27,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
What does a coffee machine, a car, road signs, a smartphone, a cathedral, a work of art, a satellite, a bicycle, a washing machine, a bridge, a watch, a computer, the body of a prominent politician and a tractor have in common? Pretty much nothing – except for the fact that, no matter how small, large, important or insignificant something is, it rarely survives without being cared for. Every object eventually experiences wear and tear, it deteriorates, stops working or breaks down. But are we giving the care of things the recognition it deserves? A counterpoint to our modern obsession with innovation but less striking than the one-off act of restoration, the delicate act of making things last rarely attracts our attention.
This book disrupts our dominant narratives by putting those individuals skilled in the art of maintenance front and centre. Jérôme Denis and David Pontille shine a spotlight on the subtle aspects of caring for things, tracing the stories of those involved and, with them, the ethical challenges raised and political lessons learned. These people demonstrate a sensitivity and attentiveness to fragility; they encourage us to cultivate a material diplomacy in which wear is accepted and our relation to things becomes a matter of negotiation and compromise – a far cry from the frenetic rhythm of planned obsolescence inherent in hyper-consumerism. Maintenance demarcates the contours of a world in which we have relinquished the human longing for unlimited power and technological autonomy, a world where our attachment to things is more profound than we ever imagined.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 603
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The art of making things last
A transfer of attention
The vocabulary of humans and things
Pathways
Notes
1. Maintaining
Beyond innovation
Repair and breakdown
A daily pulsation
Neither heroes nor heroines
Reassigning attention
Notes
2. Fragilities
Societies repopulated with objects
The diplomacy of alteration
Care and things
Notes
3. Attention
Displacements
Multisensoriality
Expertise
Vigilance
Attachments
Notes
4. Encounters
Recalcitrance
Disassembly
Transformations
Worries
The dance of maintenance
Notes
5. Time
Prolongation
Permanence
Slowing down
Stubbornness
From time to thing
Notes
6. Tact
Adjustments
Surprises
Heritage diplomacies
Pathways inspired by environmental ethics
Ethics and the care of things
Notes
7. Conflicts
Shortening the life of goods
The values of duration
The emancipation of use
Redistributed knowledge
The people of things
Responsibilities
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
iii
iv
v
vi
ix
x
xi
xii
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
THE CARE OF THINGS
Ethics and Politics of Maintenance
Jérôme Denis
and
David Pontille
Translated by Andrew Brown
polity
Copyright Page
First published in French as Le soin des choses. Politique de la maintenance © Editions La Découverte, Paris, 2022.
This English translation © Polity Press, 2025.
The translation of this book was supported by a grant from the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, Mines Paris – PSL University.
Excerpt from ‘Atlas’ in Selected Poems, 2013, by U. A. Fanthorpe. London: Enitharmon Press. Reproduced by permission of Enitharmon Press, www.enitharmon.co.uk
Excerpt from Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology, 2013, ed. by Susan Leigh Star. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Reproduced by permission of SUNY Press.
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6238-1 – hardback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024940371
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Epigraph
Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time.
The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1969)
Once something is perceived, the action of perception
continues indefinitely, changing and being changed
by other events near it, sometimes resonating,
sometimes clotting up or clumping up,
sometimes fading into background noise.
Susan Leigh Star (1995)
And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in air,
As Atlas did the sky.
‘Atlas’, U. A. Fanthorpe
Some things last a long time.
Daniel Johnston
Acknowledgements
Linked in many ways to the mundane fabric of encounters which forms our existences, this work owes so much to the particular attention of those who, through their generosity and their curiosity, have helped us to nuance our arguments, sharpen our descriptions, and reformulate our proposals. We wish to express to them here our sincere gratitude for the care with which they accompanied the slow fermentation of the different materials assembled in this book.
From the initial intuition to the different occasions of writing, there were of course many stimuli, spread over a long period, but one initial spark was decisive. So we warmly thank Mathieu Potte-Bonneville for being able to hear in the jumble of our first ideas the echoes of a possible book and for having accompanied us with enthusiasm and kindness throughout this journey.
Whether they have read the intermediate versions of certain chapters or an advanced version of the manuscript, we are greatly indebted to the attentive readings, meticulous comments, and always very astute suggestions made by Cornelia Hummel, Nicolas Nova, Marie Alauzen and Astrid Castres.
Informal exchanges during meals, in the corridors, or during remote meetings which punctuated the weeks of lockdown up to the workshop dedicated to the first complete version of the text, this manuscript also developed within a formidable working collective, the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation, where for so many years an art of precise discussion and attentive criticism has been cultivated. For their encouraging support and always relevant suggestions, we are extremely grateful to Madeleine Akrich, Victoria Brun, Béatrice Cointe, Jean Danielou, Liliana Doganova, Quentin Dufour, Daniel Florentin, Clément Gasull, Cornelius Heimstädt, Brice Laurent, Catherine Lucas, Alexandre Mallard, Kewan Mertens, Morgan Meyer, Fabian Muniesa, Mathilde Pellizzari, Florence Paterson, Vololona Rabeharisoa, Loïc Riom, Roman Solé-Pomies, Didier Torny, Frédéric Vergnaud and Alexandre Violle.
At one-off or more regular meetings, in seminars or when texts intended for academic journals were reviewed, we benefited from the wise reactions and valuable advice of Antoine Hennion and Francis Chateauraynaud. The embryonic and partial versions of our arguments benefited greatly from the attentive listening of those two demanding readers, who hold a special place in the landscape of French pragmatist sociology.
