Second Cycle: de Certeau on Making Do in the Everyday and Thai Noodle Salad

[processpark]

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 29-30 :: In spite of measures taken to repress or conceal it, la perruque (or its equivalent) is infiltrating itself everywhere and becoming more and more common. It is only one case among all the practices which introduce artistic tricks and competitions of accomplices into a system that reproduces and partitions through work or leisure. Sly as a fox and twice as quick: there are countless ways of "making do." ::

Santina's Thai Noodle Salad & Lemon Curd Pavlova

[processpark]

@santinaamato: Link to American Life podcast mentioned this morning: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/this-american-life/id201671138?mt=2&i=404675444

And this is the email chain I've been talking about that relates back to my work and has been suggested that it's my manifesto. I'm up for title suggestions or how you guys go about creating titles work. I'm sooooo bad at it!

Emails.pdf

[processpark]

A few things to take from de Certeau:

The Practice of Everyday Life refers to a way of seeing one's own engagement with the constructed environments we find ourselves in. Constructed in the sense that they are presupposed, preexisting and already determinate of a certain ruleset that begs our own engagement. Relating to Dewey's experience and the agency found in experience, de Certeau suggests that agency lies in one's interaction with exterior systems. The tactic of "making do" allows one to creatively alter a system through engagement. This engagement, it is important to note, is oftentimes coerced, however, thoughts of how to alter seemingly-all-encompassing systems gains a certain lightness. Does a laugh alter a system's parameters or merely point out its boundaries?

De Certeau couches the sense of self as encountering a system outside of the bounds within in which one was raised. Specifically envoking the experience of a North African migrant to Paris, he says: "by an art of being in between, he draws unexpected results from his situation." Is "misuse" of an object, space or relation inherently creative? Is the act of engaging a system art?

[jjuliaa]

Making Do as finding ways to choose aspects of one's path/work/purpose.

[norankhan]

On Kilogirls and making do regardless:

I'm thinking about our visit with Santina yesterday, the idea that the work goes on, regardless of whether it is seen or not. Women make do, no matter the situation - because it is what we have always been doing. We work, we care, we carry and move and build. We form emotional bonds and support that sustains communities, groups, undertakings. Our loss is felt, which means our work was there.

I'm also moved by this review of Claire Evans' Broad Band, and Ellen Ullman's Life in Code, both stories of the women who made and drove technology, and just got to work. I thought of @ursend and @jjuliaa and Santina, all, reading this. Women were the first computers; they helped build the internet; women built communes with the first commercial computer (Resource One in San Francisco). They care for machines, programmed and built them. It's a powerful essay on the history of our world now as really the history of women's labor, women making do.

I particularly love this, on looking to the next generation grappling with Silicon Valley's challenges:

"Both books end on optimistic notes. Ullman cedes the stage to the next generation, saying it is their turn to analyse and criticise the technology culture happening around them. ‘I wish their future well,’ she says. Evans, a member of that generation, takes it up and lets her allegiance be clear: ‘We can remake the world,’ she writes, ‘The final step is the hardest: we get to work.’

This rolling up of the sleeve is the last line in Evans’s book, and it is apt that it ends with ‘work’, because her book began with the etymology of the word ‘computer’. A computer, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a job: someone who performed computation. And computers were mostly women; the association was so strong that when computing machines were invented, their units of power were compared to their female counterpart — kilogirls. ‘This is the story of the kilogirls,’ Evans writes. For girl-power to be almost equivalent to horsepower is a reminder that questions of technology are still, have always been, questions of labour. And questions of labour are also feminist questions. Because in an industry where leaving at 5 p.m. counts as working a half-day, where offices are designed as playrooms for the man-boy-programmers who inhabit them, nobody can co-parent, for example, or even just establish the kind of work-life boundaries that are required not only for employees to have a personal life, but also for work environments to be egalitarian. The kind of work environments that have sprung up in the technology industries — the surroundings of the women Evans writes about, the jobs Ullman describes having — will not allow women to lean in, nor will they change that quickly."

http://www.thewhitereview.org/reviews/women-technology-history-cautionary-tale/