
According to French social anthropologist Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss, the artist “shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human life.” LĂ©vi-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 bricolageIn 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... More, 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: construction (as of a sculpture or a structure of ideas) achieved by using whatever comes to hand
Bricolage Definition & Meaning – Merriam-Webster
What do you get when monotropicMonotropism is a theory of autism developed by autistic people, initially by Dinah Murray and Wenn Lawson.Monotropic minds tend to have their attention pulled more strongly towards a smaller number of interests at... More bricolage thinkers write about monotropism
Monotropism is a theory of autism developed by autistic people, initially by Dinah Murray and Wenn Lawson.Monotropic minds tend to have their attention pulled more strongly towards a smaller number of interests at... More and neurodiversity
Neurodiversity is the diversity of human minds, the infinite variation in neurocognitive functioning within our species.NEURODIVERSITY: SOME BASIC TERMS & DEFINITIONS Neurodiversity is a biological fact. Itâs not a perspective, an approach, a... More using the bricolage-friendly tools of the open web? This website.
In the tradition of punk and disabledThe label "disabled" means so much to me. It means I have community. It means I have rights. It means I can be proud. It means I can affirm myself... More 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.
âWe Accept You, One of Us?â: Punk Rock, Community, and Individualism in an Uncertain Era, 1974-1985
- DIY or Die
- Identity Bricolage
- Scripts, Commonplaces, Canned Monologues
- Filling Our Databases With Serendipity
- Pastiche: Celebrating Our Influences
- Anti-libraries and Knowledge
- Everything Is a Remix
- Bricolage Fuels Constructionism
- That Could Be Me: Inspiring Constructionism
- Re-create and Rewrite Ideas
- Appropriate Space
- Adapt, Subvert, and Extend
- Copia Provides a Strategy of Invention
- Bricolage is a Living Thing
DIY or Die
NeurodivergentNeurodivergent, sometimes abbreviated as ND, means having a mind that functions in ways which diverge significantly from the dominant societal standards of ânormal.âNEURODIVERSITY: SOME BASIC TERMS & DEFINITIONS Neurodivergent is quite... More 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“.
People with disabilities are the original life hackers because our motivation is so high. If we donât hack we often go without.
Liz Jackson: Designing for Inclusivity â 99U
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 DIYIn 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... More (“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
The most important message I got from punk, was the DIY ethos. The DIY ethic. Itâs inherently part of surviving.
Don Letts, SHOWstudio: Stussy – Talking Punk with Don Letts and John Ingham
Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Goâs described the early Masque scene: âEveryone was kind of into the whole homemade thing, âcause ⊠you couldnât buy real punk clothes like they could in London.â
âWe Accept You, One of Us?â: Punk Rock, Community, and Individualism in an Uncertain Era, 1974-1985
Identity Bricolage
Many of us think via bricolage and form and express identity via bricolage.
The appropriation of pre-existing materials that are ready-to-hand to create something new (LĂ©vi-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. See also juxtaposition; recontextualization; compare counterbricolage.
Bricolage – Oxford Reference
Scripts, Commonplaces, Canned Monologues
Like many autisticAutistic ways of being are human neurological variants that can not be understood without the social model of disability.If you are wondering whether you are Autistic, spend time amongst Autistic people, online and offline. If... More people, we script and can.
I often think of my life, of my speech, as a database of words: Scripts, commonplaces, canned monologues that I recall, sometimes at will, sometimes by force. I am invoking the network not to stereotype me or my kind as computers, but to invoke the database as ordered fuckery. I mean that much of my spoken words are preceded. I mean that they are borrowed grammars, the rote and ritual that are both prized and demonized by shrinks and third grade teachers. I long for the parallel: the rhythm of the fingers against keys, the thoughts forged outside the grip of the other, tempoed lines that never meet.
Let us abstract together.
Talk and type as you will. Will the words. Hammer the rest.
Typed Words, Loud Voices: A Collection – Autonomous Press
Let us abstract together.
I remember how I learned to talk. When I say âlearned to talk,â I mean âlearned to shut up.â 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 anyoneâs 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. âBut she talks at home,â my parents plead. There are shrinks involved. One has copious amounts of arm hair. The otherâs arm hair status, I canât remember. This puzzles me, but not in an anthropomorphic way. âBut she talks at home,â I repeat to myself, as if Iâm in situ, but in reality, Iâm thinking about arm hair. The shrinkâs 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 canât 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
The created serendipitycreated serendipity: the more connected you are, the more ideas seem to find you, not the other way around.3 Obvious Ways Twitter Promotes Literacy â The Principal of Change Yet... More 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
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 pĂątĂ© 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
âŠpunks 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, âpunks rejected the Academy and drew instead from âlowâ 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.â As this quote suggests, there was no single, agreed-upon guise in early punk. Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Goâs described the early Masque scene: âEveryone was kind of into the whole homemade thing, âcause ⊠you couldnât buy real punk clothes like they could in London.â
âWe Accept You, One of Us?â: Punk Rock, Community, and Individualism in an Uncertain Era, 1974-1985
In punk and metal tradition, Stimpunk Diego made their own battle vest in celebration of their influences.