The small community that has formed in recent years around maintenance and repair studies has constituted a thriving and refreshing environment, where our first investigations and collective reflections matured in an open atmosphere. First of all, a big thank you to Tomás Sánchez Criado and Blanca Callén in memory of our very first playful discussions of maintenance and care. We also remember the many rich conversations that sprang from the initiatives launched by Ignaz Strebel, Alain Bovet and Philippe Sormani in Zurich in 2014, then in Rome in 2015; Lara Houston, Steven J. Jackson and Daniela Rosner in Denver in 2015; and Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel in Hoboken in 2017. During these meetings, Steven J. Jackson and Christopher Henke became regular interlocutors who shared with us their advice, and sometimes their perplexity, in the face of our investigations and our reflections, all in the interests of fruitful reciprocity. We would also like to thank, for the richness of their contributions, the participants in the various sessions that we organized between 2016 and 2022 at the conferences of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology and the Society for Social Studies of Science. We also have fond memories of the journey made with Alexei Yurchak during his stay in Paris in 2018. Finally, a special greeting to Fernando Domínguez Rubio, who sent us a mysterious signal from San Diego in the spring of 2015, assuring us that his Mona Lisa and our metro signs had a great deal in common. Since then, the fascinating conversations and sudden bursts of laughter have never stopped.
The production of a book always extends beyond official work spaces to encroach in multiple ways on family time and friendly relations. Our thanks go to Michel and Annie Delgoulet, who offered us a haven of peace in Corrèze for a few days, sheltered from the upheavals of the pandemic: this place proved particularly conducive to writing. Finally, we are immensely indebted to Catherine and Alexandra, who helped us daily to make a place for this developing manuscript in the domestic and professional economies of our respective homes.
Raphaël, Alix, Nathan and Zéphyr: this book, which you will perhaps read one day, is also intended for you. We hope that it will stimulate your sensibility as much as your presence in the world nourishes ours.
Introduction
6:30 a.m. The alarm goes off. I get out of bed and have a slow stretch – a habit that I adopted after some particularly severe lower back pain. In the bathroom, my still sleepy ears are annoyed by the repetitive sound of the tap which has started dripping again. But I know that as a vintage model it doesn’t just have aesthetic advantages: it has a gland housing, so all it should need is a quick turn of the spanner. I’ll get down to it this evening, or during the weekend. Mustn’t forget the silicone seals, either, I think wearily as I step into the shower, my eyes once again drawn to the black stains already accumulating on the smooth surface. If I leave them like this for too long, I run the risk of water infiltrating into the neighbours’ flat downstairs.
7:15 a.m. I’m washed and dressed and have a first sip of my coffee, but it tastes odd. After a brief hesitation, I grab the bottle of white vinegar that I keep with the other household products. Having set aside the rest of the coffee in a thermos I programme the coffee machine to do a vinegar cycle, which shouldn’t take too long. Anyway, I’m staying at home this morning. A technician sent by the condominium landlord is coming round to check our radiators, which seem to be having problems. Since the second Covid lockdown, I’ve had a high-speed internet connection at home. Many meetings are still being held remotely, and everything works perfectly, at least on a technical level.
11:00 a.m. The technician has arrived. I watch him place his hand on different parts of one of the radiators. He seems to be listening for sounds coming from the inlet pipe. He reminds me about the need to bleed the radiators regularly, to prevent air stopping hot water from circulating properly. After several minutes circulating from one room to another, he tells me that he has doubts about the expansion tank, a part of the collective boiler which is getting old. He suggests doing a test. He’ll pump up the tank, increase the pressure again and see how it behaves. If, after a few days, the pressure has dropped, the part will need to be replaced. He’ll check with the landlord.
12:00 p.m. I head to the train station to catch a train to Paris, where my office is situated. In the street, I pass a construction site which wasn’t there yesterday. The technicians of the electricity distribution company have dug up the road and are inspecting a tangle of pipes and cables. I don’t have time to stop, but can’t help but glance at the gaping hole. I’m both shocked and impressed to see the state of these networks which supply the entire neighbourhood – the bakery, the apartment buildings and the clinical laboratory. String, adhesive tape and ‘splints’ made of unidentified materials bear witness to frequent repairs, over a long period of time, most of them undoubtedly routine even though some must have proved crucial. As I exchange a look with one of the men in hi-vis jackets emerging from the breach, I wonder: how can all this still work on a daily basis?
12:20 p.m. From the window of the commuter train, I spot the same hi-vis jackets being worn by a group busy checking the tracks of a temporarily closed railway line. Looking at them, I think of the terrible accident which took place in Brétigny-sur-Orge in July 2013. The presence of these workers, to whom no one seems to be paying attention, reassures me. Without them, who knows how many derailments would have already occurred?
3:00 p.m. Two people come into my office and stare at the ceiling. After greeting me, they use a pole to push a sort of glass cover onto a fire alarm that I’d never noticed before. A puff of smoke comes out of the instrument. Nothing happens. One of the two inspectors writes something on a form, then both leave without a word and knock on the door of the neighbouring office.
6:30 p.m. It’s time to leave; I need to collect my electric bike from the repair shop where I left it the day before for its annual servicing. At the crossroads, I take a look at the church which has been under restoration for several months. Five or six people are gathered in front. Two are in their overalls, the others in formal suits. They seem to be debating: their attention is sometimes turned towards the voluminous documents they are consulting, sometimes towards the facade of the edifice, which several of them touch with the palms of their hands as if they were trying to ask its opinion. The building has stood there for decades, but today its fate seems to be in the hands of these experts.
