Psychic World
On Shulamith Firestone's second book Airless Spaces
Shulamith “Shulie” Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex crested an early wave of feminist discourse, developing a Marxist, class-based definition of sex and sexual difference. She brought together such disparate ideas as raising children communally and the state’s growing abuse of technology. Unlike the work of her contemporaries Janice Raymond or Mary Daly, it’s stood the test of time—or at least weathered it. (Angela Davis was among Firestone’s critics. The Dialectic’s ideas about Black women and the Oedpial complex are brutally cringe-inducing and wildly off base.) Her materialist course correction of second-wave feminism, vibrant arguments for total revolution, and utopian dreaming allowed her to rethink the work of Marx, Freud, Beauvoir for a new social context.
It’s the personal life of Firestone though that continues to elude us. After her death in 2012, Susan Faludi wrote about her nearly anonymous death. She was discovered alone in her apartment, dead for perhaps a month before being found by authorities. What happened? Well, it’s no murder mystery. She faced debilitating schizophrenic symptoms, reduced to begging on the streets. Her symptoms worsened after the death of her brother and further accelerated when her parents moved to Israel. She subsequently cut ties with them over their differing views on religion and her feminist organizing. Her father died not long after, the last in the line of tumultuous events that set Firestone down her grim, self-isolating path.
The Dialectic of Sex holds some clues on Firestone’s prickly future. Only a few years after the book’s publication, she was accused of being too egotistical and ousted from multiple groups she herself formed. She refused to do mundane scut work, apparently firing back, “I’m an intellectual, I don't sweep floors.” She wanted to be the American Simone de Beavoir and wanted others to treat her as such. Unsurprisingly, they resented her instead. Even as she held women in high esteem, she was not always so cradled. It was many years before a support group formed around her and tried to save her from homelessness. Successful for a time–and even leading to her sole literary work, Airless Spaces’, publication–the rag tag care team eventually fell apart after members moved away or fell sick. Airless Spaces is dedicated to Lourdes Cintron, one of the women who helped her during this time.
While writing her first book Firestone argued that the private life of women was the psychic space where radical possibilities took root. For instance, the long phone calls women have with one another after being dumped: “These are not trivial gossip sessions at all (as women prefer men to believe), but desperate strategies for survival. More real brilliance goes into one one-hour coed telephone dialogue about men than into that same coed’s four years of college study, or for that matter, than into most male political maneuvers.”
Without the full revolt against capitalist-patriarchal society for which Firestone advocated , however, it was all too easy for alliances to disintegrate. All too easy for the radical possibilities she called for to be suffocated by racial and class differences and for feminist organizing to turn towards more mainstream, achievable goals.
Defeat did not suit her. For nearly thirty years after the publication of The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone was silent. From 1970 to 1998 no one heard much from the iconic feminist—until she published the jagged, visceral collection of genre-bending stories Airless Spaces with Semiotexte. Newly reissued with a new foreword by Chris Kraus, the book has not held the same cultural position as her first juggernaut. The pieces included in Airless Spaces are, ostensibly, short stories–little hymns and midrashim about the lives of a rotating cast of depressives drifting in and out of psych wards. Ranging from tales of forced hospitalizations to meeting Valerie Solanas, the characters that populate this claustrophobic collection seem to share the same down-and-out suffocation that Firestone endured throughout the latter half of her life. In a broad sense, Airless Spaces chronicles the fall from Firestone’s failed revolt, the cost of living in a world where revolution has failed. In a more focused sense, however, Airless Spaces asks how we care for one another when the mental health industrial complex fails us? This seems the main thread of the collection that Sianne Ngai presciently reviewed in 2012 shortly before Firestone’s passing (Literature of the psych ward has seen a resurgence in the past few years, perhaps an alternative to the softcore slop of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). In Airless Spaces, one character remarks that electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is not what it once was. This is a flinty book about death, moral decay, the sterility of hospitals, learning to use plastic utensils after a breakdown, and the breaking apart of feminist comrades. It is, as Ngai expresses, a book about political depression. No cruel optimism to be found here. Just the opposite.
