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.

I don't know that it's possible to discuss "woke" effectively with how much it's been used and misued over the years, but frankly I couldn't be happier it is going away. I honestly blame it, its supporters and their "end of history" nonsense for the past decade or so of political failure.

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. — Joshs

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. Michel Foucault remains highly relevant here—both for analyzing our immediate behaviours and for constructing a broader philosophical perspective on wokeness. 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…'"

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. — Joshs

Don’t the regimes of these rulers represent 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.

I would put it this way. Wokism is giving a fuck about someone else's difficulties in a complex society. One is 'awakened' to the problems of being disabled, disfigured, or in any varied form divergent from the average. It leads to such horrors as designated parking spaces, ramps alongside stairs, special needs education, protection in law against unfair discrimination on grounds of age, sex, or race, and those appalling and distracting sign language displays on woke broadcasts.

Edit: In essence it is a denial of the constitutional right to join witch-hunts.

Seems like a rather rosy and narrow interpretation of what "woke" has become.

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.

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.

His point was that the movement was, at least largely, genuine. So, the analysis is supposed to help with formulating a sort of better attempt to address these sorts of issues.

The Great Awokening largely focused on sex, race, and sexual orientation. The sort of inverse, the right-wing's own wokeness, has largely focused on ethnicity, regional culture (arguably a sort of ethnicity), religion, and to a lesser extent, class. I don't think this is any accident. It reminds me of a good quote I saw on this:

Notably, the [marginalized] groups that [liberal reformers] recognize are all defined by biology. In liberal theory, where our “nature” means our bodies, these are “natural” groups opposed to “artificial” bonds like communities of work and culture. This does not mean that liberalism values these “natural” groups. Quite the contrary: since liberal political society reflects the effort to overcome or master nature, liberalism argues that “merely natural” differences ought not to be held against us. We ought not to be held back by qualities we did not choose and that do not reflect our individual efforts and abilities.

[Reformers] recognize women, racial minorities, and the young only in order to free individuals from “suspect classifications.” Class and culture are different. People are part of ethnic communities or the working class because they chose not to pursue individual success and assimilation into the dominant, middle-class culture, or because they were unable to succeed. Liberal theory values individuals who go their own way, and by the same token, it esteems those who succeed in that quest more highly than individuals who do not. Ethnicity, [religion], and class, consequently, are marks of shame in liberal theory, and whatever discrimination people suffer is, in some sense, their “own fault.” We may feel compassion for the failures, but they have no just cause for equal representation.

Wilson Cary McWilliams - Politics

Or as James Stimson crystalized this sort of idea a few years ago:

"When we observe the behavior of those who live in distressed areas, we are observing not the effect of decline of the working class, we are observing a highly selected group of people who faced economic adversity and chose to stay at home and accept it when others sought and found opportunity elsewhere. . . . Those who are fearful, conservative, in the social sense, and lack ambition stay and accept decline.”

Unfortunately, I don't think it's going away. I think it is merely having a sort of recession on the left, due to political defeats. However, I think it's metastasized on the right.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and others have claimed that Trumpism represents a sort of "identity politics for White Americans." I think this is partially accurate, but not really the full story (for one, it misses Trump's wider appeal). I think there is actually an even deeper affinity between "Woke," Trumpism and the "nu-right" than merely the utilization of identity politics. Nietzche is one strong common thread here. Obviously, the Trump coalition is quite broad, but it's newest, and arguably most defining camp is best represented by the idea of a "tech-broligarchy," i.e., by Elon Musk, Peter Theil, etc., or by thinkers like Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Costin Alamariu, etc. This is largely a "post-Christian" conservatism, although sometimes it adopts a highly aesthetic, almost re-paganized "traditional" Christianity as its mantel. In many ways, this new movement hasn't just borrowed the language, arguments, and strategies of the "post-modern" left, but has imbibed at least some of their philosophical ideas (obviously in transformed form).

John Millbank's Theology and Social Theory (and David Bentley Hart's 2003 extension in The Beauty of the Infinite) seems to be very prescient here. The main idea there was that the "ontologies of violence," and "metaphysics of power" developed through Nietzsche and his descendants has its logical termination, not in far-left politics, but in fascism and a sort of "neo-paganism." The "Dark Enlightenment" is a sort of concretization of this (I mean, Millbank appears to have been at least spot on in predicting at least this sort of ideology).

