Bricolage Method 2

Origins of Bricolage

David L. Miller (1996, online), in an article entitled “The Bricoleur On The Tennis Court” tells us of bricolage’s origins: “The word ‘bricoleur’ and its cognate ‘bricolage’ come from bricole, a corruption of which is the English word ‘brickwall,’ like the brickwall of the tennis court in David’s sketch. The root word means ‘redound’ or ‘rebound.’” Bricolage, therefore refers to shots in billiards or tennis where the ball rebounds off the wall or cushion. The Oxford English Dictionary (2003, online) defines bricole:

in Tennis: the rebound of a ball from the wall of a tennis court, ‘a side-stroake at Tennis wherein the ball goes not right forward, but hits one of the walls of the court, and thence bounds towards the aduerse partie’ (cotgr. 1611); also fig. An indirect, unexpected stroke or actions. Similarly in Billiards.

The concept of bricolage comes to us from Lévi-Strauss (1962/1966). He uses it his book The Savage Mind (La Pensée Sauvage) while discussing the difference between mythical thought and science. For Lévi-Strauss, mythical thought expresses what he calls “the science of the concrete,” which is a separate mode of knowing from science, and to which I will return later in detail. Lévi-Strauss says that the activity of bricolage, on “the technical plane,” is comparable to this science of the concrete, and describes bricolage and mythical thinking:

In its old sense the verb “bricoler” applied to ball games and billiards, to hunting, shooting and riding. It was however always used with reference to some extraneous movement: a ball rebounding, a dog straying or a horse swerving from its direct course to avoid an obstacle. And in our own time the “bricoleur” is still someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman. The characteristic feature of mythical thought is that it expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire which, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited. It has to use this repertoire, however, whatever the task in hand because it has nothing else at its disposal. Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual “bricolage”—which explains the relation which can be perceived between the two. (pp. 16-17)

The translator notes that the word bricoleur “has no precise equivalent in English. He is a man who undertakes odd jobs and is a Jack-of-all-trades or a kind of professional do-it-yourself man,” (p. 17) and is different than a “handyman.”

From the above, we can see that bricolage and play are joined from the beginning, and as these beginnings show, dealing with bricolage may perhaps be challenging. Bricolage, by its nature does not proceed in a straightforward manner; it seems to stray or wander from one thing to another with concepts bouncing this way and that, as interrelations and connections abound. In this way, bricolage’s nonlinear, irrational, fragmented nature reflects its affinity with play. As Derrida (1966, online) observes, there is an inverse relation between play and structure. As play increases, the center or structure decreases. Giving structure to play is thus difficult, because the bouncing ball will undoubtedly hit a few brickwalls, and veering off-course becomes inevitable. So, even if one begins to feel like a knight errant haphazardly crossing the countryside, in the end, there really will be a method to the madness, in fact the method is part of the message.

Lévi-Strauss’s “myth of mythology” is a mythomorphic episteme—it takes the form of what it speaks (Booker, 1991, p. 392), like the Mouse’s tale in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll, 1975, p. 49), Similarly this bricolage method, mirroring my subject matter, play, will take on this same bricolage form.

As the man who brought us bricolage, Lévi-Strauss’s (1988) description of how he works on a project is insightful:

I have a Neolithic mind . . . I keep moving along an endlessly shifting boundary . . . I get by when I work by accumulating notes—a bit about everything, ideas captured on the fly, summaries of what I have read, references, quotations . . . . and when I want to start a project, I pull a packet of notes out of their pigeonhole and deal them out like a deck of cards. This kind of operation, where chance plays a role, helps me revive my failing memory. (p. 35)

Lévi-Strauss recounts that his brioleur techniques were inspired by artist Max Ernst’s collages “which built personal myths out of images borrowed from another culture . . . making these images say more than when viewed by an innocent eye . . . I cut up a mythological subject and recombined the fragments to bring out more meaning” (Lévi-Strauss, 1988, p. vii-viii).

So, if it does occasionally feel at times as if I am rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, it is good to keep in mind what Ben Vereen, lead player in Pippin (Schwartz, 2000, television production), sang: “Easy baby, you’re on the right track!” After all, Lévi-Strauss (1962/1966) notes that mythical thought (bricolage) “for its part is imprisoned in the events and experiences which it never tires of ordering and re-ordering in its search to find them a meaning” (p. 22).

Post-Modern Bricolage or Bricolage in Po-Mo Era

In the “Bricoleur in the Tennis Court,” D. L. Miller (1996, online) discusses bricoleurs and play at some length in the context of postmodern pedagogy. D. L. Miller takes his title from a sketch of the French revolution entitled Tennis Court Oath. In that picture they were improvising a nation, while D. L. Miller is improvising education, and I am improvising a methodology. D. L. Miller notes that the bricoleur is a person of unspecialized artistry who makes do with what is at hand, and that in today’s postmodern world we are all bricoleurs. Indeed the notion of bricolage is found in many different disciplines. It has been cropping up in many places in postmodern discourse since its beginnings in the 60s—you might say bricolage became the “Po Mo” way to go. D. L. Miller follows the bouncing bricolage ball, beginning with Derrida, and includes some particularly notable side shots as well from James Hillman and Mark C. Taylor among others.

