From 'The Coming Insurrection'

"There will be no social solution to the present situation. (...)There’s no longer any language for common experience. And we cannot share wealth if we do not share a language."

 
'The Coming Insurrection' p. 15, full text here http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/

This text was brought to Australia in October by the Berlin Schauspielhaus in their performance of the play An Enemy of the People. Each night 80-90% of Melbourne audience raised their hands in favour of this text, which is regularly referred to as an anarchist text.

I find this idea of anti-social alarming and provokative but also perhaps true. The social is a place of great love and also great terror - it is where we validate each other's existence, whether that existence be, in its real effect, affirmative, or not. Therefore the Social is a place where both the best and the most evil acts can take place. But I find, it is more often a place of ignorance, in that it grants permission to ignore that which is outside of it.

Also this is an interesting statement about language and common experience. I disagree with this fundamentally - I claim there are no common experiences. Therefore I rephrase it to a problem of language itself - that "there is no common language for experience". Our experience will always be subjective and individual, but its how we share those experiences - what forums we create - these are where community can form. For a chance for that community to build, however, a network must first be created. And then it is a question of who owns the network, who has influence over its architecture, what are its objectives (trivial? narcassistic? commercial?) and who governs it.

Finally, the word 'wealth' in that last phrase is worth contemplating. I do not read this as material wealth, such as that generated in Australia by the mining boom. I read it as inclusive of those immaterial things which make up wealth - love, storytelling, community, knowledge. The idea that we cannot share this wealth without a shared language is a conservative statement - of course, someone may love someone without being able to communicate, over long distances etc. Likewise, people can share the same language and not share any of these 'wealths' at all. How do we explain this category?

The answer is simple. I once had a 2 hour conversation with a Polish man who had no English, using only our hands and a note pad. Here, language was present, but it was a language of connection, fuelled by willpower, which overpowered the inability to talk. Community, love, knowledge - these things are themselves languages.