After the Public Turn

Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur

Frank Farmer

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780874219135
• eBook ISBN: 9780874219142
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

 In After the Public Turn, author Frank Farmer argues that counterpublics and the people who make counterpublics—"citizen bricoleurs"—deserve a more prominent role in our scholarship and in our classrooms. Encouraging students to understand and consider resistant or oppositional discourse is a viable route toward mature participation as citizens in a democracy. 

Farmer examines two very different kinds of publics, cultural and disciplinary, and discusses two counterpublics within those broad categories: zine discourses and certain academic discourses. By juxtaposing these two significantly different kinds of publics, Farmer suggests that each discursive world can be seen, in its own distinct way, as a counterpublic, an oppositional social formation that has a stake in widening or altering public life as we know it.

Drawing on major figures in rhetoric and cultural theory, Farmer builds his argument about composition teaching and its relation to the public sphere, leading to a more sophisticated understanding of public life and a deeper sense of what democratic citizenship means for our time.

PART ONE

Cultural Publics

1

ZINES AND THOSE WHO MAKE THEM

Introducing the Citizen Bricoleur

La perruque is the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer. It differs from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job. La perruque may be writing a … love letter on “company time” or … “borrowing” a lathe to make a piece of furniture for [the] living room … [T]he worker who indulges in la perruque actually diverts time (not goods, since he uses only scraps) from the factory for work that is free, creative, and precisely not directed toward profit.

—Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

In an amusing illustration of how acts of resistance get mustered into serving that which they resist, Walker Percy tells of how sightseers at the Grand Canyon must exercise considerable savvy if they wish to reclaim a sovereign view of the canyon from those who intend that it be seen in the officially approved ways. Percy offers a number of tactics by which ordinary tourists can seize or “recover” the canyon for themselves. One of the most obvious is simply choosing to get off the beaten track—in other words, refusing the organized, planned tours in favor of venturing forth through the canyon on one’s own. Problems arise, however, when a park official notices that maybe a few too many tourists are electing to get off the beaten track, thereby calling into question the very necessity (and profitability) of organized tours in the first place. When this happens, only one solution recommends itself: tourists are advised to “consult ranger for information on getting off the beaten track.” Perhaps for a slightly higher fee, tourists can now buy tickets for the official Off the Beaten Track Tour and thereby maneuver around the standard tours designed for those who, sadly, cannot afford a more authentic view of the Grand Canyon (Percy 2008, 483).

Percy’s essay is a complex, somewhat desultory examination of the difficulty in exercising some measure of autonomy—or, to use his term, sovereignty—over one’s experiences. While Percy would not put it in these terms, he shows how the marshaling forces of power can so easily deputize resistant others on behalf of the complete hegemony such power seeks to enforce. In making this point, Percy raises the unsettling question of whether resistance is even possible. Is there any way to get beyond the reach of appropriating power (what Percy calls the “symbolic complex”) (Percy 2008, 482)? Are there any loopholes or escape routes through which one might pass in order to establish a site of resistance outside of that power? Is it, in other words, even possible to get off the beaten track? If we were to draw reasonable inferences from this and his other examples, Percy’s answer to these questions would be a qualified yes—qualified because, for Percy, resistance occurs not in the forum, the streets, or the public square but rather in the ad hoc, ingenuous, and quotidian strategies that individuals deploy in everyday contexts. For Percy, acts of resistance would likely seem to be rather innocuous and happenstance affairs, designed primarily to allow individuals to live lives that are genuinely their own.

Might not the same be said of the office or factory employee who “borrows” workplace time and resources for private purposes? Are these not acts of resistance as well? Certainly, in his illustration of la perruque, Michel de Certeau wishes us to believe as much. The ethically questionable practices described in the above epigraph are legitimized by the fact that “nothing of material value is stolen” and that tools are merely borrowed, not taken. Most significant of all are the virtuous ends that the activity of la perruque serves, ends that are “free, creative, and precisely not directed toward profit” (de Certeau 1984, 25). Even though it is easy to imagine other, less noble purposes that such borrowings might serve, de Certeau is not as much interested in a formal, ethical analysis of this situation as he is in identifying everyday, tactical forms of resistance. In his illustration, de Certeau wishes to draw our attention to the ordinary resourcefulness, the very unheroic cunning of those who “make do” with, or make the best of, the situations in which they find themselves.

