The perils of aesthetic freedom
Marshall, Mike (2016) The perils of aesthetic freedom. In: Ethics, Art and Moving Images, 3 June 2016, UCA Canterbury, Kent, UK. (Unpublished)
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Within the history of a philosophy of immanence from Spinoza, Nietzsche to Deleuze and Guattari,
ethics has been distinguished from morality. At the basis for this distinction are concepts of freedom and indeterminacy characterised by the potential for self-transformation and the production of an expanded capacity to critique existing norms and create something new. In this scenario, morality becomes a separate framework with differing aims, consisting of relatively static, pre-established values operative in ways that are more evaluative than creative. With morality positioned as a constraint in relation to the freedom of self-transformation, ethics, on the other hand, becomes aligned to a fundamentally creative ‘ethos’ as the production of new ways of living. Following on from notions of ‘a life’ (Deleuze) and ‘life as art’ (Foucault), this paper will examine the perils of aesthetic freedom in the light of an apparent lawlessness of ‘affect’ as a transformational force in the philosophy of Deleuze and Spinoza. A perceived danger of aesthetic freedom can be that of romantic alienation or, taken further, of a subjectivity descending into an endless chaos of amorality, unhindered by social responsibility and effectively useless in any fight against injustice. Yet counter to this is the potential for an expanding capacity of sensing, thinking and acting that processes at the level of the individual, links to the social and operates with a deliberately less determined openness that is more adequate to the problematic complexity of the world.
Paper given at a symposium held in collaboration between the University for the Creative Arts, the Centre for Critical Thought at Kent Law School (University of Kent) and the Whitstable Biennale.
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