Material Ordering and the Care of Things

Denis, Jérôme; Pontille, David

doi:10.1177/0162243914553129

Cited by 167 publications

(125 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Maintenance is related to planning, appearing as a form of 'repair-before-failure' intending to prevent 'repairafter-failure' (Jacobs and Cairns 2011). Yet it is also a matter of concern in the present, an active practice of monitoring, tracking and intervening to sustain a system and its wider relations over time (Denis and Pontille 2015). The study of these activities sheds light on the invisible relationships between order and disorder, foregrounding a process that makes possible a kind of relative permanence for a given system as a whole.…”

Section: Everyday Micropowersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

2018

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The FRINGE series explores the roles that complexity, ambivalence and immeasurability play in social and cultural phenomena. A cross-disciplinary initiative bringing together researchers from the humanities, social sciences and area studies, the series examines how seemingly opposed notions such as centrality and marginality, clarity and ambiguity, can shift and converge when embedded in everyday practices. Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of UCL. Peter Zusi is Lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of UCL.By adopting the tropes of 'repair' and 'waste', this book innovatively manages to link various material registers from architecture, intergenerational relations, affect and museums with ways of making the past present. Through a rigorous yet transdisciplinary method, Martínez brings together different scales and contexts that would often be segregated out. In this respect, the ethnography unfolds a deep and nuanced analysis, providing a useful comparative and insightful account of the processes of repair and waste making in all their material, social and ontological dimensions.Victor Buchli, Professor of Material Culture at UCL This book comprises an endearingly transdisciplinary ethnography of postsocialist material culture and social change in Estonia. Martínez creatively draws on a number of critical and cultural theorists, together with additional research on memory and political studies scholarship and the classics of anthropology. Grappling concurrently with time and space, the book offers a delightfully thick description of the material effects generated by the accelerated post-Soviet transformation in Estonia, inquiring into the generational specificities in experiencing and relating to the postsocialist condition through the conceptual anchors of wasted legacies and repair. This book defies disciplinary boundaries and shows how an attention to material relations and affective infrastructures might reinvigorate political theory.Maria This is a book about many things. Originally, it appears as a critique of discourses about the past, and yet it unfolds as an ethnography of pastness that deals with the contemporary city, geographies of affect, generational change and materiality. The work interweaves a number of topics related to how physical and cultural wasting are rarely synchronised, accounting for diverse ways of treating inheritances and the different intensities of urban memory that they generate. By studying the material and social afterlife of the Soviet world in Estonia, I attempt to show the dialectical relation between construction and demolition, and how the need to build something new entails the disinvestment and neglect of the legacies from the old regime. With a fringy anthropology, I explore how the vanquishing over the Soviet world happened on a different time scale from the decay of its legacy, allowing for new availabilities, intricate reappropriations and unforeseen opportunities for recuper...

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Section: Everyday Micropowersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

2018

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“…Also particularly important for this purpose is a 'productivist bias' in STS imaginaries of scientific innovation that Jackson also identifies, and calls to question (see also Papadopoulos, 2014). Here a feminist politics of care in technoscience -akin to Jackson and other's attention to practices of 'maintenance' and 'repair' (Denis & Pontille, 2014) and Anne Marie Mol's foregrounding of a 'logic of care' (Mol, 2008) -appears particularly relevant. It offers an inquiry into different modes of 'making time' by focusing on experiences, in this case of soil care, that are obscured or marginalised -as 'unproductive' -in the dominant futuristic drive.…”

Section: The Future Of Soil In Technoscientific Timescapesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making time for soil: Technoscientific futurity and the pace of care

2015

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The dominant drive for understanding soil has been to pace its fertility with human demand. But today warnings about soil's exhaustion and endangered ecology raise concerns that they have been mistreated throughout history. These worries are marked by fears of gloomy environmental futures, prompting us, and specially scientists and soil practitioners to urgently develop better ways of taking care of soils. Yet the pace required by ecological soil care could be at odds with the predominant temporal orientation of technoscientific intervention: driven by an inherently progressivist, productionist and restless mode of futurity. Through a conceptual and historical approach to the soil sciences and other domains of soil knowledge the paper looks for soil ontologies and approaches to human-soil relations that are obscured by this predominant timescape. Discussions about the future of the soil sciences already expose tensions between 'progress as usual' -by intensifying productivity -and the need to protect the pace of soil renewal. However it is in the interrogation of the intimate relation of soil science with productionism, and in the emergence of soil ecology conceptions that emphasise soil as a living community rather than a receptacle for crops, that we could see emerging alternative soil ontologies and human-soil relations paced by a temporality of care. The 'foodweb' model of soil ecology in particular has become a figure of alternative human-soil relations for environmental activists and practitioners, promoting soil care practices that intensify the involvement of practitioners with soil's temporality. Reading these ways of relating to soil ways of making time for 'care time', helps to reveal a diversity of more-than-human interdependent temporalities, disrupting the anthropocentric appeal of predominant timescales of technoscientific futurity and their reductive notion of innovation.

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“…In other words, every action necessitates humans and nonhumans. Furthermore, as vulnerability is the natural state of things (Denis and Pontille 2015), these human-thing networks must be stable and strong in order to resist, or adapt to, changes. According to Latour (1996, 370) strength comes from "dissemination, heterogeneity and the careful plaiting of weak ties. "…”

Section: Materials Religion Articlementioning

confidence: 99%

In Defense of the Dead: Materializing a Garden of Remembrance in South London

Berns

2016

Material Religion

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This article examines a campaign to save, protect and convert a once-forgotten paupers' graveyard in South London into a remembrance garden for the "outcast dead. " A vital component of this campaign was the materializing and maintenance of a roadside shrine on the graveyard's periphery. This campaign therefore raises questions about nonhuman agency (in terms of the materials that form the shrine, graveyard and garden) and its role in the making and protecting of a contested site. At the crux of this article stands the co-constitutive relationship between people and objects, including the gates and offerings, the supporters and gardeners, the local flora and fauna and, of course, the human remains. To explore how these heterogeneous assemblages helped to defend the graveyard, this article draws on ethnographic research, paying particular attention to discussions and activities concerning the site's boundaries, visibility and permanence.

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Material Ordering and the Care of Things

Cited by 167 publications

References 51 publications

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

Making time for soil: Technoscientific futurity and the pace of care

In Defense of the Dead: Materializing a Garden of Remembrance in South London

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