The Genealogy of Woke: Foucault's War on Truth and Knowledge

Cultural movements do not spring out of a vacuum. The woke movement is the cultural manifestation of the underlying philosophy of postmodernism.

**The essay below is contributed by Dominic Valentine, who has kindly allowed ‘Philosophy: I Need It’ to feature his work. Follow Dominic on Instagram and X to explore more of his insights.

I. Introduction: “The Woke Mind Virus”

II. What is Postmodernism? 

III. The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason

IV. From Marxism to Postmodernism

V. Foucault: Truth & Power

VI. Foucault: The Episteme

VII. Foucault: Madness & Civilization

VIII. Foucault: Discipline & The Prison

IX. Foucault: Sexuality & Gender

X. Beyond Postmodernism

Introduction: “The Woke Mind Virus”

Have you ever heard that Western institutions are inherently racist and that only white people can be racist? Or that gender is a social construct, that men can become women and vice versa? Maybe you’ve also encountered the prevalence of phrases such as “my truth”—suggesting that there are no objective or universal truths, but only “truth” relative to a given individual or group. For an increasing number of people within our culture, feelings appear to have taken metaphysical primacy over facts, and racial, gender, and sexual identity have become the ultimate determinants of human existence.

Many of our modern day politicians, media, and educational institutions echo these sentiments, with their push to view just about every aspect of society through the prism of identity politics and group oppression. In the corporate world, hiring practices and business strategies have become increasingly dictated by diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, prioritizing identity representation above individual merit. It is these same companies—once solely focused on profit and market dominance—whose marketing and advertising campaigns have now taken on the form of championing various social justice causes. 

As has become perfectly clear by now, we have witnessed a concerning social shift over the past decade especially. Elon Musk has famously described this phenomenon as “the woke mind virus”—an apt metaphor given that this is an ideology which appears to have spread throughout and infected almost every area of Western society. Amidst today’s culture wars, we hear this term ‘woke’ thrown around constantly, often without an explicit, conceptual understanding of what it represents. Vivek Ramaswamy—former presidential candidate and author of the book Woke. Inc.—succinctly defines woke in the following neutral terms:

“Being woke refers to waking up to invisible, alleged societal injustices, based on genetically inherited attributes: race, sex, and sexual orientation. And further, it creates a hierarchy based on these genetic attributes to say that you’re either an oppressor or you’re a member of an oppressed class, which creates these invisible relationships [of power].” 

Yet combined with the sociopolitical trends we see an overriding sense of radical subjectivism, as many of our most fundamental notions of truth, reality, and human nature itself have been met with dismissal. If you’re somebody who possesses even a smattering of common sense, you’ve probably asked yourself “just what the hell is going on here?” From where precisely did all of this emerge? This essay is my attempt to answer such questions. Cultural movements, ladies and gentlemen, do not spring out of a vacuum. They have causes—i.e. intellectual causes, which are rooted in philosophy. Understanding some of the most pressing issues of our day necessitates cultivating an understanding of their philosophical and historical origins. This brings me to the main thesis of this essay: that the woke movement is the cultural manifestation of the underlying philosophy of postmodernism.

What is Postmodernism?

Leading postmodernists (left to right): Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard

Postmodernism is a philosophical movement which rose to prominence somewhere between the 1960s and 70s, and is most widely associated with leading French intellectuals Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Inherent in the very name itself, postmodernism presents itself in stark opposition to modernism—namely by casting a critical eye on the foundational beliefs which have defined modern Western civilization since The Enlightenment (circa 16th-17th century). The Enlightenment was preeminently characterized by its championing of the power of reason to know reality. Postmodernism rejects the idea that reason (or any method) can provide us with objective truths about reality, arguing that our notions of truth are socially and linguistically constructed. The postmodernists view reason and knowledge as tools which have been historically wielded by the powerful to impose their worldview and maintain power.

