Caring

Traditionally, caring has not garnered a lot of attention in academia. In the rivaling theoretical schemes that dominated the social sciences in the and 1970s, daily caring activities were deemed to be of secondary importance. For example, in Marxist social theory, the feeding, sleeping, and so on, with which people sustained themselves and each other, were subsumed under the category of reproduction. The German Sorge has been employed in various ways to express an opposition between alienating and oppressive modern technologies and truly human, dedicated care. As caring is performed across networks, it is not always easy to say who or what does the caring and who or what is being cared for. Take contraception once again. The Heideggerian investment in Sorge was informed by a generalized suspicion of all things modern. Technologies were prominent among modern things but so, too, were techniques.