Serious thoughts need different cultivation and time to grow; planted as seeds of living speech in the ground of an appropriate soul, they will take root, ripen, and bear fruit as knowledge in due season
Written texts make available the notion that one knows what one has merely read.
From Plato’s Phaedrus, via Anne Carson’s Eros the bittersweet.
McKenzie Wark (2009): Détournement, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 14:1, 145-153
Détournement attacks a kind of fetishism, where
the products of collective human labour in the
cultural realm become mere property. But what is
distinctive about this fetishism is that it does not
rest directly on the status of the thing as a
commodity. It is, rather, a fetishism of memory.
Not so much commodity fetishism as co-memory
fetishism – collective remembrance as fetish. And
what is distinctive about détournement is that it
can restore to the fragment the status of being a
recognisable part of the process of the collective
production of meaning in the present, through
the combination of the détourned fragment into a
new meaningful ensemble. Détournement frees
the process of creation from the private property
of the image.
