Cultures of Energy 248 - Maintenance & Repair (feat. Jérôme Denis & David Pontille)
Feb 8, 2026
David Pontille, researcher of maintenance practices, and Jérôme Denis, scholar of fragility and the care of things, join to discuss their new books. They trace how fieldwork with infrastructure crews led them to study fragility, contrast maintenance and repair, explore attention and phenomenology in care work, and frame maintenance as a potential subversive practice in the age of planned obsolescence.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Fragility As An Analytic Connector
- Fragility serves as an analytic tool to reveal neglected practices and relations.
- Denis explains fragility connects care-of-things research with feminist care studies and draws attention to unnoticed maintenance practices.
Maintenance Is Continuous Not Heroic
- Maintenance emphasizes continuity rather than episodic innovation or heroic repair.
- Jérôme Denis explains maintenance recurs repeatedly (you must maintain again and again) and contrasts it with one-off repair and celebrated innovation.
Attention Is Maintenance Expertise
- Attention is a core expertise of maintenance workers and a bridge to phenomenology.
- Jérôme Denis recounts following subway sign maintainers and discovering that their practiced attention reframes how philosophers (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty) and STS think about material life.
