Matters of Care: a post scriptum to the Malmö gathering

Capital enters our homes, but not as a guest, turning the intimacies and quotidian operations by which we reproduce ourselves into both resource and spectacle. With the Malmö gathering, we want to consider whether, on the cusp of our uneven transition into the 5G matrix of smart-homes, the collapse of private life into the public economy of attention might be refigured in a manner that is more convivial. That is to say, how systems of reciprocity might be re-inscribed within our critical vernaculars.

Together with five invited authors and collectives, we want to think through issues surrounding criticism in relation to reproductive labour and acts of commoning. What is care within an art context, who practices it, who provides it, and to whom is it provided? How can art criticism better support artistic communities and improve material conditions and infrastructures for cultural workers? Is it possible – or indeed, desirable – to establish shared criteria and values? What are some of the risks involved in taking a critical position that prioritizes situatedness, intimacy, and well-being? Finally, what are the material and identitarian divisions that characterize our work as critics, and how do they impact us and our writing? These are just some of the questions we posed to ourselves and to the contributors invited to the Malmö gathering.

As a frame for thinking these questions through, I want to offer some preliminary remarks which take their point of departure in the home – a site which during the present circumstances is carrying a disproportionately heavy burden. In an untitled essay, poet Lisa Robertson discusses the relationship between civis and domus in antiquity as “not pertain[ing] to concepts of bordered and material spatial limitation”, but rather, “to immaterial concepts of collective reciprocity… a scaled series of collective concepts, which progressed outwards from the household”. Reimagining the domestic sphere through its etymological root, Robertson counterposes a continuum of shared practices spanning civic and domestic exchange to notions of differentiated and spatially-bounded public and private spheres. As the body is social, so too is the household – already indexed to the ‘outside’, the network of persons, places, and things to which our new public sphere insists we anxiously and incessantly connect. The domus in this sense is neither an isolated nor a private sphere, but rather a process of collective figuration.

Thus understood, the domus might encompass whatever group – not just property-owning male citizens and their kin – which uses the same dooras entry and exit. A social entity, that is, comprising anyone who, having crossed a hospitable threshold, enters into relation through a mutual set of practices and obligations. “Both domus and civis”, therefore,“correspond to the specific milieu of a social reciprocity”, Robertson continues, arguing that “the difference between them is not qualitative or oppositional, but is one of scale”. In this telling, it is not politics as such that comprises the foundation for public life, but systems of mutuality, conflict, negotiation, and distribution, as well as everyday material operations and forms of reproductive labor such as cooking, eating, cleaning, washing, fucking, resting, tending to the ill, etc. The domus is here reimagined as a kind of “mediating skin” for vulnerable bodies in need of protection, shelter, and care.

Arriving and departing through the doorway of contemporary art, could a criticism which appropriates the domus as its mediating skin place sociality at the core of discussions on art and aesthetics? Could such a criticism approach forms of life and organization tactically, yet without concrete demands or a horizon of institutional reform? What would criticism scaled to the level of the domus do if not gather ideas around the objects of its inquiry – for example, the infinitely vulnerable things that we call artworks?

To these and similar questions, I would like to put forward a few propositions: What if criticism sought to safeguard the mess of a life in common against the enclosures of attention and the domestications of visibility; the fungibility of difference; the impasses of lifestyle-based activism; and the mercenary individualism of identity, to name just a few? What if criticism refused such expropriative enjoinments and instead communized social wealth by initiating sheltering practices of sustained attentiveness and mutual support?

What if, semantically and temporally charged by the asymmetries and entanglements of cohabitation, the domus’s critical vector could sunder the semiotic confinement of appearances with the improvisatory force of embodied social life? Taking things a bit further, what if the repertoire of criticism founded on such a threshold were fleshed out collectively, in encounter and reflection, in the constant play between need and ability and a general antagonism that allies varied forms of life and struggle – out of a milieu that is hospitable, in other words, to a ‘we’ as well as its dissolution and refusal?

