On and Off "On Freedom"

Maggie Nelson and the novelist's songs / "Don't Mess with Mrs. In Between"

I suspect Maggie Nelson would rather die than be compared to ur-“male author” Milan Kundera, but her book On Freedom reminded me of nothing so much as Kundera’s many remarks on the “novelistic” way of thinking and writing, even though it’s a non-fiction work of philosophy. For example, asked about some of his favorite authors in a Paris Review interview, Kundera says

Musil and Broch saddled the novel with enormous responsibilities… They were convinced that the novel had tremendous synthetic power, that it could be poetry, fantasy, philosophy, aphorism, and essay all rolled into one. In his letters, Broch makes some profound observations on this issue. However, it seems to me that he obscures his own intentions by using the ill-chosen term “polyhistorical novel.” It was in fact Broch’s compatriot, Adalbert Stifter, a classic of Austrian prose, who created a truly polyhistorical novel in his Der Nachsommer, published in 1857. The novel is famous: Nietzsche considered it to be one of the four greatest works of German literature. Today, it is unreadable. It’s packed with information about geology, botany, zoology, the crafts, painting, and architecture; but this gigantic, uplifting encyclopedia virtually leaves out man himself, and his situation. Precisely because it is polyhistorical, Der Nachsommer totally lacks what makes the novel special. This is not the case with Broch. On the contrary! He strove to discover “that which the novel alone can discover.” The specific object of what Broch liked to call “novelistic knowledge” is existence. In my view, the word “polyhistorical” must be defined as “that which brings together every device and every form of knowledge in order to shed light on existence.”¹

I have not read any of Nelson’s actual novels, but On Freedom stands apart from most philosophy in its “synthetic power,” its use of “poetry, fantasy, philosophy, aphorism, and essay all rolled into one.” It feels very much like Nelson wants to “shed light on existence”, a pursuit more dangerous than it appears in any cultural circles like hers that have been substantially politicized. In addition to its fearless diversity of sources and references, On Freedom makes no effort to be systematic; indeed, one has the sense that a primary theme is that the kinds of systematization, reduction, and judgment more-or-less necessary to the contemporary practice of politics often sum to partialization or error.

This attitude —not uncommon among artists (and regular people), not especially revolutionary, but requiring perpetual evangelism all the same because it goes against the grain of our moralizing, Puritanical, Platonist-Abrahamic culture— could have many sources: Nelson’s practically pornographic erudition may have led her to it, as one can hardly attend diligently to hundreds of works of art without developing a kind of pluralism; the geniuses do not all agree; and they tend to be at their best when they themselves are not didactic but rather exploratory or embodying or reflecting. Or it may specifically be Nelson’s involvement with Buddhism, the great antidote for dialectical materialism, that led her to this view; a particular passage about a famous Buddhist strongly suggests as much, to me anyway.² However she got there, Nelson asks readers to consider if perhaps our moralizing tendencies have made us rash; passages like the following are nearly a refrain:

“As artist Paul Chan has it: “Collective social power needs the language of politics, which means, among other things, that people need to consolidate identities, to provide answers … to make things happen. Whereas my art is nothing if not the dispersion of power…. And so, in a way, the political project and the art project are sometimes in opposition.” Acknowledging and allowing for this opposition (when it occurs) is not the same as cordoning aesthetics off from politics. It is about attending to and allowing for differences—between sensibilities, between spheres, and between types of experience—and letting go of the insistence that aesthetic and political practice mirror each other, or even correspond amicably”

Nelson returns to this theme again and again. We must allow some tensions; we must decline to resolve some dialectics; we must be comfortable with epistemological suspension; we must at least consider approaching questions in the style of what the Buddha called “the middle way”: not falling for false binaries, but attempting mainly to perceive and understand.

