A conversation with Susan Neiman and friends around anti-fascist organizing

The video’s framing

Welcome to a salon that belongs to the online discussion group “Neighborhood.” The occasion of this salon is Susan Neiman’s short book, Left Is Not Woke, published this past Spring by Polity and already a bestseller in the Netherlands while currently being translated into Farsi, German, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.  Susan’s previous book was Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, a wonderful book, and she is well known for her 2002 book Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy.

Today, she will be joined by some of my friends from around the country.  These include Katherine Cassese who is an intentional community member of the Simone Weil House in Portland, Oregon and has been an editor on this site of her series “Starting Out in Philosophy.” Susan was once an undergraduate and a graduate student at Harvard.  Katherine now speaks among today’s college generation.

Also joining us is Julia Gibson, Core Faculty in the Environmental Studies Department at Antioch University New England. Their research finds material, emotional, and spiritual expression on their family farm located on unceded land within the traditional territories of the Wappinger and Munsee Lenape peoples. Julia’s philosophical practices on the Farm have been the subject of a past interview in the APA series, “Philosophy as a Way of Life.” Does Susan’s critique of “woke” politics speak to the concerns of someone as thoughtful and independent as Julia?

Joining us here, too, is Stephen Rich, like myself a former student of Susan from Yale College in the 1990s.  Stephen is the Maurice Jones, Jr.—Class of 1925 Professor of Law at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law, where he teaches courses in constitutional and statutory civil rights law, civil procedure, and race and the law.  He is the creator and inaugural instructor of USC’s newest required course, Race, Racism, and the Law. You can see him behind my understanding of “togetherness” in the inaugural post of my mini-series, “On Congeniality.”

Finally, we are lucky to have with us a contemporary of Susan from the Boston metropolitan area graduate school scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, an expert in critical theory. Steve Vogel is emeritus professor of philosophy at Denison University where he taught from 1984-2021. He is the author of the influential Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy After the End of Nature and Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory. His work was discussed in a post last year in “On Congeniality” about the social construction of the globe as a narcissistic object.

Like many of Susan’s books, Left Is Not Woke is an intervention into the present for the purposes of advancing social justice and critical thinking.  To my mind, the moral core of the book is an urgent warning in the fight against the formation of fascist politics.  I once claimed that Donald J. Trump was an “arbitrarian” who opportunistically took advantage of fascist undercurrents of American culture but who otherwise went with whatever would keep him free of accountability.  I now think it’s clear that Trumpism and increasingly the Republican Party in the U.S. use what Jason Stanley calls “fascist tactics.” 

In this nation state from where I speak and increasingly in many nations on Earth, fascist political movements or allied forms of authoritarianism and despotism are on the rise and digging in.  De Santis’s attack on the “woke” in Florida, a move echoed in my own home state of Ohio, is a fascist tactic, attacking the basis of critical thinking, truth, and education while dog whistling nationalist purity.  What Susan’s book does, in my view, is to urgently raise the question of whether social justice culture in the U.S., but also elsewhere, is adequately prepared to fight fascist tactics here and now.  The irony is that “woke” culture as she reconstructs it appears unable to do so.  But an old school left universalism indebted to the Enlightenment, by contrast, is ready.

How so? Left Is Not Woke argues that the left, properly defined, includes a commitment to three principles: universalism over tribalism, justice as sharply distinct from power, and the possibility of moral and political progress. Liberals share these principles too, but the left further differentiates itself from them by understanding universal social welfare rights as equally basic as political rights.

By contrast, Neiman constructs the diffuse ethos of “woke” culture as overly concerned with how one is identified rather than what one believes, how one has suffered rather than what one has overcome and done to make the world a better place, and with symbolic justices over material equalities. In other words, she imagines “woke” culture focusing on personal identity rather than the policies people hold, victimhood rather than moral heroism, and on how things look rather than on equal opportunities. You have to watch the video to see how these views get complicated by the questioning.

The salon video

Please see the YouTube version as you wish, which allows the video alone to be shared.

