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Elisabeth R. Anker, "Ugly Freedoms" (Duke UP, 2022)
01:00:09
An interview with Elisabeth R. Anker
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Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:22]
Lily Goren
This is Lily Goren with the New Books Network, the new books and political science podcast. Today I'm joined by Elizabeth Anker, also known as Libby, or that's what I call you, who is the author of Ugly Freedoms. This is published by Duke University Press and I believe it was published in 2022. And Libby goes through a very interesting analysis of thinking about freedom and liberty and integrating a whole bunch of different ways to think about freedom and liberty in our modern context through a variety of cultural artifacts as well as political theorists. But I'm going to let her talk all about that. I'd like to welcome Libby Anker to the podcast again, since she was my first interviewee when I started podcasting all those low many years ago. I would like to ask her to tell us a little bit about herself and how she came to this project about Ugly Freedoms.
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Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
First, Lily, thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm really delighted to be here and delighted to know that I was the official first podcaster of your podcasting career. I came to this project after I had been looking at questions of freedom in my first book, Orgies of Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom, and I had been frustrated by what I had diagnosed as this kind of visions of freedom that on the one hand were so violent and brutal. I had specifically in that book looked at the way in which the language of freedom justified the war on terror. I was also concerned about the ways in which freedom as a concept seemed on both not only the political right, but also the Political left often seemed to entail a kind of heroism, a sense that freedom was practiced by this heroic individual subject who was strong and brave and courageous. And that freedom was in these large cathartic gestures of either individual self fashioning or a sense of individual breaking one's own chains of domination. And I felt that this vision of freedom as heroic and as individualistic both denied the ways in which freedom projects are so often collaborative and also seemed so irrelevant to the lives of so many people who are constantly treading water just to survive in the world. And I was looking for understandings of freedom that not only were more violent on the one hand, but in the opposite way, freedom that was more accessible, that was more humane, that included many more of the US mortals in this world who might be practicing freedoms in a more daily basis than perhaps we recognized because they were not able to be understood as individualistic or deeply cathartic.
- [04:28]
Lily Goren
Again, this idea of the individual, the heroic, the great breaking of chains is a narrative that we are so embedded with in so many ways in the United States and elsewhere, but particularly with regard to our popular culture and notions of how the United States came to be. But before we get into some more of that, which is a lot of the thread that you take up in the book, what do you mean by freedom itself?
- [05:05]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
This is a complicated question because there are two different versions of freedom that I look at in the book. On the one hand, I look at definitions of freedom that are popular within the history of political thought and especially Western Euro American versions of freedom. Those are versions of freedom that on the one hand can be tied to versions of kind of individual self determination, you know, a kind of strength in breaking one's chains. They can also entail practices of things like collective self rule. Freedom, you know, is one of the most, as you know well, is one of the most contested concepts in the history of political thought. And so nobody has ever conclusively mind what freedom is, how it can be practiced, Is it non domination, is it participation, is it collective transformation of a world to full equality of all peoples? Is it, you know, the performance of, you know, one's kind of one's selfhood in its, in its recognition by others. And so because nobody has conclusively defined it, I also was not interested in saying there is only one definition, but I was interested in looking at how different definitions oftentimes produce forms of violence in their wake. Forms of violence that then get disavowed in those understandings of freedom is always ideal. So I'm interested in how versions of freedom like non domination oftentimes actually produce forms of domination as the exercise of non domination. And I can talk more specifically about that. But on the converse hand, and this is where I feel like I actually step into a more exposed and vulnerable role, I was trying to also offer definitions of freedom that I am invested in that I think can counter some of those forms of freedom that produce violence and subjugation, even when they disavow it. And so in that sense, I look at understandings of freedom that I value. That would be the sense of being able to equally and fully participate in the collective collaboration of the world alongside others, in full equality, without domination or exploitation. So it's drawing, in a sense from other definitions, but trying to also think about freedom as a practice that is connective, that is collaborative, that is interdependent on other people. And that doesn't necessarily have to be a conclusive action once and for all, that freedom can often be practiced in ways that feel small, that might be in situations of dependence, rather than, you know, heroic freedom. That freedom itself can be connected to others and accessible.
- [07:59]
Lily Goren
And one of the points that you bring up early in the book is this question that I sort of wondered about with regard to the moral dimensions of individuals practicing freedom. Because one of the things that you say is in this heroic understanding that the. The people who get to be free or perform freedom often in our sort of viewing or have them in our imagination, that they have a kind of moral valence to them. But your suggestion is that that should not necessarily be where we draw our attention to understanding freedom.
