Definitions: Repetition, Sameness, Cognition and Learning

Perceiving Repetition

If everything was always new, we would not be able to process any of our experiences; our brain would be too busy trying to make sense of unknown inputs, with nothing to connect them to. Perceiving repetition is about recognising things as similar or the same, and from that experience being able to deduce, generalise, synthesise and a few other higher level cognitive operations that are the basis for knowledge production. Looking for repetition is the basis of the essential cognitive mission of letting us identify patterns.

Let us do an experiment. Pick up a book in a language you do not know, if you have one at hand. If not, try the Internet, by, for example, switching languages in Wikipedia. Read a few sentences, if possible aloud, listening to the sounds of the unknown words. Most likely, nothing will make sense. And yet, if you read long enough, you might begin to notice certain patterns, a couple of words that turn up all the time (could they be pronouns or conjunctions?) or a similar ending in different words (are they verbal tenses? cases?). Immediately, your brain begins to scan the text for patterns, trying to understand. Not surprisingly, searching for repetition is the way that linguists work when deciphering manuscripts written in unknown languages. The yet undeciphered Voynich manuscript is a good example of these methods, as many linguists and cryptologists have attempted to find regularity and meaning in its repetitions (of characters, sequences of characters, words, chains of words). Nothing seems to make sense, and in fact there is a possibility that it is no language at all, but an elaborate puzzle, since there is too much randomness in its apparent regularity. ¹¹

Language is in fact an excellent arena to reflect over the connection between cognition and repetition. Giles Deleuze, who is often invoked as one of the prominent philosophers to have dealt with repetition, is influenced by Saussure's structuralism and its key departure from essentialist ideas about the connection of language with the world. In structuralism, any single word gets its meaning because of its systemic relation to other words, and not because it intrinsically represents the object. Sparrow is an arbitrary word for an animal, no more connected to reality than gorrión, or moineau. ¹² So we understand sparrows in relation to eagles, owls, pigeons… and we generalise a series of characteristics, looking for resemblance (perhaps having a beak, wings), to understand the overarching category of bird that covers them all.

For Deleuze, this generalising is a movement that forms the basis of thought, very simply put, looking for repetition and finding difference. In an oft-quoted passage, he writes: ‘no two grains of dust are absolutely identical, no two hands have the same distinctive points, no two typewriters have the same strike, no two revolvers score their bullets in the same manner. ¹³ ’ He is not interested in singularity as a final product to be found, but rather as striving, an ideal that is never realised. Repetition is impossible as a thing in itself, for there cannot be identical occurrences. However, it is interesting as a process since it will help us generalise and perceive difference. In this, as in much of his argument in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze leans on Hume, who famously wrote ‘repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it’. ¹⁴ Repetition in itself cannot give way to original objects, but to perceive the repetition of a phenomenon can make us learn something new.

To be honest, Deleuze's approach to repetition is not aligned with everything that I write in this chapter. He distances himself from the usual understanding of repetition in the prologue to Difference and Repetition, when he writes that repetition ‘is thought in terms of the identical, the similar, the equal or the opposed. In this case, we treat it as a difference without concept: two things repeat one another when they are different even while they have exactly the same concept’. ¹⁵ Nonetheless, his proposition is important for me in two ways. First, it highlights the action of looking for repetition as crucial, instead of just thinking about a finished product: the copy which is identical to another thing. His focus on process has animated the conception of this project, as the following chapters will make obvious in relation to storytelling or computer games. Second, the attention to difference makes a bridge to aesthetic theory in general, which often has had the focus on ‘how art objects and their experiences differ from other objects and experiences’ in everyday life. ¹⁶ While intuitively repetition would seem to be the opposite of contrast, it turns out that it is essential to perceive it. This will help me to challenge the theories that consider originality and the sublime as the only measure for successful art.

In order to think of repetition as a process, time is of the essence, that is, repetition is dependent on time to be perceived. First we become aware of one thing, say, a short melody within a longer composition. Later in the piece, we hear it again, and realise it is a repetition. Of course, if we were not attentive or did not identify it as a unit the first time around, we might not be able to realise that it is being repeated. But truly, repetition is both about remembering the past (I have heard that before) and projecting towards the future (the chorus will likely come back). So even if the nature of the entity was not totally grasped in the first encounter, the second encounter will make things clearer to us. Thus, repetition is our way of figuring out the underlying structure of things, as various elements become visible, so that we can make sense of experiences. We build upon our familiarity with the same art form, for instance rock music, in order to make sense of the unknown specimen: a new song. No matter the art form, I would argue that there is a cognitive pleasure in identifying a returning unit. We feel that we have ‘gotten’ the song, the speech or the strange camera angle. Through repetition, we learn.

