Poetry appears as a phenomenon of freedom

The poetic image is an emergence from language, it is always a little above the language of signification. By living the poems we read, we have then the salutary experience of emerging. This, no doubt, is emerging at short range. But these acts of emergence are repeated; poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity. These linguistic impulses, which stand out from the ordinary rank of pragmatic language, are miniatures of the vital impulse. A micro-Bergsonism that abandoned the thesis of language-as-instrument in favor of the thesis of language-as-reality would find in poetry numerous documents on the intense life of language.

Thus, along with considerations on the life of words, as it appears in the evolution of language across the centuries, the poetic image, assa a mathematician would say, presents us with a sort of differential of this evolution. A great verse can have a great influence on the soul of a language. It awakens images that had been effaced, at the same time that it confirms the unforeseeable nature of speec. And if we render speech unforeseeable, is this not an apprenticeship of freedom? What delight the poetic imagination takes in making game of censors! Time was when the poetic arts codified the licenses to be permitted. Contemporary poetry, however, has introduced fredom in the very body of the language. As a result, poetry appears as a phenomenon of freedom.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. xxiii

Alienation is a mode of enablement

The overall aim must therefore be picked out as an unrelenting project to unbind the necessities of this world and transform them into materials for the further construction of freedom. Such an image of emancipation can never be satisfied with or condensed into a static society, but will instead continually strain beyond any limitations. Freedom is a synthetic enterprise, not a natural gift.

Underlying this idea of emancipation is a vision of humanity as a transformative and constructible hypothesis: one that is built through theoretical and practical experimentation and elaboration. There is no authentic human essence to be realised, no harmonious unity to be returned to, no unalienated humanity obscured by false mediations, no organic wholeness to be achieved. Alienation is a mode of enablement, and humanity is an incomplete vector of transformation. What we are and what we can become are open-ended projects to be constructed in the course of time.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) p. 82

Emancipation is not about detaching from the world and liberating a free soul

Whereas negative freedom is concerned with assuring the formal right to avoid interference, 'synthetic freedom' recognises that a formal right without a material capacity is worthless. Under a democracy, for example, we are all formally free to run for political leadership. But without the financial and social resources to run a campaign, this is a meaningless freedom. Equally, we are all formally free to not take a job, but most of us are nevertheless practically forced into accepting whatever is on offer. In either case, various options may be theoretically available, but for all practical purposes are off the table. This reveals the significance of having the means to realise a formal right, and it is this emphasis on the means and capacities to act that is crucial for a leftist approach to freedom. As Marx and Engels wrote, 'it is possible to achieve real liberation only in the real world and by real means'. Understood in this way freedom and power become intertwined. If power is the basic capacity to produce intended effects in someone or something else, then an increase in our ability to carry out our desires is simultaneously an increase in our freedom. The more capacity we have to act, the freer we are. One of the biggest indictments of capitalism is that it enables the freedom to act for only a vanishingly small few. A primary aim of a postcapitalist world would therefore be to maximise synthetic freedom, or in other words, to enable the flourishing of all humanity and the expansion of our collective horizons. Achieving this involves at least three different elements: the provision of the basic necessities of life, the expansion of social resources, and the development of technological capacities. Taken together, these form a synthetic freedom that is constructed rather than natural, a collective historical achievement rather than the result of simply leaving people be. Emancipation is thus not about detaching from the world and liberating a free soul, but instead a matter of constructing and cultivating the right attachments.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) pp. 79-80

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived And What I Lived For (Penguin Books, 2005) p. 59

It is never too late to give up on our prejudices

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up on our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What every body echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilising rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived And What I Lived For (Penguin Books, 2005) p. 7

Choice is lost in the maze of generations

Love makes men foolish. I speak as a victim myself. We are taken out of our own care and it then remains to be seen only if fate will show to us some share of mercy. Or little. Or none.

Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose. But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast and endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life. [...] Our plans are predicated upon a future unknown to us. The world takes its form hourly by a weighing of things at hand, and while we may seek to puzzle out that form we have no way to do so.

Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (Picador, 2011) pp. 196-197

The pursuit of art is the pursuit of liberty

The pursuit of art, then, by artist or audience, is the pursuit of liberty. If you accept that, you see at once why truly serious people reject and mistrust the arts, labelling them as "escapism". The captured soldier tunnelling out of prison, the runaway slave, and Solzhenitsyn in exile, are escapists. Aren't they? The definition also helps explain why all healthy children can sing, dance, paint, and play with words; why art is an increasingly important element in psychotherapy; why Winston Churchill painted, why mothers sing cradle-songs, and what is wrong with Plato's Republic.

Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (The Orion Publishing Group, 2015) p. 6

The current destruction of the city

Universal history was born in cities, and it reached maturity with the city's decisive victory over the country. For Marx, one of the greatest merits of the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class was the fact that it "subjected the country to the city," whose "very air is liberating." but if the history of the city is a history of freedom, it is also a history of tyranny – a history of state administrations controlling not only the countryside but the cities themselves. The city has served as the historical battleground for the struggle for freedom without yet having been able to win it. The city is the focal point of history because it embodies both a concentration of social power, which is what makes historical enterprises possible, and a consciousness of the past. The current destruction of the city is thus merely one more reflection of humanity's failure, thus far, to subordinate the economy to historical consciousness; of society's failure to unify itself by reappropriating the powers that have been alienated from it.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) pp. 125-126

The modern increase in leisure time

There can be no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle activity is nullified – all real activity having been forcibly channeled into the global construction of the spectacle. Thus, what is referred to as a "liberation from work," namely the modern increase in leisure time, is neither a liberation of work itself not a liberation from the world shaped by this kind of work. None of the activity stolen by work can be regained by submitting to what that work has produced.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) pp. 39-40

The war of emancipation is not over

Public power portends incompleteness of individual freedom, but its retreat or disappearance augurs the practical impotence of legally victorious freedom. The history of modern emancipation veered from a confrontation with the first danger to facing the second. To deploy Isaiah Berlin's terms, one can say that, once the 'negative freedom' had been struggled for and won, the levers needed to transform it into 'positive freedom' – that is the freedom to set the range of choices and the agenda of choice-making – has broken and fallen apart. Public power has lost much of its awesome and resented oppressive potency – but it has also lost a good part of its enabling capacity. The war of emancipation is not over. But to progress any further, it must now resuscitate what for most of its history it did its best to destroy and push out of its way. Any true liberation calls today for more, not less, of the 'public sphere' and 'public power'. It is now the public sphere which badly needs defence against the invading private – though, paradoxically, in order to enhance, not cut down, individual liberty.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 51

The scope and manner of the mind's attention are social facts

The disequilibrium of the boat [...] is only a dialectical response, a fun-house mirror reflection of an initial disfiguration or mutilation inflicted under capitalism: the closure of fields of socially available perception, the reduction not only of the environment of freedom but also of the very desire for and memory of that environment. Familiarity with capitalist culture persuades us that this limitation – the specific way people, their bodies, and their physical perceptions are organized within capitalism – is not historical but natural and physical. Yet the scope and manner of the mind's attention, or of the body's capacity for sensation, are social facts – and it is precisely the blindness and dullness peculiar to social relation in market society that enable us to deny the social and allow it to be subsumed in the biological.

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space (Verso, 2008) p. 120

Emancipation must be based on a principle other than work

Emancipation – the transformation of a servile identity into a free identity – must be based on a principle other than work, since the exercise and defense of work are what constitute the servile identity. Emancipation follows from dispensing with the positivities of workers' community, and from radicalizing that atomization instead.

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space (Verso, 2008) p. 20

The field of freedom shrinks with speed

Speed allows for progress in space, only progress in space has been identified with progress in time, in history. And that is really an abuse of language. We know very well that progress in space is not necessarily progress in time. The fact of going faster from Paris to New York doesn't make the exchanges any better. It makes them shorter. But the shortest is not necessarily the best. There again it's the same illusory ideology that when the world is reduced to nothing and we have everything at hand, we'll be infinitely happy. I believe just the opposite – and this has already been proven – that we'll be infinitely unhappy because we will have lost the very place of freedom, which is expanse. All current technologies reduce expanse to nothing. They produce shorter and shorter distances – a shrinking fabric. Now, a territory without temporality is not a territory, but only the illusion of a territory. It is urgent that we become aware of the political repercussions of such a handling of space-time, for they are fearsome. The field of freedom shrinks with speed. And freedom needs a field. When there is no more field, our lives will be like a terminal, a machine with doors that open and close. A labyrinth for laboratory animals.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 82-83

Freeing spaces frees us a hundred times more than any "freed space"

Politics of the whatever singularity.
Becoming whatever is more revolutionary than any whatever-being.
Freeing spaces frees us a hundred times more than any "freed space".
More than putting any power into action, I enjoy the circulation of my potentialities.
The politics of the whatever singularity lies in the offensive. In the circumstances, the moments and the places where we seize
the circumstances, the moments and the places
of such an anonymity,
of a momentary halt in a state of simplicity,
the opportunity to extract from all our forms the pure adequacy to the presence,
the opportunity, at last, to be
here.

Tiqqun, 'How To?' on http://www.tiqqun.info/ (15/03/15)

Life does not consist of choices

"You say that if you had to choose between being a professor at a university and being a farm labourer, you would choose to be a professor. But life does not consist of choices. That is where you keep going wrong. Pablo did not start out as some disincarnate soul given a choice between being king of Spain and being the village idiot. He came to earth, and when he opened his human eyes and looked around, behold, he was in San Juan Obispo, and he was the lowest of the low. Life as a set of problems to be solved; life as a set of choices to be made: what a bizarre way of seeing things!"

J.M. Coetzee, 'The Old Woman and the Cats' in Cripplewood (Yale University Press, 2013) pp. 24-25

The freedom to uproot oneself

The freedom to uproot oneself has always been a phantasmic freedom. We can't rid ourselves of what binds us without at the same time losing the very thing to which our forces would be applied.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 32

A society of laborers without labor

Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical development had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.
However, this is so only in appearance. The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society. the fulfilment of the wish, therefor, like the fulfilment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating. It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. Within this society, which is egalitarian because this is labor's way of making men live together, there is no class left, no aristocracy of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start anew. Even presidents, kings, and prime ministers think of their offices in terms of a job necessary for the life of society, and among the intellectuals, only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living. What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998) pp. 4-5

The choice between arts and sciences

As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose [...] between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Flamingo Modern Classic, 2002) p. 15

Silence, exile and cunning

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile and cunning.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Books, 1992) pp. 268-269

Those nets

The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moment I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Books, 1992) p. 220