Analysis of the Deviant Usage of Criticism in Discourse Innovations of Cancel Culture and Woke Culture

Abstract

The research analyzed the deviant usage of critique in discourse innovations in the form of cancel culture and woke culture. These innovations represent modern ways of criticism, which rapid spread is due to network communication. The basis for classifying these types of criticism as deviant usage is the destruction of the locus of critical rationality. The problem is that the heuristic ideal of critique may be changed significantly due to the legitimation of non-standard forms of criticism. The authors identified several clusters of the normative ideal of critical activity in the form of negative assessment, logic, social constructivism, in which the category of rationality is considered. This category allows us to analyze the discourse practice of critique regarding the correspondence theory of truth using linguo-argumentative method of analysis. While using these strategies the authors came to the following conclusions. The verbalization of cancel culture represents a reactive action of critique that implements polemical negation. Criticism in woke culture reveals signs of descriptive negation. The deviant usage of critique as reasoning in the innovations under discussion is represented by errors in argumentation, factoid nature of discourse, and a mixture of stylistic modes belonging to discourses of varying degrees of institutionalization, which constitute aberrations of the rational standard of criticism.