Architecture readings and a 300-word comment

MariaPuigdelaBellacasa-MattersofCareSpeculativeEthicsinMoreThanHumanWorldsIntroduction.pdf

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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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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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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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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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6 Introduction

applies to ethical and political questions raised by care, such as outrage and con demnations about its absence, or about controlling policies that regulate what is considered legitimate care. While it might seem that care does not necessarily involve an ethics or a politics, there seems to be an inherent positioning that happens through engagements with caring. As Anne Marie Mol emphasizes in her elucidation of a logic of care in doc- toring practices: “Articulating ‘good care’ . . . is an intervention” rather than a factual evaluation or judgement of practice (Mol 2008, 84). In this book I thus explore care as intrinsically involving an ethical and political intervention that affects also those who are researching care. Because speaking of “good care”— or of as- well- as- possible care— is never neutral. Because the work of care can be done within and for worlds that we might find objectionable. For what is care given? These interrogative oscillations expose how Tronto’s definition of care— by keeping the tensions between care as maintenance doings and work, affective engagement, and ethico- political involvement— opens a terrain for exploring, in situation, the sub- tle thought of care, by reading these dimensions through each other.

Moreover, the generic character of this definition of care is also par- ticularly engaging for a speculative project. First, because it exposes the existential domains of care as something open- ended— everything we do. Second, because it points to how the “ethics” in an ethics of care cannot be about a realm of normative moral obligations but rather about thick, impure, involvement in a world where the question of how to care needs to be posed. That is, it makes of ethics a hands- on, ongoing process of re- creation of “as well as possible” relations and therefore one that requires a speculative opening about what a possible involves. And thus the thinking in this book is moved by a generic appeal of care that makes it unthinkable as something abstracted from its situatedness. So while this book is not a sociological or ethnographic inquiry into a specific domain of agencies of care, by engaging speculatively with the meanings of thinking and living with care I hope to contribute to an enrichment of its meanings in a way that invites others to consider care—or its absence—as a parameter of existence with significance for their own terrains. Yet far from a general treaty on care, this book attempts to generate its own situatedness in the interplay between the generic and the specific.3 Each chapter presents and

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Introduction 7

opens questions around care starting from different angles, questions, and problems, specific matters of care so that the generic does not resolve in a closed theory. Looking at problems and research terrains as matters of care can then also become a speculative research question as these researchers propose: “The question, then, is not ‘how can we care more?’ but instead to ask what happens to our work when we pay attention to moments where the question of ‘how to care?’ is insistent but not easily answerable. In this way, we use care as an analytic or provocation, more than a predetermined set of affective practices” (Atkinson- Graham et al. 2015).

Another thinking motif in the book, the connection of “speculative” and “ethics,” might also need some clarification, though it is meant to be quite simple. A discussion of ethicality and obligation runs across the book, but the approach does not aim at systematic ethical theorizing (I invite readers intrigued by these “ethics” to start reading from chapter 4). The journey is about ethics because it raises questions about the meanings of care for as well as possible worlds but is also marked by a trajectory that brought me to think about care first as a political commitment. The speculative then connects to a feminist tradition for which this mode of thought about the possible is about provoking political and ethical imagination in the pres- ent.4 But the ethical discussions in this book are also speculative because they try to avoid defining a normative framework for how to make the “as well as possible” as they displace the meanings of care in terrains where they could disturb the meanings of an established “well.” Affirming the speculative as a general orientation, of course, somehow presupposes a critical approach to the present. Why would one want other possible worlds if nothing was wrong with this one? Therefore a hesitant search for what it means to think critically and speculatively is woven throughout the book. But affirming the speculative in ethics invokes an indecisive critical approach, one that doesn’t seek refuge in the stances it takes, aware and appreciative of the vulnerability of any position on the “as well as possible.”

Finally, there is a more “empirical” reason why the significance of criti- cal speculative thought became part of this exploration of care. Care is not only ontologically but politically ambivalent. We learn from feminist approaches that it is not a notion to embrace innocently. Thought and work on care still has to confront the tricky grounds of essentializing women’s

