Freedom’s Poses

Stooping

Kathy Ferguson rightly notes that Simone de Beauvoir was an avid and intrepid walker, developing a “mad enthusiasm” for hours and hours of strenuous mountain journeys. But as a thinker and as a writer, Beauvoir mostly focused on women’s lives indoors in cramped domestic spaces. Beauvoir observes that from the perspective of transcendence, women are in a state of unfreedom inside homes, even when they are confined to their homes by their own consent or agency, seemingly driven by their own desire. Here Beauvoir’s analysis of how women are trained to “become” women under patriarchy, trained from day one to match their desires with societal demands, sounds much like Emma Goldman’s description of the “cage of marriage” looking oh so shiny to single women.

What happens inside this cage nevertheless is what most fascinates and sometimes surprises Beauvoir. Inside, staying put, moving in cramped spaces, Beauvoir does not only see lack of freedom. Instead, she often sees how activities, locations, and perspectives that are determined by relationships of oppression might teach women a new form of freedom, one that eschews transcendence, overcoming, moving out and away from the home (indeed, a transformation of “home” is required). This is a freedom that recognizes difference, a freedom that does not align with transcendence, with will, or with overcoming. It is the opposite of what David-Néel contends when she says of her walk across continents: “I wanted to show what the will of a woman could do.” Beauvoir is interested instead in what seems to thwart the will, what shapes the will, and she notices how agencies are never ours alone. This, Beauvoir contends, is something women learn when they are stooped in kitchens, wrestling with objects, attending to babies, thinking about what their husbands might want for dinner, most of it accomplished while bending over, looking down rather than forward.

In a recent book called Inclinations, Adriana Cavarero (2016) urges us to think about stooping over and leaning in, but differently than Sheryl Sandberg or Ali Wong do. Cavarero draws attention to the shortcomings, shortsightedness, sterility (not to mention the patriarchal leanings), of the verticality, the height, and the uprightness of the man at the center of philosophy. Cavarero says that to incline means to “bend, to lean down, and to lower” (3). Those who incline and stoop remind me of Agnès Varda’s gleaners in The Gleaners and I, the mainly female workers who in feudal France gleaned the land after harvest to recover the discarded, the leftovers, the left behind. In her 2000 film, Varda introduces us to these gleaners and more: those who glean from the trash, who glean images, even those who glean encounters. Each is stooped over in their trade. Might we say that inclination and stooping are also freedom’s poses? We might say that this is freedom in a minor key.

According to Beauvoir, because of their situation and the postures they must take, women experience time and space differently than do men. Transcendence is a false form of freedom made possible for certain men only because their power allows them to force the non-white, the non-powerful, the non-male to do the repetitive and back breaking tasks that reproduce the conditions necessary for living. But here is a key insight of Beauvoir’s: it is only in situations of encounter with others, with objects, with situations where we experience a lack of transcendence that we can learn about how freedom actually works. Beauvoir thus situates the field for learning how to experience freedom indoors and while inclined: women learn freedom by staying put in their homes stooped over and toward objects and others. They are not outdoors, in open spaces, walking upright and freely in and through the world. For Beauvoir, women are in a better position than men to learn about freedom in encounter precisely because of their experiences with repetition and with immanence, and because of the postures they take to do their work.

In The Second Sex, Beauvoir shows us how freedom in the encounter works materially by describing the housewife’s relationship to its (often unruly) objects. The fact that Beauvoir sees housework as sometimes creative and often sensual, as a lab for freedom, is often overlooked by those who interpret her as consistently condemning the kinds of work to which women are traditionally assigned (mothering, housework, repetitive jobs). Beauvoir does contest the political fact that men are linked to transcendence/sovereignty (standing upright, moving forward, and acting linearily) and women to immanence/relationality (inclined toward others and objects, standing still, moving in circles). Indeed, she warns women to avoid the “easy slopes” (757) by which she means women should avoid abdicating the responsibility and agency that freedom requires. Yet rather then advocate women’s mobility as freedom, rather than equate freedom with transcendence, Beauvoir avows ambiguity. She says we are each transcendence and immanence, subject and object, upright and supine, at once. The women’s lives whom Beauvoir describes in The Second Sex might even be said to be in tune with what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call “radical immanence”: they experience objects as having control over them rather than the other way around; they do not experience transcendence or understand their reasons for existence; everything, even time, seems outside of their control; it is difficult, almost impossible, to stand upright and move forward. And yet, they must, to avoid sliding down those “easy slopes.”

