Abstract
This chapter (and the next) try to demonstrate that the discourse on the nationhood is based on dialogic imagination; a dialogism that not only entails a gaze toward the external other and internal otherness, but supposes bivocality entrenched in culturally mediated forms of speech. This bivocal dialogism is what defines how the twenty-first-century young Georgians imagine “Georgian people” and Georgian statehood in the setting of existing geopolitical structures and how the nineteenth-century intellectual elite engages with its imaginary public to advance it to the condition of nationhood. In both cases, it is the outward gaze to the “North” and to the “West” harboring the voices of self-imagination that conceives Georgianness as simultaneously ideal and flawed. There is the simultaneity of two poles, because everything Georgian—history or culture, mentality or habits, kings or people, provincial or urban—is imagined as fundamentally incomplete in comparison with one thing and fundamentally complete in comparison to another.
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Notes
- 1.
I am grateful to the Free University administration, especially Giorgi Meladze and Aleko Shelia, for not only allowing me to use the essays for my dissertation project, but for putting me in charge of the organizational work for the writing contest in “independent reasoning.” Such close involvement gave me an opportunity to observe the entire process and look closely into how academic faculty deliberated on the essay topic. To retain the anonymity of the contestants, when quoting the essays, I either use fake names or index codes such as B31, based on my database in my Excel spreadsheet.
- 2.
A number of students used other countries as examples supporting their claims on tradition and modernity. There was an evident trend in this too. Nineteen students used Japan as an example of successful merging of traditions and modernity. Five students used the example of Israel as a testament to the claim that a nation can exist without a political entity and will succeed if traditions are preserved. A few students also mentioned “Muslim countries” as an example of “bad traditions” that need to be “modernized.”
- 3.
Jane Kitaevich’s recent research explores historical narratives and memory discourse among Georgia’s school teachers (forthcoming paper “History that Splinters”). Her findings show a pattern very similar to what I discuss here.
- 4.
We can conceive of forms of agency and tactics of reappropriation in these texts, because while students made use of the same cultural material (memory narrative motifs), they made use of them in diverse ways. This is why I think, the notion of “user” and the practice of “using” based on “tactics of consumption,” as outlined by Michel de Certeau seems especially apt here. According to de Certeau’s definition, in her “scriptual play” (p. 135) someone like Sofio, is not simply a “consumer” of a single ideological discourse, but performs as a “user” of several rhetorical genres “by poaching … on the property of others” (1984, p. xii). Thus, her argumentative tactic is a form of “production, a poiēsis” (de Certeau 1984, p. xii). Such textual production is based on a “tactic” that “insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansion, and secure independence with respect to circumstances … because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time – it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized on the wing’” (p. xix). There are many instances of how students’ tactics of argumentation depend on “seizing the opportunities,” on capturing and re-weaving socio-culturally pre-shaped and imposed discursive forms. Creators of such texts are what Roland Barthes (1977) calls “scriptors,” whose power lies in compiling pre-given texts in somewhat new ways. They are producers of textual “bricolage” (de Certeau 1984). From this perspective, understanding a text is only possible if we turn to discursive norms and conventions that underlie such scriptoral performance.
- 5.
About 33 percent of the essays that went for the traditionalist argument fall in the first category, and the 51 percent that I labeled “hybrid” fluctuated between two polarized perspectives (traditionalist vs modernist) and fall into the second category. In the first case, Georgian culture is something pre-given, a sanctuary, a “treasure house” in and of itself and in its own right; in the second case, it is something posited in relation to an external measure. Here “culture” functions as commodity that acquires its value in relation to the market that transcends its margins.
- 6.
With the exception of 29 students among “Progressives,” who either avoided discussing Georgia as an example or maintained a “rational” outlook.
- 7.
A parallel can be drawn with ceremonial speech in religious rites. The idiom employed there is invested with divine authority, namely, that whatever is said, God’s presence behind these words is assumed as an authoritative voice. Thus, in religious speech “God” serves as an underlying structure—a “schema” that dictates both how one should interpret the words and how one should act relative to them. In similar vein, speech genre that enacts the narrative schema of the nation’s past has a similar meaning-dictating and moralizing force.
- 8.
Remark in parenthesis original.
- 9.
In total, I have identified less than 20 essays (out of 204) that had no mention of terms such as “Georgian history,” “our past,” so forth, or any reference to the historical events or historicity.
- 10.
I did actually return a question to a taxi driver (as a way to provoke him) engaged in a heated discussion of Georgia’s political affairs, in that repeatedly referring to “our past” as something of divine significance and as something that guides his interpretation of current political actions, of what is wrong and what is right. My question that sounded like “Which past do you have in mind?” caught him in astonishment, he pulled on the brakes and turned around, possibly making sure that I was in fact Georgian and even then he did not deem it necessary to provide an answer. He took my question merely as cynicism upon something that I knew (or rather remembered) as perfectly well as he did.
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Batiashvili, N. (2018). Things Coded in Our Genetic Memory. In: The Bivocal Nation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62286-6_3
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