According to French social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the artist “shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human life.” Lévi-Strauss compared this artistic process to the work of a handyman who solves technical or mechanical problems with whatever materials are available. He referred to that process of making do as bricolage, a term derived from the French verb bricoler (meaning “to putter about”) and related to bricoleur, the French name for a jack-of-all-trades. Bricolage made its way from French to English during the 1960s, and it is now used for everything from the creative uses of leftovers (“culinary bricolage”) to the cobbling together of disparate computer parts (“technical bricolage”).

Bricolage Definition & Meaning – Merriam-Webster

What do you get when monotropic bricolage thinkers write about monotropism and neurodiversity using the bricolage-friendly tools of the open web? This website. This website is an artifact of our iteration and constructionism.

This page explains how and why we work the way we work. It is a field guide to our method — and the method is bricolage all the way down.

Bricolage, constructionism, remixing, and pastiche are not four separate ideas loosely grouped under a punk aesthetic. They are the same impulse operating at different scales. Bricolage is the cognitive disposition: thinking with whatever is at hand, improvising from available materials, building meaning out of the dump heap. Constructionism is its pedagogical expression: knowledge is most deeply built when you make something for others to see and use. Remixing is its cultural history: creation has always been recombination, and the mythology of originality has always served gatekeepers more than makers. Pastiche is its ethical stance toward influence: we celebrate what we borrow, we name our sources, we treat the people who shaped our thinking as collaborators rather than quarries.

For neurodivergent and disabled people, this isn’t just a theory of creativity — it’s a survival strategy. We often can’t access the official tools, the credentialed pathways, the institutional resources. So we improvise. We script our communication from fragments. We build our identities from available labels, trying them on and discarding them and combining them. We hack the tools that exist to make them work for minds the tools weren’t designed for. We build the spaces where we belong because those spaces don’t exist until we build them. Bricolage is what we do when the world doesn’t offer what we need. It has always been the disabled and neurodivergent way.

In the tradition of punk and disabled communities, we use bricolage and pastiche to roll our own.

Next in a punk sensibility was its love affair with pastiche. As the true postmoderns they were, punks drew freely from highbrow culture, lowbrow culture, and places in between, picking and choosing as they went, bound by no formal ideology.

In practice, however, punks consciously or unconsciously drew on previous youth cultures, with methodologies and ideologies marked by pastiche and bricolage. In other words, punks borrowed freely from previous youth cultures and dominant society, melding these elements into a new form of expression.

“We Accept You, One of Us?”: Punk Rock, Community, and Individualism in an Uncertain Era, 1974-1985

DIY or Die

Neurodivergent and disabled people have to do it ourselves, or we go without. We bricolage from “a diverse range of things that happen to be available“. This isn’t a creative preference. It’s a structural condition. When the tools don’t fit, when the spaces don’t accommodate, when the systems weren’t designed with us in mind — and they weren’t — we improvise. We hack. We make do. The alternative is going without.

In the arts, bricolage (French for “DIY” or “do-it-yourself projects”) is the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work constructed using mixed media.

The term bricolage has also been used in many other fields, including anthropology, philosophy, critical theory, education, computer software, and business.

Bricolage is a French loanword that means the process of improvisation in a human endeavor. The word is derived from the French verb bricoler (“to tinker”), with the English term DIY (“Do-it-yourself”) being the closest equivalent of the contemporary French usage. In both languages, bricolage also denotes any works or products of DIY endeavors.

Bricolage – Wikipedia

Disability DIY culture has a deep political history that predates punk. In the late 1960s, a group of disabled students at UC Berkeley — known as the Rolling Quads — began hacking and tinkering together to meet needs their institution wouldn’t. They designed ways to live in and out of bed, to empty catheters, to open doorways, without depending on non-disabled helpers. They built a wheelchair repair shop modeled on DIY bicycle repair shops. They ran coding classes. They did accessibility auditing. Eventually they established the Center for Independent Living — borrowing the term from the rehab profession to secure funding, then using it to advance their own political agenda. What feminist disability studies scholar Aimi Hamraie calls crip technoscience: acts of designing, hacking, and tinkering as forms of disability politics against norms and social structures.

To survive in an ableist world as Disabled people, we have long engaged in “making, hacking, and tinkering with existing material arrangements” in order to produce forms of access unavailable or economically inaccessible for us. These design interventions — what Hamraie and Fritsch call the field and practice of crip technoscience — are generated from knowing what works best for us, as well as from the shared expertise developed within Disability communities.

