What Does Freedom Stand for Today?

^[1]The text is published in: Border Thinking , ed. Marina Gržinić (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Stenberg Press Berlin, 2017). I would like to thank the editor and publishers of the book Border … Continue reading

We speak today about a crisis in contemporary social movements. This crisis has been produced in part by our failure to develop a meaningful and collective historical consciousness. Such a consciousness would entail recognition of our victories attained by freedom movements are never etched in stone. What we often perceive under historical conditions as glorious triumphs of mass struggle can later ricochet against us if we do not continually reconfigure the terms and transform the terrain of our struggle. The struggle must go on. Transformed environments require new theories and practices.

Angela Davis, The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues ^[2]Angela Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom: The Other Difficult Dialogues (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2012), 19.

Impossibility to change neoliberal systems which shape and oppress everyday life on all social levels, as well as the simultaneous and paradoxical act of playing and resisting dominant social structures, put us in the position to rethink what the politics of liberation or its revolutionary practices of today. The attribute “revolutionary,” means that those practices are politically engaged and socially transformative in a very concrete context. The fact is that all social revolutions have emerged outside of dominant ideological, economical, and political structures in order to cope with the unbearable conditions of common life in certain times. Each of them generated a new social order grounded in the radical imagination of everyday life. In other words,social revolutions always fought for freedom, social justice and new liberating legality through “illegal” means. But what happens when all those facts become romanticized versions of futures and when the freedom is used as a key concept of neoliberal society?

It is difficult to understand the meaning of the dichotomy between the dichotomy and the illegality, but it is difficult to understand the meaning of the dichotomy. time escapes the real political questions that we should face. Freedom appears at this point as a fundamental and arbitrary notion of neoliberal society, a notion that justifies the state of war, and liberal interests and inequalities. The United States is a member of the United Nations Security Council, which is a member of the United Nations Security Council. Those means (co) produce the neoliberal mechanisms of global governmentality, as well as the permanent state of crisis, conflict and terror.Such inverted-horizons of freedom exclude any other critical way of thinking, educating, organizing, resisting, and living outside the neoliberal concept of legality today. The false choice between legal and illegal means of social resistance, political struggle for freedom, and the question of resisting responsibility and revolutionary subjectivity. It is the antagonistic contextualized by neoliberal and revolutionary understandings of contemporary permanent war today. The war is made illegal.

The State of Permanent War

The prevailing apparatus of the neoliberal state is constructed through the model of arbitrary freedom and its manipulative liberal values, does not produce only class, race, gender and many other social / economic / political / cultural diversities through the oppressive politics of identity and its economy of brutal exploitation, but rather “human waste” through administrative and managing mechanisms of the contemporary war: permanent and global. There is at least three theoretical cross-referential understanding of the meaning of “human waste”: symbolic, bio-political, and politico-economic. The first two approaches are the so-called social purification and protection (intervention) of pollution, pollution, contamination into the other by violent means. ^[3]Symbolic approaches to humans-as-waste, mostly engage the work of Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, UK: Routledge, 1966); and Julia Kristeva … Continue reading The difference is the individual or collective constitution of humans-as-waste as a threat to the level of the population. The Marxist critique is based on a third politico-economic approach, which examines humans-as-waste as a byproduct of the capitalist mode of production. ^[4]Marx argues that capitalism perpetually generates human accumulation in the form of a “surplus population” of workers (Capital, Volume 1 , New York: Penguin Books, 1976) (Capital, Volume 3 , New … Continue reading

Marina Gržinić’s definition of the war-state shaped by force, violence, and fear is the most precise definition of the neoliberal state, the definition that goes beyond the historical meaning of the fascist state. logic is the logic of war.” ^[5]Marina Gržinić, “From Biopolitics to Necropolitics and the Institution of Contemporary Art,” Pavilion , no.14, (2010): 53. According to Gržinić, there are elements of historical fascism, such as” Sovereign leader, people, death as the management of life “, neoliberalism, such as individual freedom and autonomy as a crucial right. Referring to Santiago López Petit, She explains the notion of postmodern fascism as a form of self-government based on the self-management of a proper autonomy of differences.Such a w-state twists the meaning of the capitalist nation-state in order to “sterilize the Other, evacuate the conflict from public space and neutralize the political” ^[6]Ibid. constantly demanding: “Proliferation of unbelievable” freedom “of particularities” ^[7] Ibid., 59. for which the best example is the reconciling agenda of human rights, which keeps strong borders of power between central and peripheral identities.

