[This new book, writes reviewer Quinn, asks "what does freedom
look like as a practice, not in the future but now, in our imperfect
and unequal world?" ] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

WRITER MAGGIE NELSON ASKS WHAT IT MEANS TO FEEL FREE  
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Annalisa Quinn
September 8, 2021
NPR
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_ This new book, writes reviewer Quinn, asks "what does freedom look
like as a practice, not in the future but now, in our imperfect and
unequal world?" _

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_On Freedom
Four Songs of Care and Constraint_
Maggie Nelson
Graywolf Press
ISBN: 978-1-64445-062-8

"Can you think of a more depleted, imprecise, or weaponized word?"
asks the writer Maggie Nelson at the beginning of her elastic,
imaginative study of the idea of freedom.

It's a word that lends itself to any agenda, any wish, any fear. In
the past few months, vaccines have demonstrated this with special
clarity, in their double guise as tickets to liberation and tools of
authoritarianism, depending very much on who you ask.

At the beginning of _On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint_,
Nelson describes walking across the campus where she works as a
professor and seeing a young man with a sign that said, "Stop Here if
You Want To Talk about Freedom."

"_Boy do I," _Nelson thought. She asked the young man what kind 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,_'" she writes. "I noticed then that he was
selling buttons divided into three categories: saving the unborn,
owning the libs, and gun rights."

But if that kind of freedom — predicated on limiting other people's
freedoms — is antithetical to Nelson, she also does not subscribe to
the "rote, unventilated" sense of freedom as it's often used on the
left: the idea that people are working progressively towards some
joyous, emancipatory point in time when liberation will have been
finally achieved. This language, though inspiring, can "condition us
into thinking of freedom as a future achievement rather than as an
unending present practice, something already going on," Nelson writes.

So what does freedom look like as a practice, not in the future but
now, in our imperfect and unequal world? In four allusive, blunt,
funny essays, she tries to imagine freedom as it exists in the
contemporary contexts of art, sex, drugs, and climate.
 

One of the threads running through these essays is the importance of
acting, or believing, as if you have power, even in the face of
evidence to the contrary. "No doubt there is much to feel powerless
about these days, and no doubt certain bodies bear the brunt of this
fact to a much greater extent than others," she writes. But a
"deepening conviction of our powerlessness can at times make us
insensitive to the power we do have..."

This argument is perhaps most fully explored in the realm of sex.
Nelson asks: What kinds of attitudes and actions can we take in the
face of violent, enveloping misogyny that don't understate the scale
of the problem but still allow us to live our lives? How do we keep
the worst handful of people we've ever encountered from shaping our
happiness and freedom more than they need to?

Nelson is clearly aware of the pitfalls of this approach, and the
danger of deemphasizing the violent misogyny that saturates our
culture. But for Nelson, talking about trauma and fear without also
talking about pleasure and choice impoverishes women's sexual lives.
She recalls a job running consent workshops for college kids. She
quit, eventually, in part because "I felt the program did not leave
enough space to discuss the ravenous, turbulent fact of female desire,
which I had experienced as the most powerful force ripping through my
life, but literally had no place in the program's script, which mostly
focused on role-plays about how to eject a guy from your dorm room if
a massage turned sexual," she writes. Or, as Nelson puts it elsewhere,
saying no is hard, "but so is saying yes, especially if it involves
something more or different than acquiescence."

_On Freedom_ is by turns taut and discursive, precise and atmospheric,
combining fierce intellectual kick with an openness to nuance. Nelson
has a perpetual orientation towards not _either/or_ but _both/and_. I
am sure this book will offend some readers — looking at the critical
response, it already has. Two recent negative
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reviews
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have homed in on one brief section, part of which is an endnote, in
which she criticizes the gleeful response to a video of neo-Nazi
Richard Spencer being punched in the face. To me, the question of
whether this makes Nelson _secretly ideologically compromised_ (no)
seems far less interesting than the questions Nelson herself is asking
about how to live in a world with crushing oppression, alongside
people with cruel and violent beliefs, without giving into despair or
violence yourself.

There is a lot of vulnerability in Nelson's writing, and I don't mean
in the way she shares intimate and painful details of her life, though
that is there as well. After nearly every point, she will complicate
it — probe its weak spots and limits, ask what she's not seeing,
contradict herself. While she is sharp, she is rarely certain. She
doesn't write, as so many people on the internet are conditioned to
do, from a position of defensiveness, an assumption of bad faith
readings, a desire to make her words sleek and unassailable. The
result is not fuzziness but precision, a hyper-awareness of moral
shading. In _On Freedom_, Nelson is doing what feels like intellectual
echolocation: putting out calls and seeing what answers.

Annalisa Quinn is a contributing writer, reporter, and literary critic
for NPR. She created NPR's Book News column and covers literature and
culture for NPR.

Quinn studied English and Classics at Georgetown University and holds
an M.Phil in Classical Greek from the University of Cambridge, where
she was a Cambridge Trust scholar.

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