Grazing Beyond
Perhaps not all cows would choose the field if given the choice — perhaps, given a modicum of existential self-will, some would run back into the barn with pounding hooves or gaze at the barbed-wire boundaries of their manageable world. What do you think freedom means? Some want to be held.
“What men call freedom, I don’t need. I claim the freedom to stand by my feelings at all times.” [1]
This is what Svende Merian calls freedom. Merian is a German author who wrote a severely frustrating and funny novel in the 1980s about the tragedy of being a hyperfeminist yet heterosexual woman in a man’s world. What Man — with a capital M — calls freedom, calls anything, is tainted by patriarchy’s desperate need for absolute truths. Like cows in the country, they are black and white.
The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: The Emotional Modernity
Let’s start from the beginning: In The End of Love, Eva Illouz, an almost spiritual leader in the field of modern sociology, traces the fated relationship between love and freedom. Once a liberation from parental or societal constraint, the operatic elation of love nowadays lies in the right to begin a relationship according to one’s own desire. But: that’s also how it ends (not with a bang, but on a whim, to losely quote T. S. Eliot).
In as early as 1956, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm noticed in his landmark work on The Art of Loving how capitalism turned everything, including people and their emotions, into commodities (Illouz calls this “emodities”). Originally, freedom intended to reinforce one’s own sense of self: My lover, my choice. But this only worked until the market spiralled us into boundless machines of directionless desire. What happens under hyper-capitalism instead is literally an alienation of the subject from its worth. Call me a Marxist of the feels, if you will!
The constant choice to choose against, or even not to choose at all, results in what Illouz calls “negative freedom” (and thereby “negative relationships”), creating a postmodern void of “lovelessness”. Lacking any kind of script, the subject is at once completely dependent on capitalist rules defining its value and the volatile nothingness of these rules. Basically, you never know what you are—you only know what you aren’t. Sound familiar?
That Familiar F(r)eeling
This ontological uncertainty around modern relationships is bound to leave you reeling. In order to liberate and recalibrate the idea of freedom, we thus have to free it from its capitalist claws. Ironically, this could mean returning to shelter: Like the angry feminist from the 80s, I believe that freedom means being able to feel your feelings and express them, freely. Feeling (big) and not pretending not to. How many (wo)men pretend not to care in the name of revolution? [4]
Because, of course:
Most men who think they’re fighting for freedom really have a security net; even Henry David Thoreau knew his mother would come every week with a fresh load of laundry. Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre can only write in the Seychelles because someone at home is taking care of his life. And the man you’re waiting for to text only wants to run because he knows you’re waiting.
Because, of course:
Safety is a kind of freedom; ask anyone in a war zone. Or parents. Or children. Or someone in love.
When I was sitting in an airplane from Berlin to Athens last summer, wishing for it to drop out of the sky and plummet me to death, it didn’t feel like flying. It felt like falling. (Is this when the Kierkegaardian “dizziness of freedom” turned into vertigo?) Freedom, to me, is the difference between jumping and being dropped.
But why, you say — isn’t the movement, the moment in the air, exactly the same? Yes. And yet it makes all the difference. Is the cow being driven to the vet or to the butcher? You don’t know; it’s the same car. But she knows.
To feel truly free, you want something in the distance: a contract, a law, a home. A tarmac, a fence, a person.
References:
[1] Svende Merian, Der Tod des Märchenprinzen, 1980.
[2] Eva Illouz, The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations, 2021.
[3] Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, 1956.
[4] Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, 2022.
