\PassOptionsToPackage{unicode=true}{hyperref} % options for packages loaded elsewhere
\PassOptionsToPackage{hyphens}{url}
%
\documentclass[a4paperpaper,]{article}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage{amssymb,amsmath}
\usepackage{ifxetex,ifluatex}
\usepackage{fixltx2e} % provides \textsubscript
\ifnum 0\ifxetex 1\fi\ifluatex 1\fi=0 % if pdftex
  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
  \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
  \usepackage{textcomp} % provides euro and other symbols
\else % if luatex or xelatex
  \usepackage{unicode-math}
  \defaultfontfeatures{Ligatures=TeX,Scale=MatchLowercase}
\fi
% use upquote if available, for straight quotes in verbatim environments
\IfFileExists{upquote.sty}{\usepackage{upquote}}{}
% use microtype if available
\IfFileExists{microtype.sty}{%
\usepackage[]{microtype}
\UseMicrotypeSet[protrusion]{basicmath} % disable protrusion for tt fonts
}{}
\IfFileExists{parskip.sty}{%
\usepackage{parskip}
}{% else
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
\setlength{\parskip}{6pt plus 2pt minus 1pt}
}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\hypersetup{
            pdftitle={Does DIY mean anything? - a DIY attempt (= essay)},
            pdfauthor={Florian Cramer, 7-2019; originally commissioned for Anrikningsverket Journal \#1 by Norbergfestival, Sweden},
            pdfborder={0 0 0},
            breaklinks=true}
\urlstyle{same}  % don't use monospace font for urls
\usepackage{graphicx,grffile}
\makeatletter
\def\maxwidth{\ifdim\Gin@nat@width>\linewidth\linewidth\else\Gin@nat@width\fi}
\def\maxheight{\ifdim\Gin@nat@height>\textheight\textheight\else\Gin@nat@height\fi}
\makeatother
% Scale images if necessary, so that they will not overflow the page
% margins by default, and it is still possible to overwrite the defaults
% using explicit options in \includegraphics[width, height, ...]{}
\setkeys{Gin}{width=\maxwidth,height=\maxheight,keepaspectratio}
\setlength{\emergencystretch}{3em}  % prevent overfull lines
\providecommand{\tightlist}{%
  \setlength{\itemsep}{0pt}\setlength{\parskip}{0pt}}
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{0}
% Redefines (sub)paragraphs to behave more like sections
\ifx\paragraph\undefined\else
\let\oldparagraph\paragraph
\renewcommand{\paragraph}[1]{\oldparagraph{#1}\mbox{}}
\fi
\ifx\subparagraph\undefined\else
\let\oldsubparagraph\subparagraph
\renewcommand{\subparagraph}[1]{\oldsubparagraph{#1}\mbox{}}
\fi

% set default figure placement to htbp
\makeatletter
\def\fps@figure{htbp}
\makeatother


\title{Does DIY mean anything? - a DIY attempt (= essay)}
\author{Florian Cramer, 7-2019 \and originally commissioned for
\href{https://norbergfestival.com/anrikningsverket-journal}{Anrikningsverket
Journal \#1} by Norbergfestival, Sweden}
\date{}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

\includegraphics{images/01-ghost_ship.jpg}\\
\emph{The DIY space \emph{Ghost Ship}, Oakland, USA, burned down in
2016}

\hypertarget{diy-experience}{%
\section{diy experience}\label{diy-experience}}

When writing about Do-it-yourself culture, one practically needs to have
experienced it first-hand, in the same way in which one needs literacy
for reviewing literature, or at least rudimentary singing or
instrumental practice in order to understand music. Most of those
identifying with DIY culture would probably agree that any part of DIY
culture (such as DIY publishing, squatting, food coops, punk culture,
hacking, self-organized libraries, alternative arts spaces\ldots{}) is
best understood from within, since it includes personal involvement and
entanglement. This brings the messy element of autobiography into this
essay. I am writing from the perspective of a person who has been
involved - like some of my colleagues and peers (out of my head: Craig
Saper, Anna Poletti and Johanna Drucker) - in two rather opposite
cultures: (a) academic humanities, (b) practices such as zine and
printmaking, postal networking (a.k.a. Mail Art), DIY music publishing
and the running of self-organized spaces, all which weren't and still
aren't by themselves recognized as ``art''. The overarching label ``DIY
culture'' seems to have been slapped on to them only recently; or, as
Frida writes in her introduction, these fields now seem to converge.

