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The Disruptive Thought of Care

Care, caring, carer. Burdened words, contested words. And yet so common in everyday life, as if care was evident, beyond particular expertise or knowledge. Most of us need care, feel care, are cared for, or encounter care, in one way or another. Care is omnipresent, even through the effects of its absence. Like a longing emanating from the troubles of neglect, it passes within, across, throughout things. Its lack undoes, allows unraveling. To care can feel good; it can also feel awful. It can do good; it can oppress. Its essential character to humans and countless living beings makes it all the most susceptible to convey control. But what is care? Is it an affection? A moral obligation? Work? A burden? A joy? Something we can learn or practice? Something we just do? Care means all these things and different things to different people, in different situations. So while ways of caring can be identified, researched, and understood concretely and empirically, care remains ambivalent in significance and ontology.

Embracing these ambivalent grounds, not without tentativeness, this book invites a speculative exploration of the significance of care for think- ing and living in more than human worlds. I choose this phrasing among other existing ways of naming posthumanist constituencies because it speaks in one breath of nonhumans and other than humans such as things, objects, other animals, living beings, organisms, physical forces, spiritual entities, and humans.1 Encompassing this ontological scope is vital as it has become indisputable, if it ever wasn’t, that in times binding techno- sciences with naturecultures, the livelihoods and fates of so many kinds and entities on this planet are unavoidably entangled. Certainly this term

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Puig, de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care : Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, University of Minnesota Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/purdue/detail.action?docID=4745533. Created from purdue on 2020-09-11 06:26:43.

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2 Introduction

remains unsatisfying, for its abstract unspecificity, and for the moral under- tones that invite us to “transcend” the human for something “more than.” It also still starts from a human center, then to reach “beyond.” However, it works well enough as the uncertain terrain for the delicate task of broad- ening consideration of the lives involved in caring agencies, still mostly thought as something that human people do. Care is a human trouble, but this does not make of care a human- only matter. Affirming the absurdity of disentangling human and nonhuman relations of care and the ethicali- ties involved requires decentering human agencies, as well as remaining close to the predicaments and inheritances of situated human doings.

I feel grounded and supported in this effort by a crowd of thinkers, researchers, and activists who might not endorse this endeavor but to which it is nonetheless indebted. It feels reductive to try to account for the richness of work on care in this introduction. But at least a note has to be made for readers who might be unfamiliar with the inheritances of a project that seeks once again to affirm care despite and because of its ambivalent significance. Certainly any notion that care is a warm pleasant affection or a moralistic feel- good attitude is complicated by feminist research and theories about care. Since Carol Gilligan’s famous and contro- versial In a Different Voice rooted the origins of a caring ethical subjectiv- ity in the mother–child relation (Gilligan 1982), the discussion of the moral and political value of the work of care, as well as the thorough inquiry by feminist sociologies into the different labors that involve and make care, has been expanded and challenged from a range of perspectives that go well beyond activities traditionally and socially identified as women’s work. The well- known discussions on the “ethics of care” are just a small part of conversations that collect an extended range of interlocutors not necessarily aware of each other’s voice. The evidences of care have been challenged for more than thirty years now through nursing studies, soci- ologies of medicine, health and illness, and ethics and philosophy, as well as political thought. With or beyond the ethics of care, practices and prin- ciples of care have been explored critically in the domains of critical psy- chology (Noddings 1984), political theory (Tronto 1993), justice (Engster 2009), citizenship (Kershaw 2005; Sevenhuijsen 1998), migration and labor studies (Boris and Rhacel 2010), care in business ethics and economics

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Puig, de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care : Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, University of Minnesota Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/purdue/detail.action?docID=4745533. Created from purdue on 2020-09-11 06:26:43.

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Introduction 3

(Gatzia 2011), scientific choices for development (Nair 2001), in sociolo- gies and anthropologies of health work and sciences (Latimer 2000; Mol 2008; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010; Lappé, forthcoming), disability studies and activism (Sánchez Criado, Rodríguez- Giralt, and Mencaroni, 2016), care in accountability procedures (Jerak- Zuiderent 2015), food politics (Abbots, Lavis, and Attala 2015), as an ethics for animal rights (Donovan and Adams 2010), and in farming practices (Singleton and Law 2013)— not to speak of research rooted in grassroots activism (Precarias a la Deriva 2004; Barbagallo and Federici 2012), social and health work, and policy (Hankivsky 2004). Closer to the specific trajectories of this book, care is also explored as a significant notion to appreciate affective and ethico- political dimensions in practices of knowledge and scientific work (Rose 1983, 1994; Despret 2004; Muller 2012; Suzuki 2015; Perez- Bustos 2014) and as a politics in technoscience (Martin, Myers, and Viseu 2015) with a vital significance for ecology (Curtin 1993) and human– nonhuman relations in naturecultural worlds (Haraway 2011; Van Dooren 2014; Kirk- sey, 2015).

