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.

It is difficult to quantify or measure that suggestion, though as a politically active Generation X ( born 1965) for me it was not about climbing ladders, so much as exploring alternatives to that rigid hierarchy. So many of us ended up going into mental/social/health/education services and roles. We became vegetarians and set up peace camps.

If i was to construct a potted history i'd say it wa sthe 1980's generation ( post Thatcher) that embraced climbing the corporate ladder again, and inserting itself unashamedly into the establishment roles that had been previously rejected. I think of Owen Jones - he's of that generation - trotskyist parents but goes to Oxbridge, then lands plummy column in mainstream left wing newspaper. He's not half as radical as he seems to think he is.

'The Coddling of the American Mind' is worth a read. "How Good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failur"

It looks at the development of 'safetyism' and how it evolved on university campuses in the U.S. I t also notes how powerful students have become and how easily it is for them to discredit and hound their professors.

sorry always lots of typos and no edit function

It is often said that 'the teenager' was born in 1950's bringing with it a quite distinctive youth sub-culture. Before that children were dressed like mini adults, married young, had children young and went on to replicate the pattern of their parents' lives. The 1960s brought social revolution in many ways and acted as a challenge to the morals and mores of previous generations.

"By making the argument all about identity and prejudice, they no longer need to give two hoots about economic justice."

But it will be economic injustice that bites them on the arse. Hard.

It was the 1980's generation ( post Thatcher) that embraced climbing the corporate ladder again, and inserting itself unashamedly into the establishment roles that had been previously rejected.

You see, this is the thing. My experience of being late Gen X was that you just couldn't access those roles and positions, not even at a junior (or training) level.

When I was 18, I was at sixth form college with a girl who was a straight A student, parents were GPs, she spent her spare time working in their surgery, loads of practical experience, got four A levels at As (this was years before A*s and when straight As at A level were virtually unheard of) ... but she wasn't accepted at any medical school she applied to. She eventually took a year out, applied again, was rejected again, and ended up doing a science degree, then doing a medical degree after that.

That was how hard it was to get into medicine back then. And it makes me laugh when, now, they talk about a lack of NHS doctors. Well, maybe there might have been a lot more if you hadn't made it so difficult for people to get into medical school in the '80s and early '90s. Crikey, I even remember some sort of panorama programme in the early 00s that exposed just how medical schools were knowingly operating to a) limit the number of students they took and b) to ensure they were of a certain type and class.

A lot of people in my Gen X peer group went into alternative roles because we just couldn't get into established ones. In the late 90s and early 00s, particularly after the dot.com bust, there were just no jobs anywhere. I knew people who had been unemployed for two or more years back then. I know people, now in their 40s and 50s, who are pretty much still jobbing freelancers/gig workers, who have never had a stable, dependable job and income, and it is not for want of trying over the years.

I, myself, have largely been freelance my entire working life. And it is only now, as a much older woman, that I have managed to achieve a role in the "establishment", and it is essentially because a baby boomer died suddenly and left a vacancy.

@ColdMeg
I can see how that would work: a boomer clings on in the role well into their sixties, then when they retire/die, the role gets passed straight to someone in their thirties or early forties as 'young blood', passing straight over the Gen X in their late forties/fifties who are by now seen as too old!

With so many boomers hanging around for so long, the smaller Gen X never got a look-in.

Can't say I'm overly familiar with the terminologies Gen X and so on, I had to look it up in order to be able to then say I was Gen X ( born 1965). So I'm imagining you were born in the early 70's? When I talked about the 1980's generation being more accepting or keen to join the establishment or coroprate world I was referring, really, to those born in the 1980's - not those coming of age then.

My daughter is of this generation ( born 1985) and it seemed to me her generation grew up with those sorts of more, to my mind, materialistic values and expectations - a lot more socially conformist than many of my generation, or at least more accepting of established pathways to success. They also came of age in a time of established internet access and digital technology.

