The Collective of Care: Responsibility, Pleasure, Cure – Part 1

How do the histories, politics and ethics of care, as well as their collective legacies influence how care is understood today? With this two-part essay, I will flesh out the philosophical dimension of care in relation to its politics and ethics, and vis-à-vis the idea of collectivity, to see how they can inform cultural practice. To the second part of the essay.

Care derives from the Latin word cura. According to strands of linguistic theory, cura arrives from the mythological figure Cura, a female goddess who created the first human figure using clay. In Ancient Greek mythology, the sky and thunder god Zeus (the Ancient Roman equivalent is Jove) arrived at the scene and Cura asked him to give the lifeless figure a soul that would carry her name. Zeus granted her first wish, but in true patriarchal fashion he insisted on using his name. At this point, Tellus, the goddess of earth arrived at the scene, demanding the figure be named after her, given that the body was created using her soil. The decision ultimately went to the fourth deity who appeared on the scene, Cronus (the Ancient Roman equivalent is Saturn), who declared that Zeus could have the spirit of the figure after its death, Tellus could keep its body and Cura would own it throughout its life. The name he decided upon was homo (human), given that the figure was made from humus (soil, which is also pronounced hous, χους, in Ancient Greek).

The myth of Cura is found in the book Fabulae by the Latin author Gaius Julius Hyginus, the oral histories of his time, including crudely told myths. (1) Originally comprised of some three hundred brief myths, very few manuscripts of Fabulae remain, with one surviving manuscript in Bavaria’s abbey of Freising having informed the first printed edition in 1535. During my research into care, I have found that monasteries often appear as care structures, both in terms of the profile of the monastery as a guardian of knowledge, but also as an early format of what today is known as “the commons”. Surprisingly, through the “care-full” practice of monks, such fragments of “other-than-Christian” or “infidel” histories and knowledges have survived, just like the myth of Cura.

In Latin, cura has many meanings: on the one hand it signifies worries and anxieties that arise from having to conduct chores in the name of care, more or less signifying the stress of having to care for things or people, and being burdened by those responsibilities. On the other hand, it signified what is commonly understood today as care, namely, the pleasure of caring for others, the word having a positive connotation of devotion. A third meaning deriving from Latin is “curing” – cura in many Latin-rooted languages meaning cure. Summarising this myth alongside looking at the etymology of “care” can reveal the roots of how it has developed as a concept: as a responsibility (labour), a pleasure and a cure (of both problems and ailments).

In der Philosophie wird Care im Rahmen der Ethik diskutiert. Heute wird die Idee einer Care-Ethik vor allem durch die feministische Theorie erforscht. Das Konzept der Ethik hat die Philosophie lange beschäftigt, meist anhand einer Dichotomie, die so alt ist wie die Zeit selbst – Emotion versus Vernunft. Man kann die Schuld dafür den alten Griechen geben: Sowohl Platon als auch Aristoteles betrachteten die Vernunft als dem Gefühl überlegen; die Vorherrschaft dieser Betrachtungsweise wurde in der Aufklärung unter anderem von René Descartes und Immanuel Kant gefestigt, die den theoretischen Strang des Rationalismus auf diesem Gebiet etablierten. Affekte und Leidenschaften galten als Krankheiten des Geistes, die das Urteilsvermögen trüben. Der Philosoph David Hume argumentierte dagegen für die Emotionen als treibende Kräfte bei der Bildung unseres Ethik-Verständnisses. In seinem 1739 erschienenen Buch Ein Traktat über die menschliche Natur, ist für Hume die Vernunft eine Sklavin der Leidenschaften, womit er meint, dass Emotionen auf eine Handlung projiziert werden, um sie als gut oder schlecht zu bewerten – je nachdem, was wir in Bezug auf diese Handlung fühlen. (2) Während viele andere Philosoph*innen nach weiteren Definitionen suchten, möchte ich eine spezifische Position herausgreifen, die sich mit der Ethik von Care befasst hat und den Mythos von Cura aufgreift. Der deutsche Philosoph Martin Heidegger nutzte den Mythos, um die Rolle von Cura als Schöpferin hervorzuheben – im Gegensatz zu dem, was traditionelle christliche Genealogien bis dahin nahegelegt hatten. Heidegger brach mit der weithin akzeptierten und normierten Vorstellung, die Frau sei die zweite von Gott geschaffene Person und daher nicht zur menschlichen Schöpfung fähig. Dennoch ist dies in Bezug auf die Fragen der sexuellen Differenz und des Weiblichen wohl sein einziger dynamisch-disruptiver Ansatz; selbst Heidegger und seine Untersuchung von Care scheint den Traditionen einer weißen, westlichen, patriarchalen Logik verpflichtet zu sein.