The difficulties of female homosociality form the bedrock of Airless Spaces. If love animated Firestone’s early political writing, here love will be forgotten. Women will be ignored on planes, in psych wards, in doctor’s offices. No longer objects of desire, used up by life, they must turn to smaller joys. There are less and less gossipy phone calls to sort through the wreckage of life. Loneliness is a killer, the cost of camaraderie gone sour. By the time she wrote Airless Spaces, Firestone no longer seemed to believe that the private space of women was a de facto space of liberation. Women can, in fact, be cruel. Firestone was often unsparing in her ideology critiques.. She thought women put too much stock in love, forcing themselves into smaller and smaller roles in order to keep a mate. “They look alike, they think alike, and even worse, they are so stupid they believe they are not alike.” This bitterness only increased after the publication of The Dialectic of Sex. Dedication towards feminism requires fortitude. It requires being wrong, being ostracized, learning how to both scold and be scolded. The problem is the twilight hour when you must go home, perhaps alone, and realize that all politics come to roost in the bedroom. There you must live with your choices. Throughout the collection, women disappoint one another. More often than not they fare best when they leave each other to their own devices. That is, until their isolation forces them back into the hospital.
Emotions are secondary to the actual events that occur, forcing the lives of characters forward into the future one way or another. Ready or not, here I come. Soaked in gray, the women of these stories eke out the mundane tasks of life without any sense of direction. By zooming in on the minutiae–the privileges afforded to those who can perform basic social niceties in the psych ward when they “do well,” Firestone explores the class distinctions of the mentally unwell. Some people have visitors, others don’t. Some people fight and claw for privileges believing them to be their right, others don’t. The do’s and don’ts of the psych ward are often more apparent to those afraid to make a wrong move lest their status plummet even lower. The haughty and rich have to be humbled first before they learn to mind their manners and attend group activities in order to further their own goals. Everyone is one wrong step away from losing their access to the outside world. One woman is declared mentally unfit and has her property stolen by her brother. Depressives, anorexics, basketcases, schizophrenics, and beggars alike populate the dreary New York streets and public housing, brought low and leveled under the fluorescent lights. The ward, like class, is a container. It keeps everyone in their place.
Feminism is explored only as a grim pastime, one that fell apart due to egos and power-jockeying. Love is another failed pursuit, one rife with the aesthetics of silence. Patiently, Firestone and her creations wait for the end. They watch the clock run out. On their time inside the psych ward, on their lives, on their dwindling bank accounts.
In her introduction, Kraus likens the short chapters of Airless Spaces to Talmudic mishals. These are short rhetorical stories like fables or parables meant to impart wisdom. The chapters aren’t overly moral, though Kraus also points out that there are sections for Losers but none for Winners because, “whoever wins really?” Indeed, in the first few stories of the book we encounter women flummoxed by plastic wrap, dreams of sinking ships, and forced showers in the psych ward. Small redemptive moments come later but only with great cost. Limitations fence salvation into small holding cells, rooms barren with little opportunity for individual control. The hospital in question is called “Beth Abraham” in the book, likely a stand-in for Beth Israel. The names sound almost like synagogues, shelter from the storm of a godless world.
For one woman named Holly, sleep is the only solution. Until she dozes off so much that “her body could hibernate no more.” In the ward, there’s little to do but snore the time away or pace the tiny hallway. Holly turns from a chronic oversleeper into an insomniac in short order. The hospital’s perceived ability to cure such women is, in reality, a corrosive bait and switch. Doctors hold a tremendous amount of power within the confines of the ward but rarely have enough time or energy to correct the societal issues that land someone there in the first place. Finding an ally can be tricky. Trying to befriend another in the ward is dangerous—easier to fall deeper down the rabbit hole if your new friend is tanking too. “Debra Daughtery,” for instance, follows a woman who gets out but quickly turns to alcohol to cope. The narrator abandons this new friend rather than sink alongside her.
Trying to go it alone is no better, however. Another narrator–and we can never be sure if we’re following the same one from one story to the next–doesn’t “have a friend [she] was speaking to and… had no way to pay her rent.” She tries to recruit a cute Turkish filmmaker to pay her rent but can’t bring herself to ask him. Neurosis festers. One of the more touching stories follows Bettina, a woman struggling for control of the thermostat. She enjoys the cool air and the ability to sleep “absolutely still as a corpse.” Such dignity—even the dignity of a corpse—must be snatched, stolen in small gulps of hope, rather than outright asked for. No one’s in a place to make demands in the ward. Just try asking for a sweater.
When I was in the psych ward a few years ago, I watched men and women come and go with blank stares, struggling to talk about themselves with the dignity of self-worth. Instead we all looked down at the ground, shuffling around quietly, trying to reclaim our individuality in small gestures. A band t-shirt, a different lunch order, extra cranberry juice.
The ward is an abyss, a place both of promise and purgatory. A waiting room to try and crash against the borders of life and death. Maybe if you sit in silence long enough you won’t want to kill yourself. Maybe something will touch you or you’ll see people show up for you or you’ll get on the right cocktail of drugs. It’s difficult though to get the attention of a nurse. They simply have so many people to care for. Triage more than reparation, usually. When my boyfriend visited me, they were chastised for sitting on the bed with me and hugging me. Seems odd to deny the touch of another during these abysmal times. In the psych ward the conversations I had with another young woman meant the world to me. They were windows of solidarity—rare, fragile, and small. But they reminded me that the asylum was not at the ends of the earth. Just a remote island where we were all passing time.
