Booknotes: Everybody: A Book About Freedom by Olivia Laing
“The free body: what a beautiful idea….our bodies are full of power, and … their power is not despite but because of their manifest vulnerabilities.” (p15)
A beautiful, sometimes harrowing, but ultimately hopeful book that is what it says on the cover: a exploration of bodies and of freedom, and the lives, works, and thoughts of people who have explored the relationship between the two.
The specter haunting this book is Wilhelm Reich, onetime student of Sigmund Freud (who also gets explicit scrutiny in these pages) who ran with his ideas into new territory regarding sex, healing, technology, and politics, but was ultimately undone and condemned for how far that journey took him. Reich long saw the need for thinking through how our bodies can be prisons, but also forests, endless and growing. The book summarizes and ponders Reich’s life and thought, deftly intertwining the two and finding much to love and much to dismiss.
Reich’s life and works are the skeleton of this book, but the cast of characters who populate its rich narrative is astonishingly broad. Laing devotes great consideration to everyone from the Marquis de Sade to Malcolm X, Susan Sontag to Kate Bush, Andrea Dworkin to Nina Simone. Artists receive thoughtful attention, including Ana Mendieta (whose graphic and harrowing work on female violence was inspired by a murder in my home state of Iowa), Philip Guston, and Agnes Martin. Laing gives time and space to all these thoughtful people and more, probing how they work through the tensions and contradictions of living in a body alone and living in a world together.
The chapters are thematically organized, with the body always as a vantage point, but seen through different lenses and abstractions.
Chapter one “Unwell” is about health and sickness, and the various ways that, despite the abstraction and medicalization of the body, people have long understood that “There was no clean line between the emotional and physical, no safe border between the self and world.” (p 46). Reich and Sontag are the major protagonists here, as they explored in their own ways how health and sickness reverberated with cultural, psychological and structural forces.
Chapter two “Sex Acts” explores the dangers and possibilities of sex. Here Laing elaborates Reich’s theory of the orgasm as a mechanism of regulating and freeing the self, and the ways that this grew from earlier research and manifested in later liberation movements. I was riveted by her accounts of the world surrounding the Institute of Sexual Research and Magnus Hirschfield in pre-war Berlin, whose blowing open of the notion of sealed bounded gender and sexual categories is astonishingly prescient.
Chapter three “In Harm’s Way” is about violence, its costs, consequences, and how it has been interpellated and resisted. As Laing notes, violence is not merely an external force, but something that reverberates and resonates in our bodies: “Violence occurs when one person treats another as expendable, an object, garbage, but part of the violence, and the abiding horror of the violent transaction, is that their humanity does not vanish, but is made to coexist with being an object…” (p122). The major figure here is Andrea Dworkin, whose fierce and uncompromising indictment of violence against women (she called it a “silent genocide”) grew out of her own experiences of abuse by seemingly progressive men. By way of Angela Carter, Laing interrogates some of Dworkin’s broadsides, particularly about pornography, and the Marquis de Sade, whom Laing sees as a much more ethically and politically ambivalent figure than Dworkin’s famous take-down would suggest.
Chapter Four “A Radiant Net” is about the relation of technology and the body, and the possibility of annihilating the forces acting on it through technology. One of Reich’s most famous creations, the Orgone Box, is the primary figure here, as well as his persecution and breakdown the resulted from it. Laing also explores the abstract, unembodied artwork of Agnes Martin, where fields of color and lines form grids and patterns that detach the body from the material world. But Laing ultimately moves away from such obliterating, anti-embodied tendencies, arguing, in a rich and emphatic passage that: “We’re not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types, subject to expectations, demands, prohibitions and punishments that vary enormously according to the kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting. Freedom isn’t simply a matter of indulging all material cravings, Sade-style. It’s also about finding ways to live without being hampered, hobbled, damaged or actively destroyed by a constant reinforcement of ideas about what is permitted for the category of body to which you’ve been assigned.” (p 179)
Chapter Five “Cells” is about prison of all kinds, but most specifically the carceral institutions, like the one where Reich ultimately died. This chapter also juxtaposes the lives of Bayard Rustin and Malcolm X, for both of whom prison was a crucible of their lives and source of momentum for personal and social transformation. There is also a long discussion of Edith Jacobson, Reich’s colleague whose imprisonment by the Nazi’s in the 1930s spurred the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society to appease them (leading to Reich’s public break with Freud), but also inspired Jacobson herself to write one of the first studies of the psychological effects of imprisonment, serving as a touchstone for prison abolitionists up to the present day.
Chapter seven “Block/Swarm” is about the experience and potential of crowds, particularly public protesting crowds. Here Laing draws on her own experiences as an environmental protester in England in the 1990s. She parallels these personal and moving passages with a discussion of Reich’s experiences with labor and antifascist unrest in Vienna in the early 20th century, and how these moments shaped his later work. But she counter-poses these emancipatory movements with fascist marches, including the 2017 march on Charlottesville, Virginia. Her interlocutor here is the expressionist painter turned protest painter Philip Guston. In his work, which illuminated but caricatured the Klu Klux Klan, she finds astonishing insight about the psychology of fascism and prejudice: “The enemy body is always portrayed as being fashioned from grosser material, obscenely sexual or avaricious, greedy, primitive, uncontrolled, infectious, spilling over, barely human, a kind of disgusting fleshy jelly. It makes me wonder if what drives prejudice is at root horror of the body itself. After all, as Sade observed, the body can be a terrifying place: open and insatiable, helpless and dependent. Hatred is a way of displacing this annihilating fear onto other bodies, asserting a magnificent autonomy, a freedom from the sullying, hopelessly interdependent life of flesh.” (p. 272)
In the concluding Chapter “The 22nd Century”, Laing follows the life of Nina Simone, whose art and talent grew out of her body, her embodiment as a Black woman, and which explored and pushed against the limits of freedom. Though not from this chapter, Laing’s earlier words are most resonant here: “…the element of the body that interested me was the experience of living inside it, inhabiting a vehicle that was so cataclysmically vulnerable, so unreliably subject to pleasure and pain, hatred and desire” (p5) Simone’s career and work became increasingly political as the walls of the world closed in around her. This feeling of claustrophobia and the possibilities it engenders ends the book on a propulsive but hopeful note. As Laing says, on the last page: “This is what one body can do for another: manifest a freedom that is shared, that slips under the skin. Freedom doesn’t mean being unburdened by the past. It means continuing into the future, dreaming all the time…Imagine for a minute, what it would be like to inhabit a body without fear, without the need for fear. Just imagine what we could do. Just imagine the world we could build.” (p.309)
This is a book that deserves repeated readings. Laing’s reach and insights are wide and rich, and her prose is beautiful and languid and poetic.
