Was lobotomy idiotic?
— Joshs

Yes. Have you read much about the advent of transitioning pre-pubescent people? — frank

Yes. Lobotomies were performed in the U.S. for 40 years, sanctioned by all the proper scientific authorities. What’s the point of calling them idiots? Do you call yourself an idiot whenever you agree to a medical procedure which has been approved for 40 years, because you can’t know in advance which ones will eventually be discredited, just as lobotomy was.

Of course the difference between trans therapy and lobotomy was than the policies were rushed into place before the chance for any society-wide debate. Did this happen because of the decisions of idiots, or because this commonly happens when a new conception appears on the scene which blurs the lines between the medical, the psychological, the sociological and the religious and results in polarizing political debates which draw in the medical establishment when they are not prepared to navigate the political minefield.

↪Joshs That has nothing much to do with me. What I'm telling you is they are not synonymous (which is an empirical fact. Wokists do not play out hte tenets of legitimate critical theory. They play dress-up to justify shitty, incoherent moral points of view (on my view)). You can say that you think their actions are justified under CRT and Ill say no, they expressly are not. I'm not personally interested in that debate because it is clear to anyone who has a clue about CRT that things like BLM (2019-2021 type of BLM action, anyhow) were not part of the agenda. We don't need some theoretical approach to notice this. I assume you've read the basic texts. There is no debate here.

If, on the other hand, you are saying that the basis for what's called wokism is something legitimate, so we should trying to tease out what that is - yes, but that has nothing to do with understanding those wokist actors. — AmadeusD

Maybe we can find something to agree on here. Let me say that there are a lot of crazy-ass wokist actions I’m not in a position to attach a CT pedigree to. But I will say that at least one Critical theorist, Theodore Adorno, espoused some positions that on their own merit are a bit crazy-assed, and whose interpretation by activists would predictably lead to the kinds of trouble we’ve been seeing.
So let me propose the following scenario: those wokists following crazy-assed doctrines fall to the wayside, and a new wokist moment arises based closely on the CT ideas of Habermas. No more pitting of power against power. Instead an emphasis on communicative rationality and hermeneutic consensus-building. Does this sound like a palatable scenario to you?

At this point progress means waking up to how idiotic we were. — frank

Was lobotomy idiotic?

Appeals to status seeking can be merely descriptive as well. It doesn't seem they are prima facie wrong. If they were categorically off-base, then it would also be the case that segregationists and white nationalists cannot be acting to defend their own status and interests. Yet that is, quite explicitly, what they claim and understand themselves to be doing. In their newer forms, they just claim that everyone else is also doing the same thing, covertly or not, and that they're at least honest about it. However, earlier defenders of segregation were much more covert about their ends, and yet I hardly think we can avoid the conclusion that these too were also partly motivated by defending their status and control over resources. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Concepts like status, self-interest, power and control can inform diametrically opposed positions depending on how the subjectivity, or ‘self’, they refer back to is understood. If we start from the self as homo economicus, a Hobbesian figure the attainment of whose desires need not have any connection with the desires of others, then we either settle for a Darwinian Capitalism or find a way to insert into this self an ethical conscience which we will not always be able to depend on. If instead we see the self not as an entity but as a process of unification, self as self-consistency, and desire as oriented toward anticipatory sense-making ( We don’t desire things, we desire coherence of intelligibility), then there is no i weren’t slot between the needs of my own ‘self’ and the needs of other selves. The unethical is then not a result of bad conscience but a failure of intelligibility. The unassimilable Other is found wherever injustice occurs (slavery, genocide).

Second, I think I'm the only one who mentioned fascism and the idea (Milbank's, although the seeds can arguably be found in Dostoevsky) is that the logical conclusion of the ontologies of violence is fascism. That is, when there is no transcendent order of peace, goodness, or truth, instead only contingent systems of power, difference, and conflict—when truth, law, and morality are not a participation in Logos, but are rather constructed through acts of force (e.g., discourse, statecraft, capital, language games)—then violence is original, and there can be no counter-violence which truly transcends violence. There is only ever assertion over and against counter-assertion, will to power against will to power (plus or minus some post hoc rationalization, which is itself merely another assertion of value). This is precisely the spiritual logic of fascism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have argued that the doctrine of nihilistic will to power is not a plausible explanation for the moral absolutism characteristic of wokism. Such absolutism can only justify itself on the basis of a realist-idealist grounding of some sort, which happens to be the stock and traded of Critical theory. I suggested in another post that the most noxious totalitarian tendencies of wokism can be moderated or even eliminated as more activists discover Habermas’s hermeneutical, communicative brand of Critical Theory and begin to leave behind the violently oppositional language of folks like Adorno, Fanon and Gramsci.

As for Woke becoming the dominant ideology the way Neoliberalism has been in 50 years, in 50 years China and India will be the world's largest economies. The EU in particular is on a growth trajectory to become increasingly irrelevant, and the war in Ukraine has shown that it seems likely to continue to underperform its economic standing in both hard and soft power. It would take a radical sea change for these ideologies to be allowed to get anywhere in China, even if they were popular there (whereas they are popularly ridiculed on Chinese social media). I don't think India will prove exceptionally fertile ground either. Whereas sub-Saharan Africa will be to that epoch what Southeast Asia was to the 90s-2020s, the main target for new investment and consumer markets, and there are a lot of reasons to suspect Woke would need to be radically transformed to have an appeal there too. I'm just not sure that it will make sense in these settings, and a look at how Woke analogs have developed in Japan and Korea might be a good indicator here. In particular, the Sexual Revolution seems key to Woke, and yet this is probably the number one area where thought indigenous to the developing world has said: "no thanks," and "please stop trying to force this on us." — Count Timothy von Icarus

When I said the philosophical underpinning of wokism would be mainstream in 50 years, I didn’t mean necessarily in China and India. China would first have to find a way to institute representative government. However, one can use the popularity of Gay Pride parades around the world as a measure of the rapidity with which new social
movements spread internationally. The recent one in Budapest even served as an anti-fascist protest.

I think the problem is that the interests and needs of young trans people was created by woke culture. — frank

Is that any different than the interests and needs of gay people being created by gay culture? Onencould apply a Foucaultian genealogical analysis and trace concepts of sexuality to the formation and transformation of discursive systems. When did the Western concept of homosexuality emerge? When and how did it change to gayness, and then Queerness?

