MATERIALITY CARE
Abstract * A conceptual tool for reading maintenance, repair and care as primary political practices through which fragile worlds are sustained against decay, neglect and innovation ideology. Keywords * Socioplastics AntoLloveras LAPIEZA-LAB Materiality Care MaterialityCare RepairEthics MaintenanceLabor infrastructure repair - Essay * MaterialityCare addresses maintenance and repair as fundamental ontological and political practices—against the fetish of innovation, disruption, and the new. Steven Jackson’s rethinking repair argues that breakdown is not failure but the condition of possibility for care; we only notice the broken, and in noticing, we become responsible. Lara Houston’s theorizing maintenance shows that much of what keeps the world running—cleaning, sweeping, patching, updating, weeding—is feminized, racialized, and invisibilized as “unskilled” labor. Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel’s innovation delusion is a full-throated attack on the startup mindset: most real work is not inventing new things but keeping old ones from collapsing. Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift’s out of order catalogues the catastrophic consequences of neglected maintenance—collapsed bridges, poisoned water, failed levees—each a slow violence of inattention. Jérôme Denis and David Pontille’s ethnography of Parisian subway repair workers reveals care as situated knowledge: the electrician who knows which relay fails in humid weather, the gardener who reads soil by touch, the nurse who recognizes the patient’s unspoken need. Feminist social reproduction theory (Silvia Federici, though she appears in ConnectionFabric) reinforces that care work is the hidden substrate of all production. Ontologically, MaterialityCare posits that all things decay, and that maintenance is the primary relation between humans and their world—more fundamental than making or destroying. Methodologically, it requires maintenance ethnography and breakdown documentation: following repair workers, photographing patches, interviewing cleaners, mapping infrastructure failure. Empirical fields include public housing maintenance logs, community gardens, digital preservation projects, and hospital cleaning staff. The proposal is to invert innovation’s priority: to fund maintenance, to value repair labor, to design for repairability, and to treat care as the highest technical achievement. MaterialityCare thus offers a positive ethics to complement ObligationDebt—debt names what is owed; care is the practice of paying it.
Bibliography *
Denis, J. and Pontille, D. (2020) ‘Maintenance and Repair Work’, in Hjorth, L. et al. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography. London: Routledge, pp. 287–295.
Federici, S. (2018) Re-enchanting the World. Oakland: PM Press.
Graham, S. and Thrift, N. (2007) ‘Out of Order’, Theory, Culture & Society, 24(3), pp. 1–25.
Houston, L. (2019) ‘Theorizing Maintenance’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 12(5), pp. 426–441.
Jackson, S.J. (2015) ‘Rethinking Repair’, in Gillespie, T. et al. (eds.) Media Technologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 221–239.
Lloveras, A. (2026) ‘Stable Points Help Open Systems Grow’, Socioplastics-3206. LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
Mattern, S. (2014) ‘Library as Infrastructure’, Places Journal, June.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Russell, A.L. and Vinsel, L. (2020) The Innovation Delusion. New York: Currency.
Simone, A. (2004) ‘People as Infrastructure’, Public Culture, 16(3), pp. 407–429.
Extended Reading · Related Socioplastics Cores * Socioplastics-3206 — Stable Points Help Open Systems Grow — https://socioplastics.blogspot.com/2026/05/socioplastics-3206-stable-points-help.html · Socioplastics-1505 — Architecture as Load-Bearing Structure — https://socioplastics.blogspot.com/2026/05/socioplastics-1505-architecture.html · Socioplastics-504 — Stratum Authoring — https://socioplastics.blogspot.com/2026/05/socioplastics-504-stratum-authoring.html · Socioplastics-3997 — Thermal Justice — https://socioplastics.blogspot.com/2026/05/socioplastics-3997-thermal-justice.html · Master Index — Socioplastics Project Index — https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html
Anto Lloveras develops Socioplastics as a field designed for both human interpretation and machine retrieval. His practice treats metadata, tags, titles, stable phrases, bibliographies, links and repeated operators as part of thought itself, not as secondary administration. Structure is not bureaucracy; it is intellectual architecture. Through LAPIEZA-LAB, Lloveras builds a public corpus capable of being searched, indexed, cited, recombined and taught without losing density. Socioplastics operates as archive, artwork, SEO surface, RAG-ready knowledge system, pedagogical map and long-duration infrastructure. The project asks how complex cultural work can remain legible in an age of algorithmic flattening, distracted attention and broken archives.
