Freedom

To claim, to reclaim, to assert ownership or self-determination, in almost any conceivable constellation of semantics and implicature, is simultaneously an act of submission, concession and referential, relational displacement in, through and as language. Technology functions quite similarly in that every aspirational act and assertion of communication and control is only ever rendered intelligible and meaningful as inversely proportional to the dependencies it invokes. To be self-determined or purposeful, to be captain of one’s own fate, is always and already to surrender and concede to the turbulent form and flow of complex relational communication networks into which humans are born.

To seek freedom is to become ensnared in the systems of definition and bartered meaning by and through which we learn to understand, valorise and validate the concept. I suggest that this offset and displacement in language and other communication technologies embodies an intractable antinomy. To be free and constructively self-determining is always to do so within the omnipresent mechanisms of a language and culture that, in this way, imprisons us within the definitions of our freedom.