Freedom?

As a figure of thought, the concept of freedom tends to shuttle between abstraction and ideal – the first exemplified by Isaiah Berlin's contrast between negative and positive liberty, and the second by Philip Pettit's neo-republican conception of freedom as non-domination. Located within the realm of lived experience however, freedom is invariably forged from context-specific constraints, hence the title of the proposed pamphlet: degrees of freedom. The point of departure is to approach freedom as a practice which is 'conditioned' by enclosures of power/knowledge which are also enclosures of the imagination. In terms of destination, the objective is to explore the question of how to breach such enclosures, thereby opening out spaces for alternative ways of practising freedom to emerge. The analysis will encompass three fields of practice and examine how freedom is drawing inwards around the freedom to compete in a zero-sum game among winners and losers. To get to grips with the 'how' of this requires dispensing with analytical tools that operate on the basis of dichotomy (such as power/resistance, freedom/domination, top-down/bottom-up) while also stretching the analysis across distinct-yet-related fields of action. The book will thus begin with a brief discussion that sets out key concepts and ideas before putting these to work through an analysis of 1. Sport & Academia, and 2. Art.