Terms of Surrender for the Cancelers

Yes, let's de-escalate the culture wars. On certain conditions.

A lot of amusing concern has been expressed lately about shrinking freedom of speech, now that the crowd that used to say “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences” is experiencing consequences. The titles of the articles Harvard’s Double Standard on Free Speech and Double Standards at Princeton speak for themselves. Even the New York Times had to admit that the movement of seven- and eight-figure donors to Penn to send the university checks for one dollar is taking place as “Academic freedom debates had been roiling Penn’s campus.” Indeed they had—Penn has been trying to get rid of Professor Amy Wax for years.¹

Nina Power summed it up at Compact, “The fear of cancellation on the part of pro-Palestinian figures comes after many years of the same kind of behavior from those now calling for a cessation of hostilities.” Which reminds me of another situation in which the unambiguous aggressor in a recent conflict is demanding a ceasefire, namely the one instigated by the genocidal terrorist organization Hamas on October 7.

A ceasefire in Gaza would amount to a betrayal of Hamas’s Israeli hostages by their own government, and Netanyahu is correct to reject one. The recently discussed open letter at Artforum proves the folly of entertaining the political concerns of the mainstream art world. One can read the letter’s admonition, “Silence at this urgent time of crisis and escalating genocide is not a politically neutral position,” and pity the lack of self-awareness—the museums had spent three conspicuously silent weeks avoiding any statement about the original atrocities of October 7, disappointing many Jews who were hoping for a crumb of the social justice pie. But it’s one thing for Nicole Eisenman to inveigh “Not in my name!” indulgently at the New York Times, and another to get the hostages freed, a challenge that demands far more serious people. The best extant hope for the future of both the Israelis and the Gazans is the military destruction of Hamas, carried out swiftly and honorably. You’d have to be a monster not to lament the Palestinian casualties of that effort. But even if you didn’t you’d still be more civilized than 34 Harvard student groups who blamed Israeli infants for their own dismemberment. The ethical bar isn’t just low, it’s on the floor.

Likewise, the cancelers have not earned a ceasefire, and granting them one will leave wrongs unrighted and invite further hostilities. We’re talking about a cultural breakdown, not taking ten-month-old babies hostage, so I don’t want to belabor the analogy. But a similar psychology of entitlement was at work when Hannah Black complained to The Intercept about “dogmatic anti-Palestinians” who “are willing to destroy careers, destroy the value of artworks, to maintain their unofficial ban on free speech about Palestine.” This was the same Hannah Black who called for the curators of the 2017 Whitney Biennial to literally destroy Dana Schutz’s Emmett Till painting.

There are both hawkish and dovish responses proposed regarding the cancelers now seeking the kind of fair regard that they’ve been denying to the rest of us for several years. The hawks want to clobber the cancelers with their own weapons. See, for instance, Wilfred Riley:

In the wake of the pro-Hamas statements emanating not merely from Harvard but also quite a few other universities following the atrocities of October 7, many donors closed their wallets for good or emphatically threatened to — and this makes hard sense as a form of punishment. At least a dozen major firms are publicly refusing to hire students from any of the Harvard 34, and — whether you approve of this development or not — we seem to be moving toward a sort of “mutually assured destruction” re: cancel culture, which should eventually result in true free speech for all or a return to some damned manners.

The doves, such as Nina Power, want to use this moment of clarity to invite the cancelers back into civilization.

Are those artists who are now losing money and representation for failing to condemn Hamas able to understand that the free speech they desire is the same free speech desired by all the others they previously canceled? It would be easy—and somewhat gratifying—to point out their hypocrisy. But there is a real opportunity here to reject cynicism and careerism and, instead, to insist that while we may disagree, we don’t have to destroy each other. Institutions and individuals don’t have to take a political stand (but nor should they be punished for doing so).

Each approach has something to recommend it, and attendant downsides. Current events have revealed that at least some of the postliberal progressives have been caught up in social contagion. As Julia Friedman reported, half of the signatories of the Artforum letter, including several prominent ones, withdrew their support once the backlash hit, with Katharina Grosse apologizing to the public via Artnet that she had “made a terrible mistake.” Them we might think of as the Mistake Theory crowd. Going hawk on these people is overkill and only promises to restore productive discourse after a long time in the wasteland. In this case the dovish approach feels more apt.