The Enlightenment viewed man as the rational being, emphasizing the sovereignty of the individual and our ability to achieve freedom, scientific progress, and human flourishing through the use of reason. It held a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature which suggested that individuals can resolve conflicts through their capacity to reason with one another, thereby fostering mutual benevolence and social harmony. The postmodernists, by contrast, reject the idea of an essential human nature (e.g. the rational being), maintaining that human identity is arbitrarily constructed by those social forces which dominate a given time and place.

Having rejected the unifying role of reason in human life, postmodernism consistently emphasizes relations of power, dominance, and oppression between conflicting groups.

The Counter-Enlightenment Attack On Reason

For the reasons discussed, postmodernism is part of what has been termed “The Counter-Enlightenment”—the intellectual trend signified by philosophy’s gradual progression away from Enlightenment ideals over the past 200 years, as first initiated by the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Kant, as Ayn Rand states, was the man who “closed the door of philosophy to reason.” Kant attempted to separate reason from reality, arguing that reason is not competent to perceive reality as it really is. True reality—which he called “the noumenal world”—is forever closed off to us.

For Kant, the world as we experience it—‘the phenomenal world’—is created by an innate structure of ‘categories’ built into our minds—a collective distortion of man’s conceptual faculty, which no human being has the power to escape. Therefore, reason and science are thoroughly limited to the phenomena with which they deal, grasping a world which exists “only in our brain[s], and cannot be given outside it.” As Kant puts it in his seminal work, The Critique of Pure Reason: “Everything intuited in space or time, and therefore all objects of experience possible to us, are nothing but appearances, that is, mere representations, which . . . have no independent existence outside our thoughts.” 

Kant’s major epistemological theory laid the intellectual groundwork for the notion that there is no objective truth accessible to reason—an idea which later becomes central to postmodern thought in the 20th century. It is important to set the context for postmodernism with its roots in Kant, since postmodernism marks the Kantian (i.e. Counter-Enlightenment) trend taken to its logical climax. 

From Marxism to Postmodernism

In understanding the eventual development of postmodernism, it is also crucial to observe its relationship to Marxism. In their political stances, all of the leading postmodernists are individuals of the far-left. For an intellectual movement which promotes a radical relativism towards all notions of truth, one would then expect to find its representatives dispersed all across the political spectrum. This is not the case for the postmodernists, which is why the relationship between postmodernism and Marxism becomes a very interesting one. 

Karl Marx held that man’s history is fundamentally a struggle between economic groups. According to Marx, the capitalist system, characterized by private ownership of the means of production by the bourgeoisie, inevitably comes at the exploitation of the proletariat. As capitalism progresses, the tension between the two classes would grow so great that the proletariat would spark their own revolution. This revolution, posited Marx, would culminate in an eventual classless society—the communist utopia in which there would be collective ownership over the means of production. True equality would finally be achieved, with wealth and abundance available for everyone to share in. Or, in the slogan which Marx penned: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

Within the 20th century, the Marxist vision was attempted in various states—the Soviet Union and Maoist China most notably—with nothing short of catastrophic results. It has been estimated that over 100 million people were killed at the hands of communist regimes within the 20th century alone. By the second half of the 20th century, the brutality and starvation which was occurring within these states had become common knowledge in the West. Most people had now come to accept that the Marxist-socialist dream had not only failed, but had produced completely opposite outcomes of the utopian abundance it had promised. 

This crisis of socialism formed much of the background out of which postmodern philosophy emerged into prominence on the intellectual Left. While Marxism’s appeal as a legitimate political ideology had largely faded out in the West, the oppressed-oppressor narrative intrinsic to Marxism, however, did not. It was being kept alive and well by postmodernism. In addressing the postmodern task, Jacques Derrida states that “deconstruction has never had sense or interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.” 

From the intellectual context I have laid out, postmodernism is largely born from this union of skeptical epistemology and far-left politics. Or, postmodernism is born out of something of a union between the spirit of Kant and Marx—the Kantian element being the denial of reason to know reality; the Marxist element being the central focus on power relations between oppressor and oppressed.

