Those familiar with Alan Sokal will recognize this for what it is: fashionable nonsense in the form of confused thinking leading nowhere. She mistakes coincidence for cause (sugar refining enhances whiteness, symbolic of white supremacy on sugar plantations—she dwells repeatedly and at length on this, making one wonder what conclusions she might draw from coal mining); relies on popular entertainment over empirical, reasoned, and systematic evidence (imagine what one could argue for using only Machiavelli and Ayn Rand); and suffers from severe confirmation bias, abridging, and decontextualization in selecting supporting views (of which Hannah Arendt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Michel Foucault feature prominently, though unfortunately none are able to refute their association). While Anker certainly has a deft and poetic manner of writing (I’ve never encountered “anemic” used in so many different contexts), the substance of her arguments and insights (if there are indeed any) are as desultory and disorganized as dust in the wind—which is not a meaningless simile, since indeed dust is apparently a form of freedom fighting against the neoliberal order of tyranny over climate destruction, resource mismanagement, and individual sovereignty.
For the record, I listened to this book, as I often do for those whose topics I am interested in but are outside my field of neuroscience in order to glean the general direction of the arguments before sitting down later to read it in detail. However, Ugly Freedoms will not adorn my bookshelves.
The chapters themselves have the affinity to a sophomore college student’s essays after discovering queer and feminist studies for the first time. I would often forget that the point of the book was to provide new perspectives on freedom as she labored through seemingly endless descriptions of art exhibitions and an almost comprehensive plot synopsis of The Wire. (I’m certain “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” is an excellent artistic expression, but perhaps time would have been better spent following the progression of colonial senses of possession as freedom into modern contexts and how to redefine it.) It also does not seem that the term “ugly freedom” really has a consistent or universal definition, or indeed coherence of its morality: an instance of ugly freedom (peaceful protestation, as in an eye-roll) against the “neoliberal order” is good, but the same act has a damaging substance when enacted on behalf of “colonial and repressive systems of the neoliberal order”. Without systematization, the theory is groundless and can be defended or detested depending on one’s ideals—or, I guess, postmodernism.
When it comes to science, Anker is as lost as her thesis. While she waxes poetic on the interconnectedness of particles in a way that would warm Emerson’s heart, it is entirely irrelevant rhetoric, the kind that prompts affirming mutters and nods at political rallies—like the numerology of “attitude” adding up to 100%. But while she declaims that “scientists have assured us” that microchimerism (when cells from one individual infiltrate another, like circulating fetal cells), along with microbiota (which she dramatically overinterprets, which I can say with some authority as a scientist who studies the gut-brain axis) and the sloughing of our skin cells, is altering our conceptions of selfhood (“Shedding exposes personal sovereignty as border fallacy”, she writes), this drastically misses the mark on biological selfhood. She might as well have focused on somatic mutations leading each of us to be thousands—if not millions—of distinct individual genetic entities formed into a composite. Or why not go atomic such that, given hydrogen exchange of water molecules and the extensive journeys of carbon atoms, that everything has been everything and everyone à la Sagan. Unfortunately for her thesis, which rests heavily and monolithically on this fractured pedestal, this is just not how this works. If she had asked me, I would have suggested she trace how mutual interdependence breaks down the primacy of “personal sovereignty” for individual flourishing as a subversion of traditional freedom but is in itself an “ugly freedom” that can be enacted in the name of climate and resource stewardship.
So why two stars instead of one? I did learn a lot about the settlement of Barbados and its connection to the establishment of the Carolinas.
In sum: I have never fully understood the Conservative distaste for academics and ivory towers until now. Anker’s “Ugly Freedoms” is little more than soignée squawking. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that, as a pilgrim to and not a resident of this field, I simply did not understand the intricate contrivances of what she was trying to say. But, to quote Sokal, “if the texts seem incomprehensible, is is [likely] for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing.”
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