The question is: was this catastrophe just the cost of progress? Or is it a sign of something gravely wrong under the hood of wokism? — frank

Lobotomy was once a thing. But it led to progress. After all, we still use ECT.

Do you think there is something internal to Critical Theory that would adjudicate between these many divergent views? Can CT tell us whether Rorty or Adorno or Habermas is the better way? Or is indeterminacy inherent to CT, and we will always need to wait for something even better, and/or always return to something left unfinished? — Fire Ologist

My belief is that to critique CT from the vantage of Rorty, Deleuze or Derrida one must step outside of it in the direction of an alternative stance. Their questioning won’t make sense from within the confines of Frankfurt school CT. But I do think there is reason to hope that the most noxious totalitarian tendencies of wokism can be moderated or even eliminated as more activists discover Habermas’s hermeneutical, communicative brand of CT and begin to leave behind the violently oppositional language of folks like Adorno, Fanon and Gramsci.

As someone who began studying for his doctorate in Paris in 1989, Barron knows a fair bit about figures like Foucault and Derrida. — Leontiskos

Based on the video, I would say he knows next to nothing about them, but in order to demonstrate this, I would have to locate a more extended text of his on the subject and compare through it line for line with actual quotes from the authora.

As someone who began studying for his doctorate in Paris in 1989, Barron knows a fair bit about figures like Foucault and Derrida. — Leontiskos

Based on the video, I would say he knows next to nothing about them, but in order to demonstrate this, I would have to locate a more extended text of his on the subject and compare through it line for line with actual quotes from the authora.

Critical theorists and realists are distinct groups, but there is overlap between some critical approaches and a philosophical position known as critical realism. In general, most critical theorists are not realists in the traditional philosophical sense—especially within the Frankfurt School tradition and related approaches, which often critique the very idea of objective reality and emphasize the role of social constructions and power in shaping what counts as "truth"...
— Perplexity AI

So my intimation that your claim is highly inaccurate is now stronger. Note too that the folks on TPF who gravitate towards Critical theory generally do not consider themselves realists. — Leontiskos

Run Adorno through Perplexity. I ran him through ChatGPT and found this:

“Postmodern relativism (as seen in thinkers like Lyotard or some interpretations of Foucault) often claims that truth, meaning, and values are socially constructed, contingent, and plural, with no overarching meta-narratives or objective standpoint. Adorno rejects this kind of relativism. He believes that there is an objective world and that truth matters, but that our conceptual frameworks and societal structures distort our access to it.

Habermas, a member of the Frankfurt school born a generation later than the original group, endorsed a hermeneutic approach influenced by American Pragmatism. According to ChatGPT:

“Habermas does not endorse naïve or metaphysical realism (the idea that we have direct access to objective truths independent of any interpretive framework). Like many post-Kantian thinkers, he acknowledges the linguistic and intersubjective mediation of knowledge and meaning. In this sense, Habermas shares some insights with postmodern and pragmatist thinkers: all understanding is mediated, contingent, and historically situated. Despite this, Habermas explicitly and repeatedly rejected postmodern relativism, particularly as found in the works of Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault (at least in his earlier interpretations of them).He argued that postmodernism undermines the possibility of rational critique, normativity, and consensus, leading to epistemic and moral relativism—which he viewed as self-defeating and politically dangerous.”

The points I’m trying to make concerning Crrical theory are twofold. First, that regardless of how unconventional their realism was, they should not be in danger of being accused of an ‘anything goes’ relativism. Instead , they beleive that material and social formations are grounded i. truth , and truth is grounded in metaphysical certainties. Rorty had endless debates with his friend Habermas ( one of which I attended) over the latter’s insistence on Kantian rational norms. My second point is that, to the extent that wokists draw form critical theory, their moral absolutism gets its justification from theblatter’s realist stance.

Deconstruction shows what continues to bind together groups on either side of an oppositional divide, so one can never simply overcome what one opposes.
— Joshs

Now apply that to your post, because you transgress this principle multiple times. You say, for example, that Derrida was critical of Marxism and therefore Marxism cannot be used to explain his thought. On the contrary, a critic of Marxism is by that very fact informed by Marxism - especially one who holds that one can never simply overcome what one opposes. — Leontiskos

Congratulations. You have just summarized a a central feature of deconstructive reading. it can one be ‘informed by’ and at the same time move in a wholly other direction? Derrida say yes. Even repetition of the identical meaning
returns the same sense differently. Absolutely other but at the same time informed by what it differs from.

critical theory moves away from Cartesianism by showing the subject to be formed through structures of bodily, material and social interactions. Postmodernists like Derrida and Foucault go much further, making the subject nothing but an effect of these worldly interactions.
— Joshs

I just wonder why this process which sounds like it should be neutral as to outcome always yields the same political conclusions. Liberal wokism is the only result of postmodernism - how is such uniformity of outcome possible given such undefined unformed clay as “bodily, material and social interactions.” Why is there no legitimate facist dictator, but there can be a legitimate woke pontificator? — Fire Ologist

As I mentioned earlier, wokism, to the extent that it can be connected with Critical theory, is realist in outlook. So it shouldn’t be surprising that it is not neutral concerning what is real and true with respect to material or political structures. The situation is quite different for post-realist postmodern writers such as Foucault and Derrida. Unlike wokists, they do not point moralistic fingers at those who fail to take the ‘right’ course, and do not articulate social and political change via a legitimate/illegitimate binary.