Foucault: Truth & Power

Out of the leading postmodernists—Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard—Foucault has been, without question, the most significantly influential among them, which is why I wish to turn the rest of our attention to his ideas specifically. According to Google Scholar, Foucault has been the single most cited scholar in academia. His presence has not only penetrated the academic world, but his impact on 21st century society is truly palpable. It is my view that one cannot fully grasp the nature of today’s “culture wars” without a grasp of Foucault’s thought and influence. 

It all begins with the central theme which runs throughout all of Foucault’s work: that of the relationship between power and knowledge. Foucault asserts that this thing which we call ‘truth’ or ‘knowledge’ is intimately tied up with relations of power. In fact, the two are so inextricably bound together for Foucault that he often refers to them in terms of the single unified concept ‘power/knowledge’. Knowledge is always operating within the service of power, and power is always producing knowledge in order to reinforce itself. Take the scientific enterprise, for instance, which has attained a significant position of authority in our civilization when it comes to the pursuit of truth. But is it really truth which science is after? Or is truth simply the mask it employs to cover for something else? This is where Foucault casts his deadly suspicion.

Truth, Foucault tells us, is not a product of correspondence to an objective reality, but has been socially constructed for purposes of domination and control. Science produces its own institutions where its practitioners carry out their disciplines and research, generating new knowledge which only serves to reinforce and buttress the power of such institutions in our society. “Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power . . . We are obliged to produce the truth by the power that demands truth and needs it in order to function [and justify itself].” Thus, power and knowledge are in this constant reciprocal relationship, giving rise to a set “regime of truth,” in Foucault’s words.

Foucault: The Episteme

Visual depiction of the episteme

According to Foucault, every historical era is dictated by these regimes of truth—their own interplays of power and knowledge. Or, every society operates under its own version of what Foucault terms the episteme (deriving from the word ‘epistemology’, the branch of philosophy concerning knowledge). The episteme is a socially-historically determined structure which exists within the minds of individuals—consisting of the implicit assumptions and rules which have been unconsciously imposed upon them by dominant social forces. Having been socially conditioned into internalizing this structure, the episteme exerts an invisible force over how our minds perceive the world, over how we interact with the world. It is thus responsible for all of the knowledge, moral values, institutions, and technologies generated by a given culture. 

“In any given culture,” Foucault writes, “there is only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.” Since there is “only one episteme” which constrains us all at a given time, we cannot think, do, or create anything outside of what that ruling episteme dictates. Here we can identify a parallel between Foucault’s episteme and the thought of Immanuel Kant (one of Foucault’s foremost philosophical influences). Both Kant and Foucault deny any metaphysical or objective basis for our knowledge. In Kant’s approach, truth is a creation of the mind’s own innate ‘categories’. In Foucault’s approach, truth is created by those social forces which dominate a particular time and place. Under the Foucaultian episteme, it may be true in our own Western culture, but it is not true for another one; or, what was true for the modern era will not be true for our postmodern one. A given episteme, states Foucault, is “neither more true nor more false than those that preceded it,” since truth is relative to what power decides is true at any given time.

Foucault: Madness & Civilization

For Foucault, this power/knowledge dynamic, this regime of truth which governs Western culture, is fundamentally oppressive in nature. The Enlightenment West’s emphasis on reason and knowledge has led to what Foucault deems an exclusionary society. Reason functions as the episteme’s most potent weapon, producing knowledge which is then wielded by the powerful in order to coerce certain groups of people. In the attempt to demonstrate this point, Foucault turns our attention to social institutions such as psychiatry and the justice system, as respectively explored within two of his most influential works: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961) and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). 

