“Freedom is so much the essence of man that even its opponents implement it while combating its reality; they want to appropriate for themselves as a most precious ornament what they have rejected as an ornament of human nature. No man combats freedom; at most he combats the freedom of others.”
— Karl Marx, “On Freedom of the Press” (1842)¹
To act also means to act otherwise. We act within and against the world. To live is to be of our world and to step beyond it. Even to think is to already change what is given from what it is given to us as. Freedom means to go beyond the positively given; freedom is present within living itself as possibility.
But our self-activity is exactly the means for us to live in unfreedom. Our action is how we (re)create the world, and it is also how we (re)create our unfreedom. The traditions of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on our lives, but we also for our part make our circumstances in ways which we did not intend. Our world takes on intentions of its own.
We don’t choose our domination as such, as if it were presented to us as an explicit decision, but we do choose within conditions of domination. We adapt to domination or even justify it, and so we ensure its everyday functionality as a social condition. The Decision of our entire condition of life, whether we will continue to be dominated and exploited, is one which we can only make when our situation demands the necessity of such an absolute choice — when we look at our oppression, at the indifference and incompetence of society’s administration, and decide that there is no choice but to take the risk of revolution.
Freedom and Foundations
Our creative power reveals the emptiness in the world, the pliability behind the appearance of uncompromising solidity. But this also reveals a responsibility to what we (re)create, as we must know it in order to change it. Every action reminds us that we are also of the world around us, and that we are not excluded from the ephemeral nature illuminated by our labors. We withdraw with horror at the limitation of life implied by this. It is not only death, it is mortality.
Many flee and seek to bury their heads from the very sight of the flux. People turn to things which seem guaranteed, which they can hold onto amidst this storm of emerging and passing forms. They devote themselves to Divinity, the Fatherland, their Love… Even care for the Self can become an impediment to freedom if boundaries of individuality are fixed, saying “this is me, and this is everyone else” in order to maintain a single shape for posterity.
We come to desire security and predictability, looking to indifferent ‘nature’ for some ready-made order, or to some essence of Humanity for a trusty second nature. This need is a repulsion from the exertion and the confusion of creation. There are no ultimate foundations in life; there is only immanence. Freedom and creation can only be engagement with the mortality of this immanence, even if it is something which dominates and coerces us.
These are unfree situations that we ‘freely’ choose. But we should not delude ourselves so as to think that the unfree world is created by our subjective consent to it. It does not need our individual consent — it induces it. We live in true unfreedom, where both the exterior world and our own interiority appear to be hard barriers to our action. We choose to adapt to this in order to live within this world.
Self and Other
An unfree world cultivates unfree people, whose capacity for freedom becomes obscenely bound to their unfreedom as they reproduce it in their everyday lives. Their unfreedom becomes hidden to them, even in being immediately present in front of them. This immediacy encourages them to forget that their Selves are not sanctuaries from the world, but the mere inwardness of it. They try to affirm the Self as absolutely Self-Same, insisting on defending their Selfhood against the encroachment of Others like a creature defending its burrow. But this Self is one of accumulation, it is an empty perimeter which must be filled by those who cannot stand the weight of its emptiness. And yet to fill the Self up reminds us of its limitation, and the reinforcement of its periphery becomes a cell with no exit.
The others we encounter become the Other of this Self. We can only affirm our-Selves negatively as whatever is not these Others. Our Self-will can realize what it likes, with its only limitation being the hard exterior of the world — which, to the Self, is the same as the Others. Do what you want as long as you don’t impede Others from doing the same.
To open the Self up to the Others opens up a wealth of new possibilities beyond the tiny island of the Self-Same, but it is also a vulnerability. It demands that we accept the risks of failure, disappointment, humiliation, and our need for others. There is a certain emptiness which we become aware of by living relationally. Relationality reminds us that we are not the center, and some are terrified by that. But this is the only medium by which freedom can be actualized.
The Other of the Self-relation can induce us to forget the otherness of Others. They become what we need or desire them to be, a mirror of our-Selves. We place masks on them and fix our gaze on those caricature-faces. They become archetypes, and the Self paints the Others with one brush. Yet Others are not even the same as them-Selves. They continue to live just as our-Selves do. Like our-Selves, they cannot be fixed in identity with their-Selves. To do so would mean to cease existence entirely.
Identity of Labor
The affirmation of the Self’s identity with it-Self becomes a fantasy of godlike creative power. To believe that we our-Selves have absolute control over our lives is to assume that we have absolute control over our world. The same is true for the assumption of absolute responsibility of the Self, which is merely a humble narcissism.
This is both a denial of the relationality inherent to life and a secret oath of loyalty to the present unfree state of things. It ascribes a supernatural power to labor, especially to labor on the Self (in the cult of Self-care). To assume a Promethean creative power of labor, as if it is the source of all the wealth in life, is to ignore that labor realizes the potentials in the natural world and to obscure the power granted by monopoly over our conditions of life. If we say that everything emanates from the labor of the Self, we cannot see the chains which bind us to a world of needs which are enclosed by a barbed wire fence labeled by a sign which reads “PRIVATE PROPERTY.”