7:00 p.m. At the repair shop, I’m told there weren’t any particular issues with my bike: they’ve changed the brake pads, tightened the cables and also the nut for the stand, which has an unfortunate tendency to come loose over time and vibrate, making a horrible racket. I’ll also need to be careful with the battery. The electronic diagnostic gauge shows that its charging cycle isn’t all that efficient. I should avoid discharging it too often. I take note of this, remembering in passing that a few years ago, I was given the opposite advice about my laptop – I should systematically empty the battery before recharging it. I mention the possibility of changing the bike rack: one of the struts has cracked, probably a result of the cobbled streets that are part of my usual route. Don’t change it just yet, I’m told. The pandemic has vastly increased demand while disrupting supply chains. Times are tough for spare parts.
7:45 p.m. On the way back, I pass an Apple store. I can’t help but think about the screen of my iPhone: its corner got cracked a few weeks ago. So far, the electrician’s tape that I skilfully applied to stop things from getting worse has done the job. Apart from that, the phone works perfectly, so there’s no hurry – not to mention how much it would cost if I took my phone in here. I could go to the little shop right next to the station, of course, but I hesitate. I’m not sure where they get their spare parts from! I’d rather get an authentic iPhone screen and do it myself.
8:00 p.m. I return home with just one idea in my mind: tightening the bathroom tap. But on a chair in the living room, I discover one of my children’s favourite sweaters, badly threadbare at the elbow. A little note accompanies it, written with what I imagine is some urgency: can anything be done?
The art of making things last
This mundane day, recounted as in a diary or field notebook, is only partially fictitious. Certainly, the ‘I’ composing it melds together the two present authors, and the scenes collected here were not concentrated in a handful of hours. That said, they all come from our recent experience. None was invented, nothing was exaggerated. This day could well have existed. Which means it is, obviously, ‘situated’. It tells the daily life of a man who works in an office in Paris and can afford to wait for a technician to arrive in the morning. He lives in an apartment in a suburb accessible by train and cycles. If we followed the journey of a female executive in a large company, a logistics worker, a stay-at-home mother or a service worker, the scenes would change radically. Likewise, they would be very different if we located ourselves near a block of low-rent apartments in a so-called ‘deprived’ neighbourhood in another Paris suburb, or if we moved to a village in, say, Burgundy. Obviously, the contrast would be even greater if this day’s events took place in India, Cuba or Mali. Yet, in all these places, and with all these people, we could find moments that would highlight the same obvious fact that our series of sketches reveals, or rather reminds the reader of: human beings are not limited to living among a multitude of objects of various sizes and functions; they don’t just use these objects, they also take care of them. Bicycles, boilers, churches, toilets, electrical infrastructures, sensors, coffee makers, railway lines, kitchen taps, telephones and clothes are not just items at the disposal of the women and men who use them. They are also things in which it is necessary to intervene, more or less regularly, more or less drastically, so that they can continue to exist. But why is this? Because most of the objects that make up the human world don’t last. They get damaged, decompose and wear out in various ways and for different reasons. So they need to be kept in good repair, otherwise they will disappear. It is to this somewhat humdrum activity that this book is devoted: maintenance. It covers a set of actions with blurred boundaries, made up of very varied tasks, gestures, types of know-how and even theories, but they all share the same motive, the same concern. Maintenance is the art of making things last.
If we feel it is important to investigate maintenance, this is mainly because people rarely talk about it, or do so in too restrictive terms. Alongside other notions that occupy the media space – innovation, of course, but also repair and resilience – maintenance still seems largely neglected. It’s as if it were too banal or too unproductive. At a time when ‘making a difference’ seems to be the only thing that matters, making sure that everything stays more or less in place and that countless objects simply continue their bland existence isn’t a very alluring activity. And there’s another problem: maintenance often concerns things which themselves are not very glamorous, or which are also largely absent from contemporary discussions. Thus, while numerous studies, from different standpoints, agree that the Western, or Westernized, world is going through a ‘crisis of sensibility’,1 this seems only to concern the living world, from animals to mushrooms, from trees to viruses. Of course, we concur with this view, which reveals, often very eloquently, how negligence, and also more simply the absence of descriptive skills, lead to sterility in political debate and to forms of collective action being taken for granted which deserve to be discussed anew in the current environmental crisis. It is, however, striking how blind these appeals are to an important part of what constitutes the material fabric of the human world. It’s as if we first had to get rid of all the objects among which we live in order to make ourselves truly sensitive to the immense multiplicity of beings who coexist more or less easily on this Earth. Or, more simply, it’s as if the question of sensitivity to this part of the world was already settled – as if we already knew how to describe the relationships that humans have with these things, so that it was no longer worth dwelling on the question.
It is probably Baptiste Morizot – whose work, which we admire, we will be drawing on here on several occasions – who most clearly illustrates this position in an awkward scene in the introduction to Ways of Being Alive.2 He recounts a wonderful time spent observing aerial life above the Col de la Bataille, a mountain pass in southeastern France. But after describing the marvellous ballet of the numerous species of birds which meet there before beginning their migration towards the south, he draws a curious comparison. To underline the inestimable value of what he and his partner have observed, he presents in unfavourable terms another spectacle, which he openly denigrates: that of a vintage car rally. What is he criticizing them for? He reproaches them for not paying attention to what’s happening just a few metres above their heads. And precisely, by not paying attention again and again, explains Morizot, we come to cease taking certain beings into account. We stop trying to create a common world with them. In fact, he continues, while we already know how to give a good account of our relationships with technical objects, we don’t (as yet) know how to speak correctly about our relationships with other living beings. We don’t know how to make ourselves sensitive to the richness of these ‘prodigious because different’ entities.
