
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 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 Definition & Meaning – Merriam-Webster
bricolage: construction (as of a sculpture or a structure of ideas) achieved by using whatever comes to hand
What do you get when monotropic bricolage thinkers write about monotropismMonotropism 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. It’s not a perspective, an approach, a… More using the bricolage-friendly tools of the open web
In essence, the open Web, while not free from governmental and commercial pressures, is about as free from such pressures as a major component of modern capitalist society can be…. More? This website.
In the tradition of punkEverything that was normally supposed to be hidden was brought to the front.Punk subculture – Wikipedia The First Rule of Punk: Be Yourself Our Second Rule of Punk: Reframe The… More 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
What I have always been hoping to accomplish is the creation of community.Community is magic. Community is power. Community is resistance.Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century https://www.amazon.com/Disability-Visibility-First-Person-Stories-Twenty-First-ebook/dp/B082ZQBL98/ https://www.amazon.com/Disability-Visibility-Adapted-Young-Adults-ebook/dp/B08VFT4R9T/… More, 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
- 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
- Main Takeaways
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 “normal.”NEURODIVERSITY: 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 don’t hack we often go without.
Liz Jackson: Designing for Inclusivity – 99U
In the arts
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly,… More, 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
The most important message I got from punk, was the DIY ethos. The DIY ethic. It’s inherently part of surviving.
Don Letts, SHOWstudio: Stussy – Talking Punk with Don Letts and John Ingham
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
Identity Bricolage
Many of us think via bricolage and form and express identity via bricolage.
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
Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning. A “grading orientation” and a “learning orientation” have been shown to be inversely related and, as far as I can… More 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 PressWe urgently need a society that’s better at letting people get the rest they need.Fergus Murray WIP by Kristina Daniele I’m in pain. Mental. Physical. The result’s the same. Retreating… More.
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
“Participants associated puzzle pieces with imperfection, incompletion, uncertainty, difficulty, the state of being unsolved, and, most poignantly, being missing,” “If an organization’s intention for using puzzle-piece imagery is to evoke… More 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 narrativesWhen we successfully reframe public discourse, we change the way the public sees the world. We change what counts as common sense. Because language activates frames, new language is required… More 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 – 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-hierarchicalThe belief in the existence and relevance of social hierarchies must be suspended.The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations The extent to which a community… More 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 evolutionShe tells of a radical fringe of scientists who are realizing that natural selection isn’t individual, but mutual—that species only survive if they learn to be in community.Emergent Strategy: Shaping… More, within which innovation, far from being a bug, is the primary feature.
A Tale of Two Computers
Pastiche: Celebrating Our Influences
StimpunksStimpunk combines “stimming” + “punk” to evoke open and proud stimming, resistance to neurotypicalization, and the DIY culture of punk, disabled, and neurodivergent communities. Instead of hiding our stims, we… More.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.
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
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 readingThere are three types of reading: eye reading, ear reading, and finger reading.The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan: A Blueprint for Renewing Your Child’s Confidence and Love of Learning Most schools and… More 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
Remixing is key to progress.
Twenty Things to Do with a Computer Forward 50: Future Visions of Education Inspired by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon’s 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-librariesA 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.The 5-Step Research Method… More, 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.
Twenty Things to Do with a Computer Forward 50: Future Visions of Education Inspired by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon’s Seminal Work
Bricolage Fuels Constructionism
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
Twenty Things to Do with a Computer Forward 50: Future Visions of Education Inspired by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon’s Seminal WorkThe sound of the phone ringing can immediately evoke anxiety for some people, especially for autistic people and people with anxiety. If the call hasn’t been agreed in advance, many… More, 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.
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
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful IdeasSelf-determination Theory (SDT) is… — a model, a macro theory, of human motivation. It’s one of several models of human motivation, but it’s one that has been confirmed over and… More 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.
