“Totemic Nounals”: a retrospective

Preface

I’m adding this preface as it was brought to my attention that although the post concerns “Wokism” I fail to define the term. Admittedly it is somewhat difficult to define, as it does not represent a systematic socio-political position, but rather a broad set of ideas, including, but not limited to, left-wing ideas around identity politics and social justice; “Cancel culture”, i.e. attempts to have individuals boycotted or shunned; attempts to redress “white privilege” and “male privilege”; and it relates to “Black Lives Matter”, “LGBTQ+”, and issues concerning “cultural appropriation”, etc… It is often used pejoratively to mean "overrighteous liberalism", as an approach or/and sub-culture.

As I hope is evident from the article, I am giving a nuanced critique of a particular philosophical facet of the movement; I am not advancing a broadly oppositional stance.

For lack of a better term, I suppose I fall into the “anti-woke” camp, an easy space to occupy if I were some reactionary conservative - that would make things so much easier - but I’m not. For good or ill, I’m a card-carrying liberal. For some time I have wanted to write something that explored “wokeism”, but given the weightiness of the subject, I have struggled to find the right words and a suitable approach, but perhaps this will suffice.

When I was at university (and this does reveal something of my character), I became somewhat preoccupied with the idea of coining terminology. Admittedly, this was not an original impulse for me; unaware of the deeper adamic significance of what I was doing, I did the exact same thing when I was a child. When I was about six or seven, I would with some frequency ask my father to identify objects or things, in the vain hope that I would fall upon something, anything that had yet to be named. Now, with hindsight, there was a fatal flaw in my methodology: my six-year-old self took it as a given that my father would obviously know the name of anything in the known universe to which I pointed, and so I did just that, I got my dad to identify thing after thing until I inevitably came upon something for which my father did not have a name. The thing in question was the gluey/dewy drops of something that one can identify on spider webs. Finally, I found something without a name! Now I don’t exactly remember what I coined these drops, but I distinctly remember my deep sense of victory. And strangely, my six-year-old self was kind of right. Having looked it up now, they really don’t have a name, they’re merely referenced in the literature as “glue balls”.

So, for whatever strange deep-seated reason, in the second year of my degree I set out to do the same thing again. I think my roommate at the time (Barney) should bear at least some culpability for this ill-advised move, after all my sense of what was reasonable was formed, at least in part, in that room, in the many conversations that occupied our nights. The terminology I coined, if you can call it that, was “Totemic Nounals”. Not exactly a new word but close enough. The meaning was related to an experience that I witnessed in my Christian charismatic days. Before I was a Christian Unitarian, before I was an Anglican, I was an Evangelical Charismatic, and the services I frequented in those days were characterized by speaking in tongues, individuals being “slain in the spirit”, and spiritual healing. As if wielding magical power, spiritual healings seemed central to my church. I remember announcements from the front of church, “God is telling me someone here is suffering with a sore arm”; preachers compelling people to be well, and the experience of warmth in my hand, the force of the spirit working through me as I laid upon others hands of healing. In the course of one particular service I recall an announcement that a regular had been diagnosed with cancer. Unable to pray upon them directly, the minister opted to have us pray upon napkins which could be subsequently brought to the individual, napkins which would carry our (or rather God’s) healing energy. The biblical precedent was explained to us at the time: (Acts 19: 11, 12) “God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, so that when the handkerchiefs or aprons that had touched his skin were brought to the sick, their diseases left them, and the evil spirits came out of them.”

In other words, things could be imbued with spiritual energy. An idea which is perhaps less strange to Anglicans who believe in some sense the elements (the bread and the wine), the waters of baptism, or the blessed olive oil of catechumens carry spiritual force. Now it’s obviously debatable whether they actually contain some kind of spiritual energy. Even in the Acts example, is it that the handkerchief actually contains healing energy, or is it the mere fact of healing intent? Within a contemporary secular frame, the latter explanation takes center stage; there is nothing miraculous at play, rather the knowledge of good intent from the collective faithful induces in the sick a psychosomatic response. Bla bla de bla…

The ”truth” is beside the point, more important is the fact that some believe it. Some believe that things, or nouns, can be imbued with spiritual energy, much like Native American totems, which likewise are understood to contain some enigmatic spiritual force. Hence my term, “Totemic Nounals”, a recuring spiritual motif the world over that things can be imbued with spiritual energy, spiritual significance. During that second year of my degree I managed to write an entire essay exclusively on this topic.