Housework in particular teaches women a thing or two about taking the easy slopes. Although Beauvoir acknowledges that becoming a housewife, like becoming a woman, can be the path of least resistance to patriarchy, at the same time, housework might orient us toward a path wherein we can practice not only unexpected pleasures, but also newfound forms of agency and resistance. At the very least, housework “makes the woman grapple with matter, and she finds an intimacy in objects that is the revelation of being that consequently enriches her” (472). Women learn that with some tasks, waiting is best: “Respectful of duration that no haste can conquer, they do not measure their time” (642). Beauvoir says of cooking that, “working the dough [the housewife] experiences her power” (472). She doesn’t mean this ironically—she is not simply marking false consciousness, although she well knows that “working the dough” is not truly power. What she means is that women often get pleasure and even experience freedom and creativity in housework. ⁶ This is a kind of freedom that is much less dangerous than men’s misguided and adolescent belief in their unmitigated sovereignty and power. Stooped toward others and stooped over objects, learning the limits to transcendence, women experience a different kind of freedom, and this is the kind of freedom we want to replicate in the world. A key aspect of this insight, too, is that location and position matters. From within, even when stooped over kitchen sinks, babies, sewing projects, and toilets, we can change what is without, but only together with others. Freedom, Beauvoir reminds us, is only possible when others take up your projects, joining you on a path you make and remake together, but without knowing its end or direction.

Stopping

In contrast to Beauvoir’s housewives, Ferguson’s anarchist women get outside and beyond domestic space to breathe the outdoor air, to walk in open spaces. To successfully walk away from our homes, our bodies must do a thousand things at once, inter-connectedly, lest we fall down. And falling, or almost falling, is also a part of walking, as Ferguson tells us. As walking creatures, we are “forward-leaning; we fall ourselves forward.”

The mind also plays its part. Whitehead’s idea of dipolarity is utilized by Ferguson to show that in walking, physical and psychic states are, at the same time, opposed and interdependent. Indeed, Ferguson is especially drawn to Whitehead because he recognizes the conversation between the body and the mind as process thinking. For Ferguson, process thinking and walking are similar kinds of activities, and each illuminates/consecrates the other. Walking is like thinking. Thinking is like walking. Ferguson adds, too, when talking about Lily Gair Wilkinson’s essay on “Women’s Freedom,” that reading is like walking, writing is like walking. As she puts it, “Lily invites her readers to take walks with her.” Ferguson connects the textual walking of Lily Gair Wilkinson’s narrative with the actual walking in anarchist lives.

There is something very attractive about this. If reading is like walking, and writing is like walking, we get a sense of movement introduced back into texts. Concepts become less rigid. They are transformed by readers, not just static on a page written by writers. There is always room for interpretation, for critique, for the reader/spectator to make their own mark, to get lost, and to find one’s way. The path is not rigid or straight. Not only that. Reading can leave us breathless, or so I imagine. I have had this experience myself. I have to put my book down because I am excited. My heart beats quickly and I am out of breath, so moved or invigorated by the words on the page. They are like fresh air, like coming onto a beautiful vista at the top of a peak. It is then that I put down the book, or pause at the top of the mountain to catch my breath. Have I arrived? Can I rest? Or must I continue? If walking is freedom, must I continue on? Can I stop and turn direction, take another path? How do I take a break to decide where I want to go and with whom?