Re-Making Clothing, Re-Making Worlds: On Crip Fashion Hacking

The movement also claimed what they called a crip identity — a reclamation of the word cripple, an anti-assimilationist refusal of rehabilitation’s demand that disabled people become productive citizens. Activists claimed authority as design experts. The Center for Independent Living looked, functionally, like what we would today call a makerspace. It was built on interdependence and mutual aid — the same logic that would animate punk’s house shows and volunteer venues a decade later.

Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s described the early Masque scene: “Everyone was kind of into the whole homemade thing, ’cause … you couldn’t buy real punk clothes like they could in London.”

“We Accept You, One of Us?”: Punk Rock, Community, and Individualism in an Uncertain Era, 1974-1985

Both traditions — disability hacking and punk DIY — arrive at the same place from different directions: when the mainstream won’t make room for you, you build the room yourself. You use what’s available. You share what you’ve made. You treat the constraints as materials. That’s the bricolage ethic. That’s what this site runs on.

Appropriate Space

DIY doesn’t just happen in the mind. It happens in place. Punk built physical infrastructure — houses, volunteer venues, touring networks — when mainstream spaces wouldn’t have them. Neurodivergent and disabled people do the same. The spaces where we belong don’t exist until we build them.

There is, however, a major difference between these other uses of the home for collective music experiences and punk house shows. The people who live in the house and book the shows are enacting a DIY philosophy and politics, as are the bands that play and many of the people in attendance. The home space has in effect been appropriated to shift from a container for standard domestic practices to a pseudo-public place that offers an alternative venue option for many DIY punk bands that are often excluded from more official (or legitimate) live music venues.

Underground: The Subterranean Culture of DIY Punk Shows | Microcosm Publishing

Do you ever feel unsafe?
Do you wanna take up space?

Do you (Take up space)
Wanna? (Take up space)
Do you
Oh, do you wanna?
Ooh, ooh
Ooh, ooh
Sha-la-la-la-la

--Take Up Space by Dream Nails

Identity Bricolage

Bricolage isn’t only a making practice — it’s a selfing practice. Many of us think via bricolage, and many of us form and express identity via bricolage. The materials aren’t just wood and wire and found text; they’re labels, experiences, interests, relationships, and cultural fragments. We try them on, rearrange them, discard some, keep others, and arrive at a self that is genuinely constructed rather than simply discovered.

The appropriation of pre-existing materials that are ready-to-hand to create something new (Lévi-Strauss). This creation both reflects and constructs the bricoleur’s identity. The term is widely used to refer to the intertextual authorial practice of adopting and adapting fragments from other texts and to the ways in which consumers make use of commercial products and/or their advertising for their own purposes, making them their own by giving them new meanings. The American sociologist Sherry Turkle (b.1948) uses the term to refer to the way people use objects to think with.

Bricolage – Oxford Reference

Identity bricolage matters especially for neurodivergent and disabled people, who often find that ready-made identity categories don’t fit, or fit partially, or fit differently at different times. Diagnostic labels can be useful tools — they connect us to community, unlock accommodations, and name experiences that were previously nameless. But they’re tools in the bricolage kit, not the whole story. We arrange them alongside interests, relationships, and embodied knowledge to construct something more specific than any label alone can hold.

Autistic people have a reputation for being rigid, but it’s NT society that enforces strict rules, conventions and traditions. Meanwhile, autistic people are recognising and preaching the fluidity and/or flexibility of things like sexuality, gender, time, love, career and more.

@AutisticCallum_

That logic finds its sharpest expression in autistic and neurodivergent identity-making — which copia names precisely.

Copia Provides a Strategy of Invention

If identity bricolage names the general mechanism — assembling selfhood from available materials — then copia names its autistic expression. Copia is the rhetorical practice of generating proliferating variations from whatever lies at hand, multiplying possibilities rather than selecting from a fixed menu. Applied to identity, it describes how autistic people navigate gender, language, and self-definition not by choosing from binary or continuous options, but by inventing new terms, trying combinations, and building a self that fits from the ground up.

The sources considered here imply not a binary model (masculine=feminine) or even a view of gender as a continuum, but something more like a copia, the rhetorical term Erasmus used to describe the practice of selecting ”certain expressions and mak[ing] as many variations of them as possible” (17). Copia provides a strategy of invention, a rhetorical term for the process of generating ideas. To be specific, copia involves proliferation, multiplying possibilities so as to locate the range of persuasive options available to a rhetor. I find the concept of invention fitting to describe the kind of rhetoric in which many autistic individuals engage when they discuss sex and gender, a rhetoric we might consider, following Mary Hawkesworth, a feminist rhetoric, insofar as it seeks to ”call worlds into being, inscribe new orders of possibility, validate frames of reference and forms of explanation, and reconstitute histories serviceable for present and future projects” (1988).