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8 Introduction

experiences (Hoagland 1991) and the persistent idea that care refers, or should refer, to a somehow wholesome or unpolluted pleasant ethical realm. Delving into feminist work on the topic invites us to become sub- stantially involved with care as a living terrain that seems to need to be constantly reclaimed from idealized meanings, from the constructed evi- dence that, for instance, associates care with a form of unmediated work of love accomplished by idealized carers. Contemporary reengagements with care are keeping this outlook when they both engage to continue fostering care as well as warn against an overoptimistic view on its practice when they prompt us to continue “unsettling” care (Murphy 2015), or as Aryn Martin, Natasha Myers, and Ana Viseu put it, prolonging Donna Hara- way’s call, to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) in the way we engage in caring. Those involved in thinking about critically complex terrains and struggles of care for more than forty years might not feel there is anything new in these concerns. And yet, we cannot settle on the idea that these discussions are behind us. A colleague told me recently about her reaction to the organization of a symposium on care and political economy: “Care? Why should I care about care?” then pausing, she recounted how as she was hearing herself think this way, she thought: “probably because every- thing tells me not to care about care.” Beyond the obvious point that what matters to a generation will not continue per se to matter into the future, care is so vital to the fabric of life that it remains an ongoing matter of struggle and a terrain of constant normative appropriation.

And it is true that in spite of a tradition that has made of care an essential feature of transformative thinking, politics, and alternative forms of orga- nizing, care is also a commonplace topic in everyday moralizations, espe- cially in the West, or Global North. A hegemonic revival that sees care valued beyond traditional domains could be reinforced by a present per- meated by worries about the unraveling of life from all possible crisis fronts— environment, economy, values. And while the sense of emergency translates into constant anxiety, into the expectation of a catastrophic event (Beuret 2015), a less broadcasted background violence slowly destroys more fundamentally the tissue of everyday existence for living beings at all scales (Nixon 2011). This sense of crisis and the need to care more is stressed by the perspective of a few, albeit powerful, ontological loci that had benefited

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Introduction 9

from a relative sense of “security” marketed as the norm, while “the rest” of the world, at home and beyond, could carelessly be left in a state of exception (Brown et al. 2012). If only we all could care! Really? And what would that mean?

Calls for caring are everywhere, from the marketing of green products, by which companies compete to show how much they care, to the pur- chase of recycled items, by which consumers show that we care (Good- man 2013; Goodman and Boyd 2011). More profound and preoccupying beyond this moral marketing gloss is how neoliberal governance has made of caring for the self a pervasive order of individualized biopolitical moral- ity. People are summoned to care for everything but, foremost, for “our” selves, our lifestyle, our bodies, our physical and mental fitness, or that of “our” families, reducing care to its most “parochial” caricature (Tronto 1993). Those considered as traditional carers— women generally— or as typical professional carers— nurses and other marginalized unpaid or low- paid care workers— are constantly moralized for not caring enough, or not caring “anymore,” or for having “lost” some “natural” capacity to care.5 And it is not only the present uses of the notion but also past enactments of care that could be reexamined. Michelle Murphy shows in her research on the women’s health movement, which many of us still cherish as a model of reappropriation of the means of reproduction, how projects driven by a notion of care can serve colonizing projects (Murphy 2015). Care can be instrumentalized at a global political level too. In a strong critique of humanitarian campaigns in migration contexts that enact “transnational regimes of care,” Miriam Ticktin shows how in the name of a universalist idea of relieving suffering— and what Tronto would have called paternalistic care— these actions are rather perpetuating inequali- ties and preventing collective change that could make a difference for migrant lives (Ticktin 2011).

While there is nothing new in the entanglements of care with hege- monic regimes— one can only think of all the ways in which the caring mother is historically enthroned as much as confined and her caring body enlisted for the nation— different situated configurations will require criti- cal engagements from those who have been trying to have care valued as absolutely vital in the weaving of existence and who will not simply rejoice

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10 Introduction

at the overuse of the word. Some might prefer to let go of a notion far too prevalent in established moral orders. And yet there are many reasons to treat the reductive appropriation of care in the contexts of the ethical ideologies of the Global North with attention rather than scorn. In such a world, a range of different understandings and appropriations of care are made possible and need to be problematized. These will add layers of complexity to feminist visions of care and allow us to avoid reductionist simplifications of the good and evils of care. The picture on the ground is always more fuzzy, and contemporary engagements with care in new ter- rains continue to show this. Ethnographies of care show how absurd it is to disentangle care from its messy worldliness. Anne Marie Mol shows the ways in which a logic of care and a logic of choice are in constant friction in medical practices (Mol 2008), Sonja Zerak Juiderent exposes forms of situated care that persist within logics of accountability procedures that are seemingly “subjecting care” to abstract norms (Jerak- Zuiderent 2015), Kris Kortright elicits practices of care at the heart of the laboring of a new Green- GMO revolution (Kortright 2013), Wakana Suzuki exposes how an ethos of caring attention is explicitly mobilized as part of a discipline in the laboratories of biomedicine she has observed (Suzuki 2015). Expanding the sites and constituencies in which we think with care contributes new modes of attention and problematics. So rather than give up on care because it is enlisted in purposes we might deplore, we need to have its meanings debated, unpacked, and reenacted in an implicated way that responds to this present.

