"In an age where history is recorded on T-shirts, the very notion of dwelling on the deep structure of an experience has come to appear both arcane and archaic"
About this Quote
The phrase “deep structure” borrows the aura of literary theory and linguistics, and Harrison uses it strategically. He’s not romanticizing difficulty for its own sake; he’s naming the architecture underneath experience: the motives, contradictions, buried causes that don’t fit on cotton. The subtext is that we’ve trained ourselves to treat introspection as an indulgence and analysis as pretension. If the culture rewards immediacy, then “dwelling” starts to look like stagnation.
His sting is in the double indictment “arcane and archaic.” Arcane suggests elitist, inaccessible; archaic suggests obsolete, outpaced. Together they describe a society that has moralized speed. The context here feels like late-20th/early-21st century media saturation: marketing colonizing memory, identity becoming caption-ready, politics turning into merch. Harrison’s intent is less to mourn a lost golden age than to warn that when surface becomes the dominant language, depth doesn’t merely get ignored - it gets socially discredited.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Harrison, Thomas. (2026, January 16). In an age where history is recorded on T-shirts, the very notion of dwelling on the deep structure of an experience has come to appear both arcane and archaic. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/in-an-age-where-history-is-recorded-on-t-shirts-131088/
Chicago Style
Harrison, Thomas. "In an age where history is recorded on T-shirts, the very notion of dwelling on the deep structure of an experience has come to appear both arcane and archaic." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/in-an-age-where-history-is-recorded-on-t-shirts-131088/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"In an age where history is recorded on T-shirts, the very notion of dwelling on the deep structure of an experience has come to appear both arcane and archaic." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/in-an-age-where-history-is-recorded-on-t-shirts-131088/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2026.
