On Maintenance Work

• In Event: Back to Work: New Theories of Work

Abstract

Work is typically considered in terms of production—as human activity which creates something new in the world. Such ideas are reflected in the contemporary language of work: innovation is valorized and highly valued as creative and dynamic production; America’s return to greatness is linked to the revival of jobs in manufacturing “real things” rather than ephemeral services of feminized labor. Maintenance, by contrast, is about keeping things as they are. This paper considers how thinking about maintenance work can contribute to the issues at stake in feminist theories of reproductive labor and environmental theories of sustainability.

First, the paper considers the “maintenance art/work” of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s. Ukeles’s 1969 “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” challenged art’s emphasis on innovation, novelty, creativity, and the avant-garde and drew attention instead to processes of preservation and care; as artist-in-residence of the New York City Department of Sanitation she produced a number of pieces in collaboration with sanitation workers. Ukeles’s body of maintenance art/work poses questions relevant to political theorists: what is the relationship between necessity and freedom? Which activities, done by who, are considered creative work and whose is considered mere labor? I put Ukeles in conversation with the idea of the “steady state economy” advocated by ecological economists in the 1970s as an alternative to the growth economy. The steady state economy was one that could be “maintained indefinitely into the future in the face of biophysical limits”; its goal was to preserve what existed rather than producing novel goods. This section of the paper is particularly attentive to the kinds of work that such maintenance requires, including the “work of nature.”

I conclude by discussing the significance of “maintenance” for key questions of contemporary politics and political thought: which kinds of work should be recognized and rewarded? What kinds of work does an ecologically sustainable economy require? What does a different understanding of work mean for related issues, from property to profit to progress? What kinds of maintenance work does politics entail, and what kinds of politics might it inspire?

Author

• Alyssa Battistoni, Yale University