10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17450
application/pdf
2038-3460
17450
2
en
Stefano Crabu
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, University of Minnesota Press, 2017
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
10
Book Reviews
2020-01-30
2023-06-26
2020-01-30
2023-10-09
182-186
TS
Stefano Crabu
2019
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17450
182
Politecnico di Milano
2038-3460
2
en
186
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, University of Minnesota Press, 2017
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17450/16299
10
182                                                            Tecnoscienza – 10 (2)

community only as mediator or intermediary is again considering as
problematic field the social as opposed to the technological. What might
be helpful is to bring the same lenses used to look at “community”, to
look at “digital”.
    The only further problem with such a program might be a political
one. Pelizza’s approach is quite helpful in distinguishing communities,
which might transform into movements and enable more democratic
participation. The reassembled “digital” – i.e. “digital” seen under
Pelizza’s lenses – might turn on the counterparts of the criticized myths,
like the centralization of power and new alliances, e.g. government and
business. Then, what we see in contemporary political processes of
different countries might be at the same time understood and legitimized.


References
Gillespie, T., Boczkowski, P.J. and Foot, K. A. (eds.) (2014) Media Technologies.
        Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, Cambridge, MIT
        Press.
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-
       Theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Markham, A. N. (1998) Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual
      Space, Lanham, Altamira.
Van den Boomen, M. V. (2014) Transcoding the Digital: How Metaphors Matter
      in New Media, Amsterdam, Institute of Network Cultures.



                                      ***

   M. Puig de la Bellacasa
Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, Min-
neapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 280

Stefano Crabu Politecnico di Milano

    Few years ago, I got deeply engaged with my colleague Paolo Ma-
gaudda in a qualitative research focusing on the development of a grass-
roots community network (CN) in Italy, originally started in Rome in
2001 under the name of “Ninux.org” to then expand to other Italian cit-
ies (see Crabu and Magaudda 2017). CNs are commonly considered as a
case of “inverse” infrastructure (Egyedi and Mehos 2012), characterised
by being built and self-managed by communities of voluntary people
Book Review                                                              183
(hackers, engineering students, and political activists) concerned about
the consequences of the neoliberal governance of internet. Briefly, it is
about a decentralised network that is fully independent of the internet,
particularly respectful of the confidentiality and user privacy, and es-
tranged from the for-profit paradigm.
    Unexpectedly, one of the most relevant things we immediately noticed
in adopting an S&TS point of view in order to explore Ninux.org every-
day life was a sort of “widespread care for everything’s intimacy”. Thus,
the mainstream narrative according to which the source code and the
hardware do not seem matter of care, revealed itself in all its fallacy. In-
deed, in our S&TS exploration within Ninux.org, we directly appreciated
multi-faceted caring practices, like the collective responsibility to live
within more than human relations. Participating in Ninux.org means en-
acting a “logic of care” (Mol 2008) for the sake of non-human agents:
wireless antennas, which compose an alternative material-semiotic chore-
ography for digital communication, need to be “taken care of”. This ac-
tivity is essential for the development and efficient operation of the net-
work. At the same time, committing to taking care of antennas has both
ethical and material implications, as it means participating in and taking
care of the collective infrastructure as a (bio)political project.
    This way, when I started reading the dense and inspiring book Mat-
ters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, the narra-
tive of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa invited me to travel back to the CN
fieldwork evoking in such a powerful and clear way the generative, politi-
cal and hybrid nature of care. Better yet, its potential to transform the
“present”. Ambivalences remain, of course, in the foreground. As Bellac-
asa nicely put it at the centre of her feminist-positioned argumentation,
albeit care is crucial in opening new possibilities for shaping alterbiopoli-
tics (see especially chapters four and five) and counter-subjectivisation
paths, it may still entail a maintenance work deeply engaged with norma-
tive ethics and moral obligations. So, in continuity with the Tronto and
Fisher definition of care as “a species activity that includes everything
that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can
live in it as well as possible” (1990, 40), Puig de la Bellacasa proposes an
anti-paradigmatic understanding of the concept in terms of practices gen-
erated at the interfaces between “labor/work, affect/affections, eth-
ics/politics” (p. 5). In this way, by opening an innovative bridge between
feminists and posthumanists Puig de la Bellacasa’s “invites a speculative
exploration of the significance of care for thinking and living in more
than human worlds” (p. 1). Accordingly, in this book, feminist scholar-
ship and S&TS sensibility toward the relational materialism are streams
converging in a single river, thus defining a conceptual texture which en-
courage the reader to take a bold journey to “thinking care as a politics of
knowledge at the heart of technoscientific, naturecultural worlds” (p. 15),
in which a speculative posture is a reliable compass. A speculative way of
thinking that allows Puig de la Bellacasa to avoid normative instances
184                                                           Tecnoscienza – 10 (2)