But are we really capable of accurately describing the relationships between humans and things? What exactly do we know about what it really means, for example, to maintain an old car? Even more, what do we know about how things evolve, grow old and persist? And are we really capable of understanding the attachment of those who work to make them last, or even the obligations that bind humans to objects? Are we able to pay attention to everything that is at stake in this relationship – one that it is tempting to condemn for several reasons?
Of course, cars pollute; of course, an innumerable number of objects that make up our world contribute to damaging our relationships with other living beings. And there is no doubt, as Emmanuel Bonnet, Diego Landivar and Alexandre Monnin explain, that one of the crucial questions posed by the environmental crisis is that of the ways in which human collectives, at different levels, detach themselves from several of these objects and work towards the ‘closure’ of technical infrastructures that damage living environments.3 But, as these same authors point out, this immense technical and democratic problem presupposes precisely that we stop relegating the heterogeneous set of artefacts that make up our world to the background of contemporary debates. Why should we imagine that attention to the living world should necessarily involve dismissing things and those who are attached to them? And how can we divide the world in these terms, in the first place? Can we really separate the people who take care of the objects with which humans continue to coexist from those who take care of the living world, as if the two were not compatible? Is the relationship with the living world itself so immediate that it can do without measuring instruments, tools to equip the senses, monitors, and of course vehicles to move around, as well as clothing suitable for exploring the countryside, venturing into the forest or hiking in the mountains? Who takes care of these things? Who ensures the correct settings? Who repairs them? Who maintains them? Is it really reasonable to ignore this part of the story?
On the contrary, we feel that, in addition to calls to develop our sensitivity to living beings other than humans, in partnership with them, we have everything to gain from working on our sensitivity to things – including, precisely, the lack of interest in maintenance, which shows how limited this sensitivity still is. This is the first political move that we wish to defend in the present work: we seek to foster a return to what Bruno Latour called the ‘missing mass’ of the social,4 the multitude of objects with which, and thanks to which, women and men form a society. This return does not claim, obviously, that everything is inevitably good or just in this mass. On the other hand, it aims to remind us of that trivial anthropological invariant which states that humans are never entirely naked on Earth – that they inhabit the world alongside things. We assume that, by focusing on maintenance, we can cultivate a new perspective on the relationships humans have with those things that are always more – or less – than symbolic totems or functional tools. Maintenance, and those who practise it, can help us rediscover this missing mass, which seems to have gradually faded from the concerns of many thinkers, including Latour himself,5 except as seen through the prism of the negative effects that those material entities have on the world.6
Why? This is the challenge of the present book: we assume that maintenance itself has a political significance. In many situations, the art of making things last is part of a form of relationship with objects that contrasts with what is usually foregrounded – not only when the supposed benefits of ‘technical progress’ are praised, but also when the materialist excesses of consumer society are criticized. Maintenance often means resisting obsolescence and breaking, for a time, the cycle of incessant replacement. But it also disturbs the principles of a version of ‘circular economy’ which only has eyes for production, consumption and recycling. On another level, maintenance also involves disrupting the projections of a desirable or worrying future, a future that grabs all our collective attention, sometimes to the point of paralysis. It means acting within the ordinary fabric of everyday life, here and now, without our concerns being fixated on the blinding horizon of an insurmountable crisis, yet to come.
It is the discovery of these politics of maintenance, barely outlined here, on which we wish to focus, by making ourselves sensitive to things and to those who take care of them.
A transfer of attention
This is no simple task. Firstly, a large number of maintenance activities still lie under the radar of most people’s experience, just as they remain in the margins of the main forms of contemporary master narratives. Maintenance is a quintessential background activity that, very often, doesn’t seem to matter. What is more, the concrete activities that comprise it are not very talkative. Interviewing the women and men who carry them out, or simply listening to them talk, is not enough to understand what they do. Maintenance involves a recurring contact with matter, a contact that must be directly observed if it is to be understood. Not because this means that we thereby access a greater truth than by listening to people, of course, but because within the ecology of the situations – in people’s gestures, looks, words and attitudes – a certain relationship to objects unfolds. Taking full account of these relationships is an essential resource when it comes to being sensitive to the fragility of things and the different ways of taking care of them.
Maintenance draws on an attentional gesture; it is ‘a way of looking at the world’.7 It is this gesture that we wish to explore. But not just as one object of research among others – something which, having been placed at a necessary distance, remains completely external to us. The objective of this book is to develop our own sensitivity to this very gesture, learning from those who cultivate it. In this sense, we will seek to engage in what Yves Citton calls a ‘meta-attentional engagement’: to deploy an instrument thanks to which attention is ‘plugged into the attentional experience of another more or less strongly subjectivized perception of the world, through which a certain reality is revisited’.8 We want to make ourselves, and you, attentive to the attention of those who practise maintenance.
To do this, we will draw on several types of resources. They all take the form of stories. Some are well known, others less so. Some are part of the ‘great’ history of civilizations, others are mere anecdotes. All of them will serve as guides to better understand how things come to last, and how certain women and men contribute to their becoming. Among these stories are, first and foremost, our own investigations. We will be immersing ourselves in the eventful life of metro signs and in the daily activities of the maintenance workers who look after them within the Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (or RATP, the Paris public transport company).9 We will also follow the graffiti removers who work every day to maintain the graphic order of the city of Paris by removing from the facades, as much as possible, those inscriptions that are deemed undesirable.10 We will also discuss certain aspects of the asset management of water networks in France, to which Daniel Florentin devoted an investigation together with one of the authors of the present book.11
We will also rely largely on the cases presented in the work of our colleagues. In recent years, in fact, we have been able to discover a growing number of articles and books by authors from very varied disciplines (sociology, history, geography, media studies, computer science, philosophy, architecture, anthropology, etc.) which focus on maintenance activities. Through meetings, international conferences and more informal conversations, a small community has taken shape, eventually forming the outlines of a particular domain: maintenance and repair studies.12 This book will be an opportunity to discover the richness of these studies and the variety of maintenance situations that they describe. Curious readers will thus be able to collect, via our citations and endnotes, a set of valuable references which implicitly form a provisional ‘state of the art’ for this field of research, which is still a hive of activity as we write these lines.13
Finally, we will also draw some examples from the press. These cases do not have quite the same descriptive density as those resulting from research. However, as we will see, they are not without either flavour or relevance. They will also remind us that, if maintenance is generally neglected, it can sometimes temporarily become highly newsworthy. It then breaks down into different public problems: even the very formulation of these problems proves to be highly instructive.