Questions from correspondence before the salon

The four friends gathered to speak with Susan were all critical in various ways, and Susan’s responses were often helpful and accepting. During the recorded discussion, she refers to questions and comments from correspondence among the group beforehand. In order to give the interested reader a thorough background to the video, here are the questions and comments that were shared in the week leading up to the salon:

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer: First, I suspect “woke” as a term is really an internet phenomenon now.  I have never encountered a person who actually uses the term in live activism.  The only places I encountered it were either in the media – say in music – or on social media.  In both cases, it struck me as self-stylized and merely symbolic.  Now it is a term for the right wing and for Susan’s left backlash against expressive and exclusive in-group politics that purports to be social justice oriented.

But the internet and social media culture are not discussed in the book, which I think is a drawback of it.  The culture that Susan criticizes is one that is formally structured by social media connections and the social alienation that has set into our democracies in the Information Age 2.0.  People are disempowered from actually talking hard with each other, from collaborating pragmatically to advance goals, from the corridors of power and know-how on how to be civic, etc.  Meanwhile, Instagram activism and affinity pools online create bubbles of in-groupness.

It’s sad that the notion of staying woke has been co-opted by this kind of vain and self-defeating culture – and now doubled down on by the right wing which opportunistically will use it.  Here, the issue is not woke vs. left, in-group vs. universal, but learning how to have good political relationships between people around advancing practical causes for the common good.  I’d be happy to see our discussion shift toward something like that.

Second, the term “tribalism.”  I was the person Susan said had warned her off using the term because it could be “offensive to Native Americans.”  Reading that in the book, I did not recognize my comment, because what I meant was that the term “tribe” is part of the problem, namely, a world where the dominant uses of language double down on hermeneutic injustice.  That is the injustice of having your way of life written out of making sense.  

What’s at stake in decolonial criticism is opening up the pluriverse.  This is a way of approaching common humanity through appreciating how there are different worlds on Earth.  The common humanity is found in the work of respecting the different worlds on their own terms and coming to work on accountability and good relationships between people coming in an out of their worlds.  This isn’t relativism, because the normative core here is a commitment to respect autonomy in some form.  The pluriverse is a way of deepening what respect for people as ends in themselves means in the worlds where people make sense.

My criticism of the term “tribalism” is about maintaining the project of getting close to people who (a) identify with a tribe and (b) have good relations that emanate from tribal tradition.  These relations admit of forms of reciprocity, respect, care, and common humanity, as well as of ecological concerns that were largely absent from canonical Enlightenment thinkers.  In other words, easily dismissing the critique of the pejorative use of the word “tribe” covers over the nuances of trying to actually block colonial caricatures of tribes and, more importantly, it makes it harder to get to such fundamental issues as the possibility of worlds that are centered around ecologically thoughtful relations through and through, unlike much of the modern world until recently.

The term I would have preferred is “in-group politics” vs. inclusive humanistic politics.  The question then is about how to create inclusive, humanistic politics.  Support for human rights and the indigenous human rights movements all over the world is one good option.  But we’d also have to take seriously what Malcom Ferdinand – also another person who argues for common humanity through his figure of the “politics of the encounter” and the building of the “worldship” – calls the “ecological fracture.” That is the splitting off of humanistic philosophy from ecological philosophy and its relation to the “colonial fracture,” i.e., the way of inhabiting the Earth so that some are less than human and are to be dominated.  The point is that the colonial fracture allows the hermeneutic injustice of erasing ecological worlds in favor of the colonial inhabitation of the modern world where the Earth is largely a resource and non-human life is not morally significant for the most part.  So, a second subquestion here is about “inclusive ecological humanistic politics.”

Those are my main criticisms after rereading the book.  I’m in agreement with much of the orientation of Susan’s book, and I appreciate the push back against ignorant rejections of the Enlightenment.  But I also think the main analysis of the term “woke” is lacking moral insight in that it stays at the level of surface impressions rather than looking into how the kind of symbolic politics operates via the internet and in conditions of deepening social and political alienation.  Finally, I find that decolonial critique is not treated with the same nuance as the Enlightenment is and that this epistemically interferes with the common cause of Enlightenment values and decolonial and anti-colonial commitments.

Katherine Cassese:  How would a practice of organizing based on universalist leftist commitments be different from contemporary “woke” organizing?  This question comes up for me, because I think that the woke left is engaged in serious organizing. For instance, despite the interesting criticism of the term “ally” in the book, most people aren’t showing up to BLM protests based on how the success of the movement would benefit them personally. They do it out of conviction.