Re fascism, people have tried to smear Nietzche with his adoption by the Nazis, which is unfair, but sometimes it seems that this goes too far in the other direction, towards denying that anything other than a totally radical misreading could have intrigued Nazi-philes. I don't think it's an accident though that many of those who rescued Nietzsche from obscurity where, at least initially, as Kanye puts it: "Hitler fans." The logic of power is there to follow.

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.

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:

Wokism is giving a fuck about someone else's difficulties in a complex society. — unenlightened

This is exactly what I'm talking about. This is obviously, to anyone who has the patience to pay attention, untrue and an explicitly rejection of almost everything that 'woke' (in Doyle's sense - which is not something one would actively claim, obviously) encompasses. Most 'woke' behaviour, in the relevant sense, is destructive, narcissistic and clearly illogical not to mention hypocritical, historically ignorant among other things. I imagine what unenlightened wants to say is that this is what 'woke' should be and roughly, I agree. It even used to be that. I used to be actively, proudly 'woke'. But it is simply not true to claim that anymore. I can't, in good conscience, claim the area of ideology that has harmed almost everyone I know constantly for years, has caused more civil unrest than any competing ideology over the last two decades and has supported murder, street-level violence, clear and disgusting crimes if carried out by someone sufficiently 'marginalized', attacks on civil servants and the general acceptance of incredibly distrusting and discriminatory personal beliefs. It borders on McCarthyism except more people are being hurt.

Almost all 'woke' academia has a whiff of performance art to it. Look at this disaster of a paper I was just alerted to. The abstract reads like a Dr Seuss paragraph:

"The parasite, in blurring the distinctions between active subjects and passive environments, poses a problem for western epistemology. By thinking the parasite, I try to re-member precolonial Māori discourses of what being means. Helped by new materialist thought, what I uncover is an oblique and ecological model of relations in which nothing is quite separable from anything else. Through the parasite, this paper explores posthuman pasts and futures, and gestures towards the potential for a radical revision of how we understand ourselves as subjects."

As it turns out, I've interacted with this writer several times over the years. She is not capable of explaining what she writes effectively, or answering questions that pose any challenge, whatsoever, to her view points. She is also unable to understand simple concepts like "crime" (she is a strict abolitionist about prisons). Confused, buzz-word-laden work like this is a perfect exemplar of why 'woke' is so incapable of upholding either it's own tenets or those which are considered, generally, to be the 'morally correct' ways of being: non-discrimination, non-hypocrisy, honestly and accountability.

I think probably people who see themselves as part of 'woke' will be unable to accept the facts about its manifestations and so will clamour about how Woke represents something they are comfortable copping to. By way of example, the idea that half the country is racist usually isn't accepted despite indirect claims of the same. Like "Trump lovers are racist". This is acceptable to the Wokist as 'trump' has to be ipso facto bad-causing, in any association he is found. Ignoring that this condemns half the country, incl much of the productive (in terms of industry) population.

Another is the claim that 'nobody is illegal'. Well, they literally are, if they've entered the country illegal. The 'woke' wont acknowledge things like illegals committing crimes, and then being removed, is actually fine. They also routinely attribute to their enemy that which their allies have done. Obama's walk-through of his detention centres are being touted as Trump-era offerings. This is a lie, and one they buy. Then when confronted, claim "Oh well Trump is worse" because it avoids the embarrassment of being entirely wrong, over-emotional and incapable of conversing with the other side effectively. If any of this seems untrue, or you need examples please do ask. There are thousands out there. I'm being purposefully high-level in my descriptions.

I add a final note that its probably not going to be accurate that you understand "wokism" over professionals writing about it. You are claiming so, it seems, so worth noting that this is extremely unlikely. It will also be unlikely that I understand better than many, but I am certainly able to see merits and failings on many levels. The above is just what I'm currently feeling about this particular thing.

T Clark below, I think, is saying this more succinctly. I just attacked many more aspects of the playing field.