Care is too important to give it up to the reductions of hegemonic ethics. Thinking in the world involves acknowledging our own involvements in perpetuating dominant values rather than retreating to the sheltered position of an enlightened outsider who knows better. Can thinking be connected if it pretends to be outside of worlds we want to see trans- formed, even those we would rather not endorse? My intention in this book is not to stage a detached confrontation with mainstream notions of care, nor even to deconstruct or police sentiments about care as something that warms hearts and relations— such as the expectation that care brings good— but rather, to propose modes to contribute to its re- articulation, re- conception, and “re- enactment” (King 2012).6 This requires taking part

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Introduction 11

in the ongoing, complex, and elusive task of reclaiming care not from its im- purities but rather from tendencies to smooth out its asperities— whether by idealizing or denigrating it. Certainly to reclaim often means to reap- propriate a toxic terrain, a field of domination, making it again capable of nurturing; the transformative seeds we wish to sow. It also evokes the work of recuperating previously neglected grounds. But more important for the approach to care in this book, reclaiming requires acknowledging poisons in the grounds that we inhabit rather than expecting to find an outside alternative, untouched by trouble, a final balance— or a definitive critique. Reclaiming is here all but about purging and “cleaning” a notion; rather, it involves considering purist ambitions— whether these are moral, political, or affective— as the utmost poisonous. Reclaiming as political work points to an ongoing effort within existing conditions without accepting them as given. It implies not shying away from what is important to us only because it has been “recuperated” by power, or by hype. This effort is for me an attempt to prolong a style of thought learned through feminist efforts to foster solidarities between divergent feminist positions without erasing un- resolvable tensions (Puig de la Bellacasa 2013; 2014). While feminist mate- rialist analysis of care exposed society’s reliance on care— its importance— it also revealed the intricacies of the work made by carers, showing how rela- tions of dependency care can be cruel as much as loving, unpacking what is actually done in different situations under the blanket category of care. Reclaiming care is to keep it grounded in practical engagements with situ- ated material conditions that often expose tensions. Rather than engaging with discussions of care in their different specific configurations and special- ist knowledge, this book inherits from ongoing conver sa tions the assump- tion that the meanings and situated relevance of care cannot be taken for granted. Assuming how intrinsic care is to the everyday fabric of troubled worlds, I try not to pin down care to one of its ontological dimensions— affective, practical, ethico- political— and embrace its ambiv alent char acter. Inspired by Leigh Star’s insurgent approach to exclusions, to the silences and violences implied in the evidences of naming, pinning down, and clas- sifying (see, for instance, Leigh Star 1991), I resist categorizing care but rather seek to emphasize its potential to disrupt the status quo and to un- hinge some of the moral rigidities of ethical questioning.

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12 Introduction

My approach to displacing care by involving it in issues and debates in which it has not frequently been addressed is positioned within contem- porary critical reorientations but not so much by engaging with a critique of care. I am thinking care itself as a critically disruptive doing that can open to “as well as possible” reconfigurations engaged with troubled pres- ents. Thus critically but speculatively, this book stays with the transforma- tive potential care, despite and because of hegemonic ethics, of its current commodification, despite and because care’s unescapable importance makes it vulnerable to become a powerful vehicle of normative moraliza- tion. Staying with care’s potential to disrupt thus is not (only) about mak- ing visible neglected activities we want to see more “valued”— for instance, as “productive” activities with an economic worth that should be recog- nized. It requires engaging with situated recognitions of care’s importance that operate displacements in established hierarchies of value and under- standing how divergent modes of valuing care coexist and co- make each other in non- innocent ways. So if this book can contribute to the mean- ingfulness of care, I hope it will be by adding layers to perceptions of care, by avoiding the smoothing out of its disruptive potential. It is standing on these ambivalent grounds, but firm in an obstinate conviction of the exis- tential and ontological significance of care, that I attempt to expand think- ing on care by moving the investigation of its meanings into a mostly unchartered terrain: the meanings of care for knowing and thinking with more than human worlds in technoscience and naturecultures.