Solidarity in the ward is rare for Firestone’s characters as well. Even harder, though, is maintaining contact with the outside. Occasionally the well-behaved are taken on “group walks.” (I myself never experienced this. It’s hard to imagine a modern day psych ward field trip.) Others have occasional visitors or long-winded telephone calls. When one woman watches another slowly become a ghost, ignored by her sister and the nurses, she realizes how her own predicament is not that different. “She too had a sister whom she called, her closest family connection. Would her sister one day get tired of the “negativity” and just leave her inside for good, the phone calls gradually easing off?” The mirroring experience is sometimes just the thing to jolt the narrator into living. Or, permission to spiral deeper into a depression hole. It depends on whether the revelation is followed by the “unaccustomed tenderness of gesture.” Such touch is ephemeral, often ignored by others, the wearing of a special necklace or a visitor tucking a patient in with rare kindness.
The real point of the ward is optimization. The ability to return to work. Many of the characters in Airless Spaces enter vocational training to middling results. Who wants to hire a crazy? Brian McNair, one of the rare male protagonists, struggles to learn Mavis Beacon or walk enough dogs on time. He’s running on the hamster wheel against time, against capital. His lease looms. He tries to read What Color is Your Parachute? like so many before and after him. “How long did they let you stay in ‘prevoc’ before they started asking questions about ‘voc?’”
To stabilize is to re-enter wage work, to attribute to the economy. Many people who end up in the ward are there because they’ve lost the will not just to live, but to work. But even successfully returning to work presents its own complications: Mcnaircan’t earn too much or he’ll be disqualified from SSI mental disability. There’s a precarity to being unwell—on both sides. Contribute but not too much. Get better, but not too much better, or you’ll be forced to make exponentially more. That’s difficult if you’re already facing economic barriers. The likelier thing is you’ll make too much, get kicked off SSI and then drop right back down the food chain a few months later when you can’t afford bills. I didn’t go to the psych ward until I had healthcare. Even then, I was afraid to take time off work. I was not optimizing.
The beings that McNair feels the most compassion for are dogs. Walking them around the block, rather than the crushing treadmill of bureaucracy, is the highlight of his week. Such little moments of hope both in and out of the psych ward are hard won. Many characters cannot provide one another with anything but the comfort of their company. They don’t have the money or connections to help them publish philosophical tracts (“Stanley Moss”), repair radios or faucets (“Radio Station Wiss”), or buy more than one scoop of ice cream (“Loving the Hospital”). They must make do with the fraught company given by the other wards of the state. Competitive as they may be with one another at times, they are all each other has. Redemption is modest. Not in crescendos of emotional release, but in recognizing small moments that rekindle their human spirit. These are rarely political wins. They wear strange necklaces, get a few minutes of the perfect room temperature, briefly find a beautiful song on the radio, or eat a few good macrobiotic meals a week.
By zeroing in on such intimate moments of desperation, Firestone materializes the stakes of loneliness and painful reliance on state for care. The crumbling infrastructure is clearly not enough. No bread, no roses. The state replaces hope with cookie-cutter resources. Charts to fill out, activity groups to attend. But no one can address the root issue: capitalism. In fact, the rich and poor alike end up in the ward. No one escapes the whirlpool of depression. Like dominos, we’re only ever a few bad events away from ending up inside. This could be a rallying cry to organize–we’re not so different, etc–but it’s difficult for those reliant on doctors and nurses to shift the conditions of the medical industrial complex. Just read Health Communism: Vierkant and Adler-Bolton’s book chronicles the upstream battle of the anti-psychiatry movement and the idea of a surplus population that can be relied on as a source of medical and political extraction. It’s rare for doctors to work with patients rather than on them. Force is more profitable than cooperation. By the end of a stint, one just wants to get out. No one really buys that it’s helping them get better. It’s a stopgap. Many leave just as depressed, sometimes more, merely having bought time and (possibly) a more tangible connection to vital resources.
