Review of/Response to the book, Care Aesthetics, by James Thompson
By Cindy Cohen, co-director of Brandeis’ Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts
Below are excerpts from a letter to author James Thompson from Cindy Cohen, read aloud during an October, 2022 presentation by Dr. Thompson about his new book, Care Aesthetics
Dear James,
One of my first questions to you is about the craft of writing: How did you manage to squish so many nuance stories and complex ideas into a mere 160 pages? I started out marking passages or making notes on the paragraphs that could inform my comments here, and nearly every page of my copy is a mess of lines and exclamation points!
In my view, what gives aesthetic experience its transformative potential and power is the quality of reciprocity it embodies, the alignment between the perceptual capacities and sensibilities of the viewer/listener/witness/participant and the ‘work.’ Reciprocity is central to your conception of aesthetic as well. So, to be asking to call attention to the aesthetic dimension of caring – whether informal or formal – is asking to notice, and value the level of attunement between the one offering care and the one receiving. Similarly, I think that what allows experiences with art and other cultural productions to be caring, is to intensify concern for the aesthetic dimension, not at all in the worn-out elitist sense of ‘aesthetic’ experience, but in the sense of the alignment between the ‘work’ or ‘production’ and the perceptual capacities and sensibilities of those whom they invite to witness. Such works can be crafted to offer, as you put it, ‘dramaturgies of care.’ They can also, I would add, mediate certain tensions that inevitably exist within life in communities: tensions, for instance, between innovation and tradition, the individual and the collective, chaos and rigidity. The art of making ‘careful’ or caring art, I think, is to care enough to negotiate these tensions, to offer a generative mix of support and challenge, to invite experiences that respect both where people are at and offer the pleasure of growth as well.
Another thing I love about this book is the questions that it stimulates. Here are a couple that occurred to me, that might be taken up here, or in the future, by us or others:
- The beautiful image of Grace in Roger Robinson’s poem at the beginning of the book -- holding a sick and possibly dying baby to her bosom, rocking in the chair, humming a melody -- makes me wonder whether the need for attention to the aesthetics of care arises primarily in the institutionalized settings in which care takes place in the “developed” world. It seems that in many communities throughout the world, perhaps especially those who don’t enjoy – or perhaps Caren’t burdened by – sophisticated technology, incorporate music, chanting, and moving into their repertoire of care, without giving it a thought. Caring requires a kind of wisdom that can in circumstances be “educated out of us;” how can those who carry this wisdom be supported to be mentors, to take on apprentices, to sow the seeds of this wisdom far and wide?
- The brief section on place and time evokes many memories and thoughts for me. In terms of temporality, or pacing, I am reminded of the experience of feeding my mother during the final stages of her Alzheimer’s disease, when she had difficulty swallowing. As I fed her, I tried to attune myself to the rhythm with which she could consume food. It was an exquisite experience of caring, and a way to create moments of intimacy with someone who was often unreachable. (I was reminded of this recently when I needed to convince (or seduce?) Ella, our cat, to ingest medicine stirred into a tablespoon of baby food.) There is something about the way in which caring for the vulnerable ones we love teaches us about care, about attuning to their needs for time to swallow, breathe, and rest. How can we bring more of these qualities of presence to other relationships in our lives?
This section also reminded me of the work of an organization called ‘Mass Design’ that designed and built a hospital in Rwanda, not only as a place of medical care, but as a way of caring for the community in the processes of design and building. They sourced local materials—such as volcanic rock from a nearby mountain chain—and worked with local craftspeople to carve the rocks, reducing the project’s embodied carbon, and ensuring that 85 percent of the building costs were invested into the local economy. The landscape was designed with a local gardener and culture bearer to contribute to the healing of the patients in the hospital, and also to the healing of the landscape itself. This example brings together some of the main themes of the book, I think: the sensory, embodied nature of the work; the mutual respect that is engendered through listening and collaborating – with human partners and the more-than-human world, the creation of indoor and outdoor spaces that support healing on many levels.
The question this raises for me is how the values and capacities required to engage in such work can be incorporated into the education and training of designers, architects, medical practitioners, etc. How can we redirect resources from building and running medical establishments in ways that perpetuate injury and injustice, to building spaces of true healing that resist the time and space imperatives of corporatized medicine?
I’d like to close by thanking you for making a contribution to what I see as an urgent, emergent movement to transform the patterns of exploitation of persons and animals and the earth ---- inherent in contemporary manifestations of capitalism and patriarchy --- into patterns of respect, care, presence to complexity, and appreciation of beauty. It seems that the buckets (perhaps oceansful) of tears shed by humans over centuries has not been sufficient to stimulate the necessary systemic overhauls; it is taking the crises of the climate and the suffering and hardship they already are evoking and our terrifying sense of what in the future they will evoke --- to startle us, to awaken us, to mobilize many into action. This book offers frameworks for thinking about care and about cultural production; it invites us to recognize, value, imagine, and emulate patterns of reciprocity – patterns that we can seek to embody in our friendships, our work relationships, our relationships with aspects of the natural world, our lives as members of our families and communities and as citizens our of countries and the world. These frameworks should inform not only the future we hope to create, but the processes of that creation itself. In this way, Care Aesthetics is a gift.
So, James, I’m looking forward to chatting soon!
Cindy