Having tried to deconstruct what “free” might mean in relation to knowledge, in relation to my hoped-for-academy, I think that what has come about is the understanding of “free” in a non-liberationist vein, away from the binaries of confinement and liberty, rather as the force and velocity by which knowledge and our imbrication in it, move along. That its comings-together are our comings-together and not points in a curriculum, rather along the lines of the operations of “singularity” that enact the relation of “the human to a specifiable horizon” through which meaning is derived, as Jean-Luc Nancy says. (1) Singularity provides us with another model of thinking relationality, not as external but as loyal to a logic of its own self-organization. Self-organization links outwardly not as identity, interest, or affiliation, but as a mode of coexistence in space. To think “knowledge” as the working of singularity is actually to decouple it from the operational demands put on it, to open it up to processes of multiplication and of links to alternate and unexpected entities, to animate it through something other than critique or defiance – perhaps as “free.”
Rogoff, Irit (2004) Free. In: J. Aranda, B. Kuan Wood, A. Vidokle, ed. (2011) Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art, E-Flux Journal, Sternberg Press 183 – 205
(1) Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), xi.