I’m a white, liberal, registered Democrat, but I recognize what you’re calling “woke” for what it really is. It’s a way for “progressives” to show their contempt for working class, white men without suffering the consequences of saying it directly. We liberals are now paying for that.

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.

"Trump lovers are racist" will do the same job, and sound better. — AmadeusD

Well I do imagine that Trump and his followers are anti-woke because I hear them say so. So then I look at the policies being followed and the institutions being dismantled, and assume that 'woke' is the opposite. But you're right, I am no expert in what to me is a mere derogatory epithet, and no doubt the experts in derogatory epithets have the right of it And there's grades of horseshit n'all. I'll leave you experts to it.

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. — Joshs

That is partially correct. However, 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”.

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. — Joshs

In the OP, the main points aim to highlight the singularity of our current structural conditions. There are two major factors: first, a profound epistemic shift that has transformed the foundations of normative argumentation, particularly in relation to identity politics and online discourse; and second, the unique dynamics of contemporary digital environments. Both factors are distinctly modern and together make 'wokeness' not only possible, but in some ways inevitable.
To examine the emancipatory dimensions of wokeness, it is useful to revisit Foucault’s critique of sexuality. For Foucault, moments of sexual liberation are often quickly penetrated and absorbed by power. From this perspective, the institutional recognition of non-binary identities can be seen as both a progressive step and a reconfiguration of power through identity. For instance, many countries and institutions have recently adopted policies allowing individuals to identify as non-binary or select a third gender category ('X') on official documents. While often celebrated as a form of recognition or liberation, such measures also serve to classify, regulate, and normalize difference. Non-binary identity, in this sense, becomes a 'manageable form of deviance': now it can be tracked, and integrated. As a result, individuals may find themselves bound to fixed identity categories (e.g., 'X' or 'non-binary') that constrain fluid self-conceptions and impose new norms. Thus, contemporary configurations of power can quickly neutralize and absorb emancipatory movements, turning them into administrable forms of identity within broader regimes of control. Doyle’s critique of wokeness ultimately misses its deeper, more concealed alignment with newest forms of power. The history of contemporary liberation movements shows how swiftly they are neutralized, incorporated, or institutionalized.

There are some with concern for their fellow beings, raising pointed issues, being associated with or being called woke, or maybe self-labelling so.
Would women's suffrage activists have been called woke back in the day? Who knows. Anti-segregationists?

There are conservative reactionaries raising radical examples and denouncing them as woke.
After having yelled from the rooftops for some time, they've stigmatized the word for their purposes.

Wake up sheeple! — woke person?

The outrage. :fire: :D

Interesting formulation of this issue, Josh.

In Australia, the only people who use the term 'woke' are Murdoch journalists and oddly discordant right-wingers, from what I’ve seen. It doesn't seem to have captured people’s imagination as widely.

There is a bit of a culture war here too, but it’s essentially a diluted one, riffing off American Republican talking points about political correctness, minority rights, and the usual anti-trans bigotry. But I suspect you’re right. Most of these ideas that are hated or feared by some now will probably be standard worldview in a few years.

The fundamental philosophical insights guiding it are here to stay, and will become accepted by the mainstream within the next 50 years — Joshs

Can you throw us a few dot points about the philosophical insights?

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"). That is, that reforms that sprung from the movement tended to direct benefit upwards, and that much of the movement tended towards the performative; it didn't produce much of an effect from the perspective of economic, health, etc. metrics.

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.

Sure, but he's quite clear about what he means here. It isn't just about wealth, but also about status, cultural influence, and political power. A plumber with a few assistants might earn more than the mayor of a decent-sized city or the head of an influential cultural institution, but they are hardly the same in status and power for instance.

you will find very few true wokist in that group

I don't think that's true (although I guess it depends on what a 'true' wokist is), particularly among their children (who are largely destined to stay in that income bracket). You would certainly find less than in academia though, that's fair.

Thus, contemporary configurations of power can quickly neutralize and absorb emancipatory movements, turning them into administrable forms of identity within broader regimes of control.