While reading this polyphonic ode to ambiguity, I worried a bit for Nelson: in the spheres in which she travels, any refusal to “commit” to the polar arrangements of the moment is taken as political betrayal and moral failure, and indeed, I’ve found a handful of people taking her to task for precisely that; some even call her “conservative” or “reactionary,” which is outrageously absurd.

sohum, for now @antibhadrata

happy to see that Maggie Nelson is finally getting seen for what she is--a conservative sheathed in the language of liberation ofc, I tried to get her canceled in 2015

But I don’t think it was unanticipated. At times, I had the sense that Nelson was essentially engaged in what’s today a common project: trying to recover various kinds of (often ancient) truth and wisdom from the scrap heap to which they’ve been consigned by radical American politics without offending the radically political, for whom she still has sincere fellow-feeling and with whom she feels allied on many, if not most, questions. It’s a widespread predicament, and On Freedom is filled with what feel like perfunctory rhetorical nods to doctrinaire elite positions. For example, in her remarks on “care” as a concept in tension with “freedom,” Nelson casually describes America thusly:

“…a nation dedicated to indebting and overworking its populace and eviscerating social services and bonds…”

Many elites will immediately recognize this as “true,” but it’s illuminating to consider what exactly this claim entails. The United States is a 246 year old nation with a current population of ~330M people. What percentage of the people, do you think, can be said to be “dedicated to indebting and overworking [the populace] and eviscerating social services and bonds”? Which institutions would you say are “dedicated” to this, and do they think of themselves as being so-dedicated? Which laws, policies, enforcement actions, “structures,” “systems,” and so on can be plausibly so-described? Are there enough of them that it makes any sense at all to say that America is “a nation dedicated to” this? This is a childish caricature of what’s actually happening in history, where contending visions of the “the good,” arising from different values and different preferences among sets of complex trade-offs, result in inevitable political discord. I have never met someone eager to “eviscerate bonds”; the people I know who are hostile to “social services” believe, sincerely, that social services do various kinds of harm, and they are not without their arguments, many empirical and shared by the claimed beneficiaries of said services. It is not hard for me to grant this much to them even when we disagree quite bitterly. How could it be? I’ve met people different from myself, and I do not have a colonizer’s mindset that the only explanation for their variance is “false consciousness” or “barbarism.”³

Nelson is too precise a writer and too gifted a thinker not to understand the overreach of her claim, its goofy Manichaeism; no Buddhist could take such mass reduction seriously. But regardless —or because— of its silliness, it does serve as a signal for readers to understand Nelson’s bona fides. If they miss this one, there are many more in these pages. It’s a shame, because each one tore me out of the state of inquisitive openness Nelson otherwise cultivates. One of her most dismissive critics said that Nelson’s comments about free speech were worse than conservative: they were boring.⁴ I didn’t find them either conservative or boring, but I grudgingly admit that the reviewer was correct about one thing: wherever Nelson acknowledges the zeitgeist and genuflects towards one or another ideology, On Freedom is suddenly duller. We all know the slogans; we all know what the different factions expect us to say and feel, about absolutely everything. Each time she invokes the broader culture of her time and place, it is a waft of stale air into an otherwise vital atmosphere of original and creative thinking.

It seems the author of On Freedom is no freer than the rest of us when it comes to tribal battle lines: you’re either with us or against us, say dozens of groups of hundreds of millions of people. Near the beginning, Nelson quotes —without disapproval— some comments from her friends about the word “freedom”:

“‘Freedom feels like a corrupt and emptied code word for war, a commercial export, something a patriarch might “give” or “rescind,”’ another wrote. “That’s a white word,” said another.'“

Freedom: a white word. It’s a shame Nelson’s friends weren’t around to let CORE and the Freedom Riders know that they were engaged in mere Caucasian nonsense; perhaps they could’ve used their time and talents on a project better-suited to achieving liberation for the people Nelson, like so many compassionate whites, weirdly fetishizes here and there as “Black and brown bodies [sic].”

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But enough! In discussing this all with Jasmine, I confessed to being irritated at my own reactivity; who cares what Maggie Nelson’s friends think of the concept of freedom or what tortured academic language they prefer to use for the dynamics of their utopian / dystopian fantasies? The fact remains that On Freedom is fascinating, provocative, delightful, challenging, and fun. Jasmine noted for her part that

…I basically like most nonfiction books (esp criticism) based on whether they shift/challenge my thinking in significant ways vs. whether they seem Correct (since who am I to adjudicate correctness, etc), and any book that generates this much discourse feels Worth It

I happen to agree, although I also think Jasmine should feel perfectly empowered to at least provisionally adjudicate “correctness.” I also found much in On Freedom that was valuable, and even what I disliked I could not put aside casually; Nelson is simply too smart to make weak arguments. Jasmine and I disagreed about how much the book was novelistic, but Nelson’s observation that those most concerned with “care” are also capable of doing harm seemed exemplary of a novelist’s perspective:

“And here we might pause to take note of the great ironies (or tragedies, or paradoxes, or, more generously, productive antagonisms) of the upsurge of interest in care, which is that it has coincided with an onslaught of disinhibited, disparaging behavior, performed largely (though not exclusively) on social media, and deemed by many who partake in it reparative labor, even when it indulges tenuous accusation, ad hominem insult, or threat. This shouldn’t come as a surprise; forms of cruelty are commonly shoveled under the name of care. As always, the prerequisite is the belief that the justice of your cause immunizes you from causing harm, or that the harm you cause is, on measure, worth it.”

