Liberty, Freedom & Art Under Late Capitalism

We are used to considering freedom as something mainly positive: the freedom to do or to have something. Freedom of expression, freedom of worship, or the freedom to live one’s life as one sees fit. But in the context of late capitalism, the liberal concept of freedom is primarily negative (in its original sense): the freedom not to be constrained. This is the freedom to free oneself from social bonds, from solidarity, from culture, from public transport, from education, from everything that is public. It is also the freedom to take, to hoard, to exploit.

This Think.Zone proposes to question the concept of freedom from anticapitalist, decolonial, feminist, and anarchist perspectives. We will examine forms of relational freedom as articulated by Bakunin, Kropotkin, and extended by contemporary authors, artists, and theorists rooted in critical and minority traditions.

Between potentiality, impasse, and contradiction, the aim will not be to produce a closed definition of the subject but to consider freedom as a multidimensional continuum. A constellation that raises questions as diverse as: Is freedom conceived in relation to the individual or to society? What are its limits—what about violence and legality? Who benefits from freedom? Is freedom something that is granted or something that must be seized?

This reflection will be created collectively through different protocols borrowed from critical pedagogy and popular education: reading groups, arpentage, open forums, collaborative cartographies, etc.
Our reflections will be inscribed in a diagram we will construct together. The diagram will serve to organize our readings, discussions, and productions. It will allow us to map multiple relations while escaping the linearity of sequential discourse. It will enable a thought in movement, able to respond to the complexity of the contemporary world and to the paradoxes of the subject under discussion.

In terms of temporality, this seminar is structured around three full-day sessions. Designed for intense immersion, the meal will be treated as an expanded pedagogical space, a moment of shifting perspectives and exchanging in other forms. These three days will be interspersed with periods of pause, enabling us to absorb and further develop the reflection.

At the end of the year, this work will take the form of a publication, the exact format of which will be defined collectively according to the knowledge and ideas produced throughout the year. The first semester will be dedicated to exploration, research, and gathering, while the second semester will focus on synthesis and the shaping of the publication.

The goal of this Think.Zone is to foster discussion, critical thinking, and the situated positioning of the students.

Image: Mike Kelley, Statue of Liberty (from "Reconstructed History), 1989