First, freedom of mobility is a ruse
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AT AnswersAT Permutation____ Perm fails – the alternative can only exist outside of the socialProzorov, 2007, Collegium Research Fellow, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland, [Sergei, Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty, p32-34] Concrete Freedom: The Resistance of a Living Being The third response to the question of a Foucauldian freedom, drawing primarily on Foucault's writings on art, transgression and 'aesthetics of existence', attempts precisely this task of dissociating freedom from the positivity of the diagram. Such authors as Gilles Deleuze (1988), James Bernauer (1990), Jon Simons (1995), John Rajchman (1985), Paul Patton (1995) and Thomas Dumm (1996) argue not merely for the possibility of a Foucauldian discourse on freedom, but for the centrality of freedom to Foucault's historical ontology. Rajchman distinguishes between two notions of freedom at work in Foucault's discourse. Foucault's nominalist histories of e.g. madness, medicine or sexuality disentangle the processes of formation of what Rajchman refers to as 'nominal' freedoms that in our terminology are discursively constituted, positive properties of a diagrammatically specified identity. According to Rajchman, exposing the constituted character of such freedoms serves to enhance one's 'real freedom', which is understood as a practice rather than a final state, a practice that consists in one's 'revolt' against the instituted identity. For every instituted conception of freedom we apply a nominalist reversal and attempt to determine the larger practice within which it figures; that practice is then what involves our 'real' freedom, something asocial, which cannot be instituted or guaranteed. Thus our real freedom does not consist either in our telling true stories and finding our place within some tradition or ethical code, in completely determining our actions in accordance with universal principles or in accepting our limitations in authentic self-relation. [ ... ] Our real freedom is found in dissolving or changing the polities that embody our nature, and as such it is asocial or anarchical. No society or polity could be based on it, since it lies precisely in the possibility of constant change. Our real freedom is thus political, though it is never finalisable, legislatable or rooted in our nature. (Rajchman 1985, 122-23) In this approach, a 'real' freedom or, in Foucault's own (and arguably less contentious) expression, 'concrete freedom' (Foucault 1988b, 36) is characterised by the following features. Firstly, and recalling Rorty's idea of a 'private' quest for autonomy, this freedom is 'asocial' and 'anarchical', irreducible to any social order but rather implicated in every project of its transformation. It is thus clear why it is impossible to satisfy the demand of Foucault's critics for a positive alternative to a liberal diagram of freedom. Whatever such alternative could be conjured, 'real' freedom would still relate to the project of its transgression rather than be fully actualised within its utopian diagram. Nonetheless, pace Rorty, this notion of freedom is explicitly political in the sense employed by philosophers as diverse as Carl Schmitt (1976) and Jacques Ranciere (1995), since it consists in the moment of radical openness and contestation and has the force of a constitutive decision that takes exception from the positivity of the diagram. Freedom is therefore an active practice of resistance rather than a retreat into the governmentally sanctioned private space. In Foucault's fortunate formulation, freedom is an 'art [rather than a state] of not being governed quite so much' (Foucault in Chambers 2001, 116): Liberty is a practice. The liberty of men is never assured by the institutions and laws that are intended to serve it. This is why almost all of these laws and institutions are quite capable of being turned around. Not because they are ambiguous, but simply because 'liberty'is what must be exercised. The guarantee of freedom is freedom. (Foucault in Gordon 1991,47. Emphasis added.) One will know that freedom is alive not when the interests emerging in a society are allowed to express themselves, be represented and be pursued, not even when dissent and heresy are allowed to manifest themselves, but when contestation, unruliness, intractability are not yet abolished. (Pizzomo 1992,207) Incapable of being firmly established or guaranteed by any institutional structure of the political order, concrete freedom consists in a momentary act rather than a permanent state of affairs: 'It is occasion, spark, challenge. It is risk, it is not guaranteed, backed-up or assured: it always remains without an end.' (Rajchman 1985, 123) Concrete freedom is thus simultaneously political and extra-diagrammatic. Insofar as we understand the political as the constitutive outside of the social order rather than as a functionally differentiated subsystem within it (see Schmitt 1976; Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Lefort 1988; Ranciere 1995), we may suggest that concrete freedom is political without being social. In other words, it targets the totality of the diagram, in which human existence is reduced to a positive social project, contesting not the already sedimented features of this project but rather the very process of this sedimentation, whereby the acts of power, implicated in the formation of any diagram, are effaced by their reinscription as instruments of liberation. In short, the affirmation of concrete freedom is driven by the abduction of human existence, necessarily presupposed in any establishment of a 'nominally' free social order. Secondly, this notion of freedom is entirely divorced from any assumption of originary authenticity and the correlate projects of self-discovery or self-actualisation that are central to the epistemic regime of liberal government. As a number of studies have demonstrated, liberal governmental rationality synthesises the mobilisation of human desire for freedom with the specification of its content, so that one is incited to discover and liberate one's 'inner self' through following an externally devised model of e.g. an 'active citizen', an 'enterprising employee' or a 'caring mother' (see Rose 1990; Marinetto 2003; Triantafillou and Nielsen 2001; Rankin 2001). The concept of concrete freedom targets not merely these models of freedom, but the very desire for self-discovery that they respond to. In Foucault's phrase (1982, 216), 'the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.' Insofar as subjective interiority is always an effect of governmental practices of subjectification, freedom must consist in the resistance to 'the administrative inquisition which determines who one is' (Bernauer 1994,258), 'a refusal to contract into an identity, a continual twisting loose from the historical forms of life by which 1 [one] is always already shaped' (Caputo 1993, 255). Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 1.14 Mb. 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