Related questions come to mind for me as I think about Ferguson’s walking anarchists. For Lily Gair Wilkinson, as Ferguson tells us, the street, the factory, and the café serve as the settings for her textual walking in “Women’s Freedom.” She walks us out of houses and into the public to witness women struggling for freedom. We learn that Gair Wilkinson tends to conflate women’s struggles seeing the “rich man’s wife” as not much different from the prostitute: both have to sell their bodies. Likewise, Gair Wilkinson walks us through women’s radical history to introduce us to inspirational women. Events that might in another context appear discouraging are “remapped as a coherent radical legacy.” In other words, we walk across divisions and through history to keep us moving, to sustain our energy, as we move into a progressive vision of the future (but we are not always moving toward freedom, as we well know). But according to Ferguson, Gair Wilkinson indicates that even if we are feeling out of breath, we can only catch our breath by “going out into the world in freedom.” Going out into the world, though, does not always express freedom. As I am sure Ferguson would agree, having a home to which we can safely retreat may better capture freedom’s pose in another instance.

There is no resting or retreating, however, for Ferguson’s walking anarchists. Ferguson notices that when Gair Wilkinson writes about the anarchist future, a place of rest, her prose suddenly dies. Getting safely to a destination, staying put, or even resting for a spell looks to Ferguson like “the loss of a thinking presence.” In other words, stopping walking is stopping thinking. But maybe, to stop walking isn’t necessarily so easily equated to the stopping of thought. I am drawn to one of Arendt’s postures, one that was used frequently by Margarethe von Trotta in her film Hannah Arendt (2013). Here Arendt is shown reclining, and on a daybed no less. But this is not Ali Wong’s dream of repose. Arendt is not eating bon-bons and watching daytime television. She is smoking and thinking. Lying down and thinking, she is with others, others who are absent but whom she brings to mind. There is a constant conversation going on in Arendt’s head, one that the camera can only figure. ⁷

In her essays on Responsibility and Judgment, Arendt (2003) worries explicitly about not stopping, about not taking the time to lie down. She warns us about process, or at least about processes that move so well, so efficiently, so smoothly, that no one stops to question where they are going, who they serve, what damage they might do and to whom. Here she is thinking of the concept she called “the banality of evil.” By banality of evil, she did not mean to say that evil itself was banal but that the everyday processes organized to bring about the evil, may seem and even be banal processes. In an essay called “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” Arendt proposes three similes that help us understand the way Socrates, for her a critical thinker beyond compare, aroused citizens to think more critically and carefully, to examine their lives and their place in the world, to not get involved in evil processes and commit acts that destroy spaces for freedom. In this essay, she says Socrates is like a gadfly who arouses citizens put to sleep by dogma, like a midwife who helps bring thoughts to life, but is willing to kill those that are stillborn, or what Socrates calls “wind eggs”—and finally as an electric ray whose words paralyze us. Arendt puts it like this:

The electric ray, at first glance, seems to be the opposite of the gadfly; it paralyzes where the gadfly arouses. Yet, what cannot but look like paralysis from the outside and the ordinary course of human affairs is felt as the highest state of being alive. (Arendt 2003, 174–75)

Following Whitehead, Ferguson remarks that “even standing is moving,” an imperceptible “swaying back and forth,” “pivoting on your ankles.” This analysis of standing emphasizes bodily movement but it may also be akin to the mental movement Arendt talks about when she describes the state of looking paralyzed on the outside but alive with the wind of thought on the inside. It also sounds to me like the description I offered earlier when I spoke of reading that leaves me breathless. This is a moment of staying put, stopping and thinking, standing still, refusing movement but being alive to critical thought. We do not need the open air, high peaks, or long winding roads to get us thinking, to get us moving but in a different way. The connection between mind and body here is different than the one Ferguson proposes when she explores walking as a performance of freedom. In Arendt’s example of the stop and think, the mind is vibrantly alive, thinking is exploding, but the body is still. Arendt’s refusal to conflate mind and body here is, I think, useful for helping us see that sometimes when the body keeps moving—when we keep doing our jobs, keep reproducing the unfree conditions of our lives, keep breathing the intoxicating air of inequality—we are unable to stop and think, to stay put and reassess.

