4. Freedom

 

"A starting point would be to say that one society is ‘better’ than another if a greater number of its people have access to experiences that are in line with their goals. A second essential criterion would specify that these experiences should lead to the growth of the self on an individual level, by allowing as many people as possible to develop increasingly complex skills(57)."

–Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "Flow: the psychology of optimal experience"

 

 

"Modern society may be read as a discourse in which nominal freedom of action is cancelled by the ubiquitous look of the other(56)."

–Mark Poster, "The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and social context"

 

 

"‘Now at the beginning of the [French] Revolution, the end laid down for primary education was to be, among other things, to ‘fortify’, to ‘develop the body’, to prepare the child ‘for a future in some mechanical work’, to give him ‘an observant eye, a sure hand and prompt habits(58).’’"

–Tallyrand’s Report to the Constituent Assembly in Michel Foucault,

"Discipline and Punish:the birth of the prison"

 

 

"Our dominations don’t work by medicalization and normalization anymore; they work by networking, communications redesign, stress management. … If we are imprisoned by language, then escape from that prison-house requires language poets, a kind of restriction enzyme to cut the code; cyborg heteroglossia is one form of radical culture politics(59)."

–Donna Haraway, "Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the reinvention of nature"

 

 

"Today, there are dozens of web pages with detailed information on the situation in Chiapas specifically and the state of democracy in Mexico more generally. Several widely used news and discussion lists devoted to the daily circulation of information and its assessment are available. These various interventions operate from many countries and in many languages, and they are all the result of work by those sympathetic to the rights of indigenous peoples and to the plight of the Zapatistas(60)."

–Harry Cleaver, "The Zapatista Effect: the internet and the rise of an alternative political fabric"

 

 

 

"Csikszentmihalyi might be stating a universal truth about human desire, if that were possible, yet Poster, Foucault and Haraway present to us the many forms of power operating to constrain our freedom to pursue this desire. I will defer to the many volumes written on this topic by these and other authors for further explication, but I’ll note that I inculded it here as a reminder of the networks and linkages with which we operate. In the same way that we are ‘vectored,’ to use McKenzie Wark’s term, to McDonalds when we stop in for a big Mac, we are also tied in to a system of interlinkages when we check out a library book, get into our car, or jack into the WWW. We are tied in by everything that we do. However, in a manner more befitting what I would call freedom, the EZLN in Chiapas has made great use of the interconnectivity potential of the internet, for instance. Thus, the links flow both and every which way."

–Josh Knox