Individuals who find themselves engaged in this rhetorical search for terms with which to understand themselves can draw on a wide array of terms or representations, such as genderqueer, transgendered, femme, butch, boi, neutrois, androgyne, bi- or tri-gender, third gender, and even geek.

Gender Copia: Feminist Rhetorical Perspectives on an Autistic Concept of Sex/Gender: Women’s Studies in Communication: Vol 35, No 1

Their diversity does support an expanded concept of autistic gender identity that pushes past a gender continuum toward a copia, in which terms can be tried on and appropriated, discarded, and invented while still being understood as embodied and constructed. The previous sections indicate five possible ways that gender functions rhetorically: as disidentification, as a resource for ambiguity, as a social code or symbolic order, as performance, or as idiosyncratic. Importantly, any one individual might draw on and enact any combination of these gendered processes at any one time — they are not mutually exclusive.

No one theory of gender accounts for this range of insights; instead, we might draw from autistic descriptions an understanding of gender as identification, as ambiguity, as a social code, as performance, and as idiosyncrasy. Together, these elements might be understood as copia or congeries — a heaping up of theories, names, and qualities that range far beyond simple binaries or even continuums.

Gender Copia: Feminist Rhetorical Perspectives on an Autistic Concept of Sex/Gender: Women’s Studies in Communication: Vol 35, No 1

Copia resists essentialism — the demand that identity have a fixed, innate core. Florence Ashley’s theory of gender subjectivity makes the building-blocks logic explicit: we arrange experiential materials into identity, and different people arrange similar materials differently. That’s not instability; it’s construction.

While gender subjectivity may narrow the range of inhabitable gender identities, it is always compatible with more than one. To arrive at a gender identity, we arrange gender subjectivity like building materials. My theory helps us understand how different people offer seemingly incompatible accounts of their gender identity without questioning their authenticity or validity. They simply arrange similar building materials differently.

What Is It like to Have a Gender Identity? | Mind | Oxford Academic, Perma | www.florenceashley.com

The gender essentialist mindset, which can admit no gender possibilities other than two allegedly innate and immutable “biological sexes,” is inimical to gender creativity and to the realization of the infinite range of gender possibilities. By the same token, an overly neuroessentialist mindset — a mindset which conceives of human neurodiversity as consisting of little more than an assortment of largely innate and immutable “neurotypes” or “types of brains” — is an obstacle to the realization of the infinite range of neurocognitive possibilities, and to the realization of our full potentials for intentional creative queering of our minds.

Walker, Nick. Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities. Autonomous Press.

→ This is explored in depth on our Gender Copia, Bricolage, and Becoming page, which covers gender subjectivity as building materials, rhizomatic becoming, the neurodiversity smorgasbord, avoiding essentialism, and what it means to feel like yourself rather than a gender.

Scripts, Commonplaces, Canned Monologues

Language is a bricolage. For many autistic people, that’s not a metaphor — it’s mechanics. We build communication from cached fragments: scripts retrieved under pressure, patterns found in books, borrowed grammars that fit our mouths better than spontaneous speech. Typed Words, Loud Voices names this precisely.

Let us abstract together.

I remember how I learned to talk. When I say “learned to talk,” I mean “learned to shut up.” Words fill the air, but filled air does not always = meaning. Hammer, pustule, grey matter in a saucepan, dilatory arrangement. Parents who are not my parents or maybe not anyone’s parents puzzle me with words. As a child, I found patterns: books with cryptographic lines that carried seemingly intrinsic rhythms, synaesthetic soundscapes and eyescrapes and armscrapes, pustules artfully arranged. With my tongue I popped them, word guts everywhere. Talking is like mad libs. I find the pattern. I find the rhythm. I horde parallel sentence structures. What is there to communicate when the tongue gels?

My third grade teacher, a parent who was not my parent, convenes frequent parental conferences, presumably to address the State of My Silence. “But she talks at home,” my parents plead. There are shrinks involved. One has copious amounts of arm hair. The other’s arm hair status, I can’t remember. This puzzles me, but not in an anthropomorphic way. “But she talks at home,” I repeat to myself, as if I’m in situ, but in reality, I’m thinking about arm hair. The shrink’s arm hair is usually parallel, like my favorite paragraphs. I wonder what it would look like at a science museum, should the shrink stick her hands on the floating electricity orb.

Let us abstract together.