My work as a reader at an art school involves the introduction of
practices from both (a) and (b) into an institution that traditionally
stood somewhere in between these two, but has always been grounded on
the idea of a professional-institutional arts practice. The basis of
that practice has become fragile and up for renegotiation in times where
public institutions are being dismantled, infrastructures privatized and
professions deprofessionalized, and where DIY production and sharing
conversely has been appropriated as the business model of Internet
platforms. In neoliberalism and other systems with fragile institutions
and infrastructures, ``DIY'' has become the norm. As early as in 1986,
the British cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall described this as
``what Thatcherism regards as the new, vital forces of capitalism: the
small businessmen, the do-it-yourself conveyancers'' (Stuart Hall, No
Light at the End of the Tunnel, \emph{Marxism Today}, December 1986,
15).

As a result, DIY experience has often become cultural capital for those
moving from classical DIY organization into institutions or companies.
When I made my first zine in 1982, as a 13-year-old, I wouldn't have
thought that I would be brought into an art school, first to bring in
Internet expertise, later to run zine workshops there (at age 50).

\hypertarget{note}{%
\section{note}\label{note}}

\includegraphics{images/02-florian_cramer_1982.jpg}\\
\emph{in 1982, taken in the time when I made my first zine}

I normally don't write in an autobiographical style but this subject
seems to demand it, as explained in the beginning. My apologies if this
text sounds self-indulgent. It is not only subjective, but - like
something written for a zine - willfully opinionated, and therefore
inviting disagreement.

\hypertarget{beginnings-and-endings-of-diy}{%
\section{beginnings and endings of
diy}\label{beginnings-and-endings-of-diy}}

A co-worker of mine, Renee Turner, once pointed out to me that my
writing amounts to an extended meditation on Fluxus. Since then, I've
smuggled Fluxus anecdotes into most of my published essays. Fluxus was
in many respects a precursor of contemporary DIY culture, with its
founder George Maciunas rejecting art in favor of a radically
democratic, ``non-elite, non-parasitic'' practices he called
``art-amusement''. One of the first participants of the early 1960s
European Fluxus festivals (which Maciunas financed through his day job
as a graphic designer for the U.S. Army) was the German artist tomas
schmit. Tomas soon fell out with Maciunas because of the latter's
populist tactics, which included the use of Vaudeville typography and
selling funny gadgets in Fluxus stores. In his late life, tomas worked
at an artists' bookstore in Berlin (now Galerie Barbara Wien) which
stocked an extensive amount of DIY publications by former Fluxus
artists, including tomas' own. It was first located in a neighborhood
where tomas was mostly busy preventing junkies from stealing the cash
register. Once, a customer who actually had come for the books picked
one of tomas' self-published booklets. Tomas happened to be person at
the counter on that day and offered him to sign it. The customer, being
unaware whom he was talking to, hastily declined, thinking that he was
dealing with a mad person.

\includegraphics{images/03-tomas_schmit-das_gute_duenken.jpg}\\
\emph{DIY book by tomas schmit}

Maciunas would have likely disapproved of signing the book, an act of
giving it collector and art market value. While Fluxus Editions, the
self-publishing house run by Maciunas, \emph{did} sell signed and
numbered booklets and multiples, it did so only as a compromise with the
participating artists (most of whom didn't subscribe to Maciunas'
communist politics) and economic survival necessities. The ideal of
Fluxus Editions would thus have been cheap industrial mass production.
Yet individual signatures and non-mass production were precisely what
made their products ``DIY''. In that sense, the autographs of white cube
gallery art (which Fluxus was opposed to) are arguably more ``DIY'' than
Fluxus serigraphs. Yet the book store customer's anxiety was anxiety of
DIY: that a mad person, or anyone else who's not \emph{author}-ized,
could deface or damage the commodity he just bought, similar to having
one's newly bought car scratched by a random street artist with their
signature tag.

\includegraphics{images/04-fluxus_street_theater.jpg}\\
\emph{Fluxus as street art in the 1960s}

Authorship is a contentious issue in DIY: The Fluxus anecdote
exemplifies how DIY can both be attributed to extreme romantic
subjectivity, including romanticist notions of authorship and
authenticity, and its opposite of radical collective and commons
practices that give up classical authorship in favor of sharing. (No
matter the practice or technology; and including even phenomena like
Wikipedia which, despite its reach and popularity, remains a DIY
encyclopedia.)

