Verbloemd lijden: Een zorgethisch onderzoek naar het laatmoderne ideaal van een 'succesvol leven'

This dissertation is about disguised suffering, an urgent societal issue which I address with scientific inquiry. The issue at hand is that the broadly accepted conception of ‘ordinary’ citizenship lacks dark realities of actual people. The hegemonic idea of citizenship is the ideal of an autonomous free individual who designs his own life. This individual chooses his identity and directs and controls his life, health and well-being in an active way. He strives to grow, flourish and actualize himself in the context of work and the private domain. For the outcomes of his choices and actions, his successes and failures he is self-responsible. Happiness looms at the horizon if he makes full use of his resources. Care and assistance are often focused on the recovery of autonomy and freedom perceived within this frame. Compared to the ancient, top-down imposed conception of the citizen, this new conception may seem like an improvement. Upon further reflection, tensions of the new conception are revealed. It neglects the social reality where people are inevitably unequal and not so free after all. The notion of self-responsibility that projects life as malleable neglects people who have never been, or will never again be vital or prosperous. Presenting health and wellbeing as malleable forgoes the reality that sickness, loss and suffering can and will eventually happen to everyone. Failure reveals itself in the dark backgrounds of society, where dropouts should be normalized. Individual autonomy and freedom paradoxically turn out to be an aspiration and a normative duty. Broadly speaking, the ordinary conception of citizenship emphasizes the positive, nice aspects, negative, bitter aspects are left out. This change of citizenship has ties to the collective protests in 1968. Students, feminists and laborers demanded changes from the hierarchical, patriarchal bourgeois that held the political and economic power. They wanted freedom, self-determination and recognition as humans. This resulted in a cultural revolution and a process of democratization. Since the 80’s the state launched a political ideal of creative-entrepreneurial citizenship which was indirectly a response to the ‘68 protests. A large majority agreed with this affective discourse. Besides individuals also social institutions and even the state changed into creative-enterprises. The collective social-liberal welfare-state transformed into a individual-neoliberal self-care-state. Anthony Giddens labeled this new era ‘late modernity’ and described it as a dynamic, self-contradictory and conflictual hyperfase within modernity. In this era, with unprecedented material surplus for the majority, culture and economy are no longer focused on utility but on customer-experiences of products and services. Esthetics, psychology, arts and humanities serve as important resources for this culture-economy. My theoretical framework is care-ethics, a modernity-critical, political theory and ethics. It originated in the 1980s as a political movement and academic discipline. The discipline has feminist roots in the protest movement of ‘68 and subsequent civil rights movements. The first generation criticized the dominant normative ethics and knowledge theory in which concrete people, their struggles, concerns and moral experiences play no role. The second generation broadened care-ethics to a fundamental political theory. Giving and receiving care is a humanizing and societal structure defining practice that keeps the lives of all going. Care-ethics primarily puts a spotlight on people who work in the shadows and who lead adversity-laden lives. It analyzes difficult lives and suffering in a broad context of long-term social problems. I employ a threefold problem definition which showcases transformed citizenship, changed institutions and changed societies. Within those layers I want to know more about how citizenship and realities of human suffering are currently perceived. The fact that citizenship, patienthood and institutions lost their political nature plays a key part in my dissertation.