In the past few years, and with increasing intensity, ‘woke-ness’ as a political ideology, as a cultural style, and as a kind of life-style expression has been increasingly targeted by the resurgent nationalist right-wing of American politics. Even aside from the general point that historical phenomena have no essence, the central characteristics collected under the term ‘woke’-- with its plasticity, rapid evolution, and surrounding heated polemics—are by no means clear. A media profile of a ‘woke’ person would probably include participation in Black Lives Matter protests, strong verbal support for whatever currently counts as an instance of ‘social justice’, and an extreme fastidiousness about uses of personal pronouns. For the nationalist right-wing, ‘woke-ness’ is the latest instance of a liberal attempt to undermine and destroy the United States and the practices, institutions, and values that at some time or the other in the past made it uniquely great. On the other hand, no less an authority than the recent U. S. President Donald Trump, who claims to know the best words and to possess a certified genius-level intelligence, has recently declared that no one knows what the word ‘woke’ means.
In the late Spring of 2023 several new books have from a left perspective have also subjected ‘woke-ness’ and its ideologies to sustained criticism. Here and in two future blog posts I’ll offer summaries and critical reflections upon these books, Susan Neiman’s Left is Not Woke, Norman Finkelstein’s I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It, and Walter Benn Michaels’s and Adolph Reed Jr.’s No Politics But Class Politics. First, Neiman’s book:
Susan Neiman is a public philosopher based in Berlin. Her major strictly academic work is a study of the various conceptions of reason in the work of Immanuel Kant, and of what unity these conceptions might have across their uses in epistemology, moral philosophy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history. Her other books, including this most recent one, are philosophical works that aim to address an audience outside of the academic study of philosophy on issues in historical self-understanding, morality, and education. This new, quite short book bears the signs of political urgency in its passionate address to contemporary ideologies, and evidence of an undeniable haste in its writing, if not in its conception: Neiman says that it was based upon a lecture delivered in April of 2022 at the University of Cambridge; she refers to a conversation she had while finishing it in October, and I read the published edition in the latter half of May 2023. Its peculiar title, ‘Left is Not Woke’, does not give ready access to the book’s contents, as she only characterizes ‘Woke’ briefly, and uses and mentions several times ‘Left’ only in passing while suggesting that the concept is of little substantive interest. Rather, she polemicizes on two central points: negatively, that much seemingly ‘progressive’ (or ‘leftist’) recent thought is self-undermining, in that it acts upon theoretical conceptions stemming from anti-Enlightenment thought that are irredeemably anti-progressive, that is, conservative and pessimistic; positively, that the theoretical conceptions needed for a ‘progressive’ politics are found in the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, especially Rousseau and Kant (in his essays of the 1780s and 90s).
Neiman begins with an assertion: there are three “philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress.” (p. 2) She then offers brief characterizations of her critical target, first as ‘Woke’, then as identity politics. Woke is an attitude expressive of a small set of emotions and affective capacities, one that “begins with concern for marginalized persons,” then “emphasizes the ways in which particular groups have been denied justice, and seeks to rectify and repair the damage.” Rage at injustice towards marginalized groups induces the desire for immediate action. However, Woke as actualized undermines itself in neglecting or rejecting the three left commitments: Instead of starting from a universalist concern for the full range of human nature, its dignity, and its violations, it “ends by reducing each [person] to the prism of her marginalization.” It undermines its own concern for justice by de facto replacing such concern with issues of power inequality. And in attempting historical reflection and reparation Woke “often concludes that all history is criminal” (pp. 5-6), thereby losing qualitative distinctions and differentiations, and thereby losing sight of any conception of moral progress. Identity politics is seemingly the concrete expression of the Woke attitude, yet it “is interest-group politics” that “aims to change the distribution of benefits, not the rules under which distribution takes place” (p. 21, quoting Todd Gitlin). So on Neiman’s account Woke is a kind of left attitude so degenerate that it passes over into a pseudo-leftist identity politics, affirming tribalism in a manner also adopted by conservatives. (p. 20)
Why do seeming leftists become Woke? Neiman claims that the source of the degeneration is good emotions corrupted by bad theory. The leftist emotions are “empathy for the marginalized, indignation at the plight of the oppressed, determination that historical wrongs should be righted.” (pp. 5-6) [Note: it is characteristic of the very loose and surely very rapid writing here that, of the three cited ‘emotions’ (empathy, indignation, determination), only the second is in fact an emotion.] However, these ‘emotions’ are currently experienced in an atmosphere of ‘theory’, a range of anti-Enlightenment assumptions that are “now embedded in the culture, for they’re usually expressed as self-evident truths.” (p. 6)
Neiman initially identifies the prominent academic obscurantists Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha as purveyors of ‘theory’ (ibid.); but she urges that because ‘theory’ is so deeply embedded currently, to challenge it one must turn to its roots in anti-Enlightenment thought. Her chief target, and one who she discusses repeatedly, is the historian and social philosopher Michel Foucault. Her criticisms of Foucault chiefly consists in repeatedly noting that he never declared what sort of criteria governed his historical critiques. Additionally, she registers his explicit statement that ‘power is everywhere’ (p. 63) and that he suggested (without affirming) that power is “simply a form of warlike domination.” (Foucault quoted on p. 64) Finally, his writings, in particular Discipline and Punish, secrete the sense the ‘progress’ in civilization is no such thing, but rather the replacement of one system of power relations by another. So in his lack of criteria Foucault expresses the loss of universalism, in his historical analyses the collapse of the distinction between justice and power, and in his style, tone, and targets the refusal to recognize progress as such. Foucault’s great prestige among recent academics then, we are asked to think, is a major proximal source of the bad theory generating Woke attitudes.