Within Madness and Civilization, Foucault explores the history of our idea of madness and society’s way of dealing with madness. He observes that prior to The Enlightenment (circa 1685-1815), the mad were once free amongst the rest of society. People could perhaps tell there was something very odd about them, but they were for the most part tolerated. However, as reason and rational discourse became the prevailing episteme, we began to view certain expressions of behavior through the lens of reason and unreason, of sane and insane. By the late 18th and early 19th century, this led to the creation of psychiatric institutions where the mad were contained from the rest of society and became subjects in need of medical treatment.

According to Foucault, what we consider to be madness has no legitimate basis in reality, but has been socially-linguistically constructed so that a given class’s rational worldview may dominate. “Madness only exists in society,” Foucault once declared. “It does not exist outside of the forms of sensibility that isolate it, and the forms of repulsion that expel it and capture it.” By artificially inventing this new category of madness, what Western society did was exclude and coerce the previously free. Thus, in light of the central theme of Foucault's work, reason becomes exposed as a tool of oppression, and knowledge a mere stalking horse for the exertion of power. 

Foucault: Discipline & The Prison

Where else do we see society excluding those who would have otherwise been left free? Within the justice system and prisons. This became the subject of Foucault’s influential 1975 work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Much of Foucault’s philosophical project can be defined by a willingness to fully extend the domain of human freedom. He performs this task through a radical critique of all social practices and norms which he believes limit the unrestrained expression of freedom—the kind of freedom which would allow us to go beyond good and evil. Just like our conception of madness, crime too is a socially constructed category. What society labels as criminal behavior is simply a product of arbitrary moral and social norms disguised as truth. And just like madness, our practices for dealing with criminals are nothing more than the imposition of power by one element of society onto another element of society. 

For Foucault, prison is the institution in which power no longer feels the need to disguise itself, since here it has the benefit of justifying its exercise in the name of moral goodness. “Prison is the only place where power is manifested in its naked state, in its most excessive form, and where it is justified as moral force . . . What is fascinating about prisons is that, for once, power doesn't hide or mask itself; it reveals itself as tyranny pursued into the tiniest details; it is cynical and at the same time pure and entirely ‘justified,’ because its practice can be totally formulated within the framework of morality. Its brutal tyranny consequently appears as the serene domination of Good over Evil, of order over disorder.”

However, as Foucault wishes to convey to us, the kind of power which openly manifests itself in prisons is actually no different from what secretly goes on unseen in every other Western institution, from medicine to education. Just like the justice system’s standards of moral law, medicine and education involve certain authorities who assert standards of what is true or false, appropriate or not appropriate, healthy and sick, right and wrong ways of learning—standards which confine people into certain ways of thinking and behaving, while excluding other ways. Within Discipline and Punish, Foucault tells us that “the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.” 

For Foucault, every form of discipline gives birth to its own metaphorical prison—i.e. it generates its own set of rules which limit us to what we can and cannot do. In prison, the bars are literal and physically visible. In the rest of our disciplinary society, these bars operate invisibly within our own bodies and souls. Their invisibility is a product of these rules having become internalized, as we govern and regulate our behavior in the image of what an oppressive episteme—the prison of reason—has enforced upon us. 

The postmodern task then becomes clear: “It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.” Foucault set about that very task throughout his work, in the attempt to unmask what he believed was really going on underneath the West’s civilized veneer of reason, science, and progress. What is really going on at the core of Western institutions is the secret exercise of “political violence”, namely in order to coerce and oppress certain groups of people.

The attempt to unmask and fight Western institutions on behalf of so-called “oppressed peoples” is at the core of today’s woke movement. We are told that Western civilization and all of its institutions are, by nature, deeply embedded in systemic racism. The inherently racist nature of our society has conditioned some of us into being eternal oppressors, while dooming others to the fate of the oppressed. From her best-selling 2018 book White Fragility, critical race theorist Robin DiAngelo states that “white people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions.” In order to fight racism and liberate the oppressed, Western institutions must therefore be radically transformed from their very foundations—hence today’s doctrine of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion). 

