On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

For once we truly acknowledge that there are other people in the world—which is harder to do than it sounds—we must reckon with the fact that we cannot control them, even as we depend upon them (Phillips).

At a time when bigots and thugs deploy “free speech” as a disingenuous, weaponized rallying cry, it makes sense that some would respond by criticizing, refusing, or vilifying the discourse of freedom, and postulating care in its place. But care demands our scrutiny as well, as do the consequences of placing the two terms in opposition.

And yet, desire consistently purchased at the price of plausible deniability comes at a cost, both to oneself, and to the nature of the relationships or encounters it generates. Unlike cruising, wherein one acknowledges that one is looking for sex in some form, insisting that one is asking for or seeking nothing reifies the tiresome sexist construc

Letting go of a calcified conviction of what and where power is and how it moves can be a crucial part of instigating its redistribution; acknowledging and feeling what power we do have—not to mention analyzing our own will to it—invites us to investigate what we want to do, or are already doing, with it.

You can work to make a safe environment, but if the teachings at hand are meant to rattle, people are going to feel rattled.

The turn, in art, from the reparative to a demand for repair, treats art less as “a ‘third thing’ between people whose meaning ‘is owned by no one, but which subsists between [artist and spectator]’” and more as something whose meaning and function can be named and adjudicated—something that can, in fact, be moved out of the category of art, and in

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.

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.

Whereas care can slip quickly into paternalism or control when it isn’t experienced as care by its receiver (think of the last time someone did something you didn’t want or like “because they cared about you”), art is characterized by the indeterminacy and plurality of the encounters it generates, be they between a work and its maker, a work and it