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Title: For All We Care
Author: CrimethInc.
Date: May 31, 2013
Language: en
Topics: care
Source: Retrieved on 2nd December 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2013/05/31/for-all-we-care-reconsidering-self-care

CrimethInc.

For All We Care

Self-care has become a popular buzzword in activist circles. Yet until

recently, it has inspired little critical discussion. Do “self” and

“care” always mean the same thing? How about “health”? How has this

discourse has been colonized by capitalist values? And how could we

expand our notion of care outside the common stereotypes?

In this analysis, we identify the normative tendencies in conventional

self-care rhetoric, discuss how to undo the unequal distribution of care

in our society, and explore the potentially transformative power of

illness and self-destructive behavior.

This is the first text in a collection of essays about care that we will

publish shortly. We look forward to more dialogue on the subject.

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In the 1980s, as she struggled with cancer, Audre Lorde asserted that

caring for herself was “an act of political warfare.” Since then,

self-care has become a popular buzzword in activist circles. The

rhetoric of self-care has moved from specific to universal, from defiant

to prescriptive. When we talk about self-care today, are we talking

about the same thing Lorde was? It’s time to reexamine this concept.

But what could be wrong with care? And why, of all things, pick on

self-care?

For one thing, because it has become a sacred cow. It’s painful to hear

people speak sanctimoniously about anything, but especially about the

most important things. Pious unanimity implies a dark side: in the

shadow of every church, a den of iniquity. It creates an other, drawing

a line through as well as between us.

Self and care—in that order—are universally acknowledged values in this

society. Anyone who endorses self-care is on the side of the angels, as

the saying goes—which is to say, against all the parts of us that don’t

fit into the prevailing value system. If we wish to resist the dominant

order, we have to play devils’ advocate, searching out what is excluded

and denigrated.

Wherever a value is considered universal, we find the pressures of

normativity: for example, the pressure to perform self-care for others’

sake, keeping up appearances. So much of what we do in this society is

about maintaining the image that we’re successful, autonomous

individuals, regardless of the reality. In this context, rhetoric about

self-care can mask silencing and policing: Deal with your problems

yourself, please, so no one else has to.

Assuming that self-care is always good means taking for granted that

self and care always have the same meaning. Here, we want to challenge

monolithic and static understandings of selfhood and caring. Instead, we

propose that different kinds of care produce different kinds of self,

and that care is one of the battlefields on which social struggles play

out.

Don’t Tell Me to Calm Down

Though advocates of self-care emphasize that it can look different for

each person, the suggestions usually sound suspiciously similar. When

you think of stereotypical “self-care” activities, what do you picture?

Drinking herbal tea, watching a movie, taking a bubble bath, meditating,

yoga? This selection suggests a very narrow idea of what self-care is:

essentially, calming yourself down.

All of these activities are designed to engage the parasympathetic

nervous system, which governs rest and recovery. But some forms of care

require strenuous activity and adrenaline, the domain of the sympathetic

nervous system. One way to prevent post-traumatic stress disorder, for

example, is to allow the sympathetic nervous system enough freedom to

release trauma from the body. When a person is having a panic attack, it

rarely helps to try to make them calm down. The best way to handle a

panic attack is to run.

So let’s start by discarding any normative understanding of what it

means to care for ourselves. It might mean lighting candles, putting on

a Nina Simone album, and rereading Randall Jarrell’s The Animal Family.

It could also mean BDSM, intense performance art, mixed martial arts

fighting, smashing bank windows, or calling out a person who abused you.

It might even look like really hard work to other people—or ceasing to

function altogether. This is not just a postmodern platitude (“different

strokes for different folks”), but a question of what relationship we

establish to our challenges and our anguish.

Caring for ourselves doesn’t mean pacifying ourselves. We should be

suspicious of any understanding of self-care that identifies wellbeing

with placidity or asks us to perform “health” for others. Can we imagine

instead a form of care that would equip each of us to establish an

intentional relationship to her dark side, enabling us to draw strength

from the swirling chaos within? Treating ourselves gently might be an

essential part of this, but we must not assume a dichotomy between

healing and engaging with the challenges around and inside us. If care

is only what happens when we step away from those struggles, we will be

forever torn between an unsatisfactory withdrawal from conflict and its

flipside, a workaholism that is never enough. Ideally, care would

encompass and transcend both struggle and recovery, tearing down the

boundaries that partition them.