Foucault: Sexuality & Gender

The effects of power are found not only in how we think (the episteme), but how we act too—controlling not only our minds, but our bodies. Throughout Foucault’s philosophy, there is a persistent focus on the body and the way in which power restricts it. The rules which exist within Western society—our legal codes, moral codes, epistemological codes—exert a coercive force over the ways we can and cannot use our bodies, over how we can and cannot act. Power in the specific context of bodily control is aptly referred to by Foucault as biopower. And perhaps nowhere is this phenomenon of biopower more prevalent for him than in the realm of sexuality. So much so that it became the focus of an entire four-volume study entitled The History of Sexuality. 

The History of Sexuality argues that the prevalence of heteronormative sexual relationships, and their culmination in monogamous marriage and the family structure, is just another tool of oppression—an arbitrary custom of the dominant bourgeois class in order to maintain their power, while excluding other categories of sexual expression. “The procreative couple laid down the law . . . imposed itself as [the] model, enforced the norm[.]” Foucault contends that there is nothing natural or metaphysically given about heteronormative sexuality, but is simply what those with the power have dictated as normal. In his second volume of The History of Sexuality entitled “The Use of Pleasure”, Foucault will convey this point by referencing Ancient Greece where paedophilia or boy love was considered normal in many circles of society. Thus, for Foucault, what we privilege as acceptable forms of sexuality is relative to the prevailing episteme—there is no universal right or wrong. 

Plato conveyed the idea that the body is the prison of the soul—meaning: the earthly, bodily appetites lead us away from the realm of the spiritual or God. Foucault explicitly reverses this sentiment in his statement that “the soul is the prison of the body.” The oppressive biopower of sexual morality imprisons the unrestrained use of the body, preventing us from “[linking] together in liberation, and manifold pleasures . . . [from] the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights.” The way we resist such biopower, according to Foucault, is by engaging in the free, unrestrained use of our bodies, defying the restrictions imposed upon us by an oppressive episteme. 

Many of the ideas put forth within The History of Sexuality have been highly influential within the academic fields of queer theory and gender studies. This is thoroughly exemplified through the work of pioneering gender theorist Judith Butler and her 1990 book Gender Trouble, which largely took Foucault’s ideas surrounding sexuality and applied them to gender. Butler asserted that gender is not the product of an objective, biological reality, but is what she called “performative.” There is nothing about what it means to be a man or a woman which is grounded in our metaphysical nature, but rather, gender is constructed by the roles which society has conditioned us to perform. Thus, gender can just as easily be reconstructed by one’s own subjective desire to perform differently. Gender is fluid. 

Beyond Postmodernism

The most fundamental error in Foucault’s philosophy—and that of all the postmodernists—is the rejection of objectivity, namely in his reduction of all truth or knowledge to mere instruments of power. Regardless of one’s power status, nobody gets to decide what is true. Truth is the recognition—not the creation—of reality. Things are what they are independent of consciousness, they have a specific nature, a metaphysically given identity which no human being or group has the power to alter. For instance, a scientific institution does not have the power to decide which scientific principles are true; they either conform to reality or they do not. While human knowledge certainly evolves across time (as Foucault’s theory of the episteme will remind us), this does not change the fact that what any society considers knowledge at a given historical point must always correspond to facts of reality if it is to attain the status of truth. A lie or distortion, no matter how many people believe it or how institutionalized it becomes, does not make it a truth.

It is from such a recognition of objectivity that many of the West’s social codes have been, and should be, based on. We can directly observe that violent criminal behavior (including certain forms of sexual behavior and abuse) is harmful to human life and its requirements. This is why we need a criminal justice system to ensure those who commit such acts are not free to do so. The same degree of objectivity must also apply to our understanding of human nature. What we consider to be extreme forms of mental illness can be objectively demonstrated via a person’s inability to deal with the facts of reality and act accordingly. Nobody “constructs” such a standard of mental health, since it derives from the recognition of man’s nature as a being who can survive only by the use of reason. Likewise, in regards to gender, a person’s subjective feelings or “performative” behavior does not, and metaphysically cannot, rewrite the nature of biological reality. 

