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- Convenors:
-
Ferdinand de Jong
(Freie Universitat)
Francisco Martínez (Tampere University)
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- Discussant:
-
Tamta Khalvashi
(Ilia State University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Addressing the crises of our time, people of different backgrounds have adopted 'repair' as a method that seeks transformation through a fixing gesture, reconfiguring received concepts of time and politics, as well as orientations towards the future in ways that we shall examine in this panel.
Long Abstract:
This panel examines 'repair' as a heuristic of social processes. We analyse the conditions of possibility for the current ethos to repair - as an intervention that gives hope that what is lost can somehow be redeemed. As a form of care, repair is sometimes framed as a mechanical intervention and at other times understood as a form of healing that addresses personal and collective traumas. There are similarities, correspondences and isomorphisms in these diverse applications of the concept. Repair can be conceived in ethical and aesthetic registers and bring out their implication with one another. The openness of the concept allows us to attune to the requirements of the age, but also demands conceptual scrutiny.
Here, we are interested in the current Zeitgeist around repair - as a concept and as a practice. The etymology of repair posits that the word is derived from the Latin parāre, the idea of making ready and preparing anew. As Reeves-Evison and Rainey (2018: 2) state: 'Like renovation and restoration, an act of repair also holds the future in its sights, but this future is not treated as the receptacle for an ideal situated in the past.' So, if repair does not imply a return to an original state or preconceived future, how should the temporality of repair be construed? How do renewal and reconstruction recognize the failure that left the object in a state of repair? And recognizing the damage done, how does one trace futurity in the open-endedness of repair?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
As a form of repair, preventive and corrective maintenance of Mumbai's train networks is spatialised and distributed across both, urban infrastructural assemblages and embodied labour. Yet, as a temporal intervention against breakdowns and risk, repair also converges workers, materials, and objects.
Paper long abstract:
The care of infrastructural assemblages like Mumbai's suburban trains require the mobilisation of both people and matter. Engineers and workers refer to these practices as preventive maintenance and corrective maintenance. The former refers to identifying and mitigating faults, whereas the latter refers to the repair of failures or breakdowns, which are then recursively folded into routine schedules. In this presentation, I explore how preventive and corrective maintenance manages the materiality of matter—particularly water, dust, and crowd—at the oldest car shed in Mumbai. Maintenance practices are guided by relational ideas of risk, which acknowledge the fragility of infrastructures, and the fact that matter cannot be eliminated but only managed and redistributed. At the same time, because maintenance is imbricated within power structures of state bureaucracy and neoliberal capitalism, the management of matter is also political. Inasmuch as the work and labour of maintenance is entangled within these political-economic and posthuman forces, infrastructures continue being cared for. Car shed workers and engineers refer to the overwhelming and saturating effects of these entanglements as "over-capacity," but they still affirm that care is necessary to maintain both public transport infrastructures and the urban socialities and spatiotemporality they produce.
Paper short abstract:
Long excluded from motorcycling, female motorcyclists handle maintenance and repair of their bikes in a variety of ways, including emotional labor and dependency, apprenticeship, and technological autonomy relative to male bikers.
Paper long abstract:
The association between motorcycle and masculinity has been a cultural reality in the 20th century, but things are changing rapidly. Drawing on ethnographic data collected from 2012, I discuss the cultural complications generated by the entrance of women into the world of motorcycles. If one approaches maintenance and repair as heterogeneous networks of human actors and non-human actants, I ask how do female motorcyclists stabilize such networks to keep their bikes functional? What kind of labor do they need to deploy, what objects and actors do they need to enter into a relationship with, what sites do they need to visit, and what knowledge do they need to master in order to keep their bikes in a functional state? The ethnographic material reveals that the female bikes whom I got to know approach repair primarily in three ways: as emotional laborers and dependent participants inside male biker groups; as apprentices who gravitate around repair shops, where they often perform minor repairs and support the social reproduction of the male mechanics; and, finally, as actors seeking maintenance and repair autonomy in order to perform minor and major repairs by themselves. These three strategies reflect female motorcyclists’ responses to the gendered nature of moto-mobility and generally reproduce male domination in motorcycling.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the ways in which mutually-implicating notions of ruination and repair are embedded in contemporary understandings of substance addiction, and how recovery is in turn rendered a continual process of loss, renewal, and restoration.
Paper long abstract:
Prevailing biomedical discourses overwhelmingly parse notions of substance addiction as a chronic condition, marked by the certainty of continual relapse and increasingly impaired neurological reward systems, which in turn cement the impossibility of repair. Systems of care, however, remain premised on the possibility of recovery, a paradigm that at times instils hope and optimism and, at others, entrenches despair, grief, and entrapment in ever-recurring cycles of repetition. This paper draws on long-term fieldwork with people who use drugs in Southeast Scotland, to interrogate concepts of repair and ruination in both active addiction and attempts to recover. It seeks to explore how recovery and substance use become dynamically entwined, negotiated, and lived, wherein heroin is rendered both a source of irreparable damage and ruin, and intimate solace. The present, in this rendering, is composed in its relation to the dual inevitability and uncertainty of the future, forming a heuristic of temporal instability. The paper also asks, however, how this fragile, iterative dynamic of loss, renewal and restoration, becomes threaded with different potentialities for care and repair through its very repetition. It does so in part by examining the relationship of two sisters, as they attempt to reckon with their ongoing substance use, tensions with kin, and complex structural forces; and the ways in which this sororal bond is composed in processes of making, unmaking and mending.
Paper short abstract:
Human augmentation technologies are understood as a means of repairing an essentially broken human form. Such repairs are seen to lead to a posthuman form which opens a space for radical new futures. Practices of repair in the present become the lens through which new, hopeful futures are imagined.
Paper long abstract:
As time flows, the human form breaks down: we age, get ill, and become frail. From the perspective of contemporary techno-optimistic groups, -- such as transhumanists, biohackers, and self-trackers -- this highlights how the human form is fundamentally broken. It is not uncommon to hear the human body being referred to as a "meat sack", with all the unpleasant implications tied to the metaphor. This paper takes a novel approach to repair as a temporal practice by considering how conceptions of repairing the fundamentally "broken" human form allow for the emergence of radically new futures. In present-day late capitalism, as Franco Berardi (2011) and Mark Fisher (2014) argue, the "future has been cancelled". Neo-liberal logics stagnate cultural growth, optimise all innovations to serve a profit motive, and repackage radically reimagined future as products. Futuristic loses its temporal meaning and is instead reduced to genre and aesthetic. Throughout my fieldwork in Sweden, proponents of human augmentation technologies engage with these practices as the primary means to create and maintain conceptions of new, hopeful futures, often centred on visions of posthuman emergence. By conceptualising the human body in mechanical terms, repair is seen as a matter of engineering, and the invention and application of emergent technologies to the human form opens possibilities for futures through continuous repairing practices. They re-focus the utopian hopefulness away from the end-goal and towards a space of action. Ideas around repairing the human body become a forward-looking process that both requires, and strengthens, hope in the future.