Or it can make old identities new targets of power. In the context of the Great Awokening, gender seems most relevant (although religion is important too, "Evangelical" sometimes gets used almost like a slur). In the US context, the Democratic party seems to have a "young male" problem, with voters under 20 being more likely to vote for Trump than those over 75, and Trump winning the male Latino vote. This goes along with the marked "gender gap" in political ideology that has been observed across developed countries. I cannot help but think that this is because broad aspects of male identity have been deemed "problematic" by some vocal social reformers. That is, presumably "toxic masculinity," is just about the toxic parts of masculinity, which certainly exist, but there are obviously very important disagreements about which aspects these are.

I am not very big on the whole "War on Boys" narrative, although it does seem to touch on some real issues. I'd prefer to frame it as more an issue of the "education of the chest," that C.S. Lewis speaks of in The Abolition of Man, i.e., the training of the passions and the "spirited part of the soul," thymos. The problems Lewis identified only seem to have gotten worse, and they obviously affect women as well. My point would be that men raised to be "men without chests," become desperate for some sort of thymotic influence. Thus, they end up being easy prey for precisely the sort of "toxic masculinity" reformers want to abolish. So it ends up being a sort of self-reinforcing cycle.

Edit: note the timing

She is also unable to understand simple concepts like "crime" (she is a strict abolitionist about prisons). Confused, buzz-word-laden work like this is a perfect exemplar of why 'woke' is so incapable of upholding either it's own tenets or those which are considered, generally, to be the 'morally correct' ways of being: non-discrimination, non-hypocrisy, honestly and accountability.

I think probably people who see themselves as part of 'woke' will be unable to accept the facts about its manifestations and so will clamour about how Woke represents something they are comfortable copping to. By way of example, the idea that half the country is racist usually isn't accepted despite indirect claims of the same. — AmadeusD

You raise some of the most difficult and thought-provoking questions about wokeness. Why do so many intelligent and educated individuals deeply believe in something that may lack solid epistemic grounding? In my OP, I proposed the hypothesis that we are undergoing a profound epistemic shift. 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. As a result, so called ‘woke’people may become fully absorbed in the self-perceived authenticity of their feelings. Still, this phenomenon likely calls for a deeper philosophical framework to better understand the contemporary affective landscape.

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.

Well I do imagine that Trump and his followers are anti-woke because I hear them say so. — unenlightened

A fair point, but from their perspective woke is expressly not what you say it is. That's sort of the issue - the two groups are either seeing, or pretending to see 'woke' as capturing different behaviours. I, personally, think neither side has this chess move open to them.
Woke is a cultural phenomenon which has superseded an older cultural phenomenon under the same name. I think its possible OP's response to me lays out what that is, in it's current form (and thus, by inference, pretty self-defeating).

Otherwise, yes, it's grey and greyer. I can only give perspectives and note where facts come apart from them, as best I can tell.

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. — Joshs

I agree wholeheartedly with both of these positions. As noted, I used to claim Woke as it used to be a useful catch-all for some genuinely helpful social activities that did not harm anyone, basically. Now, as noted in a previous post, those activities are both self-defeating, and dangerous in a lot of cases on my view (and, the wider view from outside the bubble that 'woke' is intended to capture).

I’m interested in your knowledge of the underlying philosohies that these practices are drawn from. — Joshs

This is a rather tricky question. If you me Crenshaw et al.. stemming from Marxist thinking, then yes. I am versed (though, some time ago now - don't ask me to cite lol) in what those 'structures' are. This is not what 'woke' captures.
If you mean the actual underlying philosophy held by those currently in the bubble? Largely white man bad, minority good, disparity = bigotry, oppression=social status. This explains most of the hypocrisy, ignorance and self-aggrandizing we see (and no, this is not an over-simplification. The only thing I am missing is the wording those people use to justify it - which is identity and emotion. There is no further argument made by hte group in question - it seems perhaps not hte group you want to defend). A prime example is Karmelo Anthony. We've seen a decidedly woke response to a cold-blooded murder by an emotional dysregulated dickhead. But, it's white people's fault, he's black so can't be racist, and should have been given more money on go fund me.

To be sure, these beliefs and behaviours exist in a certain group. That is the group Doyle is talking about. Setting yourself aside, and still claiming ot be 'woke' seems incoherent.