Telling stories, rather than pretending to present a global and well-ordered view of maintenance in general, is not a trivial matter.14 In writing this book, we want to think with maintenance and, even more, with those who practise it. To do so, we cannot completely detach ourselves from the great variety of situations. We cannot abstract ourselves from the singularity of the material encounters which maintenance involves. We must observe, listen to and accompany those who take care of things. We need to assemble stories that allow their voices to be heard, without ours drowning them out (let alone replacing them) – stories that allow us to develop a vocabulary capable of heightening our capacity for astonishment and sharpening our sensibility.15 Following the valuable advice of Dorothy Smith, we will seek less to act as spokespersons for the women and men who practise maintenance than to create, along with others, the means of amplifying their words and their actions.16
The vocabulary of humans and things
In order to successfully carry out this project and to (re)discover maintenance, we must be attentive to the vocabulary we use. In particular, we need to find the right words to describe the two main protagonists of our stories: humans, and the things they care for.
Certain maintenance activities are mainly carried out by women. Others, on the contrary, are largely reserved for men. Elsewhere still, the division of tasks is more complex. Although it is important to show these differences, we will not be able to adopt a standardized lexicon that can fully cover them. On the other hand, we will try to follow a simple rule by regularly marking the presence of both genders, in particular when habit or laziness of the imagination could lead one to believe in the sole presence of men in the situations described. At the same time, we will emphasize the role of women when their presence is more important. This is the general principle which we will try to respect while preserving the fluidity of the text as much as possible.
We will also sometimes mention ‘humans’. In this case, the aim will be to mark a distinction between all women and men on one side, and the things that are being maintained on the other. This manoeuvre may seem a little incongruous at this stage, but we will see that it matters in certain cases, in particular because the relational nature of maintenance raises the question of the role that humans ‘in general’ allow themselves to play in the life of things.
Let’s move on to things, now. To things or to objects? The question may seem artificial: we could easily argue in favour of a relaxed use of synonymy and assume that we can move from one term to another without worrying about the specific resonances of each. But this would mean depriving us of the subtleties that the two words convey and missing a fundamental aspect of maintenance. So we will not be using the two terms in quite the same way. Without adopting too rigid a protocol here, we will try to play on their difference so as to distinguish between, on the one hand, what is obvious and ‘already there’, which is treated as objects, and all that can’t be taken for granted, all that can disappear, dissolve and crumble, and needs to be constantly actualized: things. In other words, objects are everything that can be used without being questioned, in an almost transparent way. Nobody is worried about them. They fall under what Bruno Latour, who proposes a similar distinction, calls ‘matters of fact’.17 What things are and become, on the other hand, lies at the heart of many different worries. They are ‘matters of concern’. Things need to be taken care of if they are to continue to exist.
Clearly, this distinction does not relate to specific entities that could easily be divided up into the two categories, once correctly identified. Rather, the two terms refer to specific relationships, relationships in which these entities are caught up. Let’s take an example. You treat your tap as an object when you simply use it to run (or not run) water in the bathroom washbasin. On the other hand, if you regularly listen to the sound of the drops that it can let fall, if you try to feel the degree of resistance it presents when being turned on and off, if you have an idea of the different elements that compose it and are familiar, even superficially, with their behaviour (if you know, for example, about the possibility of wear and tear to a ceramic cartridge left in the same position for too long, or the pressure that a damaged rubber seal is likely to exert), you are treating this ‘same’ tap as a thing. To put it more simply: maintenance amounts to apprehending as a thing something that, for others, or for the same person but on other occasions, is an object.
This choice of vocabulary obviously echoes the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, who himself distinguishes between the object and the thing.18 However, he has a different political and moral objective. As Latour explains,19 Heidegger a priori separates objects, which are the result of modern technology (inevitably cheap), from things, whose artisanal, even poetic, character ensures rich forms of connection to which we ought to return. Just like Latour, the present authors refuse to decide on the issue in advance: we wish to leave open the possibility for apparently banal and standardized objects to be treated as things. It is even the great strength of maintenance to make us rediscover, quite literally, artefacts that are generally undervalued.
Our suggestion, however, is closer to the famous distinction that Heidegger establishes between the ‘readiness-to-hand’ of objects of which we make ordinary use and the ‘presence-to-hand’ that characterizes those that break and stop functioning properly. However, we will see a little later that our proposition does not totally stick to Heidegger’s, in particular because maintenance and its concerns do not need breakage in order to be carried out. Taking care of things is not conditional on their breaking down – quite the contrary.
Finally, rather than in Heidegger, it is in pragmatist philosophy that we must seek the source of our proposed distinction (a flexible one, as we have said) between objects and things, particularly in what William James calls ‘pragmata’: those ‘things in their plurality’ that are not just given.20 Things are unfinished. They are constantly in the making. They are even still ‘to be made’, to use Étienne Souriau’s eloquent term.21 The women and men who take care of them are well aware of this, since they worry about them and participate directly in this fragile and uncertain ‘making’.
