Cancel culture jeopardises the freedom of art to disturb. #MeToo has stopped people experimenting with the erotics of passivity. Sobriety is freer than drug taking. It’s probably appropriate, in a book about freedom by one of our most radical and forward-looking thinkers, that the conclusions should be at once so adventurous and so unexpectedly old fashioned.
The question of freedom preoccupies many of our most ambitious thinkers. As the pandemic and climate crisis encourage increased state control, as freedom becomes a buzzword of the right, how can we keep faith with the liberation movements and liberal humanism that shaped us? Recently Olivia Laing excavated the culture of the past century in search of freedom. Now Maggie Nelson has written a tremendously energising book wrestling with freedom in four realms: art, sex, drugs and climate.
For centuries, people have grappled with whether freedom from is preferable to freedom to, and whether inner freedom is a mere luxury (or a booby prize for the oppressed). Nelson isn’t interested in engaging with historical thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who staked their lives on how to avoid one person’s freedom resulting in another’s captivity, but she engages deeply with these questions herself. She takes from Michel Foucault the idea that liberation is the achievement of a moment, while freedom is an ongoing practice. For her the practice of freedom is fundamentally a practice of mind characterised by indeterminacy, necessary “if we want to divest from the habits of paranoia, despair and policing that have come to menace and control even the most well intentioned among us”.
Nelson’s book is written as part of a conversation with friends and mentors. She has a gift for bringing on to the page serious intellectual debates that are full of personalities figuring out what to do with their lives. She’s less interested in defining freedom for subsequent generations than making an urgent intervention. This is invigorating because she opens the conversation to her readers as fellow interlocutors – she describes it as “thinking aloud with others” – in an astonishingly moving way. The book’s register is between the academic style of her book on the New York School and the charged, slangily poetic style of The Argonauts. It forms a companion volume to her 2011 book The Art of Cruelty, where freedom emerged as a subtext. Collectively her writing across genres is emerging as a unified project, Lacanian in its commitment to desire, intellectually stringent, faithful to the avant-garde tradition, while also freely diverse in its genres and forms.
The four sections are loosely cumulative. The art chapter centres on the relationship between freedom and care, which Nelson worries have been opposed too easily: “beyond today’s tinny stereotypes of bully and snowflake … perpetrator and victim, lie dimensions and archives of artistic freedom of critical importance for all makers and viewers”. She doesn’t want artists to have to acknowledge the harm induced by their work; she doesn’t want art that disturbs its viewers to be removed from galleries. Yet she wants to keep the gains of critical theory, the decentring of the subject, the unmasking of authority.
And so to sex, where similarly, Nelson worries about the increasing policing of the freedom of others, suggesting that we might attend instead to voicing our own desires – “the far more crucial and challenging question of what we ourselves do or want to do, and how our desires and behaviours square (or don’t) with the political stances we aspire to elsewhere”. She follows Foucault in seeing power as circulating everywhere in sex, meaning that we can’t eliminate power from desire and should instead dream up more enabling and liberating forms of power (I’d have liked to hear more about what these might entail). Though we’re right to call people out for professional misconduct, she worries we’re in danger of simmering in “resentment, frustration and complaint”, and that the structures in play are regressively patriarchal and heterosexual. We need instead to act (in David Graeber’s terms) as if already free, and to honour the ways good sex can be painful, difficult and unequal. She’s refreshingly furious with the lead singer of Pinegrove who has announced he’s no longer going to sleep with his fans because there is an “unfair dynamic at play”. Who is he to tell these women they don’t want what they think they want? Rather than joining forces with the bureaucrats charged with policing sex, Nelson wants us to acknowledge “the ravenous, turbulent fact of female desire”.
If the sections on art and sex form a kind of diptych, so do the sections on drugs and climate. The argument here is that constraint offers a richer experience of the practice of freedom than limitlessness. Writing out of her own experience of heavy drinking, she argues both that drugs give you the feeling of freedom while actually diminishing the space left for freedom, and that drugs reveal our “porousness to nonhuman people” (this becomes crucial in considering nature’s agency). There are some compelling readings of addict memoirs, where she shows freedom gaining meaning in relation to its limits. She’s clear in her commitment to inner freedom, conceived in Buddhist terms as a “renunciation, undoneness, abandonment” accessed through reaching so low a point that you touch the bareness of your bare life.
We don’t have this freedom when it comes to the climate. We can’t pursue our addiction to fossil fuels, burning down our atmosphere and building it back. Here Nelson grapples with how our freedom to exist at all is conditioned on ceasing to fetishise freedom as the defying of limits, and reimagining it (she’s drawing on Naomi Klein) as “the practice of negotiating with the various material constraints that give our lives shape and possibility”. The hope is, as with addiction, that there can be freedom found through constraint, through collective thriving, through indeed a form of bottoming out that involves giving up and embracing discipline. She hopes that a freeing renunciation and escape from self can come into play when we surrender ourselves to nature, folding ourselves into ecological time.
The climate section was for me the least satisfying, perhaps because we have less freedom to diverge in our opinions here. The unsatisfactoriness is probably fitting as a way to experience our present impasse – arguably we need to embrace intellectual limits as well as material ones, buckling down behind an orthodoxy. But somehow also the lack of interest in wider intellectual traditions that characterises the book gave the writing a thinness here. There’s a kind of magpie delight to Nelson – she quotes without giving writers their own contexts. It feels strange to have Foucault given centre stage without some sense of his complex, shifting intellectual background or without a sense of Nietzsche and Pierre Hadot behind him. It feels strange, too, for the perspectives she brings to bear to be so broadly the perspectives of liberal humanism (indeterminacy, subjectivity, ambivalence) but for the book to claim so determinedly that the needs, desires and trajectories of the liberal humanist subject are no longer available to us.
Arguably, this is a central dilemma of our age. And arguably, what makes this book so exciting is precisely the balancing act that enables Nelson to tear everything up at the same time as she retains faith in the values (desire, artistic freedom, difficulty) that shaped her. Reading it, I had a visceral experience of seeing how this can be done in good faith, how we can think as Nelson does about sex and art while also believing in the necessity for a new order. One of the few historically distant writers Nelson quotes is Ralph Waldo Emerson, who she returns to pleasingly throughout, reminding us that hers is a distinctly American lyric, and that she too sits at the feet of the ordinary. At one point she has in her head his line: “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” There is such boldness to imagining our moment as a good moment, such freedom in writing it into being. We have to hope this book will act as a call to thought, allowing other writers to return to freedom with all its messiness and difficulty, ushering in a collective conversation about the genealogy of freedom and the future of the liberal humanist subject, helping us to find out what to do with these times that may turn out to be good after all.
• Lara Feigel is the author of Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing. On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
