It’s curious how the English language has been gifted with both freedom and liberty, whereas other Western languages have had to choose only one. One can wonder if Brits, Americans and related are so desperate they need two terms for the same thing, or if the double shot makes them twice as free and liberated? The French who sort of introduced the notion can fiddle around with liberty but are cut off from freedom, whereas the Germans struggle with the opposite, freedom but no liberty. Who is best off, liberté ohne Freiheit, or Freiheit sans liberté? Beats me, but there’s probably some cute etymological explanation although I have personal issues with writers, scholars and don’t mention philosophers who bring up or reference some or other notion’s back story. Don’t ask me why and I’m of course full of prejudice, but to me, it’s simultaneously patronising and expressing a lack of elegance.
The French philosopher François Laruelle has somewhere proposed that there’s a significant difference between liberty and, as the translator somewhat clunkily phrases it, liberty’s rigour. A rigorous engagement with liberty is considerably more difficult than with liberty itself, writes Laruelle, in fact, it’s an altogether different story and might generate distinctly other outcomes.
A stupid example: consider that you’re driving your car on a road with speed limits, easy going no problem. You are at liberty to traverse the landscape as you see fit as long as you don’t exceed regulations. At some point, a sign announces, “end of all speed bans,” a white circle with five black diagonal lines. Pedal to the metal, the highway has been liberated from limitations regarding velocity and you’re at liberty to chauffeur your vehicle at any speed. A conventional understanding of liberty, suggests Laruelle, implies that the new or revised situation operates as an extension or expansion to the previous, or the two conditions are causal to each other, their relationship is probabilistic. In short, I will drive faster because I can. More importantly, however, is that liberty here is contained, in the sense that nothing else is provoked or transformed except the end of all speed bans. There’s no ambiguity, it’s rudimentary, relations are linear, drive faster, that is, the grounds upon which observations or decisions are made remain stable and thus don’t exceed the domain of strategy.
A rigorous engagement with liberty turns the affair on its head, refuses compartmentalisation, divisibility and probability and instead asks, what on a structural or fundamental level cannot not change given the altered circumstances? For example, what happens to the understanding, even ontology, of speed if its limits are banned?
Liberty’s rigour comprehended as a practice indicates a sensitivity to all other possible and impossible consequences that the end of all speed bans opens for. In other words, liberty’s rigour fucks causality and probable outcome and favours contingent, stochastic, non-calculable results that as much as they might be ordinary simultaneously can short-circuit the very conditions of the world.
When considering freedom, it might be valuable to identify two general forms. On the one hand, what one can call constituted freedom, which largely aligns with Isaiah Berlin’s elaboration of freedom from and freedom to. Freedoms that are given and protected, normally, by the state. For example, the state offers all citizens, without exception, the opportunity to move freely in, let’s say a city and protects that freedom or right if infringed upon. You are also free to drive a car in the city but the authorisation is valid only with a legitimate licence.
So, when an American dude exclaims, “Free country, huh!” it’s obviously not free at all, it’s only free with respect to what the constitution, government and, in the case of the US, mostly too old and too rich gentlemen have agreed upon. Simply put, the price to pay for this kind of freedom is paying your taxes, which makes it somewhat paradoxical to encounter that individuals identified as freedom fighters oftentimes have something personal against taxes. The other way around appears smarter, taxes, another word for the state, secure our freedom, not just mine but everybody’s. The problem is perhaps that everybody’s isn’t part of those guys’ vocabulary.
Come to think of it, the free country thing almost without exception resonates with an extractivist mindset, a settler-colonial tonality and an individualistic abusive attitude. I do what I want and nobody has the right to hold me responsible for whatever that is or was. “It’s a free country, huh.” Yeah, sure but only for certain authorised populations, right? Seriously, all those cowboys and whatnots are so annoying, that kind of freedom when considered properly is at the end of the day synonymous with responsibility, or perhaps a society that shares this understanding is what we call, with an at times infected word, civilised?
Freedom in this sense shouldn’t be dismissed on the contrary it’s fundamentally necessary to conduct life, establish relationships, control violence and manage any form of community or society. It’s perhaps also a bit rushed to argue that people are living a lie being manipulated by some all-seeing eye or machine. People know it, it just makes shit way easier ignoring it. I mean who didn’t roll their eyes the day Magritte revealed it’s not a pipe or when The Wooster group broke the fourth wall? Been there, done that.