- [08:44]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
I think in order to explain a little more what I mean, that freedom can often be practiced in immoral or morally compromised ways. I should probably explain a little bit what I mean by ugly freedom, because I think that can help us to figure it out. So the phrase ugly freedoms refers specifically to practices of freedom that produce subjugation, domination and exploitation as freedom. In other words, it's not just that freedom is, you know, that that violence or exploitation is the accidental byproduct of somebody's free expression, but that practices of subjugation are integral to practices of freedom. So one example would be just thinking about something like the founding of the United States, which we often, you know, is an archetypal definition of freedom or moment of freedom in which, you know, a group of people who have been under subjugating rule by the colonies produce their own, you know, radical act of world making where they, you know, cast off their oppression and form a new political World order based on claims of equality of all people and equal participation. Right. It's actually significantly more radical understanding of freedom than we see in, like the US Constitution, for instance. But also, on the one hand, we have this beautiful act of kind of radical political world making based on equal peoples. But as we know, just to point out, on the one hand, the most obvious, that only 2% of the people, for instance, in Philadelphia, were actually allowed to participate in this radical act of world making at the moment of its inception. And of course, this radical act of world making was, on the one hand, predicated on indigenous dispossession. It literally could not happen without having independence on the land of people who had been living and occupying the land for centuries, who are now dispossessed of that land and dispossessed of their own political practices and cultural inheritances. So this radical act of world making requires indigenous dispossession for its practice and it also for its own funding, for its own for the sense that the nation could actually be politically and economically independent of Britain. It also relied on the financing from enslavement. And as we know, most of the initial presidents and many of the signers of the Declaration were enslavers. And not just that their worldview came from practices of slavery, but also that their freedom to write treatises on liberty and to practice this act of world making relied on the material benefits that they accrued from forcing people to labor for them for free, for their entire lives and their families in perpetuity. So this is what I mean by ugly freedom. The ways in which acts of freedom often rely on forms of subjugation, brutality, and violence that are then disavowed in the stories that we tell about freedom. The connection to morality is really just that. When we often imagine what these practices look like, we imagine that the people practicing them are morally pure. On the one hand, that doesn't actually do justice to what the people who are practicing freedom or do, as the Founding Fathers clearly show us, but also in what James Baldwin tells us about morality, that morality and the assumption that freedom can only be practiced or that we can only assign moral virtue to pure subjects often denies the lived complexity of human beings in the world. And it forces people to live in ways in which their erstwhile practices of freedom or navigating the world are otherwise deemed immoral or bankrupt. So trying to move freedom out of these spaces in order to see how freedom can be practiced in ways, you know, in different ways that might have otherwise be considered immoral, but might themselves offer more emancipatory potential than things that we might see, for instance, in the American founding.
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Lily Goren
And the narrative component of thinking about freedom in a way that doesn't have the ugly component to it is also where we often get stuck in thinking about what freedom means to me, the individual, the citizen, because I have these rights that allow me to make decisions and choices before we get to our discussion of neoliberalism. But that the. The narrative is such that it's so embedded, it's. It's impossible to sort of break out of it. So in. In thinking about sort of breaking out of that narrative, I would just ask you a little bit more to talk about ugly itself. And you have discussed ugly freedom. But what the term ugly. I mean, mostly we think of it as the opposite of beauty or beautiful, but you're not necessarily talking about it in that way because it's not a perception per se.
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Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
I use the term ugliness in two ways. In the first way that I use it is where I use it to help me diagnose freedoms that otherwise that we imagine to be ideal or morally unblemished, but are themselves brutal and exploitative. And calling them ugly draws, on the one hand, an ugliness's capacity to challenge what we imagine our ideals to be. And oftentimes, ugliness is considered to form a break in what we imagine the beauty beautiful to be. It's a condemnation of an ideal. So I use ugliness in that way. And also part of drawing on this aesthetic language is to also show the ways in which politics and aesthetics are always intertwined. Right. That ugliness is often, as a concept tied to. And ugliness and beauty are both tied to political concepts. That beauty itself is often used by kind of dominant classes in any political order to describe themselves as the beautiful and to denigrate whatever is not considered the, you know, part of dominant classes as ugly. So if we just look at the kind of rise of modern political thought in Europe, and it's, you know, the concomitant rise. Rise of kind of modern aesthetics. Oftentimes we see what's considered the beautiful. Beautiful is, you know, analogous to the standards of European beauty, of white, Christian, European beauty. And ugliness attaches to Jews, to people of color who are colonized by Europeans, to people who are disabled to poverty. So on the second way of using ugliness, I'm trying to point to spaces and peoples who have often been denigrated as ugly, but who often can offer us different understandings of what free practice can be. So going into spaces that have been denigrated is ugly. And seeing what kinds of practices of freedom are there that are not necessarily celebrated by European ideals, but often can offer more emancipatory potential is the second way I use the concept of ugliness. And that's why ugly freedom itself has a double valence. On the one hand, it's a critique of forms of freedom that are understood as ideal and unproblematic. And on the other hand, it's a way of looking for and and excavating practices of freedom in spaces that would otherwise be disparaged, as unworthy, as neglected, as being practiced by people who might not seem to have anything to offer, heroic, you know, glamorous practices of freedom and trying to find something else in those spaces that we can, you know, you know, kind of celebrate. And that's that second aspect of ugly freedom that I trace throughout the book.
