Walker, A., 2025.

Boundaries, Frontiers, Thresholds and Influencers: Magic Mirrors of Freedom

A distinct boundary separating us from 'freedom' is continually represented back to us, with the implicit invitation-instruction that we strive to cross it.

I consider a range of ways to think the boundary, including as horizon or frontier (Povinelli, 'Horizons and Frontiers. Late Liberal Territoriality, and Toxic Habitats', 2022) and as threshold (Derrida, 'Hostipitality', 2000). I attend to how such theorisations of the boundary elucidate capital's structurally desired reproduction of apparent spaces of non-freedom and a supposed freedom glimpsed beyond. The frontier and the threshold are particularly helpful in reconfiguring this binary understating of the relation between freedom and non-freedom.

I look to the figure of the social media influencer as fulfilling a particular function in reproducing an image of a discrete space of freedom we might strive to enter. For all their projection of a desirable, 'free' life (at least according to the criteria of some), the influencer still produces these projected images from with the constraints of extractive, exploitative labour. Unusually though, the desirability of these images relies on the pretence that this is not the case, and that the freedom fantasy beyond is in some way real.

The image of desirable freedom which might be approached but never reached induces a flow. We are drawn into the frontier zones through the soliciting of our labour's most desired forms (entrepreneurship, creativity, virtuosity), but at the same time the frontier zones is where checks on power's dynamic violence are weakest. We are drawn into the frontier zone, only for acts and threats of violence to push us back, enforcing stable normativities.

What would happen if, instead of looking to a 'freedom' across or beyond a boundary, we instead sought to rupture or subvert the proprietorial logics of the non-freedom of actually-lived life?