wokeness - a political anthropology

I had one of those discussions last night in which the word “wokeness” wandered around like an uninvited guest at a birthday party.  “Wokeness”, at this moment in France, as a demonized thing that the Zemmourist right has decided is their ticket to ride. But for me, mostly, it is a fashionable phrase that will disappear in due course.

But then, as I was falling asleep, I had an odd thought: what if I’m… wrong?

1.

I grew up in a world in which the terms of political anthropology were clear: there was the left, and there was the right. One could draw a primitive graph showing American liberals a degree to the left and American conservatives a degree to the right, and that seemed to correspond to what we understood to be the stakes, which was about the working class and its consciousness and the owning class and its consciousness.

2.

Class has by no means disappeared, but consciousness has shifted, and with it the terms of our political anthropology.

I like to think of neoliberalism as a general term for a certain culture, and not just a certain political economic arrangement in the age of globalized capitalism. As a culture, it does work against the old solidarities by emphasizing the (false) dualism between the state and “private enterprise”. To put my cards on the table, I don’t at all buy this picture. The real question of governance is about alliances between something called the state and other entities, like multinational corporations. The upper echelon of both is on the same side, aiming for the same ends. However, putting this to one side, under neoliberalism the self is contoured more by the ecology of “private enterprise” than by the “state”. For example, Ferguson Missouri, which was subject to a massive study by the justice department, is a city where the police force, from outside, plays a massive role in controlling the mostly black population, but that population is almost completely plugged into businesses, small and large.

However, the political economy here is a culture in as much as this contouring of lives occurs in the absence of old solidarities – like an organized working class – and in the presence of a hyper-sensitive and sensational culture – a culture of affects. And this too is neoliberalism. Under neoliberalism, the old successes of the civil rights movements of the late twentieth century are as important to the neo-liberal self-consciousness as “private enterprise”. Neo-liberalism is a synthesis of these two things.

Thus, when a neoliberal exults in breaking the glass ceiling (like Hillary Clinton or Sheryl Sandberg), this is not some cynical ploy, but the neoliberal culture in action. To my eye, feminism is about breaking the patriarchy, of which the corporation and the state are products – and thus, putting women in the CEO position is precisely as liberatory as replacing the guards in a prison with “screws” among the prisoners. Still a prison, my droogs and droogesses! But where I see putting a human face on an oppressive system, the neoliberal feminist sees my objection as a male reaction to female power.

3.

However, wokeness is proving to be as irritating to the neoliberal feminist as it is to the standard issue suit. Which says something about the position vacated by the decline of the left.

The shift towards individualism of a purely formal type has been followed by a shift towards living individualism. The individual lives, it turns out, and doesn’t just consume. Living involves memory. It involves the passions. It involves affect.

The “affect” effect, from the old Left point of view, is hokum. I think it isn’t, but I also think this kneejerk reaction has to do with the fraught history of affect discourse.

The old program of taking power from the capitalist and giving it to the producers has been dogged, on the right, with a long discourse about “envy”. It was fought against as not just bad for the economy, as conceived by the economist, but also as a bad feeling, akin to the sins of the pre-French Revolutionary days.

In fact, the program of the right, since the Revolution, is keenly attuned to the culture of feeling. In an ordered society, that culture produces the right feelings – in a disordered society, one for instance in which the producer somehow ends up in the governor’s seat, it produces hate and envy.

As it turns out, however, when capitalism triumphs, globally, the discourse of affect is retranscribed. What results is that the old rightwing position, which relied on a monopoly of guilt, is shaken, and the woke position as it were seizes the right to make guilty.

4.

I am  not happy about the current state of our political anthropology, but I do take it as a given. My hope is that wokeness is a necessary but insufficient condition for the making of a better, juster, and even happier world. That is the world I, wee little pea that I am, think is not only possible, but necessary if we are to  survive the catastrophes we have visited upon ourselves.