New figurations of freedom: Ricoeurian perspectives on the digital society

In the face of innovations triggered by advances in digital technology, biomedicine, and behavioural/neurological research, the analysis of power relations has moved into substantially new territory. Attempts to chart this new territory in terms of ‘surveillance capitalism’, ‘algorithmic governmentality’, ‘sensory power’, ‘post-liberal government’, or ‘neuroliberalism’ have emphasized different dimension of emerging systems of power. These power relations challenge many established understandings of ‘freedom’ as something distinct from ‘domination’, ‘determination’, or ‘necessity’. However, critical assessments have thus far proceeded on the basis of an assumed and idealized subjective ‘autonomy’, anti-subjectivist genealogies of ‘governmentality’, or technologically oriented theories of the posthuman. The ambition of this paper is to address freedom in relation to embodied and negotiated experience. Ricoeur's meticulous, anti-dualist phenomenology of freedom enables us to anchor our analysis in intelligible structures of lived experience located between subjective autonomy and dissolution and technological enhancement and subjugation. We explore these conceptual concerns through an empirical investigation of the negotiated forms of freedom that emerge in and around people's use of smart/intelligent technology. Reflecting on a SenseMaker^® analysis, we consider emerging configurations of freedom and oppression (or in Ricoeurian terms, the voluntary and involuntary). We draw specific attention to how, in an age of smart/intelligent technology, practices of freedom are not experienced as forms of either digital liberation or oppression but as complex negotiations between the biological and digital involuntary and voluntary acts of negotiated consent.