Discipline and cancel: production of subjectivation

Abstract

This article aims to investigate cancel culture as a dispositif that emerges in hypermodern society given that its effects are set within the logic of neoliberal governmentality. It intends, based on Foucault frameworks, to assay over cancel culture and its interpretations through the concept of discipline, pointing how constant surveillance, the economy of visibility, and the exam produce disciplined individuals who act as entrepreneurs of the self — an object to be consumed, whose worth depends on individual performative self-preservation. Thus, it is argued that the cancel culture does not operate on the act itself, but on the individual who performs it, affecting their image, their relationships, and their subjectivation. Under these conditions, concepts such as spectacularization (Sibilia) and façade (Goffman) are highlighted as relevant concepts for situating the individual's constantly evaluated performance, as well as the exam, and the persistence of certain previous practices, through historical analysis, produce subjectivations in individual out of self-censorship. It is concluded that the cancel culture is a device that refines, in hypermodernity, the disciplinary exercise of power, at the same time that it produces subjects as instruments in which and through which it operates.