Nuance Interview Questions
Kanisha Dezarn
Maggie Nelson has never been one to shirk a knotty problem. The nonfiction author's books, especially 2011's The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning and 2016's The Argonauts, make room for the gentle yet persistent picking apart of ideas and ideals, on the hunt for more nuanced appraisals of the world around us. Her work, which earned her a MacArthur Foundation Fellow award last year, blends art criticism, philosophy, and memoir with startling clarity.
Over the phone from her Californian home, Nelson seemed happy to dive headfirst into a discussion about nuance in the internet age. She laughed often, and was generous with her time. We talked about social media's constraints on communication, Hannah Black's letter to The Whitney, and what she's writing next.
The post-Harvey-Weinstein wave is really fascinating because you're trying to identify a kind of behavior that is unacceptable and appalling that exists for a lot of people on a continuum. A lot of women are familiar with everything from the unappreciated leer to sexual assault. So on the one hand I think it is exciting when there is a wave, and on the other hand, it can't be an excuse to throw nuance out the window. I think there are ways in which nuance and strong tides can work together. I don't think they always have to be jettisoned one for the other.
I like the way that books can take a long time to write; they occupy a kind of space-time that is fascinating to me. I don't want to be old fogey-ish about it at all, but I don't see people not reading books. I see people still appreciating book time.
William James said it best when he was talking in The Principles of Psychology about how thinking or consciousness is kind of like a bird in that it takes flight and lands from branch to branch. We see the points of landing, maybe those are the categories, but most of the time is spent in the flight. That's when he starts talking about we should have a word for the feeling of "of" or the feeling of "but" or the feeling of "if."
Hopping from branch to branch is the way that our minds work. We suddenly, seamlessly, flash between something academic and something visceral. That is what it feels like to be inside a body.
I was interested to read that you started out in dance. Over the past three or four years, a lot of the electronic world that I write about has become intertwined with dance. I just saw a show by the artist Xavier Cha that was part opera, part dance, part play, part poetry, and part experimental score. It reminded me of your work in that it was fractured, but it all made sense together. It's really interesting to me that there has been this movement towards dance in underground scenes.
Super interesting. It makes me sad that I don't live in New York anymore because I am sure that all the interesting stuff is going on there. I always found dance both physically rewarding and intellectually very interesting. I think some of the smartest people I've ever met were dancers. Somebody was telling me about something in the Bay Area where Judith Butler just did a dance with somebody, and my friend Jack just did a dance thing with Boychild. I know Matthew Barney is working on a piece right now that's utilizing a lot of dancers from the improv scene that I used to know about in New York. I think, for me, dance on a very personal level was a vacation from the linguistic. It seems very obvious that I probably could and should pursue some kind of marriage of the two, but I actually really value dance for its non-linguistic status.
People always talk about bad dance and bad poetry as being particularly insufferable forms of art. In my formative years in New York, I ran open mics at the Poetry Project, and I went to Judson Church every Monday. I regularly saw so much dance and poetry that was not curated to be the "best," it was truly experimental. It just gave me enjoyment of people trying things out.
[With my own books,] to me they're all kind of gestures in space that I made and left behind behind me in a world that I don't feel that worked up about. It's not really about masterpieces, it's about flow. I learned a lot from [writing my books], and I learned a lot from dance about composing in the moment. I did a lot of improvisation, and I think that kind of skill set is very related to what thinking is. With writing, you get to go back and do a lot more work than you do in an improvisation performance, but I think there are a lot of freedom skills I learned by letting myself speak with my body in public, that I feel like I've kept with me.
That's really interesting. I miss dancing. In my body, I actually have dreams that my extension is the same as it used to be, or I could do all these things. Then I wake up and I realize it's all gone.
When I was writing The Art of Cruelty, by the time I'd finished it, there kind of became a shadow subject throughout the book which was about the freedom to walk out of something. It's kind of back to Rancire and The Emancipated Spectator, and some of those questions that I had there, and also about, in a more political sense, what it means to live in a time or country where [there's] a surrender of self-government, [which] is obviously very appealing to many people in a new upswing of desiring fascism that we've seen before. I'm interested in the emotional structure of that.
Those moments in The Art of Cruelty where you were talking about your very personal response to works of art in the moment, and then your changing response to certain pieces over time, was so freeing. The biggest problem that I feel in the world that there are so many deliberate restrictions to people gaining knowledge, and the fact that you were offering ways in is really generous. An early editor always told me, "You have to assume intelligence of your readers, not knowledge." We should all have access to thinking in these loose, free ways.
You bring into being who and what exists in the world by what people put out into the world, by what people consume, by what they know and talk about. I think, as we can all see playing out right now, if you pour a bunch of poison and toxicity into the bloodstream and presume that's what people need and want, then that's what you're going to get.
With the publishing world, all my books, I turn in when they're whole and say, "Do you want this or not?" but it's never occurred to me to write something that met what somebody else thought was something people needed to read. This doesn't always happen but The Argonauts was an astonishing experience because that book was rejected, as all my books are, as too niche, or only for academic feminists, or whatever. And then a lot of people found something in it. I've seen the cutest things online, like of younger people making lists of all the references and giving links to all of them, teaching themselves things through the book, and that's how people learn things. That's how I learned things! That's how I learn things everyday still. Getting people excited about that, as opposed to thinking that it's a drag, is really cool.
When my kids were in little, their elementary school taught them social/emotional skills. Their goal was to make kids better, more expansive people. Our education systems today ignore that whole-child approach. We focus on test scores, and grade markers. And we put people out there to contribute to a society that they are not very capable of understanding.
I have the same problem. Except I'm liberal and cannot have a nuanced discussion with progressives in their spaces. They won't see the nuance in issues. They only see their buzzwords. And once you violate a buzzword the whataboutism, the clown emojis, and the accusations that I'm MAGA come out.
A few weeks ago I had an encounter on Twitter with someone who I think I have interviewed on the radio. \u201CI think,\u201D because, on Twitter, he was hiding behind the name of his right-wing, \u201Clibertarian\u201D organization, and not using his name. My name is out there for all to see.
The interview on my show was about a bill in the 2017 legislature to deregulate the energy industry. His organization was for it. Unions were against it. And, of course, since it was Nevada Public Radio, the producer had to book \u201Cboth sides\u201D of the \u201Cargument,\u201D rather than simply getting the bill\u2019s sponsor on to explain it and having me ask the questions that were coming up from those for and against, or talking to energy and economics experts about how this had panned out in other states.
The point was, the cell phone industry wasn\u2019t competitive then and isn\u2019t competitive now. They all \u201Cmagically\u201D offer the same types of plans and plan discounts and charge you for the same services. They may not be colluding, but at the very least, they\u2019re watching and mimicking each other.
But this guy couldn\u2019t - or wouldn\u2019t - see the larger argument. He could only see that I had used the word with the prefix for \u201Cone\u201D instead of the word with the prefix for \u201Cthe few.\u201D
At some point later in the conversation, I responded to something he said by saying, \u201COh! You see democracy and capitalism as the same thing.\u201D He sputtered, and looked at me as if I had just said I was dating his mother.
The Twitter \u201Cconversation\u201D went along the same lines, but this time it was about him defending racism in the south, by blaming \u201Cbad apple\u201D cops for pulling over a Black family for a ticky-tacky law about tinted windows, then having the cops assume that the parents were on drugs, then forcibly drug testing them with no probable cause, then taking away the father, then stopping the mother from bailing the father out until she took a drug test in the car in front of her children, then having THE CHILDREN TAKEN AWAY as soon as she walked in the door to bail out her husband.
This was in rural Tennessee. The family was driving from their home in Atlanta to a funeral in Chicago. The state had their children - ages 7, 5, 3, 2 and 4 months - from February till April. Or a third of the baby\u2019s life.
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