The rhetoric of the maker movement speaks of transformational change to individuals, society, and culture. While this vision is dangerously appealing on a surface level, it is mostly presented from a culturally homogenous and narrow political vantage point. It does not make clear who will be excluded in this bright future, only that it is brought about by technology and innovation-driven progress with anthropocentric concerns at its core. This blinkered vision has resulted in a monoculture colonizing the idea of making and ignoring other histories, cultures, and practices – a myopic approach that overlooks any alternatives.
We have presented a number of examples of different maker practices, which are intended to actively question the possibility of forms, places, and people. Their maker credentials are not defined by their ability to master machines and manipulate materials, but are instead a product of their social and material conditions. These practices also start from a position of productive uncertainty, situatedness, and relationality to surroundings and materials. The prominent maker movement rhetoric about transformational change has not proved to foster equitable systems of mass industrial production, nor create local and socially integrated hubs with evenly distributed access. In fact, the message of individual empowerment is closest to the truth – but that individual is most commonly a neoliberal figure whose success is not judged on positive impact to the social or environmental fabric.
In this institutionalized form, maker culture has become strategic rather than tactical – shaping the actions of members within, and identifying itself against those without.
Against such exclusivity, each of the alternative examples presented here frame mak-ing as a tactic, enablmak-ing different people to participate, purposefully situatmak-ing makmak-ing in specific contexts, and opening up making to practices that go beyond domination of the physical environment. Grassroots and strategic making is broadened to include practices that are about the incidental entanglement of materials, environments, people, and ideas. These practices are then broadened to include, for instance, community making, social movement making, homemaking, and unmaking. Such making is about creating collective subjectivities that are constructed in a process with our surrounding non-human and human counterparts.
Are we best served by conceiving of making as a singularly anthropocentric concern?
What does our recent history of maker culture and contemporary conditions (social, economic, environmental) tell us about putting more things into the world based on the
29 Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/source-text/115/.
drives of human agency? Within our examples, more-than-human agency is an accepted or imposed condition that is not always desirable, but that always has potential. More-than-human agency challenges and complicates our relationship with the material world, encouraging a less hubristic, more attentive approach to making, and a more substantive politics of material culture.
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