This kind of care cannot be described in platitudes. It is not a

convenient agenda item to add to the program of the average non-profit

organization. It demands measures that will interrupt our current roles,

bringing us into conflict with society at large and even some of the

people who profess to be trying to change it.

By your response to danger it is

Easy to tell how you have lived

And what has been done to you.

You show whether you want to stay alive,

Whether you think you deserve to,

And whether you believe

It’s any good to act.

— Jenny Holzer

Love Is a Battlefield

If we want to identify what is worth preserving in self-care, we can

start by scrutinizing care itself. To endorse care as a universal good

is to miss the role care also plays in perpetuating the worst aspects of

the status quo. There’s no such thing as care in its pure form—care

abstracted from daily life in capitalism and the struggles against it.

No, care is partisan—it is repressive or liberating. There are forms of

care that reproduce the existing order and its logic, and other forms of

care that enable us to fight it. We want our expressions of care to

nurture liberation, not domination—to bring people together according to

a different logic and values.

From homemaking to professional housekeeping—not to mention nursing,

hospitality, and phone sex—women and people of color are

disproportionately responsible for the care that keeps this society

functioning, yet have disproportionately little say in what that care

fosters. Likewise, a tremendous amount of care goes into oiling the

machinery that maintains hierarchy: families help police relax after

work, sex workers help businessmen let off steam, secretaries take on

the invisible labor that preserves executives’ marriages.

So the problem with self-care is not just the individualistic prefix.

For some of us, focusing on self-care rather than caring for others

would be a revolutionary proposition, albeit almost unimaginable—while

the privileged can congratulate each other on their excellent self-care

practices without recognizing how much of their sustenance they derive

from others. When we conceive of self-care as an individual

responsibility, we are less likely to see the political dimensions of

care.

Some have called for a caring strike: a collective, public resistance to

the ways capitalism has commandeered care. In their text “A Very Careful

Strike,” Spanish militants Precarias a la Deriva explore the ways care

has been commodified or rendered invisible, from customer service in the

marketplace to emotional care in families. They challenge us to imagine

ways care could be wrested away from maintaining our stratified society

and instead lavished on fostering togetherness and revolt.

But such a project depends on those who are already most vulnerable in

our society. It would take a tremendous amount of support for family

members, sex workers, and secretaries to go on care strike without

suffering appalling consequences.

So rather than promoting self-care, we might seek to redirect and

redefine care. For some of us, this means recognizing how we benefit

from imbalances in the current distribution of care, and shifting from

forms of care that focus on ourselves alone to support structures that

benefit all participants. Who’s working so you can rest? For others, it

could mean taking better care of ourselves than we’ve been taught we

have a right to—though it’s unrealistic to expect anyone to undertake

this individually as a sort of consumer politics of the self. Rather

than creating gated communities of care, let’s pursue forms of care that

are expansive, that interrupt our isolation and threaten our

hierarchies.

Self-care rhetoric has been appropriated in ways that can reinforce the

entitlement of the privileged, but a critique of self-care must not be

used as yet another weapon against those who are already discouraged

from seeking care. In short: step up, step back.

A struggle that doesn’t understand the importance of care is doomed to

fail. The fiercest collective revolts are built on a foundation of

nurture. But reclaiming care doesn’t just mean giving ourselves more

care, as one more item after all the others on the to-do list. It means

breaking the peace treaty with our rulers, withdrawing care from the

processes that reproduce the society we live in and putting it to

subversive and insurrectionary purposes.

Beyond Self-Preservation

“‘Health’ is a cultural fact in the broadest sense of the word, a fact

that is political, economic, and social as well, a fact that is tied to

a certain state of individual and collective consciousness. Every era

outlines a ‘normal’ profile of health.” – Michel Foucault

The best way to sell people on a normative program is to frame it in

terms of health. Who doesn’t want to be healthy?

But like “self” and “care,” health is not one thing. In itself, health

is not intrinsically good—it’s simply the condition that enables a

system to continue to function. You can speak about the health of an

economy, or the health of an ecosystem: these often have an inverse

relationship. This explains why some people describe capitalism as a

cancer, while others accuse “black bloc anarchists” of being the cancer.

