Browsing by Subject "“cancel culture”"

Examples of so-called “cancel culture” are allegedly numerous, but very often the withdrawal of support, the cancelling, has in fact not taken place. In the summer of 2022, public debate in Germany was temporarily dominated by discussions about precisely this, the putative cancelling of two cultural artefacts, a children’s book and a pop song. Albeit being far more complex cases that, strictly speaking, do not classify as incidents of “cancel-culture”, the discursive existence of the term reveals far-reaching and politically relevant insights about the construction of antagonistic identities on the digital platform Twitter (now X). This thesis seeks to assess dynamics of affective polarisation and antagonistic identity-construction in discussions about the aforementioned cases using the discourse theory by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe combined with Jacque Lacan’s reading of Freudian psychoanalysis. For this aim, 8 tweets, 4 for each case, were selected whose discussion threads in the form of replies commented in response to the initial tweets constitute the object of study. These replies amount to a total of 1631 examined tweets. Key concepts, such as floating signifiers, chains of equivalences and fantasmatic constructs, thereby guide the analysis of the research material. The findings provided by this thesis demonstrate how antagonistic identities, collective as well as individual, are constructed in debates on two controversial, cultural topics. The formation of polarised blocks of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ happens primarily on an affective level presenting opinions in their relation to ‘the other’. As exemplified in the chains of equivalences articulated in this study, the analysed phenomenon of polarisation is in fact not confined to the field of culture. Instead, it refers to a polarisation of social realities incorporating a wide range of different kinds of topics for which “cancel-culture” is not irrelevant, yet merely the impetus for debate. This thesis therefore points towards a lack in academic literature by studying affective polarisation of differently lived or experienced realities as opposed to common classifications of polarising dynamics. The affective component of constructing antagonistic groups of Twitter users is thereby centred. This study furthermore corroborates the applicability and usefulness of Laclaudian discourse analysis and Lacanian psychoanalysis for research within the field of social sciences. It encourages to conceive polarisation and social antagonism as innate to the democratic system and, thus, acknowledges the value of radical pluralist democracy as theorised by Mouffe.