LIBREVILLE
introduction – counter/induction
1.
Freedom is becoming something superfluous. Like a prisoner in a cell our idea of freedom is that which is coloured by a conception of what already exists. It yearns for what is. So, it is superfluous in the sense that it is does not add anything other than to reinvest society with the very image of its own freedom. An image that is renewed, expanded and interjected at every turn. For if society can control how it represents freedom to us, if it can never let up in presenting to us its dependent freedom, then we come to accept its definition as that of our own. What society declares as free we accept as free. We coincide with society and come to relate to freedom in the same manner as we would relate to a televisual image: a signal repeated often enough becomes a reflex.
2.
The need to coincide, to belong, to conform gives rise to the repression of difference. And difference is an index of freedom. If we expend our energies in being the same as each other, obliterating the idiosyncratic on a-common ground of continually lowering potential, then the idea of freedom comes to reside not in the creative residues of our differences but in the formation of frightened similarities. We become interchangeable with each other, cloyingly familiar, and as a result we are more liable to be obedient to those represented images of freedom that are widely distributed in order to become ‘naturalised’. This need to belong, informed by a “dread of losing love”1, is a means by which we internalise the involuntary freedom of conformity. An increase in social responsibility of this kind, never raising our heads above ground level, leads to an increase of social anxiety and a consequent evisceration of freedom: “if we so want to be afraid, it must reassure us”2.
3.
If we take the Law as an example we see that a notion of freedom comes into operation that has it that to defy these laws is to be free; that the Laws are established so as to inform us what it is that we really want; how it is that we want to behave. Yet if we rob off someone else we have not exercised our freedom so much as exercised our conformity to society in wanting what we do not need. The prohibitions of the law function to present an image of freedom that does not threaten society but strengthens it. Thus by having it that it is aggression which underlies altruistic feeling3, making aggression a prime motivation, we are made to feel protected by a Law that prohibits aggression at the same time as we feel a temporary freedom when we indulge in aggression. That altruism can be a form of freedom is thus replaced by the sop of an ineffectual transgression that acts as if the Law actually exists. Social crime is surely then the creation of autonomous freedoms?
4.
This negative definition of freedom leads to a notion of freedom that captivates us. It becomes, for some, simply a matter of a legalised or legislated freedom. Civilisation, it is offered, is the process whereby instinctive urges of aggression, violence and unbridled sexuality are offset and controlled by a steady rise in Laws and Institutions. These very same come to stand in for freedom and their effects pass-by unchallenged for fear of “losing love”. Thus an idea of freedom comes to be offered that privileges, on the one hand, the primal, the instinctual and the (non) conscious and, on the other, an obligating and maternalistic Institution that offers guidance and protection from that freedom. To be moving between these poles, between the raw and the cooked, is not to be free but to be caught amidst systemised inducements of fear and conformity. Fearing ourselves as instinct and fearing internal exile from civil structures we dare not experiment in freedom and thus we come to feel expressed by the represented and disseminated freedom of killer shows and serial trials.
5.
If freedom persists in being conflated with individualism then even its repressing-representations will disappear quicker than has hereto been anticipated. Freedom will become a hieroglyph and repression will be gladly embraced. However, as a fiction that masks servitude and relies upon a notion of the unique, individualism, an unchanging essence that grows more assured the more it is ignored, represses differences in an attempt to minimise those overlapping residues that would link it to others. Individualism denies the socio-historical and is free to the extent that its sadism and selfishness passes by either unnoticed or praised: “indifference to the sufferings one causes…is the most terrible and lasting form of cruelty”4. This “indifference” is not primal. It is more dangerous than that. It is an expression of the transhistorical balance between the primal and the instituted where a ferocious self-centredness is so utterly polite as to function as a legislative obliteration of the other. In the name of freedom a string of digits can wipe out a tribe. Yet such an autism is isolated rather than separated and its insularity ends up in a suffocation of remembered cruelty that cries out for its own repression. Autonomy on the other hand, never iso- lated and spurred on by an intensity of differences, is always on the verge of overcoming separation and thus of creating a wider more encompassing notion of freedom as a continual process. Such a freedom, being enacted, cannot be represented and so cannot function as a model. It is freedom without the repression.
6.