This is practically the lesson of the form we call the novel (and of history generally): that our intentions do not save us from doing evil, that how we think of ourselves is often willfully misrepresentative, that human moralizing is often the source of immorality and violence, that we do not clearly see what we’re doing in the scrum of both local and macro societies, and that judgment is the enemy of understanding. Nelson here offers a variation on a theme of the first novel, Don Quixote: those “who partake in” social media bullying —note how passive her language here grows, how unwilling she is to personify these agents— believe their cruelty is in the service of care, because they hallucinate giants where there are only windmills; they write tilted tweets, daydream of riding out at the head of a civil war battle between armies of straw- and steel-men, fantasize about the just destruction of entire cultures they define as “objectively evil.” It is all in service to their personal psychological needs, nothing more. Form never changes, only content. I sincerely feel for Nelson: she cannot help but see the human realities, whereas politics asks us to never perceive the human in the other. This is why novels are dangerous to ideology as such.

I liked very much this side of the book: the insistent perception of the humans caught within these great tides of takes, washing the right into the left and the left into the right over and over. Indeed, Nelson observes something that’s long amused me:

“One irony of holding art to a utilitarian standard is that it echoes capitalism’s own fixation on quantifiable results—in which case, celebrating art for its nonutilitarian aspects, for the “nothing” it makes happen, can be a means of calling attention to the presence of a different schema of values, a different mode of being.”

To paraphrase Tolstoy (or Nabokov): extremists are all alike, while every moderate is moderate in her own way. That the left and right have exchanged values and tactics in their endless struggle is no more surprising than the umpteenth case of horseshoe theory or the latest revelation that some ostensible ally is actually an abusive monster or some putatively virtuous evangelical is actually a sexual predator. To an outside observer, it might seem strange that the anti-capitalists believe that life is only valuable if one is wealthy and that money —one’s “material condition”— is the root of all good, while the pro-capitalists are freshly anti-corporate and advocate for a return to traditional (even agricultural!) social modes. But it shouldn’t be surprising: the policies are rarely the point of politics, anyway. I suspect Nelson cannot help but see this, and it’s a major problem for her continued social standing in her milieu. On Freedom has something of a politician’s tone: she has a activist base; she has a larger potential persuadable audience; and she has her beliefs; and she must somehow square the requirements they all entail in her prose. Fortunately, she’s an excellent prose author, but even her skill can only polish what remains a somewhat compromised aggregate artifact. There is hedging here, in other words; whether this hedging constitutes creditable ambiguity or Nelson’s local status anxiety is not something I can assess, but it’s at least a question.

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Errata

Other passages I found noteworthy:

“…repeatedly placing ourselves in the position of rejecting or passing judgment on [the desires of others] 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.”

The living spirit of Puritanism in the United States is one of our most powerful animating forces. We remain a set of opposed factions eager to purge evil from our midst, deeply concerned with the morality of sexual behavior, language, and ritual, as we’ve been for centuries; everything is a battle for “America’s soul,” for the “soul of our youth,” between “good and evil,” and so on. And as Nelson notes, beneath this endless Abrahamic strife is personal psychology: we shame because we are afraid, and with good reason. The paranoid style is a fact of life for us, not an optional mode. Judge lots because ye will be judged!

“…many girls are deeply compelled by their desires, but since they don’t have much practice in articulating them, often not even to themselves, they instead become expert at putting themselves in situations in which “trouble” (aka sexual activity) might occur, while agilely blurring out the question of what they might be looking for (alcohol often abets this project).”

