theorize your freedom fries
It seems we cannot get enough of the word freedom when discussing dystopian literature. I want to suggest, however, following our discussion on Monday, that freedom has become an essentially meaningless term.
I don’t mean that to sound nihilistic or un-American; quite the opposite, in fact. Our training in Theory should make us suspicious of terms that are easily deployed, yet difficult if not impossible to define. We made some headway, though.
Devin remarked that there is “freedom to” and “freedom from” and that any exercise of “to” potentially comes at the expense of someone else’s “from.” My freedom to wave my arms wildly ends where it impinges on your right to freedom from being hit. Freedom is a finite commodity, distributed unequally, as illustrated by Savina’s metaphor of the chessboard. And we also noted that we cannot imagine freedom in the absence of resistance to some “other” – a “body of power.”
Freedom once was the goal of abolitionist and civil rights discourses. Its appropriation by the American conservative movement (”free markets”) means that freedom has become the discursive property of one part of the political spectrum. I don’t know how the term freedom came to supplant the preferred term of the Enlightenment thinkers, and the framers of the Constitution: liberty. Liberty can be taken as synonymous with freedom, but it’s relative “freedom” from overdetermined ideological uses by bodies of power to justify the unjustifiable makes it easier to specify productively – civil liberty, personal liberty, intellectual liberty.
Finally, freedom has never existed as an absolute concept – ultimate freedom means complete and utter independence from anyone and anything. This has never happened in human history. Freedom in fact, is downright frightening, and impossible. Imagine if you woke up tomorrow completely free: unable to rely on anyone else or anything. Perhaps I’ve read too much Žižek, but I’ll offer this nugget of pop culture as evidence. At Woodstock (1969), the folk singer Richie Havens was doing his set, but the traffic jam had caused all the other acts to be late. He had to keep stretching out his set, and he had played every single song he knew. Asked to keep playing, he began to free associate, singing:
Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, Freedom
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child . . .
A long way from my home
Freedom at that time was a rallying cry of the counterculture movement: a vague alchemy of “free” love (i.e. women’s sexual availability to men), liberty from the strictures of middle class morality and materialism, and civil rights. But Richie Havens seemed to understand intuitively that nothing is more terrifying and lonely than absolute freedom. Absolute freedom comes only one time in a person’s life: death. I have no idea what happens after death, but I do know that death is the one experience we have that no one can take from us, or assume our place. My death is my own, as yours is your own, and no one can prepare you for it, tell you about it, or do it for you (for more on this, see Derrida, The Gift of Death). That’s freedom. And while I live, until I build a cabin off the grid like Ted Kaczynski, I’ll accept the interdependence of life on earth, with all its limitations upon my freedom, while zealously guarding my civil, moral, and personal liberties.
Max wrote:
Interestingly, while writing most recent essay on Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash last night, I also noticed the loss of meaning in this word. Essentially, the governmental regulatory system has been replaced with a multitude of private corporations in the absurd and yet resonant society of Snow Crash, and people are “free” to do whatever they want in that one must only subscribe to the laws of the community with which one chooses to associate oneself. While this might seem completely “liberating” in some regards, in Stephenson’s novel, it has had the complete opposite effect; people have far less control over their lives, and are manipulated to act in certain ways by their personal financial interest and the economic power of others instead of by laws.
This got me thinking about how the only way to have “freedom,” as we understand it in American society today, is with fairly strict government control over our actions, which in itself seems to be a contradiction. On the one hand, if we are compelled to act in a certain way by the government (not kill people, not run red lights, pay our taxes, etc.), are we really “free” to do what we want? On the other hand, if nobody is there set up those rules, the lives of others begin to encroach upon our own. If there isn’t a power compelling people not to economically or physically pressure others into doing their bidding, can anybody really be “free?”
All of these contradictions seem to lead back to the original post’s point that “freedom” is arguably meaningless. However, with the inherent conflict in human nature wherein one has to forcibly compel people not to forcibly compel one another to do things against their will, it seems that “freedom” has always been without meaning in the context of societal existance. People will always try to control you, and in the void of a government forcing you to act a certain way, other elements of society will take the opportunity to fill the void because it is beneficial to them. Or maybe I’m just being to negative about human nature.
Posted 12 Dec 2007 at 12:05 pm ¶
jaron wrote:
Perhaps it is not that freedom itself is a meaningless term, but that it is hard to make sense of descriptive claims such as a society is “more free” than another, that here is a need to have more freedom, that everyone should have equal freedom or strive for maximum freedom. Such claims seem to rely on the ability to gauge degress of freedom, sometimes compatatively, sometimes absolutely. This difficulty becomes more apparent when we consider the variants of freedom that was mentioned in class. There is “negative freedom” in the sense of the absense of obstacles or contraints, and “positive freedom” in the sense of self-realization. While they seem to stem from different sources (external vs internal), they bear a relation when we consider that positive freedom is often though of as necessarily achieved through a collectivity. Thomas Hobbes termed “the right of natureâ€, which is the rough equivalent of positive freedom, as “the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature, that is to say, of his own life, and consequently of doing anything which, in his own judgment and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereuntoâ€. Hence, in the interest of self-preservation, man enters into a social contract whereby he submits himself and obeys the laws set down by a higher authority. Yet this seems to entail a diminished negative freedom. Thus, it seems like the inabiltiy of the individual to transcend his place within society inevitably leads to a paradoxical formulation of freedom, arising from the dual notions that we attribute to it.
Posted 13 Dec 2007 at 5:32 pm ¶
campagnolo wrote:
Its seems to me that freedom as desirable is a tacit assumption in our nation. I don’t speak from any experience here, but I wonder if it is the same way in countries with radically different origins and traditions. Ask a person from any other nation what it is most important that government ensures, I think you might get answers from security, to religious piety, to economic equality. In my mind those answers would be coming from a dictatorship, a theocracy, and communist state. Of course its all individual but I feel democracies and America in general put an unmatched value on freedom and the role f government in assuring it. I found particularly interesting some of Sean’s comments on liberty as having been replaced by freedom. It seems we idealize the sketchy concept of freedom here much like religious radicals treat their own stylized conception of religious law. It seems to me that essential to both is an undue weight placed upon a distorted goal.
Posted 15 Dec 2007 at 11:09 pm ¶