Woke: A Curious Object of Study

Some thoughts whilst undertaking Professor Eric Kaufmann's unique course at the University of Buckingham.

I realise things have been rather quiet on the publishing front recently, and for that I offer my apologies. One reason has been my involvement with the University of Buckingham’s new course, devised by Professor Eric Kaufmann, on “Woke: The Origins, Dynamics and Implications of an Elite Ideology.” What follows is a creative thought stream on the very idea of studying this thing we are calling “woke,” and my perception of the problem of methodology.

“Woke as an Inter-disciplinary Object of Study.” (Woke as an object we can study ‘objectively’).

We are making what we are calling ‘woke’ the object of study. Woke, this thing, this object, is the focus of our attention. Have we then come to terms with the ‘what’ of woke? What it is?

How is this possible? Is ‘woke’ in a petri dish underneath a microscope in a science laboratory? Certainly not. However, we do believe that we know what it is. We see it, but we cannot quite say it.

Where is this ‘woke,’ then to be found? Is there a place where the ‘woke’ can be had, can be located? Can we creep up on it when it is not looking, when it is unaware? Is it ever aware?

(What is ‘woke’?)

We have learned about cultural socialism, about the sacralisation of disadvantaged groups, about minorities. We have learned about race, gender and sexuality. We know that ‘sex’ should be in there. Its absence opens up a sacrilege. In a ‘woke’ bible somewhere, it may have been written that biological women are social constructs and trans women, which is another way of saying natal men, are the ‘real’ women. Even at being a woman, men are better!

Is there a thinker that enables the requisite uncovering for all of this? A thinker who shows us how we even get to start naming these things, and seeing what can and cannot be said, thought, conceived. We shall return to this.

Woke as learned about in different disciplines.

We are learning about woke. We are learning about woke in different ways, via various means. Inside different academic disciplines. We note that we are ensconced in our learning within Sociology, a senior subset of the so-called Social Sciences. Is it therefore under a microscope in a social science laboratory through which we observe this thing we are calling ‘woke?’

No.

How is ‘Woke’ studied?

Yet if we have by now come to terms with what it is we are studying, how do we reach a settlement upon the how, by that I mean how we will do this. What methodology or archive reveals this particular object of study?

I suggest that as we study on our course ‘woke’ is sensed through many lenses. Some examples:

1.    The aforementioned Sociology – which is a Marxist discipline. Marxism. Are we studying and critiquing cultural Marxism (Socialism) via a subset of Marxism? That seems counter-intuitive.

2.    There are hints of an Anthropology of sorts – formalised people watching. Culture watching. Being.

3.    Philosophy – at times heavily critiqued through Sociology. Being and Time.

4.    Psychology – the inner workings of the mind. Therapeutic. Psychology of Woke and the uses of psychology by woke.

5.    Religion – ritual, worship and sin. In and out.  Discipline and punishment.

6.    Mathematics – if statistics can be embraced by mathematics. No mathematical proofs.

7.    History – we are big on history as we are structuring the plot. Emplotment of the narrative.

8.    There is in addition, the sneaking up upon Media Studies. A modern discipline heavily supported by Marxist thinkers.

Technology’s place

Within the disciplines, there are further sub-domains. There is always hovering - the Question Concerning Technology, and where to put that. Where to ask that (question). We will ask that question in philosophy for sure. Notwithstanding the critique of philosophy and the slight swerve from it, philosophy will connect all of the aforementioned lenses.

The word ‘disciplines’ is etymologically linked to discipleship. One becomes a disciple of the discipline, meaning the ‘subject area’ with its codes and conventions. Its discourses. Its ‘world.’ (And here I evoke both Foucault and Heidegger)

‘Woke,’ we are learning, is a set of attitudes, behaviours. Woke can be found at home in social/ist media. In social/ist distancing it haunts. It is a distancing that masquerades as nearness. It is not confined to one discipleship. It is nowhere.

And everywhere.

Enframing

It is as Stephen Greenblatt a new historicist, remarks, a world of self-fashioning. However, he was writing about renaissance trends. There, and then, the invention of a window on the world, a framework within which to see the world was conceived. Or so we tell ourselves. Enframing.

How do we know when we are in the presence of woke? By the people? The language, the appearance, the feeling? The events, the sounds? Does ‘woke’ then have a subjectivity? We refer to the performative nature of ‘woke.’ Woke is performed for all to see, as if on a stage, at the theatre. It is a world of appearances. A to-be-looked-at-ness. A signalling.