- [17:02]
Lily Goren
And so I wanted to ask you to sort of start our. Our sort of trot through your book in terms of this question of not now. We now we have an understanding of freedom to a degree. We have an understanding of the sort of dichotomous nature of freedom, that it's often connected to violence and exploitation and subjugation, that we have this understanding of ugly freedom, which is this sort of double understanding. But you take us through in the book a number of different spaces where you're looking at different aspects of the idea of ugly freedom. And what it sort of traces has a lot to do with colonialism, imperialism and enslavement and land theft, as you just talked about it, with the American founding, But broadly, white supremacy, neoliberal capitalism, and climate change, which don't often come up all together, although neoliberalism and climate change sort of do, but they're not always knitted together. So I guess my question here is, as I ramble on, how did the chapters that you sort of take up and the sort of cultural artifacts and political thought that you take up, how did they come together for you as you started to sort of work through this thesis?
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Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
I wanted to make an argument that ugly freedoms are imbricated in some of the most violent and problematic issues of our time. And those broadly would be issues of settler colonialism, patriarchy and heteropatriarchy, enslavement and its legacies, white supremacy and climate change and neoliberalism. And each of these, except for neoliberalism, which is really driven by claims about freedom that dismantle economic and Social worlds. All of them are justified in different ways, and they're motivated by different systems of power. So I'm not interested in flattening and conflating all of these, but each of these different systems of power has been justified in the past as part of a practice of freedom. I wanted to trace what that looked like. I look at, in the first chapter of the book, the ways in which the origins of the plantation system, which germinated out of settler colonialism, patriarchy and white supremacy and capitalism, how the early plantation system was connected to practices of freedom. We often see the plantation as the antithesis of freedom, but in many ways, at the time of its origins, it was considered the practice of freedom. It was the freedom of independent colonial subjects who were able to practice economic independence and political independence in the colonies through the creation of plantations. So a lot of our origins of freedom, freedom is entrepreneurialism. Freedom is local autonomy. Freedom as private property and having control over one's property originate in the systems of enslavement that were created on the plantation. We also see it in the legacies of enslavement up to the present. We see it in neoliberalism, in the way that neoliberalism promises that, you know, that its policies of limiting state power and of freeing the marketplace are done in the service of the exercise of individual freedom and the free circulation of capital, which, you know, are incredibly destructive. And also in practices of climate change, which I think are often not seen as connected to freedom in any way. But we can see this from the origins of the history of political thought, or at least from its modern origins, right? Where both thinkers like Locke and Kant argue that the opposite of freedom is nature, and therefore that the practice of freedom is to control nature. They use the language of domination and subjugating nature all of the time. And that reverberates up into the present in the way in which we use resources as practices of freedom and economic process disparity in ways that are destroying our climate and destroying our world. So each of these, I wanted to show how they rely for their justification in some sense, and often entail practices of freedom that are destruction, that are destructive to peoples and worlds and lives that are both human and more than human.
- [22:03]
Lily Goren
I want to. To ask you, in each of these particular chapters, where they're sort of case studies, if you will, of, you know, sort of getting at the basis of the idea of ugly freedom. You, you know, you sort of work on and encounter the political thought in certain regards, but then you usually, you take A cultural artifact and. And you explore it in context. And so I would love, if you're willing to go with me on talking about each of the cultural artifacts that you talk about in each of these sort of sections to explain a little bit about how they are demonstrations of thinking about ugly freedom. And I was particularly taken with Sugar Baby because I had never seen the image before. And thankfully, you do have images in your book which are really helpful. So can you talk a little bit about the plantations, sugar, which is still controversial, and like huge sugar wars go on between the United States and France and all kinds of people? And I understand that the United States brought sugar to Iceland when we were there in the war. There was no sugar there before. And so sugar is important, but people don't think about it because it's part of our daily lives.