It is no surprise that the individual is sanctified by laws of personal property and laws of language. Each word is offered as a legal binding-agent that acts to stultify the progression of meaning and hinder self-reflection. This is how ‘indifference’ for the individual always translates into being a measurement of ‘success’. It is by means of such well-worn associational paths, readymade conduits between word and meaning, that ownership is made to extend to language and concepts and the individual is rewarded with a sense of being free to remain the same. Lauded as a member. There are no cumbersome nuances to words that could admit to the presence of the other; nor are there any outbreaks of neologism that could subvert this commonplace traction. And so the individual is kept intact — on course and sheltered from the ramifications of his actions. Defined once and for al the individual is free to be recognised and applauded and free, furthermore, to be entrapped by those representations of freedom that act as mirrors rather than windows. Thought itself, inner speech, becomes a marker of privatisation. Individuals cannot communicate. Indeed they are released, are free from, the need to listen because they have already consigned them- selves to the satisfaction of a professional knowledge that knows nothing of its own enigma.
7.
If the Law and Individualism serve as the dominant representations of freedom then these interdictions are made smoother by the firmly established dichotomy of the real and the imaginary. Thus we accept already extant notions of freedom and call them real whilst those imaginary strivings are named utopian. Actually existing freedom, a matter of executive politics and instituted duplicity, is one that unsuccessfully denies the existence of a metabolistic desire in an attempt to maintain its unbalanced equilibrium. Excised from the Law and made biologistic in the individual, desire, undergo- ing repression, comes to act as the unconscious of freedom. Thus latent, it is forever on stand-by to traumatise the representation of freedom with a new figure of freedom in process as it moves from ‘what is’ towards ‘what could be’. We have always almost already arrived.
8.
We can only conceive of freedom when we are not afraid of desire. We are fearful of desire because we do not want to become divorced from the images of desire that are offered-up by this society. At best desire is seen as sexual and then freedom is defined as a sexual freedom which becomes individual freedom. But desire is impossible to define. If anything it is a circulation that is uncoded and which overlaps and transmutes as it clashes and merges with other desires: “desire finds its meaning in the desire of the other”5. It is thus a diffuse and ever diffusing libidinal charge which is not genitally centred but socially orientated: “desire does not take as its object persons and things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses”6. From the autonomous perspective desire is a vehicle towards freedom, a dialogue between unconsciouses, that actively retaliates against the establishing of circumscribed Laws and individual continuities. It is free to examine its motives: “Are we who we thought we should be?”
9.
And so we have a foretaste of freedom in those unexpunged communications that music and literature make tangible. Here the residues solidify into passing affects that take hold of us and offer up a glimpse of freedom as the future-anterior rather than as an absorption of presenceless variety: the past is no more imaginary than the real; the out- come is retrospectively traceable. There is here, then, in the interstice of clarity, a communication between unconsciouses that can bypass a privatised use of words and which makes manifest the previously latent component of desire. Not necessarily syntactical but not quite illogical these communications are built from a series of non-sequiturs that are felt before they are re-arranged and filled- in. The attempt outweighs the result. In this way we too become unintelligible enough for intention and causation to become so enigmatic to us that we cannot be persuaded to conform to those causations and intentions that are ready and waiting for us to inhabit them. We are staggered. And so this is an exploratory freedom that is co-determining rather than inherited. It is neither real nor imagined but a process of becoming: “what is, does not become; what becomes is not”7.
Howard Slater
NOTES
- Sigmund Freud: Civilization and Its Discontents, Dover 1994, p52. ↩︎
- Louis Althusser: Writings on Psychoanalysis, Columbia 1996, p139. ↩︎
- Jacques Lacan: Ecrits, Tavistock 1980, p7. ↩︎
- Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past: 1,Penguin 1989, p180. ↩︎
- Jacques Lacan, ibid, p58. ↩︎
- Deleuze & Guattari: Anti-Oedipus, Athlone 1984, p293. ↩︎
- Friedrich Nietzsche: Twilight of the Idols, Penguin 1974, p35. ↩︎
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- Break/Flow was a magazine edited by Howard Slater of which two print editions appeared in 1996 and 1999, as well as an edition on vinyl in 1998. This is the Table of Content page of issue 1 from 1996.
Re-incarnated in print form and collecting essays and texts by Howard Slater from 97-99, ( only a couple of which had been previously published in Autotoxicity), this edition is almost a book. Despite the disparate subject matter a kind of narrative unfolds tracing the “foretaste of freedom in those unexpunged communications that music and literature make tangible”- Secession from the whole gamut of generalised categories as these thread through from molar notions of Nation, Class and Gender through Institutional entities to notions of identity and desire. To reject the concept of nation to such a degree that internationalism takes on a reactionary hue: there can be no ‘inter’ of nations; this is a derivative of free trade.…
