ABSTRACT
To fix requires to learn new skills: to diagnose, disassemble, fix, and reassemble. Repair entails gaining new understandings of materials and of the social world of things. The process reveals issues of design, use, meaning, knowledge and connection. Philosopher Elizabeth Spelman’s definition of repair as “Creative destruction of brokenness” is appealing because it acknowledges the creativity of the work, and its open-endedness. Conservator Barbara Appelbaum reminds us of the philosophical complexity of the “ideal state” of an object and the challenges of getting there. Ethnographic and historical descriptions balance the practical and the intellectual, the tacit and the spoken, technology and the social and cultural environment. Sociologist Tim Dant highlights the tacit, but includes more than mechanical skill: “a complex repertoire of gestures, a variable emotional tone and the gathering of sensual knowledge.” Looking closely at the new parts that came helped me figure out how to take apart the old ones on the lamp.
