Slavoj Zizek article - Wokeness is here to stay

[DemiColon]

I thought some might find this interesting and timely - Zizek touches quite a bit on gender ideology controversies, including current Scottish issues with self id, but he places them within the larger phenomena of identity politics.

compactmag.com/article/wokeness-is-here-to-stay

I looked to try and pick out some excerpts, but most don't really work as stand alone paragraphs. What I will say is that while he touches somewhat on political power, he mostly seems to come to the conclusion that what he is calling wokeness is a phenomena of the superego, which is to say, a psychological explanation.

thanks, will read.

That's a really interesting article. Vivek as ever loses me a little sometimes because he's too clever.

But I really enjoyed these bits:

'the forces at work have a momentum that far exceeds the views of individual politicians and the dynamics of particular institutions. If anything, individuals and institutions are constantly attempting to accommodate themselves to strictures coming from elsewhere, rather than imposing them top-down. It is therefore certain that similar scandals will continue to multiply.'

'Wokeness operates as a secularized religious dogma, with all the contradictions this implies.'

'this new cult combines belief in fixed, objectivized dogmas with full trust in how one feels ... A critical confrontation of arguments plays no role, which implies that “open debate” is a racist, white-supremacist notion.'

'The more you obey what the Other demands of you, the guiltier you are. ... What they really want is what they are achieving: a position of moral authority from which they may terrorize all others, without effectively changing social relations of domination.'

And the end conclusion is interesting, if tricky to parse!

I see wokeness as the monopolization of progressive causes, I hate to feel old but it is a stark contrast to my younger days when I joined on campaigns when debate and discission were an integral part of campaigns. Now it feels like a secular church with an elite with connections to charities sponsored by big businesses that are lecturing to everyone else. Stonewall is just the most obvious example.

I think that this may make sense to some, but what is clear is that "wokeness" is about performative politics.

This is mainly practiced by white middle class young people, who desparate to obscure their privilege take every opportunity to publicly signal their alignment with (actually patronising of) oppressed groups. (Except women on course) And means that as mere gestures, rather than actual change, their privilege is never undermined.

Added to which social media helps the contagion spread.

What the article doesn't address, because each of us in our youth probably thought we knew better than the generation before, is why older generations are colluding in the charade. The article just doesn't deal with that. It exists outside of political reality.

I did start a thread about a BBC series which looks at how "woke", which had real signifigance for African Americans experiencing racism, just became a meme. www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4750349-woke-the-journey-of-a-word

Certainly wokeness does seem especially to appeal to the middle classes. I'm not sure I think it is especially white or male. I think it tends to appeal to anyone from a secularized liberal middle class background, and certainly appeals to many non-white academics from that kind of background, for example. I think Zizek would point to people like Kendi as good examples. And I would not be surprised if it is more women than men, at least somewhat.

Yes, I think that first paragraph you highlighted is quite important, if it's true. What it means is that although we might block the problem in specific instances through state action, it won't really solve the larger problem.

By except women, I meant they are the one oppressed group "woke" people never try to ingratiate themselves with! In fact the opposite.

What I was really saying that what we now call "woke" has in the past being younger generations challenging the older one, but what we have never had is the older generation totally submitting to the thought process and belief of the younger one.

So wokeness (hippies being "with it") isn't the issue. The issue is the wholesale acceptance of young, immature people's view of the world.

Is it just that the current generation of grand/parents just want to be liked by their children?

I think that is part of the issue, people who know better did not put the kybosh ion this thinking, but I don't know that I think it really describes the thinking that goes on with this issue.

I don't really remembering young people in the past being so resolutely anti-intellectual. And that's what this ideology is, it isn't just unreasonable, it repudiates reason. It recognizes no need for consistency or empirical examination.

I think young people in the past did accept that there is such a thing as reason, and material reality. This POV says those things are racist/sexist/colonialist constructs.

This may seem a poor analogy but bear with me. Friends and I often go to a nice cafe for lunch. But the occasion is frequently spoiled by mothers, and sometimes fathers, who bring their small children and allow them to shout, bang the tables and generally be disruptive. They may occasionally say shush with no conviction at all, but never enforce it, and never remove the disruptive child from the situation.

I and my friends were generally what you would call easy going parents but all of us agreed that we never allowed our children to behave that badly. As my own grown up daughter said to me - there is no discipline and other people's rights simply don't matter to these parents. They are indulging their little would-be monsters.

