Repairing Infrastructures: The Maintenance of Materiality and Power by Christopher R. Henke and Benjamin Sims (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: Repairing Infrastructures: The Maintenance of Materiality and Power by Christopher R. Henke and Benjamin Sims Stefan Krebs (bio) Repairing Infrastructures: The Maintenance of Materiality and Power By Christopher R. Henke and Benjamin Sims. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020. Pp. 216. In their short, engaging book, Christopher Henke and Benjamin Sims revisit some of their previous studies on repair, conducted from the late 1990s on. They draw, for example, on Henke's study on maintaining the air conditioning in university offices and Sim's work on retrofitting the San Diego–Coronado Bridge. However, they do not simply reread their work in the light of recent discussions in the growing field of repair and maintenance studies, like David Edgerton's call for a history of "technology-in-use," Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel's plea for a history of technology "after innovation," or Steven Jackson's exercise in "broken world thinking." Instead, they draw on their own studies to make a public appeal for repairing repair itself. To this end, the authors "provide a set of tools and concepts to make sense of how repair and maintenance keep infrastructures in working order" (p. 2). Rooted in the academic tradition of analyzing infrastructures as sociotechnical systems, Henke and Sims are most interested in how repair maintains not only technological but also social order. They further scrutinize how infrastructure repair is also related to social conflicts and power relations. Their "toolkit" is built on three main concepts: materiality and discourse; power and invisibility; and scale. The last of these also provides the structure for the book: from local to national and global infrastructures and their repair practices. On the local scale, Henke and Sims introduce some of the concepts they developed earlier, like the networked body of repair workers and the importance of their working knowledge. The authors argue that "repair as maintenance" is a sort of emotional labor that could be the basis for an ethics of care to preserve material and social order. On the next scale up, the authors use repair as a metaphor to describe how local residents appropriated the space under the Coronado Bridge that was erected next to their neighborhood. Turning this vast and empty space into a cultural meeting place is described as "repair as transformation"—transformation not only of the material environment but also of power relations that had to be respected when engineers later started to plan the retrofitting of the bridge. [End Page 1256] On the national scale, Henke and Sims turn more towards infrastructures than repair when they analyze how huge infrastructure projects like water supply and road networks helped the emerging nation state maintain its centralized power. They further emphasize the role of experts and their body of knowledge in this process of building a national infrastructure. Finally, on the global scale, the authors turn towards global infrastructures and their devastating environmental impact. "Repair as maintenance" tends to preserve the material and discursive investments in global infrastructures and prevent necessary changes. This is why the authors plead for "reflexive repair" to fix the environmental impact of the Anthropocene. Drawing on Ulrich Beck's notion of "reflexive modernity," they argue that reflexive repair is a mode of repair that takes the limitations and potential unintended consequences of infrastructure repair into account. Furthermore, reflexive repair aims to bridge the interconnections between the multiple scales of repair tackled in the book. Readers who are expecting to learn more about the repair of more traditional infrastructures like water supply, road, and communication networks will be rather disappointed. At one point, Henke and Sims ask a number of fundamental questions—how much money is spent on maintaining infrastructure, how many maintainers are involved, and how has this developed over time—but they do not offer any answers. This also has to do with the very broad notions of repair and infrastructure they use. For Henke and Sims, repair is much more than a practice to fix material or social order; it is a metaphor for the renegotiation of power and identity, or the reflexive fix for repair itself. Moreover, infrastructure seems to refer to everything from office air conditioning and garages to bridges and the nuclear...