Might repairing things repair people? An idea of disorderly repair

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Fisher, T. ORCID: 0000-0003-2565-8805, 2024. Might repairing things repair people? An idea of disorderly repair. Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. ISSN 1091-8264 (Forthcoming)

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Abstract

This article proposes a relationship between repair practices and personhood, from the perspective of ‘post-cognitivist’ theories of cognition. Recent work shows that repair and maintenance practices are a basic feature of humans’ relationship with the world. Less work has been done to investigate how repair practices relate to human personhood when it is conceived as ‘interlocutory’ and relational, given that repair takes place in an interlocutory embodied relationship with human and material others.

Contributing to an emerging line of enquiry that connects maintenance and repair to human personhood it identifies parallels between ‘post-cognitivist’ notions of cognition, and personhood described in the anthropology literature. This is set in an autoethnographic case study of repair, which resists a wasteful disposable ethic. This example draws on Borgmann’s distinction between ‘paradigmatic’ and ‘focal’ consumption practices, proposing that repair can maintain the status of an object as a ‘focal thing’.

Item Type:

Journal article

Publication Title:

Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology

Creators:

Fisher, T.

Publisher:

Philosophy Documentation Center

Date:

8 April 2024

ISSN:

1091-8264