Displacing Care

A broad understanding of posthumanist thought includes work that, increasingly in the past twenty years, has questioned the boundaries that pretend to define the human realm (against the other than human as well as otherized humans), to sanction humanity’s separate and exceptional character and, purposely or not, to sanction the subjection of everything else to this purported superiority. The frontiers blurred through these ways of thinking and the sociomaterial moves that impel them are now com- monly known: between nature and culture, society and science, technol- ogy and organism, humans and other living forms. The thinking at stake is transdisciplinary to the core, involving a wide range of perspectives and

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Introduction 13

methodologies in the social sciences and humanities that form also rela- tively new fields: science and technology studies, animal studies, post- humanist philosophy and ethics, environmental humanities. The cultural, political, and ethical challenges are colossal and the search for alternatives ongoing. In this book, I modestly try to contribute to these efforts.

It could be simply said that the thoughts presented here basically dis- place usual meanings of care just because they are put to work around problems that disrupt the classic boundaries that feminist politics of care have mostly worked with in order to claim the significance of care for social worlds. But this task involves making also some nonobvious moves. The first one, in Part I, is a transfer of meaning that carries the triptych of care as “ethics- work- affect” into the terrain of the politics of knowledge, into the implications of thinking with care. John Dewey, playing with the semantic affinities of care and “mind,” of caring and mindful, said beauti- fully that ‘mind’ denotes every mode and variety of interest in, and con- cern for things. . . . In respect to situations, events, objects, persons and groups . . . it signifies memory . . . attention . . . purpose. . . . Mind is care” (Dewey 1958, 263).7 This is an appealing notion, by which the relational character of thought (as mind) is rendered as care. But thinking and know- ing are often not caring, not even mindful, nor is caring through knowing and thinking an unproblematic endeavor. With this awareness at heart, Part I engages with discussions of knowledge politics in thought that engages beyond human agencies. Part II attempts to displace questions that have been mostly asked about care as something human subjects do— and some surrogate persons such as nonhumans deemed capable of inten- tional agency and emotion. What does caring mean when we go about thinking and living interdependently with beings other than human, in “more than human” worlds? Can we think of care as an obligation that tra- verses the nature/culture bifurcation without simply reinstating the bina- ries and moralism of anthropocentric ethics? How can engaging with care help us to think of ethical “obligations” in human- decentered cosmologies?

In order to start exposing how such questions might be addressed, it is time now to go into more detail about how these two displacements unfold in this book. Part I, Knowledge Politics, starts by setting the initial motiva- tions for expanding the ethico- political meanings of care. Across the three

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14 Introduction

chapters in Part I runs a preoccupation with knowledge politics in techno- science. Thus the book starts by engaging with discussions in science and technology studies (STS) that address the “more than human worlds” of sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively politically charged “things.”

These three chapters are marked by the context of my own encounter with the notion of care through feminist work that is not typically identi- fied with discussions of care. Early Marxist- feminist materialist thinking from the late 1980s, often known as “standpoint feminist theory,” explored the possibility of a feminist epistemology and rooted the hopeful prospect of alternative ways of knowing in the materiality of women’s and other mar- ginalized people’s everyday experiences. A discussion, reenactment, and partial prolongation of these discussions unfolds in the first three chap- ters. It was in the relational confrontation with the everyday maintain- ing of life that other forms of knowing were posited as possible, one that could deeply understand the importance of material mediations against the abstractions of “masculine” thought established on detachment from these devalued activities (Hartsock 1983; Smith 1987; Collins 1986; Harding 1991). Care here is featured as a part of those labors that mediated with the material world, in particular domestic and family care labors, tra- ditionally the realm, and existential confinement, of women, especially from underprivileged class and racial backgrounds. One particular text asso ciated with such discussions marked me. Hand, Brain, and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the Natural Sciences, by the British feminist soci- ologist of science Hilary Rose, explored the political significance of car- ing to subvert the industrial- military-scientific complex (1983; 1994). She spoke of women’s movements such as the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp against nuclear weapons, which used symbols of care to cre- ate disruption, threading baby socks into wired fences, but also displaced women’s identity as caring mothers into a public sphere of direct action against nuclear weapons— and were sadly disqualified as bad mothers for leaving families behind to do so. Rose also spoke of aerospace workers who moved from participating in the manufacture of war technologies to designing socially beneficial technologies. Like others, Rose saw care as grounded in the material conditions of women’s reproductive labors, and she associated care with the working dimension of love, but the gist of her

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Introduction 15

project was to bring the obligation of care as a way to contest the dominant ways of knowledge and science production in technoscience. This way, she laid bare the potential of care’s generic significance to confront and disrupt the destructive dynamics of scientific knowledge that separates brain and hand, intellect and practice, from the “heart.”

