It is becoming increasingly difficult to not care about care. Care is simply everywhere: From the personal register of “self-care” to the infrastructural dimension of the “care crisis” as it appears in the healthcare sector, the ubiquity of the word undeniably conveys something about the current historical moment, a moment marked by but not reducible to the fallouts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The emphasis on the necessity of care has provided a crucial backdrop for artistic practice, curation and programming in recent years in the performing arts and beyond. When looking at current themes of festivals, conferences, publications, exhibitions, it seems as if not a single art institution might have refrained from creating a programme on care or related concepts such as healing, resilience, vulnerability, relationality, reproduction. This turn towards care can not only be observed in the discursive framings of art events but also within artistic practices. We can increasingly witness performances taking the form of rituals or other participatory formats in which questions around how to be with each other, human and non-human, are in focus.
As with any concept that seems to circulate too readily within cultural discourse, there is a danger of emphasising an empty signifier that everyone seems to agree upon without questioning or working on its actual use, meaning or political significance. So, in this sense, I understand this text as an invitation to pause and ask: What does this focus on care within the arts tell us about our current moment? How does the term "care" promise to act as a tool capable of addressing today's crises? And under which conditions can these promises transform into practices that might change the conditions under which we care?
The English word care holds a spectrum of meanings, encompassing its affective, ethical and material registers. In order to map these out, it is instructive to look at potential German translations of the term. In German, care could translate to Sorge – the sorrow, worry or simply feeling of concern for someone; it could also mean Fürsorge – which would name the form of nurturing care or aid being performed by relatives, friends or public services; it could translate to Versorgung or Pflege as forms of nursery care, the labour of care with those, who need assistance, or also as the attention we give to things to maintain them; it could also describe a certain quality, with which we attend to the world around us: Sorgfalt or Umsicht – as in careful- and attentiveness. Precisely because the English term seems to encompass all these meanings, it is used widely within German academia and art as well (cf. Binder/Hess 2019). While the current excessive use of the notion of care seems to point to its promise of nurture and maintenance, it might be interesting to consider that its etymology suggests less optimistic connotations as well. The Old English world caru means "sorrow, anxiety, grief" but also "serious mental attention", indexing a proximity between sorrow and care, dem Kummer und dem Kümmern. So, if I want to describe the promises of care within the arts, one entry-point might be to ask what sorrow this promise carries.
In their essay “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times”, the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant writes: “All times are transitional. But at some crisis times like this one, politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life.“ (Berlant 2016: 393) Berlant writes these lines before the global Covid-19 pandemic but I think this account of a seemingly shared public hunch that the reproduction of life is glitching has since become more accurate. This, of course, does not mean that there is also a shared understanding of which resources and ways of living would secure it, rather on the contrary. The reproduction of life generally falls into the sphere of care. This is also the case in Joan Tronto's generic definition of care: "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 that we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web" (Tronto 1993: 103) This is the ideal of care, in which a generic we collectively participates in securing the liveability of life through careful practices – especially in times where this liveability is perceived as becoming more and more precarious. It is this ideal that is optimistically interpellated when care comes into focus on stages, panel discussions, publications. Care becomes an optimistic answer to the crises of social reproduction which seem to be hitting the middle class as “crises tend to become general in mass political terms” (Berlant in Puar 2012: 166) even if they have been a reality for people in the margins for a long time. There is a stark contrast between these ethical life-sustaining promises that care entails when it is interpellated in the arts, and the conditions under which the work of care unfolds day to day.
“In contemporary discourses on care and reproductive labour [...] one encounters a common misunderstanding: the notion that these feminist movements fought for the affirmative recognition of care work as work. For the perspectives this text wants to open up, however, it is important to note that feminist Marxist scholars and activists such as Federici indeed wanted to show the mechanisms that position care work as socially devalued and invisible as labour.”
To theorise the labour of reproduction, Marxist feminist scholars (Federici 2004, 2012; Bhattacharya 2017) have directed their analyses to the beginnings of industrial modernity and its separation of the spheres of reproduction and production, and thus their gendering. The paradigmatic form for this gendered division of life is the nuclear family, in which wage labour outside the home falls to men, while the unpaid care work is performed by women1. The responsibility for care activities (household management, rearing the offspring, affective and physical care) and thus the task of reproducing life has historically been borne by women even if they also participate in wage work, as it has always been the case for poor and racialized women. Pointing out that the reproduction of life under capitalism always serves the reproduction of labour power and therefore its exploitation, was a central concern of feminist movements in the 1970s such as the “Wages for Housework” campaign. In contemporary discourses on care and reproductive labour, that is to say the context in which scholars such as Silvia Federici have been institutionally rediscovered, one encounters a common misunderstanding: the notion that these feminist movements fought for the affirmative recognition of care work as work. For the perspectives this text wants to open up, however, it is important to note that feminist Marxist scholars and activists such as Federici indeed wanted to show the mechanisms that position care work as socially devalued and invisible as labour. But they were less interested in the positive revaluation of care work – rather, they wanted to analyse how the naturalisation of care work as women's work and the accompanying devaluation function as techniques of sexist capitalist exploitation. Demanding wages was not a liberal claim to inclusion; it was posed as a revolutionary claim. Paying proper wages for care work, according to the analysis of these activists and scholars, would be incompatible with the current mode of production and thus, ultimately lead to the collapse of capitalist value extraction.
