Birnham Wood (3)

More quotes from Birnham Wood by Eleanor Catton.

Any conversation on the left these days, it's always so competitive, it's always each person trying to outperform the person before them in terms of their oppression or their lack of privilege or their personal trauma or, like, the fact that actually, they're Jewish or actually they're bisexual, or guess what, they're a quarter this or that ethnicity, which gives them the right to speak or the right to take offence or whatever. It's a marketplace! Yet again! You can dress it up in the language of sensitivity and social justice and blah blah blah, but the point of intersectionality isn't to learn how to transcend our differences, or eliminate them, the point isn't solidarity, it's about shoring up your brand, cornering the market, everyone out for themselves, maximising profit and minimising risk. It locks us into our differences, it’s segregationist. And it's also just advertising. It's brand management. That's the point. We're still inside the paradigm! p.106

A marketing algorithm doesn’t see you as a human being. It sees you purely as a matrix of categories: a person who is female, heterosexual,—or whatever-sexual—and white, and university-educated, and employed, who has these kinds of friends and shares these kinds of articles and posts these kinds of pictures and makes these kinds of searches, and on and on—and the more sophisticated the algorithm, the more subcategories it's able to diagnose, and the better it's able to market whatever it is it's selling. Identity politics, intersectionality, whatever you call it—it's the exact same thing. It's the same logic. The smaller the category, the better you're able to sell yourself. The safer you are, economically.

Yes, it is cynical, but as long as we keep thinking like this, we're stuck with cynicism. There's nothing else. We'll never be able to agree to work towards a common goal, and that means the whole project of a genuine left-wing politics is fucked. How can we even get started on the project of creating and protecting public goods when within every group there's always a subgroup, and each one has their own particular agenda, and they're all in competition with each other for airtime and market share? p.108

And “identity politics " is also a propaganda term. People who are actually marginalised, people who are actually systematically oppressed, whose lives are actually in danger, they don't say, “Oh, have you heard about this great new thing, it's called identity politics?" They're talking about justice, and survival. p.109