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.

unherd.com/2023/03/the-death-of-historical-truth/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=c859c754cd&mc_eid=8424260694

I am sorry about this post. I've written loads.

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

It struck me the other day that it's possibly an evolution of what Debord saw in the early 60s: the spectacle. This is where society, in short, has replaced real human interactions and experiences with consumerist images. It's also an aspect of what Baudrillard called hyperreality.

I noticed with the Bristol statue incident that the whole behaviour was focused on one precise moment: when the statue fell into the water. It was, almost, and this is a weird thing to say but hear me out, mimicking the orgasmic process. That moment was like a surrogate ejaculation for the release of whipped-up tension. It was "the money shot".

But here's the thing ... the "money shot" and its creation is what now constitutes "activism." Where once activism was about stuffing thousands of envelopes and distributing pamphlets and holding meetings in weird places, building a solid core of thoughts and opinions, yet also adapting along the route, it has become, instead, the creation of a five second moment.

This is not the way to change anything. The world is beyond complex, and to assume one can in any way control such entropy is deluded. There are very few things someone can change in their immediate environment without significant compromise (with the exception of possibly erecting a dog poo bag bin), never mind on a wider level.

Change takes persistent work, usually through a process of gradual incrementalism. It is a life's work for most people who manage to change one small single thing. Even Barack Obama said that as US president, you can probably only shift things about 10%.

So how have we got here? Is it constantly telling young people that they can change the world by "using their voices", when, in reality, it is often a lifetime's work?

Most people have attached to 'Progress' as a religious substitute or secular religion

The interesting thing about progress is that it is largely a technologically-driven phenomenon. Things are different from the past because we now have antibiotics, for example, or electricity, not because our souls and minds have intrinsically evolved.

People and society don't really change at all. You realise that when you look at social history. Today's mugger is the descendent of the 18th century's footpad. County lines is the modern version of the Victorian "kidsman's" trade. Wokery is the new puritanism. We are awash with modern Mr/Mrs/Mx Jellabys, who fixate more about amazon rainforests than they do about Britain's serious levels of deforestation. Even the modern clamour over "soft sentences" is strange when you look at the actual outcomes of certain regional 19th century trials.

Why has it been forgotten that progress actually occurs in laboratories and on engineering floors?

Acceptance of sexual liberation was a product of the pill, the antibiotic and better screening tests (because, otherwise, British society would have ended up riddled with STIs and abandoned babies, a bit like the situation in the late 19th century when there were very real fears that syphilis would wipe out the population).

Women's liberation was the product of electricity because without washing machines and irons and ovens and clean ways to heat homes, most married women would have had to stay home to do the time-consuming labour of washing things in dolly tubs, cooking food on coal ranges, and trying to stop the coal dust from coating everything with soot.

Yeah, the trouble with postmodernism is that if nothing is 'true' and everything is relative, what are we supposed to believe in? We have to believe in something.

What is really weird about the way postmodernism is talked about today is that, even back in the 60s and 70s and 80s, the point of the postmodern perspective was that Truth (with a capital T) could only be perceived through plurality.
So the idea was that to see the Truth of a thing, you had to explore how everyone saw the thing, and in doing that, a shape of the Truth would emerge in the cacophony, somewhat like a Platonic form.

It wasn't that every perspective was True per se, although every perspective was 'valid' and 'necessary' for the enterprise. Nor was it the case that individual perspectives had to be treated with respect and recognised and responded to with commitment: they were just material to feed into the Truth engine.

It seems like this understanding has gone missing when public intellectuals talk about postmodernism these days.

@ColdMeg

Very interesting - thanks

Why has it been forgotten that progress actually occurs in laboratories and on engineering floors?

Because that progress has stalled. For various reasons, including energy costs.

And any technological progress that does happen is not really impacting lives.
Okay we have smartphones. But back in the 70s one person (usually a man), could support a partner at home and a family, pay the rent or mortgage, run a car, and have a modest family holiday, all on one wage.
Now it takes two wages to meet the rent, no hope of a mortgage, and you can't have a baby without needing state benefits.
That is the reverse of economic progress for the masses.

So believers in progress have latched onto social progress instead.

It wasn't that every perspective was True per se, although every perspective was 'valid' and 'necessary' for the enterprise. Nor was it the case that individual perspectives had to be treated with respect and recognised and responded to with commitment: they were just material to feed into the Truth engine.