To draw upon the work of Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, if in its engagement with the aestheticized space of politics, “critique endangers the sociality it is supposed to defend”, then art criticism’s current status as a relay in the valorization process may not offer adequate shelter. Even so, the sheer glut of writing on or alongside contemporary art ensures – even to the few for whom criticism is a livelihood – ongoing precarity and crisis. This penurious status, however, affords another kind of destitution that, contrary to imperatives to occupy culture, amounts to something other than “living out a situation” and performatively acknowledging risk. Rather than demanding new (automatic, optimized) subjectivities, such conditions might instead require existing subjectivities to risk potentializing the domus as a site of struggle and transformation. Exceeding writing, criticism undergoing such an alteration becomes indistinct from ways of thinking, being, and staying ungovernable together in our everyday material and reproductive operations; in our provisioning and subsistence; in our cooking, eating, cleaning, washing, fucking, resting, tending, and illness; in our celebration and improvised systems of mutual aid; in our inefficiency and interestedness. Far from diminishing critique or reducing it to a bourgeois aesthetics of existence, such sheltering processes of collective figuration gesture towards a general intellect and a form-of-life that moves not within political processes or art-institutional frameworks, but the embodied and often conflictual mess of cohabitation – or, as Moten and Harney put it, “the sociopoetic force” of “actually existing social life”.

Indeed, an approach to criticism such as the one outlined here would out of necessity spurn both the formal art economy and politics as such. For to position one’s criticism as radiating from the humble and fundamentally social activities of maintaining oneself and one’s ‘household’ is both to keep watch over the increasingly privatized domain of reproductive labor, and to mark a disjunction with what Moten & Harney have elsewhere described as the ‘state-thought’ of governance, i.e. the management of self-management that, in extracting labour-power from politics, “wants to give you back what you got, publicly”.

Shaped, among other things, by algorithmic surveillance, structural-signifying grids, social-media platforms, and video conferencing apps, today’s home-work economy is perhaps the exemplary bourgeois-managerial host. Enunciating the general equivalent and universal exchange, its jargon is profoundly hostile – the chatter of lives “bounded by how they will be spent”. With the Malmö gathering, we want to take steps towards elaborating a more hospitable vernacular whose reciprocity is neither calculable nor foreclosed, and yet whose potentials offer shelter from spectacularization and speculation alike.

That said, the extent to which processes of collective figuration emanating from the domus become questionable during a global pandemic has hovered over our efforts at being-together. As a consequence of lockdown measures implemented to prevent the further spread of COVID-19 in Denmark and Sweden, the “Editorial Meeting” scheduled to occur on March 15 in Malmö never took place. Nevertheless, as pressures on the home – and reproduction more generally – have intensified during the recent months of quarantine and “social distancing,” we find that a collective thinking-through of criticism’s relation to care has only taken on new urgency, and (despite some misgivings) have held our editorial meetings online; some of these alternative meetings are presented here below, and under each of the contributor's written contributions.

To varying degrees this gathering of artworks and texts imagines what forms of sociability and organization might be available to forge reproductive alliances under present conditions. Artist Jakob Jakobsen presents his manifesto for the Hospital for Self Medication; an experimental space above his flat in Copenhagen for developing health care with a communist texture. By contrast, set in the fictional metropolis Double City, Gregory Sholette & Agata Craftlove’s animation ‘Travels in the Underoverfuturecommons with Mr. Greenberg’ (2020) envisions the social function of art criticism in a not-too-distant post-pandemic future. The Malmö-based collectives Metood and WeRCurious invite us, respectively, into the “cum-chronic commons,” and the “nets of care” within the built environment. Finally, on a somewhat different register, the Paris-based anonymous media collective documentations.art reflects upon the challenges of critique in a consensus-driven global art world that measures politics according to their sign-value.

Despite the aforementioned challenges to conviviality presented by our ‘new public sphere’, we hope that this gathering offers something of a refuge in these inhospitable times. The door is wide open. We bid you welcome.