Objects in Flux - RMIT Research Repository - RMIT University

Objects in Flux
61/ A ‘zine’ or ‘fanzine’ is a small
magazine-style publication with lim-
ited circulation, generally financed,
printed (often on a black and white
photocopier) and distributed by the
author/editor (Duncombe, 1997;
Triggs, 2006).
62/ A position advanced by Fred
Turner in From counterculture to cy-
berculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole
Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital
Utopianism (2006). Turner shows how
Brand and the Whole Earth network
developed connections between San
Francisco’s counterculture movement
and key individuals within Silicon
Valley’s emerging technology hub,
actively promoting a vision of the In-
ternet as a transformative, democrat-
ising space.
63/ Triggs regards the punk music
scene as the place where DIY became
a recognisable subculture (2006).
64/ Mary Celeste Kearney cites Rough
Trade’s Geoff Travis as arguing that
‘the independent DIY ethos thought
by many to be a purely punk inspi-
ration, actually came later in other
forms of music; ‘When we started
our own record label… it wasn’t punk
but post-punk… and women’s music:
Kleenex, the Raincoats’’ (1997, pp.
214-215).
74
the privileging of individual agency and self-determination. Active
resistance, conceived through a DIY ethos (particularly within the
post-punk movement), 64 shaped punk’s relation to everything from
music production, distribution and performance to fanzines, clothing,
housing (squatting) and anarchist politics.
DIY attitudes found in punk and related subcultures became prominent
in protest groups of the 1980s and ’90s, particularly within the
UK where the Anti-Poll Tax campaign in the late ’80s and the road
protest camps of the ’90s saw the adoption of direct action and the
DIY ethos as a means to influence social events (McKay, 1998, p.
6). In speaking of the similarities between DIY culture (understood
through the lens of 1990s political activism) and counterculture
movements of the 1960s, McKay cites ‘a combination of inspiring
action, narcissism, youthful arrogance, principle, ahistoricism, indulgence,
creativity, plagiarism, as well as a rejection and embracing
alike of technological innovation’ (1998, p. 2). For many participants,
the value of DIY culture ‘lies not in “the effect” of long-term
strategy to bring about political goals, but in itself as an act of noncompliance,
an act of authenticity to one’s own beliefs’ (Corrine and
Bee cited in McKay, 1998, p. 6).
For over a century DIY practices have ‘enabled the consumer to rail
against the prescribed design edicts and … social mores of the time’
(Atkinson, 2006, p. 9). Whether this be through a democratisation of
luxury goods (Jackson, 2006) or the wholesale rejection of consumer
culture, the political dimension to DIY suggests that practices may
be arranged according to their transformative potential. 65 Such an
arrangement presents a field of activity distributed between two
distinct poles: on the one hand, the commercially facilitated DIY activities
of home maintenance and renovation, on the other, a diverse
and often outspoken collection of practitioners including political
activists, indie/alternative musicians, writers, publishers, hobbyists
and ‘makers’ 66 for whom DIY is an everyday revolutionary act. This
distribution may go some way toward accounting for participant
motivation and individual agency, however care must be taken not
to assume that commercially facilitated and institutionalised DIY
practices are devoid of meaningful participant action. De Certeau
clearly demonstrates that consumers find countless ways of using the