Speech

The experience of language is a political experience

The experience of language is a political experience

A brief side note as frame: In 1991, musician Sergey Kuryokhin went on the TV programme The Fifth Wheel (Пятое колесо) to expound his theory that, as Lenin and his revolutionary comrades had been great lovers and consumers of wild mushrooms, including hallucinogenic ones, their personalities had gradually become displaced by the personality of a mushroom. His segment featured interviews with mycologists and botanists, and concluded with Kuryokhin's famous claim:

I have absolutely irrefutable evidence that the October Revolution was carried out by people who for many years had been consuming certain mushrooms. And in the process of being consumed by these people, the mushrooms displaced their personality. These people were turning into mushrooms. In other words, I simply want to say that Lenin was a mushroom.

While it would not be true to say that a majority of people hearing this subscribed to this theory wholesale, a sufficiently high percentage of the public found itself confused as to the seriousness of the message for the Leningrad Committee of the Communist Party to release an official statement in response to inquiries about the truth of the claims, insisting that these were false as ‘a mammal cannot be a plant’. Naturally, their engagement with these claims only served to expose them to further ridiculehttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14735784.2018.1496843

Agamben: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-u2019esperienza-del-linguaggio-n-u2019esperien

How would it be possible to truly change the society and culture in which we live? Reforms and even revolutions, while transforming institutions and laws, production relations and objects, do not call into question those deeper layers that shape our vision of the world and which would need to be achieved for the change to be truly radical. Yet we have daily experience of something that exists differently from all the things and institutions that surround us and that conditions and determines them all: language. We are first and foremost dealing with named things, yet we continue to talk nonsense and as it happens, without ever asking ourselves what we are doing when we speak. In this way it is precisely our original experience of language that remains stubbornly hidden from us and, without us realizing it, it is this opaque area inside and outside of us that determines our way of thinking and acting.
Western philosophy and knowledge, faced with this problem, believed they could resolve it by supposing that what we do when we speak is to implement a language, that the way in which language exists is, that is, a grammar, a lexicon and a set of rules for composing names and words in a speech. It goes without saying that everyone knows that if we had to consciously choose words from a dictionary every time and equally conscientiously put them together in a sentence, we would not be able to speak at all. Yet, during a centuries-old process of elaboration and teaching, language-grammar has penetrated us and has become the powerful device through which the West has imposed its knowledge and science on the entire planet. A great linguist once wrote that every century has the grammar of its philosophy: the opposite would be equally and perhaps more true, that is, that every century has the philosophy of its grammar, that the way in which we have articulated our experience of language in a language and in a grammar it also inevitably determines the structure of our thinking. It is no coincidence that grammar is taught in primary school: the first thing a child must learn is that what he does when he speaks has a certain structure and that his reasoning must conform to that order. .
It is therefore only to the extent that we are able to question this fundamental assumption that a true transformation of our culture will become possible. We must try to rethink from scratch what we do when we speak, immerse ourselves in that opaque area and question ourselves not about grammar and vocabulary, but about the use we make of our body and our voice while the words seem to come out of our lips almost by themselves . We would then see that in this experience what is at stake is the opening of a world and of our relationships with our fellow men and that, therefore, the experience of language is, in this sense, the most radical political experience.

February 16, 2024
Giorgio Agamben