Essentially that is what older people are doing to these young woke people, indulging their fantasies and skewed views. The problem is that the adults have left the room.

I can remember as a young person being very self righteous about a number of things. I was perhaps lucky that not just my parents but some of their friends also would challenge me. Sometimes a bit patronisingly, but they did wait for me to respond. And it certainly made me think I couldn't just announce x was y, because that's what I thought, but would need to be able to explain why I thought that.

I dont know enough about history, but in the last 100 years or so each generation has had an issue that younger people have been passionate about. Whether disarmament / CND, civil rights, alternative life styles and so on. And through the older generation interacting with that some part of each phase has been taken into the main stream.

The difference is that somehow in the last 10 or 20 years, not just parents (but lets blame them!) but the media have sort of accepted totally the view point of what isn't even the attitude of all young people.

How or why did that happen.

So I suppose what I am saying is a better article would be what is going on with the parental generation. Do they feel their world is a void and young people are helping them "understand"?!

I think there is a mistake in viewing this as a youth led counter culture which the establishment is colluding with.

It is in fact the establishment that has led and enforced it.

It's actually odd that young people are seeing themselves as saving the world by agreeing with the mainstream policies of most western governments and global seats of power e.g the WEF.

There is nothing subversive or revolutionary about wokeness it's the safe acceptable face of the establishment.

It's the equivalent of young people promoting the doctrine of the church 200 years ago and claiming moral virtue for this. Hardly brave or challenging the status quo.

What's odd is that young people are so conformist to the message of the powerful. Where are the young revolutionaries. It's not Greta. The establishment love, fête and use Greta.

We have unusually conformist moralistic young culture at present it's just the doctrine they adhere to is queer theory, anti racism and climate apocalypse.

Sometimes I think feminists are just upset that it's not the patriarchy doctrine that's most prominent and miss the central point that any ideology based on a power struggle narrative will require enforcement of language & thought to allow it to dominate.

One theory for these events is based in good-old Marxist class war.
Because in the end everything is about the money.

Starting in the US, with the Democratic party, but also in other industrial western countries, the parties of the left, supposedly the parties of the working class, have lost touch with its roots. They have become defensive of its money. Democratic/Left voters, especially the middle class who dominate the parties, gave up on economic reform, not wanting to actually give up their position of economic privilege. So they have latched on to 'identity politics' as a new way to distinguish themselves from the right.
By making the argument all about identity and prejudice, they no longer need to give two hoots about economic justice.

Sure, but in the situation you are describing, while you may have been self-righteous, you accepted that your position had to have some kind of rational basis.

This is a ideology that explicitly rejects rationality. You can't argue against the youth perspective because it is a perspective that says that math, or logic, are racist western constructs.

So, this paragraph:

'the forces at work have a momentum that far exceeds the views of individual politicians and the dynamics of particular institutions. If anything, individuals and institutions are constantly attempting to accommodate themselves to strictures coming from elsewhere, rather than imposing them top-down. It is therefore certain that similar scandals will continue to multiply.'

I think he's right, that fits my observation. The establishment is willing to use this, but I don't think it's produced it.

But were is it coming from?

Yes, that's the question, DemiColon.

It's possible that the ideology was created almost accidentally by various social forces (academia, the arts, culture) but is now used as a vehicle that offers a convenient cover for misogyny, homophobia, and racism. Plus academia and the arts seem to me to be mostly reactive forces. Who is actually actively pushing this stuff?

It makes me uneasy that nobody is really able to explain clearly where these 'strictures' are coming from. It reminds me of when liberal feminism rails against 'the patriarchy' but refuses to name males as the source of that oppression.

I'd like more clarity.

Could it be created by a vacuum, a removal of other pre existing forces?

At the heart of the woke movement is a desire to bully and control. Also, a longing to smash things up. You find exactly the same desire among those on the hard left. In my early twenties, I was in a relationship with someone on the far left and got dragged to all kinds of meetings and get-togethers. The thing that struck me most was the hatred. None of them seemed motivated by love or compassion - I mean, by a desire to make the world a better place. What they really wanted to do was hurt ‘rich’ people. A lot of them had never grown out of the adolescent rebel stage.

