme of an equilibrium of forces between two camps can be supplemented with this, because it always takes three to cancel. Institutions are not simply the playing field on which leftists and conservatives compete for sovereignty of interpretation. They can react actively and according to their own standards.

Cancel culture could even be an opportunity for them to clearly define their own values ​​and maxims, so that they can aggressively represent them in public if the worst comes to the worst. With a little optimism, it would be conceivable that in the near future canceling will be a common instrument of political debate that focuses attention in a targeted manner, but without one party needing to lose its nerve.