I don't know what I think about that! Quite the stream of consciousness! The connection you make between the covid years and woke is interesting - I think the whole charade of Deadly Pandemic was an (supposedly) educated middle-class day dream. Wokedom is the same thing - idle, educated, wealthy offspring of educated, wealthy Boomer/post Boomer white-collar workers creating exciting worlds of smoke and mirrors for themselves. The Waitrose shelf-stackers had no time for supposed plagues or anxiety-ridden adolescents who fancy pretending to be the opposite sex. They were too busy providing the sustenance for the idle day-dreamers. The Woke need to be ignored not studied!
Thank you for your comments! I think I wanted to explore (and critique) the idea that you can take this phenomenon and analyse it bracketed off from other significant contexts. Yes, this wokery has been gestating for some time, but I see that the great reset agenda has given it immense traction. Hence my ideas that if the 'virus' was as terrible as they said it was, we would not be wasting time on woke shibboleths. The fact that these things became magnified instead is a massive giveaway to their nefarious agenda. I learned a lot on the course, but this tendency to bracket off and examine 'woke' in the way (some) social sciences scholars do raises questions for me. It is a learning curve to be sure, I am really glad I did the course as it has got me thinking about how we know things and what the problems are for knowing and conveying the truth of things. These earnest young things cancelling people in the name of 'social justice' are being used by very bad actors in my view.
Thanks for the food for thought which I have filed together with some other reviews of Taboo, which is arriving next week. I share your concerns about how you pin down what Woke is (having written about it myself at an amateur level) and am intrigued by the links you make with Covid, Foucault and Heidegger.
Thank you for your thoughtful remarks. I look forward to receiving (what I hope will be a signed) copy of Taboo very soon! Eric Kaufmann has produced a very significant body of research and the course was an MA's worth of material. I am really glad that it took it! The seminars were lively, and many of the participants keenly devised extra curricular work, reading the set texts together, discussions and doing presentations. This writing came out of my own preparation for the presentations (we did them online to each other, nothing to do with Eric). I originally set this work aside to do something else, but thought it might be worth putting out as a Substack piece. It was intended as a creative critical engagement with some of Eric's approaches. He is a social science scholar after all.
My remarks cut against some of Eric's approaches in that I do not see postmodernism as such to be the enemy, rather, I understand it as attempting to reach truths in a deeper way (with an insistence on contexts). I began to think about the contexts of 'woke' and that in my view you cannot divorce it from the past four years, nor can you do away with the WEF great reset in any analysis of it. If what we were being told (since 2020) was true in reality, people would have acted differently. But it ('woke') is part of the WEF/UN/EU conglomerate's plan for a one world government - and worse. It is my view that critical theory is the thing everyone is so animated about, not postmodernism as such. I have to thank Eric for bringing a lot of material my way that I would not have had sight of ordinarily. It really was a stimulating course, one I am still processing!
I don't know what I think about that! Quite the stream of consciousness! The connection you make between the covid years and woke is interesting - I think the whole charade of Deadly Pandemic was an (supposedly) educated middle-class day dream. Wokedom is the same thing - idle, educated, wealthy offspring of educated, wealthy Boomer/post Boomer white-collar workers creating exciting worlds of smoke and mirrors for themselves. The Waitrose shelf-stackers had no time for supposed plagues or anxiety-ridden adolescents who fancy pretending to be the opposite sex. They were too busy providing the sustenance for the idle day-dreamers. The Woke need to be ignored not studied!
Thank you for your comments! I think I wanted to explore (and critique) the idea that you can take this phenomenon and analyse it bracketed off from other significant contexts. Yes, this wokery has been gestating for some time, but I see that the great reset agenda has given it immense traction. Hence my ideas that if the 'virus' was as terrible as they said it was, we would not be wasting time on woke shibboleths. The fact that these things became magnified instead is a massive giveaway to their nefarious agenda. I learned a lot on the course, but this tendency to bracket off and examine 'woke' in the way (some) social sciences scholars do raises questions for me. It is a learning curve to be sure, I am really glad I did the course as it has got me thinking about how we know things and what the problems are for knowing and conveying the truth of things. These earnest young things cancelling people in the name of 'social justice' are being used by very bad actors in my view.
Thanks for the food for thought which I have filed together with some other reviews of Taboo, which is arriving next week. I share your concerns about how you pin down what Woke is (having written about it myself at an amateur level) and am intrigued by the links you make with Covid, Foucault and Heidegger.
Thank you for your thoughtful remarks. I look forward to receiving (what I hope will be a signed) copy of Taboo very soon! Eric Kaufmann has produced a very significant body of research and the course was an MA's worth of material. I am really glad that it took it! The seminars were lively, and many of the participants keenly devised extra curricular work, reading the set texts together, discussions and doing presentations. This writing came out of my own preparation for the presentations (we did them online to each other, nothing to do with Eric). I originally set this work aside to do something else, but thought it might be worth putting out as a Substack piece. It was intended as a creative critical engagement with some of Eric's approaches. He is a social science scholar after all.
My remarks cut against some of Eric's approaches in that I do not see postmodernism as such to be the enemy, rather, I understand it as attempting to reach truths in a deeper way (with an insistence on contexts). I began to think about the contexts of 'woke' and that in my view you cannot divorce it from the past four years, nor can you do away with the WEF great reset in any analysis of it. If what we were being told (since 2020) was true in reality, people would have acted differently. But it ('woke') is part of the WEF/UN/EU conglomerate's plan for a one world government - and worse. It is my view that critical theory is the thing everyone is so animated about, not postmodernism as such. I have to thank Eric for bringing a lot of material my way that I would not have had sight of ordinarily. It really was a stimulating course, one I am still processing!