Bricolage Method 3

Bricolage has also played a big role in computer science and education where Papert (1980, 1984) and Turkel (1984, 1995) use the concept extensively in the context of soft-mastery, Internet identity and imaginings. Turkel (1984) describes how the soft-master works by feeling his way; he does not follow an exact plan, but has a goal, and allowed the work to evolve. The goal is allowed to evolve too, “he used what he found at hand and took pleasure in using something made for altogether different purpose, showing elements of improvisation and negotiating with the work in progress” (p. 131). Shih (2003, online), influenced by Turkel, uses bricolage to conceptualize consumer experience in cyberspace.

Bricolage has also made inroads in the realm of media philosophy (Taylor & Saarinen, 1994), and their book, Imagologies is bricolage at its text-based best. D. L. Miller (1996, online) further notes:

A postmodern theologian of culture, Mark C. Taylor . . . points out that cultural “imagology insists that the word is never simply a word but is always also an image” (styles) . . . . The audio-visual trace of the word involves an inescapable materiality that can be thought only if it is figured . . . . I have alluded already to the essay in which Derrida writes that “every abstract concept hides a sensible figure” (1982: 210).

D. L. Miller (1996, online) also quotes Guggenbühl-Craig (1995) who writes elegantly about how he sees the world and the paradoxical nature of it:

The paradoxical approach to psychology offers still more. It helps us to play in the most profound sense of the word. Aside from many other things, psychology is also play . . . . Psychology is play for the glory of the soul. We psychologists try playfully to comprehend the soul with images and fables. The paradox of the images reminds us continually that we are playing as if with a kaleidoscope. We shake or turn the images lightly, revealing ever new configurations. (p. 130)

Guggenbühl-Craig (1995) sees “the world as an iridescent sphere whose thousands of colors continually transform into other colors” (p. i). Lévi-Strauss (1962/1966) also likens the material of the bricoleur and the images of myth to the bits and pieces in a kaleidoscope. Earlier these materials were associated with “other coherent sets,” a past use, and now they form new patterns in a new use (p. 37). D. L. Miller (1998, cassette) calls therapy “the jiggle of the kaleidoscope.”

Qualitative researchers use other metaphors to capture these multivalent, multiperspectival qualities of the research process, such as quiltmaking, montage, pentimento, and improvisation to give a feel for bricolage. Denzin and Lincoln (2000) also liken bricolage to the notion of a crystal which reflects and refracts differently depending upon how it is held and viewed. “Researchers have used multiple voices, different textual formats and various typefaces to capture these different voices, perspectives, points of view angles of vision . . . they create spaces for give and take between reader and writer” (p, 5). Turkel (1984) discusses the privilege and responsibility that an anthropologist has “to see the world through a prism not available to members, (and this is the part that is often the most difficult) and use a new lens to see one’s own world differently as well” (p. 17). I, too, believe that looking at the world through different lenses is central to the bricoleur’s task.

Before going on to discuss the methodological allusions in Lévi-Strauss and the Bollingen stone, I should note that many bricoleurs existed prior to Lévi-Strauss’s use of the term. James Joyce comes to mind as perhaps the “most formidable bricoleur in modern literature.” Acknowledging his bricoleur nature, Joyce wrote that he was “quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man, for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description” (Booker, 1991, p. 87). Freud, Jung, and Bateson, other twentieth century bricoleur heavyweights, whose work is important to play, will be discussed later.

But it is Hermes himself who may have been the original Western bricoleur. He practiced bricolage as a child, when as his first act after leaving the cave, he made a lyre out of tortoise’s shell and its intestines. He is said to have shouted “Eureka!” when he got the idea for the tortoise shell lyre (N. O. Brown, 1990, p. 75-76). In Kerényi’s (1976/2003) translation of the “Hymn to Hermes,” Hermes remarked to the turtle, “Your shell is a kaleidoscope” (p. 61). In this way, he saw through the turtle! Later, Hermes fashions a pair of sandals for himself and for Apollo’s cattle to hide their tracks, because Hermes stole them and then lied about it. Thus, it is no surprise that for the bricoleur the truth value of things is not overly important. Hermes was not known for telling the truth, at least not the whole truth. Kincheloe (2001, online) and McLeod (2000, online) both implicate Hermes when they point out the devious means in Lévi-Strauss’s definition, and McLeod intimates that bricoleur hints at “trickery, cunning and even a small-time crook.”

Lévi-Strauss himself does not accept the truth of some of the notions he uses, such as the nature/culture dichotomy, but uses them anyway. Likewise, Turkel (1984), herself a bricoleur, is not concerned with the truth of theories, but with how they capture the popular imagination. As Klages (2001, online) tells us, the bricoleur can incorporate other things into the system and use terms and ideas without having to acknowledge the whole system of thought they come from as valid and true. A bricoleur doesn’t care about the “truth” as long as the terms and ideas are useful. Hellerstein (2003, online) notes “that juxtaposition without requiring rationality enables what Derrida calls ‘play’ addressing and affirming provisional truths.” Klages (2001, online) also points out that bricolage is not rational, but mythopoetic, which brings us to reverie and the methodological implications of bricolage.

Methodological Implications

Lévi-Strauss (1962/1966) notes that “the elements of mythical thought similarly lie half-way between percepts and concepts” (p. 18). The bricoleur’s world is a space of reverie, the land of the imaginal, composed of neither material facts nor mental ideas, which is neither empirical nor rational. It is a world, Romanyshyn (2000a, cassette) reminds us, where one is neither awake nor asleep, the “neither nor” world of soul, of metaphor, which he defines as something “that alludes to what remains elusive,” that is all that we can do here—make the allusion and elusively move on. Romanyshyn relates that this in-between space of soul is itself a perspective, which undoes the Cartesian split, and this in-between space is of utmost importance in play and we will “re-turn” to these notions.

