Vocabularies of (Dis)repair: Bonnie Honig's "Public Things" and Mierle Laderman Ukeles's "Maintenance Art"

Abstract:The uneven distribution of resources, risk and vulnerability and intensified anxieties and tensions around the environment converge to form scenes of ailing material and fantasmatic infrastructures. From within such scenes of disrepair questions arise as to possible directions and forms of response. What sites of attachment are worth (re)securing? What will reparative practices look like? This essay approaches these concerns by drawing on Bonnie Honig's notion of "public things" and Mierle Laderman Ukeles's "maintenance art." Both Honig and Ukeles consider questions of repair and the complex task of developing more sustaining and sustainable infrastructures of sociality.