Referring to things therefore allows us to underline the dimension, at once unstable and unpredictable, of the material entities apprehended by maintenance, including when they are massive and at first glance largely stabilized and inert. But that’s not all. As the example of the tap suggests, the ‘worrying becoming’ of things in maintenance gives way to a certain density, a swarming or a certain thickness, which stands out from the transparency and apparent flatness of the objects. With things, materials start to matter. Numerous, heterogeneous, sometimes elusive, they form the moving reality with which we must deal to make things exist and last. As Tim Ingold reminds us, objects generally present themselves to us in their finitude, crystallized in a form that we very easily take for granted, without having any idea of the material actions that constantly pass through them:
It is as though our material involvement begins only when the stucco has already hardened on the house front or the ink already dried on the page. We see the building and not the plaster of its walls, the words and not the ink with which they were written. In reality, of course, the materials are still there and continue to mingle and react as they have always done, forever threatening with dissolution or even ‘dematerialization’ the things they comprise.22
Maintenance presents itself as a sort of antidote to the blindness that Ingold regrets. It cannot deal with crystallized objects. In its apprehension of things, it focuses attention on the diversity of materials present and on their behaviour. Because the people who take care of things act straight from the flows of matter, they help us to become sensitive to those minute movements of materials, or ‘intra-activity’ as Karen Barad calls it,23 which constitutes the fragile life of things.
Pathways
This book is organized around individual words that designate the main questions and principal problems which an investigation of maintenance activities invites us to reconsider. We begin, in chapter 2, with the question of fragilities. We have already mentioned this point: by following people who take care of things, observing their actions and taking their concerns seriously, we find that a large number of objects, whose physical properties are generally taken for granted, are not as solid as one might imagine. From this point of view, maintenance de-centres (or re-centres) the gaze. By highlighting material fragility, maintenance sensitizes us to the modulations and deterioration that affect the material fabric of human societies. It entails a striking discordance, not only with the ordinary experience of many people, but also with the way in which numerous studies in the humanities and social sciences have tackled ‘materiality’ in their analyses by insisting exclusively on solidity and durability. Rather than denying or neglecting the wear and tear of things, maintenance starts from it. It sees it as a common condition, which forces humans to imagine different forms of diplomacy with matter. It is in this sense that maintenance can be seen as a way of taking care of things.
This fragility, however, is not obvious. That, indeed, is the problem. In chapter 3, we will look at the attention cultivated by those who take care of things in order to become sensitive to them, particularly in occupational situations. Maintenance involves contact with matter, and through this contact – which mobilizes the gaze, but also touch, hearing and smell – the people who take care of things strive to let these things express themselves. This uncertain inquiry, open to the unexpected, shows that maintenance is also an art of getting to know things on their very surface.
In chapter 4, we will continue to explore these encounters. Far from always remaining peaceful and delicate, the material interactions that punctuate maintenance may also generate tensions. Sometimes things resist care – especially when care can involve hand-to-hand tussles punctuated by sometimes quite spectacular disassembly operations. Far from sticking to subtle acts intended to preserve at all costs every aspect of the object concerned, maintenance turns out to be much more transformative than one might at first imagine. And encounters are often accompanied by a certain ontological concern: despite maintenance – because of it, in certain circumstances – the thing sometimes risks disappearing. To prevent this from happening, maintainers must give it room for manoeuvre and allow it to manifest itself: they must engage with it in a dance that humans are not the only ones to lead.
We will then return to the idea that maintenance consists of making things last, by exploring the types of time that are at work in this seemingly innocuous expression. Rather than simply constructing a purely ‘social’ time, maintenance is above all a way of making time a problem. By following this path, we will be led in chapter 5 to identify important differences in the problematization of duration. If, in certain cases, taking care of things simply consists of prolonging their use for an indefinite period of time, in other situations maintainers strive to produce the conditions for a quasi-eternity. Elsewhere, it is rather a matter of slowing down. Maintenance then amounts to fighting against the inevitable time of material deterioration, without ever claiming to stop it completely. Finally, things themselves sometimes persist in lasting well beyond what had been imagined by the humans who find themselves obliged to take care of them, more or less easily. These different ways of making time a problem are always closely associated with practical ways of organizing care. They also have a different ontological scope. Each form of maintenance goes hand in hand with a certain definition of the thing maintained and a more or less explicit identification of the elements that constitute it, elements on which care must concentrate in order to ward off the risk of seeing the thing disappear.
After exploring the problem of duration, we will question the other verb which makes up the expression ‘to make things last’. In chapter 6, we will see that the action of ‘making’ is not obvious, and that the question of its scope, like that of its intensity, haunts the whole question of maintenance. By focusing on the problem of authenticity, we will see that taking care of things is a matter of tact. This is what the intersecting history of the debates over heritage conservation and over environmental preservation shows. The former was initially based, in its modern version, on the demand for strong action by men (more rarely women) on the life of things of value. The latter, on the contrary, was based on keeping humans at bay, setting them apart from the nature to be preserved. In recent years, the two fields seem to have come together in more nuanced attitudes, which give the dance of maintenance a much more subtle dimension.
Finally, in chapter 7, we will address a question that runs throughout the book: who takes care of things? The resistance of many groups around the world and the conflicts that have emerged around the ‘right to repair’ will help us understand that if maintenance is very often a ‘dirty work’ reserved for a poorly regarded segment of the population, it is also sometimes claimed as a vector of emancipation, a means of cultivating an alternative relationship with consumer goods, freed from the arbitrary constraints set in place by large industrial groups. These conflicts remind us of the existence of a ‘people of things’ who strive, sometimes in the less visible margins of contemporary capitalism, to take care of objects that they do not want to see disappear.