This simple explanation contains a few complex propositions. Firstly, perceiving repetitions is dependent upon recognising units/entities, whose nature varies wildly across art forms. Also, the same work can even contain repetitions at different levels, and of varying scope. Secondly, diverse art forms lean on repetition differently. For instance, it is much better tolerated in music than in literature, both at a compositional level, but also in relation to consumption. Thirdly, perceiving repetition is a subjective process that depends on how familiar a person is with a specific art form. It will, for instance, always be easier for me to grasp the structure of an English pop hit than that of a traditional Korean folk song. Through repeated exposure to a particular art form, we build aesthetic repertoires that allow us to efficiently identify patterns and codify each new encounter, as well as to gain pleasure from it. This is also why first-time exposure to an unknown genre is always disconcerting, even if it also can be exhilarating and pleasurable for the senses, since we do not have a cultural framework to either understand or enjoy it in context.

We can unpack some of these assumptions with the help of Elizabeth Margulis and her many years' work on music and repetition, collected in the book, On Repeat. How music plays the mind. ¹⁷ She combines an aesthetic perspective with cognitive/experimental science to show how repetition is the basic stepping stone to understanding music. While many of her insights are of course indelibly linked to sound as the relevant modality for music, her careful exposition of the way we cognitively grasp repetition is extremely helpful for this discussion.

Music is the art form where repetition is more easily accepted, and even enjoyed. We revisit our favourite songs obsessively, with a frequence that would be untenable in any other modality. This is partly because in a way, music is repetition. As Margulis notes, ‘almost anything producible on the matrix sounds credibly musical after a few loops’. ¹⁸ In a series of experiments where subjects were exposed by music composed by a computer and modern compositions, they identified the most repetitive sequences as more enjoyable, and more likely to have been composed by a human, even if they were not. ¹⁹ Even scientists studying animal vocalisation identify it as music when there is heightened repetition. ²⁰

This points to the first element of interest for me here: pattern recognition. In music, a recognisable small unit is the individual note, but there are other levels such as a single pitch, themes, sequences or even entire pieces. ‘To hear something as a repetition, a listener must first hear it as something. In this way, repetition detection can be a useful methodology to investigate perceptual units; the segments of music that listeners treat as individual entities’ This extrapolates better to the art forms that have a temporal dimension, like poetry or dance, that both unfold in time and allow us to recognise a returning rhyme or sequence of movement. ²¹ In other kinds of art, such as painting or sculpture, the pattern recognition activity might not be necessary to appreciating a single piece as a whole, although close scrutiny might allow us to distinguish a repeated technique, say a visual pattern or a brush stroke. In these arts, pattern recognition mostly occurs at a higher level, for example when a piece is compared to previous work by the same artist, or by others, for instance in relation to specific genres. I will deal with this meta level in Chapter 3.

Let us now return to the repetition of concrete elements as an essential cognitive activity. A casual listener who is not well versed in musical terminology might be unable to explain what it is exactly that makes a song recognisable. And yet, it is not necessary to be able to analyse a song in order to identify it when it plays again, or indeed to enjoy it. Anyone can recognise a returning chorus or a sample from another well-known song integrated in the new one. In this way, music has a lower entry bar than other arts. We also consider a song more positively upon several repeats. The pop hit that sounded absurd the first time it blasted from the speakers at the local swimming pool will end up making its way into our brain as an ear worm that will last all summer (and possibly several years).

