#on freedom
“Ambivalence about responsibility for our own freedom does not mean we are stupid, self-destructive, incapable, or desirous of harm. It means we are human. And part of being human is not always wanting every moment of our lives to be a step on a long march toward emancipation and enlightenment. It also means contending with desires to circle or enter dark rooms.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“Getting to know our desires (or acting on them) doesn’t necessarily mean that we will discover their essential goodness (or that of others’). It may, in fact, entail contending with the fact that we sometimes desire (or partially desire, or desire in fantasy) that which is dangerous, if not outright destructive. Since acting on such desires can bring shame or pain (why did I do that to myself, or why did that happen to me, again?), it can be easier to disavow or displace the desire altogether, rather than to say (as many queers have helped people say), Sometimes I desire sex that feels self-shattering, self-obliterating. Sometimes I desire unsafe sex, up to and including courting HIV infection. Sometimes I desire sex that replicates my worst traumas. Sometimes I desire sex with someone who repulses, even frightens, me. Sometimes I desire sex with someone who is clearly, for a million reasons, the wrong person to have sex with. Sometimes I desire to cause another pain. Sometimes I desire pain. Sometimes I desire sex until I have it, then feel disgusted by it. Sometimes I want to relinquish the burden of my agency, come what may.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“‘There seems to be no urgent need [in cultural feminism] to understand women’s version of what Leo Bersani, writing on behalf of gay men, has called ’[gay male] love of the cock.’…It’s just missing.’ I too, have noted this omission. On the level of literature, it’s not that writing of this nature doesn’t exist. It’s more that it rarely finds an easy home in a feminist canon, especially a white feminist canon, wherein it tends to get treated as 'brainwashing or poisoning by the patriarchy.’ Listen, for example, to legal scholar Mary Anne Frank’s outraged response to Halley’s comments: 'What Halley seems to be after is not mere reinstatement of patriarchy, but patriarchy with a smile–with a stamp of (erotic) approval from women.’ Frank’s collapse of 'love of cock’ into 'reinstatement of patriarchy’ is a classic deprivation, one that elides the fact that millions of women presumably negotiate every day a world in which they desire and enjoy cock and masculinity–both in cis men and untethered from them–while working against patriarchy’s grip.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“Beyond assertions of innocence and impotence, beyond passive-aggressive perseveration on what you didn’t like…lies an ocean, the ocean of what you do like, what you do want, what you are able to ask for, what you need help in asking for, what you don’t know you want until you try it, what you thought you wanted but it turns out you don’t (or at least not tonight), and so on. We must learn to swim in this ocean if we don’t want to simmer endlessly in resentment, frustration, and complaint. (I say this as someone who has done plenty of such simmering.) If and when someone’s desires reveal themselves to be incompatible with ours, of course they can seem repulsive or wrongheaded. But repeatedly placing ourselves in the position of rejecting or passing judgment on them can become its own form of exercising shame and power, not to mention of insulating ourselves from the risks that come with naming our own desires, or even admitting that we desire. And there really are risks, insofar as owning our lust, kinks, vulnerabilities, and choices means opening them up to being judged by others–as laden with false consciousness, politically imperfect, unshared or unwelcome, asking for it, self-destructive, weird, vanilla, "TMI,” perhaps even as prosecutable.“
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“Each of us has our own particular body, mind, history, and soul to get to know, with all our particular kinks, confusions, traumas, aporias, legacies, orientations, sensitivities, abilities, and drives. We do not get to know these features in a single night, a year, or even a decade. Nor is whatever knowledge we gain likely to hold throughout the course of a life (or even a relationship, or a single encounter. None of us is born knowing how to manage our sexual drives and disappointments; none of us is born knowing how to contend with the various limitations, persecutions, and allowances of sexual freedom society has prepared for us prior to our arrival. We can work against noxious norms and laws that curtail sexual and reproductive freedom; we can create generations of people less likely to be injured, persecuted, or driven to self-harm on account of gender or sexuality; we can educate each other about mutuality and communication, the location of the clitoris, and the difference beyond a gender binary; we can challenge ourselves to accept ‘benign sexual variation’ (theorist Gayle Rubin’s contention that no sexual behavior, so long as it is consensual, is intrinsically better or worse than any other): these are a few good starts. But each sexual exchange–particularly ones performed with partners you haven’t repeatedly had sex with, but even then–is going to resemble a certain wandering into the woods, because of the fundamental unknowability of ourselves and each other, and the open question of what any new interaction might summon.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“I’m not going to confine myself to some narrow particularism. But I don’t intend either to become lost in a disembodied universalism…I have a different idea of a universal. It is a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.”
-Aimé Césaire, on identity politics in artmaking
“Sillman–a queer feminist who has dedicated the bulk of her career to abstract painting–articulates this notion as follows: ‘What would be much more interesting than the strong opposition to identity politics would be a more interesting identity politics, the formation of more questions about other people’s actual experience and perceptions, conducting more nuanced examinations of subjectivities, local culture.’ Her comment brings to mind Aimé Césaire’s famous remark, made in a 1956 letter: 'I’m not going to confine myself to some narrow particularism. But I don’t intend either to become lost in a disembodied, universalism…I have a different idea of a universal. It is a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.’”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“I make art in order to give other people my problems.”