In today’s globalised late capitalism, where a large proportion of women find themselves integrated into the labour market, albeit with lower earnings, this is perhaps even more visible: More care work is paid work in the Global North2. However, it is usually delegated to poorer, often racialized women, often immigrants from the Global South – usually underpaid and performed in the gaps of social security or labour legislation (Lutz 2008; Parreñas 2005). So, if we look at the term care against the backdrop of the history and current organisation of reproductive labour, care appears as a lacking resource, extracted through the mobilisation of gendered and racialized bodies. Through its gendered historicity, care, understood as a resource, remains tied to the affective capacity of the bodies that perform it, thus showing continuities with what can be understood as affective and feminised labour in the context of the service economy and post-Fordist labour (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2012, Precarias 2005). This is a materialist discourse through which care has been making its way into feminist public spheres – already before the pandemic. With the pandemic, it has just become more apparent to which degree societies depend on functioning infrastructures of care.
“If there was just more care (for the planet, non-human and human beings, within communities, in working relationships, in families and friendships, from the state, for ourselves), the concept often seems to imply, life would be more liveable. But care can only be transformative if its practices transform the conditions under which we care.”
But when Berlant describes, as cited above, the affective sphere within which the reproduction of life is perceived to be in crisis, this is not primarily about the unequal distribution and exploitation of care work but about a publicly shared sense that the liveability of life has shifted for the worse. In the Global North, burn-out and depression are described as affective symptoms of this crisis (Cvetkovich 2012) which are variously attributed to precarisation and the perceived loss of life time through the dissolution of the boundaries between life and work (see Virno 2005, or in a more popular version: Hochschild 2001). This shared sense might also be evoked by the lack of action, the presumed powerlessness in facing the ongoing disastrous wars as well as the climate crisis which is becoming a heightened threat day by day. In these affective states (which seem generally shared by cultural workers and artists as well), the lack of care is often experienced through social isolation, a lack of community or continuous social relations patterning our lives and the conditions that make it so hard to sustain them. It might be here that care turns into a promise. If there was just more care (for the planet, non-human and human beings, within communities, in working relationships, in families and friendships, from the state, for ourselves), the concept often seems to imply, life would be more liveable. But care can only be transformative if its practices transform the conditions under which we care. Otherwise, care in its maintaining, repairing, repetitive qualities, its necessities and therefore production of dependencies, is rather complicit in stabilising existing systems of exploitation and inequality. This is equally true for self-care which can be so easily integrated into commodified forms of relaxation. Few of us can deny the necessity of our personal self-care routines, but often their function is to allow us to keep going within lives structured by a world that we doubt. Of course, there is also a legacy of self-care as a form of resistance from marginalised perspectives. Here, we might think of Audre Lord’s famous quote from her memoir on battling cancer, A Burst of Light (1988): “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare“. When lives are deemed not worthy of life, i.e. by direct violence or structural neglect, i.e. through health care systems, racial inequalities or geopolitical action, survival can be a form of resistance and self-care, under certain circumstances, might be a tool for survival. This, however, is the tricky part in engaging with the notion of care – it is hard to distinguish when it becomes complicit with systems of power vs. when it has the potential to intervene in transformative ways.
So, when art turns to care, rather than indulging in its abstract value, it could seek to be honest with the realities of care and our contemporary yearnings for it. This would mean to not repeat the ethical and idealist promise the notion of care holds but rather, to think about the material consequences for artistic practice when wishing for a proximity to care.
One way to tackle the material reality of care in relation to artistic practice, is to think about time. I think it cannot be underestimated how much the contemporary longing for care, articulated in the arts and beyond, is related to a longing for a reworking of the relationship to time. If we think of the time of care as pausing and slowing down to rest as well as care as the urgent ongoingness and continuity of social reproduction and maintenance, care promises a temporal diversity that is contradictory to the temporalities of artistic production in the independent performing arts. It might be precisely this contradiction though that has given rise to concepts of care, rest and resilience gaining so much traction in this specific field.
Like care, time is produced through material practices. I like to think here with Alison Kafer’s (2013) definition of crip time: “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” This concept of bending the clock can be very useful in thinking about the temporalities of care. Care is not necessarily about slowing down but about bending time to meet the needs (of an action, a body, a relation…). This is also apparent in the history of feminist perspectives on general strikes – the form of the strike needs to be bend and extended as for people with care obligations in the home and/or their professional lives, it is impossible to participate in a strike that requires to disrupt this work. (Precarias 2005) Or when thinking of informal infrastructures of care in neighbourhoods or communities, which are increasingly hard to maintain within post-Fordist societies, what this work needs is disrupting productionist temporalities to foster endurance and persistence, regularity and continuity – “militant preservation”, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2013) have described the temporal resistance of marginalised life forms “carried out by and on the means of social reproduction”.