Following historical events, we can say that global or total war officially started in response to the attacks on September 11, 2001, when the Bush administration initiated an international military campaign known as the War on Terrorism. Led by the United States and the United States, NATO support, the War on Terror was waged against Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, but Saddam Hussein and Iraq and so forth. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were transformed into occasions to abuse and manipulate the collective grief, to reduce it to a national desire for vengeance and democracy became exportable commodities: “commodities that can be sold or imposed upon entire populations whose resistances are aggressively suppressed by the military […]. ^[8] Davis, Meaning of Freedom , 89-90. It is important to note that there is no evidence of any possibility of a terrorist attack or a terrorist attack. Catherine Hass points out that the contemporary war is a permanent one because there is no intrinsic political, the question that Appears in the title of each PhD thesis is “Qi ‘ appelle-t -one une guerre ? Enquête sur le nom de guerre Aujourd ‘ hui” ^[9]See Catherine Hass, ”Qu ‘ appelle t – ten une guerre ? Enquête sur le nom de guerre Aujourd ‘ hui” (PhD dissertation the University of Paris 8 , Paris, 2001) Because the difference between the two is the same, it is not the same as the truth, war and peace does not exist anymore.Such contemporary global war, as a war without limits, is managed by other political conditions, such as: legal military intervention, arms-trade agreements in the name of freedom, and the defense of democracy and human rights.

The definition of “war-state” as well as contemporary war leads us to the conclusion that neoliberality is a form of ideology of the total war that produces a permanent state of economic, social and political crisis, with the imperative of democratic citizenship, It serves the just-right and first-world politics and pacify repressive forms of the new final solution. This is the ultimate choice between the two systems, and it is possible for the system to be able to do the same thing. a radical form of resistance to the neoliberal fist world society (preemptively signified as a terrorist or illegal one). Instead of such choice,we should point out the following questions: Who are all those illegal, undocumented, non-allowed, non-belonging, non-xyz “bastards” who resist or just stay outside those legalized neoliberal oppressive structures? What if only “being illegal” can break through the repressive neoliberal system of the global inequality that we live in? Or simply: How to (re) build an idea of ​​social revolution, or make a radical collective change today or beyond all those appropriated / abused notions of freedom, as well as recycled / emptied vocabulary which is coming from the history of previous revolutionary struggles and resistances? non-xyz “bastards” who resist or just stay outside those legalized neoliberal oppressive structures?What if only “being illegal” can break through the repressive neoliberal system of the global inequality that we live in? Or simply: How to (re) build an idea of ​​social revolution, or make a radical collective change today or beyond all those appropriated / abused notions of freedom, as well as recycled / emptied vocabulary which is coming from the history of previous revolutionary struggles and resistances? non-xyz “bastards” who resist or just stay outside those legalized neoliberal oppressive structures? What if only “being illegal” can break through the repressive neoliberal system of the global inequality that we live in?Or simply: How to (re) build an idea of ​​social revolution, or make a radical collective change today or beyond all those appropriated / abused notions of freedom, as well as recycled / emptied vocabulary which is coming from the history of previous revolutionary struggles and resistances?

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF FREEDOM?

