the metaphoric roots of maker culture - stanford university press blog.pdf

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The Metaphoric Roots of Maker Culture

On the tension and the ground of object repurposing.

y RAYMOND MALEWITZ
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A 2008 Maker Faire in San Mateo, Calif. Photo by Jon Davis, CC BY-SA-3.0via Wikimedia Commons.

People have long been fascinated by the creative ways that humans repurpose objects to suit their particular needs and desires. Recentl

number of artists, historians, and critics have begun to document the myriad cases of object repurposing and the impulses behind themmyself included. In The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture, I examined some of these prac

s they surfaced in literature, art, and other cultural artifacts within the United States from the 1960s to the present. I spent the majorit

he book outlining the strange interrelationships that arise among object repurposing, contemporary Maker communities such as

nstructables, post-apocalyptic literature, and American left- and right-libertarian politics.

f I had to do it over again, Id add the hit television seriesProject Runway, which issues an annual unconventional challenge asking

ontestants to fashion clothing out of material scrounged from a hardware store, a grocery store, or a candy store.
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ThoughProject Runway, and the other aforementioned examples are specifically American case studies of object repurposing, these

ctivities are not, of course, limited to the United States. Stephen CoatesX-Ray Audio Projecttells the story of how Russian audiophile

legally distributed Western music within the Soviet Union during the 1950s using used x-ray plates scavenged from the waste bins of l

ospitals. As he notes, the plates typically preserved the skeletal images from the plates and for this reason were called bones or rib

music (roentgenizdat).
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Image courtesy ofX-Ray Audio Project.

n a similar vein, Cuban artists and designers Ernesto Oroza and Diango Henandez have amassed an enormous collection of repurpose

rtifacts assembled during the late 1980s and 1990s in Cuba. This Special Period (Perodo especial) coincided with the dissolution of oviet Union, and the resultant economic isolation encouraged an incredible amount of DIY experimentation in Cuba. Within Oroza an

Henandezs collection are television antennae made out of metal food trays, fans and shoe-polishing machines made out of washing

machine motors, and motorized vehicles called rikimbili out of fumigation machines and water pumps.
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The Practice of Misuse shows

ow rugged consumerism reflects

he dynamic social history of

bjects in the U.S. from the 1960s

o the present.

Oroza understands these objects as manifestations of what he calls technological disobedience; Cubans disrespected the authority h

y these contemporary objects. This disrespect yields a new, active, playful way of interacting with objects that considers all of these

ymbols that unify an objectthat make it a unique entity [disappear].

If object repurposing is a kind of technological disobedience, these varied examples suggest tha

that disobedience changes to fit different national and historical contexts. From the anti-Soviet w

of bones to the post-Cold War message of rikimbili to the DIY culture of American Maker

communities, repurposing is a practice constituted by political transformation as much as object

experimentation. But how might these diverse activities be brought together and read as

manifestations of a shared aesthetic practice? Borrowing from the history of rhetorical analysis,

contend that the pleasure that we get from seeing objects repurposed in surprising ways operates

along the same lines as the pleasure we get when we encounter a surprising metaphor in creative

writing.

As we are taught in literature classes, metaphors are figures of speech that compare two differen

things. My favorite metaphor comes from Annie DillardsPilgrim at Tinker Creek:the unnamed

narrator looks into a river in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and watches water turtles

gliding down with the current in a series of easy, weightless push-offs, as men bound on the moo

As this example richly suggests, the two terms in a metaphor share a common ground (or tert

comparationis in rhetorical analysis)in this case, the similar slow-motion action of a turtle mo

through water and an astronaut moving through a vacuum on the moon. A metaphor also requir

tension that generates surprise and that therefore startles the reader into a new kind of percep

in this case, the surprising commonality between very different species and contexts. This surp

in turn, defamiliarizes both turtle and astronaut, enabling us to recover what the great Russian

literary critic Victor Shklovsky calls the sensation of life; [art] exists to make one feel things, to

make the stone stony. Or, in this case, Dillard makes the turtle turtle-y.

There are plenty of ways to screw this process up, of course, which makes crafting a good metaphor challenging. Too much groundsay

water turtle being compared to a person swimmingand the metaphor loses its surprising tension. Too much tensionsay, the same tu

eing compared to a laptop computerand the tertium comparationis seems arbitrary and obscure.

omething similar happens, I think, when we examine our affective responses to various examples of object repurposing. Surely the

leasure of listening to a bootleg Soviet x-ray record has little to do with sound quality. Indeed, a critic for the London Guardian likened

xperience to listening to music heard from across a street being pummelled by torrential rain. Instead, the pleasure seems metaphor
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pleasure that is tied to the surprise and recognition of seeing ribs and other bones on a crudely cut record.

On the one hand, the bones call attention to the common material properties of thin vinyl records and thin glass x-ray plates. This, with

he terms of the metaphor analogy, is the ground uniting two unlike things. On the other hand, the differences between the two objects

ypical contexts (one serious, scientific, and visual, the other playful, commercial, and auditory) generate the surprising tension that

alances with the ground to create a material metaphor.

f I am correct, this metaphor enables us to see why certain acts of object repurposing delight us and others do not. Consider two examp

ne, a disposable coffee cup turned into seed starting trays and turf made from recycled rubber tires.

Left: paper cup used to hold seedlings. Right: Field turf made from recycled rubber tires.

n the first case, the original function of the cup is essentially preserved: instead of holding hot liquids, it now holds loose dirt. While th

hanged function may provoke some pleasureperhaps appealing to our anxieties about our ever-increasing environmental footprint

epurposed object has too much ground and not enough tension to be metaphorical. In the second case, the original artifactsused

utomobile tiresis completely effaced in its transformation into artificial turf, eliminating the ground for a material metaphor and,

otentially, obscuring its health dangers in the process. In neither case do we delight in the material experimentation in the same way t

we marvel at the ingenuity of a food tray antenna or the preposterousness of a dress made out of licorice sticks.
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This aesthetic model of object repurposing is not without its flaws (it is a metaphor after all!) but it does provide a way of understandin

ur affective responses to the DIY culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. Or at the very least, it enables us to evaluate the quality of wor

he next unconventional challenge.

tart reading The Practice of Misuse

Raymond Malewitz is Assistant Professor of English at the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State

University and author of The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture.

Posted on June 2, 2015 in Literary Theory | Permalink

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