Another example: some of the organizing I’ve been involved in hasn’t foregrounded a discussion of principles. That doesn’t mean no one had principles. In the cases I’m thinking of, people came to support the same cause and basic demands from various different points of view and convictions, and we worked together to try to achieve these things we collectively agreed for different reasons should happen.

Finally, I’d be glad if we also talked about (i) how public discussion of principles is constrained by people’s fears of being viewed as naive and idealistic and (ii) how the theory some on the left endorse (Schmitt, Foucault, and Heidegger) is actually affecting leftist politics.

Julia Gibson:  I’d like to be transparent going into our conversation that my personal experience with “wokeness” on the Left would seem to be quite different from Susan’s. If I were going to write a book on the topic, I might call it, “The Left is Not Woke… But It Should Be.” 

I have two main clusters of questions. First, assuming that wokeness and universalism have both been co-opted and abused, why is only the latter redeemable? Especially given that one (or both, if we accept the book’s account of the Enlightenment) emerged as a tool for resisting oppression and injustice. 

More to the point: A number of tools are on the Leftist chopping block in the book beyond “woke”—e.g., identity politics, standpoint theory, allyship, intersectionality, etc. In fact, “wokeness” here seems to represent an amalgamation of these tools/ideas. Many of these terms originated within Black thought, in particular Black feminism. As such, their vilification and (mis)appropriation has not been accidental. It’s a predictable manifestation of white supremacy. As Leftists, we should be concerned about purging hermeneutical resources developed by Black communities to articulate and resist the conditions of their oppression. Would justice not be better served by helping to illuminate their intended complexity rather than by writing them off for the ways they have been oversimplified, misunderstood, or deliberately warped?

Second, with regards to allyship in particular, I worry that the nuances of why and under what conditions we fight for justice are getting lost. Positionality is relevant here. Fighting out of principled solidarity and fighting for your survival are not the same endeavor or experience. Perhaps the metaphor of “ally” is flawed, but this does not diminish the importance of being aware of our own relationships to power as we move from principle to practice. When we seek to fight for justice for/alongside communities we don’t belong to, epistemic humility is essential. We will need to educate ourselves about what that community has gone through, what they need, and how we can best help. The learning curve here can be quite steep.

Furthermore, when we belong to a community that derives privilege from the oppression of those who we fight for/alongside, reliability and trustworthiness are not givens—they must be earned. That’s why allyship—or whatever a better term for it might be—is not something you can claim but something you work towards by being in community with others and building relationships. It’s not something you qualify for merely by aligning one’s convictions or principles. In fact, shared principles are often used as a smokescreen by would-be-allies in response to criticism, e.g., “How can I be harming the movement/community when we’re operating from the same principles and values?” (sometimes even followed by) “Maybe you’re the one that needs to check your priorities.” [Steven Universe has a great episode (4.18 “Rocknaldo”) on this dynamic.]

Thus, the question I would like us to think about is this: What more is required for solidarity than shared principles and theoretical commitments? When have we experienced real solidarity from others in our lives and what has it looked/felt like? When haven’t we and what has that looked/felt like?

Stephen Rich:  In general, I am sympathetic with the overall project of Susan’s book, but ambivalent about some of its arguments.  I hope that these questions nevertheless express something of my profound respect for Susan’s work and my appreciation for what I feel I have learned from her. 

First, how would this book be different (and what other possibilities for critique might have been opened up) if it did provide a more concrete examination of what it means to be woke?  I suspect that doing this would also lead to questions about where wokeness is most concentrated and where it poses the greatest threat, as well as questions about its methods (e.g., how is wokeness expressed, enforced, and operationalized?).

The answers to these questions would, I suspect, make the stakes of this debate more concrete and, in my view, would present a greater case against woke ideology.  Wokeness proceeds from a set of tribalist, or in-group, prejudices from which it chiefly sets out to make demands for recognition.  It then mistakes recognition (which is sometimes merely linguistic and other times delivered in the form of political power or punishment of its enemies) for justice.  Its methods (those through which it expresses demands for recognition and power) are authoritarian.  They are highly dependent on the control of others (through the policing of language and behavior), the suppression of dissent (through “cancellation”), and intolerance of ideological difference.  Without necessarily changing the core project of the book, an interrogation of woke methods might have set up its criticisms in a more compelling way, and it might have supported additional criticisms. 