- [23:31]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
I did not know that about Iceland. That's fascinating. I'm not surprised, but it is quite fascinating. The reason I focused on sugar and on Kara Walker's mega sculpture that used 70 tons of sugar to create what we'll talk about in a minute, her marvelous Sugar Baby is, on the one hand, the history of sugar is really central to scholars of Caribbean history, scholars of enslavement and Africana studies. And it is completely undiscussed in political thought and certainly in the history of political thought. Right. And if we're going to address sugar at all, it's just going to be childhood pleasures, candy, deliciousness, perhaps something about food, worries about health and obesity. But I wanted to show the ways in which sugar is central for helping us to understand the way in which ugly freedom originates in a transnational context, and especially the way in which ugly freedoms is central to liberal thought. Right. Sugar helps us to see that linchpin that connects liberal freedom to sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Oftentimes, when we think about where freedom originates, we have a kind of the story that it originates in Enlightenment centers of Europe and they make their way to the US where they received their central moment in the Declaration and the Constitution. And not only did I want to show the violence or the inadequacy of those stories which many scholars of colonialism and post colonialism have drawn on, but also so to make an argument that studies about the violence of liberal freedom can be found in the Caribbean and specifically in the island of Barbados, which was the kind of origin space not only for the rise of sugar as a mass consumption product. It was the origins of. It was the first successful place for British colonialism. It was the origins of, for many ideas of entrepreneurialism. And I even find traces of the importance of sugar to John Locke's political theories of what freedom is and how it's practiced. Right. The way he celebrates the West Indies plantation owner, the way he looks at the importance of sugar as a commodity when he's detailing the role of property and what happens in the state of nature. So sugar is really central to the stories that we tell about liberalism in political thought. And I wanted, I feel like, you know, once we expand our vision beyond magic centers in Europe and we actually take, you know, the non metropole seriously, we can see how important a space like Barbados, which was considered the crown jewel of Britain's colonial inheritance, is at the time that Locke was writing, which he knew well because he was, you know, the secretary and the treasurer in charge of cultivating and supporting those plantations. And that helps to broaden it out. The reason I focus not only on Locke's political thought or on the conditions of the Barbadian sugar plantation, but also on Kara Walker's recent sculpture is because her sculpture both helps us. It uses sugar to reveal the ugliness of freedom, and it also uses sugar to help us to imagine forms of freedom that would not be tied to sugar plantation slavery. So her sculpture was created and destroyed in 2014 in the. You know, it was created inside a defunct Domino sugar factory. You know, Domino's sugar was one of the most important. The industry itself of sugar was one of the most important industries in US history. Sugar was one of the first 12, you know, domino. It was previously American. Sugarcore was one of the first 12 industries in the Dow Jones Industrial Exchange. It eventually becomes defunct in part because of its transnational pull. And yet Kara Walker builds her sculpture in this space and draws on that history. She creates a 70 ton sculpture of a New World mammy figure from faced, you know, shaped in the. In the position of a sphinx, you know, as almost a timeless figure who has more knowledge than the mortals that are conditioned at their feet. And the sphinx is naked. And for Walker, part of what she's using is to show the ways in which histories of New World violence and brutality and what Jennifer Morgan has called the double labor, you know, the doubled labor of enslaved women on plantations who were both forced to labor on plantations and forced through rape and other forms of torture and violence, to reproduce children for continued labor on the plantation. And we see Walker examining and making this available to her audiences at the same time that her mammy figure is more powerful than anybody else who comes in contact with it, is unable to be excited, exploited. And Walker, you know, in many ways kind of opens her and shows the way in which for this mammy figure and her exposed, you know, both her kind of exposed reproductive organs, her exposed entire body is a way of imagining a kind of vulnerability and relationality that is not about exploitation and violence, but it is about connection. It is about relationality. It's about what Amber Musser has called her kind of dialogic labial economy. Right? One in which freedom and connection is in a dialogic way and not about domination and mastery. And in that sense, I think the Sugar Baby moves us out of imagining freedom through a plantation experience altogether, which is never about that kind of dialogic relationality and asks us to think of freedom differently.
- [29:44]
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- [30:10]
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Lily Goren
Tap the banner to learn more and you sort of stay in context of the ideas of enslavement, particularly in the, quote, new world into the the next chapter, which is, you know, sort of showing the problematic interpretations of emancipation that, you know, emancipation happened one day and then all was good. And that's the narrative, of course, and it's heroic and problems were solved. And, you know, I often talk to my students about, you know, how individuals go blink in an eye from being slaved or enslaved people to being free people. And how do you think that happened and how do you think it worked out? They're like, huh. So you take up a 2005 movie by Lars von Trier about sort of emancipation not happening. Can you talk a bit about how that fits into the concept of ugly freedoms?
