CARE (defined as neglect in financialization)
This text was written for Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary, to be published by Goldsmiths, edited by Mikkel Krause Frantzen. I was asked to write an encyclopedia entry about care.
CARE
See also [edit]
Neglect
You know when you're walking down the street and you see a person is sitting outside of the dollar store or grocery store, and they are dirty. They're sitting on the ground and maybe they have their head in their hands and they have set a cup out and by doing that they're asking for money. They don't have to say anything, this is a language we know well. And then you see that most people are still having a cup of tea or coffee with their bluetooth conversation and they're just continuing on. Maybe like one in 100 people throw some change in the cup.
I am a US artist who has spent over a decade focusing on financialization and the way that it destroys relationships of trust and interdependence in my sacred homeland of competition and exploitation. In response, with many friends and collaborators I developed a viral mutual aid project that is now practiced from couches around the world. This project, The Hologram, has revealed to me and to the many others who now work on it, that a result of capitalism is that it seems impossible to ask for or to provide help informally. It is on the basis of this project, that I ask: Has all care been made scarce since financialization has emptied out what we once imagined to be public goods (like government, health, education and housing)? Can we run out of care? In what ways is care expensive? In what ways is care cheap? Why is it that we can't afford to do it? How can we afford not to do it?"
The opposite of a miracle
The above scenario is a portrait of a common situation in all the cities I spend time in: Oakland, San Francisco, New York, Brooklyn, London, Berlin, and Toronto. Though it is common, I still see it as an astonishing phenomenon every time I witness it. What is the physics with which a society exists where people go on drinking coffee while they are surrounded by people who are dying of neglect at their feet? Is it the opposite of a miracle? If I put money in the cup, I usually do it as an excuse to communicate that I see "them" and that they matter to me, and that the world is better if they are in it. In those moments my role is to present care as a noun – to exhibit care.
When I lived in San Francisco I watched in horror as the stream of Silicon Valley tech workers rushed to get their expensive coffees on their way to their yoga classes, tripping over the bodies of dirty people laying on the ground or in tents. The people on the ground had lost their homes because of the effects of the tech boom that employed the bouncing caffeinated yogis. I struggled so much with it that I needed to leave that city. In the years after, I tried to understand what could be going through the minds of the people who skipped along without looking down at the bodies around them in one of the financially wealthiest cities in the history of the world. I came to see their avoidance as an act of self preservation in a financialized landscape. By unseeing a moment of neglect, many people avoid feelings of existential sadness that may not allow them the positive affect necessary to continue to work and reproduce themselves. If they were to stop and see the pain all around them, how would they muster the energy to pay rent or otherwise stay alive when staying alive means finding more and more forms of economic survival where your life is built on top of other people's evictions? To me, the way we are able to live in a financialized landscape that is more and more cruel to more and more people, is to perform strategic avoidance, drinking stronger coffee and doing more challenging yoga (and to participate in other affordable forms of hallucination). To make time for all the life affirming avoidance, many people seem to budget their energy and thus stop caring for some things that they don't have time for. Some of those things are people. It's as if we actually cared about others, we would be taking away from our own care for ourselves. Care becomes more of a noun than a verb, more of a concept than something we do for each other. Something to write a lot of books and make a lot of art about.
What is care?
According to feminist economist Emma Dowling, who supplies us with a summary in line with feminist theory (Tronto, Federici, Bellacasa), "Care is conceived as the activities that take place to make, remake, maintain, contain and repair the world we live in and the physical, emotional and intellectual capacities required to do so." According to gift economists like Genevieve Vaughn, care is a gift. It is, like water, what we are made of, a natural resource. Care, which is something that all people have the capacity to do, also includes some of the least valued work in the world. The people who do the most care (frequently organized along racial and gender lines) are some of the lowest paid, least cared for people on the planet. This is no surprise, since natural resources in capitalism are always taken, commodified and exploited. The natural gifts given by the planet like water and life and by carers who raise children and nurture human health are the most at risk of becoming tools of the market, and organized by levels of exchange, which is the foundation of financial markets. Financialization specifically acts to take the institutions that organize these gifts and turn them into profit factories for the wealthy.
