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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

Making Things Last. Maintenance and the Ontological Politics of Duration

Jérôme Denis
David Pontille

Résumé

n this communication, we investigate how duration is concretely cultivated in maintenance practices. We show that, more than a mere social construction of time through which people would shape a specific temporality for the objects they take care of, maintenance is articulated to certain problematizations of time. Maintenance is indeed a daily struggle against different aspects of the time that matter does (Barad, 2013), which constantly endangers the things that humans hold valuable. These struggles are in no way univocal, though. Just as multiple temporal regimes can be identified over the course of history (Hartog, 2015), there are different manners to make things last, and thus to problematize the time of things that are taken care of. Drawing on the growing literature in maintenance and repair studies as well as our own investigations, we identify four ways of dealing with time in maintenance. The first one aims at prolongation, and consists in merely extending the life of an artifact. On the opposite, the second one strives for permanence, which requires a significant amount of work and resources. A third form involves a process of slowing down, in which maintenance is carried out to slightly postpone the inevitable disappearance of objects. Finally, we highlight a fourth rather counter-intuitive form in which things last longer than expected, and confront people to their stubbornness. While these four forms of time problematization configure the conditions in which things may last, we show that they also convey specific ontological enactments (Woolgar & Neyland, 2013) in which what concretely counts for a thing to remain the same vary.

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Dates et versions

hal-03867011 , version 1 (23-11-2022)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03867011 , version 1

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Jérôme Denis, David Pontille. Making Things Last. Maintenance and the Ontological Politics of Duration. Politics of Technoscientific Futures, EASST Conference, Jul 2022, Madrid, Spain. ⟨hal-03867011⟩
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