So, 150 or so fairly prominent individuals write/sign an open letter defending “justice and open debate.” (We can call them intellectuals, or literati, or academics, or even celebrities of a sort — maybe “intellectual celebrities” — but see point #1 below on generalizations.)
In the letter, they single out Donald Trump and the “forces of illiberalism” for criticism, but aim their guns at something more general and vague — “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty” — with allusions to (citation-free) examples that only hint at specifics. Media responses have provided the missing object here, calling it “cancel culture” – a term that emerged in social media, but that has been vigorously taken up by the right as a problem of the left.
Some people are pleased by the letter, even delighted, especially on the right (note WSJ’s headline “Bonfire of the Liberals“), others are not happy at all. At least one community feels threatened and sees it as promoting an erasure of their very existence (“containing as many dog whistles toward anti-trans positions as it does”), I’m guessing especially because of one of the signatories (the one who is the most commonly cited in headlines; see point #1 below).
Here are a few observations on the letter and the responses it has elicited, accompanied by questions that are only partly rhetorical and a hypothesis that I haven’t seen explored elsewhere yet.
1) Framing, or how to generalize
Most people will see a few names they recognize and generalize from them. Fortunately for them, the media will already have done that work. (Which means: the letter is already out of the signatories’ control at that point.)
Signatories most commonly mentioned, from what I’ve seen, are, in order: 1. J. K. Rowling. 2. (tie?) Margaret Atwood and Noam Chomsky. 3. (tie) Salman Rushdie and Gloria Steinem. By singling out Rowling, the conversation gets framed as something to do with her defense of her ability to speak out about sex, gender, and trans rights (which I wrote about here). Go to point #2…
But first, a rhetorical question: what if we generalized not from Rowling and Atwood (or Steven Pinker, Mark Lilla, Bari Weiss, Ian Buruma, Laura Kipnis, or, for that matter, Francis Fukuyama and David Frum… I guess the list offers a lot of ammunition for critics), but from Mia Bay (The White Image in the Black Mind; Race and Retail), Marie Arana (American Chica; Bolivar: American Liberator), Susannah Heschel (The Aryan Jesus… now there’s a title for you), Khaled Khalifa, or (Bernie Sanders protegé) Zephyr Teachout? Are they also, like some critics suggest, both too powerful (to have anything to lose by signing a letter like this, though hopefully that’s exactly why they are signing it — because they can) and “playing the victim“? So let’s go to motives.
2) Positioning, or what we’re all doing
So, what were they trying to accomplish? There are no doubt some, like Chomsky and Rushdie, for whom signing the letter might have been a no-brainer, almost a reflex action. For Chomsky it’s probably a little like breathing, no more, no less. (He’s a true believer in the Cartesian validity of words and reasoned discourse.)
But for most it’s no doubt about positioning (which, of course, is what the responses to it have also been about, mine included). If they weren’t intended that way (which may vary depending on the signatory), they have become mostly that. They raise the question: who am I aligning with here? (Or, oops, whom have I aligned myself with here? Or here?) And for some, how do we build a herd-like safety-in-numbers, which might protect us (maybe even “whitewash” us) from the gathering hordes? This is cliquishness, but it’s also basic human sociality.
For many in this particular group, however, it’s more specific: it’s an attempt at recentering the discourse around the would-be “consensus” these writers feel is at risk of slipping away, both to the illiberal right and to the dogmatic “identity left.” Which brings me to my hypothesis.
3) The media regimes hypothesis
The letter is not really about “cancel culture,” since that’s not defined nor clearly disambiguated from other forms of “institutionalized” cancel culture — like the silencing experienced by whole classes of people over decades and even centuries.
Rather, it’s a war of position between two media regimes. One represents the “print establishment,” which is no longer the establishment. (This is why so many of the signatories are primarily writers, and why the “pundits” among them — the David Frums and David Brookses — are overrepresented.) The other represents what we might loosely call the “Twitter class” — the class of public activists who have emerged in and through Web 2.0 style social media. The latter represents a genuine democratization — an opening up of voices — which the former feel threatened by. Whether it’s a good democratization is another question, so there’s a negotiation going on here. (And the fact that many, if not most, of the letter’s signatories are also active social media users — Rowling, Matthew Yglesias, Bari Weiss, et al. all tweet — is irrelevant, since the basis of their authority is found outside of social media.)
4) So what’s at stake?
If there’s more going on here than positioning and cliquishness, it has to do with more than just free speech, debate, and “silencing.” When a university lecture is canceled due to an outcry from students, or when 8chan is shut down for harboring racist sludge, no one is being prevented from speaking. Instead, a specific platform for their speech is being taken away.
When someone is fired or incarcerated, however, they may be being prevented from speaking. It all depends on contextual variables: who the person is, what their other options are (can they go out and speak at another university, or get hired by Fox News?), and whether they are part of a historically targeted group, or a historically privileged group, or perhaps a mixture of both (e.g., Jewish-American intellectuals who use the same tools to silence pro-Palestinian voices that have been elsewhere used against them). When previously powerless groups suddenly find themselves exercising a little power, it’s not surprising that they will use it — which will shift the playing field and result in some awkwardness and realignment for the others already well positioned on that field. All of that requires more nuanced thinking than is evidenced in the Harper’s letter itself.
The question this whole episode raises for me is this: To what extent do “open letters” mean what they say, and to what extent is their meaning found in their contexts, subtexts, and countertexts — in questions like who else is signing onto this, what venue is it being presented in, what’s being stated and what’s being glossed over, and the like? Could it be that the meaning of “open letters” is changing, because they are part of a dynamic and complex media ecology that is shifting from a print-based system, with clear authority structures, to a digital one in which authority structures have not yet consolidated? If so, what are the ways that specific platforms can be used to enable and open up speech, and how can they be closed down?
There’s something about media here, and the politics of media, that is not being addressed, even as this gets whipped into the existing frames of “culture war,” “cancel culture,” and all the rest.