In this section, we have been looking at repetition as a formal property of different art forms, but Margulis points out that it is also important to consider it in relation to reception behaviours, like hitting the repeat button again and again to hear our favourite song, or engaging in different forms of ritualistic action in our everyday life. This distinction mirrors the one I started this chapter with, repetition/sameness and is important in relation to cognition because deliberately engaging in repetitive acts is key to basic survival mechanisms both at the individual (forming habits) and the collective (participating in rituals) level. Habits are sequences of behaviour that we repeat without thinking about them, in autopilot, as it were. Think of the time where you learnt to ride a bike. You might still recall how hard it was to keep the pedals turning. You trod too hard or too ineffectively, causing a change of rhythm that could throw you completely out of balance. I still remember how my father held me steady by running alongside with a broom shaft stuck into the back seat. I remember looking back to make sure he was still holding it, and later the exhilaration of realising he was not any more, as I sped forward on my own leaving him far behind. At the beginning, all my attention was concentrated on the pedals, the handles, how to balance my body most effectively. It is only later, when the basic movements had turned into an automatic habit, that I could look at the trees along the gravel path, enjoy the wind in my face or take care not to run insects over with my thick wheel. Learning to ride a bike is a process where a conscious effort becomes an automatic non-conscious operation, freeing our mental resources. Automatism is not only important in relation to physical actions, where we need to train our body and senses to do something without coping all our attention. It can also refer to the establishment of habits as sequences of everyday behaviour. Most of us have formed a number of these sequences that unfold along a normal day. Think, for instance, of bedtime routines: Do you brush your teeth or your hair first?, Do you use skin care products?, Do you drink a glass of milk? Do you read a book? Do you send a goodnight SMS to a loved person? In which order? Chances are that once you decide you are going to bed, you start going through the same familiar steps without stopping at every turn to decide which moisturiser to apply or even which side of the bed you will use to step up and tuck yourself under the covers. These chains of habitual actions free us from excessive mental work in our everyday life, and most likely from crippling indecision. When engaged in routines, our mind is free to wander elsewhere as we brush our teeth for the prescribed 2 minutes. More than once I have needed to rush to my desk with toothpaste in my mouth to note down a research idea or, less glamorously, a reminder to buy milk or send a birthday greeting the next day.

Having a number of established daily routines is not the same as if all the events of our everyday lives were scheduled to always unfold in the same manner. We are not like Phil, the protagonist of the film Groundhog Day, who is forced to live the same day over and over again, an iconic time loop narrative to which I will return to in Chapter 4.

Deliberate Repetition

Like with our first bicycle, we need to repeat the things we want to learn, also when they exclusively involve mental skills. Learning aids like flash cards are based on the idea of spaced repetition as an effective way of committing content to memory. With flash cards, we encounter the same materials (like the words of a foreign language) at strategic intervals as a way to recall, activate and ultimately memorise them. Margulis' example is that of baby talk, with its exaggerated prosody and repetition, similar across cultures even though no parents have been specifically told to talk to babies in any particular way. ²² Maybe we remember how our own parents did with us, even if it is not at a conscious level. We have a tendency to tell babies everything we are doing, as if we were a radio reporter of banality, ‘now the porridge is on the spoon, and it is about to enter your mouth’, repeating the names of important objects and actions over and over. This repetition is both soothing and very useful, as babies will with time learn to identify sequences (grasping the overarching sense of what is being said), segment individual units in the speech stream (isolating individual words that they will be able to use in other contexts) and predict developments (developing higher-level expectations about language patterns).

This rather complex process implies a movement from a whole to a part to an even bigger whole: the stream of words, the individual words, the expansion into another context, back and forth like a tide. It happens naturally when learning our mother tongue, and it is very hard to mimic again when trying to learn a new language as an adult. Repeated exposure to the foreign tongue is our best recipe for success. It is a fantastic feeling when we get to the point where listening to the stream of foreign words ceases to feel like an excruciating effort. When we finally understand enough without having to think very hard about words and grammar, we are finally at the stage where we can concentrate on the overarching meaning. We are only liberated from the tedious grinding when we finally master it, when we do not need to repeat anymore to retain.

But let us turn away from suffering and back to the delights offered by the arts and music. For what is hard in a learning process can be pleasurable when dealing with a code we are already familiar with. Margulis distinguishes between two kinds of cognitive pleasures related to repetition: ‘Process pleasure, then, can be located in the repetitive unfolding of the musical surface, but it is precisely and paradoxically this repetitiveness that affords a separate creation pleasure in the mind of the listener, who can now inventively connect different time points within the stimulus to generate novel, changing experiences’. ²³ I would add that these two kinds of pleasure are related to the movement between the concrete and the abstract, the part and the whole, that is so crucial to repetition. Music illustrates how this flows in a nearly seamless manner, maybe because it is a modality that we all have access to and experience with.

