The stupidity of cancel culture is the postmodern version of the Inquisition, dyed red.

“World, vast world/ If my name were Raimundo/ It would be a rhyme, not a solution.” There was a stone in the middle of the road, but it wasn't Drummond's, awkward in life. I don't even want to imagine Drummond if, in addition to all the patrols he lived with in life, he had lived in the era of cancellation and virtue signaling. Any first-year sociology student who has read the blurb of five books in their life becomes an art critic if they have a YouTube channel. They quickly gather an army of followers who understand as much about art as I understand about the workings of quantum theory.

The function of monitoring and punishing, previously relegated to the Catholic Church, was transferred to postmodern sectors of the left, who, under the influence of a puritanical Anglo-Saxon culture, decided to cleanse the art world. Any resemblance to the Nazi condemnation of modern artists as "degenerate art" is not mere coincidence. The left makes a fuss when fascists invade theaters trying to stone postmodern artists during their performances, but it does exactly the same thing, not only with any current artist, but also with the memory of popular culture that does not fit into the purism of its doctrines.

There are clear framing problems within cancel culture. Obviously, it's neither acceptable nor tolerable to make racist, sexist, misogynistic, ethnocentric humor, or to use art as an excuse to preach intolerance. But aesthetics is not a deterministic political discourse, devoid of allegory and metaphor, that divides people and artists into two categories: those who follow the ignorant new playbook of good-guy behavior and have entered its postmodern Anglo-Saxon puritanism; on the other hand, everyone who doesn't follow this playbook is a Bolsonaro supporter, an admirer of the reigning Nazi. Which is obviously a sectarian lie, very similar to the eschatological division of neo-rapturous sects between "us" and "them." Whoever disagrees with us is a sinner and must be punished (canceled).

The first idiotic mistake of this view is confusing reality with allegory of reality, with representation of reality. Art is allegory, mythology, symbolism, and semiotics. Describing a murder, for example, is not making an apology for a murderer. From a crude aesthetic perspective, Edgar Allan Poe would be a serial killer who did not fulfill his most secret desires, and it would be impossible to read and understand reactionary writers, but profoundly insightful into the human soul, such as Lautréamont and Sade. By the same line of reasoning, we would have to burn, in the same holy red bonfire, Oscar Wilde (reactionary anti-communist), Balzac (anti-socialist monarchist), Nelson Rodrigues (sexist defender of the dictatorship), Lispector (an elitist oblivious to social suffering, according to some), and the list would be endless. In truth, very little would remain in libraries, considering works by Milton, Dante (who belonged to the papal party in Italy), Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Unamuno, Joyce, Proust, etc., etc., etc. 

The first mistake, even more uncritically and terrifyingly stupidly, links the second mistake of the "woke"/cancel culture analysis of art: narrow biographical analysis. "Up close, nobody is normal," as Caetano Veloso would say. To confuse the artist's biography with their work is absurd. We would be forbidden from studying Heidegger and understanding phenomenology (he was a passionate and fervent Nazi who gave speeches and wrote in praise of Adolf Hitler) and we would have to close off Nietzsche's philosophy without opening it (without which we could not understand either modernity or postmodernity). A warning to the "woke" crowd: there are passages of Nietzsche's attacks on anarchists, socialists, animal rights activists, vegans, and feminists. Following the line of child biography, we would be stuck on isolated phrases from the work of the brilliant philosopher and would fail to read "On the Genealogy of Morality" and "Beyond Good and Evil," and we would be forever forbidden from understanding all subsequent philosophy that is based on Nietzsche's defense against the attack of all "isms" and the unveiling of the evil that lies in forced Christian goodness.

As Dante said, Rhetoric is the shallowest river in hell, which one can cross without getting one's ankles wet.

For those who criticize, it's possible to evaluate a work of art without understanding it, without reading it meticulously, and even without understanding all the previous and subsequent interpretations within it. Those who criticize are masters of book blurbs and pre-analysis, and they boast of knowing absolutely everything without needing to carefully study anything at all.

