The Care of the Possible

Abstract

In ecological thinking, the term care is of shifting valence. In philosophical and literary history, care is inflected as worrisome, burdensome, while, at the same time, uplifting and given to life. It has functional virtue in material practices based on what can be called an empathic relation. In recent critical texts addressing ecological dilemmas, care emerges as a diagram—an intermediate form—between possibility and event. Both palliative and favoring what is possible, care is inflected multifariously and with uncommon force of attraction in the materialist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari that inspires the work of Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Brian Massumi, Isabelle Stengers, Mark Hansen, and Jussi Parikka. In each, the care of the possible is based on experimentation and embrace of open-ended practice: collaboration rather than individual profit; posthumanism that recognizes universal entanglements; attention to the role technology plays in all spheres of inquiry; and, increasingly, sensors that produce a surplus of sensibility. This article argues that open-endedness, or possibility, has to be coupled with a palliative care brought to dwindling material resources.