Vital Technics: Making and Unmaking Life, Matter and Relations

Technics names not only technologies and devices, but also objects, practices, infrastructures and processes through which social worlds are organized. As technics move from the everyday to the laboratory, and from the handheld to the planet, vitality—or animacy, vibrancy and liveliness—is granted to technics, redefined by them and emerges through them. They are imagined to respond and adapt, to grow and ail, to wear out, die and be mourned.

This session aims to explore how vitality is made, unmade and felt in our lives with technics. In doing so, it joins a broad line of scholarship—within sociology and far beyond it—in which vitality has been claimed at once as a force of life, a relational effect, an object of politics and a quality of matter, figuring less as a settled fact than as a contested attribution whose very ambiguity calls for closer engagement, and for new ways of conceptualizing and problematizing it.

The session thus seeks to bring together scholars across disciplines, from the empirical to the theoretical, working in everyday, infrastructural, biomedical, ecological, digital and other settings, to take up vital questions such as: How is vitality attributed to, produced by, maintained through, simulated in, or withdrawn from technical objects and processes? How do technics reshape what counts as alive or inert, natural or artificial, necessary or dispensable, sustaining or exhausting? And what forms of emotional relation, dependency and responsibility emerge when technics become part of how life is sustained, imagined, repaired, simulated or lost?