On freedom, p.1
On Freedom, page 1
On Freedom
FOUR SONGS OF CARE AND CONSTRAINT
ALSO BY MAGGIE NELSON
The Argonauts
The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
Bluets
Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions
The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial
Jane: A Murder
Something Bright, Then Holes
The Latest Winter
Shiner
On Freedom
FOUR SONGS OF CARE AND CONSTRAINT
Maggie Nelson
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2021 by Maggie Nelson
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
“Leviathan” by George Oppen, from New Collected Poems, copyright © 1965 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by Target Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
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Leviathan
Truth also is the pursuit of it:
Like happiness, and it will not stand.
Even the verse begins to eat away
In the acid. Pursuit, pursuit;
A wind moves a little,
Moving in a circle, very cold.
How shall we say?
In ordinary discourse—
We must talk now. I am no longer sure of the words,
The clockwork of the world. What is inexplicable
Is the “preponderance of objects.” The sky lights
Daily with that predominance
And we have become the present.
We must talk now. Fear
Is fear. But we abandon one another.
—GEORGE OPPEN, 1965
for Iggy
already & forthcoming
Contents
Introduction
1. Art Song
2. The Ballad of Sexual Optimism
3. Drug Fugue
4. Riding the Blinds
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index of Names
On Freedom
FOUR SONGS OF CARE AND CONSTRAINT
Introduction
STOP HERE IF YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT FREEDOM – A CRISIS OF FREEDOM – THE KNOT – ENTANGLEMENT/ESTRANGEMENT – FREEDOM IS MINE AND I KNOW HOW I FEEL – PATIENT LABOR
STOP HERE IF YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT FREEDOM
I had wanted to write a book about freedom. I had wanted to write this book at least since the subject emerged as an unexpected subtext in a book of mine about art and cruelty. I had set out to write about cruelty, then found, to my surprise, freedom coming through the cracks, light and air into cruelty’s stuffy cell. Once exhausted by cruelty, I turned to freedom directly. I started with “What Is Freedom?,” by Hannah Arendt, and began to amass my piles.
But before long I diverted, and wrote a book about care. Some people thought the book about care was also a book about freedom. This was satisfying, as I, too, felt this to be the case. For some time, I thought a book on freedom might no longer be necessary—maybe not by me, maybe not by anyone. Can you think of a more depleted, imprecise, or weaponized word? “I used to care about freedom, but now I mostly care about love,” one friend told me.1 “Freedom feels like a corrupt and emptied code word for war, a commercial export, something a patriarch might ‘give’ or ‘rescind,’” another wrote.2 “That’s a white word,” said another.
Often I agreed: Why not take up with some less contested, obviously timely and worthy value, such as obligation, mutual aid, coexistence, resiliency, sustainability, or what Manolo Callahan has called “insubordinate conviviality”?3 Why not acknowledge that freedom’s long star turn might finally be coming to a close, that a continued obsession with it may reflect a death drive? “Your freedom is killing me!” read the signs of protesters in the middle of a pandemic; “Your health is not more important than my liberty!” maskless others shout back.4
And yet, I still couldn’t quit it.
Part of the trouble resides in the word itself, whose meaning is not at all self-evident or shared.5 In fact, it operates more like “God,” in that, when we use it, we can never really be sure what, exactly, we’re talking about, or whether we’re talking about the same thing. (Are we talking about negative freedom? Positive freedom? Anarchist freedom? Marxist freedom? Abolitionist freedom? Libertarian freedom? White settler freedom? Decolonizing freedom? Neoliberal freedom? Zapatista freedom? Spiritual freedom? and so on.) All of which leads to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous edict, the meaning of a word is its use. I thought of this formulation the other day when, on my university campus, I passed by a table with a banner that read, “Stop Here If You Want To Talk about Freedom.” Boy, do I! I thought. So I stopped and asked the young white man, probably an undergraduate, what type of freedom he wanted to talk about. He looked me up and down, then said slowly, with a hint of menace, a hint of insecurity, “You know, regular old freedom.” I noticed then that he was selling buttons divided into three categories: saving the unborn, owning the libs, and gun rights.
As Wittgenstein’s work makes clear, that the meaning of a word is its use is no cause for paralysis or lament. It can instead act as an incitement to track which language-game is being played. Such is the approach taken in the pages that follow, in which “freedom” acts as a reusable train ticket, marked or perforated by the many stations, hands, and vessels through which it passes. (I borrow this metaphor from Wayne Koestenbaum, who once used it to describe “the way a word, or a set of words, permutates” in the work of Gertrude Stein. “What the word means is none of your business,” Koestenbaum writes, “but it is indubitably your business where the word travels.”) For whatever the confusions wrought from talking about freedom, they do not in essence differ from the misunderstandings we risk when we talk to one another about other things. And talk to one another we must, even, or especially, if we are, as George Oppen had it, “no longer sure of the words.”
