Absent Masses in the Bathroom: the Sociology of the Shower Head
Abstract
The article offers a sociological analysis of the shower head as an example of the «missing mass» in Bruno Latour’s sense – that is, as an everyday material delegate participating in the production of the social. The empirical basis is twelve semi-structured in-depth interviews with users of a multi-mode handheld shower system, conducted as part of a user experience study and re-analyzed from a sociological perspective. The author analytically combines several traditions that develop mostly in parallel in the existing discourse: actor-network theory and new materialism, post-phenomenology, practice theory, and the concept of governance of things. The presentation is organized in five focuses. It shows how the shower head becomes analytically «visible» in moments of failure; it demonstrates the practice of systematic «rewriting» by users of scripts written by the manufacturer; it is analyzed how one artifact physically supports several stable types of human-technology relations, which empirically confirms the post-phenomenological thesis of multistability; it is investigated that the watering can coordinates culturally specific body techniques and materially supports bodily discipline; finally, it is identified how various micro- and macro-politics converge on it as the «last meter». The contribution of the article is three-dimensional: empirical (ANT-sensitive analysis of a household artifact of intimate use), theoretical (demonstration of the complementarity of several optics on one case) and conceptual (extension of the idea of «missing masses» to the sphere of intimate space and formulation of the thesis about the two-way delegation, the direction of which depends on the state of the infrastructure). Separately, the resonance of the expanded framework with the Ukrainian context after 2022 is discussed, in which systematic Russian attacks on energy and water supply networks reveal non-obvious functions initially delegated to infrastructure.
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References
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