Perhaps we can imagine similar processes in relation to other art forms. Not literally, since exact repetition of concrete units in other modalities is more difficult to bear, but in relation to a movement from the concrete to the abstract, the meta. We will explore this movement in Chapter 3 in relation to storytelling. Building upon studies about learning and children, fairy tales readings, television viewing and other activities, Margulis explains how repetition actually leads to greater understanding, opening up for meta-cognition that makes creativity possible:

repetition in general allows for the freeing up of attentional resources, such that attention can rove to different levels of the stimulus – up to higher-level, structural features (such as plot and character, in the case of the repeated TV show), or down to lower-level, detailed features (such as novel words, in the case of the repeated tellings of a story). Since so much remains for small children to learn, repetition provides an opportunity for them to master aspects of their environment they are typically too atentionally taxed to grasp. This view represents a subtle recasting of the typical account of the childhood appetite for repetition, which centers on the pleasure that can be drawn from familiarity and expertise – the pleasure of being able to predict things about an environment and feel safe. By way of contrast, the account I'm presenting here suggests that the pleasure derives not from familiarity and safety of the old, but rather from the excitement of learning and the new: namely the new elements that become available to perception and cognition when attentional resources are freed from merely tracking entirely new events. Children experience the joy of engagement with richer and more interconnected aspects of the stimulus – a type of play that often gets relegated in adulthood to the domain of the aesthetic. ²⁴

This perspective goes well with current research on the different ways that children make sense of texts. Modern definitions of literacy go beyond a binary understanding of the concept, where you either can read or not. Based on her empirical work researching how children make sense of fantasy literature, Nina Mikkelsen proposes that literacy is a multidimensional concept that covers much more ground than the merely diegetic/interpretive. These dimensions require that the child is competent in moving between the concrete and the abstract, the low level to the high level: ‘use literature to help children make meaning generally (generative literacy); make discriminations about their own feelings (personal/empathetic literacy); make connections between life and literature (sociocultural literacy); become lost in a book (aesthetic literacy); walk around the story as insiders, telling their own stories about the story (narrative literacy); resist the text for any number of reasons (critical literacy); or uncover narrative patterns and details for greater meaning-making (literary literacy) (…) reading skills and print literacy’. ²⁵

If we read and reread the same story with a child many times without zoning out as one might be tempted to, we will be able to follow this particular learning process: how familiarity engenders a sense of wonder that prompts curiosity and elaboration. Sometimes, repetition can even lead to an epiphany, as something implicit becomes suddenly clear to the mind. The child asking for the same story over and over enacts Deleuze's idea that the most mechanical repetitions can lead us to ‘endlessly extract from them little differences, variations and modifications. Conversely, secret, disguised and hidden repetitions, animated by the perpetual displacement of a difference, restore bare, mechanical and stereotypical repetitions, within and without us’. ²⁶ And this is the core of the Mikkelsen literacy perspective as well: change is perceived outside but enacted also inside.

What Is Repeated

The simple answer would be: everything. All contemporary media forms use repetitive strategies, regardless of their status as popular culture or high art, mass media or indie production. Media works quote and comment upon each other, integrate elements from previous periods, mix genres or deploy interactive mechanics. Painting, music, film… everybody is referencing, alluding, parodying, mixing, sampling, commenting upon, improving, contesting… All these verbs presuppose a relation of old and new works, a tension based on the repetition of something, but what?

It would be quite unproductive to try to dissect this at the overarching level of all media phenomena in general, since the platforms, modalities and interaction possibilities are multiple and diverse. We will not be able to precisely specify the kinds of units that get repeated: sounds, words, genre traits, so I will defer specific case analyses to later chapters. ²⁷ However, we can still consider the question of the whole versus the part, which has been at the centre of discussions about repetition, under various guises.

For Umberto Eco, it is a matter of dialectics. Our postmodern time sees the circulation of so many stories that everything seems to be already told, a picture of excess that has only gotten more intense since the 1980s, where he wrote that we can only hope ‘to relish repetition and its own microscopic variations’. ²⁸ I detect a certain regret in the way he writes about renouncing absolute newness, and settling for the pleasures of recognising scheme-variation combinations. Eco proposes that this dialectic experience of reception, with a heightened awareness of structure and repertories connects contemporary media with cultural forms like abstract art or baroque music, where the focus is not on locating specific meanings but ‘the pleasure of the reiteration of a single and constant truth’. ²⁹ That is, it is not a semiotic catharsis but an experiential one. ³⁰ This realisation will be important in my consideration of interactive art forms as we move along in the book.