In his analysis of power and knowledge, Foucault does have half a point. Sometimes institutional power does have the propensity to become oppressive and tyrannical, while justifying its practices under a pretense of truth. Whether it comes in the form of slavery in the past or the woke discrimination of DEI in our present (of which postmodernism ironically laid much of the intellectual foundations for), it is critical that we remain intellectually on guard against such dangers. Foucault’s error is that he universalizes this propensity towards a skepticism surrounding all claims to truth, towards a suspicion of all hierarchical organization in society. 

The propensity for both institutions and individuals to abuse power is precisely part of why we do need the guidance of truth and morality to discern which forms of power are and are not valid—without which we are lost. For instance, the productive power of a Steve Jobs is not the same as the coercive power of a Joseph Stalin. One is a game made possible by people’s peaceful, voluntary cooperation of mutual exchange, the other through the threat of physical force. Foucault’s philosophy fails to make such an essential distinction, linking all forms of power into one indeterminate package deal.

In order to counter the effects of postmodernism in our culture—namely its manifestation as today’s woke movement—it is essential that we understand and correct the fundamental errors of those thinkers who set such trends into motion. Ideas are what move the world. And as Ayn Rand wrote, “Ideas cannot be fought except by means of better ideas. The battle consists not of opposing, but of exposing; not of denouncing, but of disproving; not of evading, but of boldly proclaiming a full, consistent and radical alternative.” Within today’s postmodern cultural atmosphere, there is perhaps nothing more radical than an avowed commitment to reason and truth—those values which made Western civilisation the greatest and most just that has ever existed.

Thank you for reading this guest essay by Dominic Valentine. If you appreciate Dominic's perspectives, consider following him on Instagram and X for more thought-provoking content.

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References

X. Special credit to Stephen Hicks and his excellent work Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rosseau to Foucault. If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, I (Dominic) highly recommend checking it out: http://bit.ly/3vSG8bf

1 Elon Musk [@elonmusk], "The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters" (X/Twitter, 12 December 2022), twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1602278477234728960

2 Vivek Ramaswamy, "Vivek Ramaswamy on Unpacking the 'Woke" Phenomenon" (YouTube, 24 April 2022), www.youtube.com/watch?v=omruzUt0618&t=64s

3 Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual (Signet, 1963), 27

4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (The Macmillan Company, 1929), 435

5 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 439

6 Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (Peking, 1972), 17

7 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (Routledge, 1994), 115

8 Clare O'Farrell, "Highly Cited Researchers (h>100) Foucault at number 1 (2019)" (Foucault News, 1 May, 2019), https://michel-foucault.com/2019/05/01/highly-cited-researchers-h100-foucault-at-number-1-2019/

9 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (Editions de Seuil/Gallimard, 1997), 24

10 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power” in The Foucault Reader (Peregrine Books, 1986), 74

11 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (Routledge, 1989), 183

12 James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (Simon & Schuster, 1993), 98

13 Gillez Deleuze, Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power” (1972),

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gilles-deleuze-michel-foucault-intellectuals-and-power

14 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (Editions Gallimard, 1975), 303

15 Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature (The New Press, 2006), 41

16 Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Beacon Press, 2018), 132

17 Michel Foucault, “We "Other Victorians" (from The History of Sexuality, Volume I) in The Foucault Reader (Peregrine Books, 1986), 292

18 Plato, Phaedo (Oxford University Press, 1975)

19 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 30

20 Foucault, “We "Other Victorians" (from The History of Sexuality, Volume I) in The Foucault Reader, 295, 296

21 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990)

22 Ayn Rand, “The Cashing In: The Student "Rebellion", in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (Signet, 1971), 54