To survive in a world where there is so much inequality and suffering, it helps to get an apartment up high where we can't see any of the pain directly. But what happens when we go downstairs and, on the way to our coffee meeting, we look directly at a person who has been abandoned by the disorganized collective that we are a part of? What type of care does a financialized world produce, through us, in this moment of actual raw need?
Let's imagine there is a person selling newspapers outside my local train station, and that I am an anti-debt activist focused on care and wealth redistribution. As I approach, I'm not sure what to do. They are afraid to look at me, but I am also afraid to look at them. They are asking for money because they need an indescribable form of help, which is any help besides money. I want nothing more than to help this person but also I have no idea how to help them even though their hand is out. I put some coins in their hand.
I know that my change doesn't affect their situation. Nothing transforms and the person looks embarrassed. This potential connection is ruined because we both tacitly just want time to pass and for this difficult non-moment to be forgotten. I fear that they see me as money.
What if I canceled my coffee date and sat down with them. What if they need more than I can comfortably give?
Why is the answer no?
To offer more than money in this situation requires a personal risk, not a social one. When I think about it theoretically, sharing substantial resources with a single stranger feels like losing what I have earned, instead of supporting the social body that the stranger and I are a part of. By tossing some change in their cup I can perform care without doing it, and show that I am a good person (to myself and to anyone watching) but there is no precedent for how to give support to a stranger as if they are a member of my community or society.
By the time I was born, assigned American at birth (Lawson), financialization had acted upon my world in ways I could never unimagine. In my lifetime there was never any such thing as a welfare state, and even as a teenager I was keenly aware that institutions that used the word care always meant profit. I always assumed there would be no meaningful help available at an institutional level that could ever support me, this stranger or anyone to thrive, no matter what the scale of our needs. And so looking at the silent request for money in the above scenarios is like looking at a little pothole in the street. When I look closer I can see that the pothole leads to a huge underground cavity and the whole sidewalk is about to cave in. I realize that in my imagination, that hole can never be filled, and I feel so close to falling into it. There's a pang of personal responsibility. Oh wait, is that my mindfulness app? It says: "Live in the moment. Focus on your breathing. Imagine yourself sinking into the ground. There is nothing there. You are completely supported. Did you pay your student loans?" I throw my phone and it falls down a hole.
What's down there?
Neglect of an unknowable scale. The stranger seeking money represents needs that are immeasurable, that our society will not fulfill. The cave gets deeper. So many people are in the same position as this person or worse, though we can't see them right now. The cave gets wider. This level of neglect has been developing for so long, even before 1973. I realize that the cave is actually everywhere underneath us, a big void. The earth has no core, it has been hollowed out and sold and made into a debtors prison and condos. And soon we realize that what we are standing on is so fragile, it can barely hold us up. To begin to address this scale would take much more than I can do in a day, between jobs. I would have to change my whole life, and that would not be enough. I would need to change my life, all my routines and values, and I would need everyone to do it with me (Pedwell). All our habits would have to change, to soften and move to center care. The economy would shift, hierarchies would end, men would be socialized differently, carceral systems would turn into places of intergenerational healing, or would not exist at all. I would need to walk differently, and to think differently, and to stop seeing myself as my main project. I would have to feel like a part of a social world that includes all the people seeking money as help. I turn my music up really loud. My mindfulness app reminds me that I am 70% water.
Care is a miracle
A teacher asks students in Chile how they care for water. "How do we care for water?" In [the Chilean province of] Petorca there was lots of water. Now most households only have water for a few hours a day. "We have to care for it, because it determines our future," says the teacher. (The Intercept)
There's something about having a resource that occurs naturally, a gift, that makes it hard to appreciate until it is almost gone. The fact that it is common (we are made of it, it is all over the planet) has something to do with a recurring hiccup in our valuation system: when we need it, we don't value it, but it is also worth more than money. I am talking about care, but I am also talking about water, two things that determine our ability to live. In Petorca there is and was plenty of water. But there was legislation that happened on my birthday in 1981 that privatized that water, and allowed it to become profitable and not common. This was a project related to the Chilean Miracle, or the financialization of Chile, when social goods were privatized, divided up into little bundles and sold on international markets. It means that now there is not enough water for children in schools to drink, while big agriculture has plenty.