Episodic memory needs to be explicitly stated, according to Google, and maybe some academic somewhere. Who knows. But episodic memory is about time and events, and narrating those times and events. And I am impaired, so how to tell my telling when my telling can’t be told? I want to presume my competence, but then I remember my wrist, and its puzzle imprint: Who wants to solve the competency of the competent? When the competent are bored, they claim someone else as their inferiors. Then I think, quite punningly: It is hammer time.

This is a true story.

There are narratives on repeat. Sometimes they emerge from fingers. Sometimes they emerge from eyes that divert or bodies that rock and wrench. Sometimes they escape the mouth. Performance acts, much like actions perform.

Typed Words, Loud Voices: A Collection – Autonomous Press

Filling Our Databases With Serendipity

Bricolage requires material. The richer and stranger your inputs, the more interesting your combinations. We deliberately cultivate serendipity — feeds, streams, and archives that surface unexpected connections across the databases we’re always quietly filling. The created serendipity of streams offers bricolage thinkers a bounty to feed our databases.

It runs on software, the hacker ethos, and soft networks that wire up the planet in ever-richer, non-exclusive, non-zero-sum ways. Its structure is based on streams like Twitter: open, non-hierarchical flows of real-time information from multiple overlapping networks. In this order of things, everything from banal household gadgets to space probes becomes part of a frontier for ceaseless innovation through bricolage. It is a computer designed for rapid, disorderly and serendipitous evolution, within which innovation, far from being a bug, is the primary feature.

A Tale of Two Computers

Anti-libraries and Knowledge

Our research process is bricolage too. We read widely, skim strategically, and collect far more than we consume — building what Nassim Taleb calls an anti-library: a living index of what we don’t yet know. The unread books are the point.

We read and strategically skim lots of books and research. A lot can be learned from the introduction and opening chapters of a book, so we habitually download, search, and read samples from eBook stores. Highlights and notes from all this reading go into DEVONthink and Ulysses and ReadWise and Raindrop.io.

PDFs, ebooks, and web archives also go in DEVONthink and Raindrop, where we tag everything. DEVONthink’s AI augmented search helps us find connections among sources, including ones we haven’t read yet.

All of the partially read and unread text we collect and curate form an anti-library, one that has been useful in our writing and research on neurodiversity, disability, tech ethics, and education.

Ulysses and DEVONthink are our zettelkasten, anti-library, research database, cognitive net, and thinking space. No, we haven’t read everything that they and our bookshelves hold, but we’re constantly discovering, rediscovering, and connecting ideas while creating the conditions for serendipity.

Someone walks into your house and sees your many books on your many bookshelves. Have you really read all these? they ask. This person does not understand knowledge. A good library is comprised in large part by books you haven’t read, making it something you can turn to when you don’t know something. He calls it: the Anti-Library.

I remember once in college, the pride I felt about being able to write an entire research paper with stuff from my own anti-library. We all have books and papers that we haven’t read yet. Instead of feeling guilty, you should see them as an opportunity: know they’re available to you if you ever need them.

This is the mark you must aim for as a researcher, to not only have enough material – and to know where the rest of what you haven’t read will be located – on hand to do your work. You must build a library and an anti-library now… before you have an emergency presentation or a shot at a popular guest post.

The 5-Step Research Method I Used For Tim Ferriss, Robert Greene, and Tucker Max

Some questions are only asked by people with a fundamental misunderstanding. The friends who walk into my office and ask, “have you read all of these” miss the point of books.

In his book, The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb describes our relationship between books and knowledge using the legendary Italian writer Umberto Eco (1932-2016).

The writer Umberro Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read?” and the others—a very small minority—who get the point is that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Taleb adds:

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head.

A good library is filled with mostly unread books. That’s the point. Our relationship with the unknown causes the very problem Taleb is famous for contextualizing: the black swan. Because we underestimate the value of what we don’t know and overvalue what we do know, we fundamentally misunderstand the likelihood of surprises.

The antidote to this overconfidence boils down to our relationship with knowledge. The anti-scholar, as Taleb refers to it, is “someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device — a skeptical empiricist.”

My library serves as a visual reminder of what I don’t know.

The Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are The Most Important

Everything Is a Remix

The remix impulse has deep roots in the history of constructionist education. In 1971, Cynthia Solomon and Seymour Papert published Twenty Things to Do With a Computer — a 29-page paper out of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that predicted one-to-one personal computing, the maker movement, computational thinking, children programming computers, robotics kits, and computer science for all. Decades before any of it became commonplace. The final item on their list was characteristically recursive: think of twenty more things to do with a computer.

Twenty Things to Do with a Computer Forward 50, edited by Gary Stager and published in 2021 on the paper’s fiftieth anniversary, gathers four dozen educators, scholars, and technologists to reflect on that legacy and extend it. It is itself an act of bricolage and remix — standing on the shoulders of a seminal document, recombining its ideas for a new generation. Stager describes the original paper as a fractal: at every level of magnification, you see what education can be.

