When was Peak Woke?
Prolegomena to a Future History
Britain has settled into an accepted cultural chronology of ‘Woke.’ Woke, for most British commentators, is something which mainly involved transgender people, possibly Black Lives Matter. It was imported “from America” and became noticeable around 2018 when people were rude to J.K Rowling on X, it ‘peaked’ in 2020 with the George Floyd protests and then sort of went away of its own accord some time last year, without any laws actually needing to be repealed.
“Unfortunately, however, in our current climate, it is impossible to express an opinion on TV because you are bound to upset a pressure group that then runs around with its arms in the air and calling for you to be sacked… Neither is very big or important. I’d guess they have fewer members than the Church of England. But they have websites, and they have spokeswomen, and they are always prepared to come up with a quote when contacted by reporters.”
– Jeremy Clarkson, Dec 2008
This narrative is wrong for several reasons. For one, and we shall see why it is difficult to dwell too much upon this later, Britain already had several decades of Woke by the 2010s. Transgender identity, diversity quotas in broadcasting and the civil service, statutory EDI requirements were all introduced by Tony Blair’s government where they were called ‘Political Correctness.’ Sticking to the 2010s and tracking more close to the grain of received opinion as to what Woke was, a certain social media aesthetics of activism rather than any real laws, you’ll still notice the official chronology is still wrong. The cancellation of Tim Hunt, a Nobel prize winner sacked from his KCL Job in 2015 for an off-colour but harmless remark about women, happened in Britain and is one of the canonical cases of ‘cancellation.’ (It is forgotten today but the same year a ‘Nietzsche society’ was banned from the same university – never forget Britain is a country which bans students from having philosophical discussions).
The official chronology of Woke serves clear political ends. One of them is that it exculpates feminism from any role in Woke; indeed, you would sometimes be led to believe Woke was primarily a movement against feminists. Feminism was in fact not simply a part of Woke but the overwhelming driver of the main ‘cancellations’ in the 2010s: the #everydaysexism movement was a massive cultural event very much part of the Woke scene with its prototypical use of the Internet for social shaming. The main protagonists of Woke in the public sphere, such as Laurie Penny, identified primarily as third-wave feminists rather than transgender people. Secondly, it allows for the indigenous, in many ways far more vehement, establishment New Labour Wokeness to be separated from an amorphous latter-day movement so that Blair himself can now mutter darkly about the topic when he literally went out of his way to invent the concept of Transgender people. Finally, it allowed Wokeness to be blamed on “Gen-Z” when it was quite clearly a movement whose adherents were drawn from postgrads c. 2015 (born in the 80s) with the complicity of more tepidly leftwing Britpop/Boomer faculty. The reason for this is that, even in the 2010s, it was obvious Gen Z were naturally opposed to cultural anti-fascism and an elaborate propaganda campaign had to be staged to disguise this.
Although the official chronology is bunkum, it is still worth considering in itself when Woke ‘peaked’ and explaining why 2020 is the wrong answer. When writing about a cultural movement, the ‘peak’, alongside other topographies of power, is going to refer to two different points: the moment when it has the most organic support, which is often just before it seizes power and the moment when, once in power, it feels moved by boldness or fear to the greatest public displays of this power. Most regimes tend to intensify before they start to collapse, Yuri Andropov, a KGB man, was the last Soviet leader to rule before reform. The National Party in South Africa was at its most dictatorial after the Brotherhood determined that the Apartheid experiment was unsustainable.
Before answering these questions, we should first clarify why a true History of Wokeness will always be unsatisfactory. Nothing Woke people believed was actually different from the credo of the 1960s radicals, others have noted that it was present in the 1990s and we have earlier described the Blairite legacy in Britain. Any true history, therefore, will start with the Nuremberg trials and the genesis of the ideas themselves. Nonetheless, we are good Wittgensteinians and ought to recognise that when people speak about ‘Woke’ in the 2010s they are trying to point at something perceived as aesthetically new. While Britain in 2013 already had diversity quotas and sent people to prison for bad thoughts, David Cameron could also tell a female M.P to “calm down Dear” and receive no real backlash; the popular television show Bad Education (2013) is full of racial and class stereotypes in no way out of place in 2004. A judgment we can be certain of is that Wokeness was, before anything else, a reactionary movement and this would suggest that the 2010s ought to be seen not as the scene of a ‘New Religion’ but as a form of “Western” Fundamentalism: an attempt to return to an earlier version of the faith as modernity became increasingly hostile.
