8 ms·

For anyone interested in a perspective on the current woke/anti-woke zeitgeist from someone on the left, I would highly recommend Fisher's "Exiting the Vampire

• zozbot234 5y ago
  Why should we be interested in an anti-woke perspective from the left, when it's just repeating what the right has been pointing out for a long time now? The basic point that "woke" ideology makes a mockery of genuine efforts to effectively address issues of prejudice based on race, sex or sexual orientation is far from new; indeed it has been raised many times before.
  • tablespoon 5y ago
    > Why should we be interested in an anti-woke perspective from the left, when it's just repeating what the right has been pointing out for a long time now? The obvious reason is ad-hominem thinking is very human and natural, and people will be more receptive to the same message sent by someone otherwise aligned with them than someone otherwise opposed to them. Another possibility is that this article just plain expresses it better, more effectively, or captured an important nuance that your preferred people missed.
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      But the right has always been working to address prejudiced attitudes; their disagreement with the left on these issues is one of framing and preferred methods (e.g. not everything has to be a "struggle against X!" - and such rhetoric is in many ways a pointless distraction from more relevant dynamics), not so much broader social aims.
      • shigawire 5y ago
        >But the right has always been working to address prejudiced attitudes Are conservatives not by definition trying to conserve the status quo?
        • tablespoon 5y ago
          > Are conservatives not by definition trying to conserve the status quo? IIRC, in the American context there are very, very few conservatives like that. Everyone has some revolutionary project they're working towards, they're just very different and incompatible.
          • germinalphrase 5y ago
            This does not resonate at all with my experience growing up in a conservative region of the upper Midwest.
            • dwater 5y ago
              I imagine in this context conservative refers to members of the conservative political class and not conservative-voting citizens, who are mostly irrelevant to the goals of the conservative political class.
              • brimble 5y ago
                It is very important, in some contexts, to distinguish between Republican voters and Republican politicians. What you hear if you talk to the former can be wildly different from what the latter deliver and even what they make planks of their party platform. Notably, the voters tend not to like neoliberalism and globalization and to be big fans of "why don't they just..." solutions for various problems—say, "why don't they just build a wall at the border?" Sound like any recent, prominent R politicians? Yep—he seems to have noticed the large gap between the Republican Party platform and what the average Republican voter you talk to at a diner says they want, then exploited that gap, which worked because the gap is very real and pretty large. This occasionally got a bit weird, like in some of his speeches about how he'd provide "beautiful" healthcare to everyone, which seemed strangely close to some kind of (very vague) messaging about adding a public option of some kind of universal coverage and was met with cheering by his audience. This is because left- and right-wing populism in the US share a surprising amount in common, but those issues and commonalities are often ignored or deliberately sidelined by party elites. This is related to how laws that get passed and policies that are enacted are disturbingly disconnected from public sentiment generally. (none of this should be taken as an endorsement of the former president, I'm just observing the lay of the electoral landscape and how he exploited that. I am also not claiming that a similar difference between typical voters and party leaders/platform doesn't exist for the Democrats—it absolutely does. This is all probably a result of our really shitty FPTP elections.)
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Why should we be interested in an anti-woke perspective from the left, when it's just repeating what the right has been pointing out for a long time now? Critical use of the term “woke” originated within the Left before the critique was superficially adopted by the Right and then the term was stripped of all meaning and used as a generic term for everything non-Right by the Right; much the same as happened with “political correctness”, which it became a drop-in replacement for on the Right, before it.
    • dusted 5y ago
  • antiterra 5y ago
    Because calling something 'woke' is often a lazy cudgel used to dismiss any progressive idea one disagrees with. If someone agrees with the fundamentals but has an issue with the socialization of those fundamentals then it's less likely to be tainted by bias. One example would be people who are elevating Zelenskyy to superhero status. It's quite likely that Zelenskyy is a flawed person, like the overwhelming majority of us, and making weird lionizing memes of him echoes the same shirtless horse-riding personality cult stuff that preceded Putin's actions. Yet, however overblown the worship or however ineffective 'thoughts & prayers' may be for Ukraine, there's an actual population of people being invaded by another country for reasons most people find entirely objectionable. This stands regardless of whether or not someone is suggesting we boycott the YMCA for not putting a Ukranian flag emote in their twitter profile.
  • 30761722 5y ago
    >Why should we be interested in an anti-woke perspective from the left, when it's just repeating what the right has been pointing out for a long time now? Because two groups can agree on the problem but disagree on the solution. For the left, the solution to the "woke" problem is de-centering identity in order to further the cause of anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, etc; for the right, the solution to the "woke" problem is to deny that any of the problems raised by the "woke" are problems at all -- and in fact to center identity.
  • specialist 5y ago
    I, for one, am interested. My understanding is that "woke" started as shorthand for criticism from POCs towards their nominal white allies (progressives, Democrats, etc). "I know you're trying to help. Please stop." One recurring affront, of allies doing more harm than good, that I've observed many times is "white knighting" (correct term?). A white person will argue in defense of a black position (or cause). While there's black people present, trying to be heard. The correct action would be for a white person to concede their time to a black person. So that we can hear first-hand their input about policies and decisions impacting them. "I don't know. Let's ask a black person what they think." My criticism of wokeness, as a middle class white blue hair, is that maybe haranguing people is not the most effective strategy. Just like how fat shaming back fires. Personal example. I have a friend whose compulsion is to correct my misgendering of others, while I'm talking. Each and every time. Are they really listening to me? Or are they just waiting for me to fuck up and pounce, demonstrating their greater virtue? It's exhausting. Sure, I want to get the genders correct, and certainly don't want to inadvertently offend any one, especially not punch down. But decades of habit don't change over night. And how the fuck am I supposed to know when someone's picked a new pronoun for themselves? Is there a gender registry some where I can reference in real-time? I can't comment specifically on the reactionaries' criticism of wokeness. I assume whatever they're fluffed up about is just part of another grift.