I think the role of alcohol in our civilization is still under-appreciated, and further that the role of desire in alcoholic or pre-alcoholic behavior is too. I started drinking when I was 14, and while a doctor would surely point to my family, my city —everyone drinks in New Orleans, and to excess—, and to other factors, I must note that it’s absolutely the case that I used alcohol to try and catalyze romantic and sexual situations that I had no clue how to achieve otherwise. Literally: I’d get blackout drunk and hope something happened; and sometimes, it did. It felt like my best chance to overcome my shyness, to meet someone new, to find love. Of course, it wasn’t; but I was stupid and desperate. I appreciated Nelson noting that part of why high school and college are such maelstroms of substance abuse for so many is because, pitifully, we don’t know how to access or manage or express our desires. Could we learn? I don’t know; I’m skeptical of attempts to use quasi-medical or “scientific” language to sanitize and make legible the human heart, which I consider full of darkness, strangeness, and unknowability. But at least we might acknowledge that getting wasted and hoping to wind up with someone is an act of loneliness, not simply “fun.”

“But it might be paradoxically empowering for women to remember that, as Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman put it, in sex we often “desire to be nonsovereign, and sometimes not-autonomous,” and that such desires aren’t always or only a sign of gender oppression. They can also indicate the presence of a different kind of freedom drive—one that longs to be self-forgetful, incautious, overwhelmed.”

In addition to seeming loosely-related to much of what I thought was interesting about The White Lotus, I liked this as another instance of Nelson applying real scrutiny to received wisdom. There are so many naive kinds of default-association thinking in our discourse, and as with leftists who demand utilitarian impact from art, sexual activists who code sovereignty and autonomy as “good and male” and their opposites as “bad and female” strangely reify ancient sexist tropes against the reality of how millions —billions!— feel. Once more, Nelson cannot bring herself to do so and notes that there is a kind of freedom here, too, one we shouldn’t subsume into ready-made politico-moral categories.

“In other words, to be “good literature,” drug writing needs to be enlivening, surprising, and gripping, whereas the experiences being narrated are often characterized by monotony, inattentiveness, and vacancy. This alone should remind us of the transformation that must take place in order for experience to become art.”

I love observations from great writers about writing. This is a nearly technical point, but worth making: we want drug writing to somehow make us feel like we’re on drugs, but our sense of being on drugs is quite distant from actual drug-living feels like: not so many highs, after a while, but a sought non-existence; not delirium, but the relief of satiation unto mental death. I think the charge that most addiction movies “glorify” drug use is absolutely true, and it’s probably worth popularizing the awareness that e.g. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas skips all the dull parts, before too many teens —like me— attempt to recreate the excitement of its edited and purified and cinematically-enriched highs.

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The point

I don’t think it’s purely for style that Nelson calls her chapters “songs”; I think she really does wish to avoid didacticism and systematization and is taking pains to convey as much to readers. But apart from the worthy explorations of the nature of freedom in our interdependent and unstable world, I thought —or projected, as the case may be— that the primary “message” might be well-summed by the following three passages.

First: it is up to you, the individual, to sort this all out; to borrow again from the Chödrön / Trungpa story presented in the second footnote: the world is your koan to ponder, forever:

“…the fact remains that no one can ferret out for us which pleasures are taken in an “experience without truth” (Derrida), and which have truth-value (or something otherwise worthwhile); no one can figure out for us which modes of abandonment are wonderful, and which do damage (or more damage than they’re worth); no one can determine for us when a strategy of liberation has flipped into a form of entrapment. As the slogan May you be blessed with a slow recovery suggests, such proximities constitute a knot that benefits from patient, perhaps even lifelong, untangling.”

Second, one should not over-identify with a given moment’s seemingly true stories; life is long, and psychological purposes change, and beliefs fade in and out as we have new purposes and new inner and outer understandings:

“We tend to grow tired of our stories over time; we tend to learn from them what they have to teach, then bore of their singular lens. ”

And third, we could all be a bit less essentialist:

“Who I am has little to do with addiction and recovery,” Clune writes near the end of White Out. “Who I am isn’t the first thing I need to know to get better, it’s maybe the last thing.”