The fundamental philosophical insights guiding it are here to stay, and will become accepted by the mainstream within the next 50 years. — Joshs

It is not possible to know this. It is also contrary to the actual reality which is that the underlying tenets are rejected by almost all structures and authorities once hte harms are made obvious. Happy to revisit in 50 years.

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. — Joshs

Once again, obviously not true and a weird trick to avoid accepting third party critique. If your position, as noted here, amounts to "only we can critique ourselves" then that's absurd. If this is just to sa yyou have seen a critique outside the bubble which you agree with, then that stands exactly in line with my entire response. You will not be emotionally capable of doing so if you claim to be woke.

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.

To avoid replacing one form of tyranny with another, he advocates for a renewed commitment to liberalism and a revival of Enlightenment principles such as free speech, open debate, and individual liberty. — Number2018

Sounds eminently sensible to me. One of the founders of the Australian Greens, Drew Hutton, was interviewed recently about woke ideology (hate the misuse of grammar by the way) in respect of trans rights. He says since he left the party (around 2009), it has developed a stance where even discussion of the issue warrants sanction (implication being that there is nothing to discuss). He says that many dedicated conservationists who should be involved in the Green Party have left or even had their membership terminated for questioning the emphasis on the issue. I suppose it is one of the issues that green left politics tends to constellate around.

So-called wokism is the same old racism, injustice, and tribalism dressed in another garb. Beneath the strange arguments and complex surface-level manifestations lies the perennial epistemology and logic at work.

Sociologists have come up with a decent enough theory called Social Categorization (or self-categorization). It’s the process through which we group individuals based upon superficial information, such as age or race or class and so on. The quick mental trick of dissolving the target’s individuality into the soup of our social categories is supposed to shape downstream evaluation and behavior by providing prewritten judgements in the form of stereotypes and assumptions. It’s a way for the abstract-minded to better deal with the concrete complexities and diversity of life. But it is also the impetus for in-group/out-group dynamics, hierarchies, discrimination, and—as we always see with this stuff—racism, injustice, and tribalism.

My post-Marxist political stance is Old Left, or prioritizing the economic justice movement (e.g. democratizing workplaces, management & ownership) over social justice-identity politics aka "woke" policies such that the latter are historically situated, or grounded, by the former. Outside or in lieu of the movement – especially during the last half-century of Thatcher-Reagan neoliberal globalization – "wokeness" (like p0m0 discourse) has become reactionary to the degree it has failed to propose coherent alternatives to and practical resistance against populist support for rightwing, illiberal regimes.

To avoid replacing one form of tyranny with another, he advocates for a renewed commitment to liberalism and a revival of Enlightenment principles such as free speech, open debate, and individual liberty.

Sounds eminently sensible to me.

This is largely Fukuyama's answer in his recent "Liberalism and it's Discontents," which treats the same issue, but also the excesses of neoliberalism (which he sees as taking classical liberalism to an extreme, largely due to assumptions borrowed from economics).

Fukuyama is, at first glance, pretty open to critiques of the most popular forms of modern liberalism. He allows that the difficulty for Rawls and Nozick (major figures for progressive and conservative liberalism respectively) is that they have extremely "thin" anthropologies. Man is something of an atomized appetite machine who needs to be controlled by contracts and systems of "nudges and prompts," so that his inherent selfishness and gratification-seeking doesn't conflict with other's similar behavior (John Millbank's point, which is more radical, is that this is really just the Reformed theological tradition's view of man and nature, only with grace and God removed).

Fukuyama famously adds thymos back into the equation, arguing that people also seek a sense of honor and recognition, and that this is why identity fails to simply dissolve despite the pressures of capitalism and liberalism. He even makes an abortive appeal to virtue in the book. He compares a young woman going to school, supporting her sick mother, who is still actively politically involved, with a wealthier young man who spends all his time on video games and pornography, and is completely checked out of political life and any "common good." His point is that, pace earlier liberals, we can judge the former better, because we are judging based on their character, not based on immutable facts about them. He thinks we can make some judgements about the human good, even if only those goods that support liberalism itself. However, he doesn't really address the real issue, which is that a denial of human telos (or our ability to know it), makes virtue impossible to define.

