In praise of ideas

On average take there is nothing more reassuring for political thought than the reality of its validation in history. Not to speak about practices, norms and institutions but even ideas, the most ethereal of all entities are seized by the dominating eyes of history. Because of this dependency politics continuously encircles itself with passive affects of life, impulsively submerging under the authority of past tenses.

As known to philosophy, pursuing the definition of an idea is the vainest thing on earth. Idea is indefinable not because of any lack for definitions but precisely the other way around, because of having too many of them. Fortunately enough, there are rare moments when instantaneously we sense that ideas resemble the ceaseless undulations of universe, echoing the incorporeal regions of life, the lands of possibilities yet to be discovered.

Here we are interested in the mechanics of political idea or to be more exact in the value of idea in politics. How to characterize the formation of idea in politics? What is the function of it and through what types of determinations it undertakes the necessity to be actualized in the midst of things?

Without doubt politics has nothing to do with the world of Angelus Silesius, where the rose simply blooms in itself, without asking why. Various sorts of complications and exigencies are more than enough for it. Vicious intentions and age-long hubris together with labyrinths of deceptions and illusionary processes of accustomation form its everydayness. Nevertheless and quite paradoxically, productive function of idea is never given a birth from an organized incentive to reshape the entire physiology of body politic, but from the resistance to its negativities on all the possible directions of life.

Ideas are the true instruments of resistance. But concretely what do they resist in politics? – After all to limitations of life. Is there anything more self-conserving and narcissistic than politics? With high probability nothing at all. It’s infinitesimally multiplying images, voices, gestures, grimaces, words and statements are reproduced with speeds commensurable to its normalized interest for guaranteed standstill. For this reason ideas like thoughts for human consciousness, are the most inorganic elements of politics, structurally perceived as the possibilities of alterations from status quo, the most admired regime of things for politics.

Ideas in politics resist the limitations of life. They serve as vital materials against enlargement of petrified forms of historical past. Speaking with some Deleuzian overtone, if the politician without ideas exemplifies the never-ending repetition of things in sameness, the one with ideas gives voice to endless fluctuations of difference, while at the same time becoming sufficiently conscious about inevitabilities of repetitions. The world of the later somehow resonates with the world of decimal numeral system in arithmetic’s. Ten digits but infinity of combinations; Quantitatively more than finite scenarios of life but infinity of coagulations between them.

And in fact is there any single scenario of life one doesn’t experience even in the most ordinary biography? From affinity to zealousness everything is always already given. The thing is that scenarios are limited and countable, combinations between them is endless. And what, if not politics, as the operator for practical modulations of reality, is responsible with assistance of ideas to ensure the intensities for mentioned combinations?

Ideas in politics provide the sources for creative combinations of life. Something combinatorial is always presented in adequate politics. Things composed and synthesized are in need of measured proportions and the points of balances which as a result resist inherent baseness of politics to be misguided by power and thus to be confined with voluntarily appropriated reality of slavery.