I think this is one of the deepest lessons I’ve learned. My psychiatrist often inverted my sense of the important: I would begin to discuss “who I am,” and she would want to talk about whether I’d eaten or slept, superficial trivia from my point of view as a pretentious young man eager to plumb depths. But she was right to emphasize this order: we must take care of ourselves first, and only then attempt to go inward or outward. We do not need to know who we are to get better, anyway; and indeed, it is perhaps only after “getting better” —recovering from addition, or false narratives, or confused relationships with our desires, or aspirational phoniness, or whatever else— that we can even hope to know ourselves. The goal remains valuable, if only for what we learn fruitlessly pursuing it (“a knot that benefits from patient, perhaps even lifelong, untangling”). Like freedom, it is a process, not a conclusion, and its “practices” —she cites Foucault’s distinction “between liberation (conceived of as a momentary act) and practices of freedom (conceived of as ongoing)”— are in some ways the opposite of what we imagine when we conjure, as we always do, some ideal that sorts the good from the evil, the free from the oppressed, our kind from the other. We do not introspect to find ourselves, we might say, but to falsify what we’ve mistaken for ourselves, just as we seek freedom only in opposition to whatever constrains us. These “negative” processes are in fundamental tension with the “positive,” consensus-building, tribe-creating processes of positing “who we are” and “what we’re about,” and this tension is everywhere in On Freedom. I think the book is better for it, but I hope Nelson doesn’t get excommunicated for the crime of attending to it perceptively and, I believe, more-or-less novelistically. This is the exact kind of exploration our moment requires, and Nelson is just the sort of writer and thinker who can pull it off; I think she does so admirably in this book, and thank everyone who recommended it to me.

Mr. Brainwash, Freedom Kiss, 2015.

1. Kundera himself wrote two non-fiction books that exemplify this style in The Art of the Novel and the absolutely phenomenal Testaments Betrayed, in which he also explores how early in the novel’s history, there was substantially more of this kind of recombination of genres and styles and laments that novels have grown rather more constrained in their use of genres.

2. Nelson spends a lot of time on the story of Pema Chödrön, a student of Chögyam Trungpa, whose The Myth of Freedom both Nelson and I evidently like a lot. Trungpa was not a “good” person, and Nelson spends several pages discussing that fact alongside Chödrön’s refusal to condemn him. I think it’s a clue to Nelson’s real feelings on many issues, from Buddhism to censoriousness to moral judgment: “In 1993, Pema Chödrön gave an interview to the Buddhist magazine Tricycle called “No Right, No Wrong,” which focuses in part on Chödrön’s devotion to Trungpa, who was known for, among other things, sleeping with his female students, heavy drinking, and unruly behavior filed under the rubric “crazy wisdom.” The 1993 interview predates our era of trigger warnings, safe spaces, and call-out culture, but its subject matter remains uncannily relevant. The interviewer opens by asking Chödrön, “Since [Trungpa’s] death in 1986, there has been increasing concern about the inappropriate use of spiritual authority, particularly with regard to sex and power. Today even some students who were once devoted to Trungpa Rinpoche have had a change of heart. Behavior that they may have formerly considered enlightened they now consider wrong. Has there been a shift in your outlook?” To which Chödrön responds, “My undying devotion to Trungpa Rinpoche comes from his teaching me in every way he could that you can never make things right or wrong.” The interviewer pushes on: “[But if] you knew ten years ago what you know today … would you have wanted some of the women you’ve been working with to study with him, “given their histories of sexual abuse?” Chödrön still doesn’t budge, and says she would have encouraged potential students “to decide for yourself who you think this guy is.” Near the end of the interview, Chödrön offers the interviewer a final assessment: “My personal teacher did not keep ethical norms and my devotion to him is unshakable. So I’m left with a big koan.”

3. Nowhere does Marxism show its universalizing, totalizing, hegemonic, colonial nature more purely than in its description of “false consciousness,” which treats diversity of thought like a “Marxist Man’s Burden,” or like demonic possession requiring the stake. You may have to kill those who don’t agree with you, but you do so for the good of the eternal soul of the class, whatever screaming and pleading protests may come out of their corrupted mouths as they burn. That Marxism is the most Westernizing and colonizing ideology seems to get too little notice; I think it exceeds imperial Spain in its determination to reduce to “unfortunate but criminal error” all that does not align with it.

4. Her critic, Andrea Long Chu, writes: “But why should we listen to yet another emissary of Generation X complain about “a world drunk on scapegoating, virtue signaling, and public humiliation”? It simply doesn’t matter anymore whether complaints like this are legitimate. Maybe they are. But they are also boring.” As someone who also detests the boring, I am sympathetic, but I note that Chu likely makes unscrupulous use of varying critical lenses to suit her ideological purposes: when a criticism is made against her enemies, it can be as rote as rain and that surely doesn’t reduce its profundity or import in her eyes; when a criticism is made against her friends, suddenly its “truth value” “doesn’t matter,” because it’s “boring.” There’s always a way out for the clever cultural operator.