Note on cancelled speech and the corporate control of meaning
Facebook removed a quote from a film I posted, calling it hate speech. It's a quote from a recent famous film (Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds”) that most people will recognize, and I put it in quotes.
The quote is a reference to an artwork in which the phrase itself has only the virtual status of elements work of imagination. The film is set during World War II but is not a documentary; it is a plainly fantastic construction of an alternate scenario. Characters die in the film, but no persons do, or can. The status of statements like this is allegorical, not representational. They don’t refer to any real-world situations, and only relate to them through the medium of imagination.
What is the logic of this? I think the assumption, even with a quote, is that a statement must be assumed to have a referent as well as a performative function indicated by it, and the censors can decide what that referent is and then press cancel on you. Our cancel and zero tolerance culture is based on the notion that "we" decide the meaning of what "you" say.
Of course, if this is done with algorithms, and it may as well be, than the interesting fact that cancel culture and the current “liberal” war on free speech is based on the automatic implementation of judgments that requires no thinking, is underscored, and the point further exemplified that the purpose of such censorship is not to prevent crimes but prevent thought. This is why, in institutional settings, offenders are often “taken out” by one of the group’s leaders, as soon as an offense is detected. They are taken aside and given a moral lecture or given to understand that they should answer for their bad conduct with an explanation and apology. This is done precisely so that they cannot answer the accusation publicly.
When people who think in this censorious way have their way, not only is art abolished but so is every politics, because politics seeks to change the world, not administer situations or persons in it in some effective way. Politics, like art, depends on thinking.