١ ... The Body of Care

Who cares? How?

• Caring in definition, understanding and practice, is not about being merely nice. Caring -for the alienated- as a practice involves power and labour relations. Care emerges as a particularly profound engagement with the world, in Maria Puig’s recent work. Puig introduces care as: “a vital affective state, an ethical obligation and a practical labor” (2012: 197). According to Puig, to care is to become subject to another, to recognise an obligation to look after another. Puig stresses that exceeding the ethical obligation of care, caring requires more from us than abstract well wishing, it is a class of skilled labor in creating caring contexts. Care means attentiveness and consideration for people, recognising the human interconnectedness of the world and the agency in it.

• The ‘bad care’ is referring to the kind of care that causes damage to a certain party involved in the production or practice of care. Care is not a simple act. To maintain care carefully, is a complex, continuous and demanding process. Maria Puig -in her book Matters of Care- witnessed how care for some individuals and species translates into suffering for others, in what she calls ‘violent care’.

• In relation to care curiosity, Donna Haraway notes, “caring means becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning” (2008: 36). The kind of curious care Haraway is referring to here, expands into an inquisitive care. Though, when handling ‘care’ as a curious practice, We can not assume that all humans care and react towards others on the same level. There are even multitudes of

theories -like the monkey sphere theory or Dunbar theory1- that suggest that human brains are only capable of maintaining meaningful relationships with a limited number of people. For some people, humans that are outside of their personal monkey sphere are just one-dimensional characters who cannot be conceptualized as people. It is sometimes hard for some to understand or relate to someone’s reality when they do not ‘share’ it.

Then, what is vitally important here is having ‘accessible’ realities instead of ‘shared’ ones. Such accessibility allows more fluidity into power dynamics and care relations.

1 The theory of Dunbar’s number holds that we can only really maintain about 150 connections at once. Dunbar concluded that the size, relative to the body, of the neocortex – the part of the brain associated with cognition and language – is linked to the size of a cohesive social group. Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191001-dunbars-number-why-we-can-only-maintain-150-relationships.

The previous elaborations in relation to ‘Care’ and ‘Aliens’ set the starting point for investigating those stressful realities. Therefore in the coming chapters, care normalities are investigated in an indirect way, on different levels. Specifically focusing on understanding chronic stress biologically and spatially. The last chapter focuses on caring spatial environments.