This dialectic relation is more fully articulated by scholars of the neo-baroque Omar Calabrese and Angela Ndalianis in different ways, even though both operate from a premise that the whole and the part are inextricably linked: one cannot be perceived or explained without the other. ³¹ The hermeneutic movement to comprehend and consider part and whole at the same time is based on repetition. Consider the etymology of the word, repetere, which means to return to, to get back, in Latin. Perceiving a part that reminds us of a previous one sends us back mentally, allowing us to appraise and consider it to understand the workings of the whole. Calabrese makes a case to nuance our understanding of parts and the cognitive process that they set in motion. He proposes to differentiate between detail and fragment, which he considers different kinds of parts, using the metaphor of the operations of an assassin versus a detective.

An assassin cuts. Detail is ‘something cut from the existing whole’ ³² that allows us to discover ‘laws and particular aspects that were previously regarded as irrelevant to a description of the work’. ³³ We focus on a detail to explain the system in a new way, that is, the detail gives a key to the whole, but it is us who decide what to cut out, so to speak. Calabrese does not illustrate this with an example but let's consider an obvious one, like the sequence that shows Deckerd sleeping and dreaming of a unicorn running through a forest inserted into Blade Runner's Director Cut version. ³⁴ It is a very short scene, a few seconds, that critics have interpreted as a crucial detail to fuel the theory that Deckard is actually a replicant. By the end of the movie, Deckard finds an origami unicorn left by an ex-colleague who has been at his apartment but has apparently decided to spare Deckard's and Rachel's lives. The only reason why the other policeman would know about the unicorn is if Deckard was a replicant whose intimate dreams are actually a standard feature implanted by designers.

A detective, on the other hand, finds. A fragment is a fractured part, not purposely selected but happened upon. It does not need the whole to be defined, but is explained according to the absent system, like a fossil. ³⁵ Calabrese's example is the way in which micro historians analyse found fragments of documents and artefacts to reconstruct a lost past, like in the famous work The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, which recreates the period of the Venetian sixteen century through the reconstruction of an individual miller's life, based on the inquisitional record of his trial and execution as a heretic. ³⁶

Ndalianis brings new nuances to the discussion by incorporating Benjamin's idea of the fragment as a ruin, something found that can point to the absent whole but remains behind as a valuable allegory. Ruins and fragments evoke ‘the existence of a past in the present while simultaneously transforming the ruin into a restored, majestic structure that operates like a richly layered palimpsest’. ³⁷ She is inspired by Deleuze, Leibniz and the concept of the monad to insist on the relational aspect of repetition. A monad is the simplest of units that relies on the other units/monads to connect and become something. The nature of these units will be different according to platform and modality. ³⁸ This way of thinking is the basis of my method of identifying different levels of units in Chapters 2, 3 and even 4, although I would add to this that often, the smallest units are contained in the biggest ones, spawning strange rhizomatic processes of meaning making.

For Ndalianis, the creator's preference for processes of copy and seriality are essential dimensions of the neo-baroque. Repetition, however, is not neutral, in the sense that ‘While emphasising elements of repetition, the authors of each variation may also be intent on outperforming and developing preceding works: refashioning the past. New story fragments introduced therefore dynamically interact with other story fragments, uniting to create multiple, yet unified, story formations’. ³⁹ Her discussion is especially useful when looking beyond repetition of motifs within individual works, because she considers the movement between fragments and whole at a higher level. A whole work can become a fragment inside another work, incorporated through citation. One of her examples of these complex referential movements is the film Evil Dead II, which recreates the events of the first movie within its first 7 minutes (with the same male actor but a different female actor). This way, the second film departs seamlessly from the final scene of the first film (the demon running towards Ash in the forest). Ndalianis wonders about the nature of the 7-minute recreation. Is it a summary? A movie within the movie? There is not an easy answer, for referentiality in contemporary media is a multidirectional labyrinth that weaves textual connections as a complex net of references. ⁴⁰ An important point, from Ndalianis' perspective, is that neo-baroque repetition always contains a seed of virtuosity, the will to improve, an idea that will play a role in my discussion of imitation and parody later.