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Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
Yeah. One thing I should say is each of the objects that I examine, the cultural objects in each chapter that open up into these political theory questions, each of them are problematic. And or controversial. Right. Kara Walker's sculpture was controversial in many ways. People weren't sure whether it was extremely exploitative. There were many audience members who tried to exploit it. And we see the same in the Lars von Trier film Manderley, which shows a plantation in which enslavement is being practiced 70 years after the. After emancipation, after the end of the Civil War. And on the one hand, people read it as a ghastly spectacle of racism because in the end of the. Of the, the. In the end of the film, the characters who were free asked to be re enslaved. And other people have seen it, especially philosophers in the Afro pessimist tradition like Frank Wilderson has argued that it's a key text in Afro pessimism because it shows the way in which anti blackness is so constitutive of the US that blackness is only envisioned as condition of permanent enslavement. And I wanted to read it as something in the middle of or different from either of these readings. The film itself shows the plantation where enslavement's being practiced. At the beginning of the film, a white woman comes, finds out that there's slavery still practiced on this plantation. She frees the plantation, she turns all the masters into workers, unpaid workers on the plantation. All the people who were enslaved now become free. And she tries to create it into a free and equal society. It ends up that her new form of freedom is itself a form of domination where she ends up taking control of everybody, including the former masters and the formerly enslaved people. By the end of the film, her experiment implodes, the plantation is on fire and the enslaved people petition to be re enslaved and say that she should be the new ma' am of the plantation. She ends up running away and escaping. And that's how the film ends. So I read the film differently than how other people have saw it because I argue that yes, we can certainly see the way the film is critiquing the US's kind of perpetual practices of white supremacy and the way that white supremacy structures US politics certainly beyond, you know, the antebellum moment. And we can see the way the law itself is still structured as a form of white supremacy. And yet what we also see at the end of the film is that all of the white masters have run away from the plantation. Grace, the woman who tried to free the plantation, who herself becomes a practitioner of domination and white supremacy leaves the plantation. And what we have in the end is a self sufficient black polity. What we actually learn at the end of the film is that this polity had been self sufficient and self governing even before Grace came to the plantation. That it was almost operating as a ruse of plantation power in order for the black people on the plantation to be able to practice their own forms of community. We learned that they were creating the laws on the plantation, that the man was there at their request. And it was, you know, it's almost a claim that their self sufficiency was able to function. And as long as the white world around it was more comfortable with imagining that this plantation practiced a slavery out of time than that it was its own self sufficient and self governing black polity. And so reading the film in this way and tracing some of the more violent practices of the film as practices of a kind of more subtle and morally compromised, but still fully practices of liberation and emancipation is what I also want us to get out of the film. So the film helps us to see both the ugliness of freedom as white supremacy, and also it imagines in ways that might otherwise seem problematic or deviant or morally compromised ways that white supremacy itself can be dismantled and that forms of self governance that escape white supremacy can be practiced just in ways we might not have looked for or imagined in the past.
- [36:30]
Lily Goren
And your next, your next chapter dives headfirst into the problems with neoliberalism and freedom. And really, as I think about neoliberalism, false freedom, because nothing that we do in your liberal setting seems to be actually free. And you use this wonderful David Simon television show to help us think about all of the problems with neoliberalism and the sort of ideas of, of ugly freedom. And you take up the wire 20 years since it was on television, but celebrating its, its relevance and, and sort of what it teaches us. Because a lot of what, you know, sort of the golden age of television is about is also what we can learn possibly from watching and thinking about these imagined spaces and what they're presenting. So what is it about the Wire that helps us think about ugly freedom and neoliberalism?
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Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
I'm going to answer about the Wire by first making a comment about when you say the false freedom of neoliberalism. And part of what I want to argue that is that as much as we might find the freedoms of neoliberalism repugnant, that they are still legitimate practices of freedom, I don't mean legitimate in that I morally legitimate them, but legitimate in the sense that freedom has been practiced as exploitation in the past, or freedom has been practiced as the enforced isolation, as alienation from labor, as the refusal of social connection. And I think that, you know, we can say that it's false in the sense that we might not value it. But I think part of what I would want us to shift in thinking is to argue not whether freedom is true or false, but what forms of freedom do we need to revolt against and what forms of freedom are worth fighting for. So, in that sense, neoliberalism is certainly a form of freedom that we need to revolt against. And there are aspects of what happens in the Wire that I think provide us forms of freedom that can be fought for. For, you know, the Wire just, you know, had the 20th anniversary of its onset, oftentimes considered next to the Sopranos, the, you know, most most important and most influential show in the history of television. It was also seen as problematic when it came out, especially by people who argued that part of what it was showing in Baltimore was a form of poverty porn. And I wanted a. You know, once again, I'm really interested in the problematic nature of each of these objects and to see how what the Wire can do happens within its problems and not, you know, that we don't have to erase its problems to see what it can show us. Part of what I also like about the Wire is that in looking at the history of Baltimore, it shows the origin moments when neoliberalism really takes hold of city politics. That certainly started earlier in the, you know, in the early 90s, but by the time of the Wire in the late 90s and early 2000s, we really see the power of neoliberal policies, the way that they're defunding public life, the way that they are forcing all public institutions to measure themselves with performance, performance metrics for growth and efficiency, the way they enforce competition among public, you know, civil servants, the way that tax breaks are considered a better form of revenue, tax breaks for developers, rather than larger funding from the state. And to see how all of these shape the city. The producers of the Wire understand it to be a deep diagnosis of the violence