This is really interesting. It implies that the 'truth' of a transactivist is necessary to get the full picture, to make sure everything has been considered and no-one's view is overlooked.
Because without multiple perspectives we risk being caught in a kind of fundamentalism, or risk reaching incomplete conclusions. We need all the perspectives in this Venn diagram (and many more perspectives not shown here). Then we can pick apart what is useful and valuable in all of these 'truths'.

deadwildroses.com/2019/10/07/handy-venn-diagrams-the-radical-feminist-position-on-gender/

The Marxist academic Adolph Reed Jr, who write a lot on racial issues, talks about this quite a bit. He says, essentially, that as a black middle class emerged, their interests had little to do with those of the black working class or poor - in fact they were very much aligned with those of other middle class people. Identity politics he sees as a way for those people to claim moral and political leadership of that identity group, but of course their vision and solutions are what would suit the needs and wants of middle class people. He also points out that race based activism became a career path for many of the university educated young people in this group.

I think he's right - and it's the case across identity politics, though it looks a little different depending on the particular instantiation. But a lot comes down to people telling themselves that the economic and other interests of two people are joined because of their skin colour or sexuality or sex, when in a great many instances they aren't. Other factors are much more important.

Definitely worth considering how the impact of the internet has impacted on the human psyche. Yes, 'spectacle' and immediacy, and also a sudden intense globalism that we've never had access to before.

Surely the destabilising effect of postmodern ideas about decentring truth, coupled with the ability to communicate, suddenly, with virtually anyone anywhere, could feasibly lead to a huge crisis in how we have to measure and assess ourselves, our worth, our morals, against infinite access to what feels like limitless information on every other time period, culture, and social setting.

Which could easily feed into moral relativism and the loss of any form of cohesive narrative for societies or individuals within them. And a disconnected 'post human' idea of what is possible and desirable.

It struck me the other day that it's possibly an evolution of what Debord saw in the early 60s: the spectacle. This is where society, in short, has replaced real human interactions and experiences with consumerist images. It's also an aspect of what Baudrillard called hyperreality.

And what it comes up against, again and again, is the fairly disappointingly mundane aspects of plodding meatlife. Sex is immutable, boringly. We're all fallible, imperfectible, mortal beings. Just a bunch of mammals with over-excited pre-frontal cortices, really. And a persistent itch to apply narratives to our lives in the face of what may well be random accidental evolution.

Not ignoring what the rest of you have said, but taking up from where I left off yesterday about how rapidly the world has changed and what used to locate people has shifted or even vanished, so that the unreality of the internet impacts on how people think. So as said up thread for a lot of young people politics is performative (althought the SWP etc were doing this in the 70s to get pictures in the media who preferred an image to any words).

And the other big change is "education" which has been turned into a commodity. Despite all the allegations about boomers having it easy, only a very tiny % went onto hight university and either had some sort of apprentiship or for legal, financial and other white collar work became articled clerks (5 years of misery).

Now throught the Labour notion of higher education for all it isn't just that what can be achieved doesn't have any value, but that because it is bought and paid for the balance between those who are teaching and those who are learning has shifted.

I am not saying the old elite system was the best, but that education itself is no longer and learning and progressing towards something. If facts have to be edited so that students dont feel "uncomfortable" ie challenged, this only re-inforces the notion that their feelings take precedent over reality.

There are so many examples in history where young people get swept up in not just left politics but right (think of Germany in the 1930s) but the concern was that their naivety was easy to exploit.

Now we have almost the reverse where young people's naivety is extolled and amplified by parents. Do politicians really think that if the pander to younger people that at some point they can say to them we just wanted you to join us but what we actually want to do is ....

Or is it just an extension of affirmative parenting, or worse, as in the early dats of XR parents were effectively exploiting their children by pushing them forward to the front line for interviews and coaching them to mate cute comments and supplying them with meme ready placards. Greta Thunberg is the ultimate example of this, through her parents manipulation of the media when she first started her solo protests. And then later encouraging her to think that her simplistic notion of just stating this is right, and pimping her out to the MSM, created a further public perception that again performative was as effective as actually doing something. This is a bit of a side track, but there seems to be a trend in the media to ask people who will admit to autism or some other condition, and acknowledge that their pursuit of a topic can be influenced by this, as they think it makes good tv. Rather than does it actually offer a realistic way forward.

So young people are more adrift, and maybe more in need of finding a group identity.

But none of this explains why those with influence eg the media, advertisers etc., are so willing to then enter into what is effectively a niche world, and portray it as though reflective of the majority.

So it isn't really about young people, but why older people, many of them decision makers are so willling to change their ways of working, what they teach etc., to this minority group.

Maybe we should be discussing the older generation. The children of baby boomers who grew up in the loads of money era.

