Phenomenology of Repair: Negotiating the Social Order in the Anthropocene

The integration of the idea of repair into specific sets of scientific practices and social discourse pertaining to the powers of technosciences is what links together the main themes of this book. Cell meat is a form of repair work. On a direct level it regenerates tissues from a simulated wounded tissue to stimulate cell growth and proliferation and, on a larger scale; it aims to resolve some of our most pressing and urgent planetary problems, that is, industrial meat production and its deleterious effects on the environment. In addition, much of biotechnology is concerned with the tools used in cell repair (i.e. genome editing), regeneration, and DNA fixes to restore gene function, for instance. As such, repair is viewed as a form of (re)vitalization in the cellular meat project as well as in molecular biology in general. Seen as a paradigm, repair can help us unravel the types of material interventions and metaphors that become the imperative for reversing past mistakes and damages and that stand in for greater moral and financial investments in the technosphere.