what kind of thing is the soul: soul by committee: no such thing as an individual

a library full of reference cards on string and librarians haunting

..

♀️🔮11 Sebastuary 2023 🌘🐟9918🐈‍⬛🛞

from Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom

pg 8

Freedom is the process by which you develop a practice of being unavailable for servitude.

Toni Cade Bambara, Avery F Gordon

pg 9-10

because we tend — often correctly — to associate unfreedom with the presence of oppressive circumstances that we can and should work to change, it makes sense that we might instinctively treat the knot of freedom and unfreedom as a source of perfidy and pain. to expose how domination disguise itself as liberation, we become compelled to pull the strands of the knot apart, aiming to extricate the emancipatory from the oppressive. this is especially so when we are dealing with the link between slavery and freedom in Western history and thought — both the ways in which they developed together and have given each other meaning and the ways in which white people have, for centuries, Hanley deployed the discourse of freedom to delay, diminish, or deny it to others. this approach also makes sense if and when one's goal is to expose the economic ideologies that align freedom with the willingness to become a slave of capital.

but if we allow ourselves to wander away—if only for a spell—from the exclusive task of exposing and condemning domination, we may find that there is more to be found in the knot of freedom and unfreedom than a blueprint for past and present regimes of brutality. Ford is here that sovereignty and self-abandon, subjectivity and subjection, autonomy and dependency, recreation and need, obligation and refusal, the supernatural and the sublunary comingle—sometimes ecstatically, sometimes catastrophically. [my emphasis:] it is here that we become disabused of the fantasy that all selves urine only, or even mostly, for coherence, legibility, self-governance, agency, power, or even survival. such a destabilizing may sound hip, but can also be disquieting, depressing, and destructive. that's all part of the freedom drive, too.* if we take time to fathom it, we might find ourselves less trapped by freedom's myths and slogans, less stunned and dispirited by its paradoxes, and More alive to its challenges.