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Timothy Burke's avatar

This is the line that really matters here.

"Cancel culture" isn't the issue. The issue is first that the origin story of this kind of attention to language is an ungrounded runaway train version of poststructuralist/crit theory focus on language's constitutive power. The old idea of the liberal subject who has thoughts that are then expressed though language where the idea preceded speaking has been pushed out by both cognitive science and by critical theory (in different ways), and the replacement proposition on the critical theory side was (loosely speaking) that language IS thought, and thus that language CONSTITUTES consciousness, subjectivity, society. When that view seeped into activism and became instrumentalized, it led to the commandment, "Seek ye first the semantic kingdom" as the road to political transformation--that if you could get people to speak differently you'd change how they thought and if you changed how they thought you'd change the social structures that their thought was maintaining.

That was a dramatic overestimation of what change in language can accomplish. But it also hid what you (and Packer) are pointing to here, which is that this move amounted to--intentionally or otherwise--a bid for social power by people who believed they were able to see the causality of semantics from somewhere up and above the lived experience of speaking and writing, that they could identify accurately the work that particular words, phrases, discourses were performing in the maintenance of inequality, hierarchy and discrimination and they could identify accurately the replacement words and phrases that would remove that maintenance. That isn't just empirically incorrect; it also essentially enthrones a kind of master-class of hidden editors and their messengers who assert that they need to be given authority over communication and representation because they're the only ones with the proper education and training to identify bad communications and to create good ones.

As a political move, that's just a disaster: it's created enormous resentment even among people who are strongly inclined to support social transformation. It not only gets us caught up in essentially trivial struggles within organizations and between them, but it often ends up in the painful farce of a highly educated progressive telling the kind of person that he/she putatively wants to liberate that they're using the wrong word--e.g., someone who absolutely embodies the meaning of the idea of intersectionality in their experience and situation being scolded that they should be using the word "intersectionality".

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Kyra Lise's avatar

The intricate business of moving the culture forward towards new power sharing arrangements involves language cultivation. And perhaps cultivating intestinal fortitude to withstand all the pettiness and raw bullshit that’s part and parcel with the larger progressive changes we seek. These moves are ANNOYING sometimes unintentionally fully (Herstory instead of History comes to mind but seldom is the linguistic tango truly sinister. (Seldom not never. For instance I find the use of the word “Democrat” in the mouths of Revivalist QAnonists lately quite sinister - “Democrat” in this context having rather the opposite meaning to what is offered in Merriam Webster).

I work in local government and have for decades. I’ve gone to more equity training and inclusion seminars and trainings in those years that the course work may now exceed my college curriculum. Some of it is laughable and there is the tendency towards reductionism and gadget level Utopianism (“if you can just get the pronouns right we will all live in harmony!”). Some of it may be misguided some of it laughable but dangerous? I’m still intellectually free to go about my business at work. When I say “circle the wagons” no one is writing me up for HR. Where does that happen ? In organiZations that are already losing some element of there “base” - whether it’s that the charismatic founder left with no provision for a decent successor to organizations which got complacent with their missions or largely accomplished them and wanted to stay in business. That’s when we get stuck in the petty disputes and disagreements around specific forms of language.

In healthier contexts GRACE is REQUIRED for lasting social change. I’m tired of the critique that doesn’t acknowledge the real challenges of social change and gets stuck in these debates over. quotidian mannerisms

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