|
COPYRIGHT 2005 Caddo Gap Press
We have been taught the holy doctrine that democracy lies in the rule of law, that the general interest "sublimates" particular interests, that the constitutional functions of the State are responsible before the generality, and so many other similar absurdities. Spinoza, in the seventeenth century, does not put up with this drivel. Freedom, the true one, the whole one, which we love and which we live and die for, constitutes the world directly, immediately ... And the constitution of freedom is always revolutionary.
--Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly (p. xxi)
Philosophers look upon the passions by which we are assailed as vices, into which men fall through their own fault. So it is their custom to deride, bewail, berate them, or, if their purpose is to appear more zealous than others, to execrate them. They have learnt to shower praise on a human nature that nowhere exists and to revile that which exists in actuality. As a result they have never worked out a political theory that can have practical application, only one that can be put into effect in Utopia ...
--Baruch Spinoza, Political Treatise (p. 33)
Project Freedom and Utopianism
Freedom--that word rings throughout the political arena today forming the spearhead of contemporary politics. Self-described leaders of the "free world" sell aggressive political agendas to the public under the banner of freedom. We hear freedom is "on the march." An eerie utopianism has crept into the discourse that sweepingly describes certain societies as free as opposed to others that are not free. I say utopianism because all heterogeneous and conflicting forces inherent in any situation are swept aside in the vision and service of this pure dialectic. Increasingly, this utopian rhetoric also provides the cover for an unprecedented consolidation of state power that is justified as necessary for the project of freedom. Studying the politics of freedom genealogically, Nicholas Rose (1999) remarks that it is "precisely because of the potency of the politics and ethics of freedom that it calls for diagnosis" (p. 61). Taking a Foucauldian stance Rose poignantly asks if "the birth of freedom" could not be regarded as an "achievement of government" (p. 62). Utopian and patriarchal notion of freedom certainly needs careful diagnosis, but even more, it requires praxeological confrontation. For, as Marla Morris (2001) warns, it is precisely out of the dream of carrying out utopian missions that pogroms are unleashed, and such "wish phantasy" may conceal dangerous delusions (p. 197). Utopian visions must be particularly suspect when they are championed by the prelates of power, for history stands testimony that these have the effect, intended or not, of exterminating what cannot and will not fit those dreams. Consequently it is our paramount responsibility today to interrogate slogans and rhetoric whose stock-in-trade are terms like freedom, liberty etc., terms that are able to muster illimitable historical, political, and social weight, and scrutinize the mediations and the structures that are put in place under those signs. Even more, we have the task of rediscovering in our daily midst what active freedom means.
The task of rethinking once again the notion of freedom, to cleave it from the pervasive utopianism, is political as well as metaphysical. The politics of freedom must be scrutinized by pinning it down against the ontological horizon where it arises. To do the work of rethinking scrupulously we need more than ever to make philosophy go to work for us; we must activate philosophy in the manner in which Deleuze and before him Spinoza and Nietzsche taught us, allowing it to help us reconstitute the metaphysical horizon from which to consider freedom afresh. Specifically, I turn to Spinoza here, the master political thinker, in whom politics and ontology are inseparable and for whom freedom is what constitutes us and the world directly, without mediation. Situated in a Spinozian framework this paper argues that the rhetoric of freedom that is growing increasingly shrill in the corridors of some political establishments, most notably among the current leadership of the United States, has slipped into a form of superstition or superstitio as Spinoza (1982) would have it; that is, in other words, into an absolute and transcendental semiotic that is increasingly at the disposal of the State. Nested in this transcendentalism is the agenda of "freedom" that plays out in terms of a social expression found in the forces that ceaselessly champion a global order of the market, and a political expression that relies on the normalization of vast concentrations of power in the form of the State.
To put the argument in more specific terms, the appropriation and overdetermination by the machinery of the State is a mode of depoliticization that actively encourages subjects to interpret freedom more in terms of the cultural possibilities of the market than in terms of the political, the irreducible social antagonisms being shifted, diffused, and rearticulated mainly on the terrain of exchange. The magical belief in the market and its apotheosis in which "freedom" finds its expression is foundational to the utopian cultural mystification. But there is more. Transcendental or utopian freedom also has as its prop a second and more dangerous form of superstition and that is implicated in the notion of security. The concept of security is vital to the governmentalized freedom that Rose was talking about earlier. Freedom as a statized or absolute notion, instead of as an activity of the populace, needs constant referencing to its dialectical pole, that is, to the rhetoric of free societies as opposed to those that are not free. From the perspective of that logic, freedom is in need of "protection," notably by means of constant reference to fear and exceptionalism. The tensions, the polemics, and the militarization of the world during the Cold War era are a good example of the deployment of such logics. Utopian freedom is thus underwritten by the twin axes of the market and the military, or exchange and security, both important mystifications as will be argued here. An alternative to utopian freedom is suggested here that moves away from regarding freedom as a binary state of affairs and instead posits freedom as the heterogeneous and profoundly active constitutive strength of the multitude a glimpse of which is offered in the Spinozian notion of potentia.
To keep the discussion on empirical grounds and focused on the contemporary political scene, the distinction between freedom as state organized fictive utopianism and freedom as active unceasing political struggle will be brought out by examining a key US policy document called The National Security Strategy published by the White House in 2002 and currently available on its website. The analysis will show the difference between freedom as superstition in the Spinozian sense that is ultimately at the service of the State, a correlate of the vision of a bland, conflict-free world of "values," a utopia that is devoted to market relations, and freedom as political activity that cannot be guaranteed by the state, nor by a written constitution, nor even by the fact that citizens are free to vote or hold meetings in the town square. Freedom in this sense is a positivity "that exists only in the constitutive tension of thought" and its capacity to act as a material medium of production (Negri 1991, p. xix). This can not, by definition, be the privilege of any particular form of government or organization of society, but is the "constitutive power" of transgressing all forms of constituted hierarchies.
In other words, freedom is not a special condition that is bestowed on some and not on others, nor is it a state of affairs; and precisely for that reason it cannot be guaranteed or foisted by the state. And for this reason we must also reject the neocon claim that freedom can "advance," in the sense of make progress other than as an illusory effect of advancing superstition. From the perspective of the present analysis, the presence/absence of freedom is thus largely independent of the preconstituted particularities of the situation or the mediating structures of hierarchy that exist apart from living bodies and their productions that includes the material medium of thought. But one must be careful here. This is not to claim that from an individual's point of view all situations are the same, nor is it to lay claim to some inner freedom independent of outer circumstance, but it is to direct our attention to the activity of the collective in whose domain alone freedom can be tested. A useful instance of this is witnessed in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's (1991) unsentimental portrayal of the prisoners' sudden moments of solidarity in facing...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
