Philosophy
Democracy is not just administration or debate; it is poiesis, the act of making new worlds visible.
Making as a Democratic Act
The Greek word poiesis, from which our word “poetry” descends, means making. Heidegger, in his meditation on the question concerning technology, retrieves an older meaning: poiesis is any bringing-forth, any act that brings something that was not into being. The craftsman making a vessel practices poiesis. So does the farmer who brings grain from the earth. So, above all, does the poet, whose making is the most radical, because what the poet makes is not a thing but a world.
We want to borrow this term carefully. Politics as poiesis is not a demand that politicians become poets (though the imagination of some of our leaders could certainly use the enrichment). It is the claim that democratic life, at its best, is a mode of bringing new worlds into being, new forms of life, new ways of seeing and being seen. It is distinguished from politics as administration, which manages what already exists; and from politics as performance, which stages what has already been decided.
The distinction matters most when we return to the question with which we ended Part Two: if hegemony captures common sense, what captures the imagination? Gramsci’s answer was, in effect, the counter-hegemonic project, an alternative common sense built patiently through a war of position, through organic intellectuals working in civil society. This is not wrong. But it is not quite enough. It remains in the register of sense, of ideas and arguments and the slow reshaping of what seems natural.
Imagination is not sense. Imagination is the capacity to picture what has not yet existed- to feel, before we can articulate, that a different world is possible. Antonio Negri, thinking with Spinoza, calls it the productive power of desire; Ernst Bloch calls it the principle of hope, that anticipatory consciousness which reaches toward what has not yet arrived. These are not idle concepts. They name something real in democratic life: those moments when a movement, a gathering, a song, a film, a march produces not just an argument but a feeling- the felt possibility of a different world.
In Indian democratic history, this has happened. The Ambedkarite movement, in its processions and its conversions and its insistence on visible collective presence, was producing democratic imagination as much as democratic argument. The Shaheen Bagh protests of 2019–20 were a practice of poiesis. The women who sat there night after night were not merely arguing against the CAA; they were making something: a new form of Muslim women’s public presence, a new image of citizenship, a new stage of appearance. The Constitution was not merely cited; it was read aloud, held, wrapped around the body. It was made into a living thing.
Poiesis, in this sense, is not the monopoly of the educated or the elite. The Bhakti poets, Kabir, Tukaram, and Mirabai were practising democratic poiesis centuries before the concept existed. Their poetry was not private devotion. It was a public speech that crossed gender and caste lines, that created new communities of feeling, that said: the divine does not recognise your birth. This is why Ambedkar chose Kabir as one of his teachers. Not for the theology alone, but for the politics of a voice that appeared without permission.
What hegemony cannot fully capture is imagination, specifically, the imagination that arrives through form rather than argument. You can rebut an argument. You cannot rebut a feeling produced by a film that shows you your own life as if for the first time. You cannot rebut the moment when an image of a woman’s collective, of a flood survivor rebuilding, of an old man voting for the first time makes the world seem suddenly larger than it did before.
This is why art is not a supplement to democratic politics. It is one of its primary sites. And this is why we need to sit, for a moment, with three filmmakers who understood this more deeply than most.