Left Is Not Woke, by the philosopher, Susan Neiman, and published in March of this year, is unusual in that it offers a critique of wokeness from the left. We are more accustomed to hear critiques from the right, although most of what we hear from the right doesn’t qualify as formal critique, more like passive aggressive mockery or Twitter troll harangues. Nothing quite so disciplined, and therefore devastating, as Neiman’s response.
In a nutshell: wokeness can’t really lay claim to the space occupied by the traditional left, classical liberalism, Enlightenment values, etc. because it has divested itself of three essential claims. What makes the left left is that 1) it claims that its values have universal application whereas wokeness focusses on the victimhood of the tribe; 2) it insists upon justice whereas wokeness focusses on power and empowerment as the solution to the inequitable distribution of life’s goods; and 3) the left insists upon the possibility of progress even if it doesn’t currently manifest itself whereas wokeness views the extension of history into the present moment with pessimism. She devotes a chapter to each of these distinctions and, in the process, defends Enlightenment values from the criticisms that they are Eurocentric and deeply embedded in colonial projects. And she concludes that, having made these distinctions, wokeness is not the liberal project it thinks it is, but unwittingly undertakes reactionary aims.
If I accept her critique, which I think, in large measure, I do, then it has several consequences for me personally. First, she observes the woke focus on victimhood. I might speak to this in different terms, for example suggesting that modern discourse foregrounds suffering, but the result is the same: your voice lacks authenticity unless you can claim a marginal identity steeped in victimhood at the hands of whatever powers operated upon you to produce that identity in the first place. The problem, Neiman says, is that the production of marginal identities operates against the universalism that is vital to a leftist perspective. Neiman, who is Jewish, points to Netanyahu as the limit case in that he stakes his ground in the identity of the oppressed Jew yet has embarked on a project of dismantling Israel’s democratic institutions in the name of protecting the Jewish people from the threat of a whole host of Others. A universalist ethic would acknowledge that Palestinians are human beings too and therefore are entitled to the same dignities as Israeli Jews. These sorts of games around victimhood play out again and again. J.K. Rowling engages transgendered activists in competitive victimhood: the assertion of a transgendered identity poses an incursion into her staunchly defended terrain of victimized “real” women. The flipside of competitive victimhood is allyship and, according to Neiman, is equally fruitless, and for the same reason: it is tribal and makes no claims to universal values.
The focus on victimhood also produces a perverse incentive to force your personal narrative into such an identity. This may account for a spate of revelations in the news where people who claimed to be Indigenous or Black have been unmasked as white. But if, for example, you’re an academic in a cutthroat publish-or-die environment and your publisher exhibits a marked preference for writing from the perspective of a victimized identity, why not try to pass? On a personal note, there is a sense in which it was a relief to be diagnosed with a major mental health issue. As a well-educated WASP male, nobody was interested in anything I had to say because I couldn’t offer any stories of suffering and marginalization. Then, one morning, I woke up needing shock therapy, and I cried hallelujah! I wrote a paper claiming chronic mental illness as a mark of personal identity and bastardized Robert Goss’s famous mantra from queer theory: “I’m nuts, I’m here, get used to it.” The paper did quite well and I received many pats on the back from allies until, with the passage of time and improved mental health, I began to feel I had been disingenuous. It turns out I can offer thoughts that are useful and incisive without first soaking them in the experience of victimhood.
The second consequence for me personally is that Neiman’s critique forces me to examine my commitment to postmodern thought. In fact, I would suggest that it forces me to the brink of a personal paradigm shift. But don’t feel too badly for me; I’ve been feeling the ground tremble beneath my feet ever since the inauguration of Donald Trump. My first encounter with postmodernism came in 1985 when I left an English degree at Victoria College, still very much bedazzled by the presence of Northrop Frye, and went across the road to the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law which was a hotbed for a newfangled thing called Critical Legal Theory. It was seductive and I fostered a cult-like devotion to the writings of Jacques Derrida.