\hypertarget{diy-and-its-other}{%
\section{diy and its other}\label{diy-and-its-other}}

Imagine a future scenario in which \emph{all} printed matters will be
DIY products because all mass media have become electronic. Then
Maciunas' anti-art politics wouldn't have worked. Publishing artists'
books and multiples would not be a means of radically rethinking and
democratizing the art market, but of contributing to a culture of
craftiness and exclusivity. This is what factually happened to
artist-made books today, as they are shown at the NY Art Book Fair and
elsewhere, including the Fluxus booklets and multiples that have become
collector's items; a development anticipated in the 19th century when
the socialist Arts and Crafts movements advocated hand-made goods for
the masses against industrial capitalism, but ended up making luxury
items for the few. DIY, in other words, has an inherent \emph{Arts and
Crafts trap}, next to the Facebook, Instagram, Google and Airbnb trap of
participation platform capitalism (more on that later).

\includegraphics{images/05-william_morris-news_from_nowhere.jpg}\\
\emph{William Morris' science fiction novel \emph{News from Nowhere}, a
socialist manifesto for Arts \& Crafts}

However, if Arts and Crafts' ambitions would have been realized, or if
one does not merely consider industrialized cultures and societies, then
the following is true: wherever things are always self-made, the term
\emph{do-it-yourself} makes no sense, since it no longer describes a
difference. Conversely, it makes no sense to call the making of things
in pre-, non- or weakly industrialized eras and areas ``DIY'' unless one
simply views them through the lens of industrialization.
Self-organization in areas lacking infrastructures and institutions is
only ``DIY'' when one takes the existence of such infrastructures and
institutions for granted.

DIY thus only exists through its other: an industrial economy. It can
only be identified through an industrial-colonial gaze.

\hypertarget{diy-vs.art}{%
\section{diy vs.~art}\label{diy-vs.art}}

Movements like Dada and Fluxus adopted work methods from musical
performance and political activism and drew on non-Western cultures
(questionably in Dada with its ``negro chant'' poetry performances, more
consequential in Fluxus as an American-Southeast Asian movement) to
revolutionize art. Today's contemporary art system included these
impulses superficially but watered them down to what fits a white cube.
While art is thus content with being ``fine art'' again, DIY cultures
conversely seem to be less interested than in the past in alternatives
to the art system. While ``art'' (in its difference to both ``crafts''
and everyday popular ``culture'') has become an increasingly
questionable, dated, either commercial or institutional,
Western-specific concept, DIY culture has become more indifferent about
art than in the past.

Art in this modern Western sense only existed since the mid-18th century
when the Latin word ``ars'' and its modern European equivalents ceased
to generally refer to arts, crafts and sciences. It is very possible
that those two-and-a-half centuries, in merely one world region, will
remain the historical exception. But if ``art'' should revert to its
older meaning of arts, crafts, sciences and technique, then ``DIY
culture'' will no longer describe a meaningful difference to
institutional art.

\hypertarget{apparatus}{%
\section{apparatus}\label{apparatus}}

Neither does \emph{DIY} make sense when a certain practice does not
require any complex institutional or technological apparatus. Good
examples include writing - which, with its minimal dependency on
production technology, is ``DIY'' by definition - and (a-capella)
singing: As long as artificial intelligence bots haven't taken over
writing (and industrialized staff writing is the exception rather than
the norm in the overall volume of what is getting written every day) and
as long as Autotune and speech synthesis haven't taken over singing, the
notions of ``DIY writing'' and ``DIY singing'' are redundant and rather
incomprehensible.

\hypertarget{romanticism-reaction}{%
\section{romanticism \& reaction}\label{romanticism-reaction}}

Traditionally, DIY culture departs from a critique of disembodied and
alienated industrial or institutional production for which it envisions
an autonomist alternative. This critique exists in Marxist,
left-anarchist, religious/spiritual, conservative and extreme right-wing
ideological forms. A common epistemological origin, for Western culture,
lies in 19th century romanticism as a counter-reaction to the industrial
revolution. If the lineage of DIY practices goes at least as far back as
to Arts and Crafts and extends to contemporary alternative cultures and
collapsologies, then DIY has always been conservative \emph{and}
anti-conservative at the same time, depending on which concepts and
practices it either rejected or sought to preserve. It even is
\emph{reactionary} if one clings to the literal meaning of that word.

\hypertarget{left-right}{%
\section{left \& right}\label{left-right}}

Today, DIY culture is the overcoupling moniker for squat-style art
centers and spaces as they were targeted for shutdown by an
\href{https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/4chan-safety-squad-raids}{extreme
right/`Alt-Right' meme war operation in 2016} \emph{and} for the
doomsday prepper activism of people who might have been involved in that
same operation, and even for the websites - the anonymous,
participatory, low-tech \emph{4chan} and \emph{8chan} imageboards - on
which the operation was launched. Both \emph{Ghost Ship} (the Oakland
DIY space that burned down in 2016) and \emph{4chan}/\emph{8chan} are
two sides of contemporary DIY culture.