A CRISIS OF FREEDOM
Looking back, my decision to stick with the term appears to have two roots. The first involves my long-standing frustration with its capture by the right wing (as in evidence at the young man’s card table). This capture has been underway for centuries: “freedom for us, subjugation for you” has been at work since the nation’s founding. But after the 1960s—a time during which, as historian Robin D. G. Kelley recalls in Freedom Dreams, “freedom was the goal our people were trying to achieve; free was a verb, an act, a wish, a militant demand. ‘Free the land,’ ‘Free your mind,’ ‘Free South Africa,’ ‘Free Angola,’ ‘Free Angela Davis,’ ‘Free Huey,’ were the slogans I remember best”—the right wing doubled down on its claim. In just a few brutal, neoliberal decades, the rallying cry of freedom as epitomized in the Freedom Summer, Freedom Schools, Freedom Riders, Women’s Liberation, and Gay Liberation was overtaken by the likes of the American Freedom Party, Capitalism and Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom, the Religious Freedom Act, Alliance Defending Freedom, and so much more. This shift has led some political philosophers (such as Judith Butler) to refer to our times as “postliberatory” (though, as Fred Moten notes, “preliberatory” might be just as accurate).6 Either way, the debate as to where we stand, temporally, in relation to freedom, could be read as a symptom of what Wendy Brown has called a developing “crisis of freedom,” in which “the particular antidemocratic powers of our time” (which can flourish even in so-called democracies) have produced subjects—including those “working under the banner of ‘progressive politics’”—who appear “disoriented as to freedom’s value,” and have allowed “the language of resistance [to take up the ground] vacated by a more expansive practice of freedom.”7 In the face of such a crisis, sticking with the term seemed one way to refuse this trade, to test the word’s remaining or evacuated possibilities, to hold ground.
The second—which complicates the first—is that I’ve long had reservations about the emancipatory rhetoric of past eras, especially the kind that treats liberation as a one-time event or event horizon. Nostalgia for prior notions of liberation—many of which depend heavily upon mythologies of revelation, violent upheaval, revolutionary machismo, and teleological progress—often strikes me as not useful or worse in the face of certain present challenges, such as global warming. “Freedom dreams” that consisten
For this reason, Michel Foucault’s distinction between liberation (conceived of as a momentary act) and practices of freedom (conceived of as ongoing) has been key for me, as when he writes, “Liberation paves the way for new power relationships, which must be controlled by practices of freedom.” I like this proposition very much; I would even say it is a guiding principle of this book. No doubt it will strike some as a giant buzzkill. (Power relationships? Control? Isn’t the whole point to ditch all that? Maybe—but be careful what you wish for.) This is Brown’s point when she says that the freedom to self-govern “requires inventive and careful use of power rather than rebellion against authority; it is sober, exhausting, and without parents.” I think she is probably right, even if “sober, exhausting, and without parents” is a tough rallying cry, especially for those who already feel exhausted and uncared for. But I find this approach more inspiring and workable than waiting for the “final ‘big night’ of liberation,” as French economist Frédéric Lordon has put it, “the apocalyptic showdown followed by the sudden and miraculous irruption of a totally different kind of human and social relations.”
Lordon argues that letting go of our hopes for this big night may be “the best means of saving the idea of liberation”; I tend to agree. Moments of liberation—such as those of revolutionary rupture, or personal “peak experiences”—matter enormously, insofar as they remind us that conditions that once seemed fixed are not, and create opportunities to alter course, decrease domination, start anew. But the practice of freedom—i.e., the morning after, and the morning after that—is what, if we’re lucky, takes up most of our waking lives. This book is about that experiment unending.
