Daniel Coffeen

“Who the fuck cares where you went to school or where you work? The question is: Is your everyday experience good, healthy, beautiful? Because I have to tell you, while it might be cool to work for a company like Google, Apple, or The New Yorker, if your job is stupid, stressful and your boss is an asshole, there is nothing good or prestigious about that. While it might seem right to go to a school like Berkeley, if classes are overcrowded and students are nervous, anxious, religious zealots from Orange County, are you sure you want to go there? What’s good about that? To believe in prestige is to privilege abstract, collective impression over palpable, daily experience. To which I say: fuck prestige. Do what serves your everyday vitality.”
― Daniel Coffeen

“All of which is to say, the way we make sense of things is rarely to engage the things. We don’t confront the things before us as something different; we confront them as something we already know, as if everything fits into pre-ordained buckets of knowledge, as if those buckets weren’t themselves created, as if buckets and categories themselves weren’t buckets or categories that might impede knowing.”
― Daniel Coffeen, Reading the Way of Things: Towards a New Technology of Making Sense