Whereto After Woke Identitarianism: Hyperobjectivity, Neoliberalism, and Rhizomatic Universalism

This thesis asks whether "wokeness" and identity politics function as hyperobjects: amorphous, pervasive concepts that obscure material realities or perhaps as something else entirely. Tracing wokeness' intellectual roots from the post-1968 New Left through postmodern academia, the work critiques identitarian frameworks like postcolonial studies and Critical Race Theory as well as its compatibility with the current economic hegemony. It demonstrates how these schools, by positing incommensurable experiences and standpoint epistemology, ironically reify the cultural essentialism and racial categories they claim to dismantle. This shift has fractured universalist, class-based solidarity, aligning instead with neoliberal capitalism's logic of hyper-individualism and fragmented consumer identities. The project ultimately advocates for moving beyond this identitarian outlook to a method of analysis I have called "rhizomatic universalism," a decentralized, non-hierarchical constructive discourse that can confront shared material crises, like wealth inequality and ecological collapse without centering static identity categories that only divide us further