of capitalism and neoliberalism. And I think that's true. But what they also don't realize is the Wire also shows ways in which challenges to neoliberalism happen all the time. They just happen under the radar. And they happen in some of the poorest and most neglected spaces of Baltimore, but by some of the poorest and most neglected residents of Baltimore. And that's partly why their challenges to neoliberalism go unnoticed or discounted. It's also because their practices are not heroic forms of freedom. They might happen by, you know, dismantling, you know, literally, like, you know, punching surveillance systems. They might happen by using really low tech forms of surveillance and to think about or, you know, using low tech communication as a form of freedom from larger forms of surveillance. It often happens by people who are doing small actions that might not get noticed as a way of refusing neoliberal dictates. And one of the things I'm most interested in is how I think some of the most important work about neoliberalism and its power has looked at neoliberal subjectivity. The way in which neoliberal claims that we all need to be as efficient as possible, that our goals in life should not be about being good citizens concerned with justice, but individual entrepreneurs who can take on risk and succeed in the marketplace. And, you know, and that we understand ourselves to be profit maximizers, right, rather than people deeply connected to others in the world. And I think that that work is really important. But part of what the wire shows us is that it's also neoliberal subjectivity is really uncompelling, right? Most people don't desire to be profit maximizers. You might be economically compelled to be that. But wire shows us how easy it is to toss off that version of neoliberal subjectivity, right? Even people in weak spaces of power are not compelled by being profit maximizers and, you know, can easily challenge even ways in which their institutions might try to force them to be that in their jobs or workplaces. So I think when we peel back some of the larger themes of the Wire and we peel back its celebration of heroic individuals bucking the system or heroic police officers trying to do good, when we see the actions of smaller players and more morally compromised players, they actually are giving us kind of more robust, small ways that freedom can be practiced. They might be disappointing. They might not seem like they should be there, cathartic or celebrated, But I think to discount them does a real injustice to the ways in which forms of freedom that might take shape as resistance to neoliberalism are often available all the time, even for people who are vulnerable.
- [43:12]
Lily Goren
And you talk about this also in particular, that there's a sigh in the teacher's lounge that is like, you know, a butterfly flapping down in Peru creating a hurricane here or something to that effect. Can you explain why that particular example is one that really gets at this, you know, sort of how we may push against or fight against the neoliberal impositions on us.
- [43:44]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
I love this scene. It comes during season four of the Wire. Each Season focuses on a different institutional part of the city. And season four focuses on the education system. And it tracks the experiences of students, teachers, administrators, all connected to a middle school in a really impoverished and neglected part of the city. Part of the reason I was interested in it is because I was also a middle school teacher at the exact same time that the show is looking at this moment. So I felt some kind of kinship with the instructors themselves. They are, you know, in the scene that I am particularly interested in, which is easily overlooked. It's a 45 second clip of the show itself. And once again, I think that's part of what I mean where if we look at the, you know, kind of drill into some of the easily overlooked moments, we find so much there that is rich that we could, you know, gloss over. And its teachers are sitting in a teacher's lounge with a kind of paid instructor who is telling them how to make their jobs more successful, how to raise student scores, you know, which is the only thing that the Baltimore school system cares about, the only way that they actually measure teacher growth or teacher success. And the paid instructor tells them that they need to repeat to themselves a mantra, I am lovable and capable. And that by repeating this mantra, their job satisfaction will increase, which means that their teacher effectiveness will increase with the ultimate goal, meaning that they will increase their students test scores. And what's really interesting is that, you know, the teacher's response to this, that none of them buy it. We first see the teacher in this room and immediately there's a reverse shot that pans across the teachers. Maybe one or two of them are paying attention, but the rest of them are rolling their eyes. They are talking on their phones. They're whispering to each other in the way that their own students do, right? One of them is like passing a note to the other one in the back of the classroom. They are obviously not attending to this. In the second part of the clip, when the instructor starts talking about ways of managing the classroom, one of the speakers says out loud, what you're saying doesn't actually correlate to what we're doing. Another teacher also starts to yell back at her and saying, this is ridiculous. This is not addressing my job conditions. And the whole room erupts in loudness, a kind of, you know, collective refusal. And the whole scene ends. And part of my argument is that at the beginning, those small size and those small eye rolls, right, are doing something. On the one hand, they are communicating to the speaker that nothing is happening. They are communicating a dearth of enthusiasm, which already goes against neoliberal dictates that you're supposed to be enthusiastic about your shitty job conditions at all times. But just as importantly, once some teachers sense that there's a kind of contagion that happens and other teachers start to feel more comfortable expressing their rejection, and that's what then allows a couple other teachers, given the contagious affects of disaffection in the room, to start speaking out and then to perform this collective refusal. So it's only because of those initial sighs of boredom and the eye rolling that this, you know, that this refusal happens. And without them it would not. And I want us to attend once again to those small moments of the sigh and of the eye roll as a, as a resistance and a practice of refusal in this case, right? Not all practices of resistance are practices of freedom, but in this case, there's a refusal to buy into neoliberal metrics of job success and neoliberal subjectivity where I can just repeat an anodyne phrase and my job conditions will magically be better, right? That all the risk and problems of the job are on me and my own moral compass, my own approach to the job. This doesn't mean that the collective refusal magically means the whole school system is restored, that the school is healed, that wonderful learning in the classroom happens, everyone's satisfied with their jobs. That would be the heroic story of freedom that is not here. And so this freedom might seem disappointing, it might seem small, but if we don't attend to the fact that this was a practice of freedom, then we are really missing out on the ways in which these small refusals can happen and are much more accessible than we might otherwise realize.
