Repair: a Dislocating Concept and its Vicissitudes

Abstract

The concept of repair – and its very interesting synonyms (but, as we know, the synonyms are never perfectly superposing) – emphasises both its socially constructed meanings and its extra-theoretical relations or practical functions. My paper has two methodological goals. The first corresponds to the focus on the historical and social roots of the place of repair activities in different human societies, while the second consists in the insistence on the causes and consequences of the repudiation of repair in the present era of world capitalism. Passing over the etymological sources of the specific action of repair, we cannot neglect its interdependence with both the labour processes and the scarcity that characterised ab initio the human societies. The paper explains how rarity and social domination relations are ontological factors directly determining the activities of repair, and also how the indirect ontological factors of tool-making ability and the level of the means of production (or, more generally, of productive forces) and the structural relations intertwine and fuel these activities. The entire logic of epistemological origins but also of the historical attitudes towards repair reflects the role of the social domination, concretely, of the capitalist relations imposing only a fragmented, anti-ecological perspective on nature-society.