‘Renters’ and ‘Real Tbilisians’: Historicizing the ‘City’ as ethnolinguistic category

The City of Balconies: elite politics and the changing semiotics of the post-socialist cityscape

Introduction: Kitovani’s exhibition.

My first experience of Tbilisi was in the spring of 1992, a few short months after the coup that ousted the first post-socialist government of Zviad Gamsakhurdia. It also leveled much of a historic portion of the downtown area. The general who had led the coup, Tengiz Kitovani, had been a sculptor in the socialist period. As a result, the devastated downtown region became known jokingly at the time as ‘Kitovani’s exhibition’.

The coup against Gamsakhurdia was transformative in its effects on the Georgian city not only in the plastic arts, but also socially. The emergent political divide between Anti- and Pro-Gamsakhurdia (‘Zviadist’) orientations often boiled down to the inherited cultural division between Tbiliseli ‘Tbilisian’ and provincial Georgian villagers. The nationalist Gamsakhurdia government’s support was strongest amongst present or erstwhile Georgian villagers, whilst old urbanites, and the urban intelligentsia in particular, ranged themselves against the new government.

The 1992 coup was also a family feud within the socialist intelligentsia: A philologist-dissident-turned-president ousted by a sculptor-turned-general (Kitovani) and a criminal-turned-writer-turned-warlord (Jaba Ioseliani), the coup illustrated emergent and opposed tendencies within the socialist intelligentsia. Different self-conceptions of the urban intelligentsia were, as it were, incarnated in the figures who led this coup. On the one hand, the coup, in which a sculptor-turned-general ousted a philologist-turned-president, illustrates a public, exoteric, battle over the self-definition of the intelligentsia, an essentially urban, elitist intelligentsia (represented by Kitovani) turning against a provincial or provincializing one (represented by Gamsakhurdia). On the other hand, the presence of a unique ‘hybrid’, Jaba Ioseliani, a well-known criminal (‘thief of the law’, Georgian k’anonieri kurdi, Russian vor v zakone) breaking the criminal laws of non-engagement with public political life, who was himself also a writer and intelligent turned paramilitary leader, gives the coup another hidden, esoteric dimension. Here urban life and the intelligentsia is characterized not as a public apotheosis of national culture (dividing the intelligentsia from the people as urban to rural, but reuniting them within the framework of the nation), but as an urban bohemian subculture, stressing the opposition between the intelligentsia and the people, private urban subculture and public national culture.

First, the exoteric dimensions of the disagreement. The term intelligentsia (a collective term, the singulative form is intelligent) denotes a specific social formation specific to Eastern Europe. In many ways, the intelligentsia as a social class fulfills some of the functions of Western categories of ‘Civil Society’ and the system of ‘professions’ (Nodia 2002, Zurabishvili 2002). Unlike ‘Civil Society’, which mediates between the ‘State’ and the ‘People’ by a essentially Liberal, democratically imagined open-ended aggregation of voices on the analogy of a market (Taylor 2002), the intelligentsia is rather imagined as an essentially aristocratic mediator between divided portions of a bounded social totality (Nodia 2002, Zurabishvili 2002; Mannheim 1993). The intelligentsia is imagined in an organic relation to some social totality (‘the folk’, ‘the people’, ‘the nation’) for whom it speaks (hence Gramsci’s term ‘organic intelligentsia’ derives from this tradition) to the state (Manning 2004 and references there). Whereas western professions define themselves as technical specialists first and foremost, deliberating over means to given ends, the prototypical activity of an intelligent is writing, and formulating moral ends, such as ‘what is to be done’ for the good of the whole, so that they can be called ‘teleological’ specialists (Konrad and Szelenyi 1979, Nodia 2002). Hence, under socialism, the intelligentsia acted as both a critical force, as well as a legitimating force, in relation to the state apparatus (nomenklatura, many of whom were rather more ‘plebeian’ technical specialists) (Zurabishvili 2002). The intelligentsia was completely dependent on the state nomenklatura, for the state was the agency that would provide the means to its ends. But for the intelligentsia to appear to act as an independent agent, members of the ‘true’ intelligentsia entered into complicated patronage networks with the ‘nomenklatura’ intelligentsia, who provided the practical interventions with the state so that the ‘true’ intelligentsia could contemplate their ideal daydream of a independent nation without the state (Zurabishvili 2002: 48). In effect, the Gamsakhurdia government was the first government by the intelligentsia, a government that did not need the intelligentsia because it was composed itself of intelligentsia (Zurabishvili 2002:52). The 1992 was in effect a coup by the intelligentsia against the intelligentsia, inasmuch as the Gamsakhurdia government failed to provide its required patronage of the remaining intelligentsia.

At the same time, the coup revealed a central contradiction within the cultural ideologies of the intelligentsia between an ‘exoteric’ national narrative unifying the urban intelligentsia and rural folk and an ‘esoteric’ ‘bohemian’ narrative that kept these categories residentially and functionally distinct. The primary role of the cultural intelligentsia was to take care of the ‘Nation’ while the State took care of socialism (as in the phrase ‘National in form, Socialist in content’). Hence cultural production by the intelligentsia was almost always about ‘The Nation’. Culture was first and foremost a set of national forms, a set of ideologies of ethnolinguistic identity. But while this intelligentsia liked to view itself as an organic part of the nation for whom it spoke, it also liked to be separated from this nation residentially (living in cities as opposed to the countryside) and in terms of privileges received from the state as a rewards for its apparently disinterested formulation of projects of identity, legitimation and teleology. In effect the intelligentsia were an ‘aristocracy of the soul’, separated residentially in cities from the ‘people’ for whom they spoke, and separated by their nomeklatura patrons from the ‘plebeian’ state to whom they spoke (Zurabishvili 2002). The narrative of national unity was combined with a narrative of functional and residential complementarities between parts of the nation. The intelligentsia imagined itself as being in a symbiotic relation to the people in ideal terms (from which it was separated in practical terms), and in practical terms it existed in a symbiotic relation to the state (from which it distantiated itself in ideal terms).

