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John Seely Brown: Learning, Working & Playing in the Digital Age:
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Reasoning classically has been concerned primarily with deductive, abstract types of reasoning. But what I see happening to today's kids as they work in this new digital medium has much more to do with bricolage than abstract logic. Bricolage, a concept originally studied by Levi Strauss many years ago, relates to the concrete. It has to do with the ability to find something—an object, tool, piece of code, document—and to use it in a new way and in a new context. In fact, virtually no system today is built from scratch or first principles—like the way I used to build systems—but rather from finding examples of code on the Web, borrowing "that code," bringing it onto their site, and then modifying it to fit their needs. Today's systems are built up through an extensive sense of bricolage—by cobbling or "wiring" together code fragments and extending or modifying such fragments when necessary. The catch, however, is that if you are going to become a successful bricoleur of the 21st century, a bricoleur of the virtual rather than of the physical, than as you borrow things you have to be able to decide whether or not to believe or trust those things.
Does Bach perform bricolage? According to Audrey Wong (archived copy):
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Burdened with tasks, deadlines, and their accompanying frustrations, Bach often relied on recycling his own compositions or borrowing music from his predecessors or his contemporaries. The practice of parodying as commonly practiced and accepted then would often qualify as plagiarism under the copyright laws of today. Without such laws to hamper him, Bach was a master of recasting, merging borrowed materials with his own ideas to produce works melodically more subtle and rhythmically more exciting. At times, Bach did just copy from other composers, though presumably only when the music suited his own refined taste.
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Int: And yourself — how have you contributed to the ideas that had already been developed by Dewey, Wittgenstein and Heidegger?
Rorty: Not at all. I don't think I have any original ideas. I think that all I do is pick up bits of Derrida and bits of Dewey and put them next to each other and bits of Davidson and bits of Wittgenstein and stuff like that. It's just a talent for bricolage, rather than any originality. If you don't have an original mind, you comment on people who do.