about care, since this terrain should be intrinsically exposed to be cap-
tured within a hegemonic moralising regimen of truth. In so doing the
author, differently from other thought of care (see the Introduction),
handle this concept as an inspiring tool for enabling a speculative think-
ing, that is a way to “designing” other possible worlds. Under this per-
spective, the book, by systematizing seminal articles that Bellacasa pub-
lished in Social Studies of Science and in other journals related to S&TS,
deals with ethics, without representing a normative engagement, since it
traces a speculative, open-ended conceptual landscape as a way to escape
from moralistic ambush, philosophical binaries, or western-based essen-
tialisms.
     The first stretch of the journey (part I, chapters 1-3) offers the possi-
bility to cross along a theoretical matrix in which Haraway’s (chapter 1)
and Latour’s works (chapter 2) are mobilized for envisioning an ethics-
politics of care. Drawing on Latour’s concept of matters of fact as matters
of concern (2005), Bellacasa introduces the reader to the notion of matter
of care, as a way to frame the production of knowledge within a more-
than-human process, densely populated with things, devices, and instru-
ments. However, it is through a reconsideration of Haraway’s reflection
on situated knowledges (1988) that the author makes the reader ac-
quainted with a way of thinking according to which the relational nature
of thought and knowledge require care. In this instance, care is an imma-
nent dimension for collective thinking, for dis/entangling global struggles
and matters, as well as for thinking care as a political act. This first stretch
of the journey is then completed by a nice encounter with the “haptic
metaphor” (chapter 3), developed by Bellacasa to challenge the “sensorial
metaphor of vision, dominant in modern knowledge making and episte-
mologies” (p. 97). To be in touch with, that is, the sensibility in overcom-
ing conceptual and practical conundrums arising as forms of ethical obli-
gations. And more: to affirm the relationality and reciprocity in taking
care of thinking.
     What does caring mean when we go about thinking and living inter-
dependently with beings other than human, in “more than human”
worlds? This open question is at the centre of the last part of the journey
(part II, chapters 4-5), where personal experience within permaculture
movements and a critique of the productionist temporalities of technosci-
ence are combined with a feminist perspective to address the concept of
care in relation to the outcomes of technoscientific knowledge. By plung-
ing into the permaculture movement, Bellacasa questions the notion of
ethical obligation as a way to abiding with a relation ethics oriented at
constituting interdependent relations in our ordinary more-than-human
everyday life. Thus, soil-human relations are explored in chapter five,
where the issue of the temporalities of care is addressed as a means to
open living landscapes to emerging ethical and affective ecologies of care,
capable of challenging the chronopolitics of hegemonic technoscientific
innovation.
Book Review                                                              185
    At the end of a journey, on our way home, we normally spark a wild-
fire of ideas on how our “biopolitics of proximity”, the assemblages of
socio-technical relations within our more than human communities,
could be influenced by the journey itself. Now I would like to try to in-
tercept some salient points that may be of interest for S&TS scholars.
    First point: more care for thinking and living. The book gives poten-
tial conceptual tools for confronting hegemonic, established moral or-
ders, without refusing to consider mainstream notions of care: A help
from a feminist perspective, in this case, to overcome naïf or elitist ap-
proaches and to avoid reductionist simplifications about care. Under this
perspective, care is not just a feminist affaire, even if feminists offer a
strong contribution to the reflections of care, for example by exploring
apparently non-gendered practices, such as the production of technical
and expert knowledge on soil.
    Second point: more care for looking into troubles. This is, I think, a
major methodological point, in terms of politics of knowledge, concern-
ing how we – as S&TS scholars – situate our bodies-mind-nature in the
context of the research. We can push further with respect to a mere self-
reflexivity, by locating ourself(ves), as thinkers and knowledge manufac-
turers, within a web of care for the (material) consequences of our think-
ing and knowing.
    Third point: more care for engaging. This could be a call for opening
a new, more engaged programme in the politics of knowledge produc-
tion, something that can resound like “S&TS as a more than engaged
style of practice”. Indeed, in line with S&TS we are well aware of the
(toxic) politics and ethics injections within technoscience. However, the
stake here is to define a different regimen of possibility to produce
knowledge over and within technoscience, one that is able to redesign al-
ternative, more-than-human living landscapes. This also means reopening
a dialogue with the ’70 and ’80 tradition of the radical science studies
(e.g. Rose and Rose 1976). Under this light, the notion of care becomes a
dispositif to configure an “ethical-political practice” and an “affective en-
gagement” within knowledge production about technoscience and na-
ture-culture: transformative knowledge engaged in a troubled contempo-
rary technoscience is actually a matter of care.
    Overall, this book represents an embodied transformative project,
which asks us – as researchers – to articulate our biopolitical imaginaries
into biopolitical action, by refusing the mortifying normative morality, or
the neoliberal pragmatism with the aim to develop an affective engage-
ment with and for the human and non-human actors we may meet in our
fields. How to translate this points in practice? Is it a speculative com-
mitment, a sufficient style of practices to envision “how things could be
different” (p. 17)? Another journey in search for alterbiopolitcs needs to
be launched soon.
186                                                            Tecnoscienza – 10 (2)

References
Crabu, S. and Magaudda, P. (2017) Bottom-up Infrastructures: Aligning Politics
       and Technology in building a Wireless Community Network, in “Com-
       puter Supported Cooperative Work”, 27 (2), pp. 149–176.
Egyedi, T. and Mehos, D.C. (eds.) (2012) Inverse Infrastructures: Disrupting
       Networks from Below, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar.
Fisher, B. and Tronto, J.C. 1990. Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring, in E. K.
        Abel and M. Nelson (eds.) Circles of Care, Albany, SUNY Press, pp. 36–
        54.
Haraway, D. (1988) Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
      and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, in “Feminist Studies”, 14 (3) pp.
      575–599.
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network
       Theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Mol, A (2002) The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, London, Duke
       University Press.
Rose, H. and Rose, S. (1976) The Radicalisation of Science: Ideology Of/In the
       Natural Sciences, London, Macmillan.
