FROM THE POLITICS OF REGRET TO CANCEL CULTURE: THE TRANSFORMATION OF HISTORICAL OBLIVION IN THE CONTEXT OF THE MEDIATIZATION OF THE PAST

The article analyzes cancel culture as a form of historical oblivion. Existing classifications of historical oblivion formulate criteria in different ways to distinguish different types of oblivion. Paul Connerton's classification is based on a variety of functions of historical oblivion - from the repressive action of the state to the natural obsolescence of material or intangible elements of tradition. Aleida Assmann's classification is based on the difference in the positions of the offender and the victim, which allows us to formulate four possible options for historical oblivion: dialogical oblivion, oblivion on the part of victims, oblivion on the part of criminals, and dialogical memory. All of these forms involve articulating one's own position and waiting for a reaction from another community. The formation of cancel culture in modern society leads to the emergence of a new form of historical oblivion, in which the exclusion of memories from public space is considered as compensation for the inconsistency of certain memorials with the modern structure of social and symbolic space. The main factor in the emergence of this phenomenon is the transformation of collective identities, which generates a traumatic perception of the past and the need to develop new rules for the interaction of communities. Cancel culture relies on moral justification for forgetting and involves the use of media communications to publicly represent the position of one community in relation to others, allowing it to be seen as a specific form of social ostracism. The phenomenon of cancel culture can be analyzed in several theoretical aspects. In a moral and ethical sense, the key issue is the use of categories of ethics to assess the activities of individual or collective entities committed in a fundamentally different historical situation. In the legal sense, of particular interest is the need to determine the boundaries of the operation of those compensation mechanisms that imply not only symbolic, but also economic or legal sanctions in relation to the community subject to cancellation. In a socio-philosophical sense, it is worth considering cancel culture in the context of the categories of solidarity and identity, paying special attention to those symbolic splits to which the imperative requirement of oblivion leads.