How to speak politically?

If the poetic (the real) speech truly means to be forever on the road placed into the middle of a word, as Osip Mandelstam thought it in his extraordinary text on Dante, then politics with its historically conditioned experience of language apparently is the principal impossibility to speak at all. Although, politics speaks and noticeably, it speaks more than any other domain of being. It instrumentalizes, figures, shapes and influences the language in its completeness. One would rather easily imagine a poet without writing a single verse or uttering a word than a politician into the grips of the silence. So, either politics with some nondescript magic manages to speak while not speaking, or in fact posses its own superfluous mode of speech, only vaguely theoreticized until now. In both cases the triumph of sophistry over philosophy is evident.

Today, while facing the dangerous results of politics of inequality in Europe, the question concerning an adequate appropriation of language becomes the instrumental for understanding the possibilities of fair action. With eventual delusion in promises of malfunctioning representationalism, large number of those with feelings of humiliation and oppression are furiously inspecting their own ways of expression. Everything would be in the usual traditions of demonstrated social dissatisfaction, if not one troublesome detail. Something to keep in mind with “Yellow vests” protests in Europe is that long-established proportion of articulating the social problems is broken. Systematically structured politics of inequality together with deepening miscommunication between state apparatus and general will of people paved the way for radical rearrangement of conceptual map in politics. Not obliquely but in the most straightforward manner we see how the right to problematize the socio-economic discontent is methodically absorbed by ultra conservative powers, thus leaving the leftist practice of emancipatory politics as a shadow without body. Who would imagine even a decade ago anarchists and fascists under the sign of one movement? Truly a wondrous merit of neoliberalism.

Not to look for the villains of the piece any further, let’s say a few words on the question of Georgia figuring out the experience from happenings in Europe’s political mainland. There is a solid ground to think that in the absence of democratically modeled left-wing organization in Georgia, the vacuum of hope for socially excluded majority with high probability might be filled by ripening reactionary powers in the near future. From this point of view the main task for leftism is to compose the appropriate language with working class, to get in a direct touch with them, to prepare the basement for common action with real incentives of transmitting ideas into the institutionalized politics.

In “Poetics of relation” wonderful Edouard Glissant appeals to an idea of entering into the equivalencies of relation. Why not to follow his maxim as the possible answer on the initial question of how to speak with working class. Neither consciously simplified popular parlance, nor overcomplicated and scientifically formal language. These formulas are outdated, they should be abolished once and for all.

Thus, the point is through language to enter into the equivalencies of relation, where the relation itself “neither deteriorates through nor obliterates any regression. Its patience outdistances depths and sea.”

In this regime of relation language ceases to be a mere means of communication, an automaton for exchanging information or weaponry for obsolete techniques of sick persuasion. Instead it opens the door for free practices of imagination side by side with concrete work of understanding the other. Through this process step by step one becomes conscious of life, of language, of mixtures and of infinite variations of being. In certain sense one becomes the world.

Perhaps the voices of true politics are sounding from the margins of people’s becoming the world.