The question of meaning in Georgian politics

We are living the times when the voice of authenticity is overly muted. Testimony to this speaks volumes through the simplest facts from our daily life. That is not to try to enumerate them, any attempt of this kind will inevitably lead us into a bad infinity. We are witnessing how the world is becoming multitudinous, synthetic and politics not surprisingly, disposed as its archioperator. The core ambiguity of the mentioned paradigmatic shift is that the more it enlarges traditionally limited spectrum of senses, the more unintentionally it blears the sovereignty of meaning. Accordingly, questions like how to think the reality of politics left without clear meanings or what might be the possible approximation of politics circumscribed by rivaling coordinates of falsities and of weakened truths gain the substantial importance in this regard.

The given transformative process with its modes of reception and means of expression is differently distributed all over the world. However, it should be noted that the index of difference is set up from intensities of things happening and not from their compositions. To put it simply, we are speaking about the concept of democracy as the possible truth of contemporary politics. Let us look-over the Georgian experience of democracy.

Nearly for three decades, Georgia has been polishing its democratic lenses. Paradoxically but in this quite a short period of time, we have lived a compressed history of formal attributes of democracy – with its founding fathers and reformers, with social unrests and revolution, with state formation processes and precedent of peaceful delegation of power. Thinking retrospectively, however, it becomes obvious that something abundantly mechanistic was permanently haunting Georgian experience of democracy and only now, after becoming full of adventure and discovery, we are approaching the threshold where an exhausted imperative of formal mechanicism ought to be replaced by the realm of constituting the meaning of democracy.

But how to unbind the local meaning of democracy from the bonds of all-encompassing meaninglessness? In the times of precariousness of thought, it seems to be a great deal of difficulty to differentiate the ersatz politics from the true one. Nevertheless, it would be reactive to have even the minimal nostalgia for ill-famed dualisms with their dull strategies of naming and clarification, just necessary to keep in mind possibly problematical underpinnings that characterize the devaluation of meanings. The fact is that the meaning of Georgian democracy, yet to be constituted, in no way should proceed under the gaze of world picture which is convulsively fading away, with a pathetic figure of leap into the past as the most deceptive trap of its vicissitude. Neither self-imposed blinded faith in progress might be an answer here.

So, the question remains open, how to form the meaning of politics in Georgia? From today’s perspective, the only viable technique of reasoning in this direction seems to be addressed from the immanence of politics, from the intensities of converging the compositional elements between the real political experience of people and productively modeled democratic thought. In other words, people have to become the bearer of meaning in politics.

It is plain as day that the process of people becoming political is impossible to take place at zero ground. Various premises are to be fulfilled in order to initiate it and the most importantly one concrete issue – The foundational change of the concept of people in the perception of state apparatus - Understanding it as a potency of life and not an object of manipulation.