Everything is a Remix is a video essay series by filmmaker and educator Kirby Ferguson, first released in 2010 and later remastered. It has been seen millions of times and become a standard text in media literacy education worldwide. Ferguson’s central argument is compact: creativity is not conjured from nothing — it is built from copying, transforming, and combining. He traces this through music (Led Zeppelin lifting from blues recordings, Bob Dylan borrowing two-thirds of his early melodies from folk tradition), film, and technology (the Mac emerging from the collision of the graphical interface and the idea of the computer as household appliance). The series argues that our legal and cultural mythology of originality misunderstands how creativity actually works — and that embracing remix as a framework makes us better makers and more honest about what we owe to those who came before.

From our libraries and anti-libraries, we remix.

Scenius: The Ecology of Remix

Remix doesn’t happen in isolation. Every remixer is embedded in a scene — a community of people who are looking at each other’s work, sharing ideas, stealing productively, and building a shared vocabulary of forms. Musician Brian Eno coined the word scenius to name this: the communal form of genius, creativity as ecology rather than as individual spark. The punk scenes documented throughout this page were sceniuses. So is the open web. So is the neurodiversity community.

There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals; it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.

What I love about the idea of scenius is that it makes room in the story of creativity for the rest of us: the people who don’t consider ourselves geniuses. Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start. If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us. We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.

Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon

If scenius is indeed much more productive and creative than individual genius, then you ought spend more of your time cultivating it – finding interesting people who might fit together in unexpected ways and figuring out how to connect them and build spaces where they can do their own stuff.

The Aaron Swartz production function – by Henry Farrell

This is what Stimpunks is: a scenius in the making. We build in public, share what we find, link to the people who shaped our thinking, and try to cultivate the conditions for others to do the same. The bricolage on this page isn’t solo work — it’s the trace of a community of minds.

Pastiche: Celebrating Our Influences

Stimpunks.org is pastiche. We celebrate the work of the many authors and artists we incorporate into our storytelling. We encourage our learners to build and iterate via bricolage, pastiche, and celebration of their influences.

A pastiche is a work of visual art, literature, theatre, music, or architecture that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Unlike parody, pastiche celebrates the work it imitates, rather than mocking it.

The word pastiche is a French cognate of the Italian noun pasticcio, which is a pâté or pie-filling mixed from diverse ingredients. Metaphorically, pastiche and pasticcio describe works that are either composed by several authors, or that incorporate stylistic elements of other artists’ work. Pastiche is an example of eclecticism in art.

Pastiche – Wikipedia

…punks viewed the pedestrian actions of everyday life as potential expressions of art and ideology.

The vast majority of the time, however, female punks took a pastiche approach, drawing inspiration from many areas of popular culture. According to journalist Kristine McKenna, “punks rejected the Academy and drew instead from ‘low’ sources: graffiti, underground comics, advertising, car culture, the tarot, blaxpoitation, bondage and pornography, surf culture, fifties industrial films, Mad magazine, and the universe of American detritus that winds up in thrift stores. It all got tossed in the blender.” As this quote suggests, there was no single, agreed-upon guise in early punk. Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s described the early Masque scene: “Everyone was kind of into the whole homemade thing, ’cause … you couldn’t buy real punk clothes like they could in London.”

“We Accept You, One of Us?”: Punk Rock, Community, and Individualism in an Uncertain Era, 1974-1985

Adapt, Subvert, and Extend

Subcultural theorists gave bricolage its sharpest political edge. Dick Hebdige’s analysis of punk style shows how borrowed objects — safety pins, bondage gear, the Union Jack — get radically recontextualized into new meanings. This is what Stimpunks does with neuroscience, clinical language, and educational theory: we adapt, subvert, and extend.

The implications of the structured improvisations of bricolage for a theory of spectacular subculture as a system of communication have already been explored. For instance, John Clarke has stressed the way in which prominent forms of discourse (particularly fashion) are radically adapted, subverted and extended by the subcultural bricoleur: Together, object and meaning constitute a sign, and, within any one culture, such signs are assembled, repeatedly, into characteristic forms of discourse. However, when the bricoleur re-locates the significant object in a different position within that discourse, using the same overall repertoire of signs, or when that object is placed within a different total ensemble, a new discourse is constituted, a different message conveyed. (Clarke, 1976)

At the risk of sounding melodramatic, we could use Umberto Eco’s phrase ‘semiotic guerilla warfare’ (Eco, 1972) to describe these subversive practices. The war may be conducted at a level beneath the consciousness of the individual members of a spectacular subculture (though the subculture is still, at another level, an intentional communication (see pp. 100–2)) but with the emergence of such a group, ‘war–and it is Surrealism’s war–is declared on a world of surfaces’ (Annette Michelson, quoted Lippard, 1970).

