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.

Even when one assumes a posture of not caring (about audience, money, the future, decorum, proficiency, or reception), the work itself typically requires tremendous care, which is why art is no place to take cover.

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.

it increasingly seems to me that the goal of our patient labor is not our own liberation per se, but a deepened capacity to give it away, with an ever-diminishing attachment to outcome.

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

Analyzing the power dynamics of any particular scenario can be crucial to our understanding what happened and why. It does not follow, however, that if elements of power exist—as they always do—our agency is extinguished, or that an abuse of power has occurred. The exercise of agency is always a negotiation of available possibilities and pressures;

For many artists, art plays a unique and crucial role in working out “what … we might want when we’re not under surveillance,” as Adam Phillips has said of psychoanalysis.

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