La notion de « viscosité » des objets ou les résistances inégales de la réparation

Abstract

The MV Veteran, a seagoing car ferry constructed by the Dutch industrial conglomerate Damen Shipyards Group, connects the two small, rural outport communities of Fogo Island and Change Islands to the larger island of Newfoundland, Canada. Our paper examines the breakdowns of this new ferry and the repairs facilitated through its manufacturer’s warranty. In our analysis, we treat the warranty as a ‘script’ as something that both constrains and enables action and engenders resistances. The warranty anticipates and conditions both future times and spacings of breakdown and how those future breakdowns are to be addressed through activities such as maintenance and repair. In recounting the ferry’s breakdowns and repairs, we explore how the case of this ferry and its warranty in this particular place suggests a need to add to the analytical and conceptual repertoire for thinking about the breakdown and repair of technical objects. We suggest there is a need for supple enough concepts of breakdown and repair that they can deal with technical objects that are neither as ‘fluid’ as the classic example of a bush-pump nor quite as ‘fixed’ as infrastructures embedded in landscapes such as electrical grids or canals. Thus, we think with the notion of the ‘viscosity’ of technical objects. We claim that the importance of the term viscosity in the sociotechnical lexicon is not to demark a halfway point between fluid and fixed, mobile and immobile, but to point out how a single object like a ferry can be all of these things, unevenly, at once through characterizing its multiple resistances following breakdowns.