So trans activism has several important contexts:

Post-modern ideas of 'personal truth'
The social-media echo chamber
Loss of identity rooted in traditional social communities
The boredom of ordinary life compared to digital hyper-reality
A middle class using identity politics to avoid talking about economic class
The take-up of social progress as a substitute for economic progress
The lack of religious faith/belief and the need to believe in something else

plus more that I have probably forgot to list

and according to Zizek something about superego and dreams.

It may not be possible to fight back effectively and defend women's rights without addressing each and all of these. 😕

Ah yes, we can add intergenerational factors to the list, including changes in parenting, plus we can also add the way that university students are now paying customers to be pandered to.

I would maybe want to examine the idea that politics, or morality, or religion, are mainly about control and domination.

I think that is true to an extent, but it's also true, in my view, that you can't have a society without some degree of social morality, and social norms, and some means to teach those things and enforce those things within the society.

I can't think of one serious political or social question where we don't have to refer to all of these elements.

What that means is that of course, if we decide we no longer like the old ones, we will need new ones to have any kind of functioning society. But what will be the basis of those? Nature certainly doesn't offer anything that resembles civilized society.

Domination sounds very negative, and I don't think it's really adequate to describe the institutions an mechanisms a society uses to teach social values and maintain social cohesion.

It may not be possible to fight back effectively and defend women's rights without addressing each and all of these.

I think this is very true and have for a long time. Of course some progress can be made. But I find it very frustrating when people only see gender ideology as a problem and give a pass, or worse, embrace, other elements of identity politics and the thinking that produced it.

I would maybe want to examine the idea that politics, or morality, or religion, are mainly about control and domination.

I think that is true to an extent, but it's also true, in my view, that you can't have a society without some degree of social morality, and social norms, and some means to teach those things and enforce those things within the society.

The problem is perhaps the word 'domination', where one could look at it more in the sense that societies require order, and that often involves hierarchies?

An oversimplification and emphasis on how everyone is 'equal' is maybe something else that feeds into this ideology, and tends to lead us towards the flattening of structures - the end of experts, the suggestion that a child's uninformed view is of equal value to that of an experienced adults, the devaluing of the idea that we can assess some 'facts' as more truthful/useful/accurate than others, etc.

People took valid ideas about equity of sex, race, etc, that were correcting injustice, and tried to apply them to every situation which involves a hierarchy.

Not that hierarchies and power shouldn't be interrogated and tested and proved, as they perhaps weren't in the past (god-given rights no longer seen as valid reason for taking power) but people have instead gone for 'there shouldn't be any hierarchies or power structures at all'.

I did find the idea of plurality of views mentioned upthread intending to lead to a sort of Platonic ideal really interesting; I'd wondered if the 'fuck everything, nothing is real' stance was a gross oversimplification!

Women's rights is only one facet. The threats to freedom of speech/thought/belief issue are just as acutely important, in my view.

Yeah, me too. Political rights of any kind depend on those things, as well as a real social intellectual life.

you can't have a society without some degree of social morality, and social norms, and some means to teach those things and enforce those things within the society.

So totally disagree with this. And not even sure how it relates to this thread!

So it isn't really about young people, but why older people, many of them decision makers are so willling to change their ways of working, what they teach etc., to this minority group.

Maybe we should be discussing the older generation. The children of baby boomers who grew up in the loads of money era.

You touched a nerve with me here. I'm late Gen X, born to early baby boomers, and have a slightly different take on this.

I have always felt that the baby boomers had too strong a hold on pretty much everything, from culture to the economy to society to politics, until about ten years ago.

Now this is only my experience, obviously, but the baby boomers really would not yield at all. As a young (and not so young) woman, it was virtually impossible to navigate around them or get anywhere. They held all the positions of power, and personally, I felt there was a real suppression of my generation, culturally and economically, not helped by the extraordinary rises in the costs of housing at the time.

It was so bad when I was in my mid twenties that pretty much everyone I graduated with migrated to another country. If I were being blunt, I might say the baby boomers wanted to hold onto the power and spotlight for as long as they could.

What I now realise, as a much older woman, is that not only wouldn't baby boomers give a little, but also rarely engaged in any kind of mentoring of the next generation (unlike their Silent Generation parents). I don't think they even considered what would happen after they retired. There was no succession planning, no sense of needing to develop a continuity process.

So when they began to retire, it created a void of knowledge and leadership because Generation X had not been mentored to step into their vacant shoes. Indeed, Gen X had been so suppressed, in many cases, they were barely at a middle-management level (or a version of).

What I suspect has happened as a result of this is that the Millennials took advantage of that void and have whooshed in to fill it, despite having nowhere near the experience or wisdom required, helped by ridiculous fashions in recruitment practices that valued "star skills" above experience or expertise.