On the surface, then, Percy’s tourists and de Certeau’s workers would seem to share at least this much in common: a repertoire of imaginative, calculated tactics for resisting the various perceived oppressions that accompany the experience of lived life. But, unfortunately, it seems that they also share a profoundly limited vision of resistance. Judging by the illustrations mentioned here, we could only conclude that everyday resistances must be solitary, unseen, and mostly inconsequential events—here and there acts of isolated subterfuge that seemingly do not require anyone else for their enactment. After all, it would be hard to conceive of Percy’s sightseers as participants in a “resistant tourists collective” or de Certeau’s workers as members of Perruque Workers International, Marseille Local 17. What is needed, in other words, is a way to pay tribute to ordinary acts of resistance and yet not relegate those acts to innocuous, privatized domains of irrelevance. Is it even possible, then, to understand everyday resistances as having a distinctly public significance, and if so, how is that public character revealed?

De Certeau provides us with one answer by asking us to consider la perruque not as disconnected, solitary events but rather as an ensemble of practices already writ large in the culture, as something that far surpasses the confines of the workplace. When la perruque is discovered outside the office or factory, according to de Certeau, it becomes what is more familiarly known as bricolage, the artful “making do” of the “handyman” who, using only those materials and tools readily available to him, constructs new objects out of worn ones, who imagines new uses for what has been cast aside, discarded (de Certeau 1984, 29). Of course, it is possible to consider bricolage in its most restricted, literal sense, as simply the cobbling together of new things out of old materials, but de Certeau sees bricolage as having much larger significances than that.

In the pages to follow, I will examine the role of bricolage in the making of publics, counterpublics, and alternative publics. Drawing on three major commentators on bricolage—Claude Lévi-Strauss, Dick Hebdige, and Michel de Certeau—I will first review how these three thinkers, alert to its wider implications, have used this concept. Following their lead, I will show how to apply bricolage to the task of public making through a discussion of zine culture—particularly anarchist zines—which, for my purposes, exemplify how resistance can be, at once, both everyday and public, as long as we understand publics in certain ways. I argue for a way of seeing publics as not merely formations that sometimes intersect with already established cultures but instead as formations that can be said to be cultures in their own right. Put differently, I want to posit the importance of cultural publics to the work of composition, an idea I wish to introduce in this chapter and elaborate in the next.

THE RAG AND BONE SHOP OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION

Several years ago, I came to appreciate the larger significances of punk and the cultural meanings that punk, rasta, hipster, reggae, and glitter subcultures conveyed. Like many, I came to this larger awareness through a reading of that compact, incisive, and remarkable work, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, by Dick Hebdige. Writing in 1979, Hebdige provides a retrospective account of postwar, British working-class youth and their embrace of identities affiliated with a variety of musical subcultures—subcultures not only in conflict with the dominant culture but also, and frequently, with each other. And because these conflicts, whether internal or external, could shift or transform suddenly—that is, because alliances and oppositions emerged and receded with some volatility—the meaning of subculture could never be said to be stable. Definitions of subcultural styles were always in dispute and, according to Hebdige, “style [was] the area where … opposing definitions clash[ed] with dramatic force” (Hebdige 1979, 3). Style, from this perspective, signified a Refusal with a capital R, and the gestures that embodied this refusal had a public meaning, a subversive value that could be, and was intended to be, read by others.

Punk and other subcultures, Hebdige points out, refuse to be part of a willingly dominated majority, refuse to grant consent (tacit or otherwise) to be normalized within a system of pervasive control. Not surprisingly, therefore, subcultural styles are seen to go “against nature,” interrupting the “myth of consensus” and challenging the principles of unity and cohesion upon which that myth depends (Hebdige 1979, 18). Subcultural style, then, is an insult, an affront, a sneer, an outrage, an ironic smile, a slur, a provocation. It is a T-shirt that reads “Fuck Off and Die.” But it is also a task to be accomplished: subcultural style does not merely happen on its own—though, to be sure, there are spontaneous elements to it. Rather, subcultures must be made—constructed out of cultural materials or, more accurately and from a punk perspective, cultural debris. For this reason, in his elaboration of subcultural style, Hebdige refers approvingly to a term first used by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss—bricolage—to describe how a subcultural style such as punk finds expression (103).

