One Piece At A Time
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there are never creators,
nothing but combiners
A.D. Reader METHODOLOGY:
Roland Barthes, Preface to Critical Essays:
...The desire to write is merely the constellation of several persistent figures, what is left to the writer is no more than an activity of variation and combination: there are never creators, nothing but combiners, and literature is like the ship Argo whose long history admitted of no creation, nothing but combinations; bracketed with an unchanging function, each piece was nonetheless endlessly renewed, without the whole ever ceasing to be the Argo.
...The affectivity which is at the heart of all literature includes only an absurdly restricted number of functions: I desire, I suffer, I am angry, I contest, I love, I want to be loved, I am afraid to die—out of this we must make an infinite literature.
One Piece At A Time:
The narrator leaves his home in Kentucky in 1949 to pursue work at General Motors in Detroit, Michigan, installing wheels on Cadillacs, watching each one roll by day after day on the assembly line, knowingly lamenting that he will never be able to afford one of his own.
Beginning almost immediately, the narrator and a co-worker decide to "steal" a Cadillac by way of using their assembly line jobs to obtain the parts via salami slicing. He takes the small parts home hidden in his unusually large lunch box; larger parts are smuggled out in his co-worker's motorhome.
The process of accumulating all the necessary parts turns out to take at least 25 years (the newest part mentioned, the engine, is from 1973), but once they have what they think is a complete car, they attempt to assemble the pieces. Because automakers inevitably make numerous changes to their models, designs and parts over the course of a quarter-century, the result was a hodgepodge of parts from different years and models that did not fit together well (the bolt holes disappear when attempting to fit the 1973 engine with a 1953 transmission, there was only one right headlight and two left headlights, and only one tail fin).
Despite these problems, the narrator and his co-worker get the car in proper working condition.
The transmission was a '53
And the motor turned out to be a '73
And when we tried to put in the bolts all the holes were gone
An attempt at building a vehicle "one piece at a time" was completed successfully over a five-year period by a Chinese motorcycle assembly line worker in Chongqing. Although the motorcycle was fully operational, the worker's plan was foiled when no registration could be found for it; the worker was charged with theft of the parts, fined, and ordered to return the parts to the factory where he worked.
Otto Neurath, 1913:
We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
Neurath's non-foundational analogy of reconstructing piecemeal a ship at sea contrasts with Descartes' much earlier foundationalist analogy—in Discourse on the Method (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)—of demolishing a building all at once and rebuilding from the ground up Neurath himself pointed out this contrast.
Marie Neurath's isotype book "How The World Was Explored" 1951
"Hundreds of years ago the natives of Peru lashed logs of balsa wood together with ropes to form rafts. Some people believe that these rafts, fitted only with a big square sail and a crude cabin to serve as shelter, may have sailed thousands of miles across the Pacific."
Ship of Theseus:
In its original formulation, the "Ship of Theseus" paradox concerns a debate over whether a ship that has had all of its components replaced one by one would remain the same ship. The account of the problem has been preserved by Plutarch in his Life of Theseus:
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and strong timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
— Plutarch, Life of Theseus 23.1
Argo Navis constellation. Ship sailed by the Argonauts:
