(After) Care

(AFTER)CARE DANIELA VICHERAT MATTAR given and shared world (a material planet, a historical globe). If we turn our attention to questioning the ways in which we relate to the immeasurability of the otherness with which we share this planet, then care matters. Care Paradoxically, care is defined in the dictionary as a contradictory noun and verb. In both uses, care refers to a state of disquiet or feeling of anxiety, attention and responsibility, and at the same time, it can mean a state or feeling of desire, esteem or attention – an inclination towards or concern for something or someone. This paradox has been for decades a point of study for feminist scholarship. At its core the feminist critique reveals how the productive structures of society rest on the exploitation and invisibility of social reproductive work – that is, care work. Reasons for negating, neglecting and devaluing care work are multiple, but most noticeable is the fact that care is a gendered and racialized practice and a normalized disposition.3 In fact, despite how fundamental care is for the well-functioning of individuals across their lives, in their daily life, and for the reproduction of society as a whole, those who provide care tend to be invisible, and their needs are less recognized than the needs of those privileged enough to be able to pay for care services.4 This is very visible in many fields of care, from domestic work to health services, where the needs of care givers are subordinated to the needs of care receivers. Some scholars describe this subordination and invisibility as a form of privileged irresponsibility or epistemic ignorance – something one (un)consciously chooses not to recognize in all its importance.5 Following the influence of Black feminist works, there has been a recent call to politicize the study of care.6 What would this imply for the ways in which we define care? Many argue that care is not an individual practice but is better understood as a continuous network of relations and negotiations for the support of both care givers and care receivers. A recurrent definition in care theory was elaborated by Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher in 1990 when they suggested that “[o]n the most general level … caring be viewed as a species activity that 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, ourselves and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”7 In viewing care as this fundamental practice of sustaining life, Tronto identifies four important dimensions: 1. Caring about (resulting from the tension between being attentive and the said epistemic ignorance towards care needs). 2. Taking care of (balancing out the differentials in the power dynamics derived from who, how, when and where the responsibilities for care are placed). 3. Care giving (different degrees of competence and accountability in delivering care in different contexts). 4. Care receiving (different degrees of responsiveness depending on the care needs). “El tiempo está después”1 — María Gadú After what? After, care? After being cared for? After caring? And before? And during? The notion of “(after)care” presupposes that care relations are linear, as if care is a progression from a state of “before care” to “caring” to “after care”. In this logic, care is an achievement, a task to be performed, a need to be satisfied. But care is more than that; it is a relationship with – or better, a way of relating with – another (human or non-human) being. So, how to understand and visualize (after)care? And why does it matter for the ways in which we act and do things, like photography? In Spanish (my mother tongue), (after)care is not one word, it comes split as after_care. For me this is an invitation to tinker with both words separately before placing them together to understand what they do to one another. Let’s start, like everything, with time. After According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, after has multiple uses. As an adverb and preposition, it implies following, or a subsequent moment, in time and/or place. As an adjective it means later in time. As an auxiliary verb, it is used to indicate an action that is or has been completed. So, after points to a relation that has been established and exists in a progressive manner (a line of time). In this sense, the notion of time is grounded in an Aristotelian definition, considering time as the measure of change.2 But, what if instead of focusing on the causal relationality of change (something is a trigger for something else to happen after) we focus our attention on the engagements and entanglements that allow the causality to happen, looking into the relations that enable them. After all, we are all always, all the time, in relation with otherness – either others who are relatively familiar (imagine your fellow citizens in any given country) or others who are so foreign that one believes not to have anything in common with them (imagine all those strangers with whom we share nothing). In fact, even in solitude, we exist in relation to a 60 If care is anything we do to maintain and sustain life, then care is fundamental because life is vulnerable. In fact, inherent to these four 61 dimensions are internal contradictions derived from the unequal distribution of vulnerabilities and how those in positions of power have the prerogative to define what to care about and how to take care, while those in less powerful positions are left with the tasks of care giving and/or care receiving.8 As a consequence, the assumption of the individual’s agency is misleading because even if the responsibility (and accountability) of care giving is attached to those engaged in the (often) menial practice of delivering care, the real power rests in those with the power to define what care is needed when and where, how it is to be delivered, by whom and to whom, and why. In short, as a disposition and practice, care is defined mostly by the processes through which we think, value, recognize and represent what matters (why and to whom). In other words, one cares not because things have value in themselves, but rather because they are endowed with value by the care relations invested in them. Thus, how we signify something/someone as a matter of care is an inherently political act. If care is the result of processes of engaging with others in the continual maintenance of life, then when is that over? Or what would (after)care mean? And who or what could be positioned after care? One way of trying to make sense of whether or not there is any real basis to conceiving of a time that is possible after care is by connecting it with vulnerability, seeing (after)care as the potential moment when vulnerabilities are fully