Bricoleur

Description

Alessandro Longo:

"The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss introduces his famous figure of the bricoleur in the first chapter of La pensée sauvage (1962), while discussing the technical inventiveness of non-Western peoples. From there, the anthropologist builds his famous contrast between two ways of making, engineering and bricolage. Interestingly, Lévi-Strauss traces the etymology of the latter term from the French verb bricoler, which originally applied to ball games, billiards, hunting and riding, always to describe an incidental movement, like a ball that rebounds, or the horse that swerves from its course.

If the bricoleur is, at least semantically, a figure of serendipity, the engineer starts from a project: he defines one, then procures the materials and tools it requires to execute it. On the other hand, the bricoleur works “with the means at hand” (les moyens du bord): a finite, heterogeneous stock of objects, saved because they might come in handy one day, each already shaped by earlier uses. Before starting, the bricoleur questions his stock, asking each piece what it could become. The result is therefore always a compromise between the project and the materials: the bricoleur starts from existing objects and bends them to purposes they were not designed for.

The Brazilian anthropologist and intellectual Eduardo Viveiros de Castro continues Lévi-Strauss’ work in his paper “On Models and Examples”, reading this dichotomy as two poles of a continuum: every engineer becomes something of a bricoleur when his plans meet the real world, and every bricoleur is also, always, calculating and anticipating their next moves. What really separates them, he argues, is where they look for guidance. The engineer follows a model while the bricoleur is inspired by examples.

A model, in Viveiros de Castro’s sense, is a general plan conceived in advance and applied to particular cases, which are expected to conform to it. It moves from the universal to the particular, in a top-down descent and it thus creates a hierarchy between those who design it (the planner) and those who must follow it (the planned).

An example is instead a particular case that inspires another particular case. It demonstrates that an operation can be performed and invites a variation on it. Examples circulate horizontally, from person to person, transforming at each passage, with no original to return to.

Models give orders and enforce order; examples give cues.

The distinction is political as much as epistemological: examples are produced by people who are forced to live inside someone else’s model. The inhabitants of engineered landscapes and imposed institutions are never fully compliant: they bend and adapt elements of the model to their advantage, opening small spaces of autonomy from within. Today some of the most pervasive models we live inside are technological. As platform brutality settles in as the ambient condition, tiny examples of agency emerge from the bricoleurs online.

I first started conceptualising the bricoleur posture while preparing a lecture on cyberdecks: handmade portable computers built by non-technical people using a Raspberry Pi, the most interchangeable component in contemporary electronics, and housed in found cases, such as a vintage make-up kit or a Polly Pocket toy. When Amni Raihan asked “why are the girls building cyberdecks?”, she pointed to one of the main signals of the trend’s relevance: its virality, and the popularity it reached among young women and so-called “e-girls”, who build and document their machines on TikTok and Instagram.

Before embracing the bricoleur as a figure of agency, we must admit that, for decades, this kind of technical subjectivity belonged to a familiar type: the white, male nerd, devoted to his tools and often resentful toward women and outsiders. Raihan points out that technical knowledge is no longer guarded by that type and it now circulates in the open, e.g. in comment sections, tutorials and playlists, where builders answer each other’s questions and learn together: the circulation of examples Viveiros de Castro describes.

To this point, I would add that nowadays LLMs play a significant role in this horizontal circulation.

...

This recombinant logic is precisely what destabilises the current copyright regime. The bricoleur never produces from scratch: they work by taking existing software, fragments, examples and publics, and remixing them. The biggest video game IPs have already reacted harshly towards this new wave of modding: in September Rockstar tightened its modding guidelines to forbid other companies’ characters and content. Sony asked the author of a fan multiplayer mod for The Last of Us Part II to pull it before release, and Mojang had browser clones of Minecraft removed from GitHub. On 2 October, according to our modder chasm, Activision filed a complaint against his tweet showing a decompiled Modern Warfare 2.

Tolerance, on the other hand, can be part of a strategy of capture. In Brands, the sociologist Adam Arvidsson, whose work will guide us again later in this piece, argues that brands live on the productive sociality of their publics: the meanings, attachments and communities that consumers generate for free, which the brand then organises and turns into value. Fan cultures have worked this way for years, especially around pop goddesses such as Taylor Swift and One Direction, as Kaitlyn Tiffany documents in Everything I Need I Get from You. Each incursion clip, in this light, also renews the attachment to the franchises it plunders."

(https://reincantamentox.substack.com/p/drop-58-mods-of-production?)

Characteristics

David de Ugarte:

"In the widespread text "How to become a hacker", Eric S. Raymond lists the five defining features of the bricoleur attitude.

1. The world is full of fascinating problems to be solved.

2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.

3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.

4. Freedom is good.

5. Attitude is no substitute for competence." (http://deugarte.com/gomi/phyles.pdf)

Original source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html