Jetsetting is now not the privilege of the elite so much as a veritiginous mundanity for a permanently dispossessed global workforce.
Identity politics is not politics at all, since it precisely negates the political as such by re-construing political positions in ethnic terms, subsuming 'ought' under 'is.'
Interpretation
What this quote means
Identity politics distorts traditional political discourse by focusing on ethnic and identity categories rather than broader political principles.
Mark Fisher's quote critiques the concept of identity politics, arguing that it undermines genuine political discourse by framing political issues in terms of ethnic identities. He suggests that this approach reduces political arguments to mere categorizations based on identity, shifting the conversation from discussing what should be done ('ought') to what is currently the case ('is'), thus negating the essence of political debate and action.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a university lecture on social justice, I might use this quote to provoke discussion on the effectiveness of identity politics in achieving equality.
More from Mark Fisher
All quotes βIf it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation.
The most powerful love songs always turn on the discrepancy between the act of declaring love and the knowledge that the ostensible addressee is no longer there, was never there, and could never be there.
Little Axe's records are wracked with collective grief. Spectral harmonicas resemble howling wolves; echoes linger like wounds that will never heal; the voices of the living harmonise with the voices of the dead in songs thick with reproach, recrimination and the hunger for redemption.
If people dying as a consequence of the implementation of measures cannot count as evidence that the legislation has detrimental effects, what would?
What many students most want from college, although they would never admit it, is an authority structure. There is a demand for an authority which they can then reject; they want to be told what to do, so they can disobey. It is a textbook case of bad faith, a flight from freedom.
Similar quotes
So a voice in the mountain is enough to let loose an avalanche. A word too much may be followed by a caving in. If the word had not been spoken, it would not have happened.
How you approach the problem of suffering depends on how you approach life itself. There are only two ways. Either meaning is surrounded by matter, or matter is surrounded by meaning.
The final goal ... is to grasp the native's point of view, _x000D_ his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.
In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society.
They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.
For when they see the people swarm into the streets, and daily wet to the skin with rain, and yet cannot persuade them to go out of the rain, they do keep themselves within their houses, seeing they cannot remedy the folly of the people.