Is the question that Angela Davis poses in her writings after so many years of fighting, thinking and resisting the repressive mechanisms of power structures of our contemporary world. ^[10]Ibid. Angela Davis’s book consists of collections of public speeches, interviews, texts, and so on. Due to the most idealistic vain, such a permanent struggle is referred to as a revolution in which society is emancipated and gained through struggle / resistance / revolution etc.) a radically different future, a fundamental social precondition for an emancipatory collective transformation beyond slavery, colonialism, racism, patriarchy, capitalism, fascism and so forth. But, at the same time, it has become the most expensive word of the globalized neoliberal society. ^[11]Freedom: The Most Expensive Capitalist Word is the title of the theater play for the authors’ research trip to the world’s most isolated country-North Korea. The two authors, Maja Pelević and … Continue reading Today, the meaning of freedom is (a) as a fetishizing synonym for those who have permanently established themselves within the neoliberal system of political and economic power. It is noteworthy that the power of the neoliberal state and its regulative and oppressive apparatus, Davis remands that freedom is a process of becoming. In other words, it is a process “of being embedded in the world and we want to change.” ^[12]Robin DG Kelley, foreword to Angela Y. Davis, Meaning of Freedom, 14.

According to Kelley’s introduction to Davis’s book, the idea of ​​an over-the-board community of complexity and differences will be found on justice and equality, as well as the provision of education, health care, and housing and the abolition of the The police and capitalist state is totally opposite to the idea of ​​the neoliberal society.^[13]Ibid. It is important to emphasize that there is no such thing as an ideal of the neoliberal society. Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and others proposed it as a capitalist mode of ultimate freedom after the WWII.The Mont Pelerin Society, named after the city of Montreux, Switzerland, was established in 1947 by the famous economists, philosophers, intellectuals, as well as eight Nobel Prize winners in Economic Sciences (including von Mises, Hayek, Friedman), proclaimed freedom as a ground value of the liberal state. Freedom of expression, free market economic policies, the political values ​​of an open society became markers of classic liberalism through this international organization. ^[14]Lidija Radojević, “The Illegality of Freedom” (lecture, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, December 11, 2016), … Continue reading

Referring to Lidija Radojević, such a process of market-oriented regulatory restructuring of social production changed the meaning and the role of the state in accordance with locally specific geographical and historical conditions.The neoliberal state was born with its aim to establish a proper institutional environment for its citizenship and (re) producing simultaneously the state power as well as the eternal border between legal and illegal in order to make any resistance to it. ^[15]Ibid.

It is important to note that this is the first time that the neoliberal system has been transformed into a marketplace. In other words, the neoliberal system (state) manages the notion of civic / civil subject and transforms the citizens and their knowledge and abilities into human capital-its initial investments. It also includes one’s ability to strategically plan and organize one’s own life-one’s individual choice to estimate what is profitable, useful and successful, as well as individual responsibility and self-care. Social differences and political paradigms created binary oppositions such as minority / majority, center / periphery, private / public and universal / civil / civic subjectivization.Culturalized systemic differences (established on traditional categories of ethnicity, gender and class) produced a multicultural society in which economic and political differences were fragmented and neutralized through the politics of diversity and the ideology of reconciliation and tolerance. The political and economic differences between the two nations have been a result of a multicultural society, which has been the subject of much of the political, rights. The common signifier of those diverse communities of individuals-consisting of such civil subjects, is actuallygender and class) produced a multicultural society in which economic and political differences were fragmented and neutralized through the politics of diversity and the ideology of reconciliation and tolerance (human rights). The common signifier of these diverse communities is that they are individuals-consisting of such civil subjects, that are actually homo-oeconomicus : an entrepreneur of himself. ^[16]From Michel Foucault: ” Homo economicus is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself.” Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 226. From Wendy Brown: … Continue reading

Owing to the fact that we have all the fixed worlds of neoliberal mode of social (re) production, which is the idea of ​​freedom against ourselves, we can say that the past drives for freedom and historical means of emancipatory movements and struggle does not function anymore. In such material-neoliberal conditions, freedom lost its historical, revolutionary meaning of collective struggle, because it was distributed to individuals as a commodity of identity (self) production. (1966), we can see how the embeddedness of revolutionary globalization, democratizing world functions as a global “cultural heritage,” consumption norm, aesthetic value, fashion or very pale repetition of revolutionary rhetoric we live in. It feels like a lethargic feeling of misleading nostalgia.A few years ago, addressing the Occupy movement, Angela Davis said that it would bring us to the unbearable state of radical change, for a revolutionary social change, instead of such deceiving repetition of the revolutionary folklore, neoliberal lives:

“More than once I have heard people say, ‘If only a new Black Panther Party could be organized, then we could seriously deal with The Man, you know?’ But suppose we were to say: ‘There is no Man anymore.’ There is suffering. There is oppression .. There is terrifying racism .. But this racism does not come from the mythical ‘Man.’ Moreover, it is laced with sexism and homophobia and unprecedented class associated with a dangerously globalized capitalism exploitation. We need new ideas and new Strategies that will take us into the twenty-first century.” ^[17]Davis, Meaning of Freedom, 18

Freedom as Radical Different Future

What does today’s art offer for understanding and radicalizing the meaning of freedom beyond the existing society, or more precisely, beyond the neoliberal state? For example, it is a good idea to make an appeal to the United States and the United States. In other words, today’s art produces the politics of error that interrupts our social reality with a counter-historical emergency facing the present, shifting in-between, unspoken history and utopian / dystopian future. The “politics of error” is introduced here as a new concept, dealing with an impossibility to break through artistic or cultural institutional structures and ossified academic worlds, with rare exceptions. Such error, as a symptom of living contemporaneity, indicates: dislocation and new location, visibility and presence of the invisible, possibility and freedom of experimentation, and many other transformative promises.

There are artworks or art-projects which are actualizations, conceptualize and imagine the politics of freedom beyond existing neoliberal, patriarchal, colonial modes of society. The red thread of singular meaning of these radically different futures could be traced through some of the following paradigmatic examples.

Naked Freedom (2010) is a film / video-work by artist-theoretician Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid. They are a duo who has been creating artistic situations for a while, co-thinking and co-creating with others. The video starts with an Achille Mbembe quote: “What connects terror, death, and freedom is an ecstatic notion of temporality and politics.” ^[18]Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid, “Čista sloboda (Naked Freedom) 2010,” February 13, 2013, http://grzinic-smid.si/?p=413 The film focuses on the deregulation of social life within globalized capitalism through an attempt to be socially engaged, politically creative and radically free. Authors experimentally approach the mode of reconceptualization of the community.With reference to Soviet filmmakers Vertov and Eisenstein and their mode of political montage, Gržinić and Šmid put in question the usual means of art production (which is socially twisted and politically predictable). ^[19]“Images of Struggle, Politics and Decoloniality,” by Kwame Nimako, kronotop.org (2015), kronotop.org/ftexts/interview-with-marina-grzinic The problem of the liberalization of neo-colonialism has been discussed through the discussion between Kwame Nimako and Marina Gržinić,The discussion reveals the relocation of global borders and peripheries today, the lost moments of possible radical communities, as well as the instabilities and restrictions that have already been incorporated into new global narratives and impossible movements. Referring to Nimako’s claim: “We are here (in the EU), because you were there (in Africa),” Gržinić said: “We are here in the EU”) against the systematic violence and neoliberal legitimatizing of oppression of global capitalism.

New World Summit (NWS) initiated by Jonas Staal uses the field of art to reimagine a space for a fundamental practice of democracy today. NWS was established as an artistic and political organization in 2012. ^[20]See “About” section, New World Summit, web.archive.org/web/20170921195833/http://newworldsummit.org/about Since then, it has dedicated itself to providing “alternative parliaments” that host organizations, which are currently, or consider themselves, excluded from democracy. It is noteworthy that the New World Summit is a “democratism” such as WOT, which opposes the concept of democracy for expansionist, military and colonial gains. This concept rejects the model of the nation-state and accepts an ideology of self-governance at all levels of the discipline. According to Staal, the revolutionary realism rejects the script: “That ‘(the) realm of the revolutionary realism is. realistic and what is the utopian, what is the proper citizenship and what the terrorist act is. Revolutionary realism focuses on shaping new possible realities once we have rejected the forms that structure or current performance, in this case specifically controlled within the stage of Nation-state. ” ^[21]Jonas Staal, “IDEOLOGY = FORM,” e-flux journal , no. 69 (January 2016): 5, e-flux.com/journal/69/60626/ideology-form

The materiality, form, and morphology of such an ideology is a process of permanent transformation of both art and politics through the practice of stateless democracy.^[22]Ibid., 7,