A signal passed at danger. Mind the gap between the train and the no-platformed edge.

Theatre and theory share Greek roots. They are concerned with both contemplation and observation. They require distancing. To be set back, to observe. To be apart from. To have the action mediated. The attempt at objectivity that can never in truth be achieved.

Theatre offers a narrative, a story. A window upon a world. This is additionally something done within the discipleship of History. Emplotment is what we are doing with our object of study. We are telling a story. We em-plot our story of ‘woke.’ It is drama! Through drama, we undertake to explain the ‘why’ of ‘woke.’

Are we outside looking in? Looking in on ‘woke?’ or out at it? Objectifying. Othering.

Questioning builds a way. Ein Weg. A pathway. A pathway comes into being when many have walked the path. You join in with their long-gone footsteps. You join in with a constructed tradition. A tradition of treading. A tread-ition.

No amount of quantifying information tells us about ‘woke,’ although we try to do it like that because we imagine a grounding.

It appears as though we are working through an inter-discipleship of sorts. It concerns how the world is and how things are for us. And no singular discipleship fully provides this. The object of our study, this thing we are calling ‘woke’ is not in a vacuum. It is stitched into our world. It may be part of a world, but it is not part of the earth. There is no real ground for this thing, this attitude we are calling ‘woke.’

Its pathways are not the paths of peace. They are the paths that are covered over, that conceal.

Here is a question.

Why did wokery escalate when the deadliest disease known to man stalked the land with its frightening, infecting and culling? The sacred trinity of race, sexuality and trans seemed to balloon in visibility. You would surely expect its retreat.

If what they were claiming were true.

If the mediated world presented by the powers-that-be had been empirically correct, with that correspondence theatre of truth, might our priorities have been well and truly driven against wokery? Might not these woke people have turned to real priorities? Surely their very survival was at stake?

If what they were claiming were true.

If the discipleship of science, with its graphs, charts and dependable white coated disciples was correct, was it the case that it was also ‘true?’ Did the sum, the summing, the ratio, the rational, der Rechnung (the reckoning), did it all compute? Add up? Did it add up to truth?

Perhaps it was ‘woke’ itself that was the deadliest dis-ease. The putting down and geological layering of unease as some lives were said to matter, and by implication, others did not. The conspicuous demonstration of folly was the very thing that unconcealed the lack of truth in all its correctness, that is to say, its political correctness.

In the midst of a deadly plague, people were not in themselves frightened until they were told to be. What they were frightened by was the mediation of fright. Fright and fear stalked the land, and yet the dead were not being brought out in great piles in the streets. (Heck, there were not even hazardous waste bins for mountains of personal protective costumes and surgical splashguards!) In the midst of this operational theatre, little was done to assist those that succumbed.

Politicians and monarchs prescribed medical procedures for healthy people whilst ignoring the plights of those that actually became ill. Trained medics were threatened to comply with their ‘scripts.’ Only one particular illness was permitted any recognition, where it was conjured into being by a polymerase chain reaction mechanism that ratcheted up the cycles to ensure that it could be said to be-there. (Da-sein)

There was a protocol. If you became dis-eased, you were just left. And when (if) you could cope no longer, suitable remedies were expressly forbidden to you. A lifetime of enlightened Enlightenment rational thought and science was thus jettisoned. Jettisoned on the whim of politicians and their friends.

Fear came upon the people via screens and presentations and theatrical windows on a world. Through graphs and charts and through the cultural construction of a brand new ‘built back better’ world. A set of discourses where things can be made correct but not true. A thing can appear as truth appears, almost like wearing a mask that has an appearance of truth. Like a trans woman who ‘passes,’ say. But this may not be, in actuality, true. Where things mean what I say they mean, neither more nor less. Where things are true by force of will.

In the midst of all this confected chaos, wokery became strengthened and enlarged as was its wont. Woke had landed in a petri dish the size of an elephant in the room, with permeable membranes. This was because it was part of the politically correct discourse. Along with social/ist distancing and social/ist media. Mediation multiplied woke by the highest of mathematical powers.

The cult provided a wonderful opportunity!

