{"id":186805,"date":"2021-06-14T12:00:10","date_gmt":"2021-06-14T11:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=186805"},"modified":"2021-06-11T08:41:16","modified_gmt":"2021-06-11T07:41:16","slug":"the-difference-between-woke-and-a-true-awakening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/06\/the-difference-between-woke-and-a-true-awakening\/","title":{"rendered":"The Difference between \u2018Woke\u2019 and a True Awakening"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

A woman wears a pink “pussy hat” as she takes part in a march.
\u00a9 Whitney Saleski\/SOPA Images\/LightRocket via Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

10 Jun 2021 – <\/em>The supposedly liberal \u2018wokeness\u2019 and cancel culture have little to do with awakening to what\u2019s going on in the world and trying to change it \u2013 it\u2019s just noise for the sake of noise, while the status-quo is carefully preserved.<\/p>\n

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The usual liberal-conservative reproach to the so-called woke cancel culture is that it is too radical: Its partisans want to destroy all statues, cleanse our museums, rewrite our entire past\u2026 in short, they want to deprive us of our entire collective memory and purify our everyday language into a flat, heavily censored jargon. However, I think Ben Burgis is right in his claim that the woke agents of cancel culture are \u201c<\/em>Canceling Comedians While the World Burns<\/em><\/a>\u201d<\/em>: Far from being \u2018too radical\u2019, their imposition of new prohibitions and rules is one of the exemplary cases of pseudo-activity, of how to make sure that nothing will really change by pretending to act frantically<\/em>. No wonder new forms of capital, in particular anti-Trump tech capitalists (Google, Apple, Facebook), passionately support anti-racist and pro-feminist struggles \u2013 \u2018woke capitalism\u2019 is our reality. One does not really change things by prescribing measures which aim at establishing a superficial \u2018just\u2019 balance without attacking the underlying causes of the imbalance.<\/p>\n

Here is a fresh case of the politically correct struggle against privilege: California\u2019s Department of Education proposed that the gap between well-performing students and their less able peers must disappear. Professors should hold well-performing students back<\/a> and push their less intellectual peers forward, as if they were all equal in abilities. Justification? \u201cWe reject ideas of natural gifts and talents<\/em>,\u201d since \u201cthere is no cutoff determining when one child is \u2018gifted\u2019 and another is not<\/em>.\u201d The goal is thus to \u201creplace ideas of innate mathematics \u2018talent\u2019 and \u2018giftedness\u2019 with the recognition that every student is on a growth pathway.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Also –\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/span> Slavoj Zizek: Israelis\u2019 SHAME over what their state is doing in West Bank would be sign of truly belonging to Israel<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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This is a showcase of fake egalitarianism destined to just breed envy and hatred. We need good mathematicians to do serious science, and the proposed measures certainly don\u2019t help in this regard. The solution? Why not more access to good education for everyone, better living conditions for the poor? And it is easy to imagine the next step in this direction of the false egalitarianism: Is not the fact that some individuals are much more sexually attractive than others also a case of supreme injustice? So should we not invent some kind of push towards equity in enjoyment also, a way to hold the more attractive back, since there is no cutoff determining when one person is sexually attractive and another is not<\/em>? Sexuality effectively is a domain of terrifying injustice and imbalance\u2026 Equity in enjoyment is the ultimate dream of false egalitarianism.<\/p>\n

There are rare voices of authentic Left opposition to this drive towards false justice \u2013 apart from Burgis, one should mention Angela Nagle and Katherine Angel. The only problem I have with Angel\u2019s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again<\/em><\/a>is its title, which seems to imply that sex was once good (not-antagonistic) and will be that again. I\u2019ve rarely read a book with whose basic premise I agreed so fully \u2013 since this premise is formulated concisely in the publicity paragraph for the book, I will shamelessly quote it:<\/p>\n

\u201cWomen are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women\u2019s desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women\u2014and their bodies\u2014want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to?<\/em> Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women\u2019s desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Also –\u00a0<\/em><\/span> Slavoj \u017di\u017eek: Biden\u2019s words about Putin\u2019s (lack of) soul are a regression to vulgar racism<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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The parts\u00a0italicised (by me) are crucial: Any feminist theory should take into account not-knowing as a key feature of sexuality and ground its opposition to violence in sexual relationship not in the usual terms of \u2018yes means yes\u2019, but by evoking this not-knowing. This is why the motto that women \u201cmust proclaim their desires clearly and confidently\u201d is not just a violent imposition on sexuality but literally de-sexualizing, a promotion of \u2018sex without sex\u2019. This is why feminism, in some instances, enforces precisely the same \u2018shaming and silencing\u2019 of women\u2019s sexuality that it seeks to oppose. What lies under the direct physical (or psychological) violence of unwanted male sexual advances is the patronizing assumption he knows<\/em> what the \u2018confused\u2019 woman doesn\u2019t know (and is thereby legitimized to act upon this knowledge). It could thus be argued that a man is violent even if he treats a woman respectfully \u2013 as long as it\u2019s done under this presumption of knowing more about her desires than she does herself.<\/p>\n

