This is a potentially true story about the end of a political, moral, and ethical style. Those who adopt this style do not have a name for their style, because it is never good to name your own style. Those who detest this style call it “woke.” The story today is about about how woke wakes up to itself in the form of a split/successor movement called ‘hyperwoke’
But before getting to the hyperwoke, I must re-name and anatomize actually-existing "woke.” My new name is “spoke woke” and my anatomy suggests that spoke woke has three parts: maoism, technocracy and spielbergism.
First Facet of the Jewel: Anatomy of Spoke Woke
This is how Mao begins his 1926 “Analyses of the Classes in Chinese Society.
”Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution. The basic reason why all previous revolutionary struggles in China achieved so little was their failure to unite with real friends in order to attack real enemies.”
Note, first, the similarity in political ontology with the perspective so-stylishly outlined six years later by National Socialist jurist Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political: both ground politics on the distinction between friend and enemy. Who is friend, who is enemy: this is what matters in the struggle, even if the struggle has taken the “long march through the institutions” — that is, moved from a militant street battle to the occupation of institutions. The name of the enemies and friends change, but the basic violent polarized good/evil ontology progressive/regressive paradigm persists.
Even in the 70s, Maoist revolutionaries theorized the enemy in different ways, and fought viciously with each other about the right way to characterize the enemy. How to best describe the enemy is the best way to distinguish Marxists from each other, but for now we can observe an “evolution” in enemy concepts from the 1970s, when the enemy was the Capitalist-Imperialist System, maybe also Patriarchal, to the present, when the enemy is ‘hate speech’ or ‘threats to our democracy’—- what you are seeing here is the social flex of the administrators class. Marx missed more or less every important social trend of the 19th century, but most importantly, he missed the rise of the administrative class: a whole material class position dependent on their existence on growing fused interfused corporate interests lead by technocratic experts in their fields.
As the Maoist became managers their Maoism got mixed up with the managerialist talk, the tone, the paradigms. This particular managerial maoism gets us so far, but not all the way to understanding the "“wokist” metastystle. what’s missing are the aesthetics. This is what i’m calling “Spielbergism” after the forms greatest creator; the films of Steven Spielberg are to Spielbergism what the plaza of Salamanca is to Churrigueresque! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churrigueresque
After that you awaken, dazzled from the strange erudition of that remark, you are ready to fully understand what kind of aesthetic turns the systematic mass murder of 11 million human beings by German people into a 3 hour melodrama with a german hero, and a “kitch” quasi-asethetic move (black in white, girl in red dress that provides an easy memory tool to evoke the emotional “impact”)
In short, spielbergism is the complete subsitution of feel-good hollywood narrative for any kind of truth, the cretion of a warm, stupid lie for millions of people so they don’t have to learn more.
Add this syrup to the manager maoist mix, then zap inside for twenty five of a social media hellscape and you get “wokeism” --
You’ve read this far because you want to get to the second facet, and now you can flip this essay over, and learn how Wokism wakes up; how it ends. The one word answer: hyperwoke.
Second Facet of the Jewel: Hyperwoke, Again
Hyperwoke begins with a rebranding of wokeism: because nobody is a self-identified wokist. Wokist an exonym form many people whose endonym is: progressive, socially conscious, marxist, even socialist. All of these people are going to be rebranded “spoke woke.”
What does this mean? It means that their wokeness, despite its seeming “radical intentions” actual plays a role as a spoke in the central power system of our time: that there is a reason corporations and governments and universities love divide people into discretely identifiable groups that can be governed separately. The pleasures of Rome, Calvin’s Geneva, and a Uniqlo Ad all bundled up into one dystopia. Spoke woke names the complicity of progresisvism with existing powers.
Spokewoke is the annoyance; hyperwoke is the cure. hyperwoke returns to one very pure and primordial spring of woke: the socrates of Woke, a genius in truth, Judith Butler, who in her teachings on “Gender Trouble” alers us to the difference between expressive and performative attribution. Expressive attribution says that there are attributes, like my age, like my name, like my sex, like my ethnicity, like my bank account: these attributes expresse some essence. That is the “expressive attribution” philosophy. Most everyone, progressives, conservatives, trads, marxists, monarchists: they all agree with this expressive attribution idea.
The salient characteristic of being hyperwoke is a persistent, performative even, adherence to ‘performative attribution’ - that is, to repeatedly insisting the truth that we are performing here, that this world really “is” a large-scale performance art piece with 8 billion people each, themselves, doing little individual performance art pieces. To be hyperwoke is to see this: how many performances there are, how connected they are, and how fake it all is.
How fake? Because imagine tomorrow we all forget our names and histories, remembering only our capacities and desires and deep truths; we would wake up freed from particular grievances and longings, free into a space where all abilities, talents and gifts could be shared in a complex, ever-intensifying process of social evolution.
Such a process obviously isn’t happening now, in part, because of the evident evils of all styles of reasoning based on “ontologies of violence.” -- wokism is one such style, nationalism another, marxism another,old materialism hellism, perhaps, are the most dominant “violent” styles of reasoning: hellism the belief that a loving God would doom some of his children to eternal hell while the good children got to watch the bad boys and girls squirm forever) Old materialism is the even more terrifying idea, and even less convincing that our seemingly expanding conscious blissful experience is, in fact, the accidental emanation of totally blind material. Despite the apparent stupidities of such materialism (for instance, the fact that dead people often speak with living people: that we can easily-ish separate ourselves from our bodies,) -- many “intelligent” people bought onto the program. Because to be old materialist in this way, to be against woo, this signaled that you were a strong hard man.
But now, according to leading scientists, old materialism is a turn off. What femmes want these days, bros, is a “daddy” who understands that our basic matter, experience, is creative, knowing, and bliffful: that we are becoming gods within the love of an even large, almost unnameably great God, a God-material which we live in and become in through; an actually superdupermaterial.
the hyperwoke movement awaits its angel investors:
b.shepard at
udk dot berlin
slash de