RAY BRASSIER & MATTIN - UNFREE IMPROVISATION/

COLLECTIVE FREEDOM 

(confront collectors series ccs 29)

 

Recorded by Kenny MacLeod at Arika's Festival Episode 4 "Freedom is a Constant Struggle", 21 April 2013, Tramway, Glasgow.

 

"I have been thinking back to this performance.  I am trying to think about the relationship between choice, freedom and the subject… The first thing that came to mind is that: I think I disagree with Hannah Arendt about the political - she says something like that in order to be granted access to the political sphere, you have to choose to put aside unreason, irrationality and the messiness of everyday sociality, and demonstrate to the sovereign that you are a good subject or citizen. I guess then you would be granted access to society, and as such democratic choice.  This seems like begging the sovereign to also grant you sovereignty - which seem to me to cede to them way too much power.  Maybe on those terms, some of us don’t want to be subjects - or some of us don’t believe in democracy.  Maybe the political is very specifically in the messy, infinitely differentiated sociality that exists in apposition to sovereign power.  Or maybe the political is the freedom from certain choices… Or not. I’m not sure.  But I am also wondering if the illusion of freedom of choice (in the way that it captures desire and shackles it to individuality) is the earliest seduction of the western citizen - a thorn planted in the somatic field of the mind, around which the subject develops like a callosity". (Barry Esson)