In The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss observes that there is no accurate English equivalent for the term bricolage. Noting that in its older senses bricolage referred to human movement, especially motions accompanying sports and pastimes—ball and billiards, “hunting, shooting, riding,” and the like—Lévi-Strauss tells us that in our times, bricolage refers to a kind of radically flexible handiwork, an eclectic method by which the practitioner of bricolage, the bricoleur, employs all the available tools and materials “at hand” to accomplish some purpose, typically in innovative, unpredictable, and cunning ways. Yes, the bricoleur is truly someone who, to quote Lévi-Strauss, “undertakes odd jobs and is a Jack of all trades, a kind of professional do-it-[yourself-er]” (Lévi-Strauss 1962, 16–17n). But she is much more than just a resourceful fixer of things. And to understand why these Jacks and Jills of all trades interest Lévi-Strauss, I want to revisit his argument briefly.

Lévi-Strauss desires to rescue what others refer to as “primitive magic” from its thoroughly discredited status in the wake of Enlightenment reason. He does not endorse the usual opposition between magic and science, the common opinion that sees them as incommensurable world-views. Nor does he see magic as an evolutionary stage, a harbinger of a yet fully realized science. “Magical thought,” he tells us, “is not to be regarded as a beginning, a rudiment, a sketch, a part of a whole …” Rather, magic constitutes a viable system in its own right, and for this reason, it invites comparisons to “that other system which constitutes science,” so that we may see them as “two parallel modes of acquiring knowledge.” Indeed, Lévi-Strauss devotes much of his argument to the task of illuminating how magic and science “require the same sort of mental operations and [how] they differ not so much in kind as in the different types of phenomena to which they are applied” (Lévi-Strauss 1962, 13). He concludes that it would be more accurate to say that we are actually examining two kinds of science, with primitive magic now renamed by Lévi-Strauss as “prior science” (15–16). To glimpse how these two “sciences” differ, Lévi-Strauss asks us to compare the situation of our mythical handyman bricoleur (underscore mythical) and his counterpart, the trained engineer.

Lévi-Strauss observes that the bricoleur “is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks,” but those tasks, given their number and variety, as well as their ad hoc and unplanned nature, are not necessarily to be called “projects”—at least not in the way that an engineer might refer to her work. In other words, the bricoleur “does not subordinate each of [his or her tasks] to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project.” His materials and tools are finite and heterogeneous, and “they bear no [necessary] relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project” (Lévi-Strauss 1962, 17). They are, rather, the accumulations—the remains—of earlier constructions and destructions, and they thus represent always and only potential uses that are not yet foreseen: “Elements are collected or retained on the principle that ‘they may come in handy.’ ” Unlike the engineer, the bricoleur does not possess nor want the specialized tools required of every particular project. Instead, she wants tools that are specialized enough not to require “the equipment and knowledge of all trades and professions,” but not so specialized that each tool is limited to “one definite and determinate use” (18). This is all very interesting, especially when each of us recalls how we once jerry-rigged a temporary fix to that broken showerhead or improvised a gate lock out of an old bike chain and a rusty C-clamp.

While Lévi-Strauss acknowledges the importance of bricolage at the purely mechanical level, his larger purpose is to show how mythologies, as well as things, are made, sustained, and transformed by “the new arrangement of [existing] elements” and the “continual reconstruction of the same forms” even, or perhaps especially, when those same forms are in disrepair, relegated to the junk heap—when, in other words, those forms don’t work anymore (Lévi-Strauss 1962, 21). The mythmaker bricoleur, at this point, improvises new structures out of old ones, and in doing so, improvises useful analogies between the natural and the social realms that can, in the words of one observer, “satisfactorily explain the world and make it able to be lived in” (Hawkes 1977, 51).