Jacques Derrida (1966, online) rebounds from Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of bricolage in The Savage Mind with a lecture entitled “Structure, Sign, and Play,” and so begins Deconstruction. Derrida uses the notion of play to give us decentered discourse and deconstructed Lévi-Strauss’s dichotomy of the bricoleur and engineer to demonstrate how texts don’t mean what they say, but that “texts subvert, exceed, or even overturn their author’s stated purposes” (Hedges, 1998, online). This deconstruction of the bricoleur/engineer dichotomy produced a difference without a distinction or maybe it is vice versa; in any event the dichotomy was destroyed and it seems that the engineer was a myth, quite probably made up by the bricoleur—“which was very likely true!”

By now, it is getting very Alice in Wonderland-like—and makes one wonder whether the caterpillar’s name was Jacques? Nevertheless, this bricoleur/engineer dichotomy, although perhaps meaningless, was still a useful notion. Derrida’s deconstruction effectively kept bricolage center-stage and in play, ironically using play and decentering as a method. Derrida (1966, online) also shows that all discourse is bricolage: “if one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concepts from the texts of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur.” Derrida’s own method of composition is bricolage, his texts are, “quite literally ‘assembled’ ” as Booker (1991) notes, quoting Derrida himself:

I insist on the word “assemblage” here . . . . The word “assemblage” seems more apt for suggesting that the kind of bringing-together proposed here has the structure of an interlacing, a weaving, or a web, which would allow different threads and different lines of sense or force to bring others together (Speech & Phenomena 132). (p. 86)

D. L. Miller (1996, online) recounts that the term bricolage “did not remain only in the field of cultural anthropology. It redounded—itself a bit of bricolage—to other discourses: postmodern philosophy, theology, depth psychology, and literary theory.” The postmodern situation, where image has displaced text as the primary medium of discourse has made bricoleurs of us all. It seems that at least psychologically, everyone is liminal and there are no more specialists.

D. L. Miller (1996, online) shows that bricolage has even bounced around in our own backyard of Archetypal Psychology. Most recently, T. Moore (2000, online) confesses to be a “spiritual bricoleur,” but Hillman (1975) it seems, was bitten by the bricoleur bug early on. In Re-visioning Psychology, too, after a discussion of Knight Errant, where he discusses the wandering nature of the soul, Hillman (1992) cryptically mentions the bricoleur at the end of his chapter on psychologizing—in a “parting shot” if you will. This sly bricoleur doesn’t develop the concept any further, instead he leaves us hanging, brilliantly leaving the sentence, and paragraph, and chapter unfinished:

Psychological reflections always catch light from a peculiar angle; they are annoying at the same time as they are perceptive. Psychologizing sees things peculiarly, a deviant perspective reflecting the deviance in the world around. The psychological mirror that walks down the road, the Knight Errant on his adventure, the scrounging rogue, is also an odd-job man, like Eros the Carpenter who joins this bit with that, a handyman, a bricoleur—like “a ball rebounding or a dog straying or a horse swerving from its direct course” –psychologizing upon and about what is at hand; not a systems-architect, a planner with directions. And leaving before completion, suggestion hanging in the air, an indirection, an open phrase . . . (p. 164)

As Mary Poppins would say, “well begun is half done” (Stevenson, 1964, motion picture), and I shall develop the concept further later. But first, let me follow the course of bricolage a bit further. The 1990s were big for bricolage—everyone was jumping on the bricolage bandwagon—especially after the Internet began to take off. Bricolage has bounded its way into many other diverse realms, from cultural studies and computing to business. In the realm of cultural studies, Weinstein and Weinstein (1991) discuss the concept at great length in regard to Georg Simmel, “an astute wanderer [who] can connect seemingly isolated fragments with other apparently isolated fragments” (p. 160). They say the bricoleur

is practical and gets the job done, but it is not always or even usually the same job that was initially undertaken and is uniquely structured by the set of “preconstrained” elements that are selected from the treasury. A substitution of one element for another would change the form of the construction. The bricoleur works and plays with the stock. His parts are not standardized or invented; they are appropriated for new uses. (pp. 161-162)

Hellerstein (2003, online) turns to bricolage in information retrieval/database discussions where he used the bricoleur/engineer notions to show that this dichotomy was “simultaneously meaningless and useful” to understand the difference between information retrieval systems, which are based on “found” structure, that is bricolage, and database systems which are “engineered, stable” structures.

Weick (1993) in the area of organizational design sees design as improvisation versus architecture. He notes that improvisation could be considered a kind of bricolage and the improviser a kind of bricoleur. To the bricoleur, the materials at hand are not project-specific, but, instead, are associated with all the ways in which the materials were used before, and they are retained on the principle that they might come in handy. The materials, in other words, mean whatever they have been used for in the past. The more diverse these uses, and the more fully the materials themselves are understood, the more a bricoleur is able to develop a richer understanding of the object. Consequently, the bricoleur is able to develop innovative uses for the object, by always being open to and in the process of trying out new ways to use an object (p. 353). Along these lines, Thayer (2003, online) notes we should be investing in the bricoleur.

Fonstad (2001, online) in discussing the roles of information systems technology in improvising, likens bricolage to jazz improvisation:

A core element of improvising is that improvisers rely principally on features of the situation (e.g., local norms, available artifacts, and audience feedback) and their memories to develop their innovations. Barrett (1998, p. 616) notes: Jazz players, junkyard collectors and technical reps find themselves in the middle of messes, having to solve problems in situ, creating interpretations out of potentially incoherent materials, piecing together other musicians’ playing, their own memories of musical patterns, interweaving general concepts with the particulars of the current situation, creating coherent, composite stories.

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