When the market economy is always advertising its newest advanced technologies as something essential for your living, even if you had a fully functional device that you were satisfied with the day before the ad came up, what you feel for the new one is not a desire but a need. Consumerism takes away one’s attachment to materials and assumes materials as non-agentive. According to Jenny Odell (2019), repair, the verb, works as a resistance; if something is repairable, then capitalism fails as they cannot sell you a new one. Even though the Right to Repair legislation in 2023 intends to secure the consumers’ ability to repair their existing products, in a context of consumerist hyperculture, the inevitable question would be, then: who seeks for a repair today, and why?
If we can look away from ‘products’ to ourselves, our essential identities are not made up of the products we use, but the very existence of our being—our body and mind, that, if broken, cannot be replaced by buying a newer one, rather can only be repaired. Steven Jackson (2014) associates repair with care work (p. 223)—instead of throwing away a non-functional present, repair carefully bridges between the past and the future. This reminds me of my friend, who was diagnosed with cancer at an early age and sensed his future was shrunken. He went through extensive medical care and was repaired. It has been almost twenty years, and his neck still carries the scars from multiple surgeries. Imperfections! While the scars are a constant reminder of his illness, it also reminds him that he is alive! One day he told me about Kintsugi, the Japanese traditional repair method that takes the broken parts of ceramic pots and seals them back together with lacquer and gold or silver powder. Kintsugi not only brings back beloved pots new life, but the metallic seams highlight the rebirth of once cherished pieces and add more value to them, both materially and emotionally. Instead of hiding the damage, the repair work illuminates the imperfections and embraces them. My friend, inspired by Kintsugi art, found solace in his scars. A physical mark from his broken past signified not death but life to him.
While that story sets the non-thingy repair work on a different spectrum from things, there are products that claim do repair sold in the name of Kintsugi—by exploiting its association with repair work.
- Since Kintsugi reveals the beauty in imperfections, a US based luxury beauty brand, kintsugi, has a range of hair products that help repair and renew hair without masking the flaws.
- “Kintsugi brings to mind the beauty of patina and the awe and reverence of restoration” is how the textile brand PORTER TELEO product named after the art describes it.
- Mind can be broken too. Inspired by the same Kintsugi art, two women based in the Bay area have founded an AI-driven technology, KINTSUGI, to care for mental health. The technology, supported by the National Science Foundation, can detect anxiety and clinical depression in real time from voice samples.
- Another journaling and self-care app also works from a voice sample.
Due to the capitalistic nature of these digital products, the choice of using the word Kintsugi in their name is rhetorical for them to establish their ethos as a repairer. However, the same digital world practices repair as resistance to capitalism by building communities.
- A platform called the Culture of Repair Project, a political but non-partisan initiative, identifies repair as an actionable and pervasive cultural value that resembles both Odell and Jackson. This platform offers a great resource including publications on repair.
- The Maintainers is another global research network—comprised of engineers, businesspeople, social scientists, people work in the government and non-profit sectors, artists, activists, and coders—focuses on the maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the many forms of labor.
- Repair Café is a community meeting place that has tools and materials and volunteers to repair together.
- Repair Design is another community, based in Australia, that opens a space for public discussion about repair practices and their limitations in the local context.
- Repair is a similar initiative based in Luxembourg, that studies the history of repair and maintenance in Luxembourg in the 20th century. It situates the repair work both in the context of time and space.
The variety of work and understanding related to the concept of repair shows its essential connection to care and context, which sets it at the opposite of capitalist hyperculture removed from rooted values. In the age of consumerist and segmented identities, repair brings back the memory of community existence through care. (769) [SN–Blog#2]
[Jackson, 2014; Odell, 2019]
Picture taken from Wikimedia Commons