I'd say the profile you give of your generation is quite similar to how I would describe my trajectory- but then we are both Gen X who came to adulthood in the 1980's. When I gave up teaching ( in my late 40's) I just couldn't get any breaks in any other area - even though I had many transferable skills.

Yet I still don't see the 'boomers' as being necessarily any more privileged than those that followed.My mother, for example, like most women of her generation had children young and was primarily a housewife. She didn't get to accrue a private pension and when she reached pensionable age her state pension was far less than my father's due to lack of National insurance contributions She had no savings and when she died a couple of years ago, age 75, she was still living in social housing. Many people of her generation are amongst the poorest and least privileged and with no opportunity or way to improve their lot.

She wasn't educated beyong age 16; it wasn't normal for her generation to go to university; she didn't travel the world or have cheap or multiple foreign holidays - in fact the first time she went on a plane was in her late 40's.

Just posting a quote or two from the new Mary Harrington book/article:

''we have wildly underestimated how completely the shift to a digital-first culture is unmooring us — or, at least, some of us — from material reality.''

...

'In Feminism Against Progress, which is published today, I have argued that these revolutions take aim at aspects of embodied human experience that were previously treated as natural and immutable: for example that men and women exist, and can’t change sex; that most are heterosexual, and the point of sex is, ultimately, making more people. It even takes aim at the fact that only women can have babies, or that puberty is “natural”.

Instead, since the contraceptive revolution, “progress” increasingly entails waging war on human nature as such. And this is justified on the utopian basis that it is a fallacy to claim that anything about us is “natural”, and these claims mostly serve the patriarchy, or white supremacy, or some such boogeyman.'

unherd.com/2023/03/why-progress-isnt-feminist/

I think it's worship of the self.

I periodically re-listen to the David Foster Wallace 'This is Water' college commencement speech (2005) as I think it is one if the wisest speeches I've ever heard.
Interesting that the students listening then would be 30 something now.
Just re-listened again and found it held another layer of thoughtful interest for me in seeing what's happened in the world since then..

Here's one of the most powerful sections (but I'd recommend the whole thing if you've not heard it):

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

Hm. One doesn't 'worship' the four noble truths, that's a gross misunderstanding and pretty much the antithesis of Buddhist teachings.

I'm just placemarking to come back to this thread later.

Perhaps doesn't help this is out of context of the whole speech Arabella.
I think he is talking about worship- not in the traditional sense- but in where you put your attention and what you give meaning to in life.
Right now, for example, there seems to be a focus on (worship of- in these terms) the self ('finding your 'true' or 'authentic' self) and identity.
That's how interpreted it, and what I linked this too as I listened to it again.

I'd have imagined it's more than just 'attention', worship? It's elevating and intently paying respects to, in my understanding.

But a minor quibble and I don't mean to derail.

Back on topic - ironically, Buddhist teachings gently lead one to let go of the self entirely, that is foundational to much of what it's all about! No soul, no self.

I'd say that contemporary focus on the 'self' is also of course focus on the individual, setting up more tension between this intently, intensely cultivated 'self' and the 'other'. I guess this is maybe where Zizek's superego points come in, an aspect of his argument I think I've not yet quite grasped.

I took him to be meaning something more like acknowledging as the highest principle, or most real thing, or most true thing, for "worshiping".

I'd also say, I think pretty much every major religion, in one way or another, teaches that focus on self is the way to destruction, and transcendence of self is the way to some kind of fulfillment or contentment. It's seems to me for a long time that what secular society is teaching is pretty much the opposite of that.

I wouldn't be that hard on yourself. Sometimes writers appear to be too clever to understand because their verbosity hides the fact that their ideas actually don't make sense. I think Zizek is absolutely one of those people. He throws out concept after concept without really defining them, so trying to understand him or critique is like nailing down smoke. This article is an example of that.

I'm tempted to say that I think he's full of shit, actually - a leftwing Jordan Peterson - but that would probably be unfair.

Incidentally I think he's got the court decision wrong: the question as I remember it was whether the Tavistock had unlawfully prescribed treatments to patients who were too young to give informed consent. The High Court said it had but the clinic won on appeal.