CANCEL CULTURE IN THE POLITICAL SPHERE: MODES OF AGENCY IN THE DIGITAL CIRCULATION OF DISCOURSE

Abstract

Discussing the engendering of digital materiality (Gallo, 2019) in the conditions of discourse production in contemporaneity is an unavoidable task when seeking to understand the place of digital media in meaning-making processes and the determinations this materiality imposes on how we see and interpret the present. Under these enunciative conditions, self-discourse—through stories, livestreams, or other forms of digital textualization—has become an act of influence that activates modes of engagement and agency among subjects who inscribe themselves in the audience of media personalities. Among the discursive practices emerging from this conjuncture of the digitalization of affects, the practice of cancellation stands out to me as a symptom and effect that points to the desire (of the canceling subject) to interdict a given position (of the canceled subject) within discourse.Grounded in Materialist Discourse Analysis, this paper revisits Michel Pêcheux’s discussions on modalities of subjectivation (Pêcheux, 2014) to support the interpretation that cancellation is established in the tension between the subject-enunciator’s taking of a position (in relation to a discursive formation) and what their audience regulates as sayable or unsayable. I therefore orient my analysis through argumentation, understood as a mode of “sustaining meanings within signifying processes, ideologically structured within one discursive formation (and not another)” (Orlandi, 2023, p. 52). Methodologically, I follow the movement of describing and interpreting (Pêcheux, 2015) to analyze excerpts from an Instagram livestream by Jojo Toddynho, broadcast in September 2024, guided analytically by the following questions: (I) What enunciative positions (Zoppi-Fontana, 1999, 2017) are mobilized in Jojo Toddynho’s discourse? (II) Which positions are ideologically sustained in the textualization of the livestream? (III) How can we perceive the emergence of the cancellation effect on the enunciated position in Jojo Toddynho’s discourse during the livestream? On the horizon, then, emerges a possibility of reflecting on the movements of cancellation inscribed in “Mediocracy,” a term used by Byung-Chul Han (2022, p. 29) to explain that “entertainment is the supreme commandment, to which politics also submits.” In this way, such dynamics produce effects in the political sphere, affecting the trajectories of subjects and meanings and contributing to transformations in the democratic fabric, increasingly shaped by political-digital performativity.