The scarce water becomes politicized in the wrong way. Children are taught that it is their personal responsibility to care for the water by not wasting an extra drop. The future becomes the responsibility of individual children in Petorca who must carefully turn the tap off. Are children also taught about what happened in 1981, and why there is no water? Children are taking responsibility for a water crisis caused in part by American Imperialism, organized to test out Financialization by "Chicago Boys". Is it a miracle?
What is a miracle?
The birth of the thing we call financialization is sometimes called a miracle. It began in 1973 when the US academic mercenary Milton Friedman went to Chile. Many internet neoliberals (Cato Institute) describe the time after this visit as the Miracle of Chile. In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty and at the end of this miracle, poverty levels are said to have at least doubled. The president, Pinochet, was in power after a successful military coup to dismantle the former socialist era of former leader Allende, and this new economic system was delivered with the force of a military junta, causing danger and extreme trauma.
In 1990, the year Pinochet left office, Milton Friedman coined the phrase, ‘The Miracle of Chile.’ What does it take to see a golden glow around a growing GDP while a military state takes over, all social services are privatized for the small wealthy elite, half the population is unemployed, and the military enacts extreme violence on the poor? I am really interested in the collective imagination necessary to see a miracle where there is actually social death.
Dying for Coffee
Sometimes I feel like I live a double life, between two dimensions. In dimension #1, which takes place in Berlin, I drink flat whites to accelerate the inertia, and things are kind of fine. I adapt to my conditions like everyone does, but the conditions are somewhat stable, or I don't really notice them. I live a life where I am valued for my small contributions (of chaos and honesty) to places where capitalism usually wouldn't let them live. But dimension #2 is a place I can only touch when I first wake up or when I slow down, though it is always underneath everything. It is one of huge existential dread, where pipelines are being attacked in the ocean as acts of war, where whole countries are flooded and washed away, where thousands of people are currently in the Mediterranean on ships that have nowhere to land, where places I have lived may be swallowed in fire. These parallel dimensions feel like they are two parallel horizontal lines moving closer to each other. In my imagination, when these two lines cross where I am, the fears that I have been cultivating will be more real than the current flat white dimension is right now. I don't know what to do when that intersection happens. I don't know what to do until that intersection happens. There may not be any care infrastructure left to deal with the large-scale harms that are taking place in most people's lives. For some of us, this is not the first time. There is so much to care about, but it also feels like there is nowhere to put that care.
Derico, Ben and Jocelyn Tabancay Duffy, directors. IN CHILE, EVEN WATER IS PRIVATIZED. THE NEW CONSTITUTION WOULD CHANGE THAT., The Intercept, 12 Aug. 2022, https://theintercept.com/2022/08/12/chile-drought-water-constitution/. Accessed 27 Jan. 2023.
Dowling, Emma. “What Is Care.” The Care Crisis, Verso, 2021, pp. sec 381.
Grandin, Greg. “Don’t Do What Allende Did.” London Review of Books, 19 July 2012, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n14/greg-grandin/don-t-do-what-allende-did. Accessed 27 Jan. 2023.
Guo, Rui. “Did Pinochet, Following Milton Friedman, Really Create an ‘Economic Miracle’ in Chile? (Leiter).” Home Is Where The Heart Dwells, Harvard, 16 Dec. 2006, https://blogs.harvard.edu/guorui/2006/12/16/did-pinochet-following-milton-friedman-really-create-an-economic-mi/. Accessed 27 Jan. 2023.
Lawson, Stella. “Astrology Session with Stella the Witch.” Astrology reading. Astrology reading, 6 Jan. 2023, Zoom, Zoom.
Kaiser, Alex. “The Fall of Chile.” The Cato Journal, Cato Institute, 2020, https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2020/fall-chile.
Pedwell, Carolyn. “Social Change in a Minor Key.” Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal, 2021, pp. 3–27.
Vaughan, Genevieve. “Gift Economy.” The Gift Economy, http://gift-economy.com/.