The second form of freedom, freedom that is void of any form of authorisation is much less complicated but simultaneously impossible to unfold and give extension in any real-life situation. Absolute freedom turns on itself and becomes totalitarian, it eradicates every form of choice, relation, change, difference and dynamics, even time, space, stability and direction. Somewhat paradoxically to prominent freedom there are no options, it’s freedom and that’s it. Absolute freedom is the antithesis of negotiation and therefore the obverse of politics, after all, absolute is not a different way of saying a little bit. Keep in mind, if you for some reason bump into a genie think twice before you wish for freedom, because freedom the real deal isn’t like a cabin in the forest, a bottle of bourbon and a golden retriever. For starters, freedom cannot be shared, freedom has no friends and isn’t a society. The image of freedom and feeling free is far from being free.
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Art is not culture nor is culture art. Culture and art are differentiated in respect of value. Culture is known, negotiated, measurable, comparable and attached to value similar to any other service or commodity. Art grasped as a thing or object follows similar if not identical dynamics but the artwork as artwork and aesthetic encounter is a different story. In order to contextualise a specific artwork’s value, which naturally is provoked and dependent on forces that want to make profit but not exclusively, a different set of strategies must be applied. The value of an artwork, a painting, a theatre performance or a novel, cannot be reduced to a calculation of labour hours, costs for materials, rent and transportation before anything else because material value is not all there is, but more centrally, only regarded as singular can the artwork circumvent being synonymous to its functions, and if value is accounted for in regard to function any reproduction of Mona Lisa would be equally fine, as much as any Iphone 14 is equally Iphone14.
But if the artwork exists in its own right, it cannot not be void of value, value after all is constituted through forms of comparison.
Culture follows the logic of constituted freedom whereas art, in respect of its status as artwork, aligns with the absence of the logic of prominent or absolute freedom, which furthermore allows us to pair the artwork’s singularity, which mustn’t be mixed up with individuality or uniqueness which remain relational capacities, with sovereignty.
Laruelle asks, how can one conceive of the principles of liberation without immediately unleashing fantasies of total freedom and anything goes? Without trying to answer, it’s not crazy to connect culture and cultural work with liberty, the easy way, and art with liberty’s rigour. The artistic labour or aesthetic engagement, differentiated from accompanying craft and managerial labour vis à vis which the artist is identified as a cultural worker, denies itself the opportunity to take advantage of liberty and is instead driven by rigour, without which aesthetic engagement would stumble precipitously into exactly fantasies of total freedom and anything goes.
From this perspective, artistic freedom has very little to do with freeing oneself, being or feeling free, or offering the opportunity to express whatever one wants. On the contrary, artistic freedom, independently of medium, format, alone or together, instead indicates the opportunity to engage with liberty’s rigour and hence the outcome of such engagement cannot be determined it cannot not be anything else than freedom, the freedom of not being able to anticipate a result, effect or ramifications. Said differently, artistic freedom implies the authorisation of being irresponsible, which evidently is a massive responsibility.
But wait a second, don’t forget that this freedom is exclusive to artistic labour and the aesthetic engagement, and doesn’t authorise anybody to be a douchebag, take advantage of people, be generally flaky or whatever artistic anything goes behaviour.
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Autonomy is something that has haunted art and its discourses for more than two hundred years. Contemplating or appreciating an artwork, argued Kant, must be an autonomous activity freed from interests, and for this to be possible, the artwork must also be understood as autonomous. The artwork doesn’t need support or back-up and its value is not dependent on its relations. Needless to say, every artwork needs support in the sense of a stage, a plinth, a wall, a screen, a photo album, a storage space, a bookshelf or museum but again this is the object or activity which isn’t synonymous with the artwork.