Now it should be apparent that both Hebdige and Lévi-Strauss understand bricolage primarily in terms of culture and myth, respectively, even though Hebdige seems more intent to align bricolage with critique, to show how it may be used to expose and resist the hegemonic “myth of consensus” that I mentioned earlier. Or, to put things differently, one might argue that Hebdige regards bricolage as mythbreaking rather than mythmaking. Yet that distinction would still be too simplistic and too misleading, I think, for Hebdige, too, sees in subcultural style the promise of alternative ways of being that point to the need for social arrangements not based upon the domination of one group by another. In any case, both Hebdige and Lévi-Strauss see in bricolage a practice that is simultaneously resistant and constructive.¹

Similarly, another way to understand bricolage is to observe how it overcomes the usual dichotomy between consumption and production. Bricolage, according to de Certeau, is able to surmount this opposition by rendering consumption itself into an alternative kind of production, a special and clever form of “making” that, as a consequence of its furtive deployment, goes mostly unnoticed. In fact, de Certeau suggests that the best way to observe this appropriative form of making is not through its own products but its “ways of using the products imposed by a dominant social order” (de Certeau 1984, xiii). He explains:

The “making” in question is a production, a poi

sis—but a hidden one, because it is scattered over areas defined and occupied by systems of “production” (television, urban development, commerce, etc.), and because the steadily increasing expansion of these systems no longer leaves “consumers” any place in which they can indicate what they make or do with the products of these systems. To a rationalized, expansionist, and at the same time centralized, clamorous, and spectacular production corresponds another production called “consumption.” The latter is devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly, because it does not manifest itself through its own products. (xii–xiii)

Because “people have to make do with what they have” and because “what they have” is largely determined for them, individuals and groups resort to various tactics through which they might enact a productive agency while, at the same time, consuming the imposed, ready-made products of a dominant social order (de Certeau 1984, 18). According to de Certeau, they do this through any number of ruses, tricks, moves, insinuations, ploys, tropes, poachings, and mutations—any of which might be creatively exercised when the right opportunity presents itself.

It is not difficult to see how what de Certeau describes here is emblematic of the arts of bricolage, and thus we should not be surprised at de Certeau’s frequent and favorable allusions to bricolage even though he typically is more inclined to speak of “uses” and “tactics” to describe these arts.² And while de Certeau acknowledges his debt to Lévi-Strauss and the mythmaking potential of bricolage, he clearly sees bricolage as having neither the unity nor the coherence that Lévi-Strauss posits in his description of “mythological universes.” Rather, in de Certeau’s broader understanding, bricolage represents “ ‘another kind of ‘mythology’ dispersed in time, a sequence of temporal fragments not joined together but disseminated through repetitions and different modes of enjoyment, in memories and successive knowledges” (de Certeau 1984, 174–75). If, in fact, bricolage is implicated in mythmaking at all, it is a very different kind of myth than the one that informs Lévi-Strauss’s conception—a piecemeal, forever incomplete mythology of seemingly discrete, unrelated temporal acts.

But is this not an extremely limited understanding of bricolage, one that precludes our exploring the larger meanings of its importance? If what de Certeau says is true—namely, that what he intends to elaborate is a “science of singularity … a science of the relationship that links everyday pursuits to particular circumstances,” (de Certeau 1984, ix), then are we not severely hamstrung in our efforts to entertain the possibility that bricolage might mean something more than its random and particular instantiations? Even de Certeau seems uneasy with this conclusion, for elsewhere he suggests that we do indeed need a larger frame by which to understand bricolage. Thus, in commenting upon the repertoire of tactics available to the bricoleur, de Certeau observes that “a politics of such ploys should be developed.” While he does not offer such a politics, he does provide the contours for what this project would likely entail. De Certeau thus maintains that “such a politics should … inquire into the public (‘democratic’) image of the microscopic, multiform, and innumerable connections between manipulating and enjoying, the fleeting and massive reality of a social activity at play with the order that contains it” (xxiv).

Taking my lead from de Certeau’s suggestion, and drawing upon the earlier work of Hebdige and Lévi-Strauss, I wish to propose a differe...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Turning and Turning
• Part One: Cultural Publics
• Part Two: Disciplinary Publics
• Epilogue: Whereabouts Unknown: Locating the Citizen Bricoleurs among Us
• References
• Index
• About the Author