It is Rose’s insight that initiated me on a path for thinking care as a poli- tics of knowledge at the heart of technoscientific, naturecultural worlds. Hilary Rose’s conception is marked as much by radical feminist knowledge politics as by “radical science” movements (Rose and Rose 1976). Like con- temporary early sociologies of science, this work understood that sciences and technologies are permeated by politics and ethics to the core rather than, as traditionally conceived, in their application or “use/abuse” by soci- ety. But specifically, this is work that sustained a firmly critical attack on the pervasive exclusions and violences inherent to technoscience. Politics in this early type of “radical science studies” of the late 1970s and early 1980s was more than an analytical parameter of sociological inquiry; it encom- passed a commitment and positioning of the knowledge we produce for “as well as possible” worlds. This political urge contrasts with the predomi- nance of more “neutral” approaches to politics and ethics developed since the bourgeoning of analysis focusing on technoscience that converged in forming the loose interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Some have argued that the critique of science simply became “aca- demic” and the commitment to critical intervention faded away (Martin 1993; for a recent, similar argument, see Mirowski 2015). Another transla- tion of this is the qualification of the field as description- oriented— in the wake of the Actor Network Theory of “following” the actors on the ground— rather than normative (i.e., ethically or politically oriented to impose an ideological “should be”). While these critiques are without doubt accurate in some ways, blanket judgments of depolitization also tend to disregard that a discussion of forms of ethical and political involvement in approaches to technoscience has never been completely closed; it is a recurrent theme, and one that has remained particularly alive in influential feminist work in the field (see, for instance, Mayberry, Subramaniam, and Weasel 2001; Star 1995; Suchman 2007a) and other explicitly positioned approaches (Hess 2007; Winner 1986; see Sismondo 2008 and 2010 for an overview).

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16 Introduction

And today it is possible to perceive a renewed interest in more “explicit” forms of engagement with the politics of the production of knowledge in technoscience. Here a notion of care has also become a way to name an ethico- political practice and an affective engagement within knowledge production about technoscience. Notions such as a “radicalization” of care and a “politics of care” are addressing the nature of “implication” and “rel- evance” (Savransky 2014) of intellectual and research work as interven- tion.8 Caring also becomes a way of speaking of the critical engagements of knowledge producers beyond the polarized divisions around the meanings of social and politically “useful” research (Metzger 2013; 2014). One of the initial and ongoing motivations in writing this book is partly situated in this collective reenactment of committed knowledge as a form of care. There is renovated enthusiasm in these moves that is relevant not only to a reinvestment in a critique of contemporary technoscience but, more im- portant for this book, to a search to prolong transformative knowledge as it is involved in troubled worlds after the fundamental lesson of contemporary STS: not only that knowledge and science are material- semiotic affairs with strongly political and ethical consequences but that a decentered concep- tion of human agency exposes relations with objects, things, and other than human animals, organisms, and forms as political in their very ontology.

Thinking about and with care is compelling in this context because it offers possibilities for thinking commitment and obligation as nonnor- mative forms of ethical engagement that could be more attuned to the decentering of human agency and privilege in contemporary thinking of technoscience and naturecultures. But this assumption is just a starting point. Reconnecting a politics of commitment and of ethical obligation with an ontology of more than human worlds without falling back into classic humanist categories of thought requires a speculative effort. It specifically poses the question of the compatibility of distributed agency and decentering the human subject with situated ethical obligations and commitments. That this is a tricky problem is well stated in how Lucy Suchman reminds us that when engaging with technoscientific assem- blages “the price in recognizing the agency of artefacts need not be the denial of our own” (Suchman 2007b, 285). In this direction, the discussion of care in this book ultimately relates to how we conceive of a critical or,

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Introduction 17

political, ethos in posthumanist thinking, of an “insurgent posthumanism” (Papadopoulos 2010). Indeed, the reclamation of care in approaches to more than human worlds marked by technoscience is a political project that defies the traditional ethical boundaries that have marked critical thinking. Following the trope of care into an “unexpected country” (Hara- way 2011) of blurred boundaries— moral as much as material— requires opening up its possible meanings.

