[FRIAM] Me Too, Cancel Culture, and Art

[jon zingale]

Briefly, last vFriam, a couple of us got to talking about the complicated
relationship between the Me Too movement, cancel culture, and art. Too
often, and likely due to the sensitive nature of the topic, I find that
the challenging questions posed are quickly and all too thoughtlessly
dispatched. That I find Michael Jackson monstrous, contributes to the
unease I experience (at times) when hearing his music, but also to the
ambivalence I have when purchasing the Beatles' music that he owned.

It was suggested, in the meeting, that there is the possibility of
monsters without victims. Cases, where those transgressed against, were
not *damaged* or cases of *pure depiction* where there is no one to be
transgressed against. While these points are interesting on their own,
I wish here to address the question of *erasure*. Should a statue be
removed or should it stand as a monument to shameful dominance? When
does the fact of the statue serve to catalyze tools for preventing future
occurrence, as in the case of Heidegger, or the related complication of
Heisenberg's work.

For me, as a bibliophile, I often pour over the works of individuals
that would never let me (and have not let me) sit at their table, those
pompous asses that would cancel me simply for my lack of pedigree. I
intuit that this reversal of the cancellation question may provide an
in-road. Here, there is not the same paradox of I like this person (the
work)-I don't like this person (the monster). Instead, I like this person
(the work)-this person does not like me (the wastrel). Suddenly, I am
free to derive whatever value I wish from the work. This, of course, is
only the case *access* willing.

As with the statue problem, it seems important to distinguish the cause
from the symptom. Here I, and naively so, suggest power differential as
the cause and the artifacts produced by this difference as the symptom[☤].
Whenever I would pass that besieged plaza statue (surrounded by its
pathetic little fence) and its public statement about the *savages*, I
could not help but to stop and think about how embarrassing and abstracted
the culture that would erect such a thing must be. For such a wound to
heal, I suspect there must be enough balance for the discussion, the
discussion that begins with one side claiming, "We must not forget our
glorious past" and the other claiming, "Yes, you must not forget your
monstrous past". Here, I do mean begin. The past *will* be forgotten,
as ultimately it should. But here, while in memory, we have the opportunity
to heal the past and to establish a balanced discourse. The move to
erase is not equivalent to the move to forget. Erasure is higher-
level, in that it is a desire to forget what one cannot tolerate.

[☤]OTOH, the symptom-cause metaphor is perhaps not the best one. That I
advocate for addressing power by addressing the statue, suggests to me
that it isn't quite right.




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