Statement 47
“The only weakness of bricolage – but seen as a weakness is it not irremediable? – is a total inability to justify itself in its own discourse. The already-there-ness of instruments; and of concepts cannot be undone or reinvented. In that sense, the passage from desire to discourse always loses itself in bricolage, it builds its castles with debris ("Mythical thought ... builds ideological castles out of the debris of what was once a social discourse." [Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. 32 [p. 21]). In the best of cases, the discourse of bricolage can confess itself, confess in itself its desire and its defeat, provoke the thought of the essence and the necessity of the already-there, recognize that the most radical discourse, the most inventive and systematic engineer are surprised and circumvented by a history, a language, etc., a world (for 'world" means nothing else) from which they must borrow their tools, if only to destroy the former machine ( the strop-catapult [bricole] seems originally to have been a machine of war or the hunt, constructed to destroy. And who can believe the image of the peaceful bricoleur?). The idea of the engineer breaking with all bricolage is dependent on a creationist theology. Only such a theology can sanction an essential and rigorous difference between the engineer and the bricoleur. But that the engineer should always be a sort of bricoleur should not ruin all criticism of bricolage; quite the contrary. Criticism in what sense? First of all, if the difference between bricoleur and engineer is basically theological, the very concept of bricolage implies a fall and an accidental finitude. This techno-theological significance must be abandoned in order to think the originary appurtenance of desire to discourse, of discourse to the history of the world, and the already-three-ness of the language in which desire deludes itself. Then, even supposing that, by bricolage, one conserves the idea of bricolage, one must know that all bricolages are not equally worthwhile. Bricolage criticizes itself.”
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, 138-9