So we are now in a weird situation where we have seen boomers retire over the last fifteen years and suddenly key leadership and authority posts are full of thirty somethings or younger (the comment above about 19-year-old councillors fits this model). Gen X is almost invisible.

I've seen this situation replicated in a lot of industries and sectors: from governance to higher education to journalism to the civil service. I now see twenty-somethings getting jobs and positions that I would never have been able to get at their age twenty-five-years ago, and thirty-somethings leading departments that 50 and 60-somethings would have led when I was at that age.

This, I wonder, might possibly be the reason for the rapid rush of wokery throughout society. When the baby boomer dam disappeared, there was no Gen X dam behind it.

I have always felt that the baby boomers had too strong a hold on pretty much everything, from culture to the economy to society to politics, until about ten years ago.

I think every generation growing up has that feeling about their parents generation. But it is just about the structure of society, that in most instances you feel old people are in the way.

A lot of those becoming young adults in 50s felt that about their parents generation, and despite what they went through during WWII, were actively criticising them.

And in both circumstance is ironic as older people feel they are put on the rubbish heap and ignored despite still being able to work and have relevant ideas.

But again I think a lot of this depends of the social group of ones families. There was as much a push back against baby boomers alternative hippy values from the younger generation as any other.

And referencing mentoring is reflective of the vacuum created by Thatherism where traditional routes to advancement such as apprentiships, evening classes, etc., were dismantled by Thatcher who said (or maybe didn't) that there is no such thing as society.

But either way, the difference is that at no time (as far as those commenting so far seem to think) have we had a younger generation dominating / dictating social values.

And in fact it is possible that all of this is about not society as a whole, but what used to be called the chattering classes or those setting the media agenda which has virtually no real reflection of life as lived by the majority.

Demographics plays a part here, as Gen X is smaller than both the boomer and Millenial generations.
It may also be the case that Gen Xers have been less interested in climbing the corporate ladder and have gone off to do their own thing.

A fair bit of the thread is talking about the loss of older forms of social morality and their replacement, and the article is also talking about how we ascertain Truth. Not just as individuals but as a society.

Do you really think we can have a functioning society without some agreement about what constitutes right and wrong, or true and false? You've never made an argument that some social structure or law was unjust, or thought that someone has done something morally wrong? Where does law even come from if there is no sense of shared visions of correct behaviour.

You post here a lot, often sharing your view on these kinds of questions and how society should deal with them - what's the point if there is no sense of a social morality we can all acknowledge, or should all acknowledge.

Agree with you. Also, the divisions caused and promoted by wokism, e.g. TWAW, Critical Race Theory, catastrophic climate change and so on, serve to divide those who would otherwise be angry that the less wealthy/less better-off/poor are bearing the burden of economic crisis caused by the exploitation of resources both human and natural that has gone on since roughly the 70s when neoliberalism became the dominant economic doctrine, throwing aside both social contract and social construction of society, making everyone individually responsible only for themselves. I suspect most people on here are pro-EU but the policies of the EU, particularly the ascendancy of the right of establishment over workers' rights, promote those ideas. It is no surprise that the EU also promotes a social ideal that is against traditional values and promotes e.g. TWAW. Divide and rule is the actual process going on as climate changes and pollution (which is hardly addressed - it costs and there is no profit element) make life harder for ordinary people, who, if they were allowed to join as one would revolt against the elite.

This.

Generally, I agree. However, I am a Brexiteer, and I did not vote to leave the EU on the grounds of a mythic England or nostalgia. I voted on socialist grounds, as expounded originally by Tony Benn (hardly a man nostalgic for a mythic past) who spoke of the erosion of sovereignty through membership of the EEC. I also voted to leave because I saw that membership of the EU was undermining the rights and prosperity of people of the working classes who experienced the joys of free movement as a lowering of wages and prospects. I come from those people, I am aware of the history of trades unionism in the UK, and saw the actions of the EU as being against the rights of workers, as against trades unionism that actually protected workers when they came into conflict e.g. with the Right of Establishment. The social democracy of the EU (and the UK, too) is a mask - currently being ripped apart in the UK e.g. the number of adverts for private health care and the underfunding of the NHS, neither of which would be prevented by EU membership since both ally with EU policies - behind which those who drive the TWAW ideology are also behind, elites who wish to maintain their power whilst dividing the rest of us from ourselves. I do not like the Tories but at least they can be voted out. The EU bureaucracy can never be voted out.

"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."

I think there is a lot in this, although some may care about economic injustice but not have much of an idea what to do about it.

Plus once an ideology gets established in an organization it attracts every creep and climber who gives not a shit about anything other than getting on in that realm.

The witch trials of JK Rowling definitely worth a listen. Seeks to uncover the roots of all this and is quite chilling