Eurograd message

Message posted on 13/08/2024

Talk: Mark Thomas Young "Beyond Winner's Bridge: Maintenance and the Political Histories of Artifacts" Maintenance & Philosophy of Technology SIG, Thursday August 15th 1800-1915 UTC+1

Dear All,

We’d like to announce the next session of the SPT Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology SIG this coming Thursday. In this session, I’ll be giving a presentation which explores the influence of Langdon Winner’s famous article ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics’ on contemporary philosophy of technology and examines how turning our attention to the neglected topic of maintenance opens up new and promising ways of thinking about the political nature of artefacts. Along the way we’ll be uncovering the hidden and surprising history of the Golden Gate Bridge, focusing particular attention on the processes that led to the recent addition of suicide nets. If you'd like a link for the talk, please email me at: mark@markthomasyoung.net

Best, Mark

Beyond Winner's Bridge: Maintenance and the Political Histories of Artifacts

Mark Thomas Young (University of Oslo)

Thursday August 15th 1800-1915 UTC+1

Abstract: Since the publication of Winner’s influential article in 1980, the idea that artifacts have politics has remained a dominant theme in STS and the philosophy of technology. Yet despite exploring the political nature of artifacts from a variety of different perspectives, little of this work has paid attention to the politics underlying changes artifacts undergo after they are produced or constructed. In this presentation my goal will be to demonstrate how the neglect of such processes has obscured important dimensions of the political nature of artifacts, by casting them as stable features artifacts come to possess through design, rather than as ongoing processes that continue throughout the lives of artifacts. My goal will be to show how turning our attention to maintenance, and in particular practices of retrofitting, grants us insights into the relationship between technology and time that promises a major upheaval in how we conceptualize the political nature of artifacts. The first section of my presentation will address one of the fundamental assumptions behind Winner’s argument: that artefacts acquire their political character through the formative activity of a designer. By revealing how artefacts often continue changing after their construction through the practise of retrofitting, I’ll attempt to show that these formative acts are rarely confined to phases of production and construction and instead continue to apply throughout the histories of artifacts. In order to demonstrate this claim, I'll review a variety of different artefact kinds to illustrate the extent to which they continue to change after production. After detailing reasons why these processes of change should be considered forms of maintenance, I’ll turn my attention to the political processes underlying such changes. In contrast to accounts in the philosophy of technology which depict breakdown and failure as objective states of an artifact, I’ll demonstrate how, whether or not artifacts such as bridges require alteration in the form of repair or retrofitting, is an inherently subjective question that depends on values. Yet whose values take precedence in shaping the evolution of artifacts depends on questions of power. In the final sections of this presentation, I’ll illustrate how attending to these processes encourages us to understand the politics of artifacts less as a matter of design and more as a matter of governance and by doing so raises a range of important yet unaddressed questions surrounding the ethics of the built environment.

(In order to avoid confusion regarding the timing of the talks - the following table clarifies when the talks begin in different locations)

Amsterdam 7:00pm London 6:00pm Toronto (New York) 1:00pm San Francisco 10:00am

Remaining Schedule for 2024

September 12th 2024 (1800-1915 UTC+1) - Yuriko Saito (Rhode School of Design) “Aesthetics of Care: Practice in Everyday Life”

October 10th 2024 (1800-1915 UTC+1) - TBA

November 14th (1800-1915 UTC+1) - Brooke Rudow (University of Florida) “The Focality of Maintenance and the Making of Home"

December 12th (1800-1915 UTC+1) - Andrea Gammon (Technical University of Delft) “Environmental Technology and the Absence of Maintenance"

Mark Thomas Young Postdoctoral Fellow University of Oslo https://univie.academia.edu/MarkThomasYoung


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