Starting from these discussions, Part I engages with the politics of think- ing and knowing in the more than human worlds of technoscience— mostly involving “things” and objects or, broadly speaking, material- semiotic agen- cies mobilized by science and technology (while Part II attends to relations of caring in more than human living ecologies). It locates the discussions within technoscience, understood basically as a world and time in which scientific knowledge and the material production of technologies are in- separable from sociopolitical processes and imaginaries, including those of commodification. Technoscience as the world where knowledge is insepa- rable from material worlds—where knowledge is involved in making things matter— is here conceived as literally as possible: material- semiotic agency in the mattering of worlds. As Karen Barad notes, it is through entangled agencies and practices of matter and meaning that technoscientific worlds “come to matter” (Barad 2007). So as the first three chapters unfold, ques- tions about the politics of knowledge in technoscience increasingly delve into ethical concerns raised by our proximity and involvement with the material effects of our thought. Worlds seen through care accentuate a sense of interdependency and involvement. What challenges are posed to critical thinking by increased acute awareness of its material consequences? What happens when thinking about and with others is understood as living with them? When the effects of caring, or not, are brought closer? Here, knowledge that fosters caring for neglected things enters in tension between a critical stance against neglect and the fostering of speculative commitment to think how things could be different.

Chapters 1 and 2 engage with these questions through what can be read as a contrast between two close readings of Bruno Latour’s and Donna Haraway’s work. The thinking, concepts, and research objects, but mostly the knowledge politics of these authors, are terrains to think speculatively

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18 Introduction

about what caring knowledge politics could mean in more than human worlds. Speaking of contrast here is not meant to create opposition but to unpack propositions that both diverge and communicate through con- nected concerns. Chapter 1, Assembling Neglected “Things,” engages with the politics and agency of things in science and technology studies. It is articu- lated around a commentary and prolongation of Latour’s notion of “mat- ters of concern.” The chapter makes explicit the notion that gives title to this book, “matters of care,” as one that inscribes care in the materiality of more than human things. It inherits from a now well- established tradi- tion that rejects the representation of science, technology, and nature as depoliticized matters of fact, as uncontestable truths. I bring to the center of these interrogations feminist research and thinking in science and tech- nology studies as work that remains crucial in encouraging an ethos of care not only in thinking the processes of construction of socio- technical assemblages but as an ethico- political attitude in the everyday doing of knowledge practices. Latour’s naming of matters of fact as “matters of concern” attracts attention to the ethico- political effects of constructivist accounts in science and technology studies as they attempt to make things matter by “re- presenting” things. Concern brings us closer to a notion of care. However, there is a “critical” edge to care that the politics of making things matter as gatherings of concerns tends to neglect. Against this back- ground I explore what it would mean to think matters of fact and socio- technical assemblages as matters of care. Can more awareness regarding concerns favor the promotion of care in contemporary technoscience? Can an affective ethico- political concern such as caring become a thinking pattern when engaging with science and technology? This chapter tries to respond to these questions without seeking a normative answer and by drawing upon feminist knowledge politics and theories of care, as well as commenting on empirical research in the field of science and technol- ogy studies that expands and reaffirms the importance and meanings of care. I read this work not so much to develop or discuss the substantiality of their contributions— that is, their research on specific cases of care— but in search of ways of thinking that engage care. Positioning for care emerges as an oppositional practice that both creates trouble in the democratic assembly of articulate concerns as well as generates possibility: it reminds

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Introduction 19

us of exclusions and suffering and fosters alternative affective involve- ments with the becomings of science and technology. Rather than defining moral parameters for these positionings, I ask a speculative question “how to care?” about the ways “things” are constructed, presented, and studied, especially when care seems to be expendable.

Chapter 2, Thinking with Care, probes further into imagining how a style of thought can contribute to caring thinking in living with other than humans. If bringing care to matter started in the previous chapter as a requisite for knowledge that aims to re- present things, here knowledge is further conceived as embedded in the mattering of worlds. This chap- ter expands the premise that thinking and knowing are essentially rela- tional processes that require care. Grounded in this relational conception of ontology inspired by Tronto’s web of care, I explore “thinking with care” as a thick, noninnocent requisite of collective thinking in interdependent worlds. This speculative exploration of motifs thinking with care unfolds through a reading of Donna Haraway’s work, specifically her take on the situated character of knowledge. A notion of thinking with care is articu- lated through the chapter as a series of concrete moves: thinking- with, dissenting- within, and thinking- for. While weaving Haraway’s thinking and writing practices with the trope of care offers a particular understanding of this author’s knowledge politics, the task of caring knowledge also emerges as more challenging. Exploring the generic notion of care through a con- frontation with the more than human worlds in which “staying with the trouble” appears as the only ethical option for knowledge mattering (Hara- way 2016) shows again the potential of care to create trouble in established logics, as well as possibility.

