tony chamas, genealogy of wokeism — review
tony chamas writes theory as if he's writing customer support pages
introduction
"the genealogy of wokeism" is framed in this way where chamas is overly aware about his own audience and likely because of the media ecology he is in (podcasting related to his 1dime project), is "presenting" a term and trying to trace it for an audience that has already regurgitated it previously in discursive fields – even at one point mentioning, "i'll just go ahead and define it since everyone's using an llm", where chamas includes also three separate tiny warning sections in the intro before actually allowing himself to speak on the topic, one for the reasons behind why he's talking about it, another that clarifies the surrounding discourse, and a third that then also defines the term pre-emptively.
this practice then is not necessarily theoretical in the old aristotelian or new foucaultian sense of observing a genealogy or set of practices and then creating both categorizations and new delineations or perspectives for the term, primarily because the author "closes in" on what wokeism is supposed to be, or essentially, is attempting to define the concept by trying to figure out its common ground within media discourse, precisely when media discourse often fragments terms. this mentality can be seen clearly: "that tells us little about what “wokeism” as a style of politics is, and how it has evolved."
the etymology of wokeism
chamas, in other words, even with all the conceptual fervor in the world, is categorically a philosophical slave to this term, is inconspicuously under its total value, is merely tracing it in his own presentation of what he's supposed to be doing, even if his ambitions are greater than that. the historical account that he then uses to explain, locate or justify the reading has this frustrating issue of not allowing chamas to actually bid his own stakes on the term, or turn it into a constructive weapon from the get-go, because of the pleasantry involved in having to simultaneously appeal to the audience and to appeal to the term. chamas' method appears like a form of "truism": "the language of “awakening” and “waking people up” is key to understanding the essence of what wokeism is" there is indeed something stylistically annoying about the presentationalism that both considers itself secondary to theoretical discourse, yet still primary towards a more general discourse. there are useful minor points in the start, like the idea wokeism is a floating signifier and that the left denial of wokeism is a habitat problem, but tony's own marxist instincts are to frame this as a political failure rather than what it is - something native to the media ecology.
defining wokeism
chamas' definition, then, "a political mentality that presupposes that awakening people to a correct consciousness is the precondition for both political solidarity and sociopolitical change" is offensively obvious and not an intriguing observation about the quality of the term. what follows this is a paragraph that instead of tracing the philosophical movement of this "awakening" in a mechanically conceptual fashion, instead highlights its key terms in bold as if it was an instagram post, beginning with "pseudo-political activity", moving onto "shared class interests", an interesting term chamas coins himself, "self-contained opposition", and then right after, the paragraph ends in "culture wars" another euphemism for mediated identity. chamas is seen vaguely gesturing at the mechanism behind the term by simply invoking it, letting us know that, yes in fact, wokeism is about tribalism and not about political liberation, as if it was not obvious to anyone who is not stuck in an internet camp. in the next paragraph, chamas is seen regurgitating the point by pointing out the surface-level mechanisms behind intolerance, presupposition, advocation, belief-systems, awareness and so on, before simply ending the contrast by just comparing culture against politics.
what chamas is pointing out when he says "they say actions speak louder than words, but for the woke people, the most important actions are words" is actually the mixed result of platform politics incentivizing niches and camps, the politically realist fall of non-populist political struggle in general under modernity (something writers for the ill-will journal like idris robinson and phil neel have long attempted to theorize the future of, usually failing to do so), and the further result of these two forces in subordinating political activists to their own language by crippling and tying them down to their own narratives, a crucial contemporary political revelation. all of this, albeit obvious, isn't used in these terms by chamas, but this isn't necessarily a downside, due to the fact that it can at times be refreshing to see speculative thought phrased through common terminology rather than through references, concepts or proto-terms, and also, as chamas slowly can actually be seen thinking through the implications in real time, can allow himself to posit further mechanisms about wokeness as the article grows in complexity.
what follows is the predictable case of chamas, who is naturally more predisposed to putting cultural primacy over politics rather than aesthetics, getting entangled in the idea that because wokeness supports ideological gerrymandering (or in other words, working class liberals supporting ivy league politicians over trumpie families), therefore something about wokeism must be politically corrupt rather than being a genuine cultural divide, not only does this idea continue into the entire rest of the review, but chamas continues his bad streak of describing ideas rather than building them up with this very funny line that looks like a marxist from the first international era suddenly woke up in a hospital bed and it's his first day in the modern world: "the woke mind thinks of politics in terms of friend-enemy distinctions, but in a post-materialist way".
