Tom McCarthy: Satin Island

Forget family, or ethnic and religious groupings: corporations have supplanted all these as the primary structure of the modern tribe.

For anthropologists, even the exotic’s not exotic, let alone the everyday.

If people were to tell other people everything about themselves, we’d live in a dull world.

We require experience to stay ahead, if only by a nose, of our consciousness of experience—if for no other reason than that the latter needs to make sense of the former, to (as Peyman would say) narrate it both to others and ourselves, and, for this purpose, has to be fed with a constant, unsorted supply of fresh sensations and events.

The first move of any strategy of cultural production, he’d say, must be to liberate things – objects, situations, systems – into uselessness.