When I think of how often I repair things today as a student of rhetoric, the most recent thing I can think of is replacing a battery in a key fob. Replacing a battery is a relatively simple endeavor, but considering that until the beginning of this very month, I hadn’t owned a key fob for nearly five years, it required more attention from me than I am accustomed to giving acts of repair. In many ways, the act of repairing is baked into the work of rhetoric and language. The field of conversation analysis calls moments of clarification in speech “repair,” and I.A. Richards defines rhetoric itself as “the study of misunderstanding and its remedies.” The metaphorical extension of repair here is not a difficult one to make, but I do not wish to be flippant with my discussion of repair work.
I was once a repair worker in a very literal sense during my time working as a nuclear operator in the United States Navy. In fact, it wouldn’t be disingenuous to say that this was one of my main roles. While everyone with my qualifications was required to both operate and perform maintenance on power plant equipment, I specialized heavily on maintenance and repair. In this role the work was both heavily rhetorical and material; “Material History Petty Officer” was one of the key responsibilities I held. This job involved tracking (and carefully recording) every piece of equipment and every corrective maintenance item (repair) performed on that piece of equipment. To tell a history is to craft a reality, and to craft a history of repair may be as material and concrete as my labor has ever been. Through my meticulous notes of serial numbers, part numbers, maintenance procedures, and underlying faults, Reactor Controls division would trace the life of our ship’s components and restore them to wholeness whenever they faltered.
The work of repair is an underappreciated one, even in a space where everything absolutely must work, such as an aircraft carrier. As Jackson (2014) points out in “Rethinking Repair,” this work is often rendered invisible. Jackson points to the “…differential visibility of faculty and nighttime cleaning staff…” and I point to a ship that ran without issue 99% of the time where the only thing anyone could remember about the Reactor department was that time we caused the ship to go dead in the water at the pier. “Nukes,” as we were affectionately called, were part of the furniture, a part of the “…technologies and practices which rise (or sink) to the level of infrastructure and are frequently invisible until breakdown” (Jackson 2014, p. 230). Nukes are always out of sight and (hopefully) out of mind, working in the deepest parts of a ship in restricted areas. The work I did as a nuke, in some ways, will remain with the ship forever; the material history I recorded will last until the power plant’s decommission even if the parts I replaced don’t. I, however, have long since been forgotten. No one recalls who made entries for the material history of the USS Theodore Roosevelt from 2006 to 2008.
My shift to academia, to language and to rhetoric, has rendered the work of repair even more invisible. There is very little (perhaps nothing) required of me in terms of physical repair work. But if the work of repair encompasses fixing any problem, then I am certainly in the business of repair, even if only by virtue of handling my own issues. One such way I have attempted to repair my relationship with my work is by keeping a labor log, but what gets counted as work in this log rarely, if ever, accounts for the maintenance of my personal and even professional work. I don’t log the many hours I spend on reading and responding to student email, for example. In the weeks where my grandmother died, or I replaced my vehicle, the time logged for such weeks is (within the document) inexplicably low. Keeping myself running, or my transportation to and from work running, simply doesn’t count as labor, even to myself. Yet perhaps, even if only to be kind to myself when I review my own logs, the work of maintenance and repair should be something I take into consideration.
The work of repair, as Jackson (2014) posits it, calls for maintenance and care of more than the material; it also demands our attention to each other and our own need for care. This is one lesson that I did not learn during my time as a repair worker. It is one that is not easily learned as a rhetorician either. All the same, I am glad to turn my attention to the work of repair for this brief musing, practicing the care of the self that nuclear electronics repair rhetoric and writing does neither teaches nor encourages of its many practitioners.
References
Jackson, S. J. (2014). Media technologies : essays on communication, materiality, and society. In Rethinking repair. essay, The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262525374.003.0011
