Sleepers, Awake!

I understand “woke” in its early usage to have referred to a state of nascent political alertness. To become woke was to be awakened to certain realities; to stay woke was to bear them vigilantly in mind. Such terms are always doubled, shadowed by irony, from the very beginning: one might use the same word to send up someone who had abruptly and comically switched from head-in-the-sand obliviousness to excitedly declaiming the bleeding obvious, or whose sensitivity to the machinations of systemic forces had strayed into a paranoid or apophenic register.

I’m old but not completely amnesiac: I remember,for example, “right-on” being used in similar ways, both in approbation and in gentle mockery; and then, inevitably, as a snarl word by establishment opinion columnists and the like, for whom “right-on” was something one could only ever be “painfully”, “wincingly”, “excruciatingly” and so on. TV comedians like Ben Elton and Rob Newman were earnestly right-on, for a time, but also extremely squirmy around the stereotype of the right-on lefty male, cringing in anticipation of an internalised adversary’s violent contempt - a posture which for me remains a vivid component of the emotional signature of that era.

Terms referencing some type of “raised” political consciousness are always going to be caught up in a web of contested meanings, indexing not only convictions but also hesitations. But this complexity is crudely pulverised in their use as snarl words, wherein they lose referentiality entirely, emptying out into a vacuous expression of hostility towards the very possibility of becoming conscious of new things or in new ways. So it evidently is with “woke” now: a snarl of the encroached-upon against the encroaching.

I would like to try to discourage a particular line of argument which a few people seem to be trying out at present, to the effect that excesses of “woke” have fed into the escalating segregationist backlash in America. Because a certain anxiety about going too far has always flickered within the semantic field of the term itself, it may seem natural to wonder whether transgressions of everyday commonsense have created opportunities for the enemy. I do think that there is something of what I call a “normie riot” (by analogy with “police riot”) about the current wave of reaction — that it is in part a reaction against encroaching “abnormality” on the part of those who want to see the restoration of a status quo in which the old pre-eminences were taken for granted. But I don’t think that reactionary impulse is activated by excesses of fringe political experiment; its core animus arises out of large-scale, visible social change, disruptive global events, and the desire to reverse historic defeats such as, you know, civil rights.

Mostly if you dig into the “woke radicalised normies to be more reactionary” argument it’s about trans rights. Like, basically always, that’s what it’s really about. Because trans rights entail trans people existing socially, asserting needs and wants which in turn necessitate adjustments in the way the social order is structured around sex. And for purposes of inciting a normie riot, getting people riled up about manifest abnormalities encroaching on core aspects of the way they understand their own social roles, this is good red meat to throw around. But I still think it’s weird that people care so much about it, and I think the reason they care so much about it is because it’s a highly resonant stand-in for all the things they find discomforting about a rapidly changing sexual dynamic, in which the patriarchal bargain is falling apart.

It’s not a small thing that the patriarchal bargain is falling apart: it means that men are no longer men and women no longer women in terms of the co-ordinating constructs that used to define men and women as social types with complementary roles, aptitudes, desires and so on. And that large-scale social change is not trans people’s fault, although it and the kairos of trans liberation happen to coincide for not entirely coincidental reasons. But while the normie riot picks out obvious “deviants” as its primary targets, the underlying discontents can’t be resolved by bullying those targets into extinction. You can’t make men be men again without making women be women again, and women don’t want to be women any more (except for the ones desperately seeking re-atttachment to idealised hyperfemininities because they don’t know what else to do with themselves). The wider reactionary program is one of sweeping sexual re-subordination, just as it is one of sweeping racial re-subjugation. We must hold the line against it.