Culture War Complexity: How Contaminated Words and Heterodox Positions Challenge Traditional Dichotomies

Abstract

This essay addresses some of the key terminological conflicts of the ongoing culture war between “wokes” and “anti-wokes” in many Western societies. In a public debate culture where words and labels are rapidly contaminated when appropriated by the “other side,” it is increasingly difficult to make sense of the key positions and battle lines to decode who is battling whom. The “culture war matrix” serves as a heuristic tool to contain some of the central culture war positions in an otherwise fragmented space of mediated discourse. Two intersecting tensions are suggested between woke and anti-woke and between cancel culture and free speech. While this two-dimensional understanding by no means exhausts the complex positionings in the culture war landscape, it represents an alternative to the one-dimensional dichotomy-thinking, which reduces the struggle to a matter of left versus right. In conclusion, a third way of understanding contemporary culture wars is suggested by focusing on heterodox impulses and alternative sources of intellectual authority.