/philosophy/ -The bricoleur and the meme farmer

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The bricoleur and the meme farmer Anonymous 02/11/17 (Sat) 17:59:18 4b8fbc No.4983

In his 1962 work, "The Savage Mind", Claude Lévi-Strauss lays out the dichotomy of the bricoleur and the engineer. A bricoleur is one who practices bricolage, which is a sort of improvisation; bricoleurs 'tinker', they creatively use whatever tools and materials are at hand to complete various odd jobs as they arise. For Lévi-Strauss, the bricoleur has the 'savage mind' and engages in mythological thinking, while the engineer has the 'scientific mind' and engages in scientific thinking. What we're talking about here is different ways of creating and disseminating meaning through the manipulation of signs. Quoting Lévi-Strauss:

>"The 'bricoleur' is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with 'whatever is at hand', that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions. The set of the 'bricoleur's' means cannot therefore be defined in terms of a project. It is to be defined only by its potential use or, putting this another way and in the language of the bricoleur himself, because the elements are collected or retained on the principle that they may always come in handy. Such elements are specialized up to a point, sufficiently for the bricoleur not to need the equipment and knowledge of all trades and professions, but not enough for each of them to have only one definite and determinate use. They each represent a set of actual and possible relations; they are 'operators' but they can be used for any operations of the same type."

Furthermore:

>"Mythical thought, that bricoleur, builds up structures by fitting together events, or rather the remains of events, while science, 'in operation' simply by virtue of coming into being, creates its means and results in the form of events, thanks to the structures which it is constantly elaborating and which are its hypotheses and theories. But it is important not to make the mistake of thinking that these are two stages or phases in the evolution of knowledge. Both approaches are equally valid. Physics and chemistry are already striving to become qualitative again, that is to account also for secondary qualities which when they have been explained will in their turn become means of explanation. And biology may perhaps be marking time waiting for this before it can itself explain life. Mythical thought 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. But it also acts as a liberator by its protest against the idea that anything can be meaningless with which science at first resigned itself to a compromise."

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Anonymous 02/11/17 (Sat) 17:59:33 4b8fbc No.4984

>>4983

Now, in "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", Derrida criticizes Lévi-Strauss' notion of the engineer, arguing that the engineer must actually be a myth of the bricoleur, another bricoleur himself in fact, as no individual can be the absolute origin of their own discourse. And furthermore, the bricoleur gains its meaning through its difference with the impossibility of the engineer. Whereas Lévi-Strauss argued that neither the bricoleur nor the engineer necessarily supersedes the other, Derrida argued that there are only bricoleurs. But this is orthogonal to the subject at hand, which is memes.

Memes have become an internet cultural phenomenon, lately bleeding over into real life. Some people refer to 2016 election as the "Great Meme War", and a presidential candidate even referenced certain memes in a high-profile speech. There even exists a veritable encyclopedia of memes along with numerous sites that simplify the creation of memes. There are even memes about being a 'meme farmer', which sounds a lot like being a bricoleur.

In fact, the very term 'meme', coined by Richard Dawkins in the 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene", was, as he explains himself, 'hijacked', and that while the original idea meant a random mutation spread by a form of Darwinian selection, 'internet memes' are altered deliberately by human creativity. The 'bricoleurs' repurposed the scientific concept of 'meme' for the mythological concept of 'internet meme', and thereby became 'meme farmers'.

How does a meme farmer tend to her memes? She maintains a collection of images and videos, characters, situations, reactions, concepts, tropes, one-liners, quotes, references, symbols, etc. She plays with them; she mixes and matches different elements until she creates a rearrangement relevant to whatever happens to be her subject of interest. Different elements applied to different structures relevant to different events.

Now lets looks at Lévi-Strauss' explication of the work of the bricoleur:

>"The elements of mythical thought lie half-way between percepts and concepts. It would be impossible to separate percepts from the concrete situations in which they appeared, while recourse to concepts would require that thought could, at least provisionally, put its projects (to use Husserl's expression) 'in brackets'. Now there is an intermediary between images and concepts, namely signs. For signs can always be defined in the way introduced by Saussure in the case of the particular category of linguistic signs, that is, as a link between images and concepts. In the union thus brought about, images and concepts play the part of the signifying and signified respectively."

>"Signs resemble images in being concrete entitites but they resemble concepts in their powers of reference. Neither concepts nor signs relate exclusively to themselves; either may be substituted for something else. Concepts, however, have an unlimited capacity in this respect, while signs have not. The example of the bricoleur helps to bring out the differences and similarities. Consider him at work and excited by his 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. He interrogates all the heterogeneous objects of which his treasury is composed to discover what each of them could 'signify' and so contribute to the definition of a set which has yet to materialize but which will ultimately differ from the instrumental set only in the internal disposition of its parts…But the possibilities always remain limited by the particular history of each piece and by those of its features which are already determined by the use for which it was originally intended or the modifications it has undergone for other purposes. The elements which the bricoleur collects and uses are preconstrained like the constitutive units of myth, the possible combinations of which are restricted by the fact that they are drawn from the language where they already possess a sense which sets a limit on their freedom of maneuvre. 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."

tl;dr: If you consider yourself a meme farmer, then you should investigate Structuralism and Post-Structuralism

Disclaimer: this post and the subject matter and contents thereof - text, media, or otherwise - do not necessarily reflect the views of the 8kun administration.