PART ONE
Cultural Publics
1
ZINES AND THOSE WHO MAKE THEM
Introducing the Citizen Bricoleur
âMichel 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 ârecoverâ the canyon for themselves. One of the most obvious is simply choosing to get off the beaten trackâin other words, refusing the organized, planned tours in favor of venturing forth through the canyon on oneâs 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 âconsult ranger for information on getting off the beaten track.â 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).
Percyâs essay is a complex, somewhat desultory examination of the difficulty in exercising some measure of autonomyâor, to use his term, sovereigntyâover oneâs 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 âsymbolic complexâ) (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, Percyâs answer to these questions would be a qualified yesâqualified 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 âborrowsâ 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 ânothing of material value is stolenâ 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 âfree, creative, and precisely not directed toward profitâ (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 âmake doâ with, or make the best of, the situations in which they find themselves.
On the surface, then, Percyâs tourists and de Certeauâs 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 eventsâhere 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 Percyâs sightseers as participants in a âresistant tourists collectiveâ or de Certeauâs 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 âmaking doâ of the âhandymanâ 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 bricolageâClaude LĂ©vi-Strauss, Dick Hebdige, and Michel de CerteauâI 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 cultureâparticularly anarchist zinesâwhich, 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 subculturesâsubcultures 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 suddenlyâthat is, because alliances and oppositions emerged and receded with some volatilityâthe meaning of subculture could never be said to be stable. Definitions of subcultural styles were always in dispute and, according to Hebdige, âstyle [was] the area where ⊠opposing definitions clash[ed] with dramatic forceâ (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 âagainst nature,â interrupting the âmyth of consensusâ 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 âFuck Off and Die.â But it is also a task to be accomplished: subcultural style does not merely happen on its ownâthough, to be sure, there are spontaneous elements to it. Rather, subcultures must be madeâconstructed 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 LĂ©vi-Straussâbricolageâto describe how a subcultural style such as punk finds expression (103).
In The Savage Mind, LĂ©vi-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 pastimesâball and billiards, âhunting, shooting, riding,â and the likeâLĂ©vi-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 âat handâ to accomplish some purpose, typically in innovative, unpredictable, and cunning ways. Yes, the bricoleur is truly someone who, to quote LĂ©vi-Strauss, âundertakes odd jobs and is a Jack of all trades, a kind of professional do-it-[yourself-er]â (LĂ©vi-Strauss 1962, 16â17n). But she is much more than just a resourceful fixer of things. And to understand why these Jacks and Jills of all trades interest LĂ©vi-Strauss, I want to revisit his argument briefly.
LĂ©vi-Strauss desires to rescue what others refer to as âprimitive magicâ 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. âMagical thought,â he tells us, âis not to be regarded as a beginning, a rudiment, a sketch, a part of a whole âŠâ Rather, magic constitutes a viable system in its own right, and for this reason, it invites comparisons to âthat other system which constitutes science,â so that we may see them as âtwo parallel modes of acquiring knowledge.â Indeed, LĂ©vi-Strauss devotes much of his argument to the task of illuminating how magic and science ârequire 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 appliedâ (LĂ©vi-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 LĂ©vi-Strauss as âprior scienceâ (15â16). To glimpse how these two âsciencesâ differ, LĂ©vi-Strauss asks us to compare the situation of our mythical handyman bricoleur (underscore mythical) and his counterpart, the trained engineer.
LĂ©vi-Strauss observes that the bricoleur âis adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks,â but those tasks, given their number and variety, as well as their ad hoc and unplanned nature, are not necessarily to be called âprojectsââat least not in the way that an engineer might refer to her work. In other words, the bricoleur âdoes 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.â His materials and tools are finite and heterogeneous, and âthey bear no [necessary] relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular projectâ (LĂ©vi-Strauss 1962, 17). They are, rather, the accumulationsâthe remainsâof earlier constructions and destructions, and they thus represent always and only potential uses that are not yet foreseen: âElements are collected or retained on the principle that âthey may come in handy.â â 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 âthe equipment and knowledge of all trades and professions,â but not so specialized that each tool is limited to âone definite and determinate useâ (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 LĂ©vi-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 âthe new arrangement of [existing] elementsâ and the âcontinual reconstruction of the same formsâ even, or perhaps especially, when those same forms are in disrepair, relegated to the junk heapâwhen, in other words, those forms donât work anymore (LĂ©vi-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, âsatisfactorily explain the world and make it able to be lived inâ (Hawkes 1977, 51).
Now it should be apparent that both Hebdige and LĂ©vi-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 âmyth of consensusâ 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 LĂ©vi-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 âmakingâ 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 âways of using the products imposed by a dominant social orderâ (de Certeau 1984, xiii). He explains:
The âmakingâ in question is a production, a
poisisâbut a hidden one, because it is scattered over areas defined and occupied by systems of âproductionâ (television, urban development, commerce, etc.), and because the steadily increasing expansion of these systems no longer leaves âconsumersâ 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 âconsumption.â 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. (xiiâxiii)
Because âpeople have to make do with what they haveâ and because âwhat they haveâ 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 mutationsâany 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 Certeauâs frequent and favorable allusions to bricolage even though he typically is more inclined to speak of âusesâ and âtacticsâ to describe these arts.2 And while de Certeau acknowledges his debt to LĂ©vi-Strauss and the mythmaking potential of bricolage, he clearly sees bricolage as having neither the unity nor the coherence that LĂ©vi-Strauss posits in his description of âmythological universes.â Rather, in de Certeauâs broader understanding, bricolage represents â âanother kind of âmythologyâ dispersed in time, a sequence of temporal fragments not joined together but disseminated through repetitions and different modes of enjoyment, in memories and successive knowledgesâ (de Certeau 1984, 174â75). If, in fact, bricolage is implicated in mythmaking at all, it is a very different kind of myth than the one that informs LĂ©vi-Straussâs conceptionâa 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 trueânamely, that what he intends to elaborate is a âscience of singularity ⊠a science of the relationship that links everyday pursuits to particular circumstances,â (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 âa politics of such ploys should be developed.â 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 âsuch a politics should ⊠inquire into the public (âdemocraticâ) 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 itâ (xxiv).
Taking my lead from de Certeauâs suggestion, and drawing upon the earlier work of Hebdige and LĂ©vi-Strauss, I wish to propose a differe...