Wokery escalated because the ill-at-ease (dis-ease) project was itself an exercise in wokery. What else could it have been? All of the hallmarks were present, public genuflection, virtue signalling, along with narratives of oppressors and oppressed, good and bad and the hankering for state controls for everything. The righteous narratives of where to stand, the cancellation of basic norms, the pretence of care masking the enrichment of the rich, the utter upending of reality and the silencing of questions. Demons demonised. Demonetized.

And so Woke is the object of our study. We are its spectators, as in the Greek theatai, watching, observing. Arendt tells us that to look upon the spectacle is to forego the opportunity to participate. It is the divorce between doing and understanding. Judgement is only possible when we can see the whole from our vantage point. This is interesting.

Woke cannot be placed in a Petri dish. You cannot place a discourse or a set of attitudes into a petri dish. You cannot place western culture into a petri dish. Oh, hang on. Thanks to Herr Petri, we have a curious analogy. We are not so much growing cultures as watching culture being upended. Culture is now mediated out of existence. Distanced.

During the state of exception woke proliferated. We do not know it through graphs and charts (although these can be really useful). We know it through witnessing, experiencing its cruelty, its lies and its regression. Woke has inordinate power. We know this because we are seeing it play out in cancellations and sackings. In ruinations and proxy executions. It plays out in out and out lies, in selective decolonising, in new legislation over what you can say, over what you can think. Over whom (or what) you can be.

We are seeing woke in the trans debates concerning the Being, existence itself, what it means to be human, there-being. Dasein. The discourse of trans opens up the world of knowledge, power and language. The attempt to reconfigure reality through language is not something done by woke postmodernists. It is (supposedly) postmodernist Foucault who enables us to see this play out.

Truth is not something made by force of will. Truth is what is disclosed to us via experience and paying attention. Try as they might, with all of their might, with every sinew stretched and taut. No muscle of any magnitude can make lies into actual truth.

There are many thinkers that help us untie this tangled knot, this warped WEF-t.

Foucault is one. And we can be selective, not everything about his thought is palatable. However, his observations about power and knowledge can help us understand the woke stranglehold on power and their choking of knowledge. He helps us see how they have created their new discourse, that is to say, a new structure of knowledge and communication. He helps us see how woke’s structured stranglehold shapes what can and cannot be said, the new social practices that take place under woke, and how ideologies are constructed and propagated. He helps us see how new discourses are pushed to create new ‘norms’ and standards of behaviour. Think Tavistock here. And, how resistance to these things is possible.

Moreover, he is a master at how the medical profession gets to objectify and interpret the body. No, this is not against science. It is about the abuse of science and the abuse of the human. This is the recognition of the trance of the trans where bodies can be altered to fit woke pride, desires, norms and ideologies.

And there is Heidegger, with Being and Time. Being, in all aspects is what one does not is. Thus, a person is one who is linked to other beings in a world of shared understanding. You cannot be a person without connections with and to others. Therefore, your personhood as such is not an object for observation, nor is it the sum of its categories such as race, sex, social class and so on. This propensity for the objectification of personhood covers up a person’s potentiality of being, his possibilities for actualisation. We may have certain characteristics as humans, but we choose, from a range of possibilities, our personhoods. This sense of personhood is not one associated with a soul or some inner self, but one who exists in a world of relationships.

We are, in a sense; what we do, our activities, choices and projects. These activities are the results of choices made along the way, on a path, ein Weg, of being towards death. In the world of woke however, the human self is an object, a thing with categories (race, sex, class) rather than a potentiality for action and thought.

Woke likes to homogenise thought.

The Question Concerning Technology

Woke’s existence is a mediated one, not an authentic one. This mediation is a technological thing, but it is also a distanced thing. It is a means of avoidance of being.

It exists in its ‘enframing’ –in social-ist media platforms driven by algorithms; we now see the reduction of complexities to mere simplifications and soundbites. We are limiting authentic engagement with the world and with others. Wokery enframes and simplifies. Wokery is driven by anti-social media, unsocial media.

Woke’s bodies are thus regarded as a collection of parts to enhance, diminish or hack off at will. Technology can sometimes literally change us.

I think about the Petri dish. Where they grow cultures. Where cultures are observed. It was the daughter of one Petri, Elfride, that was to marry Martin Heidegger, with his focus on Being, authenticity, technology and the understanding that all is interpretation. No. You cannot study ‘woke’ in a petri dish. It is and always has been interpretation. And the questioning that builds a way, ein Weg, a joining with many ‘treadings’ in a tread-ition.

Thank you for reading! Feel free to comment and share.

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