Other forms of conviviality

Think about the evening during the day.
Text about when and where.
Be there when and where.

Care collective is a group of ten people who coordinate Park McArthur’s nightly care routine. The basic function of care collective is to assist in changing Park’s clothes and to lift Park in and out of the shower and into bed. This routine is often accompanied by other convivial activities, such as making dinner, drinking, talking, reading, watching YouTube videos, massaging limbs, drawing, videotaping, and sharing stories. In June 2011, Park and Tina began using letters, text messages, and text-based art to explore ideas of care and intimacy. In November 2011, Park began a routine of brushing Tina’s teeth. In April 2012, Park and Tina began writing scores for lifts and transfers. Tina Zavitsanos and Amalle Dublon are care collective Friday night.11Amalle Dublon also contributed some writing to this piece.

“XO” is often left at the bottom of what appear to be exchanges: kisses for greeting and parting; signed letters; an end to correspondence; a smoothing over of communication delays and failures; the arrangements of players and antagonisms; a process of score keeping. As an abbreviation, XO may signify intimacy or curtail it. Sometimes the banal routine of this curtailment is itself the location of intimacy—when, for example, “love you” means “this conversation is over.”

Yet convivial forms of correspondence need not constitute exchange. In the first chapters of Capital, Marx suggests that exchange asserts an impossible equivalence between irreducibly incommensurable terms; exchange violates that incommensurability, while mobilizing it as quantifiable (in)difference. Gestures of intimate inclusion are regularly used to make violence appear as equitable exchange. Given that care work has historically been a site of violence done to both domestic workers and those who depend upon care,22People with disabilities who depend upon daily care experience a disproportionately high rate of sexual assault, physical abuse, and neglect. In addition to physical violence, affective claims of intimacy—“but she’s one of the family!”—attempt to conceal and steal the reproductive labour of domestic and direct care workers. can we find other convivial forms for this labour (care work) that do not depend on exchange? Can these new forms crip our understanding of labor? What is the capacity of debility in terms of labour power? What are the possibilities of (inter)dependency for the “temporarily abled”?33In “The Ethics of Care, Dependence, and Disabilty,” Eva Feder Kittay (2011) terms non-disabled people “temporarily abled” in recognition of the fact that dependency is a reality for all bodies. This reality is not meant to de-centre disabled people from the particular material struggles and real-world concerns that construct their daily lived experiences.

What if we refuse the convivial forms of care that deal in contracts of exchange? What if we approach care as an event? How are we to accept and coordinate our mutual and divergent forms of precarity and (physical) risk? Let us acknowledge that such precarity and risk are routine.

Can the banality of care, its constant rehearsals, routine demands on bodies, and coordinated movements, produce and sustain intimacy without becoming fixed? Can the intimate actions and bodily movements of care work coordinate themselves in terms of the event—simultaneously static and dynamic?

We in the midst of care work wonder how needing help with daily activities mandates a physical closeness that complicates the utility of actions and gestures most often associated with intimacy. What might the consistency of this intimacy be if the main caring action of care collective—wrapping arms around each other to lift and transfer bodies—weren’t so reminiscent of a hug? There are many ways to lift and transfer someone, one of which involves leaning forward so that the person lifting can grab around the liftee’s waist, pivoting from surface to surface. Really, how much of this comes down to the fact that we are often cheek-to-cheek in acts of care, head on shoulder? Should the reasons for being this close be intimate ones?

“Ready?”
“Ready.”
Work to deliver your bodies safely from platform to platform, surface to surface.
Hold yourself; stand.
Stand and hold yourself while holding someone else.
Learn how the you of your body and me of mine work our mutual instability together.
Learn how the instability of holding while moving is a moment.
Learn that to move is to hold a we.
When we are crossing, dressing, lifting, rounding, it reminds me how rarely I share this kind of coordinated, unstable touching, these routine experimentations, with others besides Amalle. What contexts, proximities, and spaces permit the sharing of these simple actions?

Bow your head forward.
Look at your lap.
If the person doesn’t notice your position as a gesture of what you want to do next, say
“hey, can we take my shirt off please.”
Once you are positioned facing one another, put your head very close to your partner’s stomach, placing your hands on your thighs to keep yourself upright.
Feel your stomach tighten as you continue to work to keep yourself stable against the
motion and pull of fabric over your head.
Give yourself a challenge; wear a turtleneck.
With the opening of the shirt over your head and resting as a droop at your neck, have your partner pull the bottom of the shirt resting at your shoulder past your left arm.
Your left arm leaves the sleeve.
This helps the right sleeve to pull down, too.
Your right arm is free.
Your shirt is now on your lap.

Share your feelings.
Ask someone to share their feelings with you.

Think about your first lift with your partner.
Know that your partner has done this one million times more than you and that in twelve-point font, a list of names of people that have done these lifts with her is thirty-eight inches long when printed and leaves a fourteen-inch block of space for all the names that will come after you.
Realize you don’t remember the occasion of your first time, despite never having done this before.
Realize that she probably does remember.
Consider this discrepancy.
Know that now feels like the first time precisely because the first time felt like you’ve done this forever.
Pull the manual wheelchair down the ramp backwards.

Notice your partner’s lap has been the same shape for some time and ask if she’d like it tight or open.
Wait for her response.
Bend over and pick up her leg from the mid calf.
Place her ankle over her opposite thigh.
Adjust as directed.

Don’t leave me tired.
Make me try.

We are interested not in the exchange of XOs, but in (X,O) as coordinates, or rather unstable coordination. We approach the event of intimate care as a shared risk of falling and failing.

Look up the floor plan online.
Guess the width of the stairs.
Go to the site; imagine holding the weight of another body as you use the stairs up and down. Express your worry.
Show up together.
Look at everyone looking at you with expectation.
Look back with expectation.
Feel the expectation of embodiment.
Reassure each other.
Accept help from others.
Decide on a piggyback classic with additional butt support.
Look at the stairs’ steepness and narrowness.
Look at each other.
Imagine falling together.
Imagine losing footing.
Bend your knees until your hands rest on the ground; stabilize yourself.
Wrap legs around the sides of your body.
Hook elbows and knees.
Lean arms over shoulders, chest on back.
Prepare to stand.
Accept weight.
Accept leaning, working against leaning.
Stand to hold while holding.
Hold onto someone holding you.
Hold on to someone holding onto you.
Take the first step down.