Hmm I thought I lined up the shot a little better than that. Oh well I am a bit like Charlie Allnutt whoopin' the African Queen up the river in a monsoon. Doin' the best I can, by golly.
Heh. I still remember my throbbing fingertips as a child, after having worked all day long on short stories using a manual contraption like that. It didn't even have the ultra-modern electric solution that's visible in the picture. :)
Excuse my urge to comment on your subtitle:
"organizing information in the manner of a bricoleur. think of kaleidoscopes. think of crazy quilts."
Yet how crazy is the effort people see in order to make things look like they by virtue have a pure, single-hue logic of their own? A bricoleur simply connects what can be connected. Quilts work!
I not only excuse your urge, but invite you to elaborate if you would like. I have only the most glancing knowledge of bricolage. Quilts---crazy or otherwise, I am fond of as a recipient of their warmth and loveliness--they way they work, indeed---but not as a quilter. Kaleidoscopes: well, they're marvelous.
My apologies for a late reply - it's the summer...
Bricolage is a very useful expression, methinks. As I've come to understand the term in some literatures (Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Deleuze & Guattari, Latour), it marks various critiques of Modern great stories and centralised rationalities. The concept is used to point out that rationality has much more to do with creative solutions to temporary dilemmas or intrigues, using what is at hand. For Lévi-Strauss the bricoleur was the primitive as opposed to the Modern engineer. In later elaborations the entire thought of there being a single Modern rationality has been disreputed, since even the practices that we recognise as the most emblematically rational ones - say natural sciences - involve a great deal of shuffling to make things work both in laboratories and without. Not to mention the partial extent to which people in 'Modern societies' actually understand the scientific results or their technological applications. The diversity of understandings can't be helped.
People have also invested astounding amounts of their time and effort in trying to make things look like they belong together before they were actually put together by human hand or eye. Perceived purity always requires acts of purification. Hybrids of assumedly pure substances, thus, require purification, too. But it was a bricoleur, who felt the initial urge to purify something for some particular purpose in the first place. =;)
Hmm I thought I lined up the shot a little better than that. Oh well I am a bit like Charlie Allnutt whoopin' the African Queen up the river in a monsoon. Doin' the best I can, by golly.
ReplyDeleteHeh. I still remember my throbbing fingertips as a child, after having worked all day long on short stories using a manual contraption like that. It didn't even have the ultra-modern electric solution that's visible in the picture. :)
ReplyDeleteExcuse my urge to comment on your subtitle:
"organizing information in the manner of a bricoleur. think of kaleidoscopes. think of crazy quilts."
Yet how crazy is the effort people see in order to make things look like they by virtue have a pure, single-hue logic of their own? A bricoleur simply connects what can be connected. Quilts work!
I not only excuse your urge, but invite you to elaborate if you would like. I have only the most glancing knowledge of bricolage. Quilts---crazy or otherwise, I am fond of as a recipient of their warmth and loveliness--they way they work, indeed---but not as a quilter. Kaleidoscopes: well, they're marvelous.
ReplyDeleteMy apologies for a late reply - it's the summer...
ReplyDeleteBricolage is a very useful expression, methinks. As I've come to understand the term in some literatures (Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Deleuze & Guattari, Latour), it marks various critiques of Modern great stories and centralised rationalities. The concept is used to point out that rationality has much more to do with creative solutions to temporary dilemmas or intrigues, using what is at hand. For Lévi-Strauss the bricoleur was the primitive as opposed to the Modern engineer. In later elaborations the entire thought of there being a single Modern rationality has been disreputed, since even the practices that we recognise as the most emblematically rational ones - say natural sciences - involve a great deal of shuffling to make things work both in laboratories and without. Not to mention the partial extent to which people in 'Modern societies' actually understand the scientific results or their technological applications. The diversity of understandings can't be helped.
People have also invested astounding amounts of their time and effort in trying to make things look like they belong together before they were actually put together by human hand or eye. Perceived purity always requires acts of purification. Hybrids of assumedly pure substances, thus, require purification, too. But it was a bricoleur, who felt the initial urge to purify something for some particular purpose in the first place. =;)