The intentionally ruptured and temporal self of do-it-yourself architecture

Abstract

Abstract This article focuses on the collapse of temporality, subjectivity and objectivity involved in particular forms of do-it-yourself (DIY) construction and their attendant discourses. Contrary to the consistent historical association of DIY with a cohered and stable self-identification, this article instead associates do-it-yourself with a nomadic and ‘non-unitary’ (Braidotti, 2002: 172) subject. As such, the ‘time crime’ committed here is the deliberate displacement of a particular chronological history of ipseity and the essentialist relations between self, time and space upon which this history is arguably founded. Since its emergence in post-WWII North America, the DIY phenomenon has been presented as a methodology for circumventing a reliance upon mainstream, industrialized and discretized systems of production in order to create an accordant sense of worth and identity through independent self-production. Yet despite the perceived benefits of DIY, there remain historically persistent and unresolved questions concerning the phenomenon’s relation to mainstream consumerism and its attendant binding of all subjectivity to fiscal pursuit. From its earliest incarnation in post-World War II DIY in North America, through to ‘off-grid’ countercultural DIY and, more recently, the maker movement of the new Millennium; the do-it-yourselfer is frequently positioned as an ideologically consistent subject resisting institutional and economic control through project self-initiation and production. Yet the frequent reliance of self-producers on commercially-produced DIY products, materials and systems is also seen to simultaneously thwart their capacity to create ‘genuinely’ liberated selves. To explore these contradictions further, I will deploy contemporary poststructuralist and feminist accounts of subjectivity in order to trouble the conservative image of do-it-yourselfer. To this end, I will also posit my own small acts of DIY as specific instantiations of the complexities and challenges of self-production within, and in spite of the capitalist apparatus – and the architectural envelopes which contain and sustain it. By highlighting the complexities of my own DIY practice, and its potential links to consumerist behaviours, it will be argued that do-it-yourself is not only symptomatic of the conceptual schisms and temporal hybridity of particular architectural acts, but the inherent discordance of the makers themselves, professional or otherwise.