Like all bullies, the woke mob want power. And, again like all bullies, that longing for power is bound up with sadism (I control you, and it gives a thrill to know that I can hurt you any time I like). I’m convinced the majority of them couldn’t really care less about the things they oppose. The cause is irrelevant. If they’d lived in Tudor England, they’d be hunting down Catholics (or Protestants, depending on who was in power). What they really enjoy is provoking people. They love to get a reaction - to see people angry when they demand that Nelson’s Column is knocked down, or that bookshops stop selling novels by Kipling, or whatever. They don’t really care about Nelson or Kipling. It’s the thought that someone is upset that thrills them - it’s knowing they have the power to do that. Like all bullies they will keep going, and things will keep escalating, until someone stops them.

Sure, but in the situation you are describing, while you may have been self-righteous, you accepted that your position had to have some kind of rational basis.

I wish I had been that educated and informed. I just couldn't bear that someone could find weaknesses in my assumptions. So if anything I would have used "irational" arguements to try and win my point. The problem was though, that just because of age so less experience / knowledge it was fairly easy to find fault in my position on any number of things. The difference was the older people just did not (not that anyone would have thought to say that at the time) just accept what I was saying because I "identified" that to be the (my) truth.

That is the difference. This endless need to pander to younger people.

If baby boomers are to be blamed for anything it is that they seem to have as parents had children who when they became parents were so terrified of being thought old, out of date, even a parent, bent over backwards to be friends to their children.

So these children, the grand children of baby boomers go to college and dont understand that the world doesn't revolve around them. That to achieve things you have to work. That sometimes things around you aren't nice.

This is a ideology that explicitly rejects rationality. You can't argue against the youth perspective because it is a perspective that says that math, or logic, are racist western constructs.

I think this is a different arguement. I think because some people have challenged the establishment in terms of education, history etc., because it erases them, others, as I said up thread, who in fact are the beneficiaries of that erasure, then ramp up the arguements to make themselves seem worthy of being considered in the vanguard.

Yet again this is where ideas and words (like woke as explained in the BBC documentaty) become meaningless as they are coopted and used to those who want status and realise they dont have any because in fact they are boringly part of the majority.

The establishment is willing to use this,

The establishment only uses it to shore up their reactionary notions of how the UK for instance should be run.

Brexit was won on an appeal to basically mythical ideas of a pre war Britain, or rather England.

The establishment benefits from each "irrational" statement, as it can use it to stir up those entrenched in tradition as needing to guard the country from losing its contrived history.

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Funnily enough I think it is about identity or rather not having one. In the past most people never moved far from where they were born. Only got scraps of news, and saw themselves willingly or unwillingly part of a community with a specific identity.

Now most people dont stay in their physical community, and get random information from any number of sources. If you listen to the news or talk shows most people actually have a very narrow idea of what is important, and only occassionally get caught up in these movements.

Maybe the problem is this generation is really the first internet generation, so in the virtual world anything is possible, and most of those following identity politics are in a postion where they can sit around thinking I could be this, that or the other. Whilst those from a less privileged background are too busy trying to survive to even spend time on it.

And I think the politicians and media going along with the identity politics think they are buying young people by pandering to them.

And of course the self id movement is an ideal vehicle for entrenched mysogyny.

I think the article fails because it is lacking in historical and political context.

Sory for all the typos I shouldn't try and write this late at night but cant resist adding this in light of the comment about bullying which certainly seems to be true in most areas of politics.

JK Rowling says she was bullied off a Harry Potter forum she joined under a pseudonym

Speaking on the podcast The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, she said: “I chose a random name that was not a Potter related name, as I was almost scared that I would somehow self-reveal.”

Rowling said she shared a “very bland” opinion about Harry Potter and “got rounded on by users who told me in no uncertain terms to get out”.

The author said she was told that she wasn’t “familiar in that room, and that I’m clearly an idiot who doesn’t know anything”.

“I left,” she said. “And I was thinking, I’ve written three and a half books where bullying is such a theme from the very first page, where bullying – and authoritarian behaviour – is held to be one of the worst of human ills, and look what just happened, from these people who call themselves such fans of this franchise.”

Rowling continued: “I didn’t care. I’m a pretty robust person. But what if I’d been some 12-year-old who was excited to go into this room, and was immediately, caustically chastised for not belonging?

