Bricolage

Bricolage is the process of taking consumer objects and symbols and putting them together in new configurations to create new meanings. Examples of bricolage in consumer culture include the use of the safety pin in punk subcultures or, in the United Kingdom, the Volkswagen car insignia in hip-hop culture as personal decorative items: a sort of homemade jewelry made from nonjewelry items. The term is usually used to describe the practices of groups or subcultures for whom the use of consumer symbols provides an identity that is resistant to the dominant culture from which the symbols were appropriated. Although primarily associated with British subcultural groups, such as punks, mods, Teds, and skinheads, the term is now used widely to describe any active “putting together” of styles, music, settings, and objects that contribute to a group identity.

The term bricolage (from the French bricoler: to arrange, to “potter”) has been used in various disciplines (including visual arts, architecture, and linguistics, as well as in the social sciences) to refer to the process of “putting together” of different items. Its influence in studies of consumption originates from the seminal use of the term by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, between 1964 and 1991. This usage borrows heavily from the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, which describes bricolage as the improvisations of ordinary people in making order and meaning from the world around them. The Birmingham school approach also favored a broader model of hegemonic power that relied on ideas of negotiation and partial consent within hierarchies. Other important influences on the use of the term include Surrealist art, particularly the use of “ready mades,” such as Marcel Duchamp's “Fountain,” constructed from a urinal. Its use by the Birmingham school means that bricolage has a particularly British and European pedigree, yet the term has traveled well, capturing the process of using style and consumption to display active or resistant group membership across the world and in many different settings.

The publication by members of the CCCS of the key texts Resistance through Rituals in 1976, and Subcultures in 1979, launched the notion of bricolage as stylistic politics, in which groups of young people used style and consumption as a way of marking differences from dominant and parental cultures. In this context, bricolage refers to the presentation of a collection of cultural and consumer symbols by youth groups to define specific group identities. Important, however, is that the presentation of symbols often involves the subverting of original or intended meanings, or the reuse (the term appropriation is often used in this context) of symbols alongside other contradictory or jarring symbols. Perhaps the most widely known example of this type of bricolage is from the punk subculture, originating in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, but then spreading to the United States and beyond. Punk became the archetypal do-it-yourself bricolage, in which not only did musical skill matter less than “making noise” with instruments, but key symbols of authority, such as images of the British aristocracy (the queen's portrait, tartan), were placed playfully on clothing and record covers, alongside reappropriated tokens of throw-away consumer culture, such as the safety pin and ripped plastic bag.

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