Notes on Freedom

Everyone is breaking down borders now. They are crossing lines, breaking down distinctions between academic disciplines or categories. Everything is trans this, inter- or multi- that. They are opening up things that had been closed, celebrating the virtues of visibility or transparency: buildings must have glass walls and open doors, offices must be open-plan. The virtues of the day are mixing, fusing, crossing.

Any kind of line draws objections: anything that says, ‘this is A, that is B, they are different’. There is no difference between men and women, art is not distinct from life, or life from art. Any category or line is an invitation for it to be challenged, questioned, overcome.

Many of the distinctions that were fundamental to the modern nation state are being broken down. In the eleventh century, church canon lawyers developed the distinctions between church law, state law, and personal morality. They drew lines. They said: this is a matter for the individual and their conscience; this is a religious offence and a matter for the church; this is a crime and a matter for the state (1). Thus the domains were established; the different arenas with their different actors were marked out. (This contrasts with primitive or tribal law, where everything is mixed up and crimes are listed alongside moral or religious offences or violations of etiquette.)

Now the state is deliberately crossing the line between law and morality, violating domains. Officials make laws about matters of etiquette: in several councils, it is now a crime to shout or swear or to be rude. The state is breaking down the distinction between law and life, between crime and rudeness, such that there is a general difusion of coercive instruments into the interstices of everyday life. When two categories blur in this way, both are lost.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard observed that social phenomena of many kinds are escaping their bounds, diffusing from their own domain into every other sphere. ‘Every individual category is subject to contamination, substitution is possible between any sphere and any other: there is a total confusion of types. Sex is no longer located in sex itself, but elsewhere – everywhere else, in fact’ (2). The same goes for sport, for art, for politics: everything else is aestheticised, politicised, sexualised, or sportified (turned into a sort of performance or contest). The spread of politics or art into every sphere was pursued as a progressive and heady act. People had jobs taking art practice into science or science into art. They had jobs putting cyber cafes in libraries or museums in cafes.

Yet how could we be so against the border per se? The first law, said Aristotle, is the law of non-contradiction: A is not-B. A man cannot be a man and not a man at the same time. Thought starts with the question of distinction, of drawing lines: of saying this is A, that is B, they are different. The Chinese categories of Yin and Yang separated the phenomena of the world into two polarised categories: male and female, hot and cold, wet and dry, active and passive, and so on, with elements of human character mixed up with physical forms in this drawing of an essential line. The Pythagoreans of ancient Greece traced all things to 10 oppositions, including finite and infinite, odd and even, good and evil, square and parallelogram.

An excellent book by the French philosopher Régis Debray, In Praise of Borders (3), stands against today’s blurring of categories. As he points out, the frontier was the basis of a community: Romulus’ act in the founding of Rome was to draw a line on the ground with a plough. A city is marked by its walls; a home by its threshold. Debray notes how the shapes of communities and the domains of social life have been marked out physically on the ground, with gates, walls, bridges, doors. A space such as a tomb is separated from the everyday; it is isolated and concentrated, made sacred and not profane.

It is the line that makes something itself and not something else: something has an essence, and an autonomy from other things. Many creation myths conceive of the moment of creation as one of separation: of separating day from night, the earth from the sky. In Greek myth, Kronos forced his father sky away from embrace with his mother earth: the sky fled upwards into the heavens. In Genesis, God divides the light from the darkness, the heavens from the waters, the waters from the land.

This can be seen even at the level of the molecular cell, says Debray. The cell exists because it has a membrane, which makes the distinction between inside and outside. Indeed, the progress of evolution draws a line more and more between inside and outside: to have a skin, to maintain one’s own body temperature, to bear one’s young inside one’s body, to feed them one’s own milk. The characteristic of a more developed organism is that they are more distinct from their environment: they are more autonomous, more self-regulating; they maintain themselves apart to a greater degree. The higher the level at which they exist, the sharper becomes the line between an organism and its environment.

Debray also makes the point that a distinction or a frontier is also a relation – it is not an absolute separation but a means of passage. The cell membrane, just as the city wall or river, are lines that provide a means of transport from one side to another. Indeed, it is because of the separation that there can be a relation: it is because of the division between states, or households, or cities, that these cities can have a hostile or friendly relation.

Having said all this: it is also the case that many of the best thinkers in the past sought to show the provisional nature of categories. This is the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, with his statements that ‘hot and cold are the same’ and ‘wet and dry are the same’. But this meant not that these things are actually the same, but that they exist in a relation of opposition (hot is only hot in relation to cold); and also that they exist in a state of transition (things that are hot are becoming cold).

Hegel, who loved Heraclitus, sees every social form as existing as part of a totality: so morality, or law, or art, exist as elements of a social body, as interrelated, just as the leaves of a tree are related to the trunk and cannot be detached from it. Hegel also sees every form as existing as a moment in a process of transition, as a stage in a series. And yet he has not abolished categories or distinctions: the categories of the individual and state, morality and law remain cut out in sharp distinction from one another. He is showing the relations and transformations of distinct things.

Today, categories are being overcome not by universalism or revolutionary change: instead, lines are being crossed for the sake of it. Just as Isis is driving its bulldozers over the Syrian/Iraqi border, people are breaking down disciplinary boundary stones or crossing social spheres as an end in itself. They make a project out of the crossing of lines,  declaring lines null and void. We are left with formlessness and confusion. At base, this is making the process of intellectual and social corrosion into a virtue and a project.

(1) Law and Revolution, Harold J Berman, Volume 1, Harvard University Press, 1990

(2) The Transparency of Evil, Jean Baudrillard, 1990, p8

(3) Éloge des frontières, Régis Debray, Gallimard, 2010