But it’s likewise clear that there’s a Conflict Theory crowd. This includes LionLez, the lesbian club at Columbia University, who announced in response to the October 7 massacre that “Zionists aren’t invited” to their forthcoming film screening, and that “white Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people.” (Thanks to a clever soul on social media, the club will be forever known as Lezbollah.) We need the hawkish approach to deal with this kind of sociopathy. Hannah Black’s commitment to free expression obviously extends to her own interests and not a femtometer further.² Grosse is a contrite dupe. Black is a cynical parasite. If we reply to Black with the magnanimity that Grosse deserves, Black is going to find more victims at the next opportunity.

And then we have the case of the contrite parasite. Jumana Manna, artist and past Documenta curator, took to Instagram to repost a picture of Tribe of Nova dance festival attendees fleeing for their lives, with the caption “Ain’t no fun raving in the vicinity of the world's biggest prison.”³ Unfortunately for Manna, this was picked up at Die Welt under the headline Der Israelhass ist ein strukturelles Problem (“Israel-hatred is a structural problem”). She subsequently lamented to Hyperallergic that “At the time I shared my stories on Instagram, it had not become apparent that hundreds had been deliberately shot and kidnapped,” which is impossible to believe. She also noted that “International institutions that have worked with me in the past or present are being harassed and pressured. This has resulted in the cancellation of public engagements and exhibitions in Germany, where I live, and elsewhere.”

She then repeated the usual slanders about Israel being guilty of apartheid and genocide before reminding us that “Solidarity is born out of the courage to demand and seek justice across different perspectives and interconnected struggles.” In isolation this sounds noble but in fact she was only referring to her own perspectives and struggles. Hyperallergic had the gall to run this petulant non-apology under the title The Embargo on Empathy, as if Hyperallergic has been a longtime champion of empathy.

I call Black, Manna, and Hyperallergic parasites because they are parasitizing the liberal culture of tolerance. Liberal culture recognizes this and has grown tired of it. Considering that there was an international campaign not long ago to humiliate a high-schooler for wearing a cheongsam to her prom, some museums disdaining to work with Manna for reveling in images of terrorized Jews seems proportionate. Die Welt asked, “Should curators who share the Palestinians’ jubilation over the 700 deaths be given professorships, like Reza Afisina and Iswanto Hartono at the art school in Kassel?” It answered itself: “Nein. Nein, auf keinen Fall.” No, no, absolutely not.⁴

The law is on the side of the hawks. Lezbollah has a First Amendment right to make intemperate remarks about “white Jewish people,” if not actually prevent them from attending their showing of Rafiki. The rest of us are free to discover who belongs to the group and publish their identities so that future employers can keep their workplaces free of these Sapphic Stalinists. But at best, that is the cultural situation for which we have to settle because the cancelers scorched the terrain. The doves might steer us toward the culture we want, in which we can use discussion to discover truth and enjoy the freedom to make interesting art.

How to thread this needle? I propose a razor: If you abominate the liberal order, you forfeit the protections of the liberal order. Freedom of speech is core to the liberal order because it allows us to resolve differences through dialogue instead of violence. The liberal order assumes tolerance, individual rights, and equality, which are related—equality is an attestation that for all our gifts, we are limited individual minds, and therefore we owe each other a measure of humility as we judge one another’s claims.

How does one abominate the liberal order? First, by calling for genocide, such as the “from the river to the sea” collocation, which has been recognized as a demand to eliminate Jews from the Holy Land since the 1940s.⁵ Second, by answering speech with physical threat, vandalism, or related mayhem that fails the liberal requirement to answer speech with speech. Third, expressly, as when Manna denigrated “liberal democracy’s colonial foundation.” Cases failing the razor get the hawk treatment.

Should the case survive the razor, an additional consideration applies: extant arrangements should be given a chance to survive. Nina Power related a story:

Speaking on background, one artist who signed the original [Artforum] letter told me that her work is being returned by a New York gallery that she has worked with for several years. Other artists are suffering similar consequences, she noted, with collectors putting pressure on gallerists, who are, in turn, blacklisting creators.