There’s a lot that needs to be absorbed in order to situate the various positions within and after wokism. For instance, among Critical theorists, why does Habermas reject Adorno’s negative dialectical realism in favor of a positive hermeneutic model of communicative action? Why does Rorty believe that Habermas’s reliance on Kantian categorical norms of rationality is too metaphysical? Why does Deleuze attack Rorty’s pragmatism as platonic dogmatism? Which of these positions is most or least compatible with the moralistic blamefulness of wokism?

reform of wokist excesses can take place within the bounds of these philosophical ground
— Joshs

They can't, it appears. Theory isn't particularly of any moment here — AmadeusD

What if that theory appreciates, as Antony appears to, that ‘rationality’ can’t be separated from what’s being dichotomously treated as merely “feeling -based’ and emotional? Let’s say one articulates what arises incipiently in the guise of an intuitive feeling into a system of logically coherent assertions amenable in principle to empirical test. How far does that articulatory effort go toward alleviating the need to do what Antony is prescribing, making oneself responsible for stepping outside of one’s system of rationality in order to have the chance of glimpsing another’s affective-rational system from their own perspective? Or should one only be responsible for anchoring discourse to some overarching meta-rational facts of the matter?

the problem with Nietzsche's philosophy is that it is inconsistent here IMO. If the 'highest form of life' is a life where we impose our values and there is no critierion in which we distinguish, in a non-arbitrary manner what is the best way to 'affirm life' then a 'life affirming' stance is no 'better' than a 'life denying' one, as both are said to be manifestations of the 'will to power'. Why should a manifestion of the will to power be better than another if there aren't criteria to tell which is better? In other words, I do not see in Nietzsche's philosophy enough convincing arguments for avoiding a compeletely arbitrary stance of life where absolutely any stance is no better or worse than any other. — boundless

We always have criteria for the best way to affirm life, but those criteria come from within the contingently produced perspectives we create. Within a value system we inhabit for a period of time, perhaps our whole lives, that stance is clearly better than the alternatives. When we transition from one perspectival valuative system to an another, our criteria change along with it.

To assume that one could impose a criterion for the goodness of a value system, the ‘best way’ to affirm life, from outside of all contingent perspectives, a god’s- eye view, view from nowhere or sideways on, is to impose a formula which is meaningless. In Nietzsche’s sense such aesthetic ideals are the definition of nihilism. And given the fact that most of the suffering in this world comes at the hands of those who act on behalf of supposedly perspective-free principles and criteria of truth and righteousness, it may be time to think differently.

0. Suffering is not the problem to solve, but the meaninglessness of it.
1. Aesthetic justification: “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”
2. The Will to Power. Suffering acquires its meaning through overcoming it. — kirillov

Just to clarify, for Nietzsche suffering is necessary because life is eternal , creative becoming, and suffering is that phase of becoming in which something must be negated in order to move onto a fresh, transformed meaningful perspective on the world. This cycle is endless, and suffering plays a substantive and positive role in the heightening growth of experience.

That the world's "Value lies in our interpretation (- that somewhere else other interpretations than merely human ones may be possible -); that previous interpretations have been perspectival appraisals by means of which we preserve ourselves in life, that is, in the will to power and
to the growth of power; that every heightening of man brings with it an overcoming of narrower interpretations; that every increase in strength and expansion of power opens up new perspectives and demands a belief
in new horizons - this runs though my writings. The world which matters to us is false, i.e., is not a fact but a fictional elaboration and filling out of a meagre store of observations; it is 'in flux', as something becoming, as a
constantly shifting falsity that never gets any nearer to truth, for - there is no 'truth'.

The 'meaninglessness of what happens': belief in this results from an insight into the falseness of previous interpretations, a generalisation of weakness and despondency - it's not a necessary belief.

I think you may be missing a trick wihch is implicit in all our comments here... These are not synonymous. At all. — AmadeusD

Then you’ll need to inform Bishop Barron of your tricks, because apparently he hasn’t gotten the memo. It’s clear from the video that he believes Critical theory is, if not synonymous with, then the basis of wokism. He specifically states that Critical theory has expressed itself as wokism (24:54). If what is implicit in “all your comments” is something contrary to this, then I’m not sure why Leonstikos directed me to this video.

I’m watching the Bishop Barron video. The first factual error I noticed is that he claims Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault belong to the Frankfurt school of critical theory (he says Derrida is the patron saint of critical theory) , which is not true. Instead, they were critical of Marxism and the Frankfurt school. Deconstruction overturns the assumptions of Marxism. The second one is where he says that critical theory privileges the subject over the body in a radicalization of Descartes. On the contrary, critical theory moves away from Cartesianism by showing the subject to be formed through structures of bodily, material and social interactions. Postmodernists like Derrida and Foucault go much further, making the subject nothing but an effect of these worldly interactions. Barron also claims that gender theory privileges subjectivity over the body, as when someone claims that they were born in the wrong body. But at least some within the transgender community accept the biologically-based theory that psychological gender is a function of brain ‘wiring’ that one is born with. Furthermore, as someone who is apparently so concerned about protecting the truths concerning the body, Barron should know that many of today’s leading theorists associated with the new synthesis approach to evolutionary biology as well as embodied approaches to cognitive science are sympathetic to critical theory.


Barron also argues that Critical theory is radically relativistic. It isn’t. It adheres to a form of realism and as a result believes in the notion of social progress and emancipation. Only postmodern writers like Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida reject realism and grand narratives of emancipation, but wokism embraces these narratives and their accompanying moralism.

Barron blames Derrida’s use of binary oppositions for the sorts of black and white oppositions used by wokists (oppressor/oppressed, master/slave, privileged/marginalized), but unlike in Crrical theory, Derrida’s binaries are not dialectical oppositions. Deconstruction shows what continues to bind together groups on either side of an oppositional divide, so one can never simply overcome what one opposes.
Finally, he asserts that for Critical theory power is the central principle of society, and that it supersedes truth (such as that 2+2=4). But there is no central tenet of wokism arguing that 2+2 can equal anything we want it to (in spite of a handful of wokists who may or may not have made that claim), because critical theorists are realists, not radical relativists.

Left and right with Andrew Breitbart:
https://youtu.be/ftZfdrqVpOk?si=2ZxxQ3vVX16y4xwW

But I think wokeness is correctly construed as wanting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. — Leontiskos

And I think the superficial characterizations of the grounding presuppositions of wokeness i’m seeing in this thread are also wanting to throw out the baby with the bath water. And what is the baby? if one remains at the surface level of ‘things wokists do that annoy us’, the baby is nothing but these arbitrary and wrongheaded actions. In the hands of the better journalists delving into this socio-political phenomenon, the baby is a spectrum of philosophical positions, bookended on the right by Hegel and on the left by 1960’s French thinkers like Foucault. Throwing out the baby then means that one refuses to accept that reform of wokist excesses can take place within the bounds of these philosophical grounds, that these philosophies were unnecessary in the first place given that there are already perfectly workable, intellectually superior ethico-political frameworks to guide action. Much of the critique Ive read so far ranges from ad hominem attack on character flaws in the activists ( status seeking) to historical regressiveness ( it’s a return to fascist thinking or a twisted variant of Romanticism.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that wokism’s roots contribute nothing innovative or valuable to the canons of philosophical thought. Arent development and innovation qualities to be expected of political thinking? Doesn’t progress in thinking about justice move in continuous cycles from counterculture to mainstream culture? Isnt it a sign of progress that what was once deemed
socially acceptable is now considered cruel and unnecessary? And if so, what contemporary counterculture would you point to as superior to wokism? Or are we supposed to rely on tradition rather than evolutionary transformation in considering how to think about justice?

