CYCLICAL VISION: CANCEL CULTURE AND THE LOSS OF PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

This article offers a philosophical analysis of cancel culture as a specific regime of public obviousness emerging within digital public space and characterized by a gradual loss of perspective, depth, and the capacity to see otherwise. The central thesis is that contemporary public violence increasingly ceases to appear as a discrete event endowed with procedure, responsibility, and symbolic finality, and instead operates as a regime: continuous, decentralized, and self-reproducing through repetition, archiving, and algorithmic amplification.

Cancel culture is examined not as an isolated moral practice or a mere form of social sanction, but as a symptom of a deeper transformation of publicness itself – a shift from dialogue and argumentation toward a rhetoric of obviousness in which complexity is perceived as a threat and alternative perspectives as a defect of vision. The article introduces the concept of cyclical vision to describe a mode of perception in which repetition replaces understanding, the circle supplants the route, and obviousness takes the place of truth. Within this regime, exclusion is enacted without formal decision or explicit verdict and arises as a side effect of collective consent to “non-intervention”.

Methodologically, the study combines discursive, phenomenological, and conceptual analysis with a structural reading of mythological figures. Homer’s Cyclops (Polyphemus) is interpreted not as an emblem of archaic brutality but as a model of single-perspective vision that admits neither doubt, dialogue, nor return. Opposed to this figure is the politropic navigation embodied by Odysseus – a rhetorical logic of displacement, delay, and refusal of definitive identification (“Nobody”), which preserves meaning and subjectivity in an environment where language functions as an instrument of capture.

The article argues that cancel culture not only produces victims but progressively sacrifices the very possibility of perspective, imagination, and closure. In relinquishing finitude, it transforms violence into a background condition rather than an event. Philosophical analysis of cyclical vision thus emerges as a form of critical resistance aimed at restoring essential distinctions – between obviousness and truth, repetition and understanding, the closed circle and the open route – without which public space loses its capacity to function as a site of shared thinking.