\includegraphics{images/06-answer_me.jpg}\\
\emph{Second issue of \emph{Answer Me!}, an early 1990s underground zine
that included the extreme right in its narrative of transgression and
whose editor has become an icon of the `Alt-Right'}

This was just as true in the past. DIY has historically included actors
from the extreme left and the extreme right, with both fighting
institutions and industrial capitalism. Radical DIY movements and
subcultures from punk (including Crass as well as Skrewdriver) and zine
making, noise music (involving Throbbing Gristle as well as Boyd Rice)
to Internet meme warfare (involving Anonymous and the `Alt-Right' on
\emph{4chan}) always involved actors from both political camps.

\hypertarget{collapsology-vs.diy-super-stores}{%
\section{collapsology vs.~diy super
stores}\label{collapsology-vs.diy-super-stores}}

DIY is a survivalist strategy, both in the sense of emotional survival
(such as in queer and people of color communities and self-help zines)
and physical survival. The latter is becoming more pronounced in times
of impeding ecological catastrophe and collapse of civilization. It
unites different political factions, too.

The document \emph{Alternatives to the Singularity}, collectively
written by a network of futurologists in 2011, includes the
``Hexayurtularity'' as one of its 82 dystopian futurological visions.
The Hexayurtularity unites the left and right, digital and non-, post-
or anti-digital DIY cultures: ``global currency collapse meets DARPA
sponsored DIY state regeneration projects led by Scottish Burning
Manstyle collapsitarian gurus. Your future made of plywood.
Scythe-wielding Afghan poets and wobble bass.'' (The document has been
archived
\href{https://monoskop.org/images/0/03/Alternatives_to_the_Singularity_2011.pdf}{on
the Monoskop website}.)

This scenario points to two manifestations and aspects of contemporary
DIY: factual extremist DIYers such as the Unabomber and, as their
opposite, \emph{Home Depot} shoppers, i.e.~the consumers (or
``prosumers'') of the kind of stores that are commonly called ``DIY
Superstores'' in America.

\includegraphics{images/07-henry_david_thoreau-walden.jpg}\\
\emph{First edition of Henry David Thoreau's \emph{Walden}}

\includegraphics{images/08-temporary_services-self_reliance_library.jpg}\\
\emph{DIY zine by Temporary Services, Chicago}

The Unabomber could be seen as the radicalization, Home Depot as the
mainstreaming and commodification of a DIY mythology created in Henry
David Thoreau's 1854 book \emph{Walden}, an autobiographical account of
leaving civilization and living an autonomist life in the woods.
Although many other (non-American, non-Western, and older) sources could
be pulled into a cultural history of DIY, the name and its associated
culture remains American at its core, linked to a history that
prominently includes Thoreau and his concept of ``civil disobedience''
as well as the (often right-wing and Christian-fundamentalist)
homesteader movement.

\hypertarget{poetics}{%
\section{poetics}\label{poetics}}

\begin{quote}
the writing machine is for everybody do it yourself until the machine
comes here is the system according to us (William S. Burroughs, Brion
Gysin, \emph{The Third Mind}, 1977)
\end{quote}

An immediate forerunner of DIY manuals are \emph{poetics} books from the
antiquity to the Renaissance. The \emph{Poetic Funnel} (\emph{Poetischer
Trichter}) of the 17th century German poet and scholar Georg Philipp
Harsdörffer promised to funnel the art of poetry into anyone. It is
factually a DIY manual for literary writing (heavily based on Julius
Caesar Scaliger's 1561 \emph{Poetices}).

Considering the meaning of the Greek word \emph{poeisis}, making, DIY
amounts to a poetics in the most literal sense. In the 18th century,
Western art theory largely abandoned poetics in favor of the
newly-coined aesthetics, in an act of shifting the definition of art
from making to perception (\emph{aisthesis}). The expulsion of making
from art - that is still very much in place wherever art is defined as
conceptual, post-conceptual or more recently ``post-contemporary'' -
conversely opened up a space for DIY as poetics.

In a European context, DIY cultural strategies are more commonly
associated with self-publishing and its historical origins in the
reformation age, political pamphletism and literary writing since the
18th century (as documented by Craig Dworkin, Simon Morris and Nick
Thurston in the sourcebook \emph{Do or DIY}, Information as Material,
2012).

In the arts, DIY thus not only stands for anti-institutionalism, outside
either white cubes or creative industries. It also implies
anti-aestheticism wherever it frames itself as technical practices that
can be picked up by everyone.