The woke might object that all of this misunderstands them because they are advocating for universalism–that is, for the universal value of dignity, or recognition.  But their particular politics will only allow them to advocate for individual dignity through authoritarian means.  If, in other words, wokeness is a politics, it is a politics for a broken political order, a regime of failed political practices and institutions.  But, of course, this exactly defines the period in which wokeness was born. . . . 

Still, to me, it seems that the best case to be made that the woke have turned their back on the Enlightenment is, as Kant might have said, that their particular combination of entitlement and authoritarianism is evidence of their immaturity—self-incurred immaturity to be sure.  This immaturity is best observed, in my view, by examining what they say and do. 

Second, are the emotions that undergird wokeness really the same as the emotions that undergird the traditional Left? Woke politics is a politics of bared teeth.  It is not just intolerant of injustice and motivated to take some action against it.  It is angry about it, takes it personally, and attaches culpability for it to others personally. For these reasons, punishment appears to be its preferred form of justice.  Perhaps it is a mistake to suggest that Leftism and wokeness come from the same emotional place. Perhaps the difference in their emotional registers explains the abandonment of rationalism.  The problem with rationalism is not that Heidegger or Foucault convinced the woke to distrust it.  The problem is that it gets in the way of the white hot emotions that people wish to express.  What if we think that the woke do distrust rationalism?  Yeah, they probably do.  But not because it was defeated (to their satisfaction) philosophically.  It is because it has proved to be feckless and ineffectual and left them with a social world that they hate having to live in. 

Third, aren’t many critiques of the Enlightenment (such as those found in post-structuralism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, and Foucauldianism) really extensions of the Enlightenment? When I was an undergraduate at Yale, I took a seminar taught by Susan on the Enlightenment and its critics.  That class is where I first read Kant and Foucault alongside one another.  I can’t imagine that I would have continued to read them in later life, and especially Foucault, without the benefit of Susan’s class.  In the context of that class, however, Foucault, Adorno, Horkheimer, and other critical thinkers suffered from a kind of curse of the Enlightenment: no matter how some of them might have protested, the forms of critique that they advanced had been, in some sense, pioneered, anticipated, or made possible by Enlightenment thinkers.  A distinct familial relationship existed between the Enlightenment and its critics.  (This might only be my superficial undergraduate understanding or my now faded memory of that understanding.  But it feels right. So I’m sticking by it!)

My question is really about how adopting that perspective might affect one’s thinking on the arguments advanced in Susan’s book.  For Foucault, for example, this could be interpreted to mean that Foucault’s theory of power (as reduced by Susan, that “all is power”) is not a theory that “all is domination.”  Just because Foucault is not particularly interested in the distinction does not mean that he is invested in the conflation.  What is evident, from an Enlightenment perspective, is that some forms of domination are unintelligible and there is little to no prospect of escape from them without a critique of power that includes something like Foucault’s concept of discipline.  The fact that Foucault would have considered “escape” to be merely transitional (escape from one disciplinary power relation into another) is not the same as saying that escape is an illusion or otherwise without consequence in the life experience of the individual.  It simply means that the project of individual liberation merges with the method of critique and is never ending.  Seeing what power does and how one is implicated in what it does to others and to ourselves is, one might say, for Foucault, part of growing up. 

Is the alternative view expressed in the book (that Foucault’s philosophy is pessimistic and fundamentally inconsistent with any progressive understanding of justice) really a more compelling view or a more clarifying one? Perhaps it would not be unfair to say that Foucault did not personally have a politics or had only a reactionary politics. But it need not follow that Foucault’s and other postmodern forms of critique need be painted with that apolitical brush.  Much depends on their use. 