Genau wie Care selbst ist auch die deutsche Übersetzung des Wortes kompliziert. Heidegger unterscheidet sorgfältig zwischen Sorge, Besorgen und Fürsorge. In seinem Hauptwerk Zeit und Sein von 1927 scheint er an einem vagen „moralischen“ Aspekt der Sorge als individueller Eigenschaft interessiert zu sein. Sein berühmtes Konzept des Daseins – der Erfahrung des Seins, die speziell dem Menschen eigen sei – ist ein Mit-anderen-Sein; so wie ich sein Werk lese, schafft er es jedoch nicht, der individualistischen Vorstellung von Care als einem Akt der Pflicht, einem Akt individueller Arbeit in Bezug auf andere (oder zum Nutzen anderer) zu entkommen, und perpetuiert damit die „orthodoxen“ akademischen Vermächtnisse eines eurozentrischen westlichen philosophischen Kanons. In diesem Sinne wird die Ethik von Care immer von der singulären Einheit her verstanden: dem Individuum und seiner Beziehung zu anderen. Sie wird als Aufforderung zur Sorge, als Arbeit, als „Selbstverbesserung“ und sogar als Eigenschaft des überlegenen Selbst eines „zivilisierten“ Menschen positioniert. Care wird jedoch nie kollektiv konzeptualisiert: als Seinszustand, als Zustand der Gesellschaft.

Die individualistische Vorstellung von Care war eine Weiterentwicklung der Idee der Selbsthilfe, die durch die Arbeit von Samuel Smiles weithin bekannt geworden ist. Smiles war ein schottischer Regierungsreformer, der 1859 ein Buch mit dem Titel Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct verfasste und die Idee propagierte, dass Fortschritt durch neue Geisteshaltungen und nicht durch neue Gesetze entstünde. Er wurde zum „Lifestyle-Guru“, bevor dieser Begriff existierte, und sein Buch wurde als Inbegriff des viktorianischen Liberalismus gefeiert, weil es die Vorstellung propagierte, dass jeder Mensch alles werden könne, solange er nicht von anderen abhängig sei. Wie der Historiker Asa Briggs, ein führender Experte für die viktorianische Ära, betonte: „Sich auf sich selbst zu verlassen, wurde moralisch – und wirtschaftlich – der Abhängigkeit von anderen vorgezogen. Es war ein Ausdruck von Charakter, selbst wenn es keinen Erfolg garantierte – oder tatsächlich gar keinen zeitigte. Es hatte aber auch soziale Implikationen allgemeiner Natur. Die fortschrittliche Entwicklung der Gesellschaft, so wurde argumentiert, hänge letztlich nicht von kollektivem Handeln ab, sondern von der Verbreitung der Selbsthilfe-Praktiken.“ (3)

Das Theoretisieren über „Selbstverwaltung“ und „Selbstfürsorge“ ab den 1800er Jahren förderte eine westliche Kultur, die sich selbst als autark und allen anderen überlegen betrachtete. So wurde Care auch als Vorwand benutzt, um die Kolonisierung vieler Länder zu rechtfertigen. Die Kolonisator*innen wurden als Beschützer*innen dargestellt, die sich um die Erziehung und „Zivilisierung“ kümmerten – um die Einführung ihrer Untertan*innen in eine bessere Welt. Dies bildete den Deckmantel für – kurz- und langfristige – Gewaltakte, die im Namen der „guten Absichten“ von „Mutterländern“ verübt wurden, die sich um ihre Untertan*innen (ihre „Anderen“, weit in der Ferne) kümmerten. Die Systeme der Unterdrückung, die von den Kolonisator*innen unter dem Deckmantel von Care eingesetzt wurden, umfassten zum Beispiel Standards für Hygiene und Ernährung, die den indigenen Bevölkerungen aufgezwungen wurden, um ihnen das „beizubringen“, was der Westen für angemessene Selbstfürsorge hielt. Am Ende stand die dominante Vorstellung von Care als Verantwortung gegenüber sich selbst und der Gesellschaft, sich selbst zu verbessern und die weniger Glücklichen zu erziehen: die „Wilden“ zu „zivilisieren“.

“To us, as caretakers of the heart of Mother Earth, falls the responsibility of turning back the powers of destruction.”
— Chief Arvol Looking Horse, Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe (4)

Due to the necropolitical form of power perpetuated by the nation-state, Indigenous knowledges and philosophies of care have little presence in Western canons of academia. However, First Nations and Indigenous leaders and their communities the world over have been safeguarding these knowledges – against very violent resistance coming from white supremacy – for their future communities and generations. They understand the individual completely differently to the canons of reason in the Age of Enlightenment. Such positions are inspired by various legacies of non-patriarchal societal structures, many characterised by matriarchy, where care was shared at all levels of human activity as the way of understanding and existing in the world. In his brilliant book Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (2019), citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, Nick Estes, describes First Nations camp life as performing “another critical function: caretaking, or providing nourishment, replenishment, comradery, encouragement, warmth, songs, stories and love”. (5) However, Estes makes sure to break the romantic notions held in the West about Indigenous culture, which has been “aided by disciplines such as anthropology”, by echoing another Dakota scholar Kim TallBear, who specialises in racial politics in science and has argued that caretaking labour in First Nations communities was – and still is – gendered and seen as women’s work. (6)

