The Communicative Relationship Between Dialogue and Care By Mari ...

communication today, the devaluation of care. Appropriately, a communicative ethic, such as dialogue as the labor of care, is called for because of the current postmodern historical moment, which is marked by the loss of narrative background, routine cynicism, extreme individualism, and existential mistrust between persons. This project seeks to bring together dialogue, labor, and caring as a path to developing this particular communicative ethic. In doing so, this work recognizes that the ongoing devaluation of caring exacerbates the problem. The communicative problem of this moment has come to the foreground because in recent years, many people, for many different reasons, find themselves in relationships requiring care and are at a loss as to how to enact the caring needed.

Up until this point, the communicative relationship between dialogue and care has been implicitly assumed and on occasion made explicit as a suggestion by authors such as Richard Johannesen and Nel Noddings. Through Martin Buber's theory of dialogue and foundational literature related to care, specifically in the field of communication, our work points to the necessity of a more textured understanding of the connection between dialogue and care. Additionally, through a traditional epic story by Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, this book identifies and exemplifies a unity of contraries posited within this argument. The purpose of our project, then, is to make explicit the relationship of these contraries and the need for a response to a communicative problem that hampers community and relationships. Through Arendt's concept of labor, dialogue and care are united in a metaphor that frames care as a unity of contraries—blessing and burden, joy and suffering. The nature of caring is both obligatory and relational—caring is an action that yields life-related communicative outcomes in the context of everyday public and private human interaction. Our discussion begins with an exploration of the burden of care as a call for great deeds in the everyday struggle of life as seen in an excerpt of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.