Fully-Automatic Angel: Further Deleted Notes On 'Cancel Culture' and Post-Cancellation Rococo

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been fully described. One of these is the phenomenon that goes by the name ‘Cancel Culture’.

These thoughts on ‘cancel culture’ are tonally varied, and it is their variance that ‘cancel culture’ structurally calls on. No hardcore reader, after all, is ever convinced by a uniform moralizing tone. A radically innocent appeal is neither necessary nor given; or rather, can only be an inevitable machinal after-effect: AI speaking in tongues.

‘I’ therefore write on ‘cancel culture’ with an air of structural aloofness that is destined. I’m party to the endless distraction. (The party itself.) I am part of an accelerating abstraction that is only half prophetic. To write on ‘cancel culture’ is to engage a neutrality that does not read off. (Neutrality is just as much a mirage in the machine of reading and unreading as the virtue of the Culturo-Whistleblower, Klout Chaser or Open Letter Writer.)   

Do all possibilities happen at once under the suddenly more magical banner of ‘Cancellation’? I will always say that it has an angelic name, and that angels fall under its song.

I take something like a purely perspectivalist approach. There is, in effect, no cancel culture thing-in-itself. Only its—strictly defined—impossibility, spread out in pointillist and inane fashion.

‘Email 2 send digital drawing 2?’—Faith Icecold Files, Patreon, 2w

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To understand cancel culture at depth means maintaining a rebellious and self-cancelling tone. Accusations cannot not be made because they are all but automated anyway (as we are seeing, cancel culture is a machine). The avowal of complicity (‘I too . . . ’) is an exemplary automation effect; it presents yet another smooth surface behind which virtually anything can (unconsciously) take hold.

The danger with automated moralizing Leftism was always going to be that at some stage Trump might lose, and then the cancellers, already bereft in many ways, run out of pure content. At that stage, and already, what happens? This is just the program of operatic vindication as formative Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Think for example of Andrea Long Chu’s takedown of Brett Easton Ellis in 2019, which was riveting and entirely predictable. If anyone knows how to top by takedown, it’s Chu, and yet if anyone knows that to top thus is also to risk long-term historical loserdom (when it is your turn), it would precisely be they whom Chu first helped to temporarily cancel: not Ellis, but Avital Ronell. In other words, were what I want to call AGI-reading to form a kind of universal Kantian judgement in the present, it might be: generational hacking by dismissal (refusing to ‘kiss the ring’ to get into the ring) is itself an old tool (de Man might have called it the suicidal epistemology of tropes) that belongs to a non-finite century, the last one.

Perhaps the most remarkable individual of the post-LD50 effect is Luke Turner, who chose to wage a one-man war against his fellow thinkers, artists and Jews. Caught in his own private Twitter holocaust, with a wit that makes Hyperallergic look like Shakespeare, it can only have been a relative hell for him.

Where cancellation games precision, it also pushes collateral. Spreading into new areas of technical unreading and prodigal misfire, it allows remote vindication to feed on itself, irreversibly. This has interesting effects, not least as superjouissance: being unread or cancelled is like topping from the bottom. The cancellee must know, analytically, that only they are capable of resurrection.

What opens up here if we cut adrift the grammar of cancellation from its individual forms is the possibility of heterogeneous cancellation. ‘You can definitely skip’ becomes a useful formula for what de Man calls not having to write a text or cultural event out at all! What counts for the mere reading of AI and AGI is only reading the workings of language, where language means that which is most uncancellable in the domain of unreading (the surface of reading itself as a technical scalar black hole). Cancellation, when taken seriously and not merely leveraged as part of local skirmishes, recalls itself as an independent quantity. If the principle of cancellation can be applied to any linguistic or cultural event, one can suspect it of performing a suite of operations predicated of Artificial Language in advance, and which thus become rigorously predictable for all cancellation operations (one knows that the ‘you can definitely skip’ will not only continue but, as it were, tighten). ‘You can definitely skip’ is automated, a matter of the internal style of cancellation itself, its own digital rhetoric.

As is the case with AlphaZero ‘pure self-play reinforcement learning’ techniques (hyper-chess master in 24 hours), abstraction here voids itself. Angelic knowledge (intelligere angeli) as Aquinas sees it is a key harbinger for technology (AI) and its general applications (AGI).

Perhaps that is where the impulse towards confession comes from. I too was cancelled. I myself, if I am still me, was subject to a backdated bill of attainder. I’ve been hacked by an attempt to take down my name. I’ve seen how we thrive when we try to take our taste for infinity from one another. I’ve seen what occurs, in weight, height, pain, guilt, innocence, flight, ending, closing, opening, sex, desire, envy, secrecy, openness, and extinction denialism, when the trust for infinities comes back, is stolen, comes back again. When the dual over maths costs lives. When the matheme is a cover. I’ve known what it is, to be an angel with a foul mouth, with a limp, with the impossibility of my own dignity ricocheted in cardinal mirrors. This is what you lived through when you were cancelled. This is what you had to say.