What whispered confidences and secrets may citizen and alien trade as they make their moves?
What new things may be afoot in their wake?
In 1762, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau added a conditional “but” after the phrase “man is born free” in The Social Contract, was he implying that there could be hidden costs to birth in the human species?
And were these the hidden costs factored into the ubiquity, the “everywhereness” of the “chains” that mark the second half of his axiom?
What is Rousseau pointing to when he says, “One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they”? If the master’s room for maneuver is regulated by the pallet fork of mastery itself, then can the slave be the escapement, the spinning wheel that lets things move?
Can the watch of power unwind itself? What kind of knowledge needs unlearning now?
Rousseau had no time for art and for artists. For him they sprang from arbitrary indolence, from excess and decadence. Can art unmake the social contract to make it adequately annoying for Rousseau’s ghost?
Can the glue of the polis come undone through contact with the solvent of the demos in a world imagined into statelessness by artists and other partisans of the distracted imagination?
Can the commons replace the contract as the suffix to the social? Could this be the founding and dissolving protocol of the last international, the first and last stand of a supercommunity?
How would the new social arrangements look if they had no enforcers, if no one were “forced to be free”?