Finally, why is the book’s cast of villains so narrow? If we were thinking about concrete examples or practitioners of woke ideology–such as we find in the context of the university–we would have to broaden the list to include, at minimum, trauma theory (including from clinical psychiatry, not just as reinterpreted by the humanities), queer theory, and post-colonialism.  It may be that the implication behind not tackling these additions head-on is that they too are descendants of psychological pseudo-science, nihilism and authoritarianism, but, if so, that would be a critique worth reading!  Trauma theory, queer theory, and post-colonialism provide much more of the language of the woke, and, more importantly, its purported moral authority.  (In fact, to say that one doesn’t understand how Foucault could be emancipatory could be construed as the same as saying that one doesn’t understand how an LGBTQ person might experience a vast array of mainstream social norms and conventions to constitute domination of them personally.)  In my experience, in most instances and despite the origins of the word “woke,” wokeness is expressed (that is, its particular language and set of authoritarian methods are called upon) in disagreements between whites–disagreements about how to speak and how to behave that are really about how to show respect for others (or, as Susan might say, for victims).  It is in these disagreements between liberal and conservative whites that the language of wokeness has to express not just outrage but also authority. 

The final addition to the expanded cast of villains could be the traditional Left itself.  In a sense, the woke are the Left’s disaffected children, raised on their obsessions with social justice, taught to view the world as replete with injustice, and ultimately deeply disappointed and left feeling profoundly insecure by what they see as their parents’–the Left’s–failures to win in the political contest over progressive and conservative principles and to bring about real, durable change.  Again, one might say that to be precisely what their sad and frustrating parents were not seems to be something of a basic motivation for the woke in relation to the traditional Left.  I suppose one could say that, if this is the case, the woke are wrong about the Left and its track record of success; but I doubt that would much change how they feel when they look at the world around them. 

This final question reflects something of my sense being an outsider looking in when I read Susan’s book.  Both Susan and the Right seem to be saying to the woke (one about the Enlightenment and the other about American identity, or the America Creed) something like, “We have the best ideas.  How dare you disrespect them?” This is the least sympathetic aspect of Susan’s book to me. To make the case for the Left and for the Enlightenment, one has not just to discredit the progenitors of wokeness.  One has to make a case to the very victims of injustice on whose behalf the woke appear to feel such indignation and for whom they purport to be making demands of recognition.  What is that case?

As a descendant of American slaves with pro-Enlightenment leanings, I cannot help but have a complicated relationship to the Enlightenment.  Rejoinders that there were heroic dissenters to the institution of slavery (among other horrors) and that “we” have made progress ring hollow, particularly if what is being proposed in practical terms is a return to universalism. 

I now teach law, including U.S. civil rights law.  Civil rights law is often viewed as embodying universal moral principles, a rare instance some might say in which morality finds true expression in law.  In fact, even when expressed in universalistic terms, these laws were enacted to respond to concrete problems that affected discrete populations of individuals at particular moments in time.  Whether one thinks that universalistic terms are used aspirationally or in order to legitimate the enactment of laws that radically effect social relations is a matter of debate.  For the last half-century, however, the effect of viewing Reconstruction Era concepts like “equal protection” and “due process” through a universalistic framework rather than with an eye to histories of subordination is hard to doubt.  The denial that these laws were enacted in order to remedy particular forms of injustice has the present effect of disabling their ability to remedy today’s injustices. Worse, it may contribute to them.  SFFA v. Harvard, which prohibits race-based affirmative action as inconsistent with the putatively universalistic value of colorblindness, is an excellent example. 

The woke are intolerant of such failures, and what they take away from them is less about principle and more about power—that what matters is having the numbers.  They’re not entirely wrong. 

For someone who is descended from a group that has been historically disadvantaged, power may be less the issue than recognition of their value.  SFFA is a case in which the application of universal principle would seem to trump the value of individual difference (to the educational institution) and the value of remedying histories of discrimination against marginalized communities. 

And so another way to reformulate this question would be to ask: How should the case for universalism be made to history’s “victims” whose wrongs have yet to be remedied, to whom justice has yet to be delivered? How would it answer their potential objection that those wrongs cannot fully be remedied without recognition of the moral significance of the sociohistorical fact of their difference—a moral significance that ordinarily (including in legal contexts) universalism would seem to deny?  I think this makes the case for universalism much harder really, but potentially also even more meaningful. 

Steven Vogel:  My semi-facetious question to Susan would be: Why are you so mean to Foucault? More seriously, I want to ask about the relationship between social critique and “common sense,” and to push Susan a little on the question of the normativity of the woke.