The characteristics of the punk movement - ``DIY politics, DIY
organisation, DIY publishing and printing {[}\ldots{}{]} all linked
together'' (quoted from the book \emph{Ripped, Torn and Cut. Pop,
politics and punk fanzines from 1976}, Manchester University Press,
2018) - effectively applies to every radical DIY movement.

\hypertarget{mainstreamed-diy}{%
\section{mainstreamed diy}\label{mainstreamed-diy}}

The 1960s/70s US-American \emph{Whole Earth Catalog} marked the
convergence of proto-``Maker Culture'', Thoreau-inspired counterculture
and DIY superstores. As both a manual and a product catalog, it gave
``access to tools'' (its motto) for squatters as well for homesteaders.
Its publisher, Stewart Brand, went on to become a Silicon Valley
entrepreneur. The 1980s, San Francisco-based social network \emph{WELL}
("Whole Earth `Lectronic Link"), a conceptual forerunner of Facebook,
marked the transition from 1960s countercultural entrepreneurship to
'New Economy' startup capitalism. (This history has been documented
among others in Lutz Dammbeck's 2004 documentary film \emph{The Net} and
Fred Turner's 2006 book \emph{From Counterculture to Cyberculture}.)

\includegraphics{images/09-whole_earth_catalog.jpg}\\
\emph{First issue of the \emph{Whole Earth Catalog}}

Craig Saper observed a similar tendency in Fluxus. Starting in 1967,
Maciunas tried to convert two Manhattan houses into an artist-run
housing project: ``George Maciunas's FluxHouse project functioned like a
DIY development corporation, but with cooperative and social capitalists
motivations. Maciunas referred to it as entrepreneurial communism, but
now the phrase social entrepreneurs describes similar projects like the
Kiva or Kickstarter projects.'' (Craig S. Saper/dj readies,
\emph{Intimate Bureaucracies: A Manifesto}, Punctum Books, 2012, 2.)

The transition from DIY to the so-called ``New Economy'' is best
embodied by hacker culture which applied counter-cultural and autonomist
DIY principles 1:1 to technological systems. Today, this also includes
techno-utopian and transhumanist movements that believe in total
makeability. The 2014 Xenofeminist manifesto, for example, suggests that
``we {[}can{]} stitch together the embryonic promises held before us by
pharmaceutical 3D printing (`reactionware'), grassroots telemedical
abortion clinics, gender hacktivist and DIY-HRT forums, and so on, to
assemble a platform for free and open-source medicine''.

Applications of DIY to science and high technology expose an internal
contradiction within DIY movements: between (a) categorical rejections
of complex technologies and complex systems from which DIY seems to
offer rescue, and (b) applications of the DIY principle to such systems
themselves.

This begs the question whether DIY is still a useful term at all, or
whether it doesn't rather serve to gloss over, obscure, sugarcoat and
create fake common sense around extremely opposite
philosophical-political agendas and forces.

\hypertarget{postscript-scrap-buffer-leftovers}{%
\section{postscript / scrap buffer /
leftovers}\label{postscript-scrap-buffer-leftovers}}

The above differences become blatantly visible as soon as two opposing
camps reclaim DIY for themselves: Silicon Valley companies for their
``participatory'' social networks as opposed to zine and DIY print
makers who have come to understand their medium as a counter-practice to
these systems. (Which seems to have replaced art as the frame of
reference: where Mail Art and zine making might have been alternative
art practices in the 1970s and 1980s, they are now seen as alternative
social networking practices. This development already manifested itself
with the terminological shift from ``Mail Art'' to ``Eternal Network''
in the 1980s/1990s.)

However, these DIY alternative practices tend to have their own blind
spots: lack of intersectionality, despite claims to the contrary; high
dependency on mainstream social media platforms in community
organization; DIY spaces being a driver of gentrification in their
cities (including privatization of public spaces); involuntary execution
of neoliberal agendas that shift public services and responsibilities to
DIY private initiatives (which the king of the country where I live
praised as the ``participation society'' in his inauguration speech to
the throne). The old blind spots of both political activism and
contemporary art thus carry over into contemporary DIY culture.

Instead of Maciunas' ``entrepreneurial communism'', these contemporary
clusters of neoliberal and communitarian agendas - no matter whether
they're perpetuated by self-organized communities, municipalities or
companies - result in something that may be called ``platform
communitarianism''.

It still remains to be seen whether the alternative social networking of
contemporary DIY culture will eventually amount to post-digital
repetitions of 1990s digital culture mistakes: whether contemporary DIY
culture will eventually yield its own (non-digital) Whole Earth
Catalogues, Apples, Ubers and Airbnbs.

\end{document}