According to Lévi-Strauss (1962/1966), when the bricoleur begins to work on a project,

His first practical step is retrospective. He has to turn back to an already existent set made up of tools and materials, to consider or reconsider what it contains and, finally and above all, to engage in a sort of dialogue with it and, before choosing between them, to index the possible answers which the whole set can offer to his problem . . . . and the decision as to what to put in each place also depends on the possibility of putting a different element there instead, so that each choice which is made will involve a complete reorganization of the structure, which will never be the same as one vaguely imagined nor as some other which might have been preferred to it. (pp. 18-19)

This retrospective step is reminiscent of Romanyshyn’s (2002) “backwards glance,” and demonstrates the dialogical nature of bricolage. Combined with the insight that bricolage brings of pictures hiding in the shadow of words, and the metaphorical nature of bricolage, our imaginal bricolage methodology is beginning to emerge. As Lévi-Strauss (1962/1966) further describes the bricoleur working on a project we can begin to see allusions to three different methodologies:

“it would seem that mythological worlds have been built up, only to be shattered again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments” (Boas I, p. 18) . . . . [in] the continual reconstruction from the same materials, it is always earlier ends which are called upon to play the part of means: the signified changes into the signifying and vice versa. (p. 21)

Genette (1964/1982), in a classic article paying tribute to Lévi-Strauss, relates the literary critic to the bricoleur and comments that the work he is criticizing is “like those primary wholes that the bricoleur dismantles in order to extract parts which may prove useful.” Genette also argues that “this constant interchange, this perceptual inversion of signs and meaning is a good description of the dual function of the critic’s work, which is to produce meaning with the work of others, but also to produce his own work out of this meaning.” The interchange and meaning making of both the critic and bricoleur give us insight into the hermeneutic nature of bricolage. Bricolage also alludes to phenomenology, as Lévi-Strauss (1962/1966) notes:

Further, the “bricoleur” also, and indeed principally, derives his poetry from the fact that he does not confine himself to accomplishment and execution: he “speaks” not only with things, as we have already seen, but also through the medium of things: giving an account of his personality and life by the choices he makes between the limited possibilities. (p. 21)

Finally, we can see hints of heuristics in the statement: “The ‘bricoleur’ may not ever complete his purpose but he always puts something of himself into it” (Lévi-Strauss, 1962/1966, p. 21). Gathering up the bits and pieces from above, we can see that bricolage contains all three items that I wanted to have in my methodology, pictures, words, and conversations, as well as alluding to the three different methodologies I have included.

As previously mentioned, Guggenbuhl-Craig (1995) refers to the different configurations of images produced by turning the kaleidoscope, when discussing psychology, paradox and play. The following brief interlude, a kaleidoscopic turn, if you will, reveals how we might whimsically see these methodologies written in Jung’s stone. Later, other turnings will reveal different images.

Brief Interlude:
Written in Stone? An Allegorical Tale Alluding to Method.

When first learning about the different research methodologies I imagined a three-way dialogue between the methodologies, a mélange a trois, as it were. I imagined them to be three different people: Hermen Neutic, Phen Nomenology, and Heu Ristic. Now with bricolage, we have a fourth imaginal representative: Bri Colage, making this perhaps an appropriately Jungian mélange a quatre. This scene is reminiscent of the Mad Hatter’s tea party and let’s see how it plays out. Imagine them all, sitting at a table, perhaps over a potluck dinner, discussing how each of them might appear or be alluded to on the stone. Hermen can’t help talking in circles, Phen is gesturing wildly, while all Heu does is talk about himself.

Bri: The stone itself is a bricolage, you know. The three different sentences on it come from three different sources (Jung, 1961/1989). It is made up of bits and pieces of all different things: astrological glyphs and all sorts of other symbols are alluded to. And bricolage is all about bits and pieces. We have the squared circle, the Axiom of Maria and the Telesphoros, made of Mercury or Hermes, who Jung shows (Jaffé, 1977/1979) is himself made up of all the other symbols. And as you know, Hermes himself was a bricoleur. So I feel very comfortably represented.

This is all too much for Hermen who is spinning about in circles.

Hermen: Well what about me, I’m there too, right smack there in the middle of things. It’s like a hermeneutic circle, you know, we’re really always in one, but the big question is where do you jump in and how do you know when to jump out?

Heu: Oh that’s easy, that’s where I come in, you just use a bit of personal or tacit knowing (Polanyi, 1966), a bit of complex knowledge (Romanyshyn, 1991), if you will.

Hermen: Not so fast Heu, I wasn’t finished. You know this parts/whole thing is rather an odd business, kind of reminds me of Romanyshyn’s discussion of tangled hierarchy, and the whole observer having an effect on the observed thing in quantum physics (Romanyshyn, 2000b, lecture).

Heu: You realize don’t you, that this whole stone circle thing looks like a big eye, Jung (1961/1989) himself said so when he talked about the pupilla, the reflection of yourself that you see in the eye of another. Personally I see me! It really is all about me! If you think about it, the glyphs could in a way suggest a person’s birth chart, which could be one way of saying its your personal way of seeing, the planetary relations suggesting complexes that might be influential in complex knowing—a very personal kind of knowing, fueled by what Polanyi (1963) calls intellectual passions.

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