Investigation: “free” acts

Did you watch the videos? Notice any common themes?

Well, I did!

It appears that a new form of romanticism is approaching. Each of these young lovers is exercising a sense of “freedom” that appears to transcend time and space. We watch as each of the (ultra cool, btw) couples move effortlessly between geographical places and temporal spaces. City turns to country. Day turns to night. Girl turns into a horse? This effortlessness is also echoed in the nonchalant, no big deal rapport between each couple. There is much, much more that can be said about these videos but what I really want to talk about is this idea of a “free” act.

Perhaps the big D. can help explain. I mean Mr. Gilles Deleuze.

Actually, I will reference Daniel Smith and his writing on Deleuze and the question of desire (Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Toward an Immanent Theory of Ethics). Here, Smith draws on the work of Leibniz to describe a “free” act: an “act that effectuates the amplitude of my soul at a certain moment, the moment the act is undertaken. It is an act that integrates the small perceptions and small inclinations into a remarkable inclination, which then becomes an inclination of the soul.” (Smith, p.73). Amplitude of my soul. In other words, at any given time, we are swarming with inclinations and therefore a “free act is simply an act that expresses the whole of the soul at a given moment” (Smith, p.73).

This is where Deleuze comes in. As cited in Smith, Deleuze weighs in about these “free” acts with the following:

“There are all sorts of acts that do not have to be confronted with the problems of freedom. They are done solely, one could say, to calm our disquietude: all our habitual and machinal acts. We will speak of freedom only when we pose the question of an act capable or not of filling the amplitude of the soul at a given moment” (Deleuze as cited in Smith, p. 73).

So, with this in mind, maybe we aren’t talking about “true” “freedom” in the videos investigated here. Perhaps the “freedom” the couples are demonstrating is just a response to a growing disquietude in the twenty-first century. Excitations of imagination and responses to fleeting emotions.

More to come…