- [48:25]
Lily Goren
And so I want to transition you to the last chapter, which titled Freedom as Climate Destruction. And again, this is a little bit of a swerve as they're sort of going along, although I get it. And you talk about all kinds of things that maybe we don't want to think about all the time, like what's going on in our digestive systems or I remember you giving, I think, part of this paper at an apt, and I got really like, yeah, that's not really descriptive, but yeah. And so the idea of consumption, the idea of taming nature, of ordering it, of taking it over as making nature not free, but that helps us as human beings to be free, is also this question of, you know, how does ugly freedom work in this, in the context of climate change?
- [49:33]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
Great, I will say this chapter was the one where I went out on the biggest limb, because I really try to articulate new ways of imagining bodies that practice freedom in ways that can often be considered as disgusting or gross or the eh. So your, your expression is exactly what I'm trying to capture here. But my hope is that, you know, thinking about these kind of more gross ways of imagining freedom actually can help to transmute that, ugh, into something that is more about a kind of interest and curiosity. And I'll explain what that looks like in a second. So I'm really, on the one hand I look at the ways in which practices of freedom, freedom being able to control nature, to use all the resources that I can pay for freedom, to control the land, to extract as much out of the land as possible, are forms of freedom that are, that have been practiced through colonialism, through capitalism, certainly through forms of dispossession of the land and that themselves contribute to climate violence. So really showing how practices of freedom contribute to the destruction of the land, I then look for practices of freedom that challenge this understanding that the human being is separate from nature, that the role of the human is to dominate nature, that we are, you know, the human exceptionalism, that we are the only creatures that can be free. And I do it in some gross ways. So on the one hand I'm really interested in how our guts and our whole bodies are shaped by microbiota, which are the non human biotic creatures that actually outnumber the human and the self cells in our body by a factor of somewhere between 8 to 1 and 10 to 1. So that numerically our bodies are primarily, you know, created by non human, you know, creatures that often shape our, you know, our mood states, right? When we just look at the microbiota in our gut alone. Microbiota condition are, you know, states of ease or depression. They help to determine when we are hungry or cranky. They help us to make decisions about the world. Which doesn't mean they're the little puppets pulling the throne, but it does mean that when we imagine freedom is that we ourselves determining that that self determining self is always a collective shaped by microbiota. And that the microbiota in our body are in turn shaped by corporate, economic, technological decisions about how we eat, how we give birth, what do we put in our soap, how is our municipality treating our wastewater? So it's not even that microbiota are an origin site, but that so many of the decisions of our culture, our economics, our technology condition, aspects of our microbiota in ways that it's hard to determine the origin Point of any decision. Microbiota also protect our skin. Literally, our skin would start to become decrepit and funguses would eat it if we didn't have microbiota protecting us. Even what we imagine as our autonomous bodies are being protected by non human selves, which I think shows the ways in which our bodies are collective and interdependent from the start. I also look at ways in which we are constantly eating the bodies of other people, right? The way in which every time we shake hands, if we put our hands to our mouth, we're exchanging DNA, we're eating people's shed skin, we're constantly eating fecal cells. And this is the part where, when I presented this a couple times at conferences and stuff, people are like, a, that's disgusting. B, I'm canceling my dinner plans with you, not interested in eating you for dinner. Thank you. But I'm really interested in the ways in which these, you know, this challenges our notion of this individual, autonomous self. And it starts to mean that practices of freedom that we've always imagined to be autonomous and self determining have never been as such. And maybe that means that practices of freedom that we might want to develop, that are. That would be more participatory and collective, are already drawing on the resources that we already have with us. And I think through some of these understandings, through feminist science studies, through indigenous studies, indigenous science studies, through queer inhumanisms, which looks at the ways in which our bodies are often centrally connected to non human matter in the world. And to see ways in which we're often connected to other bodies, other creatures, those that are dead and alive. And in fact, the front cover of the book, which is a beautiful piece of art by an emerging artist in Lebanon, Dalia Basiri, uses Dust, which is literally the amalgamation of tiny worlds, right? It's our dead skin cells. It's the cells of live creatures and mites. It contains bomb fallout, it contains the residues of colonial occupation. It contains drywall. Right. The ways in which it shows the interconnection of worlds allows us to think about and dust itself as a reminder that we're all going to die in moments. And that those cycles are about composing and decomposing worlds, you know, helps us to imagine ways in which forms of interconnection, interdependence and deep vulnerability can be the groundwork for practices of freedoms that work to rehabilitate the earth and to allow for the flourishing of all creatures, rather than just as their destruction or as forms of hierarchy and domination, which I think you know, suffused so many of our contemporary practices of freedom.
