mrt, Habermas, 9/22

I often find myself struggling with some of the readings for this class, so to further my comprehension I'll first do a simple read-through of the passages and then after taking some time to reflect, I'll do a second read-through and take notes on the concepts that stuck out to me the most, or that I had trouble understanding. For today's entry, I want to focus on a quote that I really didn't think too much of when I first read it, but upon my second viewing found it really interesting and particularly relevant in our current social climate.

"We observe the anarchistic intention of blowing up the continuum of history, and we can account for it in terms of the subversive force of this new aesthetic consciousness. [...] This aesthetic consciousness continuously stages a dialectical play between secrecy and public scandal; it is addicted to a fascination with that horror that accompanies the act of profaning, and yet is always in flight from the trivial results of profanation" (Habermas, J., 1997).

I feel like this concept is really interesting when you apply it to society's current fascination with cancel culture and the appearance of 'wokeness'. The anarchistic intention would in this case be that sense of wokeness and the subversive force being the ability to call out the continuum of history, which would be the trend of those in positions of power (historically cisgender, heterosexual, white men) to abuse that power without being held accountable. In theory, this is great, I full-heartedly believe people should be held accountable for their actions. But, the problem lies in the obsession with the appearance of wokeness and the addiction to "canceling" everyone with a platform that's ever done anything wrong when more often than not they don't hold the people in their real-life to the same standards. But, this fascination lies in the fact that we, the aesthetic consciousness, are mostly safe from the effects of this phenomenon. If the layperson could be canceled at the scale public figures are for mistakes that I'm sure they themselves have either made or made excuses for, we would also always be in flight from the trivial results. Initially, I thought that this example differed from Habermas' initial ideation because the results aren't necessarily trivial, but upon further reflection I kind of feel that they are. I can list at least 10 celebrities that have been "canceled", but still have their platform and are most likely still making money from it-- so the results are clearly (at least in some cases) still insignificant.  

Habermas, J. (1997). Habermas And the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. The MIT Press.