On the contrary, the prevailing temporal form in which work in the independent performing arts is organised, is the project. As the word itself suggests, the project encapsulates a specific relationship to time – it projects the future while being oriented not towards its own needs, but towards its own end, its completion or, one might say, death (as in: the deadline). The temporal modus operandi of project work is the future perfect. Here, the relationship to the present is marked by debt, a promise that has been made towards the future, the completion of the project that is always already anticipated. In her book Artist at Work. Proximity of Art and Capitalism (2012), the philosopher and performance theorist Bojana Kunst has named this temporal form of work “projective temporality.”
When, beginning with its first conception, the project will have been finished in the future, the temporal cycles of project work overlap: While you are rehearsing for the upcoming premiere, you are most likely already working on the concept for the next project to meet the upcoming application deadline for funding or the expectations of the international performance curator. While you are awaiting letters of approval or rejection from the funding body or potential partner institutions, you engage in already funded projects, work in projects of other people, participate in residencies or other forms of temporary work commitments like teaching. The temporal limits of project work sentence you to keep yourself busy with more and more temporary work, usually spread out geographically, so maintaining the everyday becomes challenging as well as maintaining a continuous artistic practice that is not ruptured or over-determined by the project form, for which artistic practice always has to promote itself as something new. Rather than emphasising that one has been continuously developing a method, an aesthetic, an idea, a practice-, within projective temporality artists have to frame their proposal as original even within their own career. For artist working in countries without sufficient art funding, projects can often only evolve through organizing their international circulation and therefor financing – here, making the project happen is highly dependent on touring the projects through culturally and economically dominant countries.
Projective temporality makes centring care a challenge. In regards to artistic work, it not only makes it hard to sustain a continuous practice – even within the project, it oftentimes seems impossible to create on a timeline that is structured by what the work needs. It also becomes a strenuous effort to sustain an artistic team over a longer period of time as projective temporality produces highly individualised schedules. Committing to care responsibilities for friends, family, children or non-human beings also becomes an almost impossible task that might even endanger careers. The constant precarity of the future also challenges the mental health situations of many actors in the field, producing anxiety and depression while work schedules make organising regular support systems such as therapy sessions difficult. For artists, who are already sick or disabled these temporal structures in themselves already act as barriers for making work.
Projective temporality produces precarity – even though, whether this precarity actually makes our lives precarious strongly depends on individual class backgrounds and socially determined material support systems that we can or can not fall back on to. As has been thoroughly discussed within political theory, the precarisation of social security also acts as a form of governance (cf. Lorey 2015). That this holds very true also in relation to the arts, has become extremely palpable in the past year – especially in Germany. We have seen funding being suspended, exhibitions, shows and conferences cancelled over political disagreement – sometimes explicitly, sometimes disguised as economic necessity. With authoritarianism on the rise, the project form based on terminable funding reveals itself to be keeping the infrastructures of care that we build within the arts dangerously volatile. In Germany, the performing arts are predominantly state-funded, lacking alternative economies or funding through private foundations (as it is more usual i.e. in the United States). While it is a defendable democratic value that art and especially theatre, as a place of assembly, are public goods and should therefore be financed publicly, the centralisation of funding infrastructures produces a material dependency on the side of art institutions, artists and other actors in the field that can impede on their capacity for political dissent – a capacity that needs to be trained, protected and fought for. In this sense, imagining and creating materially and socially resilient infrastructures of care within the performing arts is becoming a political necessity in this historical moment in time.
Luckily, shaping and making time are really at the heart of performance-making. Here, a political imagination of how to bend time towards sustainable forms of relating can be sown. But political imagination of care can only happen within the arts when it is not approached with an aesthetics and rhetoric that presuppose what care looks, feels and sounds like.
1 Lives outside this binary have always existed. Here, I forgo using a gender-neutral or gender-inclusive use of the terms men and women as I am describing their socially produced and assigned roles within the historical division of labour within the socially constructed gender binary.
2 I don’t use the notion of Global North and South here as geographical terms, but as terms that describe hegemonic relations between countries and regions which are embedded in the unequal distribution of wealth and extractivist practices.
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Antonia Rohwetter works as a dramaturge, theatre scholar, author and curator in the context of the independent performing arts. She studied philosophy, cultural studies and gender studies as well as applied theatre studies. Instead of producing knowledge about the arts, she is interested in thinking with artistic practices and understanding them as forms of discursive, sensory, critical and embodied knowledge. Her work is informed by materialist analyses of queer, feminist and decolonial perspectives.