-Mike Kelley
“…being a killjoy means acknowledging that there is a lot in this world to feel justifiably unhappy about, and that drawing certain others’ attention to those unjust, unhappy things will risk making them feel unhappy too (which, in turn, tends to make the messenger into the bad object, if she wasn’t already, simply by virtue of her presence). Ahmed’s killjoy defiantly resists the demand to be happy, especially if and when that happiness relies on the suppression of the unhappiness of others, up to and including their subjugation.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“Many of the artists and thinkers I’ve drawn on in these pages have experienced some sort of ‘takedown’ or another; in fact, this book has taken so long that some have moved through their takedown phase into the category of 'problematic fave,’ a term I despise. I despise it because it presumes there are human beings who are or could ever be 'nonproblematic,’ which I guess means that nothing they ever said, believed, experimented with, or did would unsettle any other, which defies most of what I know about what it takes to think hard, make good art, or be a complicated human being.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“If the current reckoning underway in the art world about structural racism, inequitable opportunity, toxic philanthropy, art washing, community relations, restitution, and divestment is as thorough and transformative as it should be, a lot of people are going to feel–and be–disturbed and displaced. This seems right. My hope is that we can undertake such a reckoning while also remembering that we go to art–or at least, many of us went to it at some point–precisely to get away from the deadened binaries of like/don’t like, denunciation/coronation–what Sedgwick called the ‘good dog/bad dog rhetoric of puppy obedience school'–all too available elsewhere.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“While we may fantasize about our care as limitless–and it may even be so, in a spiritual sense–in our daily lives, most of us run up against the fact that care, too, is an economy, with limits and breaking points.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“As a matter of both pragmatics and principle, I remain devoted to radical compassion, and not the kind that waits for a call. Figuring out what such compassion looks like in practice–and how to differentiate it from what Chögyam Trungpa has called ‘idiot compassion’ (by which one might let oneself get walked all over, or undertake 'doing good’ as an act of self-gratification)–is the unceasing, rigorous work of a lifetime. It isn’t something one always gets right.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“‘Shut up already,’ can at times be the right response, be it directed at others or oneself. At the same time, my experience as a teacher (and a parent) has taught me that little lasting good usually comes from bearing down on it, especially without adequate explanation or care. Psychologically speaking…we tend to hate those who demand that we inhibit ourselves; this is especially true if we have not been properly educated about our historically unequal relations to speech. It is maddening and unjust, but nobody is born understanding these historically unequal relations, or their inheritances in regard to them. We have to learn them, and we have to teach them. That teaching requires forbearance; its burden should not fall on those who have been made to suffer most from the inequity.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“Learning to follow one’s intuitions doggedly without killing them with prejudgment; to hold at bay catastrophizing projections about reception; to have the fortitude to continue on in the face of indifference, discouragement, or intense criticism; to access or sustain the ambition to try things considered unwise, impossible, taboo, or out of step with one’s times; to ‘stand up for your work! Open it up! Don’t shut it down, man!–all of these things may overlap at times with the aggressive, contaminated language of freedom and rights. But that doesn’t mean they can or should reduce to them. For they are also hard-won habits of artistic devotion that can take years to cultivate, without which a lifelong commitment to art becomes significantly less possible.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“Imaginative writing that polices itself from making ‘politically incorrect’ statements; or from dramatizing difficult conflicts and disturbing states of consciousness; or from using language disapproved of by today’s liberal mores; such writing is useless…One of the social functions of literary art…is to expose moral hypocrisy where it hides from view, in our best intentions.”
-Joshua Weiner, from The Racial Imaginary
“Making art won’t feel like reparative labor; it will feel like sanding aluminum for eight hours and breathing in toxic dust, wondering why you’re not hanging out with your family or binge-watching Netflix or visiting your sick mother or performing labor guaranteed to pay instead of cost. It will feel, and perhaps it will be, indefensible, despite your developed ability to claim aluminum sanding as a blueprint for a utopian future.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“It is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices.”
-Eve Sedgwick
“‘What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?’ For this isn’t just a matter of how to write good criticism, or how to keep criticism in its allegedly proper place (i.e., subservient to the genius art that gives it rise). It’s also an ethical matter, insofar as Sontag’s question reminds us that the world doesn’t exist to amplify our own preexisting tastes, values, or predilections. It simply exists. We don’t have to like all of it, or remain mute in the face of our discontent. But there’s a difference between going to art with the hope that it will reify a belief or value we already hold, and feeling angry or punitive when it doesn’t, and going to art to see what it’s doing, what’s going on, treating it as a place to get 'the real and irregular news of how others around us think and feel,’ as Eileen Myles once put it.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“It does not require that we agree. It requires that we not abandon one another.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