In The Crisis of the Object, Breton further theorized this ‘collage aesthetic’, arguing rather optimistically that an assault on the syntax of everyday life which dictates the ways in which the most mundane objects are used, would instigate … a total revolution of the object: acting to divert the object from its ends by coupling it to a new name and signing it…. Perturbation and deformation are in demand here for their own sakes…. Objects thus reassembled have in common the fact that they derive from and yet succeed in differing from the objects which surround us, by simple change of role. (Breton, 1936) Max Ernst (1948) puts the same point more cryptically: ‘He who says collage says the irrational’. Obviously, these practices have their corollary in bricolage. The subcultural bricoleur, like the ‘author’ of a surrealist collage, typically ‘juxtaposes two apparently incompatible realities (i.e. “flag”: “jacket”; “hole”: “teeshirt”; “comb: weapon”) on an apparently unsuitable scale … and … it is there that the explosive junction occurs‘ (Ernst, 1948). Punk exemplifies most clearly the subcultural uses of these anarchic modes. It too attempted through ‘perturbation and deformation’ to disrupt and reorganize meaning. It, too, sought the ‘explosive junction’. But what, if anything, were these subversive practices being used to signify? How do we ‘read’ them? By singling out punk for special attention, we can look more closely at some of the problems raised in a reading of style.

In Resistance Through Rituals, Hall et al. crossed the concepts of homology and bricolage to provide a systematic explanation of why a particular subcultural style should appeal to a particular group of people. The authors asked the question: ‘What specifically does a subcultural style signify to the members of the subculture themselves?’ The answer was that the appropriated objects reassembled in the distinctive subcultural ensembles were ‘made to reflect, express and resonate … aspects of group life’ (Hall et al., 1976b). The objects chosen were, either intrinsically or in their adapted forms, homologous with the focal concerns, activities, group structure and collective self-image of the subculture. They were ‘objects in which (the subcultural members) could see their central values held and reflected’ (Hall et al., 1976b).

…self-consciously subversive bricolage…

Subculture: The Meaning of Style

Bricolage Fuels Constructionism

All of this — the DIY ethic, the remixing, the anti-library — is in service of making. Bricolage feeds constructionism: the learning theory rooted in building artifacts that represent your knowledge. Seymour Papert’s insight was that people don’t just learn by doing — they learn by making things for others to see and use. This site is that kind of artifact.

Imagine an educational technology ecosystem in which children build their own computer with something like the Raspberry Pi, create a server out of another, automate classroom or home appliances, program videogames on their personal computer, post programs online for others to download to their handheld gaming systems or remix, control robots they invent, 3D print toys, make films including musical scores they compose, share experimental data with scientists, sell their poetry anthology, and oh yeah, do some schoolwork too. One of the biggest ideas of Twenty Things is that we can do so much (more) with just a few good constructive materials.

For fifty years, those of us on the Solomon/Papert team have been dismissed as reckless utopians for advocating the outrageous notion that every student should own a personal laptop. Providing something of value to “other people’s children” is particularly controversial with affluent parents whose own kids have multiple phones, tablets, and smartphones. Providing reasonable access had been a long hard slog until 2020. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck and schools were forced to move online, laptops magically rained down from the sky into the waiting arms of students. Imagine how much better and less instructionist “Zoom School” might have been if the educational leaders who miraculously found sufficient funds to purchase computers during a crisis had an educational philosophy ready to support their use? Any coherent vision and accompanying pedagogical strategy would have been welcome.

Twenty Things to Do with a Computer Forward 50: Future Visions of Education Inspired by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon’s Seminal Work

For me, constructionism lies at the heart of what I want to study—how do students construct music knowledge in a school makerspace? My hypothesis is if students make music artifacts in a makerspace, they will construct music knowledge. At this proposal stage of my dissertation, prior to any research, I am using a constructivist/constructionist definition of music knowledge: meaning derived from an experience with aural phenomena (Shively, 1995). A music artifact would be a representation of this constructed music knowledge through performance, creation, or description (Shively, 1995; Wiggins, 2015).

Constructionism is being practiced anywhere where people are making artifacts to represent their knowledge constructions.