But before starting this journey,24 we must return to the very term ‘maintenance’ and highlight the theoretical and political gesture which consists of placing it at the centre of our book. This is what we propose to do in the first chapter. For this, we will be drawing on Mierle Laderman Ukeles, a conceptual artist close to Marcel Duchamp and author of a manifesto for the art of maintenance in 1969.25 She is a sort of godmother of maintenance and repair studies. Her artistic approach will help us better understand the movement, both perceptual and conceptual, which consists of bringing to the forefront of our descriptions activities that are generally ignored or insufficiently esteemed. By focusing on maintenance, a reproductive activity par excellence, one that is carried out in the ordinary run of daily practices, we can rid ourselves of the contemporary obsession with innovation. But because it operates within the fabric of continuity, maintenance differs more generally from the omnipresent idea of disruption. In this sense, it also allows us to distance ourselves from the vocabulary of repair and resilience, as these remain deeply marked by the language of crisis, accident and shock, all of which disrupt an initial order, a peaceful state that must be restored. With Ukeles, we will realize that maintenance operates in a completely different space-time. It is an activity anchored in the folds of the present, one that always needs to be repeated: a banal gesture which does not recognize any hero. That is precisely why it deserves our full attention.
Notes
1
See, among many other studies: Léna Balaud and Antoine Chopot,
Nous ne sommes pas seuls. Politique des soulèvements terrestres
(Paris: Seuil, 2021); Emanuele Coccia,
Sensible Life: A Micro-ontology of the Image
, translated by Scott Alan Stuart (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); Gilbert Cochet and Béatrice Kremer-Cochet,
L’Europe réensauvagée. Vers un nouveau monde
(Arles: Actes Sud, 2020); Vinciane Despret,
Habiter en oiseau
(Arles: Actes Sud, 2019); Dusan Kazic,
Quand les plantes n’en font qu’à leur tête. Concevoir un monde sans production ni économie
(Paris: La Découverte/Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2022); Baptiste Morizot,
On the Animal Trail
, translated by Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2012); Estelle Zhong Mengual,
Apprendre à voir. Le point de vue du vivant
(Arles: Actes Sud, 2021).
2
Baptiste Morizot,
Ways of Being Alive
, translated by Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2022), p. 1.
3
Emmanuel Bonnet, Diego Landivar and Alexandre Monnin,
Héritage et fermeture. Une écologie du démantèlement
(Paris: Divergences, 2021). For an overview of recent dynamics of detachment that operate in different domains, see Frédéric Goulet and Dominique Vinck (eds.),
New Horizons for Innovation Studies. Doing Without, Doing with Less: Destabilisation, Discontinuation and Decline as Horizons for Transformation
(Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2023).
4
Bruno Latour,
La Clef de Berlin. Petites leçons de sociologie des sciences
(Paris: La Découverte, 1993).
5
Bruno Latour,
Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime
, translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).
6
There are countless high-calibre works that consider the transformation of living things and the modes of presence of the products of human activity, from major infrastructures to residual products, as forms of toxicity, and more generally of the deterioration of the environment. See, among many others, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, ‘Plastics, materials and dreams of dematerialization’, in Jennifer Gabrys, Gay Hawkins and Mike Michael (eds.),
Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 17–29; Sophie Houdart, ‘Les répertoires subtils d’un terrain contaminé’,
Techniques & Culture
, no. 68, 2017, pp. 88–103; Max Liboiron, Manuel Tironi and Nera Calvillo, ‘Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world’,
Social Studies of Science
, vol. 48, no. 3, 2018, pp. 331–49; Matthieu Duperrex, V
oyages en sol incertain. Enquêtes dans les deltas du Rhône et du Mississippi
(Marseilles: Wildproject, 2019); Soraya Boudia, Angela N. H. Creager, Scott Frickel, Emmanuel Henry, Nathalie Jas, Carsten Reinhardt and Jody A. Roberts,
Residues: Thinking through Chemical Environments
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021); Trisia Farrelly, Sy Taffel and Ian Shaw,
Plastic Legacies: Pollution, Persistence, and Politics
(Athabasca, Alberta: Athabasca University Press, 2021).
7
Hilary Sample,
Maintenance Architecture
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018), p. 17.
8
Yves Citton,
The Ecology of Attention
, translated by Barnaby Norman (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), p. 161.
9
Jérôme Denis and David Pontille,
Petite sociologie de la signalétique. Les coulisses des panneaux du métro
(Paris: Presses des Mines, 2010).
10
Jérôme Denis and David Pontille, ‘Maintenance epistemology and public order: Removing graffiti in Paris’,
Social Studies of Science
, vol. 51, no. 2, 2021, pp. 233–58.
11
Daniel Florentin and Jérôme Denis,
Gestion patrimoniale des réseaux d’eau et d’assainissement en France
, Caisse des Dépôts-Institut pour la recherche et Banque des territoires, 2019.
12
For an overview, see Jérôme Denis and David Pontille, ‘Why do maintenance and repair matter?’, in Anders Blok, Ignacio Farías and Celia Roberts (eds.),
The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), pp. 283–93.
