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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