This three faceted thought jewel is both for those who hate woke and woke people who fear that they have become hateable. It sketches a future evolution of woke, “hyperwoke” based around a wholly performative idea of selfhood, so that all people will be freed forever from all “essential” definitions about themselves.
The first facet gives a new name to what we call woke today, the second facet models your awakening into hyperwoke, and the third facet reveals new materialism as a partner religion to Hyperwoke.
Facet One: Spoke Woke
In order to make clear why we need hyperwoke I’m going to coin the intentionally rude sounding phrase “spoke woke” to describe the current woke framework. Spoke meaning that their mentality serves as a “spoke” to existing systems of domination and human control -- with further connotations, that “spoke woke” that they have become carcereal and policing in disposition, that “spoke woke” deploys secularized protestant theologies of sin and goodness, that “spoke woke” helps large capital and state divide and rule.
Spoke woke was once fresh and new. Gil Scot Heron has some words in Comment #1 about this:
“We learned to our amazement untold tale of scandalTwo long centuries buried in the musty vault
Hosed down daily with a gagging perfume”
If you haven’t read settlers, go now and read it and gag again on the terrible scandal of American history, the truth of being a “a chain of European settler colonies that expanded into a settler empire.” Faced with this truth you’ll want to be a race traitor, a feminist, anything to be on the good side, anything not to be an Ameri-nazi. So how did you end up working as an administrator for the state bureaucracy? How did your terms of liberation become the terms of progressive capital and the state and NGOS?
As the name suggests, becoming woke is a kind of awakening: there’s a connection to sleeping and waking and dreams. We were asleep in the patriotic perfume and then we awoke and saw the genocidal nature of settler colonialism patriarchy --
We can wake up again. Maybe we have to wake up again. Here is how it goes.
Facet Two: Hyper Woke:
Hyperwoke starts with a very abstract distinction between two kinds of personal attributions - between essential attribution and performative attribution. This comes from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble work, and arose in connection to another quasi-imaginary movement third wave social theory.
Essential attribution means, as the name suggests, that there’s attributes which describe your essence. From this perspective, I have a species, first name, a last name, a middle name, a social security code, a mailing address, having an ethnic “.5 Jewish” essence, having an essential “American” nationality, a “White” race. Performative attribution, by context, depends on the specific situation: I could, with make-up, perform as 9999 year old dragon woman named Twin Mushroom Tintoretto. Or I could “perform” as myself.
Now it might seem at first that a society would need essential attributions to survive: to give people names and ethnicities and races etc. How else could we preserve accomplishment and incentivize good behavior?
You may be imagining that performative identity means no identity. Instead consider how it would mean more identities, and that identities would become more and more valuable. There is good reason to think that if people could test out and try new and different identities and personas on a socially accepted level, mental health problems would radically decline -- at least this is what the hyperwoke believes.
Did this passage woke you up to hyperwoke? Do you have a sense of how powerful it could be to recognize that all society, everywhere, no matter what, is already a performance art. Seeing the world this way, as Mr Y taught me, lets you see it as alive in the way that any performance is alive; and it lets you see your role inside the performance in a realistic, but also optimistic way.
Once you awoken to hyperwoke, you may also be interested in a new religious faith. One such one would be “new materialism.”
Facet Three: New Materialism
Old materialism starts from the crazy idea that dead hard matter somehow gives rise, via “emergenct relations” or some other fiction, to the knowing, blissful, and creative mental life which is the basic “material” of our own experience.
In that gnarled last sentence is the basis of new materialism: the recognition that the material of our experience is conscious, is blissful, and is creative. Just the fact of reading that last sentence, of coming to believe (or not believe) in it proves the truth that you are conscious (you can understand these words) you can experience bliss (the thought that your nature is bliss also may induce this bliss) and you are (potentially) creative: once you see yourself as infinite consciousness bliss, then the possibility for creativity expand.....infinitely.
If this sounds somewhat “woo” or bullshit to you, New Materialism may still be good for you, becuase it is based on reasoning; the initial axiom that the material of experience is conscious, blissful, and creative. Would it be better to say that experience is potentially conscious, blissful, creative? Because it doesn’t seem like we experience bliss or creativity all the time? Anyways: the point is that New Materialism is a community of inquiry, of self-organization, of experiments in collective divination.
if you want to sponsor a new materialist church here in prussia, please email me: b.shepard at udk slash berlin dot de.
May all beings realize their true nature asap.