The third mistake (or perhaps a forced analysis by those who engage in "woke" or "shut-down" rhetoric) is that they randomly weigh the hypertext in the direction they want. For example, when they like funk music, they gloss over all the sexist, misogynistic, and macho lyrics, claiming an anti-elitist defense of funk (which they claim is music from the favela, suffering from all the prejudice in the world and, therefore, free to say whatever it wants). However, they emphasize any and all contrary hypertext in their analysis of samba from the 50s and 60s, removing it from its social context and pretending that samba didn't suffer (and much more strongly than funk, since samba musicians were arrested simply for participating in a samba circle) from social prejudice. Those who engage in "woke" rhetoric lack parameters; they use their magnifying glass in whatever direction they want and perform a type of pre-analysis that is extremely intellectually dishonest. They force analysis by disregarding anything that contradicts their conclusions, and highlighting negative aspects of a work, literary school, or musical movement that they want to include in the new index prohibitorum of this red inquisition. If that doesn't work, they simply label or insult those who disagree with them (an old tactic of the inverted fallacy of extreme authority, reducing the opponent to a reactionary defender of the worst in humanity) to win the debate without having to debate and clarify their own lack of knowledge or familiarity with the aesthetics of the work of art.

It's worth remembering that communists and socialists were never very good at trying to confine art within some kind of limit. They were better at creating movements. Soviet workerism and realism were crude schools of art that bequeathed us absolutely no distinguished writers. All the major socialist and communist offices were those that rejected the crude policing of this reduction of literature to a pamphlet of a reified pseudo-communist religion. Soviet workerism and realism already persecuted and outlawed surrealism (a communist aesthetic movement) and were responsible for the nightmarish policing in the lives of exceptional writers like Cortázar and Neruda.

The real "cancel culture" types don't even like art very much. They prefer Big Brother Brazil. In fact, they defend tooth and nail that Big Brother Brazil is a "popular" artistic expression. They confuse popular culture, which has a long history of being rooted in the struggles and demonstrations of the people, with the mass-produced, formulaic recipe stamped by the media. They've never bothered to read Adorno, Guy Debord, or Walter Benjamin, and they defend the dictatorship of the single image and the genocidal cultural blender (of the diversity of popular manifestations) of the society of the spectacle as "true popular culture." Although they have never delved into the subject of popular culture, the society of the spectacle, and the technical reproducibility of the work of art in and by capitalism, and the appropriation and sterilization of popular forms by the culture industry, they believe that simply calling their opponent "elitist" and "alienated" is enough to become popular and trendy. Talking about astrology and Big Brother Brazil makes them pop and trendy. A left wing that speaks of cultural resistance and denounces that, deep down, they defend the aesthetics of the enemy, must also be ridiculed and canceled.

For the BBB-cancel culture left, defending the aesthetics of the class enemy through the culture industry and society is considered popular. It's no coincidence that we're only chasing our own tails, no longer influencing the culture of society. We've been reduced to foolish worshippers of the pasteurized products of the dictatorship of a single image. These "cancel culture" activists are, at heart, sophisticated lovers of imperialist globalization and have no resistance whatsoever against it.

They like to cancel art and have little or no reading of aesthetic poetry. But they freely and courageously opine on both things. They may understand nothing about Bossa Nova, but in 2 minutes they heterochronically condemn the movement as music of the South Zone elite and sexist old fools. In fact, all the analysis of the "cancel culture" types boils down to a priori labels and condemnations, and polyphonic movements, which will remain for posterity, when, while today's "cancel culture" types will be ridiculed as the workers of the 40s and 50s are.

The fourth error is heterochronism. Those who criticize and "cancel" are the moral guardians of humanity, transcending time and space. They received a divine mission from the God of Polynesia, and now they reclassify all culture under the morality and vision of the 21st century. Reading the Iliad and the Odyssey with today's eyes is to reduce an immemorial treasure to a collection of murders and a great genocide. Without understanding anything about metaphors and symbolism, they reduce the entire work of art to a political pamphlet that has to ask permission from the present day to be validated or forgotten. 

I imagine an audience of cancel culture/virtue signalers watching Pasolini's Salò. Will these imbeciles reduce the work to an apology for murder and rape?

Finally, cancelers and those who engage in performative activism make the same mistake as communist "workerism," Soviet "realism," the "year zero" of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or even the French Revolution. They are ahistorical. They think the world began today and that their values ​​are timeless. They are merely a product of a historical culture, just as all those they condemn in the past with such emphasis will continue to be giants; they, the cancelers, however, will only be remembered as a small church that tried to become famous by engaging in performative activism on the internet.