Caring thinking needs to resist an idealized version of knowledge politics. Chapter 3, Touching Visions, builds on this understanding by reading caring thinking and knowing as touch. Touch, or the haptic, could be the sensorial universe that better explores the ambivalences of conceiving caring knowl- edge as an intensification of involvement and proximity. Touch is also the sensorial metaphor that better exposes qualms around the materiality of thinking and its consequential effects: we think, therefore we touch. But this exploration of touch attempts to be in itself an exercise in carefulness about the speculative potentialities of haptic visions. In other words, (my)

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20 Introduction

efforts to reclaim touch— aka proximal intimate knowing— as a neglected way of knowing need to resist an idealized version of knowing- touching. This discussion inherits both from work in feminist knowledge politics and conceptions of science and technology that problematize epistemo- logical distances— between subjects and objects, knowledge and “the world,” and science and politics. In this direction, touch expresses a sense of material- embodied relationality that seemingly eschews abstractions and detachments that have been associated with dominant epistemologies of knowledge- as- vision. Touch becomes a metaphor of transformative knowl- edge at the same time as it intensifies awareness of the imports of speculative thinking. In other words, the haptic disrupts the prominence of vision as a metaphor for distant knowing as well the distance of critique, but it also calls for ethical questioning. What is caring touch in this context? Here, somehow paradoxically, thinking touch with care troubles the desires for immanent proximities as susceptible to reproducing the negation of medi- ations and the nonevidence of ethical reciprocity. The terrain around which I articulate these arguments is the revaluation of the sense of touch, from cultural theory to expanding markets of haptic technologies. Instances of haptic fascination expose not only the potential of thinking with literal and figural meanings of touch but also the temptations of idealizing material- ity. Yet engaging speculatively with experience, knowledge, and technol ogy as touch allows us to explore a possible transformation of ethos that could be brought by more careful touching visions and the forms of ethical obligation they entail. In particular, touch’s unique quality of reversibility, that is, the fact of being touched by what we touch, puts the question of reciprocity at the heart of thinking and living with care. What’s more, the reciprocity of care is rarely bilateral, the living web of care is not maintained by individu- als giving and receiving back again but by a collective disseminated force. Thus conceived, the complexity of the circulation of care feels even more all- pervasive when we think of how it is sustained in more than human worlds. Care is a force distributed across a multiplicity of agencies and materials and supports our worlds as a thick mesh of relational obligation.

Part II, Speculative Ethics in Antiecological Times, moves through this liv- ing mesh as it engages with everyday ecologies of sustaining and perpetu- ating life for their potential to transform entrenched relations to natural

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Introduction 21

worlds as “resources.” If the focus of the first chapters was on technosci- ence, here care matters pertain to relational webs in naturecultures. Though distinguishing technoscience from naturecultures is in many ways mean- ingless in contemporary political ecologies, other ethico- political and affec- tive questions of care emerge when they involve humans- and- other- species (see Latimer and Miele 2013) as well as other than human (though not human-free) entities such as biophysical energies and elements. While Part I engages with conceptual work, approaching other thinkers’ thought and research, as well as cultural phenomena, as its materials, as its matters of care, the two last chapters bring in my own experiential research in two overlapping terrains of ecological ethics: the practices of the permacul- ture movement and the transformation of human–soil relations around a notion of soil as living. This order manifests an underlying direction in the book that is not intended as a hierarchical prominence that puts con- cepts and thinkers first and substance second (or that goes from theory to practices). The truth is more biographical, and it exposes an engagement with the concept of care that evolved from being embedded in philoso- phies of science and the politics of knowledge (affected by my philosophi- cal background and by becoming a scholar in the midst of the explosion of epistemological debate in the early 1990s) to become absorbed in science studies, a field rich in situated ethnographies that enticed me to want to tell stories. Maybe inadvertently my work also followed a “turn to ontol- ogy” (Lezaun and Woolgar 2013) that affected the field itself and relegated epistemological interest or, in more generous terms, rematerialized it. So while the thinking in Part II remains conceptual, the interventions are the most “empirically” grounded— as if the need to treat care in situated- ness intensified as it became more layered with meaning, and therefore closer to be presented through “terrains.” Yet the thinking efforts appear at their most speculative— as if the limits of what I can think with (my) available ethical notions became more acute when confronted with actual emergent relational arrangements that require making care central with- out reinstating a human center. What does it mean to think of agencies of care in more than human terms? Engaged more substantially and deeply in telling stories around experientially observed and researched terrains makes the complexities of thinking with care even more intricate. In any

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22 Introduction

case, my relation to these worlds remains openly moved by a commitment to treat the emerging issues as matters of care and therefore attempts to tell involved stories, neither theoretical nor descriptive, open to alternative readings, yet situated.