The appearance of free creation and free agreement with other free creators is a veil over objective unfreedom. It is also the very medium by which our bodily capacities, our creative power, is externalized from our laboring bodies into the fungible, measurable, saleable commodity of labor-power. We sell measured out bits of our lives to capitalists by contract, agreeing ‘freely’ for our laboring bodies to be exploited. Our creative powers are abstracted and homogenized for the equality of exchange, and that flattening into coinage in turn acts as a force shaping the organization of our everyday lives.
The workday becomes the center of our lives, because it is the means by which we access what makes them possible. We praise ourselves for how controlled we become in this waste of life, this output of dead labor into that gleaming thing called Capital. To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, such discipline in the metabolism of life-activity — molding inputs into outputs made in the image of their production process — is reminiscent of our childhood days controlling the shit coming out of our assholes.² All the money we save in our lives out of self-discipline is just so much shit held onto, and all the money we spend is so much shit excreted. And now “the toilet’s clogged in this world of shit.”³
Emancipation of Experience
In this society dedicated to the accumulation of capital, life becomes a tired routine. The lifetime is an excruciating duration of time, a passage of empty years towards the permanent oblivion of death. This is a single, uninterrupted life without a rational beginning — in media res, we are thrown into the world at birth — and without any endings except for the final one. This is living without flourishing, without any change apart from upticks in the accumulation of savings from a lifetime — whether this is capital or a store of portioned out experiences. The experience of capitalist life is dead. It’s all for nothing.
It is tempting to scream out, to affirm our experience of life against these deadening demands of a calcified world. We want to tell this ordering machine that we can’t be fit into any of its categories and that our experience is strictly our own. We try to open ourselves up to the ‘true’ world beyond this, or perhaps just beneath this. We search for the enrichment of experience everywhere, from the grand and epic of the mountains to the infinitesimal breaths and heartbeats of our beloved.
Linear time is time towards death, and we want to disrupt it by living more richly in each moment and taking in as much life as possible. Each moment contains the potential of multitudes. But this experience is blocked regardless, because our lived experience is socially organized, and our possibilities are the possibilities of the world. To affirm experience without conditions remains in the same realm of labor-worship, with all of its same pitfalls.
Setting out to emancipate experience is setting out to emancipate the world. The richness of experience is the richness of the world. The wealth of life can only be liberated by wresting it from the power of capital. Capital cultivates a dragon’s hoard of wealth, and wastes it on a Leviathan scale in conformity with the demands of accumulating its own capital-copies. A free world would do otherwise. Instead of subordinating the movements of life to the repetition of a form — capital — freedom would mean the burning, living fire of movement expressing itself in the infinity of forms.
Mastery of Rhythm
Freedom means working with and through nature, realizing potentials already present within it. To create is always also to discover.
But we live in a wrong world, a world of wasted potential — disappointments, failures, fragments. We cannot freely realize these possibilities of life without struggling against capital, which lives through our labors and twists them into forms amenable to it. And so, as Mario Tronti taught, “To be at peace with oneself is to go to war against the world.”⁴ This war emerges from our refusal to tolerate this world. It is a desire for an absolutely other-world, a world which is no longer this one, a utopia. But the promise of this new world is already within this one — “the kingdom of God is in your midst.”⁵
This newness can be heard, felt, if we would only listen. The world speaks of it, even if only in whispers. This language is without absolute logical foundations, whether in signification or grammar. It is instead a complex of rhythm. The same is true of life as a whole. It is not a total solidity of disembodied Spirit that can realize freedom, but a rationality of free rhythm. Yet rhythm is not always free rhythm. Free movement can only be realized by freely associated creators. They can only freely associate if they are masters of their powers. The flourishing of living Spirit can only proliferate on the basis of care for our natural, animal existence — we can only extend our powers beyond our mortal, bodily existence if those bodies are well cared for and loved.
Such a reconciliation would enable mastery of life’s multifarious aspects, working with the limits of our power and in cooperation with the powers of others in order to extend our collective creative powers. This rhythm is the movement of freedom in forms. Rhythm is many, and labor is the living time by which we can master our rhythms. War with this unfree world is the only rhythm that can keep pace with it and break its spell, so that life may break out into a great freedom of creation instead of falling into a silent grave.
References
[1] Karl Marx, “[As a Privilege of Particular Individuals or a Privilege of the Human Mind?],” in On Freedom of the Press (Marxists Internet Archive, 1842), https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1842/free-press/ch04.htm.
[2] Sigmund Freud, “Character and Anal Eroticism (1908),” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 9 (London, United Kingdom: The Hogarth Press, 1959), 167–76, https://archive.org/details/standardeditiono0009freu_j3r9/page/n7/mode/2up.
[3] Dystopia, “Stress Builds Character,” track 1 on Human = Garbage (Misanthropic Records, 1994).
[4] Mario Tronti, Dello spirito libero: Frammenti di vita e di pensiero (Milan, Italy: Il Saggiatore, 2015), p. 227.
[5] Luke 17:21, New International Version Study Bible (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2011), p. 1739.
