PODCLUB: The Intellectual Roots of Wokeness

Thank you. I was overcomplicating it but it makes more sense now. I agree with you that I don't know how useful this can be. In a legal context it is important to make sure that discrimination doesn't find a loophole. Otherwise it seems intersectionality is a very divisive way of understanding the world.

I understand the legal argument that you could miss out or discriminate against people in these intersections even while making provision for all the characteristics they possess. But I don't get how being a traveller woman is to be oppressed in a special way that is more than the adding of one oppression to the other. I get that it's a double whammy but I don't get how it's something different than the combination of those two things. It sounds like 2+2=5... maybe I am over complicating. Are you saying that there's a special kind of oppression directed at the people at each intersection or am I misunderstanding that idea? I'm worried then that this would take us into "we can never understand anyone else's story" type territory and further from the idea that we're all human with empathy and imagination.

Yes, can't wait to talk about Coddling too! It might help me to make sense of some of this stuff!

Haha thank you *TheRealMcKenna". So, basically, intersectionality was the result of seeing how equality for black people and equality for women still left a gap where black women could be discriminated against. That makes sense.

But I don't follow your next point, or have an intuitive feel for that idea. I can understand that you can be discriminated against on the basis of both sex and race but I don't see how that creates a special kind of discrimination that is more than the sum of those parts?

I will of course agree with anything you say about that or anything else!!

I don't think I quite understand intersectionality. It seems like it's used as a kind of points system. The more intersections you hit, the more points you get. But I'm getting the idea that it originated as a valid analysis of workplace discrimination? I haven't got to that bit in the book yet.

Agree with Bovary and others, Coddling is a really great read, thanks for suggesting it. Apologies for my long contributions, was mainly just thinking aloud, so feel free to skim over. I think a lot of this stuff isn't vitally important to understanding the situation now, anyway, but it's interesting and illuminating to see how ideas evolve and change over time, and it puts into perspective lots of ideas and theories I was aware of, but didn't really have a context for.

So I'm getting the idea that the social justice movement is what brought in the moral/religious element. Because now all these ideas are being used for the liberation of mankind, for justice, equality etc.

Lindsay gives the example of Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw, says that the difference between them is postmodernism. They were both cynical about liberalism, but Bell was a materialist. He was interested in the law and institutions. Crenshaw (his student) is also writing about the law and she identifies that it's possible to discriminate against black women while not discriminating against blacks or women (hence intersectionality). A confusion for me: they all praise this insight and say it's one of the most important insights in discrimination law, but I think then they should be saying that black women are in a separate legal category to other women, and I'm not sure they would argue that? Or maybe I'm missing something there.

Anyway, JL says Crenshaw rewrites this work a couple of years later and explicitly argues for identity to be the primary lens of looking at this (rather than the law). She says that being black as an identity is more important than just happening to be black. If you just happen to be black then blackness can be deconstructed to mean nothing. But if blackness is an identity, then it exists as a permanent representation of the oppressor/victim dynamic, and therefore can't be talked out of existence. JL says this is the fusion of those three ideas: she has taken the critical theory of the view of the world being this permanent condition of oppressed vs oppressor, then linked social justice theory (identity politics) to argue for putting identity at the heart of the theory, then she brings in postmodernism as the means of getting rid of the contradictions inherent in her argument, which she can do because she is doing this on the side of freedom and justice and revolution.

JL goes on to say this approach then spreads like wildfire because "now they have tools to problematise each other [...] so all the feminists were like 'ahhhh we're racist now'.'" He says it consumes the entire intelligentsia and the left. So I guess that's where he's pinpointing the start of Wokeism.

I think this loss of historical materialism might have come at the same time as Marxists adopted the idea of culture as the dominant way in which oppression and exploitation are reproduced. They talked of 'the means of cultural reproduction', by which they meant literally reproducing capitalism as a world order and oppressing the masses. So they weren't saying 'culture is also important, let's look at how it contributes,' but they were saying 'culture is how capitalism maintains itself; it's culture that is central'. That was the Frankfurt School, anyway. (I think there were some big fights and the socialist left tended to veer to a more materialist class analysis. They were also interested in raising class consciousness, but they thought the way to do this was to explain how economic exploitation worked. I think even in the 80s and 90s this analysis persisted. But eventually the left came on board and are now the leaders of wokeism.)