A terrible line has been crossed when transgression is valued for transgression's sake, but I want to say that the precursor is the undervaluation of the conservative instinct, or the status quo, or tradition (or whatever else one wants to call it). I don't think that line ever gets crossed without this preliminary — Leontiskos

Antony’s contributions to this thread I think exemplify the kind of thinking that doesn’t throw the baby out, but instead occupies a position (later Wittgenstein) within the philosophical spectrum that includes wokism, from which vantage he can reform and moderate its excesses.

I’ve read only one work by Brassier on Deleuze, in ‘A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy’, so I’m not familiar with his overall perspective on Deleuze. However, I read a few works by Brian Massumi, who is an affect theorist — Number2018

Have you read John Protevi’s work on political affect?

Protevi, J.: and Christian Helge Peters. (2017). Affective Ideology and Trump's Popularity. http://www.protevi.com/john/TrumpAffect

These are beliefs and activities that seek to confer a certain status and halo upon those that express them, while damaging those who they claim to support — NOS4A2

You’ll never get anywhere in understanding the origin or purpose of these beliefs by dismissing them as personality defects (status-seeking on the part of the economically privileged). If I introduced you to non-affluent woke activists who have sacrificed personally for the sake of their social justice aims would you try to poke holes in their sincerity, or make an effort to accept their ethical intent and try to understand why they think their approach is superior to more conservative politics?

However, I disagree with your claim that Foucault and Deleuze do not offer a full-scale critique of affect. Your statement that “the analyses of Foucault and Deleuze are not critiques of affect per se, but of how affect is disciplined and made legible—subsumed into power/knowledge formations” is only partially accurate. While insightful, it risks downplaying the ontological commitments both thinkers make toward affect and desire.Foucault, for instance, interrogates the bodily, emotional, and relational dimensions of power. Power, in his view, does not merely repress; it incites, induces, and seduces. His concept of the microphysics of power within disciplinary regimes becomes a theory of affective modulation. His method reveals how affect is produced, channeled, and governed. In this sense, his theory of power becomes a philosophy of affect, in the sense that is thoroughly conditioned by and entangled with power relations. — Number2018

You mentioned Ray Brassier as one interpreter you read Deleuze through. His treatment of Deleuze has been described as realist, rationalist, and deflationary, and he appears to embrace an eliminative scientific realism beyond human experience (He was considered one of the founders of speculative realism, although he disavows this movement now). Do you think this is a fair assessment of Brassier, and would you say that you are in general agreement concerning his reading of Deleuze, and his philosophical outlook in general? I ask this because it would help clarify for me where you’re coming from with respect not only to Deleuze but to Foucault, especially concerning the possibility and sense of a critique of affect. As you know, there are anti-realist, or if you prefer, ‘radically relativist’ postmodern readings of Deleuze and Foucault which strongly disagree with Brassier’s take on Deleuze.

What the Civil Rights Movement in the US fought for or labour laws in my view isn't anything to do with woke or wokeism. Just as isn't the shortly lived protests against Israel's actions in Gaza. The proponents of DEI surely might see them as the continuation or those that continue to further these past political struggles, but in fact they are not — ssu

Certainly Marxism and post-colonialism were elements of 60’s activism, but It tends to be the psycho-social aspects of wokism that some surviving participants of 1960’s activism object to. The focus on the power of language and material structural aspects of social practices to create and sustain implicit bias derives from Critical theoretic and poststructuralist sources. Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse was the intellectual darling of the 60’s Berkeley intelllectual scene, but didnt have an influence on the theoretical wing of the civil rights movement. Writers like Foucault were writing in the 1960’s but their work didn’t make its way into the playbook U.S. political activists until at least the 1980’s. While 60’s figures like Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky are avid supporters of the pro-Palestinian cause, the anti-zionism associated with it is anathema to some 60’s social justice veterans, and I suggest this may be due to the ‘wokist’ belief that even if one is a well-meaning zionist who espouses equal rights for all citizens of Israel, nonetheless one comes up against one’s own ineradicable implicit bias owing to the religious or cultural nationalism zionism enacts.

It really didn’t seem to last very long. There was a backlash, university administrators took control and protected free speech, due process became a thing again. I think what has happened is that what started as an active policing of speech has morphed into peer pressure. If one cares about and identifies with the perspectives of those who are active within a ‘woke’ community, then one will find oneself making an effort to be conscious of such things as the use of pronouns. Ultimately, it’s positive persuasion rather than threats which cause a movement to spread. Acceptance of gays by mainstream culture resulted from the discovery made by people around the world that their own parent, child or co -worker was gay, not by lecturing from liberals.

About 10 years ago the U.S. news media was filled with stories about how the me-too movement ruined the careers of celebrities like Senator Al Franken and tv journalist Charlie Rose. In academia, professors were fired over the innocent use of words like ‘spook’. It seemed as though administrators were letting a small group of students dictate policy based on arbitrary grievances and the policing of language. Invited speakers were uninvited or prevented from speaking based on their conservative views. Meanwhile, trigger warnings and safe spaces protected students from even the suggestion of uncomfortable ideas, or ‘micro aggressions’.

What was new about wokism was that a huge domain of speech suddenly became the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater.

I'm not saying there aren't issues, but what I’m looking for are concrete, institutionalised examples, something with real substance, that's meaningfully different from, say, right-wing identity politics where people view all of life through the lens of gun ownership, MAGA, or Christian nationalism, where ridicule and debate are also used to silence dissent. We know this group censors libraries, for instance. — Tom Storm

You mean examples where people got hurt , had careers ended, etc, because they were on the wrong end of wokist politics?