Anti-libraries and Knowledge
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. DEVONthinkâs AI augmented search helps us find connections among sources, including ones we havenât 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 havenât 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 materialâ-âand to know where the rest of what you haven’t read will be locatedâ-âon 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, âhave you read all of theseâ 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 âWow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read?â and the othersâa very small minorityâwho 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 Ecoâs library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People donât walk around with anti-rĂ©sumĂ©s telling you what they have not studied or experienced (itâs 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. Thatâs 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 donât 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 âsomeone 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 â a skeptical empiricist.â
My library serves as a visual reminder of what I donât know.
The Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are The Most Important
Everything Is a Remix
Remixing is key to progress.
Twenty Things to Do with a Computer Forward 50: Future Visions of Education Inspired by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomonâs Seminal Work
Creation requires influence. Everything we make is a remix of existing creations, our lives, and the lives of others.
Everything is a Remix Remastered (2015 HD) – YouTube
From our libraries and anti-libraries, we remix.
Remixing is key to progress, and good user interfaces encourage remixing, especially by newcomers who might have fabulous ideas.
And there is a diverse and growing community of users whose projects are available for remixing (as in Scratch and Snap!).
Kids all over the world are sharing projects and remixing and extending them.
Plus, by observing how organizers design and facilitate the experience, we discover interesting activity prompts, design principles, and facilitation strategies that we can remix and apply with our students.
Even when students engage in individual projects, they can learn from each other by sharing their work. For example, we often encourage students to have a look at what others are working on to get ideas and inspiration. Children and teachers are often surprised because this is usually forbidden in schools. 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.
The social aspect of musical performance also parallels the perspective that computing is both collaborative and creative (Brennan & Resnick, 2012). An analog can be built between the way programmers work together, building communities around sharing and remixing code, and the way in which musicians build communities of interest through performance, sharing, and debating best practices. Programmers review code and musicians critique performances. Both musicians and programmers modify, improvise, and derive inspiration from the work of peers and mentors.
Twenty Things to Do with a Computer Forward 50: Future Visions of Education Inspired by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomonâs Seminal Work
Bricolage Fuels Constructionism
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 âother peopleâs childrenâ 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 âZoom Schoolâ 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 Solomonâs Seminal Work
The central tenet of his Constructionist theory of learning is that people build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world. As early as 1968, Papert introduced the idea that computer programming and debugging can provide children a way to think about their own thinking and learn about their own learning.
PROFESSOR EMERITUS SEYMOUR PAPERT, PIONEER OF CONSTRUCTIONIST LEARNING, DIES AT 88
In many schools today, the phrase “computer-aided instruction” means making the computer teach the child. One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas
For me, constructionismWe have to break away from that, accept the fact that we have to give every child--not just one maybe, maybe several, but at least one--personal computer to be his... More lies at the heart of what I want to studyâhow 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
For her 19th Birthday, she took a chance on seeing a London band with a provocative name.
That band was the Sex Pistols.
At the time, The Pistols were merely support for obscure Welsh metal outfit Budgie, they were mostly playing ramshackle rockânâroll covers and there was barely anyone there.
They were just a bunch of kids playing music with no pretensions of professionalism.
But that was key: Like many others after first seeing the Sex Pistols, Elliot was hooked and realised that she could do this too. “That’s why I formed X-Ray Spex.â
Before Riot Grrrl: X-Ray Spex & “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” | New British Canon – YouTube
Pretty much immediately Poly Styrene and X-Ray Spexâs 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 âThat could be me.â 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. âThe 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 didnât necessarily have to be in a glossy magazine, and they didnât have to weigh 90 pounds and have blonde hair down to their ankles or whatever was the fashion of the day.â
Before Riot Grrrl: X-Ray Spex & “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” | New British Canon – YouTube
I would argue that the ability young women and girls now have to embrace the DIY approach to music would not be as prevalent as it is now had Riot Grrrl not busted down the door back in the 90s.
The 90s DIY feminist art punk scene in the Pacific Northwest gave us Kurt Cobain, Ian MacKaye, and Sleater Kinney. And the list of bands in the Riot Grrrl legacy goes on.
Riot Grrrl: The Story of Feminist DIY Punk
Re-create and Rewrite Ideas
In the face of market notion of school reform in the United States, many liberal and neoliberal educators have rediscovered Freireâs 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 Freireâs leading ideas to a method. According to Stanley Aronowitz, the North American fetish for method has allowed Freireâs philosophical ideas to be âassimilated to the prevailing obsession of North American education, following a tendency in all human and social sciences, with methodsâof verifying knowledge and, in schools, of teaching that is, transmitting knowledge to otherwise unprepared students.â
This fetish for method works insidiously against the ability to adhere to Freireâs own pronouncement against importing and exporting methodology. In a long conversation Paulo had with Donaldo Macedo about this issue, he said: âDonaldo, I donât 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.â
Teachers As Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach
Appropriate Space
Two of the most important developments that began in the 1990s, and continue to thrive today, are the staging of house shows and the establishment of volunteer-run community spaces. Both materialize DIY in important ways, but each has a unique historical trajectory.