13
Since the first publication of this book in French, a large number of publications have enriched the flourishing domain of ‘Maintenance and Repair Studies’. Among them, we would like to mention a few important collective books, which we encourage readers to discover: Markus Berger and Kate Irvin,
Repair: Sustainable Design Futures
(London and New York: Taylor & Francis, 2022); Stefan Krebs and Heike Weber (eds.),
The Persistence of Technology: Histories of Repair, Reuse and Disposal
(Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2021); Dimitris Papadopoulos, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Maddalena Tacchetti (eds.),
Ecological Reparation: Repair, Remediation and Resurgence in Social and Environmental Conflict
(Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2023); and Mark Thomas Young and Mark Coeckelbergh (eds.),
Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology: Keeping Things Going
(London and New York: Taylor & Francis, 2024).
14
Narratives are a resource for producing knowledge about the world that the formal procedures of the modern sciences do not capture. See Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret,
Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf
, translated by April Knutson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
15
Like the ‘sensitizing concepts’ dear to Herbert Blumer, who says: ‘Whereas definitive concepts provide prescriptions of what to see, sensitizing concepts merely suggest directions along which to look’ (Herbert Blumer, ‘What is wrong with social theory?’,
American Sociological Review
, vol. 19, no. 1, 1954, p. 7).
16
Dorothy E. Smith,
Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
17
Bruno Latour,
Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy
, translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Bruno Latour, ‘Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern’,
Critical Inquiry
, vol. 30, no. 2, 2004, pp. 225–48.
18
Martin Heidegger,
What Is a Thing?
, translated by W. B. Barton Jr and Vera Deutsch (Washington, DC: Gateway Editions, 1968).
19
Latour, ‘Why has critique run out of steam?’
20
William James,
The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to ‘Pragmatism’
(1909), available online at:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5117/5117-h/5117-h.htm
. We owe this pragmatist reference to Antoine Hennion: see in particular ‘Enquêter sur nos attachements. Comment hériter de William James?’,
SociologieS
, 2015,
https://doi.org/10.4000/sociologies.4953
.
21
Étienne Souriau,
The Different Modes of Existence: Followed by On the Work to Be Made
, translated by Erik Beranek and Tim Howles (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Publishing, 2015).
22
Tim Ingold, ‘Materials against materiality’,
Archaeological Dialogues
, vol. 14, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1–16 (p. 9).
23
Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter’,
Signs
, vol. 28, no. 3, 2003, pp. 801–31.
24
We have arranged these chapters so that they form a course made up of plateaus whose progressive discovery reveals an ever-denser image of maintenance, while leaving space for exceptions and individual cases. That being said, each chapter can be read independently, and nothing prevents you from reading this book in another order and discovering the ethics and politics of maintenance at your own pace. If you want first to understand how collectives defend their way of taking care of things in the face of large industrial groups, you can start with chapter 7. If it is maintenance as a work activity that interests you, and the sometimes rough and ready relationships with things that it involves, you can skip directly to chapter 4. If the controversies and debates on the value of things that need to be maintained and on the role of human beings in their preservation intrigue you, you can turn to chapter 6. If you wonder what changes are brought about by the maintainers’ gaze when they scrutinize the place of objects in society, and are curious about the relevance of the vocabulary of care when it comes to talking about things, you will find some answers in chapter 2. If you tell yourself that, above all, the main issue in maintenance is the relationship that humans have with time, you can take a look at chapter 5. If you are fascinated by the ability of maintainers to see signs of wear or failure in objects, chapter 3 may inspire you.
25
It is called
Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!
, and is available on the website of the Queens Museum:
https://queensmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Ukeles-Manifesto-for-Maintenance-Art-1969.pdf
.
1Maintaining
On 20 July 1973, Mierle Laderman Ukeles was invited to the Wadworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, to stage her very first performance, entitled Transfer: The Maintenance of the Art Object: Mummy Maintenance: With the Maintenance Man, the Maintenance Artist, and the Museum Conservator. As the title suggests, Ukeles was not alone. Inaugurating a long series of collaborative works, she invited one of the institution’s curators as well as one of its maintenance staff. At the centre of the performance was a work already on exhibition in the museum – an Egyptian mummy on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art – around which the three protagonists played their parts. Less than the mummy itself, it was its display case which was at the heart of the operation, with spectators being encouraged to pay attention to the special care it received. The performance was organized in three distinct moments. It began with the cleaning of the display case by the maintenance worker, who carried it out as he had done every day since the work had entered the museum. A maintenance task like any other – quite routine. Secondly, the worker’s gestures were repeated identically by Ukeles, who had carefully observed them. This second phase ended with the affixing of a stamp to the display case, inscribing the expression ‘Maintenance Art Work’ in ink. In a gesture directly inspired by the work of Marcel Duchamp, the operation transformed the impeccably clean surfaces of the display case into proof that the work of cleaning was itself a work of art. The curator was then obliged to authenticate it and write a ‘condition report’ for the display case. Above all, he became the only person authorized to carry out future cleaning operations. Now handled by a curator, the actions carried out by the maintenance worker, and then by Ukeles, had thus changed their status. Maintenance had shifted into the realm of art.
The performance, a first opportunity for Ukeles to put to the test the principles of her manifesto for maintenance art,1 had a considerable impact and marked a time of profound upheaval in conceptual art. What was she doing, exactly? How did she help to transform the gaze of the spectators, but also that of artistic institutions themselves? The implications of this ‘transfer’ are numerous, but one central point in Ukeles’ work is particularly salient here, and deserves our attention. By making maintenance an art, Ukeles strives to highlight the ‘reproductive work’ that is usually left aside, remaining in the shadows of exhibitions, reserved for spaces and times from which the public is absent. Simultaneously, she seeks to unravel the obviousness of the creative gesture and to undermine the separation between the two forms of action, one highlighted in the name of originality, the other devalued because it is ordinary, a matter of mere continuity.