I've wondered about this myself. Simple question: do you think wokism is a significant and growing issue in society? — Tom Storm

Well, ssu pointed out that wokism tends to be used by those hostile to practices they associate it with, so right from the start the term defines behaviors deemed problematic. But I think what makes them problematic is fascinating. If you introduce a new way of thinking about social and political interactions which has not had time to be absorbed into the general culture, and then you proceed to demand that everyone whose behavior doesn’t conform to its standards be cancelled, you will be vilified as a tyrant (or as privileging irrational affect over logic).. It’s not the demand for conformity by itself that produces the hostility, it’s that what it is in service of is incoherent to most people, so your efforts will be explained as a desire for power and control. We already live in a society controlled by strict norms of conduct, but there is a general consensus of understanding about the nature of those norms and standards. My own critique of wokism is that it keeps too much from traditional societal norms (righteous moralism).

Critics argue that emotional discomfort has become a trigger for restricting speech, displacing debate with moral claims based solely on feeling hurt or offended — Number2018

What do you suppose elevates the role of feeling to the status of sovereign arbiter of justice for wokists? Is the affect doing all this ethical work by itself, or is it the interpretation of the discursive context within which the affect arises which grounds the supposed moral authority of feeling? I’m suggesting it is a certain moral absolutism associated with the attribution of causes for the sources and triggers of pain which is the culprit here, not affect in itself. If I address you with the wrong pronoun and you respond with pained moral outrage, it is because your feelings are expressing your assessment that I am culpable for my slight, even if I insist that it was inadvertent. There are no accidents or innocent mistakes when concepts like while privileged and implicit bias judge us guilty in advance. It is this assumed culpability by association, birth and ingrained use of language that is at the bottom of the hyper-moralism attributed to wokism, not a blind reliance on the authority of affect.

But is there not something of value to be gained from concepts like implicit bias? Do they not act as a corrective to the metaphysics of the autonomously willing subject? What such wokist memes could stand to learn from Focault and Deleuze is that there is no privileged moral vantage from which to judge whose community is more or less biased. What we want to do is to continually follow lines of flight away from the entrenchment within any particular bias, not reterritorialize on a transcendent objectivity beyond all bias.

Does the wokist reliance on a sovereign ground of moral truth amount to an abdication of factual accuracy and logical coherence? On the contrary, the most secure, emancipatory Hegelian logic can be located as an important thread within many strands of wokism, fueling their moralism and providing the metaphysical support for their objectivity. What they need more of factual accuracy and logical coherence but Deleuzian paradoxical nonsense, a logic of sense.

I had edited the post you responded but apparently too later for you to see it. Here’s the edited post:

The analyses of Focault and Deleuze are not critiques of affect per se, but of how affect is disciplined and made legible—subsumed into power/knowledge formations. Critique is aimed at sedimentation, normalization, and instrumentalization—not at affect’s foundational role. Deleuze’s entire philosophical project (especially with Guattari) can be read as a critique of how desire/affect is captured by molar systems—Oedipal structures, the State, Capitalism, Signifiance, etc. Not a critique of affect as such—but of affect when it gets captured by stratifying assemblages that block lines of flight. When it is allowed to become via lines of flight, affect is liberating. When it becomes stratified within epistemological logics, it becomes repressive. It sounds like this is your point, also:

Whereas the wokeness machine induces emotions like shame, guilt, and vulnerability to generate moral authority and political legitimacy, the philosophical machine must resist this affective economy by refusing to be coded within it. Instead, it amplifies its own intensity and its capacity to think and feel. In this sense, the line of flight is an experimental process that exceeds the coordinates of recognition and representation. It constructs an autonomous plane of consistency where thought is no longer mediated by identity, morality, or social function, but engages directly with the real. — Number2018

↪Joshs
Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley appear in the video. They are completely genuine in expressing not just their concerns about fascism, but also about wokism.
— Joshs
But what is your assessment of the academic content of this video—especially considering that Snyder is a leading scholar on fascism and Nazi Germany? — Number2018

I think I’m understanding a bit better the points you’re making about the discursive structures within which affect is captured in wokist thought, but in the case of the contributors to the video, don’t we need to extend that critique to normed practices that I would argue are little changed from what they were prior to the emergence of wokism? And then wouldn’t it be useful to make distinctions between the sorts of affective stratifications you associate with wokism and those that are applicable to moderate conservatives and centrist liberals, both of whom disavow most aspects of woke practices?

I am no fan of wokeness either but I think there are more careful considerations and critiques of it from the likes of Sam Harris to name one, or Zizek, from the little I watched of the latter, but I doubt this guy will fall into that category. I suspect it will just be the usual right-wing dog whistles of cultural marxism and such — unimportant

To effectively critique wokism you have to understand its philosophical underpinnings. As someone drawing from Freud, Lacan, Hegel and Marx, Zizek is actually a lot closer to these underpinnings than you might think. On the other hand, I don’t think writers like Sam Harris and Steven Pinker are in a position to do so, given their embrace of conventional aspects of their own field of psychology. Harris and Pinker may be limited by their empirical/rationalist frameworks, which aren’t well-equipped to grasp the continental philosophical roots of woke ideology. Zizek is just as likely to defend wokism from the likes of Harris and Pinker as he is to take their side.

What is your take on this video about contemporary fascism? It highlights the stance of critical intellectuals against authoritarian regimes that are increasingly targeting academic freedom. They are completely genuine while expressing their concerns. The video constructs a stark us vs. them narrative. In fact, its moral binary and emotional framing reflect characteristics often associated with “woke culture”: strong normative certainty, oversimplification, moral urgency, and an appeal to identity and belonging. This resemblance suggests that the crisis revealed by wokeness is not merely cultural or political. Also, it reveals a deeper epistemic, ethical, and moral rupture — Number2018

Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley appear in the video. They are completely genuine in expressing not just their concerns about fascism, but also about wokism. In The Road to Unfreedom and On Freedom, Snyder critiques identity politics and the politicization of group-based grievances. He explicitly criticizes “identity politics” as a divisive force that fuels cultural polarization, framing it as part of authoritarian memory politics. He warns against narratives driven by victimhood and “us vs. them” thinking—structures often associated with woke discourse—even if the label isn’t used. In sum, Snyder’s critique overlaps with what critics call “wokism” — particularly around moralism, identity-based politics, and the erosion of shared facts.

