CREDITONULO SOBRECARGA

In Matters of Care in Technoscience, Puig discusses care in the context of

knowledge politics in Science and Technology Studies (STS). She asks how concern and care might inflect how STS observes and presents its technoscientic objects and ideas. She concludes that concern and care—or the lack thereof—can have world-making effects in so far as they, and she borrows Barad’s terminology here, “are intimately

233 _{Purdy, 2000, 191.} 234 _{Rose, 2011, 27.}

entangled in the ongoing material remaking of the world.”235 _{Care she argues, refocuses}

our attention, adds an urgency to engage differently with the material life of things, and opens new modes for doing and intervening.236 _{Placing care at the core of a technotheory}

is one of Puig’s primary interventions into the field. Care for Puig is grounded in the practical everyday relatings that engage with the complex and “inescapable troubles of interdependent existences.”237 _{She looks at human-technology-environment care}

relations as permaculturists do: as intertwined material practices working within entangled ecological systems. Thinking with Maria Puig has been formative to my thinking about how relations, care, permaculture, and technoscience can intertwine. Her work provokes the question of how digital-care practices might transform the way we do digital theory.

Thom van Dooren configures care as an “exploration of contingencies,” and as such it becomes the locus for a more embodied, practical ethics that allow us to perform our responsibility to action.238 _{For him, when we situate our critical inquiries within a}

care-practice, our critique becomes “grounded in a new way in the specificity of real bodies and worlds in ongoing relationship.” Understood as such, he says, “care is a vital

235 _{Puig, 2011, 87.} 236 _{Ibid, 96.} 237 _{Puig, 2012, 199.}

238 _{van Dooren, online at FutureLearn.com: Environmental Humanities course (one must be enrolled in the}

concept for an engaged environmental humanities.”239 _{As members of the planetary}

cycle, we have an obligation to be aware of our material and energetic (read: metabolic) connections and their implications.

For his monograph Flight Ways, van Dooren spent time living-with several endangered birds on the edges extinction. Rose, who frequently collaborates with van Dooren, has conducted a range of her own hands-on environmental humanities field work with dingos, flying-foxes, and Hawaiian monk seals. Both demonstrate that through active interdisciplinarity and commitments to care, the environmental humanities can illustrate the overlooked and underappreciated connections that we must begin considering if we are to do sustainable environmental humanities

scholarship. Haraway in her work on companion species says “care is a doing necessary for significant relating” 240 _{and you cannot have one, either care or a meaningful}

relationship, without the other. Without care, we continue to live with the same

technospheric troubles that the ‘immaterial’ motifs endorse (chapter one). By caring for our digital technologies in so far as we recognize our care for them as directly affecting human and ecological health, we can begin living-with a more natural, sustainable earth-tech-human union. In the context of digital metabolic thinking, this way of care- full figuring links human responsibility and action with the digital, with the earth, and

239 _{van Dooren, 2014b, 293.} 240 _{Puig, 2011, 98.}

back again. The responsibilities of caring for our technologies and our earth are commitments to our own human permanence.

Following Puig, Haraway, and van Dooren, my argument here is not that we should focus on care so much as it is that we should focus on our digital media objects, our theoretical frameworks, and our digital practice with earth-people-digital care relationships in mind. Doing so may challenge and/or positively inflect our scholarship with more sustainable praxis. The point here, as it is for Puig, is to make care a way of relating, a way of closing the distances that rhetorically separate us. Puig reminds us to be sensitive to normative or overly feminized notions of care—think mother and child, for instance—and says that we should think of care instead as “an attempt to add something to the world, something that, we hope, will connect the gatherings we study and make a difference.”241 _{Puig writes that we must “insist on this interweaving in order}

to be able to think how care holds together the world as we know it and allows its perpetuation.”242 _{She continues:}

Acknowledging the necessity of care in every relation is to be aware of how all beings depend on each other. Moreover, if care is a form of relationship it also

creates relationality…we are in relations of mutual care. Many nonhuman

agencies are taking care of many human needs, as much as humans have their own tasks in the maintenance of the web of caring.243

241 _{Ibid, 96.} 242 _{Puig, 2010, 13.}

In permaculture, care is this type of interwoven connected gathering that performs in reciprocity: care for the earth returns its caring in the form of people-care through healthy ecosystems, abundant food, and resilient communities. This is the type of care we need in digital media and humanities praxis. Care here isn’t meant to

anthropomorphize digital, just as Haraway never meant to anthropomorphize the canine with her companion species figuration and Puig does not intend to

anthropomorphize nonhumans. Instead, the challenge is to see the metabolic

entanglement as the tie that binds us into mutually-reflexive relationships that require maintenance and upkeep if we are to maintain a permanent-permutable culture. Permaculture gives us an alternate sort of humanistic model that places the human always and incontrovertibly as a system of earth-human. As Haraway says, “nothing comes without its world.”

Puig herself finds inspiration in permaculture appreciating how permacultural ethics are “born out of material constraints and situated relationalites” and how they are based on the notion that embeds us in a “web of complex relationships in which

personal actions have consequences far more than ourselves and our kin.”244 _{What Puig}

sees at stake in permaculture’s inseparability of people care and earth care is that in this arrangement, “interdependency is not a principle but a vivid material constraint.”245

So the obligation ‘to care’ is more than an affective state, it has material consequences. As I said previously, in permaculture practices the condition of sustainable collective caring is the maintenance of resources, including those of one’s self. In a conception of care as a collective good, care has to be shared, the ‘surplus’ of life and energy that it produces returned to the carers in order to avoid affective and material burn-out.246

This materiality is what the earth-human, and the digital-metabolic,

configuration draw out—as humans metabolically entangled with the earth and all of its elements (digital, mineral, biological, chemical), all of our actions are physical acts performed in a material world in which everything is materially connected. We see this insistence appearing too in the rather heady metaphysical/philosophical works of those like Barad and Whitehead, but what permaculture’s notions provide that these theories do not are simple, generous, actionable thinking and acting tools that are always grounded in the material-natural world. It is thus in permaculture that I see a relevant, approachable, applicable toolkit for cultivating more sustainable digital scholarship.

Previous chapters provide glimpses of how people—from miners to

manufacturers to users—and the earth—from soils to airs to waters—are affected by digital use and the stories we tell. Indeed if we look back, chapter two’s major project

245 _{Ibid, 15.} 246 _{Ibid, 14.}

was to suggest that what the digital is thought to be may affect the ways we care for it. If digital use, in addition to digital language became, at least partly, a care relationship, how would we treat our technologies? On a hands-on, practical level, how can care lead to action, and what care-full actions can we take? This is the question the remainder of this chapter seeks to answer. Permaculture helps us begin actively performing

scholarship differently.

Permaculture Manual for the Digital: Appropriate Technology,