Maggie Nelson believes we react too quickly and think ungenerously.
In her new book, shes guilty of both.
On Freedomis out Sept. 7.
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I dont mean that cruelly.
In fact, they are bits of straightforward academic criticism.
They do not sing; they talk.
This is a fine, if unremarkable, thesis.
Maggie Nelson could etch sentences into a grain of rice if she wanted to.
So why write an academic book?
Why hide in the endnotes arguments that could have appeared out in the open?
Whatever else it was,The Argonautswas beautiful.
She does not often have ideas, only opinions.
(Nelson says they probably didnt, if you still care.)
In fact, Im going to spend the rest of this piece talking about it.
Nelson doesnt like this line of thinking.
It simply doesnt matter anymore whether complaints like this are legitimate.
But they are alsoboring.
But fine, lets talk about it.
Violence is a difficult word these days; it means too much and rarely enough.
But watch what Nelson says next.
This is a surprising comparison.
Equating art with violence is bad, but equating rhetoric with violence isnt?
Who is calling who the state now?
But isnt that exactly what protesters were saying that racism could be diffuse, benign, and slow-acting?
Thats Nelsons image, not mine, taken from a passage in the books climate essay.
The italics are mine; the murder charges, maybe not.
Is racism like art?
Art like climate change?
An open letter like the police?
After all, what Ive just described is a prison.
Unfair, Im being unfair.
Nelson is using a metaphor, which is when you use one thing to describe a different thing.
The first words were all false equivalences: The wordfireis not a fire.
Expression needs context, she writes.
This is an excellent observation, and a perfect example.
If the protesters had wanted to be open to interpretation, they should have tried being paintings.
Thats a reasonable retort.
Lets say the protestors really did want the art removed.
The real question is how to do it without resorting to the gulags.
But Nelson feels especially protective toward art.
Lets say something obvious.
People have the right to make art.
People have the right to write books.
They also have the right to go to school for those things.
(In fact, the state should pay for it!)
Or consider Hannah Blacks open letter to the Whitney.
Did Hannah Black mean it when she wrote ofOpen Casket,The painting must go?
What does it mean to say she meant it?
I am not saying the open letter was a work of art.
For a critic, it is easy to attack, harder to understand, hardest to understand ones attackers.
The rhetoric of harm is just that a rhetoric.
It does not really divide the world into victims and perpetrators of harm, either literally or metaphorically.
Where is its army, its police?
This is what Ive been trying to show you, modestly, in my back and forth with Nelson.
The freedom not to mean it, or to mean it only sometimes whose freedoms are these?
I am generally opposed to the censorship of troubling or controversial speech, except for when I am not.
How do I quarter that orange?
Indeed, opinions can be formed no other way.
Like all of us like you, like Maggie Nelson I do this every day.
It is, if nothing else, a practice of freedom.
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