Immanent obligations of response: articulating everyday response-abilities through care

Abstract

ABSTRACT The geological epoch of the Anthropocene provokes the reconceptualization of responsibility as response-ability. Going beyond bounded individualism and human exceptionalism, this notion emphasizes the constitutive relationality of heterogeneous more than human beings that allows for response. Feminist STS scholar and biologist Donna Haraway has developed response-ability primarily as an epistemological notion with ontological and ethico-political aspects, crucial in the context of professional technoscientific research practices. This article articulates a nonprofessional, everyday response-ability, by rereading it as a combination of forms of care that are worldmaking, an etho-ecological practice, and experimental in nature. Thinking through María Puig de la Bellacasa’s multispecies care and Isabelle Stengers’ etho-ecological practices, I articulate everyday response-abilities. Response-abilities, like Puig de la Bellacasa’s worldmaking care, are ubiquitous. They constitute multiple, conflicting worlds in need of sustenance. Response-ability is self-reinforcing, which is both promising and problematic since it leads to unequal burdening and overburdening. Relaying response-ability as Stengers’ etho-ecological practice lays out its immanent obligations that both limit and allow for agency to respond beyond self-reinforcing appeals and amid conflicting obligations. This agency in response-able practices requires careful experimentation. Everyday response-abilities are something we are all engaged in yet need cultivation in times of crises through careful tinkering.