1.
Those tarred as the “woke right” have spent about a week protesting their dissimilarities with the “woke left”; these protests have, however, pretty much cemented the idea that their emergent ideology is, indeed, emergent and “woke“.
It wouldn’t be counterintuitive to characterize “the Right” as the thought that imagines itself not to be “thought”; or at least, not to be “transcendental thinking” but, instead, derivative from “plain fact”. This would (more or less) pin the birth of “the Left” on Kant. Perhaps more clearly put: the secret name of “the Right” is qualunquismo. “The Left” has no such secret name because it identifies itself with broad tropes it managed to paint as equivalent to civilization itself: enlightenment, progress, reason. This is why the final boss for the Left is l’uomo qualunque; and that, in turn, is why it keeps getting tangled in morally abhorrent causes (for example, in sexual issues as it pertains to children). Si, il gramigna è anch’esso rizoma.
Whence, then, the “woke right”? Well, the more extreme views of “the woke left” have nothing to do with “woke” — they’re just generic left-wing positions (not everyone in “the Left” is, however, required to hold all possible left views). What’s notable about the woke left is its quickness to arrive and adopt certitudes. Their “ideas” are hardly ideas at all — they’re obstructions. Take the Climate Rebellion’s signature tactic of gluing themselves to works of art: the worldview they want to highlight is actually the generally accepted worldview — the only novelty to be conveyed is in the urgency.
This already exemplifies two key features of “woke” tout court. First, woke is not a deep rebellion against a status quo, but an ancillary feature of one. Second, woke has this asemic quality — clearly seen in Climate Rebellion’s antics, but also in the looting of high-fashion stores during Black Lives Matters — it really isn’t saying anything except “this is a big deal”. Therefore, all popular woke slogans are essentially pleonastic: trans rights are human rights; black people are people; America for Americans.
2.
My son is going through a domino toppling phase. Even at the dinner table he’ll cyclically place four or six pieces, announce something and push the starter piece. Dominos used in this fashion dramatize the (usually left in the background, like air conditioning and garbage disposal) issue of cause and effect: the future here is inside the present.
Domino toppling is Apolinean; the Dionysiac counter part is chain reaction sequences (“Rube Goldberg” machines). It’s surprisingly difficult to find content with chain reaction machines that isn’t sauteed with dark humor — the trick is to look through domino creators until you find the ones that do extended rube-goldbergiana within child-friendly boundaries. But chain reaction videos are sharply distinct from domino topples in that they “wear their contingency on their sleeve” (often, a succesful chain reaction display will be followed by a carnival of failures). What’s more: since, fundamentally, the chain reaction falldown is a generic, unformalizable object, there’s no broad theory to these failures — or, to think of it, of successes.
Of course, there is something very generic to these “machines”: if you run the film in reverse, what ensues is so patently unreal that we immediately know it’s backwards. This is because — I mention this to my son now and then, but it’s still way beyond what he conceives he’s even able to conceive — chain reactions work by releasing energy that was painstakingly (and at a great rate of error) distributed towards the machinery. Fussy as those are to correctly progress, they still dramatize something close to a moral theory of cause-and-effect: causality (the drop from a high energy to a low energy state) is actively inserted in the system by the human hand. The contingency — the effective infinity of ways in which the falldown can fail — stands in for human faliblity and sin.
This energy-drop account of how “things” can be made to accomplish “goals” is, sometimes, generalized into a kind of “physical economics” that centers cause-and-effect and reads either the difficulty or the asymmetry of effort into a direct theory of value — it’s much harder to drop an egg to the floor than it is to glue the egg back in place. This is at the core of the labor theory of value — workers cause nature to fold into shape. It also still haunts us when cryptography is marshalled to forcefully equate hardness of effort and scarcity: thereby crypto mining very directly enters energy inputs into a chain reaction contraption. “Physical economics” can, at the same time, be constructed so to imply or handwave a natura cogitans into the turbulent core of general ecological causation: if the purpose of a system is what it does, then the world is dotted, doted with “natural capital” and ecosystems can be said to “perform labor”.
Now: after having seen some number of domino topples up close, one acquires a certain familiarity with the toppled-down state of various simple arrangements. Even then, we can’t easily reverse the toppledown — we can’t, starting from the fallen system, pick the last piece and gently push the system back up. This has to do in part with the loss of energy as sound (and so on, and so on); but the main issue is that even a four-domino row is a distributed system in that energy has been inserted at separate places (in order to produce the stable domino row we can look at) but drops all at once. This realization should effectively pop the energy-drop theory of value: if the state transition was inherently meaningful, then meaning would be trivially be recoverable from the lower energy state. This is why standard, subjective-value economics is essentially unassailable from otherwise very sound “physical” critiques: the semantic content of things is, for most purposes, self-replicating — I’m right here discussing causality with reference to domino topples that have taken place in the past — and value isn’t anything if it isn’t semantic. What, you can make bread out of talking about Bitcoin without ever mining any: the value of crypto arises out of conversations about it.
3.
A tentative definition of “woke” is: germinal-terminal fusion by means of rabble-rousing. It’s one of those daredevil takes I’m prone to quietly incorporate to the general lexicon of theory — it takes an empirical explanation (woke is pleonastic because it’s an obstreperous reaffirmation of what Lacan termed S1, the dominant sense of things) to an unexamined theoretical connection. We gave a name for such Tony Hawk-styled high jinks: functoriality. Given that woke is, in fact, whatever it is in the real world, this connection becomes binding on the theory side of things. To make a connection is to say that theory bends but not breaks under its pressure.
This “functoriality” (and the abuse of a math word is, perhaps, the quintessential heart-stopping daredevil move of theory) maps neatly to Lacan’s Discourse of the Analyst*.
The intellectual style of woke is nearly indistinguishable from the Discourse of the Master (and very sharply distinguished from the model of actual political rebellion given to us as the Hysteric); the already-dominant system of meaning recruits and deploys all other sense-meanings of the world (S2) in order to produce its little profit — the little validations of woke causes that dynamize the pleonasm as inevitability. Trans rights are therefore not only logically and ethically human rights, but they’re also politically so — “get used to it, get used to it!”.
Functoriality (with a germinal-terminal fusion) then arises from taking the Analyst position and making the little validations (or rather the desire structure behind them) speak; the “Other” of this alternate discourse is that which had founded the dominant sense of things in first place — the “broken” or “divided subject”. What is thereafter produced is the dominant sense of things itself. The connection is then critically contingent on how the little validations (or, more precisely, the impossibility of sufficient validation) negotiate with the broken and mirror-staged subject. So, for example: how is the ongoing drama of Solow convergence and demographic collapse massaged by the little kicks given by a nostalgia-for-Americana woke-right position? There’s of course, a real-world answer — rabble-rousing. But at the other end of the connection — what is the neurotic motor that animates the general circuitry of things into melting itself down?
If this is sounding a lot like General Axiology, that’s because it illuminates the fundamental naiveness in General Axiology. The woke right has discovered a kind of Dark Switcheroo.