This in no way implies that women\u2019s desire is in some sense deficient compared to that of men (who are supposed to know what they want): The lesson of psychoanalysis is that a gap always separates what we want from what we desire. It may happen that I not only desire something but want to get it without explicitly asking for it, pretending that it was imposed on me \u2013 demanding it directly would ruin the satisfaction of getting it. And inversely, I may want something, dream about it, but I don\u2019t desire to get it \u2013 my entire subjective consistency depends on this not-getting-it: Directly getting it would lead to a collapse of my subjectivity. We should always bear in mind that one of the most brutal forms of violence occurs when something that we secretly desire or fantasize about (but are not ready to do in real life) is imposed on us from outside.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Also –<\/em><\/strong><\/span> Slavoj Zizek feat. Rammstein: \u2018We have to live till we die\u2019 is the Covid-era inspiration we all need<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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The only form of sex that fully fits the politically correct criteria is a sado-masochist contract.<\/p>\n

Leftist partisans of political correctness often reproach to its critics that their focus on PC \u2018excesses\u2019, on the prohibitive aspect of cancelling and woke culture, ignores a much graver threat of censorship. Just in the UK, we have police infiltrating trade unions, regulation of what gets published in the media and appears on TV, underage children from Muslim families questioned for terrorist links, up to single events like the continuing illegal imprisonment of Julian Assange\u2026 While I agree that censorship is much worse than the \u2018sins\u2019 of cancel culture, I think it provides the ultimate argument against the woke culture and PC regulations: Why does the PC Left focus on regulating details of how we speak, etc. instead of bringing out the above-mentioned much bigger things? No wonder Assange was also attacked by some PC feminists (not only) from Sweden who did not support him because they took seriously the accusations about his sexual misconduct (which were later dismissed by the Swedish authorities). An unproven infraction of PC rules outweighed the fact of being a victim of state terror\u2026<\/p>\n

However, when the woke stance touches on a really important aspect of the reproduction of the hegemonic ideology, the reaction of the establishment changes from ridiculing the opponent for its excesses to a panicky attempt of violent legal suppression. We often read in our media complaints about the \u2018excesses\u2019 of critical gender and race studies which try to reassess the hegemonic narrative of the American past. But we are now in the middle of an ongoing reactionary counter-offensive to reassert a whitewashed American myth. New laws are proposed in at least 15 states all across the US that would ban the teaching of \u2018critical race theory<\/a>\u2019, the\u00a0New York Times\u2019 1619 Project<\/a>, and, euphemistically, \u2018divisive concepts<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Also –<\/em><\/strong><\/span> Slavoj Zizek: We\u2019re at a grim crossroads in this pandemic: one path leads to utter despair, the other to total extinction<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Are the prohibited theories really divisive? Yes, but only in the precise sense that they oppose (divide themselves from) the hegemonic official myth which is already in itself divisive<\/em>: It excludes some groups or stances, putting them in a subordinate position. Furthermore, it is clear that to the partisans of the official myth, truth does not matter here but only the \u2018stability\u2019 of the founding myths \u2013 these partisans, not those dismissed by them as \u2018historicist relativists\u2019, are effectively practicing the \u2018post-truth\u2019 stance: They like to evoke \u2018alternate facts\u2019, but they exclude alternate founding myths.<\/p>\n

While criticizing the PC cancelling culture, we should thus always bear in mind that we share their goals (for feminism, against racism, etc.), and that we criticize their inefficiency in reaching these goals. With advocates of the founding myths, the story is a different one: Their goals are unacceptable, and we hope they will fail to reach them.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Slavoj \u017di\u017eek<\/em>, a Slovenian cultural philosopher<\/em> and psychoanalyst, is senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humaniti<\/em>es of the University of London.<\/em> He has also been a visiting professor at more than 10 universities around the world. \u017di\u017eek is the author of many books, including<\/em> Living in the End Times, First As Tragedy Then As Farce, The Fragile Absolute and <\/em>Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? He lives in London.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – rt.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

10 Jun 2021 – The supposedly liberal \u2018wokeness\u2019 and cancel culture have little to do with awakening to what\u2019s going on in the world and trying to change it \u2013 it\u2019s just noise for the sake of noise, while the status-quo is carefully preserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":98727,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[2365],"class_list":["post-186805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","tag-cancel-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186805\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}