This is Ragbags and Bricolage, a newsletter (of sorts) where I will gather interesting articles, quotes, thoughts, and other such things in the fashion of ragbags and bricolage.
ragbag (n): “a bag in which scraps of fabric and old clothes are kept for use”
bricolage (n): from French bricoler (to tinker), “construction or creation from a diverse range of available things”
Back in the Tumblr days of the Internet, a certainly pseudonymous Raynor Ganan ran an account named “The Ragbag.” My early education in etymology began with his regular “Words Wholly Unrelated” posts (who knew that “female” and “male” came from totally separate roots? Certainly not high-school aged me). I once tried my own hand at this sort of thing with “macaroni” and “blessed” (words somewhat related!) on my own cursed Tumblr. That interest in etymology found further fodder in the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.
Bricolage is a related and important concept. As popularized by Jeffrey Stout, bricolage refers to the necessity of piecing together our knowledge and language about the world from whatever is at hand, where the “bricks”1 we are using can’t ever be made to fit perfectly together, even if we can always find better arrangements. Stout likens this process of bricolage to a metaphor from Otto Neurath:
We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
And so, by gathering interesting scraps of etymology, philosophy, politics, ethics, and literature into the ragbag, this “newsletter” will attempt at some sort of “gradual reconstruction” of knowledge about the world and the way of things, in the manner of a bricoleur (a practitioner of bricolage).
This kind of meandering post is what you can anticipate (or dread) should you hit the subscribe button below. Thanks for reading!
“Bricolage” and “brick” are words wholly unrelated. But bricolage is a kind of “brick-laying,” and both are important concepts for learning to navigate the world virtuously. Or, at least, that is one way I try to reconcile the disagreements of Jeffrey Stout and Stanley Hauerwas (my former professor) over the nature of bricolage and intellectual traditions.