To finish this section on the nature of the repeated units, I would like to borrow another one of Calabrese's points, who proposes that there are three areas to be considered when thinking about mediatic repetition ⁴¹ :

1. Production. What is repeated here are the industry strategies to produce repetitive content, for instance through the establishment of models and standards of production.

2. Text. We can also look at content, how repetition works across texts at several levels like typical scenarios, motifs and genres. Focusing on the repeated content lets us see what is identical (the building scaffold) and what is different (the variation).

3. Consumption. Like Margulis pointed out, reception can also be in focus. What is repeated at the level of consumption are behaviours, guided by expectations and motivated by personal goals, like what Calabrese calls ‘consolatory behaviour’, where repetition of well-known elements provides comfort to the viewer.

Calabrese wonders if these three optics can be correlated, which is one of the ambitions of this book. For they are, of course, absolutely intertwined. The astute reader will also have realised that the three dimensions correspond to the simplest of communication models. They identify the different actors participating in a complex exchange, each with a series of attached motivations like increasing sales, implementing an aesthetic strategy or regulating one's mood. For repetition always has an effect, of one kind or another.

What Does Repetition Do?

In this introductory first chapter, preoccupied with defining, framing and limiting, I have adopted a very broad approach to repetition, bringing together a multiplicity of perspectives, academic domains and media. This makes for a very wide palette of repetition affordances that could be commented upon here. I will nevertheless concentrate exclusively on the overarching level that can be applied to every kind of media repetition, by now disconnected from specific contexts of use. ⁴² This means focusing on the effects that repetition can have and the emotions that it can produce in general. The following chapters will look at specific instances. I have already considered a few of the ways in which repetition is connected to learning in the first section of the chapter, so I will here concentrate on the sought-after effects of using repetition as a mode of expression, engendering different kinds of pleasure. The problematic side of these pleasures will show itself later in the book.

Repetition Creates a Tension Between Engagement and Boredom

I have already suggested that time is an important factor when considering repetition, both in terms of frequency (how often do things appear) and in terms of subjectivity (just how much can I bear). Excessive returns might spoil the experience, turning it into something boring or downright unbearable. There seems to be an ideal balance between novelty and recognition which is not easy to hit.

New Media theory (specially in relation to computer games) has often turned to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his theory of flow to explain the necessary balance between anxiety and boredom that ensures that any experience falls within the spectrum of the optimal: not too difficult, not too easy. People engaged in flow attain a deep state of concentration and satisfaction. ⁷¹ In his framework, boredom emerges when something is too easy, and repetition is certainly key to this: too many repetitions of the same simple interaction after we have mastered it will make it boring.

There is another concept that can complement flow by describing how repetition changes the way we feel about a media product a long time. That is, the first time we are confronted with something, it is new. With each repetition, it becomes more and more familiar until it is boring. The Wundt curve (Fig. 2) is a bell-shaped curve proposed by Wilhelm Wundt in 1874 to describe the subjective effect of stimulus intensity: low to moderate levels are pleasant, but high levels become unpleasant. It has been used in psychology and cultural studies to explain motivation, novelty seeking behaviours, marketing of products and many other things. Daniel Berlyne has adapted it to investigate aesthetic enjoyment with great success. ⁷² He uses the concept of ‘hedonic value’ to refer to how a stimulus arousal potential will affect people differently.

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Fig. 2.

Wundt Curve. ⁷³

According to the literature in the field of experiential aesthetics, this curve seems to work across media and modalities. Novelty is pleasurable (as long as we have enough context to understand and enjoy the new), and the hedonic value of the media experience can be sustained until familiarity grows excessive. I will consider the risk of boredom as a factor when discussing algorithmic recommendation systems in Chapter 5. There is also a subjective factor at play here, for research shows that not everybody is equally motivated by curiosity. ‘Nevertheless, curiosity does seem to be an important mechanism in the development of knowledge and competence, so it's reassuring that something is coming out of the hours people spend scrambling around playgrounds, reading low-brow books, and street tuning old Honda Civics’. This kind of everyday creativity will be at the centre of Chapter 6. ⁷⁴