Cancel Culture in the Dicionário Informal: discourses, subjects and ideological affiliations

Abstract

In this approach, we understand that the discourses of cancel culture are symptomatic of the upheaval that the digital order has brought to the processes of subjectivation, emerging in a socio-historically situated time and space affected by contemporary capitalism, which operates through the mediatization of life on social networks. In this direction, we seek to make explicit the functioning of ideological affiliations—that is, the effect of alignment of meanings within a given chain of signification—a relation that guides the meanings of cancel culture in digital circulation, specifically on the website Dicionário Informal. To this end, we adopt as our theoretical-methodological horizon the framework of Materialist Discourse Analysis, which allows us to produce interpretive gestures about the term cancel culture within production conditions where power relations are organized through circulation. Methodologically, we follow these steps: (1) description and interpretation of the registration process on the Dicionário Informal website, aiming to make explicit the movement from the position of user to that of subject-lexicographer; (2) mobilization of the gesture of selecting and analyzing the definition produced by the user-subject @Antonio Aquino, exposing the fragility of authorship; and (3) comprehension of the entanglement effects from which senses emerge, reaching the ideological dimension. From this trajectory, we point out that the discursivization of cancel culture analyzed here reveals the fractures of a divided society marked by intolerance, reaffirming the need to produce intelligibility regarding current discursive conditions—through gestures that take responsibility for the consequences of the notions of language and subject implicated in a materialist discourse analysis.