overcome and the complete autonomy of the self as an individual is achieved. Thinking about autonomy as independence in line with the myth of the “self-made” individual overlooks the extent to which any sense and condition of autonomy depends on and is framed by structures – from socio-economic institutions, political-legal forms of recognition and rights enfranchisements, and socio-cultural systems that either recognize or negate the value of care.12 These structures are never neutral, there is always a perspective that shapes how vulnerability and care are systematically (miss)recognized in relation to the unquestionable value of autonomy as an absolute condition.13 In other words, what tends to be forgotten is how autonomy is always the result of a network of historical and place-based interdependencies and entanglements based on care relations.14 If we take interdependence seriously, as an ontological and existential condition, then the idea that there is some moment when vulnerabilities are overcome, when care is not needed, a moment post care when the individual is a complete, self-bounded, autonomous being, seems absurd. Undoubtedly, one of the biggest achievements of modernity is the emancipation of the individual from the constraints of tradition and various types of authority (most noticeably religious and political). What is tenaciously forgotten or neglected from this epochal exaltation of individual freedom and emancipation is the extent to which any experience of total autonomy is illusory, because the autonomous self is never an abstract isolated being. The individual self always rests on a network of interdependencies that support it and make autonomy possible (human and/or non-human, from technology to nature). In this sense, what characterizes us as living beings is that, in one way or another, we are all care receivers. The problem, though, is that not everyone is ready to recognize the need to also be(come) care givers, and the burdens of care keep on being disproportionally shouldered by women, especially racialized migrant women. Hence, there is an urgent need to change dominant normative images of vulnerability and care. Photography, like British photographer and photo therapist Jo Spence suggests, can play a crucial role in exploring ways to reframe and overturn these normative ideas, so “words and images can take on new and different meanings and relationships and old ideas can be transformed”.15 Vulnerability Generally, vulnerability is understood as a condition of exposure to different types of risks, either due to conditions integral to one’s body or as result of situational circumstances and changes.9 In either case, the vulnerable individual has a reduced ability to respond to risk situations, whether because they lack assets, capacities or support. Since we are all dependent on structural support in the face of vulnerability at some point in life, it is also logical to argue that vulnerability is a structural condition. In fact, legal theorist Martha Fineman goes as far as describing it as a shared and universal human condition, even if this of course does not suggest that we are all vulnerable in an equal manner.10 However, the myth of the autonomous (neo)liberal subject stresses a different approach to vulnerability, framing it rather as the result of each individual’s actions and decisions, and thus responsibility. This is done with special acrimony when describing groups that are traditionally labelled as vulnerable, like women, racialized peoples, the poor – all identities that place individuals in these categories as publicly unable to make the right choices to overcome “their vulnerability”. In this logic, vulnerability becomes a condition of “legibility” over certain bodies that are rendered weak, a burden and inherently susceptible to harm.11 Agency is denied from those defined and represented as vulnerable; totalizing images of what “they” need become, in a paradoxically pathogenic manner, the justification for forms of paternalistic care. Yet, if vulnerability is what characterizes us as living beings, the narrative about the self-sustained individual misses the extent to which vulnerability is also the result of misrecognizing the profound interdependences of care that make any form of autonomy possible. 62 Photography As an artistic practice, photography is neither directly nor explicitly contingent on care giving. Yet, as the works in this issue reveal, in the process of image making care should be taken at every step, especially if you recall the first two dimensions of care discussed above: defining what to care about (making it (in)visible) and how to do it (the exercise of framing). It matters how vulnerability and violence are represented and made visible to the public eye, and who has the power to define them and with what aim. It matters not only as a descriptive task, but mostly to question traditional ways of understanding the roles of care giving and care receiving in contexts of vulnerability and violence. Perhaps this can even help question the prescribed and normalized roles of the photographer and the photographed, especially if the practice of photography is to be understood and transformed as a care act.16 63 I would like to suggest that to act with care requires being open to being transformed by the otherness of others. To develop skills to become aware of the order we unconsciously impose when looking at alterity, from the moment we direct our attention and lens (or choose to ignore, as a form of privileged ignorance). To conceive of photography as a practice of care, it is necessary to tinker constantly with imagination, compassion and action – all forms of engagement in which we can actively resist the temptation of seeking to attain and represent a complete and total image of alterity. In this sense, considering care both as a disposition and a practice, the positionality of the photographer is from the onset one that negotiates with(out) care the otherness that is to be photographed.17 As a practice that mediates reality, photography holds relative power to define, give shape to, represent and frame vulnerability and care, either as experiences to be overcome (so there will be a moment after them), or as inescapable and constitutive conditions of being alive (thus partial and unfinished). In doing the latter, there is no space for abstract and neutral representations of alterity, because what is at stake is precisely the recognition that all points of view are interconnected, each with a given perspective and specific aim. What I am contending here is that care, as an idea and a practice, is by definition incomplete. It is a constant invitation to explore the question of what matters, when, why and for whom, and