Meanwhile, Jason Stanley offers a theoretical critique of political language and propaganda. Stanley’s work discusses woke moral language, examining “woke” discourse as a phenomenon that has peaked. He has also strongly condemned book bans and restrictions on speech tied to identity-driven moral politics, framing them as authoritarian and illiberal.

I think you’ll find moderate religious conservative like David Brooks and Peter Wehner making exactly the same points as the contributors to this video.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/donald-trump-authoritarian-actions/682486/

Does this fact make them woke? If so, then it seems to me the concept becomes meaningless.

In the case of wokeness, the issue is not one of disagreement or misunderstanding. Rather, it lies in the complete blurring of boundaries between the authenticity of identity performance and the sincerity of moral expression — Number2018

Btw, you never responded to my question to you:

“Are you placing ‘factual accuracy’ on one side of a divide and ‘emotional expression’ on the other side in order to deconstruct and overturn this metaphysical dualism, as Nietzsche, Focault, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida have? Or do you seriously want to justify such a reason-privileging split? Or is ‘emotional expression’ as Deleuzian desire, Heideggerian attunement and Foucaultian power the very pre-condition of factuality?”

The similarities lie more in the focus on identity, grievance, narratives of power, skepticism of institutions (instruments of power), and as Doyle puts it, "admission of spectral evidence," (i.e., personal feelings of grievance as indicative of moral wrong). There is also a similar distrust of scientific, journalistic, academic, etc. institutions as mere instruments of power, a sort of epistemology of power to go along with the metaphysics of power. The "nu-right" is a heavily aesthetic movement, drawing a lot from ancient epics and art, and so you also have an "aesthetics of power." The preference for classical art styles for instance, is not mere reactionary preference for the old, but obviously because these are taken to by symbols of imperial power and warrior spirit. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is essential to separate questionable political applications of ‘wokeness’ by individuals and groups who call themselves woke from the mix of underlying philosophical ideas they claim to be drawing from (and in many cases misinterpreting). This is important because I believe many of what are now seen as repressive excesses of the movement will likely be eliminated as the movement becomes more conversant with the most rigorous and forward-thinking philosophical elements it now engages with in an often superficial manner. As a result, far from ‘fading away’ as another regressive fad alongside far right thinking, the substantive grounding of what we
now call wokism will remain and eventually become the dominant political thinking among mainstream cultures around the world.

In order to separate the superficial from the substantive, it is necessary not to settle for surface comparisons like the following: both the far right and wokism is concerned with “narratives of power, skepticism of institutions (instruments of power), and as Doyle puts it, "admission of spectral evidence,"”.
While the Frankfurt school of critical theory understands the concept of power in terms of a willed force concentrated within , controlled and wielded by individuals and groups, this is not at all the case for poststructuralists like Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida. Foucault’s notion of power, for instance, is a relation of mutual affecting connecting each individual to other individuals within a community rather than hierarchical weapon of domination. For him power isn’t something to overcome or control, it is the motivational and valuative basis of the reciprocal interactions from which our institutions of ethics, politicos and knowledge emerge.

There is the transformation of the foundations of normative, intersubjective argumentation, particularly in the realms of identity politics and online discourse. In this emerging framework, factual accuracy and logical coherence are increasingly overshadowed by emotional expressions of identity and marginalization, which come to serve as autonomous validations of truth and moral authority. — Number2018

Are you placing ‘factual accuracy’ on one side of a divide and ‘emotional expression’ on the other side in order to deconstruct and overturn this metaphysical dualism, as Nietzsche, Focault, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida have? Or do you seriously want to justify such a reason-privileging split? Or is ‘emotional expression’ as Deleuzian desire, Heideggerian attunement and Foucaultian power the very pre-condition of factuality?

it wouldn’t take me very long to demonstrate that he never even attempts to analyze the underlying philosophy
— Joshs

For for it. Review his entire output on this topic, including books, podcasts, lengthy posts and articles. I'm not going to claim to hav ea citation to hand, but he has explicitly spoken about the Marxist, and then Frankfurtian bases through Critical Theory and on into CRT - running that through the milieu of the 60s-70s civil rights activations and then making his conclusions from there. He is not an idiot. I do recall him going relatively deep into this in The New Puritans.

It seems you've rejected his position without knowing it. Odd. — AmadeusD

Yes, he has made his way through some Marxist and Frankfurt school texts. If his critique were based on a perspective inside of the relevant philosophies, he would be comfortable with the following ideas:
Languaged discursive conventions shape the meanings of concepts, so any attempts at ascertaining objective truth cannot look for a position outside of all normative cultural configurations from which to ground truth absolutely. These normative structures and their associated linguistic concepts can ossify into an entrenched status quo, and as a result become repressive in relation to marginalized individuals and groups. But one must be careful in how one points attention to these repressive, self-entrenching tendencies. One cannot simply demand that others change their vocabulary. They should instead attempt to demonstrate the benefits of alternative intelligibilities. This would be a positive use of power rather than a punitive use.

A critique from the outside, as I believe Doyle’s is, rejects the Kuhnian implication of critical theoretic approaches to objective truth, in favor of something closer to Popper’s Kantian notion of falsification. Truth isn’t just a culturally negotiated pragmatic way of knowing one’s way around the world ( although Kuhn doesn’t reject the idea of scientific progress in toto), languaged concepts hook up to objective truths which transcend cultural dynamics. I suggest that Doyle’s rejection of this crucial philosophical underpinning of wokism motivates his rejection of it. Even if wokists no longer tried to impose their notions of discursive openness onto others, he would still find it wanting in comparison with his non-relativistic liberalism. He would simply pivot from an attack on wokism as too repressive to one in which it becomes too permissive and anything-goes, ungrounded in the objective facts of the world.