THE KNOT
“No matter what cause you advocate, you must sell it in the language of freedom,” Representative Dick Armey (R-TX), founder of “FreedomWorks,” once said. Whatever my feelings about Dick Armey, I began this project presuming that his dictum was, in the United States, fated to remain pretty solid. By the time I sat down to write, however, it was the fall of 2016, and Armey’s dictum seemed to be swiftly unraveling. After years of freedom fries, Freedom’s Never Free, and the Freedom Caucus, the rhetoric of freedom appeared momentarily in retreat, with protoauthoritarianism rushing into its place. In the run-up to the election, I spent more hours than I care to admit watching Trump’s online supporters come up with new terms of despot endearment, such as “the patriarch,” “the King,” “Daddy,” “the Godfather,” the “Allfather,” or, my personal favorite, “God-Emperor Trump.” And I’m not just talking about the 8chan crowd; after the election, the Republican National Committee sent out a Christmas tweet heralding “the good news of a new King,” an indication of all that was to come. Multiple word clouds have since confirmed: “freedom” is scarcely to be found in Trumpspeak, save in the cynical invocation of “free speech” deployed as a troll, or in Trump’s ghastly iteration of freedom-as-impunity (“when you’re a star, you can do whatever you want”).8 Even the administration’s 2019 effort to brand natural gas “freedom gas” sounded more like deliberate scatological farce than earnest ideological branding.
Over the next few years, the airport kiosks had lit up with titles such as How Democracies Die; Fascism: A Warning; On Tyranny; Surviving Autocracy; and The Road to Unfreedom. Wendy Brown’s warning about “an existential disappearance of freedom from the world” felt newly corroborated, as did her worry that decades of privileging market freedoms over democratic ones may have led some to lose a longing for the freedom of self-governance, and to develop a taste for unfreedom—a desire for subjection, even—in its place. Such concerns many times brought to my mind James Baldwin’s observation in The Fire Next Time: “I have met only a very few people—and most of these were not Americans—who had any real desire to be free. Freedom is hard to bear.”
In such a climate, it was tempting to write a book that aimed to “reorient us as to freedom’s very value,” or to encourage myself and others to join the ranks of Baldwin’s very few people with a real desire to be free. Such entreaties typically begin with a strong argument about what freedom is or ought to be, as in sociologist Avery F. Gordon’s The Hawthorn Archives: Letters from the Utopian Margins, a collection described on its jacket as a “fugitive space” for the “political consciousness of runaway slaves, war deserters, prison abolitionists, commoners and other radicals,” in which Gordon asserts (paraphrasing Toni Cade Bambara): “Freedom … is not the end of history or an elusive goal never achievable. It is not a better nation-state however disguised as a cooperative. It is not an ideal set of rules detached from the people who make them or live by them. And it is certainly not the right to own the economic, social, political, or cultural capital in order to dominate others and trade their happiness in a monopolistic market. Freedom is the process by which you develop a practice for being unavailable for servitude.”
I have been moved and edified by many such entreaties.9 But they are not, in the end, my style. The pages that follow do not diagnose a crisis of freedom and propose a means of fixing it (or us), nor do they take political freedom as their main focus. Instead, they bear down on the felt complexities of the freedom drive in four distinct realms—art, sex, drugs, and climate—wherein the coexistence of freedom, care, and constraint seems to me particularly thorny and acute. In each realm, I pay attention to the ways in which freedom appears knotted up with so-called unfreedom, producing marbled experiences of compulsion, discipline, possibility, and surrender.
Because we tend—often correctly—to associate unfreedom with the presence of oppressive circumstances that we can and should work to change, it makes sense that we might instinctively treat the knot of freedom and unfreedom as a source of perfidy and pain. To expose how domination disguises itself as liberation, we become compelled to pull the strands of the knot apart, aiming to extricate the emancipatory from the oppressive. This is especially so when we are dealing with the link between slavery and freedom in Western history and thought—both the ways in which they developed together and have given each other meaning, and the ways in which white people have, for centuries, cannily deployed the discourse of freedom to delay, diminish, or deny it to others.10 This approach also makes sense if and when one’s goal is to expose the economic ideologies that align freedom with the willingness to become a slave of capital.11
But if we allow ourselves to wander away—if only for a spell—from the exclusive task of exposing and condemning domination, we may find that there is more to be found in the knot of freedom and unfreedom than a blueprint for past and present regimes of brutality. For it is here that sovereignty and self-abandon, subjectivity and subjection, autonomy and dependency, recreation and need, obligation and refusal, the supranatural and the sublunary commingle—sometimes ecstatically, sometimes catastrophically. It is here that we become disabused of the fantasy that all selves yearn only, or even mostly, for coherence, legibility, self-governance, agency, power, or even survival. Such a destabilizing may sound hip, but it can also be disquieting, depressing, and destructive. That’s all part of the freedom drive, too. If we take time to fathom it, we might find ourselves less trapped by freedom’s myths and slogans, less stunned and dispirited by its paradoxes, and more alive to its challenges.
