Replacing and
repurposing the concept of care, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s text Matters
of Care invites “a speculative exploration of the significance of care for
thinking and living in more than human worlds” (1). Rethinking care as a
practice of the everyday can be, as Puig de la Bellacasa argues, a radically
transformative political project, repairing our worlds and broadening the frame
beyond the human. This idea of care, as such, is part of a life-sustaining web.
The notion of care, here, is not a concrete, ready-made explanation or
blueprint. Rather, care is a provocation; it is speculative, open-ended,
nonnormative, and situated. The speculative is embraced to imagine other
possible worlds and is grounded in the belief that things could be otherwise.
Care, here, becomes a political imagination, fueling hope and desire for
transformative action. Rather than a utopian project, Puig de la Bellacasa
seeks to situate her work in current material worlds of the everyday: in the becoming
of things.
Engaging with Puig de la Bellacasa’s proposition of rethinking care and
relating it to the current situation, I wonder: who is worthy of care these
days (human or nonhuman) in times of covid-19? Whose lives are disposable, and
who is cared for? And how can Puig de la Bellacasa’s rethinking of the concept
of care perhaps help us to care today?
Moving to the chapter Touching Visions, Puig de la Bellacasa
proposed to rethink the notion of touch as a way to further an embodied
approach to care, enabling us to eschew abstractions and detachments associated
with the omnipotence of the visual. Touch, according to Puig de la Bellacasa,
enables us to understand care in terms of interconnections and fosters a move
away from reciprocal acts. This way, touch shows us that care can be
asymmetrical, enabling us to start approaching care as a form of circulation in
a much broader world beyond the human. Rethinking care and engaging with the
notion of touch, then, is aimed at more involvement in and commitment to the
world. Overall, Puig de la Bellacasa offers us a powerful argument for thinking
care and taking care, and to consider the agencies and liveliness of nonhumans
as a requirement for constructing possibilities for heterogeneous flourishing
in livable futures.
Engaging with
the idea of touch as a caring practice, I wonder how, in times of covid-19 and
social distancing, we can manage to stay in touch with ourselves, our bodies,
when most of our connections are through digital networks? How can we stay in
touch in quarantine times?
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