In his book, Estes discusses politicisation through Indigenous struggle, assessing how political subjectivity can be understood as part of a communal care structure. Such views are echoed in the words of Gladys Tzul Tzul, a Maya K’iche’ theorist and activist studying indigenous politics and gender relationships in Guatemala, who describes: “a collective and community one, not a liberal one in which an individual citizen exists, represented and protected by the State.” (7) Seen in this light, the self is not the one (individual) that can be with others, as articulated by Heidegger. This translates into how a subjectivity understands herself, and how she performs the politics and ethics of care: it is less about the burden of responsibility or the idealistic character of caring for someone – or something – to aid them, to make one a better person, but rather, the collective joy of enacting care together, and this being the only way to understand oneself in the world. In the words of Honduran environmental activist and indigenous leader, Berta Cáceres: “let us build societies that are able to co-exist in a dignified way that protects life. We come together and remain hopeful as we defend and care for Earth and its spirits”. (8)

The histories of colonialism, imperialism and the Industrial Revolution, as well as globalisation and its neo-colonial and neo-imperial tropes today – enacted by nation-states and their institutions – have always fought against care as a collective act. A vast part of Western society from the 1950s onwards firmly based its understanding of care as individual development and progress – a specific kind of social mobility and “self-betterment” that is tied to conservative politics. With the rise of commodity capitalism, care was translated into products: fridges, automobiles, even cocktail recipes made by seemingly smiley housewives aiming to provide the best care for their husbands. Self-care equalled high-maintenance hairstyles, complicated beauty routines and anti-anxiety pills. The counter-cultural fever of the late-1970s brought to the mainstream the appropriation of Eastern and South American religious and self-care practices via the new-age spiritualism of the hippie movement. This hippie self-care, which was further developed in the so-called “first-world” economies during the 1980s, saw industries relating to health, self-improvement and self-help skyrocketing. Jane Fonda became a fitness and health icon as a result of her home workout videos, propagating self-care in the comfort of one’s own living room – a far cry from her feminist rebel “Hanoi Jane” days of the 1960s. The cultural imprint of that period even continues to resonate today during the COVID-19 pandemic, not least for the author of a recent article in Women’s Health magazine, who described Fonda’s 1982 videos as being the “bright spot in my self-isolation”. (9)

The self-care industry has a projected global revenue that will exceed the current 450 billion US dollars it grosses today. (10) Research into the concept of care and its link to individualism shows that individualism is inextricably linked to wealth and GDP per capita, as demonstrated in the recent book by Ronald Inglehart published in 2018, Cultural Revolution: People’s Motivations are Changing, and Reshaping the World. (11) Regions of the world that are considered developed (“first-world”) economies, are the most individualistic, compared to partly individualistic regions such as Eastern Europe. The most collectivist cultures are found in developing economies, in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast and Central Asia and South and Central America.

The development of such individualist notions of care sparked a resistance in certain feminist and civil rights movements, which asked for a return to rethinking collectivist politics and ethics of care. Second-wave feminism, which began in the United States in the early-1960s and lasted for roughly two decades, contested that care should be an obligatory act of love. Marxist feminists demanded that domestic and reproductive care work must be fairly compensated, most famously in the Wages for Housework Campaign, which called for a Global Women’s Strike on 8 March 2000, seeking recognition of the labour inherent in caring for the home (house work) and payment for all caring work – in wages, pensions, land and other resources. One of the main figures of this movement was Silvia Federici, who argued, “by denying housework a wage and transforming it into an act of love [care], capital has killed many birds with one stone.” (12) Feminists stated that the material conditions of oppression within a household affected real relationships of care due to the economic, social and psychological dependencies of the caregiver – or in other words, such domestic strictures impacted how caregivers were able to care.

Feminist theory ardently addressed the ethics of care from the 1980s onwards. For example, the American psychologist Carol Gilligan suggested in her 1982 book In a Different Voice that the moral outlook of women is different to that of men. While her thinking was very much criticised – even by feminists – it sparked a proposition for a distinctly feminist “ethics of care”, which was further discussed by the American feminist philosopher Nel Noddings, and her 1984 book Caring, which argued that the concept of ethics can only be understood through the idea of natural caring – as per the mother caring for her child. She questioned whether or not organisations that operate at a remove from caring relationships could be called ethical, proposing a realignment of education to encourage and reward not just rationality and trained intelligence, but also enhanced sensitivity in moral matters. Once again, such a proposition found resistance in parts of the period’s feminist movements, since a genderised notion of morality failed to encapsulate a-gendered and trans-gendered morals – indeed, it further feminised the ethics of care.