Neiman’s conception of reason as a counter to Woke is given in a few pages (pp. 67-70), together with claim that the conception is distinctive of Enlightenment thought. A major use of reason is to question established authorities. Reason, as Kant put it in his essay on Enlightenment, requires for its exercise a kind of courage in thinking for oneself. In order to think for oneself, and not just to follow established authorities, one needs ideas that have an evaluative dimension and that cannot plausibly be seen as simply reflections of and prima facie legitimations of established authorities, practices, and institutions. Such ideas are ideals, and “[r]eason’s most important function is to uphold the force of ideals.” (p. 68) So reason is really a demand for legitimation, as expressed in the question “Does this practice or institution or manner of living meet our ideals?” For something to so much as be a candidate for a legitimizing response to this question, the response must cite reasons, and not just say ‘that’s the way it has been and is’. Finally, reason motivates action, in that if the response to the question shows a human phenomenon to be incapable of legitimation, one as a rational reason to act to change the situation in the direction of meeting the relevant ideal. So reason, and Enlightenment thought generally, can be seen as the source of the core characteristic ideas of the left: the possible application reason generally to human phenomenon, and the relevant evaluative criteria expressed in terms of general human possibility, are part of its universalism; the use of ideals marks the conceptual gap between de facto power relations and just situations; and its efficacy in motivating action oriented towards bettering situations shows its belief in the possibility of progress. Later, again echoing themes from Kant’s late thought, Neiman suggests that it is a distinctive activity of reason to provide orientation for critical thinking (p. 102) and ground the possibility and intelligibility of hope (p. 107).
Does Neiman’s diagnosis of the anti-Enlightenment roots of Woke hit the mark? Is her counter-appeal to reason plausible? These questions are not easy to answer, in part because of Neiman’s style of urgency. She gives only the briefest of characterizations of leftism and progressivism; she identifies herself as a socialist but says nothing of what is distinctive of socialism, nor offers a single sentence of reflection on its historical failures (on this see Dunn (1984) and (1992); a fortiori she says nothing about the relation (Identity? Overlapping concerns? Common concerns and conceptions with some tension among them?) between socialism on the one hand, and leftism, progressivism, or for that matter anarchism. Her stipulative characterization of the three commitments central to leftism would be rejected out of hand by many leftists; among countless examples, the analytic Marxist John Roemer characterizes socialists as committed to equality of opportunity for self-realization, political influence, and social status (see Roemer (1994), p. 11). A similar vagueness or indeterminacy attaches to her very brief characterization of Woke, with only its concern for personal pronouns cited as an instance of its concrete activity (p. 140)
Aside from the not insignificant issue of indeterminacy of its key concepts, it seems to me that the most basic problem with Neiman’s approach attaches to her quasi-Kantian conception of reason in its critical employment. For Neiman the use of reason is historically situated, but nothing of that situation marks its characteristic activities and conceptions. ‘Reason’ produces ideals, which are then used as criteria to judge the legitimacy of historical phenomena. Reason is like a judge with a schedule as long as human existence and cases extending throughout every phenomenon in human culture. Reason in 2023 is no different from reason in 1793; reason now has nothing to learn from the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment, nothing to learn from Marx or Nietzsche, nothing to learn from the historical failures of socialism. There is only ever and ever more judging. Along with a failure to engage with the specifics of Woke, Neiman misses (so it seems to me) the point that Kantian reason does not exhaust the orientations, motivations, and exercises of critical thinking. A kind of Romantic, and even Kantian, way of putting the point would be to note that Neiman does not so mention the imagination as something that would be exercised in constructing counter-images to the present.
One might also think that Woke too lacks imagination. Neiman suggests that Woke’s lack of the distinction between justice and power impoverishes its sense of what might be changed, and can only satisfy itself enforcing pronoun usages. But it seems to me that the point is better put in the manner of Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, who note that identity politics seems in imagination to hold the entire world, its practices, institutions, and hierarchies fixed, and only to want to re-arrange the ways in which the various slots in the infernal prison are filled. The leftist appeal is not to reason’s criteria, but to Rosa Luxemburg’s imaginative project of counter-posing socialism and barbarism.
Next (in 3-4 weeks) I turn to Norman Finkelstein’s book, which in great contrast to Neiman’s offers detailed critical accounts of the thought and activities of leading figures of Woke ideologies.
References:
John Dunn, The Politics of Socialism: An Essay in Political Theory (1984)
-----Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future (2nd edition (1992))
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1977)
Todd Gitlin, Letters to a Young Activist (2012)
Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’’ (1784)
-----‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ (1786)
-----‘On the Old Cliché: That May be Right in Theory but it Won’t Work in Practice’ (1793)
Susan Neiman, Left Is Not Woke (2023)
John E. Roemer, A Future for Socialism (1994)