If with Whitehead, we see ontological and biological processes as challenging our attempts to divide the world and its immanent experiences into clear and separate categories, we could speak politically about the anarchy of experience, or the experience of anarchy in our encounter with the world, such that walking itself becomes a political example of a series of multidirectional, interactive, even interspecies encounters—bees, rocky terrain, bumps in the road in this picture are transformed from obstacles on our path to themselves constituting the path, creating our sense of direction, even our “choice” of companions. To me, this way of reading Whitehead on process as related to walking as an anarchic experience is akin to the way Beauvoir’s housewives incline toward objects and others in the home. Their experience, too, is immanent, chaotic, anarchic, out of control. Freedom understood this way demands that we acknowledge ontological conditions of non-knowledge, non-sovereignty, inter-species, inter-relational assemblages of affect and agency, but doing so, we can also exert human agency to sometimes stop and think about collective human interventions that we may choose to make (although we can’t control their outcome). Maybe this is a freedom in thinking, a free thinking without banisters (as Arendt would put it), that can be done in various postures: while stooping, walking, reclining, or even on the stairs. Always, though, without the safety of the banister, which I take to mean both that the rules are not clear, and also that the destination is not predetermined as progressive, beautiful, or necessarily opening onto more freedom.

Thinking without banisters and avoiding the easy slopes, I want to challenge Ferguson on the attraction of leaning toward the pose of the walking individual as metaphor and performance of freedom. Ferguson beautifully describes freedom as a bodily practice, a practice of walking out and in the world, encountering others and objects, and walking into a new world. But describing freedom itself as walking does not allow us a moment to stay put and critically examine the processes we are part of. It also neglects to consider other postures and spaces that seem to incline us against freedom, but may instead offer not only a critical perspective on freedom, but an alternative way to realize it. Even when described by Ferguson as enabling and encouraging encounters, and as exemplary of process thinking, walking looks too much like a sovereignly directed solitary activity (although sometimes requiring the aid of canes or wheelchairs). Encounter, on this reading, becomes not the two or more with the transformation of both, but the consciousness raising of the one, the walker, who dreams the dream of freedom.

Walking not alone, but with Beauvoir and Arendt, I challenge what I take to be Ferguson’s too seamless, too smooth, adoption of Whitehead’s process thinking for feminist and anarchist purposes. I worry that Gair Wilkinson’s and David-Néel’s accounts of walking in the world accord more with the kind of freedom that men have often experienced, as noted by Adriana Cavarero. They seem too resonant with the ways that those who move more comfortably (sovereignly, confidently) feel their way in and through the world. They walk with purpose toward new experiences and new encounters, often changing and transforming their own perspectives, but not faltering in their goals or expectations. As shown by Ferguson, Gair Wilkinson and David-Néel use their walking experiences to reflect on the lives of other women, those less fortunate than they are, but they always experience and relate to their encounters as exceptional women. They breathe in the fresh and uncontaminated air, while other women (other workers, others yet on even darker and rockier paths) mostly remain indoors breathing in the recirculating air of too intimate bodies, of soiled sheets, moldy walls, and dusty corners.

Maybe rather than escape the home, women need a “grand domestic revolution” of the sort documented by Dolores Hayden (1981) who is attentive to the design and material culture of homes, neighborhoods, and cities. It could be that the alternative experience of time, and the immanent activities of the kitchen and the home, opens a space for women to stoop, to stop, and to reorganize and intervene to transform the freedom-denying aspects of our material and structural worlds. This is the kind of freedom Ferguson’s anarchist women seem to want, too. Maybe this thinking/doing, freedom in the encounter, is not only a way of conceptualizing freedom, but also a way to remake freedom and remake ourselves. We might miss it though: hidden away in a dark corner of the kitchen, sometimes experienced while lying on a daybed, freedom in the encounter is not a freedom we are trained to notice.