Special issue on Materials and Society: the Circular Economy SAM-13

Birat, Jean‐Pierre

doi:10.1051/mattech/2020007

Cited by 2 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…3. LCA can be described in ANT terms [12], but only imperfectly: indeed, the ANT network in that case is the value chain, but there are no "actants" in LCA beyond a small number of human actors (the practioner, its client, a few other experts). LCA does also propose a translation [13], in the sense of Michel Serres, in as far as it transforms the input data into indicators, including midpoint and endpoint ones: however, it is a kind of procedural, automatic, mechanical translation, based on LCA methodology anchored in ISO 14040 standards, rather than the result of the interaction, ripe with controversies, among the network's actors 8 .…”

Section: Materials As Actantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, what remains is a continuity of usage in changing societies. Copper is an interesting case in point, as it developed into a functional material, wherein its "most useful" property is presently electrical conductivity, used in connection with the universal use of electricity, nowadays 12 but structural uses are still in play, such as in copper pans, roofing in Northern Europe, etc.…”

Section: Wrap Up and Tentative Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Progress has turned from good to evil, from positive to negative. 12 An automobile, today, is composed of 1.5% copper (source ADEME). This number will increase when cars become powered by electric engines.…”

Section: Wrap Up and Tentative Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A companion paper [12] proposes a parallel effort to introduce ANT in connection with materials, but more specifically as a possible way to rethink LCA and SCM methodologies.…”

Section: Wrap Up and Tentative Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Materials are social constructs, but they also have agency

Birat¹

2023

Matériaux & Techniques

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A puzzling matter about materials, particularly structural materials, is that they exhibit both a rather extraordinary extension in time, bridging over many historical and prehistorical ages, and a dynamic dimension, changing as they are in time to the point that materials may not be easily recognized as similar today as thousands of years ago. To understand this dichotomy, it is necessary to reach beyond materials science and STEM disciplines and to collect concepts and methods from SSH. Materials and energy are at the core of the physical world in which society functions: they provide the structure of the artifacts that we need, along with the ability to make and use them. They do not exist in an absolute, Aristotelian world, but are invented along historical time, by people to meet their needs, hic et nunc. Materials are social constructs, as is the “theory” (technology, science in modern language) that gives us the keys for making them. As society changes historically, people’s needs evolve and “new” materials are created on the shoulders of older ones, in a kind of evolutionary process. This is the view of social constructivism. This evolutionary metaphor is a first explanation of the continuity between, say, iron from a Roman bloomery and steel, as a contemporary commercial product. This has been formulated as the Social Cycle of Materials (SCM) by sociologists of Knowledge and Innovation, as a process of continuous innovation in which materials are socially constructed over and over again, a process often called “progress”. The continuity from old to new materials needs to be explained by some other model, however, to be fully understood: indeed, why is iron enduring so much, when it might have been displaced by another material at each evolutionary step and it didn’t. The explanation we propose is to accept that “materials have agency”, i.e. that they themselves are the actors of their own perenniality. This refers to another model, the Actor Network Theory (ANT) of Latour et al., which analyzes how change is pulled by a combined network of actors, that include people, organizations, non-human living entities and inanimate things as well.

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Section: Materials As Actantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Wrap Up and Tentative Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Wrap Up and Tentative Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A companion paper [12] proposes a parallel effort to introduce ANT in connection with materials, but more specifically as a possible way to rethink LCA and SCM methodologies.…”

Section: Wrap Up and Tentative Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Materials are social constructs, but they also have agency

Birat¹

2023

Matériaux & Techniques

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“…O between a concrete, a steel or a wooden building, etc.?). However, there is another narrative that relates to materials and tells how they constitute the backbone of the anthroposphere and how they perform this role all the better that they are reused and recycled more and more [18]. This latter story is less audible in the general public than the former one, because there is no clear monetary value associated to recycling.…”

Section: What Is More Important the Parchment Or The Book The Matermentioning

confidence: 99%

Palimpsest and heterotopia, metaphors of the Circular Economy

Birat

2019

Matériaux & Techniques

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Words like palimpsest or heterotopia do not belong to the working vocabulary of materials or engineering sciences: they are used in Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). A palimpsest is a manuscript written on an older document, the text of which has been erased. Heterotopia is a young word forged by Michel Foucault in 1967 to describe a closed space, the boundaries of which mark a discontinuity in terms of behavior: a jail or a monastery are thus a heterotopia. The Circular Economy (CE) is an essential concept in the framework of the ecological transition, pulled by a series of converging economic, ecological and political drivers. It is usually described as the adoption of a circular model of production to replace the “linear model”, but also as the new buzzword to describe material efficiency, the 3-R rule, the zero-waste ideal, the concepts of lean or frugal design or their reformulation by the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, as a societal challenge and an ethical necessity. Materials producers claim that they have been practicing the Circular Economy since long before the expression was ever invented, thus à la Monsieur Jourdain, etc. The point of this paper is to describe the Circular Economy as a palimpsest and as a heterotopia and to use the metaphors, if indeed they are only metaphors, to highlight some of the less obvious features of the CE. A palimpsest is a parchment or a papyrus, which is used several times to support a series of consecutive texts. Secondary raw materials are like a palimpsest, because there are retrieved from a previous life and used again in a second life: a new artefact made from that material is like a new text written on/with this material – a metaphor also used, mutatis mutandis, in expressions like 3-D printing or laser scribing. Some interesting features of the CE pointed out by the metaphor: a the palimpsest can be used several times, like a material can be recycled several times; the concept of the palimpsest posits that the parchment is somehow more important than the text that is written on it, therefore a material is more important than the goods that are made of it; the palimpsest was used before the invention of paper and, similarly, the Circular Economy was the standard model before mass production of cheap consumer goods imposed the so-called “linear model”; a palimpsest keeps a fragmented memory of the past, in the same way as recycled material maintains a link to its past lives, through its composition in tramp elements. Examples of heterotopia are a prison or a cemetery. The Circular Economy defines a space where a particular material/element exists in its various avatars, impersonations and reincarnations and this may tentatively be worked out as a heterotopia. This is a more complex endeavor than discussing the palimpsest metaphor, but a potentially more fruitful one. Foucault has provided criteria defining heterotopia which can help us explore the analogy: particularly the point that such a space is either a space of illusion or a space of perfection. This analysis is original because it hybridizes materials and SSH concepts and thus fits with the exploration of the frontier between materials and society that SAM conferences are concerned about.

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Special issue on Materials and Society: the Circular Economy SAM-13

Cited by 2 publications

References 9 publications

Materials are social constructs, but they also have agency

Materials are social constructs, but they also have agency

Palimpsest and heterotopia, metaphors of the Circular Economy

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