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. — Joshs
I've wondered about this myself. Simple question: do you think wokism is a significant and growing issue in society? — Tom Storm
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
There is an epistemic shift in the grounds of justification, so that the conventional norms of rational discourse yield to the immediacy of subjective experience. — Number2018
irreversible transformation of the autonomous, rational subject of liberalism into a digitized, emotive, and aestheticized form of subjectivity. — Number2018
So, emotional authenticity has been elevated to the status of epistemic foundation of identity politics and online discourse. — Number2018
struggle between oppressing and oppressed groups — Number2018
prioritizing a collective identity over personal freedom. — Number2018
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.I'm not sure how wokeness is different from an agenda of conserving grudges, as if we lost the momentum and are now losing all the gains from the Civil Rights Movement. We've landed back in the 1960s and the only way forward is to demand corporate virtue signaling. I'm detecting a lack of underlying meaning. — frank
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.
The US has a real political crisis with Trump's actions and is on the road for an fiscal, monetary and economic crisis ....sooner or later. — ssu
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.
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
. 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. — Joshs
And no doubt there are some zealous left-wing activists who go too far, — Tom Storm
Žižek’s post-Marxist critique of wokeness is compelling in many respects. However, he falls short of fully disclosing the nature of wokeness or accounting for its emotional appeal and social power. His framework remains confined to traditional ideological critique and thus may overlook a crucial dimension: wokeness is not purely ideological—it is affective. It is about the desire to feel seen, safe, included, or conversely, excluded. Through wokeness, underlying structures of power can engage with and regulate deeply human emotions of shame, guilt, pride, vulnerability, and anger. It operates without the mediation of ideology, class struggle, or systems of political representation. — Number2018
Instead, I attempt to diagnose a shift in discursive practices, particularly in the domains of identity politics and online activism, where affective expressions of marginalization have begun to function as sufficient sources of epistemic and moral authority. My argument is not a metaphysical claim about truth; it is rather a phenomenological observation about a shift in rhetorical argumentation in public discourse. You rightly point out that for thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, and Heidegger, knowledge is always situated in structures of power, affect, or ontological attunement. However, those thinkers are engaged in an epistemic inquiry, rather than describing contemporary discursive practices. What we are witnessing today is not the philosophical deconstruction of rationalism, but a normative inversion in the public sphere. Thus, emotional experience and perceived marginality are not retained within rigorous ontological framing. Instead, they assert themselves as affective self-reference of truth and moral authority, becoming resistant to questioning, nuance, or deliberate reflection. Therefore, one needs to differentiate the rigorous epistemic critiques of the mentioned thinkers from the description of today’s affective politics of visibility and recognition.. — Number2018
Thank you for your responses. Btw, I’ll respond to your second point about the role of affect in the context of wokism later. 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.Regarding your point about Deleuze and Guattari, you’re right that desire- affect is always embedded within social, historical, and material strata. Yet, desire is fundamentally affective. Despite their insistence that desire only exists in relation to molar structures and historical plateaus, it remains affective at its core. It is non-psychological, impersonal, composed of flows, intensities, and blockages. Desire, in their framework, does not stem from lack; it produces and generates reality through bodily and collective flows and assemblages. Their conception of desire-affect is ontological—it constitutes the very fabric of social, psychic, and material life. Ultimately, their work is grounded on affect in the Spinozan sense: the capacity to affect and be affected.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 — Joshs
Is the extent of your OP that there are legitimate objections to these methods? That rational discourse has become lost? This is of course a serious issue (deeper and more wide-spread than even these concerns I would think). But do your objections to these methods include (and wish to refute) the underlying interests? — Antony Nickles
In an attempt to provide an example of that kind of inquiry/discussion: If we look past the demonstrations we take as (somehow completely) reflecting “woke” “culture”, can we brainstorm what might be the circumstances involved, the necessity of the claim, even the need to make it in a fashion we might misinterpret or not know how to make intelligible? Don’t these claims have a history? Here I am not enough of a social critic to know the answers, but, if we are to be “woke”, what is it we were asleep to? — Antony Nickles
I realized that you actually have done some work in coming up with some theories about what is important in judging these claims (whatever they actually are). — Antony Nickles
why you are unable to generalize the grounds, evidence, situations, etc. This makes me thinks we are perhaps skipping forward to assume ends, goals, enemies, etc., when the claim stops before all that. — Antony Nickles
What would you say to the objection which says that wokeness is a transitory phenomenon? That given its affective character it will never be more than a bridge between more stable and rational cultural epochs?
On the one hand I do not think it will go away quickly. On the other hand I do not think it has the wherewithal that is traditionally needed for durable staying power. I suppose the question is then whether the new social media technologies have altered the landscape to such an extent that affective movements will become more permanent. — Leontiskos
Certainly, the Kavanaugh hearings exemplify the extent to which public life often is structured by affective discursive formations of contemporary woke culture. — Number2018
As we become increasingly conditioned by digital infrastructures, our dependence on affective patterns within society only deepens. — Number2018
I do not attempt to re-inscribe a metaphysical binary between reason and emotion — Number2018
emotional experience and perceived marginality are not retained within rigorous ontological framing. — Number2018
What we are witnessing today is not the philosophical deconstruction of rationalism, but a normative inversion in the public sphere. — Number2018
escape the dominant power formations. — Number2018
this doctrine of knowledge that literally pushed [Foucault] towards the discovery of a new domain, which would become that of power. — Number2018
legitimacy, moral authority, and social control now flow through different channels. — Number2018
practice is subordinated to representation — Number2018
reconfiguration of power through identity — Number2018
expressions of marginalization have begun to function as sufficient sources of epistemic and moral authority. — Number2018
they assert themselves as affective self-reference of truth and moral authority, becoming resistant to questioning, nuance, or deliberate reflection. — Number2018
establishing a cultural norm where a testimony of harm received moral and epistemic authority… the status of the primary epistemic standard. — Number2018
moral claims based solely on feeling hurt or offended. — Number2018
this phenomenon likely calls for a deeper philosophical framework to better understand the contemporary affective landscape. — Number2018
All in all, the Kavanaugh hearings exemplify the extent to which public life is structured by affective discursive formations of contemporary woke culture. — Number2018
In principle, you are correct. However, the 2018 Kavanaugh hearing is a paradigmatic example of a triumphant woke spectacle. And it perfectly illustrates an epistemic shift in the grounds of justification so that the intersubjective norms of rational discourse yield to the immediacy of subjective experience. Only recently has anti-woke discourse begun to gain momentum and take the lead. Yet this turn also reveals how underlying structures of power can rebrand themselves and adapt their affective grip with remarkable resilience.Curious that you only look at one side of the spectacle. The testimony of both Ford and Kavanaugh was emotional and lacked the explicit language or rhetorical style that typically marks woke or anti-woke discourse. Ford was adopted by the woke and Kavanaugh by the anti-woke, and the anti-woke won. — praxis
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