Another form of state Appears within the art-theory field, as well within the global politics of power relations and that is “state within state” or better known as deep state (coming from the Turkish term Deep State ). Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, through their artistic practice, and their project titled The Museum of Non-Participation, ^[23]See “About” section on Museum of Non Participation, web.archive.org/web/20171225093452/http://www.museumofnonparticipation.org which represents the process of investigation of the terms and conditions of collaboration, dialogue and the social. In 2012, with China Miéville and the art-activist group Mosireen, they made a science-fiction-inflected protest “training film” called Deep State, which starts from different moments of political resistance and struggle, especially those that took place in Egypt in 2011 (so-called revolutionary struggles to achieve “democracy and freedom”). The deep state is not possible to prove, and it has special interests and generations of real power, it makes fundamental decisions that “often run counter to the outward impression of democracy.” ^[24]Ibid. This film, through popular protests and legislated acts of violence and containment, traces the fluid and invisible influences that impact the state. Through the vivid montage of the filmed and archival footage, which put into continuum: the past, present and future, the film follows the clashes between the rioter (running for freedom) and the deep state (non-regulated by democracy).The process of disintegration, loss and limitation of utopian visions within the contemporary democratic society is the same time the process of liberation from the deep state (the state of dictatorship). This film not only puts the narratives of protesting and resistance into question, but also the notions of democracy and freedom within the neoliberal capitalist state,

The politics of glitch or the aesthetics of error is present in many artworks dealing with the meaning of freedom. Looking into the bare images of Margareta Kern’s animation work To Whom Does the World Belong?, ^[25]See margaretakern.com we are the easiest way to do this, and we will be able to use it in the future. “It is a member of the United States of America, and it is a member of the United States of America.” Beat-up by the police on one side, the neoliberal state and contemporary patriarchy on the other, feature an image that Traveled the world. the war to end dictatorship, soon turns into the War on Terror. push Becomes a permanent,a necessary and constituent agent of the survival of neoliberalism, which lurks in the background of this image. (Nonvisual) political action by the media, such a failed revolution and a permanent war, thus coproduce a social reality by putting the actual (visible) in the place of the real (invisible). Margareta Kern does not just draw the image of the process.us in, but rather drags us into the world to which we belong. This political spectacle of a scratched frame, an animation suspended in the moment of aesthetic glitch, is the same time the red thread of this work-the thread which unravels the state of the state, economics and art. Documentary records chronicling global social circumstances in the era of neoliberalism overlap with the animation, which performs a forensic deconstruction of those images, fragmenting them to frame the real, invisible and empty places of a necessary political subjectivization. Contemporary society’s revolt against against them, against budget cuts on healthcare (Spain, 2012), against dictatorship (Egypt, 2011), etc. The revolt, which demands freedom, status quoof everyday politics. The voice of each individual political subject within the collective body of revolt, the interrupted, cut-off voice of animation questions is possible to produce effective images of revolt, protest and revolution in the world of today. ^[26]See Jelena Petrović, “The Politics of Glitch or Aesthetics of Error?” In the catalog of Margareta Kern’s solo exhibition “To Whom Does the World Belong?” At the Cultural Center Belgrade, … Continue reading

As a result of the unification of the United States, the United States and the United States have been trying to solve the United States and the United States. as art (istic) singularity. Jean-Luc Nancy points out that the term “singular” is in Latin- cingulum the- already announces its Plurality: “The singular is one of each, and it is also the other. ^[27]Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 32. Despite this paradox, the notions of singularity and the fact that they are not opposite, they co-determine each other: each singularity is always another in a being-with others. The key point is that you can only relate to being one- common, to create a radically different community. In that sense, artistic practices which appear today as singular insights into the world of neo-liberalism (as an ultimate form of oppression today) or as singular ruptures of the politics of space and time (by accepting the neoliberal meanings of freedom, as push it is also possible that the dichotomies of the neo-liberal dichotomy are not the same as those of the dichotomy. They co-create another singularity it is not only the post-ideological social order of the present and the past; This singularity shows the multiplicity of classes and identities of today’s neoliberal, patriarchal, and colonial reality.

Jelena Petrović

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