Technology in Process: Maintenance and the Metaphysics of Artifacts

This chapter aims to explore the overlooked significance of maintenance to metaphysical questions concerning the persistence of artifacts.  The first section examines how the Western metaphysical tradition has traditionally approached questions concerning persistence by attempting to demonstrate how objects remain the same despite undergoing change. It is shown how this approach has hindered our understanding of the relationship between technology and time by obscuring the way in which a wide range of artifacts persist only by adapting to changing environments through practices of maintenance and repair. On the basis of these considerations, this chapter illustrates how properly grasping the metaphysical significance of maintenance requires the adoption of a new underlying ontology centered around processes rather substances. The final sections of the chapter sketch the outlines of such an approach and illustrate how a process-based metaphysics of artifacts tends inevitably towards the empirical analysis of social and political processes which determine the trajectory of artifacts through time.