On Constructionism, Makerspaces, and Music Education

That Could Be Me: Inspiring Constructionism

Constructionism doesn’t only spread through curricula and classrooms. It spreads through the “that could be me” moment — the live transmission that happens when you encounter someone making something and realize, with a jolt, that the distance between them and you is smaller than you thought. Seymour Papert built the theory. But it was punk that demonstrated the mechanism at scale: put a band on a stage with no pretensions of professionalism, and you don’t just entertain the audience — you recruit the next generation of makers. The Sex Pistols inspired X-Ray Spex. X-Ray Spex inspired Riot Grrrl. The chain runs forward. Each act of making in public creates the conditions for someone else to start.

Pretty much immediately Poly Styrene and X-Ray Spex’s influence was felt. Just like seeing the Sex Pistols had convinced Styrene that getting onstage without much musical grounding was possible, a generation of punk and new wave women saw X-Ray Spex and thought “That could be me.” Her left of centre look also helped in that, not being the traditional male fantasy of many other women that had appeared on Top of the Pops. “The idea that just anyone could (start a band) was really big to me. That people in your neighbourhood could start a cassette label or a record label, that you could see people who were making records walking down the street. And they didn’t necessarily have to be in a glossy magazine, and they didn’t have to weigh 90 pounds and have blonde hair down to their ankles or whatever was the fashion of the day.”

Before Riot Grrrl: X-Ray Spex & “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” | New British Canon – YouTube

I can fix my bike up (Do it yourself)
I can grow a salad (Do it yourself)
I can start a punk band (Do it yourself)
Do it, Do it, Do it, Do it, Do it yourself
I can make peanut butter (Do it yourself)
I can walk myself home (Do it yourself)
I can make the rain come (Do it yourself)
Do it, Do it, Do it, Do it, Do it yourself

Do it do it yeah x3

I can make the first move (Do it yourself)
I can fight my own corner (Do it yourself)
I can put it back together (Do it yourself)
Do it, Do it, Do it, Do it, Do it yourself
I can put shelves up (Do it yourself)
I can give a hair cut (Do it yourself)
I can heal a broken heart (Do it yourself)
Do it, Do it, Do it, Do it, Do it yourself

Do it do it yeah x6

You are good enough (Do it yourself)
You are strong enough (Do it yourself)
You are smart enough (Do it, Do it, Do it, Do it, Do it yourself)  x3

You are good enough (Do it, do it, do it)
You are strong enough (Do it, do it, do it)
You are smart enough (Do it, do it, do it)  x2

Do it yourself

Re-create and Rewrite Ideas

Bricolage isn’t copying. It’s reinvention under constraint. Freire said it plainly: you can’t export pedagogy — you can only re-create it. We take that seriously. Everything we’ve learned from Papert, Freire, and the punk tradition gets rewritten through our own context, our own community, our own situation.

In the face of market notion of school reform in the United States, many liberal and neoliberal educators have rediscovered Freire’s ideas as an alternative to the conservative domestication of education that equates freemarket ideology with democracy. However, part of the problem with some of these pseudocritical educators is that in the name of liberation pedagogy, they reduce Freire’s leading ideas to a method. According to Stanley Aronowitz, the North American fetish for method has allowed Freire’s philosophical ideas to be “assimilated to the prevailing obsession of North American education, following a tendency in all human and social sciences, with methods—of verifying knowledge and, in schools, of teaching that is, transmitting knowledge to otherwise unprepared students.”

This fetish for method works insidiously against the ability to adhere to Freire’s own pronouncement against importing and exporting methodology. In a long conversation Paulo had with Donaldo Macedo about this issue, he said: “Donaldo, I don’t want to be imported or exported. It is impossible to export pedagogical practices without reinventing them. Please tell your fellow American educators not to import me. Ask them to re-create and rewrite my ideas.“

Teachers As Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach

Bricolage is a Living Thing

Everything on this page — the DIY ethic, the appropriate spaces, the scripted language, the anti-libraries, the remixes, the sceniuses, the pastiche, the subverted signs, the invented identities, the constructionist artifacts, the pedagogies that had to be reinvented to travel — all of it describes one underlying motion: taking what’s available, recombining it under pressure, and making something that works. Something that didn’t exist before. Something that reflects who you are and what you need, built from whatever was at hand.

Bricolage doesn’t complete. It doesn’t arrive at a finished state and rest. It’s a practice, not a product — a way of moving through the world that stays responsive to what the world offers and withholds. What punk understood, and what disabled and neurodivergent people have always known, is that nothing is sacred and fixed. Every tool can be repurposed. Every sign can be relocated. Every constraint is also a material.