↪Joshs

What's the objection here aside from him being a "moralist?" It seems like you could describe his basic thesis just as well in the amoral language of classical economics (which just assumes that everyone is always "selfish"). — Count Timothy von Icarus

There is nothing amoral about the classical economic notion of selfishness, which is why al Gharbi’s thesis is so compatible with it, and in fact depends on the same Enlightenment-era notions of the autonomously willing subject.

the defining feature of our contemporary condition is that we can no longer rely automatically on the continuity of ‘discursive enactment’ grounded in a shared normative community. We must continually renew and reinvent both our discursive practices and our conception of community. This aligns with what Nietzsche called the 'untimely'—a becoming that diverges from historical continuity. Foucault expressed a similar idea: 'The description of the archive unfolds its possibilities; its threshold of existence begins with the break that separates us from what we can no longer say and what falls outside our discursive practices; it begins with the outside of our own language; its place is the distance from our own discursive practices”. — Number2018

We can and we can’t rely on the discursive continuity of a normative community. For Deleuze we must rely on such stability for a time. We spend most if not all of our lives within relatively stable systems. Territorialization is as necessary as deterritorialization. What we cannot do is assume any one social formation as sovereign.

Your OP covers a slew of issues and connects them in a particular way. It begins with Doyle’s critique of wokism, and then lays out a Foucaultian analysis of wokism, from which vantage Doyle’s own thinking is itself a symptom of wokist power relations. This seems to drive more from Deleuze than Focault, since Deleuze insisted that only revolutionary change could break one free from the hegemony of discursive regimes, such as Capitalism. Foucault, on the other hand, was more open to compromise with the dominant cultural , since unlike Deleuze he didn’t see regimes like capitalism as monolithic entities but as already slowly transforming themselves from within their own power dynamics. This allowed him to accept a critique of Doyle from a wokist vantage that was itself open to its own transformation through its own dynamics of power.

he doesn’t understand the basic philosophical grounding for them and ends up throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
— Joshs

This is patently untrue. I think its more likely this stems from those who share views not noticing what it looks like from the outside. For instance. many will claim that "woke" is: — AmadeusD

Patently untrue? Let’s put it to the test, shall we? My thesis is it’s a collosal waste of time to critique wokeness on the basis of specific practices that call themselves woke , and that are felt by many as totalitarian, repressive or McCarhyesque. I’m interested in your knowledge of the underlying philosohies that these practices are drawn from. You see, the practices can change and become much less repressive without significantly altering the underlying worldview that generates them. I’m not a fan of woke overreach either, but I know two things. The fundamental philosophical insights guiding it are here to stay, and will become accepted by the mainstream within the next 50 years. So I’m talking about two sorts of critiques, a critique from within which accepts and is indebted to the innovative philosophical grounding of wokism , but wants to take the next step , which involves transcending the moralistic finger-pointing which Wokism has inherited from more mainstream political theory. The second sort of critique is a critique from without. This critique has no clue what the underlying philosophies are talking about, and just sees wokists as bossy moralistic people who want to act like dictators.

To find out whether Doyle’s ( or your) critique is from the inside or the outside won’t be too difficult. Doyle has written a lot about wokism, and it wouldn’t take me very long to demonstrate that he never even attempts to analyze the underlying philosophy, except by repeating one-line cliches he picks up from others who haven’t bothered to carefully read the authors they cite.

If you're interested in the topic, I thought Musa al-Gharbi's We Have Never Been Woke was a good treatment. His main thrust was that the "Great Awokening" following the Great Recession was the result of (relative) elites feeling the need to justify their own rapidly growing wealth and privilege in the face of declining standards of living for the rest of the country (also declining life expectancy). Social justice became a way to justify one's own position in society. It also became a means for those already positioned near the top, and who had been raised in a pressure cooker environment focused on accomplishment and securing one's own spot in the elite, to secure elite status, by positioning themselves as representatives or allies of victimized groups. However well-intentioned though, these movements often tended to slide into (largely unreflective) self-serving behavior. That is, the empirical case for the positive benefits of the "Great Awokening" for its supposed beneficiaries is weak — Count Timothy von Icarus

Al-Gharbi has a thing about selfishness. Since he is really an old fashioned moralist at heart, he sees everything in that light. Nice touch there, reducing the good intentions of wokism to underlying base motives ( in spite of ‘good intentions’). I’ve read al-Gharbi, and if I were convinced he understood the ideas swirling around beneath the catch-all term of wokism I would be more enthusiastic about his analyses. No doubt the inertia of the status quo within a normative community exerts a powerful restraining force on reform, but it will not be solved by pointing fingers at individual weak will. Besides, if you put tighter a list of the top 5% by wealth you will find very few true wokist in that group. The core of the movement is to be found within academia, a cohort which is significantly less prosperous than your typical Manhattan professional. Paying lip service to wokist slogans is not the same thing as understanding the meaning of intersectionality or critical race theory.

When we engage in contemporary online or identity politics discourse, the very act of speaking subjects us to the same conditions that shape what is commonly called ‘wokeness.’ In that moment, we are often not reflecting on our deeper philosophical or political commitments. When we engage in contemporary online or identity politics discourse, the very act of speaking subjects us to the same conditions that shape what is commonly called ‘wokeness.’ In that moment, we are often not reflecting on our deeper philosophical or political commitments. Therefore, it may be useful to distinguish between our discursive practices and their deliberate interpretations — Number2018

I dont think we can distinguish between them. We don’t need to ‘reflect on’ or theoretically articulate our philosophical commitments in order to enact them, because the commitments only exist in their continued discursive enactment in the partially shared circumstances of a normative community.

From a Foucauldian perspective, wokeness can be understood not only as an emancipatory gesture but also as a mode through which power is reproduced via identity. Identity politics thus operates within the current digital power/knowledge regime, simultaneously enabling recognition and reinforcing normative expectations of being 'woke.' As Foucault put it, 'It is a form of power that makes individuals subjects—that subjugates and makes subject to…'" — Number2018

The above analysis applies to any normative community in any historical era. The OP’s critique of Doyle’s attack on wokism misses the fact that he sees the myriad varieties of wokism through a perspective that gets its intelligibility from discursive practices that belong to an older era. Through his Kantian perspective, anything woke is simply marginalized. What is emancipatory within wokism is therefore invisible to Doyle. When Focault analyses identity politics , he does so from a vantage which understands identity and subjectivity as effects of the circulation of power. When Doyle criticizes identity politics, has has no intention of deconstructing the concepts of identity and subjectivity. On the contrary, he is interested in reifying them.