now, retrospect this account with the actual existing genealogical intervention of writers for the journal american affairs, sheluyang peng’s “more christian than the christians,” places wokeness as one outcome of american christianity's internal decomposition, where he ties it to the intersection between quakerism and puritanism as actual specific tracable and somewhat paradoxical established cultural attitudes merging with demographics and cultural developments to form modern wokeism. eric kaufmann on the other hand treats wokeness as the radicalization of a liberal affect instead of a marxist deviation, where liberalism’s fear of majority tyranny becomes an anti-majority emotional machine, and where marxist oppressor/opressed language plugs into that already-existing liberal matrix. patterson, as opposed to chamas' use of al-gharbi goes in a similar direction, arguing that dei, oppression and identity become actual religious vechiles corresponding to priestcraft, caste and sacrilization respectively. all three of them tie culture, religion, politics and historical development way cleaner and in a more genealogically interesting way than what happens in this article, and they are useful for later extrapolations into exactly how such a genealogy needs to be staged in this discourse.
the professional managerial class and the symbolic capitalists
moving to the actual contents of the piece, but not before a long and burdensome vomit of references and yet another over-written paragraph that essentially explains symbolic capitalism and socialization as if they need to be handfed to a concussed reader, chamas begins by reducing the professional managerial class to the blue-white collar distinction, deriving "professional" in "educated" and "managerial" in "aspirational". he then regurgitates the basic point that they are involved in the production of the symbolic and information economy over the production of physical goods genuinely in four different long paragraphs. one point, not necessarily a good one, but a point nonetheless, that does arise here is the idea that their rhetoric and lifestyles are contradictory specifically because of their post-materialism, or in other words that they have no stakes in the symbolic requirement to participate in politics.
wokeism beyond the professional managerial class
its almost as if chamas actually believes that culture is itself a type of "baby" or infantile variation of politics, simply by the way he speaks about it as if it was juvenile or a deformed state of being: "a factory worker who defends progressive language norms on facebook is not a symbolic capitalist; she is a consumer of symbolic capitalist culture, absorbing the moral vocabulary that saturates the information environment." there is something borderline interesting in the latent structural narcissism to believe that the social machinery inherent in the saturation of public discourse itelf isnt partially the thing causing this discourse to be the currently accepted norm for workers. chamas actually retains the idea of a workers revolution through a type of accidental ivory tower that denies the existence of media ecology as an actual tangible source of power in the world, the way it otherwise would appear to anyone who understands the stakes on a more fundamental and less metaphysical level.
totemic capital: victimhood as status currency
chamas hinges on al-gharbi for deal life with the otherwise very interesting concept (albeit also indirectly derived from existing discourses on the topic outside of literary capacity) of totemic capital or in other words the economy of pride and performative suffrage in the cathedral (the moldbugian term for the professional-managerial network), as well as a reappropriation of standpoint epistemology away from its original roots in serious feminist discourse and into the modern vulgarization of this term as an epistemology tied strictly to virtue economies (which in and of itself absolutely isnt true given the original intention was to question the legitimacy of the scientific apparatus and of personal contradictions between identity and status rather than to derive legitimacy for yourself).
these concept on their own are interesting, however, chamas fails to do anything meaningful with them when he again turns to his theoretical instincts of basic description: "appeals are made to third parties rather than through direct confrontation. individuals paint themselves as weak, vulnerable, and damaged to attract support. personal slights are tied to historical injustices ... the result is not serious structural analysis, but a politics of moral deference". he then basically puts ibram kendi fairly on blast for this prospect, and argues that it also appears in marxist spaces. sludge.
leftist vs liberal wokeism
finally ending an awful streak, chamas does make two interesting claims in the section where he contrasts liberalism and leftism. he claims that liberals on one hand are unaware of the actual battle in the job economy between working class deprivilegeds and the migrant diaspora largely because they are already integrated into the thin professional network, further claiming precisely that leftist partisans themselves often end up being resentful about liberals furthermore because of this cultural battle prospect, or in other words, because they were denied submission into the elite managerial camp. this makes a turn not only to break chamas' earlier weak descriptivist tendecy, but also breaks his reliance on the vague rhetoric seen throughout that the culture war is a politically unproductive issue, even if never explicitly stated.