I don’t approve. Said gallery connected with the artist over her work. A conversation with the artist was warranted prior to the gallery returning it. Did the artist understand in retrospect how profoundly disdainful the letter was to Jews worldwide? Was she willing to recant or qualify the associated statements? If so, the dove treatment is perhaps warranted.

Future, hypothetical arrangements deserve no such protections. The signatories of the Harvard letter that proclaimed, not a full day after the butchery of October 7 and prior to Israeli retaliation, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” should not be expelled from Harvard before an attempt at dialogue. Their enrollment is an extant arrangement. But their identities should absolutely be discovered and publicized. Not their digital or physical addresses, that would be doxxing. But their names should be widely known so that peaceful resolution can be attempted and peaceful disassociation can be chosen if it fails.⁶ As Alan Dershowitz trenchantly put it,

Hypothetically, if a club were formed at any of these universities that advocated rape or the lynching of African Americans, the newspapers would most assuredly publish the names of everyone associated with such a despicable group. Why is this different? Rape has become a weapon of war for Hamas, along with lynching, mutilation, mass murder and kidnapping. Expressing support for these acts, while constitutionally protected, is wrong. The answer to wrong speech isn't censorship; it is right speech, and transparency.⁷

Callen Zimmerman, described as a singular-they who “explores intricacies of material culture and queer experience, as fashion freak, educator and maker” and “are always working on the intersections of radical pedagogy and artistic practices,” and who was discovered ripping down posters of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas, has earned the hawk treatment.⁸ Run her out of her teaching position at the Stony Brook University’s Center for Inclusive Education. She and her kind are the reason that a lot of us hear “inclusive” and think “fascist.”

There’s a third consideration: One may, without qualms, separate from them who support the profoundly irrational and usually racist Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, such as Hyperallergic editor Hrag Vartanian. It would be unsurprising to learn that the portion of Artforum letter signatories who endorse BDS is a subset bordering on an equivalency. If I have established to your satisfaction that Hyperallergic is running the most anti-Semitic program that it can get away with in the New York City art world, namely a barrage of tendentiously anti-Israel pseudo-journalism, a veritable orchestra of Jew-hating dog whistles, and a cover project of superficially philo-Semitic art stories by guest contributors who should know better, then unsubscribe and tell them why. It’s not cancellation, it’s divestment.

Who does that leave? “Sadly, there can be no respite from this process because once the anthropological machine got the taste for cancellation, it will forever demand new bodies,” mused Pierre d’Alancaisez. “Even now, someone must be forensically comparing the signatory lists of the various open letters, tracking discrepancies into ammunition for the next round of cancellations.” But the Artforum letter, while dangerously foolish, survives the aforementioned razor. They who signed it merit dovishness. They who withdrew their signatures merit it still more. Mutually assured cultural destruction is not our only option. Yet.

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1. Reports about Wax’s difficulties at Penn often mention that she has uttered racist remarks but almost never mention that she’s Jewish.

2. The Intercept should have done their homework regarding Black and cut her from the article—presenting her as a spokeswoman for free speech made the authors look silly.

3. One of the problems of describing Gaza as the “world’s largest open-air prison,” as we’ve been hearing lately, is that one of the walls of this vaunted prison is the Egyptian border. Why doesn’t Egypt open the border and free all these supposed prisoners? Good question.

Another problem is that even if you accept the characterization, the Xinjiang internment camps may in fact be larger. China may have as many Muslim prisoners as Israel has Muslim citizens. Have you heard of any progressives mounting anti-China demonstrations lately?

4. Auf keinen Fall, literally “in no case.” It sounds way more adamant in German.

5. They who invoke this collocation without being able to name the river and the sea should be generously dusted with fish food and thrown into a vat of piranhas.

6. “I asked whether they understood why so many people had been shocked and hurt by the letter’s failure to express any sympathy for the Israeli men, women, and children who had been murdered barely a day before its release. But they stubbornly resisted this line of thinking.”—Eren Orbey

7. Hat tip

Jack Miamensis

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8. “Explores intricacies,” but “are always working.” Honestly what offends me the most about this is the grammatical inconsistency, excepting the bit that singular-they appear to be pro-terrorism.