Towards the end of the book, Susan talks about the value of philosophy as a way of “uncovering the assumptions behind your most cherished beliefs and expanding your sense of possibility”; she also quotes C.S. Lewis about how when examining the disputes of past ages we can see now (what they could not):  the way in which both parties in the dispute share various assumptions that we no longer find acceptable. We should be mindful that the same might be true of our own disputes. 

Now there is a tradition on the left that takes this kind of idea very seriously, trying to show how the things that a society takes for granted as unquestionable and politically neutral might actually be indications of what’s wrong with that society. Changing things for the better might require rethinking and overturning those supposedly obvious truths (the critical tradition here is sometimes called Ideologiekritik).

But there’s a kind of rhetorical move Susan makes several times (especially about Foucault) that stands in contrast to this idea in ways that I think weaken her arguments: she snarkily says he was “disinterested in anything so common as common sense,” for instance, or disparages him for failing to show “the sort of everyday wisdom we expect grownups to have” – as though in a thoroughly screwed-up society like ours, “common sense” or the “everyday wisdom of grownups” are the sorts of things we can or should trust.

I frankly think Susan’s reading of Foucault is uncharitable.  His work is very much in the tradition of Ideologiekritik. And it doesn’t make things less uncharitable for Susan to say that she realizes she’s oversimplifying Foucault’s views or that she knows that “more generous” interpretations of his views are possible.  Suggesting that complexities in a view might “need a Ph.D” or “being an initiate” to be understood, frankly, smacks of a kind of anti-intellectualism that ignores the possibility that correctly understanding the terrifying world we inhabit might be difficult and require study! 

Foucault certainly isn’t arguing it’s better, or no worse, to be drawn and quartered than to be in prison.  If woke activists think he is, then they’re just bad readers. That might raise the question of why they’re bad readers.  Rather, Foucault’s doing something quite familiar:  showing that attempts to improve people’s lives sometimes have unintended consequences that exceed the foresight of the reformers. These consequences reveal to later generations that the reformers had not entirely shaken off older ideas from which they thought that they had freed themselves.  This is not so different, say, from the idea that color-blind admissions policies, in the context of a racist society, aren’t sufficient to overcome racism, or the idea that calling homosexuality a psychiatric illness rather than a sin might itself still express homophobia.

But even more to the point, what I wish that Susan had done in the book, especially in the crucial chapter on power and justice, is to explore the normative dimension implicit in Foucault’s work – and in the woke’s politics. When Foucault writes about the Panopticon, it’s clear that we’re supposed to hate it and clear that he hates it too. There is a strong normative element to what he’s doing. What he is writing is a critique, not simply a description.  Susan criticizes him for rejecting normativity, but that’s misleading:  the normativity is obviously there, but what might be missing is its justification.

This point applies – even more strongly – to the wokeness Susan describes and (in my view, correctly) criticizes.  It’s even more clear than in Foucault’s case that the “woke” – in their anti-racism, in their calls to decolonize theory and to transform the language with which we discuss gender, in their complaints about the ways in which appeals to “universalism” threaten to efface difference – are themselves motivated by profound normative commitments, which is to say commitments to something like justice.  If they (or he) really believe that all appeals to justice simply mask the workings of power, then they’re guilty of a performative contradiction in which it becomes impossible to explain not only why the Panopticon is bad but why racism is wrong. 

Susan gestures to this idea a number of times and is absolutely right that a critique of power requires at its base some notion of justice – that without the latter, the former is incoherent. I would have liked, though, to have seen more about the extent to which the woke objection to, say, colonialism or racism in fact depends on universalistic premises, and indeed can’t really be made sense of without such premises. I know the book is intended to be a short one, and this would have made it longer, but I would have wanted to know more about what justice is (beyond, anyway, the appeal to “common sense” previously mentioned), and to have it shown that the woke actually do have a conception of justice that’s implicit in all their critiques.

With thanks to Allan Cao and Susan Ashley from the emergent discussion group "Neighborhood," and Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen and Billy Koutcher for the APA YouTube version.

Recoded from Case Western Reserve University's Zoom platform, August 7th, 2023.

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Minor edits made April 18th, 2024