Chapter 4, Alterbiopolitics, proposes a speculative approach to a nature- cultural ethics of care as it manifests in the everyday practices promoted by the international ecological movement known as permaculture. I argue that in order to understand the specific contribution of these forms of ethical engagement without reducing them to “back to nature” ideals or a matter of lifestyle ethics requires us to displace traditional understand- ings of the ethical. Notwithstanding what can be read as a mostly unsophis- ticated use of concepts familiar to ethical theory, the chapter does draw on postconventional and poststructuralist ethical approaches that have expanded the limits of ethical discussion. These moves allow us to think the ethics involved in the continuation of life, of bios, not so much as a matter of individual morality but as a personal- collective mode of engage- ment in the everyday that is more about the transformation of ethos than about a normative morality. Discussions about ethics in biopolitics are here an entry point for the displacement of the ethical from its status as an edification of a higher morality. But to understand the relevance of an ethics as that of permaculture, embedded in the basic aspects of sus- taining and fostering life at its most corporeal levels of naturecultural interdependency— biological and physical— we also need to question the focus on the perpetuation of life as human. For this I explore ways in which the notion of “ethical obligation” shifts meaning, from ethical com- mitments arising out of moral principles— such as contracts or promises— to be embedded in vital material forces involved in the constraints of everyday continuation and maintenance of life. Care troubles and opens questions here too. Connecting the practices of permaculture ethics as everyday ecological doings with a feminist notion of care displaces bio- political moralities, allowing us to envision alterbiopolitics as an ethics of collective empowerment that puts caring at the heart of the search of everyday struggles for hopeful flourishing of all beings, of bios understood as a more than human community.

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Introduction 23

The final chapter of the book, Soil Times, examines contemporary trans- formations in human–soil relations happening at the interface of scientific conceptions of soils and ecological practices and that are remattering soil from inert, usable substance and resource into a living world of which humans are also part. It is based on a review of the literature of the soil sciences and research on connected domains of production of knowledge around soil, including permaculture. My reading is oriented by the specu- lative project of looking out for those displacements where a difference is being made in ways to care for the soil. The dominant human relation to soil has been to pace its fertility with production demand. But today public consideration for soils is changing, amid concerns that they have been mistreated and neglected by the productionist drive. Soils are perceived as endangered ecologies in need of urgent care and warnings about their ex- haustion are marked by concerns about a gloomy future that prompt us to act now. This chapter introduces a new motif in the discussion, that of the temporalities of care. The pace required by ecological relations with soils could be at odds with accelerated, future- oriented responses characteristic of the pace of technoscientific innovation. Here, making time for care time appears as a disruption of anthropocentered temporalities. Contrasted but interconnected temporalities are at work in contemporary conceptions of soil care in scientific research and other domains of soil practice. Alterna- tive practical, ethical and affective ecologies of care are emerging that trouble the traditional direction of progress and the speed of technoscien- tific, productionist, future- driven interventions. Among these are the cur- rent trends in scientific conceptions of soil that depart from a notion of soil as resource and receptacle for crop production to emphasize its status as a living world. In this context, a “foodweb” model of soil ecology has become a symbol of embodied, caring, involvement with soils. Focusing on the temporal experience of soil care at play in these conceptions reveals a diversity of interdependent temporalities of beings and things at the heart of the predominant futuristic timescales of technoscientific expectations.

The chapter opens to the books conclusions, with thoughts on the untimely character of care in the current political economies of produc- tionist, future-oriented technoscience. Making time for care appears as a

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24 Introduction

material effort for speculative ethical commitments in more than human worlds marked by technoscientific and naturecultural relations. I have tried in the book to approach tensions without succumbing to easy oppo- sitions, thickening the meanings of care as a noninnocent but necessary ethos of always situated implications. Reaching the end, the reader will, I hope, see how the generic notion of care with which this journey starts has become extended but also challenged. Its ambivalences deepened without diminishing the urge to keep practices of care within our thinking spec- trum when seeking ways of living together as well as possible. From the perspective of human– nonhuman relations in technoscience and nature- cultures, unproblematic visions of care— whether as an exploit of higher ethical beings, a marketable productive activity, or even a recuperated morality to reject— would not only be meaningless but could be fatal. We cannot afford to obscure the actual more laborious and situated conditions in which care takes place and by which its agencies circulate in interdepen- dent more than human relational webs. So as the argument in this book progresses, an acute feeling also intensifies: that an ethical reorganization of human– nonhuman relations is vital, but what this means in terms of caring obligations that could enact non exploitative forms of togetherness cannot be imagined once for all. And so I hope the reader will forgive me if this book opens up more questions than it offers answers.

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