Chronicling The Bricoleur

Scott McLemee:

The notion of the bricoleur exerted a certain charm among the strenuously professionalizing, for it offered the gratifying prospect of imagining a tactile and worldly dimension to one’s intellectual activity. The bits and pieces of various theories or systems could be regarded as parts of a rough-and-ready "tool kit." If they were incomplete or out-of-date—well, so much the better: To "make do" was a challenge to prove one’s knack. Thinking became tinkering. And while the status-minded protocols of professionalization might seem to demand ever-greater rationalization and bureaucratization of intellectual life itself, the fantasy of bricolage gave one permission to see the accumulation of cultural capital as infinitely flexible and almost automatically self-regenerating. The bricoleur’s bag of tricks "is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock," as Lévi-Strauss wrote, "or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions."

Enter Richard Sennett, whose book The Craftsman is the first volume in a projected trilogy — but also the latest in a series of reflections on the damage to the social fabric caused by the reigning economic system, whatever one might want to call it. ("Neoliberalism" implies a new order; "late capitalism," something decrepit. Either way, it sounds like wishful thinking.) Sennett’s work is not easy to pigeonhole. It roams with barely legal freedom between political philosophy, social psychology, art history, urbanism, and yesterday’s news about downsizing.

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