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On the Impulse
to Fix Things
Elizabeth Spelman is a Smith professor
of philosophy and women’s studies who asks a lot of questions and
then looks for a lot of answers. She has explored such questions
as, How do people perceive the suffering of others? And what
are the problems of exclusion in feminist thought?
In her
newest book, Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile
World (Beacon Press 2002), Spelman, the Barbara Richmond 1940 Professor
in the Humanities,
explores a core aspect of human activity: the impulse to fix things.
“To repair is to acknowledge
and respond to the fracturability of the world in which we live in a
very particular way -- not by simply throwing our hands
up in despair at the damage, or otherwise accepting without question that there
is no possibility of or point in trying to put the pieces back together,” she
writes, “but by employing skills of mind, hand and heart to recapture
an earlier moment in the history of an object or a relationship in order to
allow
it to keep existing.”
At its core, the book urges its
readers to think about the variety of repair that takes place
in their own lives -- and how
humans, as a species, judge what is possible to repair and what is irreparable.
Over
the past several years Elizabeth Spelman has explored many
of these topics with students in a first-year seminar called “The
Work of Repair.” Selections
from her new book follow.
The English language is generously
stocked with words for the many preoccupations and occupations
of H. reparans [the
human being
as a repair animal]: who
repair, restore, rehabilitate, renovate, reconcile, redeem, heal, fix, and
mend -- and
that’s the short list. Such linguistic variety is not gratuitous. These
are distinctions that make a difference. Do you want the car repaired, so
that you can continue to commute to work? Or do you want it restored, so
that you
can display it in its original glory? Is a patch on that jacket adequate,
or do you insist on invisible mending, on having it look as if there never
were
a rip to begin with? Should that work of art be restored, or simply preserved?
Why do some ecologists want to preserve an environment rather than try to
repair the damage done to it? Does forgiveness necessarily restore a ruptured
relationship
or simply allow a resumption of it? What does an apology achieve that monetary
reparations cannot -- and vice versa? What was thought to be at stake
for citizens of the new South Africa in the contrast between restorative
justice
and retributive justice -- between the healing promised by a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission and the punishment exacted through an adversarial
court system?
In thinking about the household
as a multipurpose repair shop, it’s important
to consider not only the kinds of repair that are undertaken there, but also
the kinds of discussions that take place, the lessons handed down, about
the varieties of damage there are in the world, what one
can or can’t,
should or should not do about it. Indeed, there are implicit
lessons, in civics, morality,
economics, and politics that are passed on in household discussions and decisions
about to whom one has and has not to apologize, whether and how one is responsible
for damage to the environment, when a marriage or partnership has frayed
beyond the point of repair, what kinds of repair it is
deemed appropriate for men and
women of one’s class or ethnicity to engage in.… Whether households
are good or lousy at it, they are places where people are supposed to get
prepared for lives as citizens, consumers, workers, moral agents, friends.
The wide range
of responses to the horrible wounds inflicted on September
11, 2001, bear solemn witness to the sheer variety of
H. reparans’ capacities:
The twin towers can neither be repaired nor restored, but as the president
of the Historic Districts Council of New York City sees
it, whatever is done at
the site “must reweave the damaged threads of fabric that terrorism
sought to tear apart, and create a sense of place that fills the void and
honors the
losses of Sept. 11.” [Hal Broom, “Letters,” New York
Times, November 10, 2001] In one issue alone of the New York Times Magazine, there
were stories devoted to the tasks of “mending a psyche” and of
figuring out “how to put the family back together.” An op-ed
essay by former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin on September 30 described
a “Post-Disaster
Economy in Need of Repair.”
Homo
reparans stalks the land. Humans seem everywhere and ceaselessly
engaged in projects of repair -- nursing machines back to life, patching
up friendships, devising paths of reconciliation for conflicting peoples.
But
not everything that breaks can be fixed. The skills we
repairing animals have to learn include the self-reflexive
one of coming to grips with the
limits of those skills and figuring out what to do in the face of the irreparable.…Our
coming to grips with the reparable and the irreparable also is the scene
of comedy -- of
our bumbling attempts to undo damage -- and of tragedy -- of stark
and hard-earned realization that the damage cannot be undone. |
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