Walden and DIY Ontology

In our DIY Writing class we have been reading Walden. I hadn’t realized the extent to which Thoreau can be counted as one of the founders of DIY thinking. This is great, because to me the DIY mindset is synonymous with computers and writing. And probably something that will be needed to save English studies, help transform education, and bring fulfillment to people.

The links to contemporary phenomena like Web 2.0 or creative pedagogy and DIY are nothing new. But the founding sounds in Walden push what might become too practical a focus back into idea space. For Thoreau there is a kind of DIY ontology that threads through our conceptual and educational endeavors:

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. (9)

For education:

The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme—a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection—to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, while the students that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights successive generations have to pay. I think that it would be better than this, for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation themselves. (34)

Theoretically, this ontology also prefigures many of the contemporary DIY constructs layered over the social Web, which tend, roughly, along the lines of technology-mediated shifts in access enabling individuals and groups to be not only consumers but also producers of media. Of students, Thoreau urges “that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end” (34). There is a performative dimension to the DIY ontology and aesthetic. The emphasis on process links Thoreau’s DIY credo with conceptions of becoming and the active movements of time:

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviae from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter. (204)

This is DIY performance meant to illuminate the acting subject and world, and as such it brings focus to emergence and moments of passing time. The mobius instances where past flows into future at the point of the present are central to DIY aesthetics and philosophy. Like the tree emerging through its accumulating wooden layers, or the carver lost in the stripping of bark, Thoreau suggests that the authentic action recasts our understanding of time:

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. (11)

The point is that DIY does not simply stand for a means of getting practical work done. Nor is simply meant to represent reshuffling social or media boundaries. DIY goes hand in hand with the subject of the book, transformation.

We see this in the many examples of boundary breaking offered by Thoreau. Most of these examples display the astute sense the recognizes the humans are bound with institutional fetters that can be countered by the DIY approach: “As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail” (56). Or, “I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society” (115).

The recognition that DIY endeavors can transcend bonds again echoes philosophical as we hear, perhaps, Nietzsche’s call for art to tear open new channels as perceptions of the world become hardened through institutions like language. Thoreau, too, tells us that “we need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander” (210) and that “the universe is wider than our views of it” (211). Of course, the boundaries and institutional constraints matter, for without them where would we find opportunities for transformation? The DIY approach, the many experiments, the sounding of the pond all suggest new perceptions that transcend what have become conventional understandings of the world.

For Thoreau, the key medium is the word. And just as a more authentic experience can be had from shifting our relationships with the owl or the ant, transformations are to be had from artistic crafting of our communicative materials:

It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. (162)

So we’re called back to workshops for our words, to ply the trade of meaning making using the materials of language. This makes sense because mediums offer both constraints and opportunities for transformation. The key for Thoreau is an authentic posture that drives our experience through a given medium, a DIY artistic function that is artistic precisely because it understands, then plays with material constraints: “If you would know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cowboy or the partridge. It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them” (116).

And for contemporary champions of Web 2.0 endeavors, the lesson is much the same today as it was in 1850. Producing rather than consuming is only half the measure of true DIY engagements with life. In fact, the biggest danger is perhaps that technologies become yet another mediator between our selves and authentic experience and thought:

The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side . . . With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them. (78)

The potential loss of authentic engagement and the mediation wrought by nineteenth-century institutions and technologies is likely a danger that has only amplified in the intervening century and a half. The key move today is to expand our understanding of modes of and mediums for transformation. Words were once a mode through which we might reestablish engagement through DIY expression. They still are. And now we have other modes as well—images, sounds, motion. Things like ice, sky, and wood were similarly materials that might be engaged by the DIY philosopher to enjoy authentic experience. Now we have communicative materials that call for similar DIY experimentation and engagement—mxing boards, layer palettes, scrubbing timelines. We have the means and the materials. We just need to make sure to include the higher philosophical and artistic calling.

Passages are from Walden and Civil Disobedience. Ed. Owen Thomas. New York: Norton 1966.