The penultimate section, “Obits,” is perhaps the portion most often read for its more autofictional passages. The first follows two women, Rozzie and Myrna, and their parasocial orbit over the years. After falling out over the implosion of a feminist group, Rozzie loses touch with Myrna. Worse, Myrna passively supported those who wanted Rozzie out. This wasn’t that far from Firestone’s own experience on the feminist organizing circuit. Rozzie’s resignation from the group is a political statement, she ends up crawling away from those who once so revered her. Only later does she hear the whole tragic story of Myrna’s life—decaying health issues and an abusive husband. Elsewhere, Firestone pays homage to Allen Ginsburg as “Jeremy Salzburg.” “Probably,” she writes, “he was the bad boy he was reputed to be, homosexual to the core.” Yet the narrator is enamored by his “essential goodness and rightness of judgement.” When the narrator goes to meet Valerie Solanas (who isn’t given a gimmicky nickname), she doesn’t view it as a meeting of equals but as a morbid investigation. She believes Solanas’ work is “a glorification of women as they are in their oppressed state.” Eventually, Solanas becomes a beggar, struggling for quarters and shelter. The descent of a woman into delusions and poverty.
Some of the other autobiographical stories hit closer to home. Firestone writes a moving ode to her brother in the last section of the book. Nicknamed Danny in the book, she marvels “how similar our paths had been, even with no contact for over a decade.” Before they lose touch they share a touching discussion of Dostoevsky. Then, later, separated by geography, they both explore mysticism and Zen. Their investigations into the metaphysics of life take on a new poignancy after his passing.. Her brother, like Firestone, rejected his family and sought out a Zen center to dwell during his final days. Even so, her brother had been rebuked for speaking in “a Talmudical way antithetical to the Zen Path.” A stirring likeness that goes unacknowledged. She ends by pointing out that her brother’s death, and the theories surrounding it, led to her “shattering nervous breakdown.” A mystery that dogs Firestone for her whole life.
There’s another key suicide that Firestone’s autofictional self takes stock of. After a male friend kills himself, she reads his final note and is shocked to read his sign off: “I die with a smile on my lips.” The narrator can’t deny the likeness to her book that argued women should enact a “smile boycott.” The book in question is The Dialectic of Sex, the book that ended up costing Firestone so much.
While Airless Spaces can be read as a more straightforward account of her time in the psych ward, its absences are loud. Firestone has been disabused of her notion that good politics is enough to save her. Constricted by her mental health and the weight of her dwindling class status, she wrote in spits and spurts rather than delivering another mammoth polemic. This is not the only way to delve into politics. Literature is not merely mimetic, showing us how to live. It can also illuminate the cracks in Leftist orthodoxy, the inertia of those left behind. Foregrounding disabled voices as political, as in a sense, a class-system of its own, is inherently radical. The psych ward could be an organizing space, or at the very least, a psychic arena for reflection on healthcare, liberation, and class. Firstone, tired as she is, lets us fill in those gaps for ourselves.
Writing was the way that Firestone married the overpinning structures of society to the minutiae of her own fractured existence. It was her way out. Writing is, as Hil Malatino writes in Side Affects, is a strategy to navigate chaos and dysphoria, a way of facing a blank page and organizing one’s life into something more manageable, more controlled. After one character in Airless Spaces is released from the ward she struggles to get back into the swing of things. “Once in a while she prodded herself to write, but the old excitement of creation did not return, or if it did, it fizzled by morning after her nightly medication. It was a dry fuck, every word painful and laborious. But like sex itself, even masturbation, it was the initiative that was most lacking.”
Therein lies the crux of the matter. Initiative is difficult to rely on. It’s a resource that comes and goes, natural as it is. Just like political defeat, personal tragedy can grind our motivation to a halt. Sometimes, as in Firestone’s case, the two are intertwined. Cast aside by her sisters in Marx, she had to scrounge together a living on her own. Yet the stories of Airless Spaces reveal the possibility of hyperlocal community, the redemption of the world to come. Tikkun olam. While Firestone doesn’t write too much about the women who rallied around her during these intense psychic episodes, they were the glue that allowed her to write such a difficult novel. Firestone is a fierce chronicler of her past friends and comrades, writing meditations on their demise. Even if they are no longer with her, Firestone remembers them with surprising tenderness. She remembers a moment when “Yvonne” accompanied her to get a paycheck from a withholding boss. She remembers feeding Valerie Solanas in her time of need, giving her a few books. Who knows, she seems to muse, everyone is one or two bad moves away from ending up on the street.
We must be each other’s comrades as we repair the world, building the possible utopia Firestone dreams of. Even egoists and clumsy neurotics need community. Together, perhaps, we can “create paradise on earth anew.” But, as Airless Space suggests, such community can only truly emerge in the course of a successful revolution–and vice versa. If Eden comes again to Earth, the gossip of women will certainly play a role. The material stakes of feminist continue to confound us, long after Firestone’s powerful texts. We will do more than wash the dishes this time. We will win.
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