But then, by moving the focus from the economy to the culture, I wonder if the neo-Marxists built a theory that was essentially incapable of changing? They believed that 'the ruling culture is always the culture of the ruling class.' So in a way they sort of stopped history by inventing this permanent condition where the ruling class basically control our minds. They then had to fit everything into this condition, and they did this by essentially jettisoning anything that didn't fit. And they could do this, because postmodernism said that nothing really meant anything, and the post-structuralists led the way in showing how to use words to take literally everything apart, except for this one idea which was then considered to be 'material reality'.

Having said that, maybe another part of this is the beginnings of mass media - Walter Benjamin wrote about television, and television in particular was seen as the new 'opium of the masses'. The cultural hegemony was sustained by these new mass media, with the ruling class able to now mind-control people far more easily. This idea, as well, has been really influential. (I'd really love to also put Marshall McLuhan in here somewhere. He had a really different take on the media, and he both predicted the internet and knew it would be a force for evil.) Ironically, it is social media that is mind-controlling the masses, not through hegemony, but through addiction. And more ironically, it doesn't propagandise for one supremacist worldview; it propagandises for the idea that there is no truth at all.

It's interesting that as critical theory and postmodernism and social justice meet and fuse, they actually don't become more complex and multivalent and proliferant of meaning. They actually become less complex and less dynamic, and less capable of creating meaning. They tend towards slogans as the highest point of explication. Because it's a success of the theory if there is only one thinkable thought: revolution! So it's always working its way towards shedding everything that's unecessary, deconstructing everything that can contradict it, until it ultimately becomes both theory and activism in one.

It is absolutely pissing down with rain here so I'm just sitting trying to figure this out! I think I'll need to listen to it about ten times. Thanks so much for talking about it!

I guess I think materialism is not in itself a critical theory. Understanding historical material conditions and how they affect social relations is maybe even counter to critical theory, because for critical theory, social relations are timeless, not connected to material conditions but a result of the (what they would call material) division in the world between the oppressed and the oppressor. So to be a woman in 2020 is no different than to be a woman in 1020, because to be a woman is to be oppressed. They project our current worldview backwards through time rather than try to understand the worldview of people whose world was actually quite different.

So I think I'd call what you're talking about 'historical materialism' rather than critical theory.

But my argument is that critical theory still exists and is used quite independently of postmodern belief.

I'm not sure that's true. Even the focus on representation (which I agree has been a useful tool/mode of analysis in the past) has become an 'own voices' focus on lived experience. I'm talking about university courses here. I think you're right that many individuals would have some agreements with ideas such as the need for fair representation in culture, without necessarily buying into the idea that the culture is a product of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy. I'm not sure if you could still call them critical theorists?

The social justice piece of the puzzle as I understand it: It's social justice that was the vector for these two theories to work out their contradictions and create wokeism. (If I were to continue the metaphor of wokeism being the child of critical theory and postmodernism, social justice movement (feminism; black feminism) would be its surrogate mother).

Feminists hit on the idea on privilege, and postmodernists were seen to be privileged white guys who could theorise about oppression only because they didn't experience it. So they said the oppressor/oppressed paradigm is what's real, and has to be set aside from being deconstructed. Deconstruction should only be used to deconstruct the ways in which this oppressed/victim dynamic is perpetuated.

Coleman Hughes talks about the first time he realised he had an accent, when he saw there was no objective standpoint to discuss accent, because there isn't an accentless person. It just describes how people talk. He says that moment of realisation that there's no centre (no other) is what PM tries to replicate in every sphere of life. Lindsay agrees and says that idea is applied to things he shouldn't be applied to, such as epistomology.

I think that makes sense.