For Harold S.
I am honest and I recognize that the title is a "bait" that I used to attract clicks on this column. In reality, it is not about Petro or about Gaitán, as can be believed from the image that illustrates it on networks. I take them as an excuse, yes, to talk about something that is essential in political life, although each time it sinks into almost unstoppable destruction: speech, speeches.
Antes de eso, no puedo fail to write down a fact that is interesting and that I found out when I finished writing this column: that María Valencia Gaitán, granddaughter of that historic liberal leader, was appointed by Petro as the new director of the National Center for Historical Memory. And this is important because memory here in Colombia —for all communities, as anywhere in the world— is a field of dispute, a battle arena in which the discourses or communicative processes that claim to be are located. But we'll talk about that another time.
Gaitan revived
Ahora sí: que valga la It is worth bringing up Petro's speech before the UN not to analyze it, because they have already talked about it enough, but to highlight something that seems even more relevant to me, although it did not last long: that they talk about the importance of speeches in what awkwardly we call politics. However, I do not agree that Petro is compared to Gaitán in this area (perhaps there is a consensus that he is the orator of Colombia par excellence), much less with Demóstenes and Cicero, as I have seen him there. They made enlightened people (I promise to talk about them both in other texts and place them in the scope of their contexts: the Greek and the Roman). Petro, in the midst of a scenario of collective silence that is what this country is, is an outstanding actor, a good speaker in his own way, but without coming close to those other great characters who literally lived on great words. and in the big words.
Que los discursos eran el sustrato de lo propiamente político ya lo sabían los greeks. That in fact, two thousand five hundred years later, we are not capable of making better speeches than those delivered by the great political animals of yesteryear would be enough to fill our faces with blushes in recognition of the incapacity in which we live and in which the government regimes in which we are (sub)jected.
¿Qué es el discurso? How to distinguish speech from other types of speech processes? «discourseit is, originally, the action of running here and there, there are comings and goings, “wanderings”, “intrigues”», said Roland Barthes. Discourse is a constant activity. The discourse does not cease to be. And it does not cease to be because it is the expression of the "who" of a human being, and it makes sense only to the extent that it is said, it is revealed to other human beings. The discourse is nourished by a double meaning: the one expressed by its author and the one received and given by his listeners. The discourse does not cease to be because it "runs from here to there" in the mind and entrails of the person who says it, throughout his life, and also "runs from here to there" in the minds and entrails of those who hear it. The speech, if it is speech, excites the words from all fronts. Parallel to the torrent of speech run the arrows of Apollo, the god who does not say but means; Crossing the torrent of discourse, the network of meanings is illuminated, creating rainbows. The discourse, if it is discourse, has a beginning, but it never ends. The words of a speech never stop flashing, revealing things.
La mayoría —por no decir the totality—of the communicative processes that we hear today (emphasizing the government-administration sphere) lack the qualities of discourse. The catastrophic levels of that loss have not yet been sufficiently pointed out. It is the degradation and loss of the human condition that we are witnessing...
Ahora, ¿por qué esos communicative processes are not speeches? It is good to indicate that in the field of language there are different relationships: there is not only an active-sender and a passive-receiver in the communicative relationship. Not only is the ability to speak used to communicate. It also canpersuade(which is where the discourse is primarily inscribed, and let's remember that persuasion has to do with desire, with non-finality...), converse, chat, dialogue, debate... And each of those words with which we designate different forms and purposes of using speech has its own realm, its own unspoken rituals. Thus, what remains is to ask ourselves what type of society we are in, what are the primary orientations of its experience, what type of spaces it constitutes, how it fills them. My tentative answer is the following: we are in a society of idiots (by this I do not mean an insult but the declaration of a symptom. To idion/ ta idiotsin Greek: the private, one who is deprived, without the ability to... speak freely and take care of oneself. Perhaps it goes without saying that it is a condition in which we are all (for worse) subjected. The task then is to reach political maturity and get out of there... along with the others).
El basamento político de este tipo of society is the silence that is evident in the incapacity of speech, that is, it does not have a political base but mechanisms of domination. The fact that muteness is characteristic of the society of idiots does not mean that there are no communicative processes. On the contrary, the specific type of silence, of "deprivation" of our societies deploys its mechanisms in the communicative process of command-obedience, and on this our forms of government are sustained. There is no free word, except for some very specific cases that are exemplified in the fight of the mosquito against the elephant.
Por supuesto, la comunicación mandar -To obey today is full of performativity, which is the precious instrument of tyrants who try to hide, without luck, not being. They hide the mandates in questions, including: “why haven't we finished the job?” —he tells his workers in the company, where clearly he, as the owner, does not employ his labor power. "Your opinion is important to us! We want to hear you!" —they say from the administrative instance in which they want to comply with the obligatory part of the process of legitimization of private decisions, that is, they listen once to take notes and later ignore or, in common cases, to never listen again , not tomustlisten again. “This assembly is the true expression of youth!” —say the young leaders who, consciously unaware of what an assembly process is, try to fill their lack of legitimacy with massive convocations in which the submission of opinions are “inputs” so that they can follow the step by step of an apparently decision-making process that does not occur in the assembly (if in an assembly there is no discussion, it is not deliberated and it is not decided within itself - all three things at the same time - that is not an assembly, it is a circus in which spectators are summoned so that they shout and get excited andobey instructions) because clearly the assembly "was not chosen" to carry out this process, it is "elected and summoned" by them to validate their private decisions (they will hide behind "what the law says", when the law is learned to knowfendher). Having to put up with the daring and tyrannical ignorance into which they want to put us, all because they are not even capable of reading about the political experiences in which the assemblies arose and were endowed with meaning, this being the proper sphere of the speeches? So I could go on for a long time with breakdowns of that type of tyrannical spaces that seem not to be.
La invitación es la siguiente: not to confuse, to be able to distinguish. The putting into practice of political thought has to do with distinguishing: one thing are speeches and another thing are performative mandates; one thing is an assembly and another thing is a circus —Roman circuses—; It is one thing to exercise free speech among equals and another to speak to the master so that he listens to the requests of the subject, or to speak to the subject so that he obeys and carries out the orders of the master. In all this there are differences. And the best antidote for the tyrannical ignorance that locks us in a society of idiots is distinction, because "to know is to distinguish", just as our grandmothers do when in a well-populated garden they distinguish the 20 or 30 species of plants and flowers that there is in it and its uses, and out of ignorance we only see uniformity, "a garden with beautiful plants".
October 5, 2022