the interesting question that arises here is of how liberal guilt and leftist resentment coincide with the rights' humiliation, since according to bifo, one thing that characterizes rampant ethnonationalism or right populism is a promise not for a better working position but for a better cultural mythology around it - broken precisely by a managerial class that in many ways wrecks this image or makes it politically costly to believe. leftists have been associated by eco-anarchists for a long time now as privileging the virtue of weakness, and liberals as privileging the virtue of puritanism. the next two sections are forced to consolidate al-gharbi's four stages of "awokening" in a scholarly boring manner, moving onto the actual genealogy halfway through the text with "the first awokening"
the first awokening
by the time we get to the genealogy, it is clear just how retrospectively different american affair's accounts of wokeism are to triple ampersand's accounts. chamas identifies religion in the form of a surface resemblance to the media culture war, where the real rise of wokeness appears once political classes get betrayed by the institutions they belong to and are re-routed through different cultural machinery, whereas pengs account in american affairs argues that the american culture war is still a christian-theological war, or in other words, liberalism and its manifestations have precisely become more culturally established as they have taken on the metaphysical burden and unconscious identification with culture more strongly than marxists, historical christians or even conservatives can, since conservatives themselves use it as a detached tribal signifier - a point similarly echoed in chamas' own positioning of this as wokeism being aligned with liberalism because of the way it corresponds institutionally to this particular identification of power.
there is one aspect of his claim that does come slightly closer to peng's claim in that it is not just a social movement but does also correspond to an actual essential cultural prototype already inherent in social roles, and that is the idea that american socialism and all of its writers, artists, and intellectuals treated culture as propaganda and consciousness-remaking from the get-go all whilst still being socially distant from workers "socialists and communists from privileged backgrounds who struggled to sell their radical visions to the very working class they claimed to represent" as he says. chamas wants this to show that “woke” consciousness-politics had an older prototype in middle-class cultural radicalism.
there is also an element of classist stigma involved too, where he writes "sometimes i look at a socialist—the intellectual, tract-writing type of socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his marxian quotation—and wonder what the devil his motive really is. it is often difficult to believe that it is love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed." he isn't wrong to view this class archetype as removed from the circumstances or immediately alien to the task at hand, however it's quite ironic on one hand that he behaves as if he's curious about the issue rather than having already developed a certain standpoint (for, if so, would he admit that technically in his very article he's involved in the culture war?) and on the other hand, that the young middle class petty bourgeoise purist (or more poetically called, the savior of weakness) is actually in many ways the image of someone more actively involved in a not necessarily performative but definitely self-scheduled pursuit?
this image actually belongs today to a far more economically justifiable role (the ngo-complex) than workers unions themselves (who are actually a part of an opportunist and drifting social pursuit), given how much the job economy itself has taken away from its original protestant and factory-related slavery complex and into a far more modifiable and non-definitive social role (which you can tell from the very name itself, the job economy, an economy of jobs rather than an economy held together by jobs). of course, chamas isn't wrong about the actual underlying historical position of the original material conditions of economy, for he writes "today, that broader labor infrastructure has largely been dismantled, which means that when elite overproduction generates a new awokening, there is no countervailing working-class movement to anchor it in material demands", a statement which honestly slightly puts to question his earlier rhetorical positioning and the fact his latent values or rather emphasis is positioned so strongly in something he himself views as a non-countervailing class.
the second and third awokening
in the second cycle, chamas argues that civil rights achieved most of its core wins before the student awokening, and that after the symbolic professions became more central, racial progress stalled, so that the era of maximum cultural anti-racism is not the era of maximum material racial progress, or in his words: "the driver was not the civil rights movement, which had begun to lose momentum by this time. rather, the simultaneous draft threat and economic squeeze on professional opportunities transformed previously apolitical students into self-proclaimed revolutionaries." he then drops this bombastic statement "every awokening since has coincided with the stalling or reversal of that progress, not its acceleration."