Such readings on the ethics of care nonetheless led to new approaches in professional fields such as nursing, education and house-care work. The political scientist Joan C. Tronto furthered this progress by underlining the importance of disengaging from the idea of morality and engaging, instead, with an ethics of care through a political context. For Tronto, care requires attentiveness, capability, responsibility and responsiveness. In 1990, together with her colleague Berenice Fischer they described care as such: “On the most general level, we suggest that 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, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.” (13)

The civil rights movement was another great force that promoted not only collective care, but also a different type of “self-care” through community care work. One profound example is the courageous, impressive and admirable community social programmes of the Black Panther Party, which remain under-recognised. These included free services, the best-known of which is their Free Breakfast for Children Program, but with countless more such as clothing distribution, classes on politics and economics, free medical clinics, lessons on self-defence and first aid, transportation to prisons for inmates’ family members, an emergency-response ambulance programme, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and many others. Thus, the idea of self-care as self-defence simultaneously became a form of care towards others – a fact that is clear in their founding name: Black Panther Party for Self-Defence. In the words of the co-founder Dr. Huey P. Newton:

“All these programs satisfy the deep needs of the community but they are not solutions to our problems. That is why we call them survival programs, meaning survival pending revolution. We say that the survival program of the Black Panther Party is like the survival kit of a sailor stranded on a raft. It helps him to sustain himself until he can get completely out of that situation. So the survival programs are not answers or solutions, but they will help us to organise the community around a true analysis and understanding of their situation. When consciousness and understanding is raised to a high level then the community will seize the time and deliver themselves from the boot of their oppressors.” (14)

For feminists and civil rights activists alike, the idea of care stemmed from thinking not of one’s individual relationship to an ethics and politics of care as a moral obligation, but oneself as one part of a much greater organism, namely, your community and its interests – echoing indigenous and first nations philosophies and knowledges about the ethics and politics of care. The collective joy of care then also becomes a means of self-determination: a political act. It is thus a way of bringing together the labour and pleasure of care to form a meaningful model of collective living.

iLiana Fokianaki is a theorist and curator, and the founder and artistic director of art institution State of Concept in Athens, Greece. She has further founded the research platform The Bureau of Care, which considers the politics and ethics of care today, and enquires how they can be utilised for what she names “care-full” institutional practice. She is a lecturer at the Dutch Art Institute and is a contributor to journals such as e-flux, Frieze, art agenda and others.

Endnotes

1. Mary Grant, ed., trans., The Myths of Hyginus (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960).
2. David Hume, “Book II, Part III, Sect. III ‘Of the Influencing Motives of the Will’”, A Treatise of Human Nature, www.pitt.edu, https://www.pitt.edu/~mthompso/readings/hume.influencing.pdf (accessed 27 May 2021).
3. Asa Briggs, “SamuelSmiles: The Gospel of Self-Help”, History Today vol. 37 #5 (May 1987), pp. 37–43, (accessed 11 May 2021).
4. Nick Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (New York: Verso, 2019), p. 75.
5. Ibid., p. 19.
6. Ibid., pp. 16–19.
7. Gladys Tzul Tzul, interview by Oswaldo J. Hernández, “Confrontingthe Narrative: Gladys Tzul on Indigenous Governance and State Authority in Guatemala”, www.upsidedownworld.org, 10 February 2014, (accessed 11 May 2021), http://upsidedownworld.org/archives/guatemala/confronting-the-narrative-gladys-tzul-on-indigenous-governance-and-state-authority-in-guatemala/ (accessed 11 May 2021).
8. For documentation of Berta Cáceres acceptance speech of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize please see the DisobedienceArchive (accessed 11 May 2021).
9. Melissa Matthews, “JaneFonda’s Workout Is The Bright Spot In My Self-Isolation”, www.womenshealthmag.com, 12 April 2020, (accessed 11 May 2021), https://www.womenshealthmag.com/fitness/a32111020/jane-fonda-workout/ (accessed 11 May 2021).
10. “Taking Charge: Consumers Grabbing Hold of Their Health and Wellness Drives $450-Billion Opportunity”, www.iriworldwide.com, https://www.iriworldwide.com/en-ca/insights/publications/self-care-trends-en (accessed 19 May 2021).
11. Ronald F. Inglehart, “Global Cultural Patterns”, Cultural Evolution: People’s Motivations are Changing, and Reshaping the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 40.
12. Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol and London: Falling Wall, 1975), p. 48.
13. Joan C. Tronto, Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice, (New York: New York University Press, 2013), p. 15.
14. The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), pp. 3–4.