“They just kicked someone out because they were new. I thought that was so interesting, that you’re passionate about these books and yet, in the course of living, you are behaving in a way that I depict as one of the worst and most stupid human behaviours.”

uk.news.yahoo.com/jk-rowling-says-she-bullied-102838005.html

I feel the article posted contradicts and/simplifies his earlier stances on these subjects. In something that’s consistent about Zizek, it’s his inconsistency. I used to know a lot of postgraduate male students who very much liked him for the way he brings in Lacan when he feels like it, and made them feel clever when they recognised his references to Fanon or Hegel.

Anyway, I find his 2016 article more fleshed out, whether you agree of not, and more consistent with his previous philosophy
’ To recapitulate, not only do I fully support the struggle of transgender people against their legal segregation, but I am also deeply affected by their reports of their suffering, and I see them not as a marginal group, which should be “tolerated” but as a group whose message is radically universal: it concerns us all; it tells the truth about all of us as sexual beings. I differ from the predominant opinion in two interconnected points that concern theory: (1) I see the anxiety apropos sexual identities as a universal feature of human sexuality, not just as a specific effect of sexual exclusions and segregations, which is why one should not expect it to disappear with the progress of sexual desegregation; (2) I draw a strict distinction between sexual difference (as the antagonism constitutive of human sexuality) and the binary (or plurality) of genders. Both these points are, of course, totally misread or ignored by my critics.‘

zizek.uk/a-reply-to-my-critics-re-the-sexual-is-political/

That's a thought.

There are people who argue that modern philosophy has simply given up on metaphysics, that it thinks that it's not possible to do anything along those lines. I think that sense is something that has now trickled down to the general public, it's really an unconscious assumption for most secular liberal progressive types.

If that's true, then what is the basis of our epistemology? We know that logical positivism doesn't offer enough content to fulfill that role. And without a basis for epistemology, there is no way to confidently assert any kind of truth, empirical or otherwise.

Things that might tend to support that are that this is the group that seems to affected with this ideology; the crises in academia and the sciences seems to center around the inability to make good judgments about truth or even acknowledge it exists; the attempt to substitute subjective takes on reality for truth; the rise of scientism which is really a kind of positivism, and I think you could probably look at some groups like the New Atheists similarly as trying to hold onto positivism. And the dogmatic moralism, which is really the only way you can have any effective ethical structures if there is no way to talk about truth that is not simply nature. (Most people are really not brave enough to assert there are no ethical imperatives at all. So they need to find something to hold onto in that regard.)

That could set the stage, maybe?

His earlier thoughts seem to be reading gender ideology as a kind of abstract critique that he might make himself, rather than anything to do with actual transgender people or the political policies or medical practices being promoted.

Maybe something happened to make him think he needed to address the reality of it.

Enlightening article by Zizek. Made it very clear why the TRAs will allow 'no debate', for debate is itself violence, just as the actual statistics of incarceration in the US are violence - they do not conform to the message. (This applies to stating biological fact in the trans debate.) The point about feminists backing Muslim men trying to silence a Muslim woman pointing out how much Islam oppresses women is telling and reminds me of the feminist views on FGM up till the 80s; that FGM was a cultural choice by the women involved and no-one else had any right to intervene, that to do so was actually wrong. It's what we now call virtue-signalling, that is, I am with the oppressed and people who say that these oppressed people are oppressive/are not as oppressed as they think, are even worse oppressors and 'ism' of choice as well. It's double-think. I see 'wokeness' as a tool of the Western elite, another means of dividing those who should be standing together against our exploitation so that the 1% of the 1% can maintain their hold.

I think part of the vacuum is the lack of any other political outlet - their are no significant 'fights' for the energetic youth to join, all there is left is so-called democratic capitalism.
Decades ago students and young people could join all sorts of political parties and ideologies, but I think most of these groups have just about vanished.

@DemiColon

I kind of get what you are saying - how can we know what is true in the absence of socially-dictated morality and religion, and in the defeat of philosophy. Subjectivity has replaced the discredited idea of objective truth.

However humans need religion like they need food and water. In the absence of any other religion, most people have attached to 'Progress' as a religious substitute or secular religion. To test this out, just try arguing with someone that progress has stopped - you will be treated as a blasphemer.

The trouble is that economic progress has stopped, and gone into reverse, over the last several decades. In these circumstances, people have latched onto 'social progress' instead, because they need to believe in Progress. So after gay rights and black rights and women's rights and disability rights, next on the list is trans rights - it is the last shiny new thing to fight for, to give the illusion that one can still be fighting for progress, still be on the right side of history.