On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
Whenever someone starts talking about “absolute freedom,” you know you’re in the presence of a straw man. No one on earth has absolute freedom to do much of anything; as anyone who has ever tried to install a piece of art with mold on it in a museum or spill blood in a piece of live performance art quickly discovers, such endeavors require
... See moreMaggie Nelson • On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
Such an approach invites us to leave behind the poles of pre- vs. post-liberatory, negativity vs. positivity, optimism vs. pessimism, utopia vs. dystopia, and to reckon instead with the fact that everything is not going to be OK, that no one or nothing is coming to save us, and that this is both searingly difficult and also fine.
Maggie Nelson • On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
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.
Maggie Nelson • On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
Refusing to take up the burden of how one’s art may make innumerable, heterogeneous, essentially uncontrollable others feel does not to me signify ethical failure.
Maggie Nelson • On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
The eruption of these issues into the realm of art via the uncritical valorization of care no doubt contributed to my “yuck,” insofar as it risks suggesting that art—a realm to which women have been allowed entrance basically one second ago in human history—should become yet another place where women must grapple with an already-feminized,
... See moreMaggie Nelson • On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
Yet one of art’s most compelling features is how it showcases the disjuncts between the time of composition, the time of dissemination, and the time of consideration—disjuncts that can summon us to humility and wonder. Such temporal amplitude understandably falls out of favor in politically polarized times, in which the pressure to make clear
... See moreMaggie Nelson • On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
It also risks reducing care to giving, protecting, and fixing, rather than treating it as a negotiation of needs that involves assuming strength in the other, resisting the temptation to provide all the answers, inevitable failure and disappointment, allowing for the fact that our desires for others may chafe against what those others want for
... See moreMaggie Nelson • On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
Faced with the binary choice of aligning with or against so-called exclusionary works of art or culture, disidentification proposes a third way, one that allows people to transform “these works for their own cultural purposes.”
Maggie Nelson • On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
But they can also condition us into thinking of freedom as a future achievement rather than as an unending present practice, something already going on.