The artwork’s and the aesthetic encounter’s autonomy is, however, particular and constructed otherwise than the autonomy of say a body, a nation, a process or forms of decision making, which can cause some confusion. Conventional forms of autonomy are relational and established through arguments, division and borders. A body is autonomous through, for example, a social security number, a name or the opacity of the skin, but it’s still comparable, divisible and exchangeable. Something is autonomous because of what it’s not. More examples, France is not Norway or the process of creating a dance performance is autonomous to baking a sponge cake, still, we understand something’s autonomy only in regard to other similar entities, other nations, dances or cakes. Autonomy in the sense of talk to the hand, and since it’s based on “not that” it can or must be defended.
The artwork, and possibly a few other opportunities, flipside or reverse the terms. Autonomous due to something’s singularity implies that it cannot establish relations and is unable to generate borders, after all, how do you build a border to nothing? The artwork’s autonomy has zero to do with what it’s not, rejection or provocation but on being unconditionally defenceless and totally open.
A body or nation’s autonomy is authorised, if only through “not that,” whereas the artwork’s is absolute. One could also say, conventional autonomy is effective and the artworks and the aesthetic experience autonomy affective.
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Freedom of speech or expression and artistic freedom are not rarely equated, put in the same basket and used, especially by the populist right, as a means to bash interventionist cultural politics in favour of assumed self-regulating market-oriented financial support, philanthropy, patronage and similar. The argument, in short, is that all forms of state-regulated cultural politics infringe on the freedom of expression resulting in instrumentalised art, art as a service for the state apparatus and ultimately malign censorship. Unfortunately, the jargon of the right has slowly and tenaciously infected the entire debate concerning cultural politics and the social democratic left has, instead of taking a stand-up position putting up a struggle, among other passive-aggressive concepts introduced arm’s-lengths distance in order to shield art, or culture as is the favoured term is, from meddlesome politicians, or as the far right warns from ultra-woke identity politics.
An initial problem is the strategic blending of art and culture whose aim is to correlate artistic quality and cultural value. This process favours value and relativises quality, using the argument that value is quantifiable and therefore measurable, we can understand and “prove” what it’s good for, whereas quality, WTF is that supposed to be good for? On a practical level, and this is really worrisome, it moreover proposes that there’s no categorical difference regarding engagement – social, political, financial, concerning identity, accessibility etc. – between a museum director, a graphic designer, a game show host and a dancer, painter or novelist. Evidently, both museum staff and installation artists work within the cultural sector but what they produce, may that be an activity in the case of a tour guide or a dancer or a material object created by a painter or a wig maker in a city theatre, are principally different, even ontologically exclusive.
A museum director who offers a blockbuster show for the tourist-intense summer months, fair enough I get it, but a painter who jampacks canvases with puppy dogs and fluffy kittens as a means to cater to the vulgar taste of potential clients comes across as compromised. The problem isn’t paintings with baby animals, but when an image’s motif is directional to a business plan the work is reduced to its function.
Reversing the dynamics, the director of a dance festival is responsible vis à vis an audience and can invoke it arguing for the composition of the program. As a cultural producer, the artist is also responsible, for example deciding not to show depictions of violence for a young audience, but isn’t regarding the choice of motif, abstraction, figurative, excessive violence or puppy dogs. There’s a significant difference, recalling Laruelle, between what somebody paints and what that somebody decides to show. Yet, there isn’t a significant difference between what a museum director decides to exhibit and what the audience is shown.
Regrettably and thankfully, in practice things are not that water tight cut but liberty’s rigour might still not be a bad idea.
Freedom of speech appears today to have become somewhat one dimensional, lost track of reciprocity and responsibility, and through the acceleration of right-wing rhetoric transformed into something like: Anybody has the right to say, write or express whatever they want and if there are any consequences the individual should be protected without regard for or not taking responsibility for what was expressed. To me, that sounds approximately as mature as a punk shouting fuck the police with a raised middle finger but calling 911 when being evicted after months of unpaid rent.
Freedom of speech is an authorised form of freedom – the state grants each individual the right etc., but like any grant, the price to pay is that you’re obliged to report how it was used.
Artistic freedom occupies an entirely different territory. It doesn’t authorize the right to express whatever you want but instead, the opportunity to express something you don’t know what it is or what it expresses. The price to pay is that since what is expressed is not known it can also not, except on a strictly structural level, be protected. But mind you, this is by the same token what makes art exceed arguments and convincing rhetoric in favour of the fantastical, overwhelming and goddamn world changing.
