On repair, domestic fantasies and antiwork politics

As it becomes more urgent to move away from an economy based on ever-increasing production, extractivism, and growth, repair practices will acquire a more important role in redefining what kind of forms of life we could collectively create. The ongoing expansion of smart objects and the introduction of automation replacing human labour has been described in terms of a postwork society, and yet many have remarked how this technological shift is not at all resulting in less, but more work (paid or unpaid) for all. In reaction to this, the spread of a repair ethic could be seen as contributing to an antiworkerist stance that refuses the ‘productivist bias’ (Jackson 2014, p. 234) of life put to work. Collective repair movements offer a performative critique of a capitalist society based on work as the ‘primary force of social mediation’ (Postone 1996, p. 49) and constitute an interesting form of reproductive labour that goes beyond the household. These movements are contributing to the shift from repair seen as a ‘family responsibility to societal imperative’ (Rosner and Ames 2014, p.55), thus reframing the conversation around life and work. Collective repair can be seen as a site for re-skilling subjects who have been stripped of the opportunity to learn how to intervene in the materiality of everyday lives and its infrastructures in a self-organised, autonomous manner.
Our hypothesis is that the sociality of collective repair can become a significant moment of politicization when it becomes not only an occasion of environmental commitment, but when it is also understood as a potential locus of anti-work tactics.
Repair needs antiwork, otherwise it risks becoming a form of acquiescence with the present neoliberal discourse that promotes self-reliance and resilience as a form of self-sufficiency that embraces the ongoing impoverishment of society. Our talk will expand on such issues by present our ongoing work on the spatialisation of repair.