this actually matches what he says later on and is defended by the idea being that awokenings always look bigger than they are because symbolic capitalists control media, universities, art, and cultural production and that they mistake their own cultural volume for democratic support, giving the examples of mcgovern, may 68, and reagan, which are perfectly almost handpicked examples of political authority and electoralism rejecting popular movements with little consequence to their position. chamas writes "many still don’t acknowledge that the rise of reagan & conservatism more broadly was, in part, a reaction to the excesses of both the late 60s counterculture and a culture-war backlash to the third great awokening of the 80s. it was this dual dynamic of awokening and reaction".
the idea then naturally segways quite well into the third awokening, where the dissapearance of white collar jobs actually intersects with further class resentment, which is partially the origin and spawnpoint of a lot of the modern political positions, such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, crt, third-wave feminism and intersectionality. he also notes political corectness as a term that is supposed to highlight this mode of power, but a weakpoint in this chapter is his combination of various discourses that don't necessarily emerge from the same place. critical race theory is definitely originated from a distaste towards earlier civil war rhetoric, and third wave feminism does land around this time, but merging it with postmodernism (which is a reaction to may 68 rather than to the dissapearance of managerialism) and so on is more of an associative claim.
chamas frames the operational quality of wokeness as "it is a reaction against the alienating, militant, and condescending ways that symbolic capitalists attempt to censor and shame anyone who disagrees with the latest iteration of their moral vocabulary.", essentially, not necessarily siding with conservatives, but siding against the idea that wokeness is a natural progression of thought, which is rhetorically the way it tries to pull you into its concept. yet, just take a look at how pang frames the problem "in many ways, today’s social justice warriors are the descendants and inheritors of the christian values that set america’s moral standards for much of its existence." on the one hand, you cannot believe that wokeness and its increasingly narrowing vision of the world is narrowing in a way that retrospects cultural change as in the changing of social roles and where they belong, with the development of attitudes that correspond with new normativizations, given that much of these very same standards or rather maybe the personalities that can give way to particular standards have existed way prior to even chamas' pinpointing of the first awokening.
not to mention the way in which the politically frail terms of "left and right" hide under them increasingly dynamic and often times contradictory motives. it is in fact the least productive to analyze political divides through cultural divides, and in fact most productive to do the opposite. in a lot of ways, the very fact that a lot of these attitudes precede political denominations but don't precede political donimations shows that the analysis hits a weak point the moment that it tries to understand normativity as narrow in a socially transformative sense rather than narrow in a cyclical and often times backwards sense (as pang proves "as aaron renn has pointed out, american christianity now exists in a “negative world,” where being seen as a christian is, for the first time in american history, a negative thing. progressives, and a sizeable number of liberals, tend to view conservative christians—and the republican party’s status as the nominal party of christian (or “judeo-christian”) values—with suspicion)
chamas drops next arguably the worst statement in his entire article. he writes "the culture wars are not a battle between the powerful and the powerless; they are, in large part, an intra-elite status competition that the rest of the population is forced to endure." yet, arent most people involved in culture war media ecologies? arent an increasing amount of people middle class or urban class in the sense of, not being white collar but definitely not being identifiable with an "oppressed majority" in any real political sense? an intra elite status competition sounds far more aristocratic than the reality proposed here
the binary “symbolic elite vs oppressed majority” is lazy because much of the population is neither elite nor proletarian in a clean way. there are teachers, nurses, students, baristas with degrees, failed creatives, nonprofit assistants. a better way chamas could have put it is to argue that the culture war is not simply intra-elite but rather its a mechanism that is elite-seeded but mass-mediated, or in other words, a cultural simulacrum originally carried over by elite masses but quickly picked up by an increasingly reactionary and bored urban middle class that invokes the culture war in the dead image of the class war partially because the class itself has overcome its class position, or rather, stagnated, rather than overcoming, the material conditions of things, and increasingly finds itself in environments where old vocabularies are new status claims rather than political realities.
connection between wokeism, political correctness and cancel culture
after spending an entire section gassing himself up over the fact he gives us the supposedly "missing piece" to al-ghraib's actual analysis, chamas moves on to correlate wokeness with cancellation and narcissism. there are some sharp quotables in this segment, such as this: "wokeism is an anti-democratic current that wants to re-create the demos in its own image. at its core, woke politics is bent on ideological conformity, but because it’s impossible to get everyone to actually agree, the best it can achieve is getting enough people to pretend they agree by enforcing politically correct speech codes."
