The Persistence of Technology: From Maintenance and Repair to Reuse and Disposal ed. by Heike Weber and Stefan Krebs (review)

Reviewed by: The Persistence of Technology: From Maintenance and Repair to Reuse and Disposal ed. by Heike Weber and Stefan Krebs Kevin L. Borg (bio) The Persistence of Technology: From Maintenance and Repair to Reuse and Disposal Edited by Heike Weber and Stefan Krebs. Bielefeld: transcript, 2021. Pp. 292. The editors' two introductory essays to this collection draw upon a broader historical discourse about temporalities—time experienced as "mingled pasts, presents, and futures"—to tie together the heretofore tangentially connected studies of maintenance, repair, reuse, and disposal (see M. Champion, "The History of Temporalities," 2019). Given that human cultures generate layers of technology in use, they argue, any particular technological system displays varying depths of overlapping chronologies and contexts of creation, use, repair, dismantlement, reuse, disposal, and decay. Thus, at any point in time, any technological system is polychronic, or exhibits a mixture of ages in use that reflect dynamic amalgams of overlapping socio-technical parts in varying states of persistence. Interrogating the persistence of technology in this layered, polychronic sense is the editors' core heuristic contribution to the field. The following ten case studies are situated within the twentieth century with foci in North America and Western Europe as well as in China, Central Asia, and northern India. The first section features three strong studies of electric power and communications infrastructures. Ying Jia Tan examines the constant repair, dismantling, and relocation of power grid components in China during perpetual warfare from 1937–55. In the United Kingdom, Thomas Lean explores the effect that shifting political systems had on the workers who maintained the power grid before and after privatization in the 1980s and '90s. And in Canada from the 1880s to the 1930s, Jan Hadlaw finds that Bell Telephone of Canada treated in-home telephones as extensions of the utility grid, and thus the durability and persistence of the units became a point of pride for Bell Canada and its service workers. These studies highlight the polychronic layering of old and new technology maintained by resourceful, embedded actors, revealing as well the political and corporate frameworks within which maintenance and repair workers were more or less valued over time. The book's second and third sections present a diverse set of five case studies, three of which concern automobiles. Krebs reveals the centrality of repair—specifically owners' self-repair—to German automobility and argues that it elevated owners' social status in the twentieth century as consumers willingly shouldered part of the burden of automobility. Karsten Marhold finds maintenance bottlenecks hampered French and German power companies' efforts to develop electric vehicles in the 1970s. And David Lucsko presents an intriguing study of the aestheticization of visible wear [End Page 936] on old automobiles. The early twenty-first-century movement to preserve the "patina" of classic automobiles, rather than restoring them to "like-new" condition, seems to foretell a cultural shift toward valuing technological persistence. Intermingled with these automobile studies is Jonas van der Straeten and Maria Petrova's gem of a study on the persistence of traditional adobe building and repair in Soviet-era Samarkand in Central Asia, a technology that persists by maintaining deep community roots. Slawomir Lotysz contributes a well-told story of the removal, transportation, and reuse of an entire Canadian Merk penicillin plant in post–World War II Yugoslavia and the unanticipated learning opportunity it provided the new owners, though this study is less well integrated into the volume's heuristic frame. The final two essays follow technologies to their "ends" through regional and global networks. Weber looks at consumer durables in West Germany in the 1960s–80s, noting the coevolution of planned obsolescence and municipal disposal service, which essentially municipalized waste and discouraged salvaging and reuse. Yet, Weber also shows that polychronic persistence survives and warrants further exploration, noting the persistence of mending, repair, and reuse, symbolized by hand-me-down sewing kits and thriving secondhand sales channels. Finally, Ayushi Dhawan traces the life cycle of the SS France from its launch in 1960 as an elegant transatlantic ocean liner through its second life as a Caribbean cruise ship where years of poor maintenance took its toll, culminating in a massive and deadly boiler explosion...

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