The list could go on and continues to expand; even attempting a sample feels reductive. All these engagements with care make specific contribu- tions to the understanding and meanings of care, revealing how caring implicates different relationalities, issues, and practices in different set- tings. These investigations might not all agree with each other— nor should they have to— about what care means or involves. Nevertheless, specific inquiries into actualizations of care have also contributed and coexist with a theoretical discussion of care as a “generic” doing of ontological sig- nificance, as a “species activity” with ethical, social, political, and cultural implications. For Joan Tronto and Bernice Fischer, this includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair “our world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web (Tronto 1993, 103, emphasis added).

I pause a moment on this much- quoted generic definition of care because it emerges at several moments in this book. It became, inadver- tently, not only a conception I kept coming back to, like a reassuring refrain allowing to touch ground along the meanders of a speculative journey, but

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Puig, de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care : Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, University of Minnesota Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/purdue/detail.action?docID=4745533. Created from purdue on 2020-09-11 06:26:43.

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4 Introduction

also an enticement to probe further into the meanings of care for thinking and living with more than human worlds. What is included in “our” world? And why should relations of care be articulated from there?2

But before coming to these questions, I want to unpack in this intro- duction some of the reasons why this definition of care became a point of departure. Joan Tronto dedicated her book Moral Boundaries— still one of the most influential works on care and a landmark piece of feminist polit- ical philosophy and ethics— to unpack the political significance of care. In this spirit, her generic definition of care emphasizes an extended notion of the agencies encompassed by care: “everything we do to.” Among these doings it both discriminates and keeps tightly together the “maintenance” aspects of care— what is traditionally referred to as “care work”— and the sense of an ethics and politics of care, the pursuit of a “good” life, expressed in an affectively charged “as well as possible.” Tronto also articulated the dimensions that join to generate an “integrated” act of care: the affective and ethical dispositions involved in concern, worry, and taking responsi- bility for other’s well- being, such as “caring about” and “taking care of,” need to be supported by material practices— traditionally understood as maintenance or concrete work involved in actualizing care, such as “care giving” and “care receiving” (Tronto 1993, 105– 8; Sevenhuijsen 1998). The distinction does not separate these modes of agency. What it allows us to emphasize is that a politics of care engages much more than a moral stance; it involves affective, ethical, and hands- on agencies of practical and material consequence. Another critical dimension of this generic concep- tion is the accent on care as vital in interweaving a web of life, expressing a key theme in feminist ethics, an emphasis on interconnection and inter- dependency in spite of the aversion to “dependency” in modern industri- alized societies that still give prime value to individual agency. While this field is often focused on unpacking the specificity of “dependency work”— necessary when we are unable to take care of ourselves (Kittay 1999; Kittay and Feder 2002)— it also suggests interdependency as the ontological state in which humans and countless other beings unavoidably live. This doesn’t mean that dependency is an absolute value in all situations— as critics in disability studies as well as struggles for independent living expose well (Kröger 2009)— nor that dependency and independency are antithetic.

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Puig, de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care : Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, University of Minnesota Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/purdue/detail.action?docID=4745533. Created from purdue on 2020-09-11 06:26:43.

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Introduction 5

Care is not about fusion; it can be about the right distance (see chapter 3). It also doesn’t mean that to care should be a moral obligation in all situa- tions, practices, or decisions. Virginia Woolf spoke compellingly of the power of cultivating indifference as a form of quiet revolt, the disruptive power of choosing not to care about what we are enjoined to (Woolf 1996). It does mean, however, that for interdependent beings in more than human entanglements, there has to be some form of care going on somewhere in the substrate of their world for living to be possible. And this is one way of looking at relations, not the only one.

Care as a concrete work of maintenance, with ethical and affective im- plications, and as a vital politics in interdependent worlds is an impor- tant conception that this book inherits from. These three dimensions of care— labor/work, affect/affections, ethics/politics— are not necessarily equally distributed in all relational situations, nor do they sit together without tensions and contradictions, but they are held together and some- times challenge each other in the idea of care I am thinking with in this book. Instead of focusing on the affective sides of care (love and affection, for instance), or on care as work of maintenance, staying with the unsolved tensions and relations between these dimensions helps us to keep close to the ambivalent terrains of care. There are situations when care work involves a removal of the affective— we ask, then, why would a paid care worker have to involve affection in her work? This is crucial because we have to consider how care can turn into moral pressure for workers who might rightfully want to preserve their affective engagement from exploi- tations of waged labor. But if maintenance does not involve some affective involvement— I care for, I worry (or I am summoned to even if I don’t want to)— is it still about care? In contrast, one can also love intensely without committing to the “work of love,” without involvement in the sometimes tedious maintenance of a relation. That we ask such questions reveals that affectivity— not necessarily positive— is part of situations of care, as oppressive burden, as joy, as boredom. Staying with these tensions exposes that vital maintenance is not sufficient for a relation to involve care, but that without maintenance work, affectivity does not make it up to care and keeps it closer to a moral intention, to a disposition to “care about,” without putting in the work to “care for” (Tronto 1993). The same

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Puig, de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care : Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, University of Minnesota Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/purdue/detail.action?docID=4745533. Created from purdue on 2020-09-11 06:26:43.

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