Oh bondage, up yours
Oh bondage, no more
Oh bondage, up yours
Oh bondage, no more

That’s the punk move, and it’s the neurodivergent move: bring the hidden to the front. The scripts we use to navigate conversation. The stims that regulate us. The identities that don’t fit the available categories. The knowledge built outside institutions. The tools modified to fit bodies and minds the original designers didn’t consider. All of it — forward. Visible. Legitimate. Ours.

Bricolage is a living thing too. It doesn’t belong to any one tradition or discipline or community — it moves through punk, through disability culture, through constructionist education, through autistic identity-making, through the open web, through every scene of people who looked at what was available and decided to make something from it anyway. It turns problems into assets. Constraints into materials. Exclusion into invention.

This website is our bricolage. It’s made from whatever was at hand: research we found, language we borrowed and adapted, tools that weren’t designed for us but that we made work anyway, ideas from people whose work we love and want to celebrate. It will keep changing. It isn’t finished. That’s the point.

Main Takeaways

DIY or Die

• Bricolage: construction (as of a sculpture or a structure of ideas) achieved by using whatever comes to hand.
• Bricolage is a French loanword that means the process of improvisation in a human endeavor.
• Neurodivergent and disabled people have to do it ourselves, or we go without.
• People with disabilities are the original life hackers because our motivation is so high. If we don’t hack we often go without.
• To survive in an ableist world as Disabled people, we have long engaged in “making, hacking, and tinkering with existing material arrangements” in order to produce forms of access unavailable or economically inaccessible for us.
• The most important message I got from punk was the DIY ethos. The DIY ethic. It’s inherently part of surviving.
• Both disability hacking and punk DIY arrive at the same place: when the mainstream won’t make room for you, you build the room yourself.

Appropriate Space

• The spaces where we belong do not exist. We build them with radical love and revolutionary liberation.
• The creation of house spaces, volunteer-run spaces, and other punk-specific locations truly materialize DIY in powerful ways that also model what it means and feels like to do DIY together.
• The people who live in the house and book the shows are enacting a DIY philosophy and politics, as are the bands that play and many of the people in attendance.

Identity Bricolage & Copia

• This creation both reflects and constructs the bricoleur’s identity.
• “My whole life has been a process of finding labels that fit.”
• Copia provides a strategy of invention, a rhetorical term for the process of generating ideas. Copia involves proliferation, multiplying possibilities.
• To arrive at a gender identity, we arrange gender subjectivity like building materials. Different people arrange similar building materials differently.
• An overly neuroessentialist mindset is an obstacle to the realization of the infinite range of neurocognitive possibilities.

Scripts, Serendipity & Anti-libraries

• My life, my speech, is a database of words: Scripts, commonplaces, canned monologues.
• The created serendipity of streams offers bricolage thinkers a bounty to feed our databases.
• Everything from banal household gadgets to space probes becomes part of a frontier for ceaseless innovation through bricolage.
• A good library is filled with mostly unread books. That’s the point.
• The more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
• My library serves as a visual reminder of what I don’t know.

Everything Is a Remix & Scenius

• Everything is a remix. Creation requires influence. Everything we make is a remix of existing creations, our lives, and the lives of others.
• Remixing is key to progress.
• The work of Papert and Solomon is like a fractal. At every level of magnification, you get a glimpse of all we can be.
• Scenius stands for the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.
• Good work isn’t created in a vacuum. Creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.
• Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.

Pastiche, Subversion & Adapt

• Unlike parody, pastiche celebrates the work it imitates, rather than mocking it.
• Punks drew freely from highbrow culture, lowbrow culture, and places in between, picking and choosing as they went, bound by no formal ideology. It all got tossed in the blender.
• These magical systems of connection are capable of infinite extension because basic elements can be used in a variety of improvised combinations to generate new meanings within them.
• Prominent forms of discourse are radically adapted, subverted and extended by the subcultural bricoleur.

Bricolage Fuels Constructionism

• The central tenet of Constructionist theory is that people build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world.
• Constructionism is being practiced anywhere where people are making artifacts to represent their knowledge constructions.
• Instead of creating a competitive environment, we try to promote a culture of cooperation in which students are happy to see their ideas being appreciated and remixed by others.
• Each act of making in public creates the conditions for someone else to start.
• It is impossible to export pedagogical practices without reinventing them. Re-create and rewrite ideas.

Bricolage is a Living Thing

• Everything that was normally supposed to be hidden was brought to the front.
• The forbidden is permitted, but nothing, not even these forbidden signifiers, is sacred and fixed.
• Punk rock is a living thing. It’s about turning problems into assets.
• Every tool can be repurposed. Every sign can be relocated. Every constraint is also a material.
• Bricolage is what we do when the world doesn’t offer what we need. It has always been the disabled and neurodivergent way.