For me, constructionismPapert was one of the founders of constructionism, which builds on Piaget’s theories of constructivism — that is, learning occurs through the reconstruction of knowledge rather than a transmission of… More 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
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
There is nothing more human than play. Humans were designed to learn in play. In fact, nearly all mammals evolved this way.Play’s Power At our learning space, we provide learners fresh… More ramshackle rock’n’roll 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.”
Before Riot Grrrl: X-Ray Spex & “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” | New British Canon – YouTube
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 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
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
DIY by Dream Nails
Re-create and Rewrite Ideas
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
Appropriate Space
The spaces where we belong do not exist. We build them with radical love and revolutionary liberation.
Gayatri Sethi, Unbelonging
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
Underground: The Subterranean Culture of DIY Punk Shows | Microcosm PublishingEmergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds Emergent strategy is a way that all of… More 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 awarenessAcceptance means training mental health service providers to look at autism and other disabilities as a part of a person’s identity, rather than a problem that needs to be fixed. Acceptance… More 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 ‘80s. Punk bands have played at houses since the music began.
There is, however, a major differenceOur friends and allies at Randimals have a saying, What makes us different, makes all the difference in the world.Randimals We agree. Randimals are made up of two different animals… More 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
I think the key here is space.
“It’s Not Rocket Science” – NDTi
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 ‘science of the concrete’ 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 ‘primitive’ man responds to the world around him. The process involves a ‘science of the concrete’ (as opposed to our ‘civilised’ science of the ‘abstract’) 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 ‘logic’ which is not our own. The structures, ‘improvised’ 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 ‘explain’ 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 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).
…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 genderDue both to their ability to denaturalize social norms and to their neurological differences, autistic individuals can offer novel insights into gender as a social process. Examining gender from an… More 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
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 dressed–with calculated effect, lacing obscenities into record notes and publicity releases, interviews
Subculture: The Meaning of StyleWhile the autistic individual is interviewing, they will often be acutely self-aware and preoccupied by their own nervousness and internal coaching, and be simultaneously experiencing two conversations at once—one that is shared… More and love songs. Clothed in chaos, they produced Noise in the calmly orchestrated Crisis of everyday life in the late 1970s–a 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 Styrene’s famous dictum: ‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’, 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.
Everything that was normally supposed to be hidden was brought to the front.
PUNK SUBCULTURE – WIKIPEDIA
Punk rock is a living thing.
It’s about turning problems into assets.
Don Letts, Rebel Dread
Main Takeaways
- Bricolage: construction (as of a sculpture or a structure of ideas) achieved by using whatever comes to hand.
- Punks draw freely from highbrow culture, lowbrow culture, and places in between, picking and choosing as they go, bound by no formal ideology.
- Punks borrowed freely from previous youth cultures and dominant society, melding these elements into a new form of expression.
- 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”.
- People with disabilities are the original life hackers because our motivation is so high. If we don’t hack we often go 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.
- Bricolage is a French loanword that means the process of improvisation in a human endeavor.
- The most important message I got from punk, was the DIY ethos. The DIY ethic. It’s inherently part of surviving.
- My life, of my speech, as 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.
- We celebrate the work of the many authors and artists we incorporate into our storytelling through pastiche.
- 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.
- Punks view the pedestrian actions of everyday life as potential expressions of art and ideology.
- 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.
- You must build a library and an anti-library now.
- The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there.
- The more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
- A good library is filled with mostly unread books. That’s the point.
- My library serves as a visual reminder of what I don’t know.
- Everything is a remix.
- Remixing is key to progress.
- Creation requires influence. Everything we make is a remix of existing creations, our lives, and the lives of others.
- 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 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.
- Constructionism is being practiced anywhere where people are making artifacts to represent their knowledge constructions.
- It is impossible to export pedagogical practices without reinventing them. Re-create and rewrite ideas.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Prominent forms of discourse (particularly fashion) are radically adapted, subverted and extended by the subcultural bricoleur.
- Copia provides a strategy of invention, a rhetorical term for the process of generating ideas.
- Copia involves proliferation, multiplying possibilities.
- Everything that was normally supposed to be hidden was brought to the front.
- Punk rock is a living thing. It’s about turning problems into assets.