In the face of such struggles, 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 emergence of the house as a DIY venue explicitly and implicitly challenges conceptions of the home as cut off from public life. Houses are transformed from somewhat isolated private spheres to pseudo-public spaces when punks decide to host shows in their homes. House show spaces are now standard locations for punk shows and are considered important options for DIY punk bands touring the U.S.; however, this contemporary awareness among punks that houses can function as venues did not develop uniformly. The contemporary DIY touring network is very much a product of efforts made in the 1980s but shifted and changed throughout the 1990s because of some limitations with the more common spaces used for shows during the â80s. Punk bands have played at houses since the music began.
Underground: The Subterranean Culture of DIY Punk Shows | Microcosm Publishing
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
Adapt, Subvert, and Extend
Discoveries made in the field of anthropology are helpful here. In particular, the concept of bricolage can be used to explain how subcultural styles are constructed.
These magical systems of connection have a common feature: they are capable of infinite extension because basic elements can be used in a variety of improvised combinations to generate new meanings within them. Bricolage has thus been described as a âscience of the concreteâ in a recent definition which clarifies the original anthropological meaning of the term Bricolage refers to the means by which the non-literate, non-technical mind of so-called âprimitiveâ man responds to the world around him. The process involves a âscience of the concreteâ (as opposed to our âcivilisedâ science of the âabstractâ) which far from lacking logic, in fact carefully and precisely orders, classifies and arranges into structures the minutiae of the physical world in all their profusion by means of a âlogicâ which is not our own. The structures, âimprovisedâ or made up (these are rough translations of the process of bricoler) as ad hoc responses to an environment, then serve to establish homologies and analogies between the ordering of nature and that of society, and so satisfactorily âexplainâ the world and make it able to be lived in. (Hawkes, 1977)).
Subculture: The Meaning of Style
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 Ecoâs phrase âsemiotic guerilla warfareâ (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. 100â2)) but with the emergence of such a group, âwarâand it is Surrealismâs warâis declared on a world of surfacesâ (Annette Michelson, quoted Lippard, 1970).
In The Crisis of the Object, Breton further theorized this âcollage aestheticâ, 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 itâŠ. Perturbation and deformation are in demand here for their own sakesâŠ. 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: âHe who says collage says the irrationalâ. Obviously, these practices have their corollary in bricolage. The subcultural bricoleur, like the âauthorâ of a surrealist collage, typically âjuxtaposes two apparently incompatible realities (i.e. âflagâ: âjacketâ; âholeâ: âteeshirtâ; âcomb: weaponâ) on an apparently unsuitable scale ⊠and ⊠it is there that the explosive junction occursâ (Ernst, 1948). Punk exemplifies most clearly the subcultural uses of these anarchic modes. It too attempted through âperturbation and deformationâ to disrupt and reorganize meaning. It, too, sought the âexplosive junctionâ. But what, if anything, were these subversive practices being used to signify? How do we âreadâ 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: âWhat specifically does a subcultural style signify to the members of the subculture themselves?â The answer was that the appropriated objects reassembled in the distinctive subcultural ensembles were âmade to reflect, express and resonate ⊠aspects of group lifeâ (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 âobjects in which (the subcultural members) could see their central values held and reflectedâ (Hall et al., 1976b).
…self-consciously subversive bricolage…
Subculture: The Meaning of Style
Copia Provides a Strategy of Invention
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 ââcertain expressions and mak[ing] as many variations of them as possibleââ (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 ââcall worlds into being, inscribe new orders of possibility, validate frames of reference and forms of explanation, and reconstitute histories serviceable for present and future projectsââ (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
Bricolage is a Living Thing
Oh bondage, up yours Oh bondage, no more Oh bondage, up yours Oh bondage, no more
The punks wore clothes which were the sartorial equivalent of swear words, and they swore as they dressedâwith calculated effect, lacing obscenities into record notes and publicity releases, interviews and love songs. Clothed in chaos, they produced Noise in the calmly orchestrated Crisis of everyday life in the late 1970sâa noise which made (no) sense in exactly the same way and to exactly the same extent as a piece of avant-garde music. If we were to write an epitaph for the punk subculture, we could do no better than repeat Poly Styreneâs famous dictum: âOh Bondage, Up Yours!â, or somewhat more concisely: the forbidden is permitted, but by the same token, nothing, not even these forbidden signifiers (bondage, safety pins, chains, hair-dye, etc.) is sacred and fixed.
Subculture: The Meaning of Style
Everything that was normally supposed to be hidden was brought to the front.
PUNK SUBCULTURE â WIKIPEDIA
Punk rock is a living thing.
Itâs about turning problems into assets.
Don Letts, Rebel Dread