• lanfeust6 5y ago
  > a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements Sounds like a deflection, and inaccurate. The issues don't arise "outside" of the movement, they spring inevitably when there is enough traction and zeal because the mob doesn't understand nuance. Mobs are dogmatic and orthodox, and everything is a nail. The Fabians (a bougie socialist club intent on popularizing Socialism) had this fear about laymen should Socialism be in vogue, the Catholic Church about the Bible being interpreted by the public, etc. - they were all correct. Media of course is in it for the money, they just do what they've always done which is exploit salience.
  • pea 5y ago
    Interesting, thanks for sharing your perspective. Do you think both could be true?
    • slothtrop 5y ago
      To the extent that media exploits things, you could easily frame that as a perversion, but I guess this isn't about that. The fact that platforms like Twitter are optimized to maximize controversy exacerbates things, which is kind of perverse. Ultimately people do the legwork. I think ascribing bad behavior like witch hunts to "the bourgeoisie" is a weaselly, weak argument.
• makeworld 5y ago
  Great article, thanks for sharing. Spot on, even today.
• MrPatan 5y ago
  I guess now that it's wrapped in academese it will get some traction.
  • wahnfrieden 5y ago
    You’re criticizing aesthetics. Find a less superficial angle please
    • Psyladine 5y ago
      How something is said is at least as important as the intention. Isn't that tone policing core to the hn ethos? Dressing up thoughts in symbols may seem like a marketability approach, or maybe an attack vector in the best traditions of fiction (the best sci-fi is, after all, merely a glass darkly by which to critique contemporary social ills), yet as Blair reminds us: >"In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations." So, jumping on pop-culture loaded symbols & jargon is a quick way to hijack sentiment or thought along well-dug rut of loaded connotation. Entirely valid critique.
  • ruined 5y ago
    when the right speaks on this, they use their own jargon, but just pretend it isn't jargon. one of the things the left is good at is being willing to admit to ideology. it is okay to have reasons, intentions, and motivations. pretending one does not, pretending ideological choices are innate and universal, and pretending one can avoid specificity when speaking are failures.
    • jamal-kumar 5y ago
• Barrin92 5y ago
  I like Fisher's theoretical stuff a lot but I never was a fan of that piece, because it reeks of personal animosity towards newer generations on the left. It's very typical with old left Brits who couldn't get over the fact that class struggle isn't going to bring anyone into the streets any more, it's the kind of piece that is ten times more likely to be quoted on a conservative site than anywhere else. And when one looks at British Labour politics in the years after this piece was written Fisher kind of got his wish, and it was an absolute electoral dead end.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    These days, anti-COVID protest is what brings people to the streets. A few years back, it was all about wearing yellow vests and protesting gas tax hikes that harm small business.
  • tablespoon 5y ago
    > I like Fisher's theoretical stuff a lot but I never was a fan of that piece, because it reeks of personal animosity towards newer generations on the left. That may be so, but it doesn't mean there's nothing to it. Those "newer generations on the left" tend to think and behave in ways that can be pretty alienating to the rest of society, and so doom their prospects.
    • jonathankoren 5y ago
      This is always said, but it is never true. The olds die, and the youngs become the old. As Abe Simpsons famously said, "I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!"
      • tablespoon 5y ago
        >> That may be so, but it doesn't mean there's nothing to it. Those "newer generations on the left" tend to think and behave in ways that can be pretty alienating to the rest of society, and so doom their prospects. > This is always said, but it is never true. The olds die, and the youngs become the old. > As Abe Simpsons famously said, "I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!" Yeah, but just because some "it" is current doesn't mean it's better. It's quite possible the hip new thing is just the youngs wondering off on a detour and getting lost.
• rjbwork 5y ago
  Indeed. I have been assumed to be attacking those struggles when criticizing the zeitgeist on this very forum within the past 2 weeks.
• thatcat 5y ago
  For an even less woke perspective, I would recommend the memeing of mark fisher, a review of mark fisher memes from 2020 http://thememeingofmarkfisher.com/ http://thememeingofmarkfisher.com/
• majormajor 5y ago
  This fails to explain a very easy-to-observe conundrum in the US: Religious and other highly-conservative groups on the right practice exactly the same sort of shame, shunning, reactivity, and condemnation behaviors. They've practiced them longer than "woke" has been a thing[0]. Yet they get to rail about these things in the press without being told to take the log out of their own eye by either their own members or the supposedly-hostile press. The public lets the right set the agenda on "PC" or "woke" discussions instead of simply rolling their eyes and being like "how can the group that is trying to cancel people for not being obsequious enough to Trump say shit like this?" It clearly isn't a communication style thing alone that results in people disliking it, or results in it being ineffective with some people. People who identify any complaint about any white person's behavior w.r.t. race as a personal attack on them don't care about the framing, they care about the message. "We fixed racism in the 60s, stop trying to be reverse racist" and stuff like that. [0] See https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0924S9N7W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0924S9N7W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... from almost 30 years ago, talking about a long history even then, for instance.
• deleted 5y ago
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