Anyhow, I bring up Fukuyama because he is one of the better, fairer attempts to defend the view that what is needed is a return to classical Enlightenment liberalism. It's a short book too.

I think it is wrong though. I think Fukuyama errs because, while he finds a role for thymos, he ignores logos, that people want to do what they think is "truly best." Thymos alone doesn't explain rich men in the Roman empire giving up all their status and wealth and becoming celibates to pursue the monastic life or philosophy. It doesn't explain Marxist revolutionaries who were willing to take on suicidal missions to further what they saw as a path to a truly better society. Self-interest doesn't explain athiest martyrdom.

Fukuyama makes the Wars of Religion out to be entirely battles of thymos, when in reality they were, above all else, wars over logos. Likewise, even on smaller scales, people don't abandon good careers, status (thymos), and consumption to do things like care for sick parents as a means of pursuing thymos or epithumia (pleasure), they do it because it agrees with logos, i.e., what they believe "a good person should do." One need not even suppose any "objective good," for this to be true, one only need allow that people's notion of goodness is often the deciding factor in what they choose to pursue, and that it often trumps pleasure and status seeking.

This is a big miss because the classical liberalism Fukuyama defends is arguably most choice-worthy precisely because the "marketplace of ideas," and universal education it fosters allows people to best fulfill the desires of logos by allowing them to explore goodness and virtue. Arguably, this oversight could actually be used to support "classical liberalism" against its competitors.

I am more skeptical. I think that classical liberalism is largely defined by its anthropology, so that any system with an appropriate role for thymos and logos probably becomes something quite different. However, this doesn't mean it jettisons the things Fukuyama thinks are most valuable about liberalism, namely:

1. Accountable government (normally through some form of elections)
2. A strong, independent, professional civil society
3. A centralized state monopoly on force
4. Rule of law and property rights

So, whether you'd want to call a reform based on a "thick" anthropology "liberalism" or not seems besides the main point to me.

To bring it back to Woke though, the post-modern thread Fukuyama objects to likewise suffers from this thin anthropology because it is an outgrowth of liberalism itself. I think it's also unable to take logos seriously. The "metaphysics of power" normally tends to dissolve the subject possessing logos, and to make logos merely an illusion of power, or nothing but power itself. However, I don't think the foundations of this movement are actually philosophically sound, and even if they were, their logical conclusion will be fascism (what we are indeed seeing), not some sort of radically left egalitarianism.

John Millbank's point, which is more radical, is that this is really just the Reformed theological tradition's view of man and nature, only with grace and God removed — Count Timothy von Icarus

Makes sense to me. Counterpart to Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic.

I assume that your particular distillation of wokeism helps you to better deal with the concrete complexities and diversity of life.

↪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.

Just philosophically speaking, we may be mixing a few things together. Presumably, we want to have a discussion about something on which we might all not agree, nor agree what to do about, nor even be able to value together as an issue. I take these to be moral claims.

But the main thing I see being noticed, objected to, and perpetuated on both sides is superior, righteous judgment, criticism, shaming, and condescension, which I would differentiate as moralizing (e.g., on terms of, say, "good" and "evil"). Unfortunately, any actual discussion of these issues is getting buried under this pile of mutual indignation, claims/denials of authority and rationality.

But in a moral moment there is no authority to claim what is right, thus the importance of understanding the issue from the inside, on another's terms. To make the "strongest" case for them, which is not to say the one we ourselves would make (based on our standards), but respecting that they might have legitimate interests that we don't yet know. Thus a moral discussion is putting ourselves in the place of the other; digging deep to understand (not assume) what they value and want, and not dismissing them out of hand (as we too often do in philosophy, looking first to refute).

an emotional expression and personal experience increasingly substitute for rational deliberation and shared ethical frameworks. — Number2018

It is easy to find ways to close this argument, shut out or moralize the other, but a moral claim puts this responsibility on us, to find its ineligibility, its "rationality" as another's reasons. Of course, these conversations fail all the time, and of course there is not any guarantee of resolution, but I would think the point is to learn what is at stake in a way that is deep, explicit, and wide-ranging.

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.