On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
by Maggie Nelson
Graywolf Press, 2021

“Thinking aloud” is a dialectical process, if only among Maggie Nelson’s ideas. In her new book, On Freedom, thoughts build like a jigsaw puzzle of indeterminate dimensions. Her project is the tricky concept of freedom, a concept that has, in her words, been “depleted and weaponized.” Her puzzle has no outer boundaries—arranged to stretch possibility by calming today’s politically-charged language and idealisms. On Freedom is a book of small but powerful corrections to discourses on art, sex, drugs, and climate. These are big frontiers, but that’s the power of this book—and any Maggie Nelson work, really—to invoke so much with so little space.

A single work of art can stir heated debate, however, Nelson notes that our first phenomenological response to art is scarcely emotional. “Symbolic warfare” steam-rolls a plurality of experiences, and the “will to fight” becomes clear, while the will to engage in art directly is not. If engagement with art peaks when there is something to fight about, the normative argument over art’s imperative to address injustices is questioned. Under a hierarchy of artistic goals, artistic possibilities congeal, serving only preexisting normative appetites. The idea that art always has to be “doing” political work can be a new powerplay, which may also burden non-white artists disproportionately with both a single lens of creation and a single lens of interpretation.

Nelson’s stance is antithetically bipolar, which means she opposes those who police from any ideological end. This places her at the center of something—but what exactly? She rejects many prepackaged arguments, giving her a place to plant her flag by her refusals. Nelson isn’t radically indifferent, but she is looking to tear down heuristics that hurt rather than help. Eve Sedgwick’s notion of “paranoid reading,” or the presumption of total and immovable interpretations, frequently appears in On Freedom. A paranoid reading homogenizes and flattens, which may make excising an idea (or a person) more palatable. It’s here that Nelson’s discussion of artistic freedom pours into other kinds. If art embraces the imperative to right wrongs, how do we grapple with artistic, sexual, or political expressions that are ethically dubious, complex, or disturbing?

“Primordial impeccability” is the carrot on stick for idealistic arguments: if we were only to focus, we’d live in a far better world. Nelson’s essay on sexual freedom quietly questions this hegemonic end game because desire may be weird, self-destructive, or opposed to what we want politically. But those same desires may also open new channels of what we know of ourselves and other people.

Nelson has many questions. She questions why consent is the only heuristic for sexual engagements. She asks whether some ideas are popular only because of their neophillic clout. She questions false consciousness’ role as shapeshifter—changing by our evolving orientation toward sexual experiences. She challenges market-friendly versions of empowerment that push simulacra of sexual freedom. Nelson isn’t looking to provide answers, but she does warn of what may happen if we don’t realize where discourse isn’t progressing how it should. For instance, if our mechanisms for fighting power dynamics fail to update, we’ll be stuck arguing over the glow of stars that are no longer there.

In “Drug Fugue,” Nelson describes the passivity of her decision to quit drugs—coming to her like the message of God—using words like “total” and “vow.” The essay about drugs is about pairing what might be a natural impulse to undermine our senses with how stories about drugs have been misguided (and have historically benefitted and hurt particular groups). Our experience with mind-altering substances makes us both free and unfree, straddling an elusive line where control meets its negation. Her essay tackles agency, power dynamics (again), and the gendered telling of drug stories.

The references of Nelson’s book feel like a game of Tetris. And this feeling reaches a height in the final essay on environmental doom. The pieces flow like pre-fabricated shapes, and she applies them on her growing playboard. But sometimes, the excess—or what fills pages of anecdotes—feels more necessary than supplemental. One may wish that the format were more epiphytic, where she includes rather than relegates knocks against a false-environmental prophet like Jonathan Safran Foer or enlightening disagreements over the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch. The random chance of “who” is called to mind is likelier than proper induction, while her clean prose may handicap the technicality and messiness of some discussions.

On her way to “correcting” our storytelling about environmental travesty, Nelson swaps out the “wrong” narrative devices with her own. She employs the metaphor of a runaway train, labels oil companies arch nemeses, and interprets “game over” white men attitudes as concerned only with privileged statuses. Sedgwick’s “paranoid reading” and indeterminacy should have made an appearance here to suggest that storytelling—in all its forms—can be dangerous in diagnosing complex truths. Nelson writes positively on how some writers on climate believe they have a critical role in determining the future, but this may also contradict the idea that moral imperatives muddy rather than clarify the waters.

Storytelling does have its place. In Strangers in Their Own Land, Arlie Russell Hochschild empathetically engaged with Louisianians who voted in the politicians, like Bobby Jindal, who brought Exxon’s toxic petrochemicals to their backyards. Hochschild spoke at length with people on the nostalgia of what Bayou fauna had once been. She also spoke to them about their friends and relatives who died young of cancer from years of toxic exposure. Her book was a finalist for the National Book Award because she genuinely grappled with the origins of their many points of cognitive dissonance. For Nelson, the metaphors, evil men, and Standpoint Theory give her narrative structure but less insight into the serious political problems that put climates across the world at risk of permanent change.

However, Nelson is only one author, and On Freedom is her process of “thinking aloud,” figuring things out. Her style encourages you to place your own supplemental anecdotes, philosophical ideas, or lines of argument between the double-line breaks. In stringing together so many different ideas and people under one book, she’s indicating where she is along her intellectual journey but also the collaborative processes that got her there.

Kyle Sellers is a writer currently living in Guilderland, New York.