- [55:04]
Lily Goren
So basically, you're asking us to reconceptualize our entire being as one that is a collective, as opposed to that narrative of individual bootstrapping.
- [55:16]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
I am asking us. Yes, that is exactly what I am doing.
- [55:21]
Lily Goren
I hope we get there, because I think it would be better.
- [55:27]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
Just think about it every time you have dinner with friends or by yourself.
- [55:31]
Lily Goren
Because you're still eating other people who are floating around.
- [55:35]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
Exactly, exactly. And you're still being constituted by, you know, the toxic chemicals, the 10,000 toxic chemicals pervading your system that themselves shape your decisions and subjectivity.
- [55:46]
Lily Goren
Right.
- [55:46]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
You know, we're being shaped, you know, and the, you know, the star matter.
- [55:50]
Lily Goren
Right.
- [55:51]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
You know, it doesn't only have to be the toxic world, you know, thinking of, like, the James Webb telescope and the ways in which matter from the stars that actually predate our solar system is also shaping your subjectivity. The iron in your blood, you know, comes from supernovas. And how do all of these things, from the most mundane to the most ethereal to the most violent and brutal, shape who we are and how we engage with the world?
- [56:17]
Lily Goren
And I always think back to the conversation that Hamlet has in the graveyard about this is that we all are dust and that, you know, sort of. Who is he talking about? Alexander. We might be eating Alexander right now and.
- [56:39]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
Exactly right. It's not new knowledge, which is all right. And certainly, you know, indigenous studies, you know, insists on that.
- [56:45]
Lily Goren
Right.
- [56:45]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
Which so much of its understanding of relationality and connections between the human and the more than human world, you know, rely on that understanding.
- [56:54]
Lily Goren
So, Libby, what are you working on now that you've produced this amazing, fascinating, and slightly depressing book?
- [57:03]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
You know, I. People have said that they find the book, you know, kind of dark in that way, but I find that looking at these small, disappointing compromise practices of freedom is trying to argue that freedom is more accessible than narratives of, you know, of heroic transformation allow. And they actually, you know, I hope, especially in a world where we're all feeling overwhelmed, beat down, and kind of powerless to the horrible changes around us, that it actually shows ways in which practices of freedom can be more accessible than we might otherwise imagine. But my next project is tentatively titled Trickle Down Domination, and it's looking at the ways in which. It's trying to look at people in the middle of. Of systems of domination, people in the middle of systems of white supremacy or workplace domination or capitalism, and how people in the middle both strictly obey the people who are above them in hierarchies of power and then in turn subjugate the people below them and understand that subjugation is a way of accumulating power. So I'm interested in workplace violence. I'm interested in gender based forms of domination. And I think we can look at abortion and the glee in which average people who support forced birth are literally supporting the forcedness of forcing people to give birth as a practice of their own pleasure and workplaces and middle management and things of that nature. So. So that is what I'm exploring right now.
- [58:46]
Lily Goren
Well, I look forward to talking to you about it when it becomes a book.
- [58:51]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
Sounds great. I would love to.
- [58:54]
Lily Goren
I would like to thank Libby Anker for joining me today to talk about Ugly Freedoms, published by Duke University Press in 2022. I believe this is available at the Duke University Press website. Is there any brick and mortar store that you would like to give a shout out to?
- [59:09]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
Libby? Yes, I would love to give a shout out in D.C. to both politics and prose and to loyalty books. I know both of them carry the book and are great independent bookstores.
- [59:19]
Lily Goren
Thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.
- [59:22]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
Great. Thank you so much for having me. I always love talking with you, Lily.
- [59:38]
Jack Daniels/Liberty Mutual Advertiser
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- [59:55]
Elizabeth Anker (Libby)
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [59:58]
Jack Daniels/Liberty Mutual Advertiser
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