February 2010, A Web of Interconnection

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Shaul Kelner is assistant professor of sociology and Jewish studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. He is the author of Tours that Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism (NYU Press, April 2010).

Naming is not what it used to be. In the biblical account, when the Master of the Universe creates the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky, God parades the animals before Adam to see what the man will call them. “And whatever the man called each living creature, that would be its name.” Rashi adds, “l’olam” — that would be its name “forever” — based on the midrash that Adam’s names for the animals reflected the true essence of their being.

We have no such good fortune when it comes to naming the new phenomenon discussed this month in Sh’ma. Some have tried the term “start-ups” or “emergents,” others, “the innovation ecosystem,” and here we see “DIY.” The first looks to the business sector for a guiding metaphor; the second to American Protestantism; the third to ecology. As for DIY, Do-It-Yourself, its roots in the subculture of punk music open new ways for making sense of what is going on.

Before considering what the metaphor offers, let us acknowledge that no terminology will ever capture the essence of the phenomenon. If we want to be charitable, we might say that the midrashic take on the relationship between names and their objects is, well, difficult to generalize from beyond its particular case. Better to think of naming as an act of imposing meaning, not of reflecting it.

And yet, it has proven quite hard to impose a stable meaning here — to agree upon a single name for this phenomenon, or to stop searching for more useful, less problematic labels. This in itself should tell us something. A lexicon in flux indicates a changing situation that we do not adequately understand and whose stakes include the power to shape how people think about the nature of the phenomenon in question.

I subscribe to Eilon Schwartz’s position, articulated in Hava Tirosh-Samuelson’s volume Judaism and Ecology, which suggests that we are best served by a multiplicity of metaphors. In the “DIY” metaphor, I find a valuable invitation to place Jewish expression in the context of contemporary cultural production more generally.

Punk’s DIY culture emerged in the 1970s as a reaction, in part, to a highly commercialized music industry. In their recent book, Engaging Art, my colleagues Steven Tepper and William Ivey situate DIY in the broader arc of American cultural history. They argue that the early 20th- century witnessed a revolution in cultural

A Lexicon in Flux
SHAUL KELNER
[12] FEBRUARY 2010 | SHEVAT 5770

production. Whereas culture in the United States had formerly been local and democratic, involving people as producers of their own art and music, the rise of mass media conglomerates commanding new recording and broadcasting technologies positioned Americans as passive consumers of a national culture created by professional artists. Now, fueled by 21st- century technologies, a counter-revolution, first anticipated by DIY, is in full swing. Cultural production is being decentralized.

Like any metaphor, “DIY” has limits. Probing these limits is useful for furthering the work of conceptual clarification. Consider three:

1) DIY lets us understand new forms of Jewish expression as critiques of the centralized model of federation- and denomination-based Jewish cultural production. Yet this dualism misleads by masking the key enabling role of foundations. The decentralization of philanthropy has played a major part in the decentralization of cultural production.

2) In certain ways, Jewish religious culture has always been DIY. For instance, congregational worship and home ritual observance are almost always local and performative. Yet the dilemmas of centralization and passive consumption have long been present. How, then, should we speak of shifts in the position of Jews as producers and consumers of Jewish culture?

3) If we think of arts production in terms of individuals and markets, how can we translate this to interpret religious production by communities in nonmarket settings? How do we account for the constraints on cultural production imposed by politics and networks of accountability?

These limitations should not blind us to the power of the DIY metaphor. Drawing on the lexicon of punk rock to name the new Jewish enterprise offers an important counterbalance to a conversation that tends toward technophilia and uncritical celebration of market-based models. Punk was political. It critiqued the bourgeois blandness of mass-produced, homogenized culture. The language of DIY should remind us that today’s Jewish activists have picked up this critique. Consider the activists as political artists and you might see the meaning of their work in an entirely new light.