In praise of maintenance

Do you know who washes your office windows? Or the names of the technicians who check the elevators every month? Probably not. It’s a fact: maintenance jobs are largely invisible. When everything is well maintained, you don’t need to think about it; and when you do need to think about it, it’s often already too late. Worn-out, damaged, broken… the objects of our daily life then require drastic intervention, i.e. repair, or even replacement.

A caretaker for thirty years, Catherine regularly experiences this. As soon as she goes on holiday, the building she looks after deteriorates in just a few days. “To ensure that the premises are well maintained,” she explains, “it’s everyday. You mustn’t wait, and should be regular.” As soon as a light bulb breaks, muddy boots dirty the entrance, or a dustbin fills up too quickly, she intervenes. “Even when I’m not supposed to be working, I sometimes sweep up the dead leaves at the entrance of the car park or mop the floor in the lobby,” she says. Stains that aren’t cleaned right away may set in permanently. Sometimes, health and safety issues are also at stake, when a resident uses the fire extinguisher cupboard for storage, for example, or when rubbish risks attracting pests. “If I didn’t take out the rubbish every day, we’d definitely end up having rats.”

‘Maintenance often means resisting obsolescence and, for a time, breaking the cycle of incessant replacement’

—Jérôme Denis and David Pontille

For the environment’s sake

Why are these thousand and one discreet gestures less valued than spectacular repair or disruptive innovation? In a society haunted by the ideal of Homo faber – that of the crafty or inventive humans who have learned to make tools and objects to emancipate themselves –, we’re more keen to celebrate the curator in charge of a monument’s restoration or the startupper offering new services and technologies.

This valuation owes much to our appreciation of “creative destruction”, theorised by the economist Joseph Schumpeter in the first half of the 20st century. According to him, innovations are the main drivers of economic growth, but they regularly make old goods and services obsolete. In a new era of environmental crisis, could the time for innovation be over? In their book Caring for Things (in French, 2022), sociologists Jérôme Denis and David Pontille develop the idea that maintenance might have political significance. “Maintenance,” they write, “often means resisting obsolescence and, for a time, breaking the cycle of incessant replacement.”

‘Maintenance is a political objective more compatible with the new environmental challenges’

It also means questioning so-called “environmental” practices which continue to emphasise production, consumption, and replacement – ​​like excessive recycling. Maintenance is a political objective more compatible with new environmental challenges: there’s certainly nothing spectacular or heroic about dusting your computer keyboard, cleaning the coffee machine, or changing the aerator of a tap. You can’t communicate about it on LinkedIn or include it in your activity report, and it will go unnoticed by most of your colleagues. But these largely invisible, mundane gestures could be part of the solution to the environmental crisis.

In Lasting