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MATTERS OF CARE: CARE MATTERS.

To care signifies: an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation.


It is thus not so much a notion that explains the construction of things than a suggestion on how those who study things can participate in their possible becomings.


Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things

by Puig de la Bellacasa M. (2011).




‘Care’ is a slippery word

The Politics of Care in Technoscience by Martin A., Myers N., and Viseu A. (2015)



This seems an awakening, but we need to be care-ful and careful….awakenings can easily be turned into residuals and be absorbed by the hegemonic culture.



Ok, sorry. My bad.

Let’s talk English.

Actually, let’s not talk at all.

Let’s have a look.


Assembling neglected things: part one - How power neutralizes power’s critics.

Unfortunately, even discourses about caring can end up in practices of not caring.

This is a visual representation of what the residual is:



Assembling neglected things: part two - Let’s play

You will read some public figures’ quotes….

it does not matter if you do not know them…


just play and guess WHEN they were said 😊


Quiz solutions and further information on the quotes can be found at the end of this post.


QUIZ 1: Culture is not having a well-stocked warehouse of news, but the ability our mind has to understand life, our place in it, our relationships with other human beings. He who is aware of himself and of everything, who feels the relationship with all other beings, has culture.


QUIZ 2: We must work passionately ... to bridge the gulf between scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance […] when scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men.


QUIZ 3: What need is there for another kind of Science when it has been so successful? […].

The classic answer is that these are not scientific problems: science provides neutral instruments, and it is the political forces who must use them justly. If they don't, it's not science's fault. This answer is false: current science does not create all kinds of instruments, but only those that the system encourages you to create.

For the individual welfare of some or many, refrigerators and artificial hearts, and to ensure order, that is, the permanence of the system, propaganda, the readaptation of the alienated individual or the dissatisfied group. Instead, it has not been so busy creating instruments to eliminate these underlying problems from the system: methods of education, participation, distribution, so that they could be as efficient, practical and attractive as a car. Even the most flexible tools, such as computers, are made with certain ends in mind more than others. Although the power would suddenly pass into well-inspired hands, they would lack the adequate technology to transform socially, culturally - not just industrially - the people, without incalculable and useless sacrifices.


QUIZ 4: But where we used to accept unquestioningly the facile (and often self-serving) argument that traditional economic growth and distributional equity are inseparable, new moral and humane stirrings now are nudging us. We can now ask whether we are not already so wealthy that further growth, far from being essential to addressing our equity problems, is instead an excuse not to mobilize the compassion and commitment that could solve the same problems with or without the growth. Finally, as national purpose and trust in institutions diminish, governments, striving to halt the drift, seek ever more outward control. We are becoming more uneasily aware of the nascent risk of what a Stanford Research Institute group has called "... 'friendly fascism'? a managed society which rules by a faceless and widely dispersed com plex of warfare-welfare-industrial-communications-police bureaucracies with a technocratic ideology."



QUIZ 5: A residual cultural element is usually at some distance from the effective dominant culture, but some part of it, some version of it – and especially if the residue is from some major area of the past – will in most cases have had to be incorporate if the effective dominant culture is to make sense in these areas.



QUIZ 6: We are convinced that the world, even this terrible, intricate world of today, can be known, interpreted, transformed, and placed at the service of the human being, of his well-being, of his happiness. The attempt to achieve this goal is an attempt that can worthily fill a life.



Assembling neglected things - SOLUTIONS


QUIZ 1: Between 1929 and 1935

Original quote:

Cultura, non è possedere un magazzino ben fornito di notizie, ma è la capacità che la nostra mente ha di comprendere la vita, il posto che vi teniamo, i nostri rapporti con gli altri uomini. Ha cultura chi ha coscienza di sé e del tutto, chi sente la relazione con tutti gli altri esseri.

Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere


Antonio Francesco Gramsci (22 January 1891 – 27 April 1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, linguist, writer, and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime. (Wikipedia)


QUIZ 2: 1967

Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go from Here Chaos or Community?