As I view it, the problem with postmodernism generally is that people have difficulty distinguishing description from prescription. I like to use the example of economics because this difficulty plays out there in a more obvious way. Economists like to say of themselves that they are engaged in a scientific discipline: they describe collective human interactions and then, when they’ve gathered enough data, they try to offer explanations as to why those specific interactions and not others. But the discipline doesn’t stop there. Most notably with the rise of people like Milton Friedman, explanation shifts to prescription. Economists shift the conversation from what is the case to what ought to be the case, and they frame the shift in terms that make it seem natural. If things happen naturally, then there’s no point resisting them, and there’s no need for input from, say, a voting public. Neoliberalism is just the way things are. Because the markets function organically, there’s no need for government intervention as that will only screw up the natural order. And so on. We apply this strategy all the time. So, for example, we take Darwinism, first offered as an explanation of how a species can come to be so well adapted to its environment, and apply it prescriptively to modern human behaviour: competition is just that way it is and we are helpless to act otherwise.
Postmodernism as an idea has undergone a similar shift. Thinkers began by setting out analytic tools to reveal the hidden power relationships behind many of our cherished assumptions. It was descriptive in the sense that it replaced an older naive account of the world with a fresher more hard-boiled account. For example, it observed the way boundaries are enforced between “high” and “low” culture and offered a nod to people like Andy Warhol who appropriated the style of the advertising industry (soup cans, brillo boxes) and gave it space in formal galleries. In time, our culture experienced a shift to the prescriptive: these became necessary disruptions to prevent our acquiescence to traditional power dynamics. At the time, it seemed a worthy undertaking. But we might have thought differently if we could see its endgame: photographs of Donald Trump in the White House behind a table heaped with McDonald’s hamburgers. Far from exposing latent power relations, Trump used postmodern strategies of disruption in the same way he might use artillery assaults: to soften our cultural ground before invading with more oppressive power relations. Similarly, postmodern critiques began by examining the distinction between advertising and journalism and ended up with a world in which we are increasingly encouraged to take as natural the assumption that all media disseminate lies. It’s fake news all the way down and truth is impossible.
Neiman is particularly harsh in her assessment of Michel Foucault whom she regards as a corrosive voice without any kind of intellectual redemption. He had great fun dismantling all our institutions—health care, asylums, prisons, academies—but offered no vision of life beyond his destructions. In the real world, his academic musings have found their full expression in the rationalizations and austerity movements of neoliberalism which has proven quite efficient at destroying our major social institutions. And it offers, as an article of faith, the assurance that the markets will answer the lingering question Foucault left behind. The markets will naturally furnish a vision of life beyond these destructions through the miracle of privatization. Anyone who can’t share in this vision simply isn’t squinting hard enough.
Neiman’s critique forces a third consequence upon me: I need to re-examine some of my personal reading. She defends the Enlightenment value of progress, arguing that belief in the possibility of progress is a hallmark of the left. Note that she does not say that progress has to be realized at every historical moment, only that we commit ourselves to its possibility as we would to any other ethic. I think in particular of Andrew Potter’s recent book, On Decline, in which he argues that if we feel each succeeding year is worse than the one before, we may be justified in our perception. It’s possible that Potter is a pessimist who nevertheless believes in the possibility of progress. But it’s also possible that he’s simply a nihilist. It’s difficult to tell and I must confess that I was drawn to some of the darker strands of his arguments. Since I could interpret him in either direction, the challenge lies in managing my own bias because its my bias that determines how I read him. If I’m feeling despondent, I’ll read him as a nihilist. But if, with Neiman, I commit to the possibility of progress, then I’ll read him as documenting a narrow historical moment without foreclosing the possibility of sunnier days at some later time. And so I must proceed, book by book, asking myself if the times haven’t infected me as I read, subtly luring me away from my commitment to universal values, justice, and belief in the possibility of progress.