The two systems are lethal to each other; nourishing one means

compromising the health of the other.

The repressive function of health norms is obvious enough in the

professional field of mental health. Where drapetomania and anarchia

were once invoked to stigmatize runaway slaves and rebels, today’s

clinicians diagnose oppositional defiance disorder. But the same thing

goes on far from psychiatric institutions.

In a capitalist society, it should not be surprising that we tend to

measure health in terms of productivity. Self-care and workaholism are

two sides of the same coin: preserve yourself so you can produce more.

This would explain why self-care rhetoric is so prevalent in the

non-profit sector, where the pressure to compete for funding often

compels organizers to mimic corporate behavior, even if they use

different terminology.

If self-care is just a way to ease the impact of an ever-increasing

demand for productivity, rather than a transformative rejection of that

demand, it’s part of the problem, not the solution. For self-care to be

anti-capitalist, it has to express a different conception of health.

This is especially complicated as our survival becomes ever more

interlinked with the functioning of capitalism—a condition some have

designated with the term biopower. In this situation, the easiest way to

preserve your health is to excel at capitalist competition, the same

thing that is doing us so much harm. “There is no other pill to take, so

swallow the one that made you ill.”

To escape this vicious circle, we have to shift from reproducing one

“self” to producing another. This demands a notion of self-care that is

transformative rather than conservative—that understands the self as

dynamic rather than static. The point is not to stave off change, as in

Western medicine, but to foster it; in the Tarot deck, Death represents

metamorphosis.

From the standpoint of capitalism and reformism, anything that threatens

our social roles is unhealthy. As long as we remain inside the former

paradigm, it may be that only behaviors deemed unhealthy can point the

way out. Breaking with the logic of the system that has kept us alive

demands a certain reckless abandon.

This may illuminate the connection between apparently self-destructive

behavior and rebellion, which goes back a long time before punk rock.

The radical side of the Occupy Oakland assemblies, where all the smokers

hung out, was known affectionately as the “black lung bloc”—the cancer

of Occupy, indeed! The self-destructive energy that drives people to

addiction and suicide can also enable them to take courageous risks to

change the world. We can identify multiple currents within

self-destructive behavior; some of them close down possibility, while

others open it up. We need language with which to explore this, lest our

language about self-care perpetuate a false binary between sickness and

self-destructiveness on one hand and health and struggle on the other.

For when we speak of breaking with the logic of the system, we are not

just talking about a courageous decision that presumably healthy

subjects make in a vacuum. Even apart from “self-destructive” behavior,

many of us already experience illness and disability that position us

outside this society’s conception of health. This forces us to grapple

with the question of the relationship between health and struggle.

When it comes to anti-capitalist struggle, do we associate health with

productivity, too, implying that the ill cannot participate effectively?

Instead, without asserting the ill as the revolutionary subject à la the

Icarus Project, we could look for ways of engaging with illness that

pull us out of our capitalist conditioning, interrupting a way of being

in which self-worth and social ties are premised on a lack of care for

ourselves and each other. Rather than pathologizing illness and

self-destructiveness as disorders to be cured for efficiency’s sake, we

could reimagine self-care as a way of listening into them for new values

and possibilities.

Think of Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo, Voltairine de Cleyre, and all the

other women who drew on their private struggles with sickness, injury,

and depression to craft public expressions of insubordinate care. How

about Friedrich Nietzsche: was his poor health a mere obstacle, which he

manfully overcame? Or was it inextricable from his insights and his

struggles, an essential step on the path that led him away from received

wisdom so he could discover something else? To understand his writing in

the context of his life, we have to picture Nietzsche in a wheelchair

charging a line of riot police, not flying through the air with an S on

his chest.

Your human frailty is not a regrettable fault to be treated by proper

self-care so you can get your nose back to the grindstone. Sickness,

disability, and unproductivity are not anomalies to be weeded out; they

are moments that occur in every life, offering a common ground on which

we might come together. If we take these challenges seriously and make

space to focus on them, they could point the way beyond the logic of

capitalism to a way of living in which there is no dichotomy between

care and liberation.