Martin Luther King Jr. January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesman and leader in the American civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King advanced civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience, inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi. (Wikipedia)


QUIZ 3: 1969

Original quote:

¿Qué necesidad hay de otro tipo de Ciencia cuando ésta ha tenido tantos éxitos?

[…].

La clásica respuesta es que esos no son problemas científicos: la ciencia da instrumentos neutros, y son las fuerzas políticas quienes deben usarlos justicieramente. Si no lo hacen, no es culpa de la ciencia. Esta respuesta es falsa: la ciencia actual no crea toda clase de instrumentos, sino sólo aquellos que el sistema le estimula a crear.

Para el bienestar individual de algunos o muchos, heladeras y corazones artificiales, y para asegurar el orden, o sea la permanencia del sistema, propaganda, la readaptación del individuo alienado o del grupo disconforme. No se ha ocupado tanto, en cambio de crear instrumentos para eliminar estos problemas de fondo del sistema: métodos de educación, de participación, de distribución, que sean tan eficientes, prácticos y atrayentes como un automóvil. Aun los instrumentos de uso más flexible, como las computadoras, están hechas pensando más en ciertos fines que en otros. Aunque el poder

político pasara de pronto a manos bien inspiradas, ellas carecerían de la tecnología adecuada para transformar socialmente, culturalmente – no sólo industrialmente– al pueblo, sin sacrificios incalculables e inútiles.


Oscar Varsavsky, Ciencia, Política y Cientificismo


By the end of the 60’s and the early 70’s a large critical wave on the role of science and technology appears throughout the world. Similarly, in Argentina, this movement was expressed by the creation -from 1968 and 1969- of institutional spaces for public debate and knowledge production on science and technology. The confrontation of ideas revealed a process of politicization of science that had quite different meanings: on the one hand, a «moderate» group was looking for analytical and normative tools for the implementation of public policies of S&T and, on the other hand, the «radicals» which impelled the integration of science and technology in politics itself. One of the most prominent representatives was Oscar Varsavsky (18 January 1920 - 17 December 1976).

Science as a Matter of Public Debate in Latin America - “Radical” Perspectives in the Early Seventies in Argentina by Adriana Feld and Pablo Kreimer (2012).


QUIZ 4: 1976

Amory Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken? in Foreign Affairs.


Amory Bloch Lovins (born November 13, 1947) is an American writer, physicist, and chairman/chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute. He has written on energy policy and related areas for four decades, and served on the National Petroleum Council, an oil industry lobbying group, from 2011 to 2018. In 1983, Lovins was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "pioneering soft energy paths for global security". He was named by Time magazine one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2009. (Wikipedia)


QUIZ 5: 1977

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature.


Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contributed to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books were sold in UK editions alone, and there are many translations available. His work laid foundations for the field of cultural studies and cultural materialism.(Wikipedia)



QUIZ 6: 1984

Original quote:

Noi siamo convinti che il mondo, anche questo terribile, intricato mondo di oggi, può essere conosciuto, interpretato, trasformato, e messo al servizio dell'uomo, del suo benessere, della sua felicità. La prova per questo obbiettivo è una prova che può riempire degnamente una vita.

Enrico Berlinguer, Ultimo comizio 7 Giugno 1984


Enrico Berlinguer (25 May 1922 – 11 June 1984) is considered the most popular leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which he led as the national secretary from 1972 until his death during a tense period in Italy's history, marked by the Years of Lead and social conflicts such as the Hot Autumn of 1969–1970. During his leadership, he distanced the party from the influence of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and pursued a moderate line, repositioning the party within Italian politics and advocating accommodation and national unity. Berlinguer himself described his "alternative" model of socialism, distinct from both the Soviet bloc and the capitalism practiced by Western countries during the Cold War, as the terza via or "third way". (Wikipedia)

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