the most redeeming quality of these sections isn't just the tightened language but that the mechanism is finally introduced even if far too late (and even if the mechanism itself isnt a process but just the arrival of a narrative unfortunately), where correctness is supposed to serve as a replacement for naturally arriving at justice, basically, an acceleration of cultural acceptance. this idea is not only strong but fundamentally more interesting than a majority of the article that came before this point. there is something interesting about the cynicism in which he correlates politics with pedagogy as in the professionalist class essentially forcing everyone to accept their terms on behalf of a paternalistic vision rather than as based on truth, but the presentation also appears far too stitched together in this section:
"history becomes a seminar. politics becomes pedagogy, and in the case of most woke politics, it is pedagogy on behalf of “the oppressed” rather than any kind of concrete working-class movement with concrete goals." even though the language suffers, his move to connect it to pathology also makes sense, but his mention of the attitudes corresponding to this type of culturalism clearly lacks the very genealogy this paper is supposed to be titled after "the deeper irony is that this style of politics is often sold as compassion, while it smuggles in a kind of moral solipsism", a realization that is far less an actual development and far more a basic component of existing puritanism, if only the smallest amount of historical research would appear in this article to break the illusion.
am i a class reductionist?
"in its woke form, indigenous politics is often reduced to symbolic gestures and moral signaling ... these practices create the appearance of radicalism while leaving the underlying material conditions of indigenous communities largely untouched" chamas repeatedly gestures at a structural and systemic account of politics without ever arriving at it, precisely because he keeps envisioning the only valid form of political involvement as the one that has to envision material conditions, an old marxist heresy, not realizing that what is considered a material condition in this instance is precisely the fact of the matter that the status economy sits on top of material struggle as the battleground of very material possibility, not just in a professional economy but in a more generally aspect, as a social arena, a basic property of media ecology, and ultimately as a medium that condenses struggles themselves to an abstract process that considers them as categories of identity, a historical social movement that itself can be seen as appropriating its own conditions and instrumentalizing the conditions for its resources rather than the standpoint from which it can debate those same resources.
this critique is actually revealing in a subsequent section, where chamas argues "changing how people talk does not automatically change how people live, and it certainly does not automatically build the durable coalitions required to win power." not realizing that a process that selects how people live does not need to happen on the primary structure of expected material selection, but rather on an undertow structure, a conditioning layer or substrate that indirectly and slowly selects class positions as indirect deficits of a wider reactionary cultural war, or a lifestyle that selects subjects based on extremely abstract and instrumentalized positions of identity. the class war itself has partially moved or been obscured by technologies of war, and the hidden determinants behind these structures resemble the indirect power involved not just in the positioning of subjects within friend groups, institutions and so on the way the professional class would have it, but on a multiplication of "types of achievable status", to a gameification of almost every worldly realm. to a certain extent, it is impossible to even imagine a primary class politics today whatsoever, if not for economies that are late a hundred or more years from the current utmost transformed "standard"
from hyperpolarization to depoliticization
to a certain, way less developed extent, chamas again manages to figure out a subsequent critique of his own position in a later chapter without managing to confront the rhetorical positioning he had just acquired by using yet another great source, sheldon wollin, to redescribe a political movement: "sheldon wolin’s distinction between politics and the political helps make this precise. politics, in his account, is the ceaseless contestation among organized and unequal powers over access to public resources ... the political, by contrast, is episodic and rare" in a sense, you could even read chamas interpretation not as wokeness' failed or naive belief in appropriated or accepted ideas as an ideological underlayer to reality, but rather, as a sigil or a passing emblem related to a type of abstract economy that behaves as if it were material. just look at how chamas positions this issue: "even in its most radical manifestations, woke politics usually amounts to self-contained opposition. it dismisses and excludes people who don’t have the “correct ideas” "
finally, chamas ends his chapter off by saying that part two will analyze precisely protestant christianity and american wokeness, ranging all the way back to the 1730s, as mentioned earlier in this review. yet, a lot of those ideas clearly sit against some of the very same ideas he develops in this article.