Don’t the regimes of these rulers reveal distinct modes of exercising power? For instance, Orbán and Erdoğan were democratically elected, while Putin maintains only a façade of electoral legitimacy. So, what exactly constitutes this so-called 'school of autocracy'? As for claims of 'Trump’s fascism,' such assertions depend entirely on how fascism is defined. Without a well-developed and nuanced theoretical framework, labeling Trump as a fascist may become an example of a political slogan or ideologically driven discourse. — Number2018

What these regimes have in common is rule by the arbitrary edict of one man rather than by law, constitution and judicial process. In each of these countries, the independence of the judiciary, the press, opposing parties , universities and civil organizations are systematically dismantled so that they won’t present a challenge to the authority of the leader.

It would make just as much sense to say, “Occasionally I feel this strange impulse to stop smoking, but happily I've manage to combat that drive and pick up a cigarette whenever I want.”

Would it make just as much sense? People don't generally talk this way at least, right?

It would be sort of bizarre for someone to say: "I was tempted on my work trip, and unfortunately my sex drive was not strong enough to make me cheat on my spouse. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What’s the difference between saying ‘occasionally I have a strange impulse’ and ‘I have an impulse to perform an immoral act’? The difference is that the use of moral language like ‘cheating’, ‘murdering’ and ‘stealing’ as opposed to value-neutral terms like ‘having sex with’ , ‘killing’ and ‘taking from’ follows upon the interpreting of an act as immoral. And Nietzsche’s point is that we only arrive at such moral interpretations after the stronger drive has won out and we justify its success posthoc as being the ‘moral’ choice. If we don’t consider picking up a cigarette whenever we want to be a moral act, it is because the drive to smoke is in a close battle with the drive to quit. If we became fully convinced that there were no solid reasons to quit (health, economic or hygiene), then we would with good conscience consider our decision to smoke not to be the less moral choice.

Certainly, Doyle's critique mistakes the symptoms for the underlying structure. Wokeness is not simply an ideology or a belief system. Instead, it reveals the irreversible transformation of the
autonomous, rational subject of liberalism into a digitized, emotive, and aestheticized form of subjectivity. — Number2018

I would put it this way. Wokism is a loose constellation of political positions drawing from a range of philosophical worldviews heavily indebted to Hegel and Marx, but also extending into postmodernist territory expressed by anti-Marxist thinkers like Foucault. Specific interpretators of Wokism have undoubtedly been responsible for excesses and infringements on personal freedom, but Doyle’s shrill, blanket critique of wokism and identity politics suffers from the fact that he doesn’t understand the basic philosophical grounding for them and ends up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. At the same time, his relative conservativism blinds him to the greater dangers from the far right, leading him to claim that accusations of fascism toward Trump are “unjustifiable and untethered from reality”. You won’t find many thoughtful writers in America these days who still deny that Trump’s playbook comes straight out of the school of autocracy perfected by pols like Putin, Orban, Erdogan and Bolsonaro.

There's a sense in which I can understand akrasia -- where I've dedicated myself to do such and such, like quit smoking, that the "rational" frame makes sense of -- but I'm more inclined that Nietzsche is right in that when I quit smoking it's because my desire to quit smoking was more powerful than my desire to smoke, for whatever reason/cause.

I had to work on not-wanting in order to stop-wanting. And that was a desire I built up in order to stop-want — Moliere

Exactly. Daniel Smith contrasts the hierarchical relation between rational will and passion that Timothy seems to be describing with Nietzsche’s subordination of rational will to passion.

Now: to be sure, we can combat the drives, we can fight against them. Indeed, this is one of the most common themes in philosophy, a Platonic theme that was taken up by Christianity: the fight against the passions. In another passage from Daybreak , Nietzsche says that he can see only six fundamental methods we have at our disposal for
combating the drives. For instance, Nietzsche says, (1) we can avoid opportunities for its gratification (for instance, if I'm combating my drive to smoke cigarettes, I can stop hiding packs of cigarettes at home, which I conveniently “find” again when I run out), or (2) we can implant regularity into the drive (having one cigarette every four hours so as to at least avoid smoking in between), or (3) we can engender disgust with the drive, giving ourselves over to its wild and unrestrained gratification to the point where we become disgusted with it (say, smoking non-stop for a month until the very idea of a cigarette makes me want to vomit) And Nietzsche continues with several other examples.

But then Nietzsche asks: But who exactly is combating the drives in these various ways? His answer is this: The fact “that one desires to combat the vehemence of a drive at all, however, does not stand within our own power; nor does the choice of any particular method; nor does the success or failure of this method. What is clearly the case is that in this entire procedure our intellect is only the blind instrument of another drive which is a rival of the drive who vehemence is tormenting us….While ‘we' believe we are complaining about the vehemence of a drive, at bottom it is one drive which is complaining about the other; that is to say: for us to become aware that we are suffering from the vehemence [or violence] of a drive presupposes the existence of another equally vehement or even more vehement drive, and that a struggle is in prospect in which our intellect is going to have to take sides” (Daybreak

09). What we call thinking, willing, and feeling are all “merely a relation of these drives to each other” (BGE 36). In other words, there is no struggle of reason against the drives, as Plato, for instance, held. What we call “reason” is, in Nietzsche's view, nothing more than a certain “system of relations between various passions” (WP 387), a certain ordering of the drives. What then do I mean when I say “I am trying to stop smoking”—even though that same I is
constantly going ahead and lighting up cigarettes and continuing to smoke? It simply means that my conscious intellect is taking sides and associating itself with a particular drive. It would make just as much sense to say, “Occasionally I feel this strange impulse to stop smoking, but happily I've manage to combat that drive and pick up a cigarette whenever I want.” Instinctively, Nietzsche says, we tend to take our predominant drive and for the moment turn it into the whole of our ego, placing all our weaker drives perspectivally farther away, as if those other drives weren't me but rather something else, something other inside me, a kind of “it” (hence Freud's idea of the “id,” the “it”—which he also derived from Nietzsche).

“The ego,” Nietzsche writes, “is a plurality of person-like forces, of which now this one now that one stands in the foreground as ego and regards the others as a subject regards an influential and determining external world.”3 When we talk about the “I,” we are simply indicating which drive, at the moment, is strongest and sovereign. “The feeling of the ‘I' is always strongest where the preponderance [Übergewicht] is,” Nietzsche writes, although the so-called “self-identity” I seem to experience in my ego is in fact a differential flickering from drive to drive.