Now, that is a very long introduction to what I actually want to talk about in this essay: “wokism”. You see, I intuit a relationship between my droll “Totemic Nounals” term and “wokism”. Whether I can articulate that relationship is another question. Back in those days of old I used the word “nounal” in an unnecessarily jargonistic fashion, given that the synonym “thing” would have been quite sufficient. However, in retrospect, I think “nounal” was actually a far better word than I realized. A “nounal” need not be a thing or a “noun”, rather it relates to, or is of the nature of, or has the quality of, a noun. An important distinction. You are not a noun. We all remember being taught in school that a noun is a person, place or thing. So, we can all be forgiven for thinking of ourselves as nouns. But it just ain’t so.

I explored this in greater depth in a previous post, but the bottom line is that you [insert your name here] is not really you. It’s an outward expression of something, it’s an actor playing a part on the stage of this world, to borrow Shakespeare’s often used analogy, but it’s not you. The “I” which is you merely watches from afar the character which you identify with play out their little role. In as far as we falsely identify ourselves with this character, the word “nounal” is appropriate. Likewise, we may think of words such as man, woman, black, white, gay, straight, etc. as descriptors, but in the “woke vernacular” they falsely act as nouns. To refer to them as “nounals”, however, reframes these words as reductive adjectives, certainly not nouns, but rather, merely related to, of the nature of, and having the quality of, nouns. To use the word “nounal” generally then, stresses that it is the related/nature/quality aspects which are of import, not whether said ______  is or is not a noun, regardless of whether society treats it as such.

To abstract this further, we can imagine a religious figurehead conducting a ritual, a shaman, a priest - in as far as they are conducting their function, presiding at the altar, they are a noun. They are a religious object, a noun fulfilling a particular purpose. But not merely a noun, but also imbued… an object which contains meaning greater than the sum of its parts, which transcends their “nouness”. Which is to say they act as a totem.

All such dominant categories in contemporary society have a “Totemic Nounal” quality. They fulfill a religious function. It is not enough to describe one as gay, one must believe in gay. It is not enough to know one is straight, one must believe in straight as a totemic power within society. A negative power which again, transcends the sum of their parts (literally).

“Totemic Nounals” act as a reductive lens through which reality is distorted. This is not necessarily a problem in itself, it’s only a problem when this reductive function is not recognized as being such. “Totemic Nounals” in an overtly religious context for example are rarely a problem as it is recognized that they are only meaningful within the given context. “Totemic Nounals” are necessarily reductive, reducing complexity to something which one can simply assert and believe. “Wokeism” is very simple, you either believe or you do not. The temptation of spiritual life is to be consumed by our wounds. “Wokeism” offers us just that. A lens through which all of reality can be subsumed by our perceived wounds. In such a framework the descriptors such as black, gay, woman, etc… are rendered into “Totemic Nounals”. These wounds are elevated above the altar with zealous pride.

It is strange that in our day it is necessary to state that it is unhealthy to define ourselves in terms of oppression, either as perpetrators or victims. This is to diminish our humanity.  

I feel at this late juncture that it’s important to acknowledge that although as I said my sympathies lie with the “anti-woke” crowd, I often find myself cringing when I hear them speak. They are guilty (who isn’t) of reducing complex arguments down to simplistic assertions of truth. Often, “anti-woke” is synonymous with conservatism; as such these assertions take on the form of asserted reductive conservative truisms, which are rarely any better than woke asserted truism.

Ultimately, reductive lenses, a “Totemic Nounal” framework, hijack and negate our own individual stories. We cannot be reduced to such dominant categories.

Do not be deceived. “I am large. I contain multitudes.”