what position one has in all of it (or in other words, how are we implicated in what we see and how we do it). The fact that a photograph is always, and by definition, taken from somewhere, for someone and for some purpose, raises far-reaching questions about the personal position, the direct and relational accountability and the capacity of the photographer to negotiate how to frame and represent fragments of the world in which we are all entangled. A caring way to do so requires beginning by resisting the tendency to do so in an abstract, apparently neutral, and totalizing manner.18 A caring way demands recognizing difference in its incommensurability and the inescapability of our participation in it. (After)care So far I have attempted to argue that the (after)care question is not a temporal one – after care, what? – but a procedural one about how to care; how to do so in ways that recognize that “the needs of” and “to care” are at the core of life’s infinite interdependencies. To politicize and democratize care implies thinking of it as an affective disposition that connects the self to others (or, in other words, how self-care can never be carried out without care for another). Care implies immersing ourselves in feeling/thinking with – instead of feeling/thinking for – others. Mobilizing care as a goal requires us to be aware of the extent to which we are involved in the acts of preservation and maintenance of individuals, communities and different social worlds.19 To help with this, then photography can mobilize new forms of imagining, reimagining, thinking and acting “other-wise” rather than “self-wise” with care.20 My attempt here has been to invite you to think how, in the care/ vulnerability dance, there is no after. If this is so, then there is only time to care. All the rest comes after. 64 Daniela Vicherat Mattar (Santiago, 1974) is Associate Professor of Sociology at Leiden University in The Hague. Her research, teaching and publications gravitate around 3Cs: Cities, Citizenship and Care, how they are thought, imagined, contested and experienced. Currently she is senior fellow at Mecila (Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America) based in São Paulo, where she is working on the project The Union of Disunion: Spatialising the Inequality-Conviviality Nexus in Chile, looking at the history and experiences of Plaza Dignidad/Italia/Baquedano in Santiago. 1 “Time is after” – My translation. 2 In philosophy, time, although dominant, is not only conceived as the measure of change following Aristotle and Heraclitus. Another line of thought, following Parmenides and Zeno, contends that change is just a mental illusion of the totality of life, hence time is just an idea of the mind. See Adrian Bardon A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time (OUP, 2013). 3 For instance, in its 2020 report “Time to Care”, Oxfam estimates that out of the 67 million domestic workers worldwide, about 80% are women, with about half of them lacking minimum wage protection, and more than half having no legal protection on their working hours – patterns exacerbated by the internationalization of the domestic work industry and traffic, which follows a south/ north pattern, clearly framed by acute racial and class inequalities. Alison Jaggar calls our attention to how this system rests on logics of coerced consent that make it even more difficult to dismantle. See Alison Jaggar “We Fight for Roses Too: Time-Use and Global Gender Justice”, Journal of Global Ethics 9/2 (2013), 115–129. 4 Joan Tronto Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care (Routledge, 1994), 116. 5 See Riikka Prattes “ ‘I Don’t Clean Up after Myself’: Epistemic Ignorance, Responsibility and the Politics of Outsourcing of Domestic Cleaning”, Feminist Theory 0/0 (2019), 1–21. 6 On the politics of care see the work of Deva Woodly. Important is also the work of Beatriz Nascimento on the Brazilian quilombos 65 as places of resistance and care, or the decolonial feminist work of Maria Lugones and Rita Segato. 7 Joan Tronto Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care (Routledge, 1994), 103. 8 Ibid. 144. 9 See Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds (eds.) Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (OUP 2014). 10 See Martha Fineman “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition”, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20/1/2 (2008). 11 Erinn Cunniff Gilson eloquently describes how the association between femininity and vulnerability is also at the core of women’s susceptibility to harm and violability. See “Vulnerability and Victimization: Rethinking Key Concepts in Feminist Discourses on Sexual Violence”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42/1 (2016), 71–98. 12 In the words of Susan Dodds, “we are inherently vulnerable to dependency”. See Susan Dodds “Dependence, Care, Vulnerability” in Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds (eds.) Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (OUP, 2014), 194. 13 In other words, my contention here is that neither autonomy nor neutrality can be fully attained, because both are dependent on the relationships that make them possible (often defined in terms of power inequalities that enable a single individual and/or their perspective to be conceived of as the desirable and universal one). 14 The privileged irresponsibility and epistemic ignorance I discussed above can here be understood in relation to this “self-made” fiction that enables an individual to neglect and dismiss the care relationships that make that sense of autonomy, undermining in turn the value of care work and care giving. 15 See Jo Spence’s exhibition “Libido Uprising” (1–31 August 2019), https://www. richardsaltoun.com/viewing-room/6-jospence-libido-uprising/ 16 An example of this practice can be the seen in the graduation work of Federica Iozzo at the KABK in 2021, the production of a care album. For more information see https:// graduation2021.kabk.nl/students/federicaiozzo 17 I want to thank the comment of my student Eline Koopmann, who suggested on an early version of this essay that I should think about photography as an act and practice of negotiation. 18 I am aware that photographers hold relative power to do this in as much as they are also conditioned by their own vulnerabilities, positionalities, possibilities and relationships with their patrons. However, there is a strong care potential in framing and producing images of others and the world. 19 Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times”, Social Text 38/1/142 (2020), 1–16. 20 Kathleen Lynch “Love Labour as a Distinct and Non-Commodifiable Form of Care Labour”, The Sociological Review 55/3 (2007), 550–750.