This text is an excerpt from the PhD thesis titled 'Ṗolisfonia - Stimulating political dialogue through sonic practices in the public space' (Matteo Pra Mio 2024).
Unless we live in isolation, without any kind of contact-to or interdependency-from other human beings, we live in society. This means sharing physical, hybrid and/or digital spaces with other people, and interacting with them generally with the aim to make life in that context more comfortable and, in most cases, even possible.
Living in complete isolation is not only very hard, mainly because it requires to take care alone of everything needed for physical and mental survival, but it is certainly more difficult than living in society, where basic needs can be taken care of more easily. Even though coexistence in society might often seem chaotic, it is based on structures and forms of organisation, be they formal or informal, which not only allow human life to unfold, but exist for the very sake of making life better (easier, more efficient, more meaningful, etc.).
Associated activity, emotionally, intellectually and consciously sustained, being together, is as reflected by Dewey in The Public and its Problems 'how things are done'. Human beings naturally interact with each other in a process that is a fundamental condition for the creation of community.
Life in society has advantages but also difficulties, which are due, among other things and simplifying a lot, to the fact that each of us has different needs and desires, which can sometimes be in strong conflict with those of other people. In order to fulfil our desires and needs we need to coordinate with other people in our social context, and this kind of coordination is what I call politics.
The word politics finds its origins in the ancient Greek word polis (meaning city) and since Aristotle's writings, titled the same way, it was meant to describe the activities concerning the management of public life in the city-states of his time. Aristotle's contribution to political though is considered to be one of the foundational stones of western political tradition, which radically evolved over time despite being almost exclusively characterised by male and European perspectives.
At present times, politics cannot be considered a fixed concept or one globally shared approach, but should be viewed as a context dependent practice that can take many different forms, and whose very definition and perception varies considerably depending on the setting taken as reference. By researching, for instance, the definition of politics on the most acknowledged dictionaries in one single language, it is perhaps not much surprising how many different nuances of the word's meaning can be found, even more so when we search for the same term in dictionaries of different languages, when we compare its meaning in different historical ages, or when we look at how the term was defined by political thinkers over time.
The attempt to define politics as an immutable concept is therefor not much useful, but I would like still to outline a few characteristics that seem to be shared by most definitions I came across during my studies, being aware that a unified consensus on the matter cannot be reached:
- Politics is a human activity that concerns the organisation and structuring of our coexistence in public and private life.
- Politics is associated with the practices and institutions of government. Historically referring to the government of self-administered communities of various types and sizes, at present times mostly referring to the government of national-states or, on a smaller scale, municipalities.
- Politics is characterised by the exercise and management of power, the capability to take action, to influence how life is lived in a given context.
Summing up, as human-beings we organise our coexistence in public and private life, we give shape to structures and institutions on multiple levels to do so, and take action to influence these processes, calling them politics. In other words, politics is all those processes in which we use our power to shape and organise our coexistence as human-beings in public and private life, creating supporting structures, and institutions on the way.
Defining the concept of politics in a multicultural/ multitemporal perspective would be a fascinating research per se and would obviously require a much greater endeavour than what is functional to my work. The definition I give here is thus a rather functional one that highlights the core characteristics of politics in the geographical and temporal context of my research.
Concretely this means that practically everything we do has a political dimension.
An example of the political dimension of everyday activities is the common situation of sharing a flat between roommates. In order to live well together, one decides together how the house is furnished, what cleaning shifts there are and how they are divided up, whether one can smoke inside or not, if and how common expenses are shared, whether one cooks and eats together, etc. These are all political decisions because they coordinate the coexistence with other people and their purpose is to make all flatmates feel as comfortable as possible together.
If we enlarge the group of people involved, for example by including all the people in a given region or even a state, the scale and form of coordination changes, but the principle is still the same. We have to decide which rules to give ourselves so that we can live together in the best possible way. The problem, however, when the size of the group of people involved is very large is that it becomes very difficult to get every single person involved in the decisions that have to be made. To solve this problem, therefore, mechanisms of representation are created so that each person's opinion can count up to a certain extent.
In any case, a number of other questions arise from this reflections, such as:
- Which needs and desires are most important to satisfy?
- Which of these are acceptable and which are not?
- And above all, who has the right to decide these things?
- To these questions, as to many others, there is no single answer because depending on the context in which we ask them, the answers can be very different.
My personal perspective, in my context, is that one should try to satisfy as many desires and needs of as many people as possible, trying to achieve as equal a condition as possible with mutual respect. The result is that everyone's wants and needs are all the more acceptable the more satisfying them fosters, or does not harm, a condition of fairness and mutual respect. I believe that every person in a given social context should have the right to take a personal part in deciding these issues, and healthy, functioning political institutions should guarantee this right.