The Gamsakhurdia government, in effect, sided with ‘the people’ and neglected its ‘state nomenklatura’ role of patronage for the intelligentsia. Part of the disagreement may have lay with how seriously Gamsakhurdia emphasized the narrative of national unity over functional and residential complementarity between socialist estates. The Gamsakhurdia government was a high water mark for the political fortunes of a puristic conservative utopia of Georgian cultural nationalism, what Zurabishvili calls a ‘mythopoetic’ nationalism, which attempted to put the received collective daydream of an ethnolinguistic category of the nation into practice, including rigid essentializing notions of ‘ethnic purity’ based on the belief of the ‘exclusiveness and uniqueness of the Georgian ethnos’ (Zurabishvili 2002: 50). Accordingly, Gamsakhurdia’s supporters were in fact primarily provincials rather than urbanites, bringing the national and urban narratives of intelligentsia identity into conflict. But many opposition members at that time shared with Gamsakhurdia an ideological commitment to the essentializing ethnolinguistic basis for national unity, the real problem was that the ‘intelligentsia state’ abrogated the tradition patronage relations between nomenklatura and intelligentsia:

The opposition of the greatest portion of the Georgian intelligentsia with Gamsakhurdia was not provoked by the first president’s ideology. Simply, Gamsakhurdia rudely abrogated the existing harmony within a united, symbiotic system—he befriended some of them and brought them (or left them) in the nomenklatura. Most, however, he declared the enemies of the Nation and criminals. (Zurabishvili 2002: 52)

The late socialist intelligentsia bohemian subculture of the city was defined not only negatively in opposition to the rural peasantry, but also positively by the idolization of the criminal subculture. After all, the main participants of the coup were poets, artists, and criminals. In fact, Jaba Ioseliani (1926-2003), one of the leaders of the coup, was himself rooted in all these different worlds. He was a notorious soviet criminal authority, one who had stepped from the ‘anti-society’ of thieves’ law, whose main stricture was not to participate in any way in the official world of soviet society, into the political process by forming a patriotic paramilitary organization (the Mkhedrioni), one filled both with gun-toting poets and thieves. He also held a held a doctoral degree in theatre science and taught as a professor at Tbilisi state University, writing several novels before his death. The figure of Jaba Joseliani seemed to embody the contradictions of the streets of the Tbilisi I came to know, one in which the children of the intelligentsia were often close to the world of thieves, in which cafes were filled with members of the Mkhedrioni by day, both poets and criminals, with khalishnikov rifles propped against the tables, and by night, gunfire, chaos, robberies (see also Manning 2007a, N.D. on this period of post-socialist Tbilisi).

The idea of Tbilisi as a ‘bohemia’ had already been canonized in the writings of the poet and urban folklorist Grishashvili in the 1920s (1963 [1914-1918]; 1963 [1926-7]), who synthesized various streams of received 19th century city culture into a nostalgic folklore and apologetic mythology of the city, with its characteristic poetic genres (the mukhambazi), dialect, music, and customs (Shaqulashvili 1987). Grishashvili, of course, was a revisionist, too. The most significant change was that the ubiquitous figure symbolizing urban life in the nineteenth century, the carefree kinto, the street peddler, was no longer an acceptable mythic figure for the city, especially under socialism. The kinto was reduced to an effeminate comic figure of exchange, placed in almost structuralist opposition to a (hitherto completely unknown) masculine, heroic, figure of production, the urban proletarian qarachogheli (‘wearer of the black chokha’, essentially an urban guild-worker), who became the new (cultured, masculine, proletarian) paragon of urban life. Grishashvili’s writings on the bohemia of Old Tbilisi formed the authoritative basis of a nostalgic discourse of urban subculture when they were republished in 1963, at a time when the creation of the massive new neighbourhood of Saburtalo (1965) allowed a massive influx of new population into the city. These new urbanites, presumably, uncertain of their own urbanity, needed a narrative to find themselves at home in the city, and embraced Grishashvili’s mythology as an authoritative charter. At the same time (1965), Cagareli’s nineteenth century comedy about urban life, rac ginaxavs veghar naxav (‘What you have seen, you can never see again’), was released as a film (and even in cartoon form), again, with a figure of the qarachogheli replacing the kinto, canonizing and popularizing this image of a specifically Georgian yet cosmopolitan urbanity.

By late socialism, the figures representing this subcultural aspect of this divide had changed again. While aristocrats like Grigol Orbeliani ‘slummed’ in the 1840s by getting drunk with kintos and composing mukhambazis, and from the 1920s to the 1960s the nostalgic image of the city was symbolized by the equally poetic qarachogheli, by the 1980s it was de rigeur for slumming intelligentsia to hang out with ‘thieves of the law’, adopting their mannerisms and jargon as a kind of subcultural style, even attempting to pass themselves off as thieves:

Many representatives of the intelligentsia were friends with criminal elements and spoke using thieves’ jargon. The influence of the criminal counterculture on the intelligentsia was so great, that there existed “white thieves”. This meant someone who had never been in prison, never committed any kind of crime, but carried himself as a thief and circulated in intelligentsia circles (Gvasalia 2001)

The late socialist intelligentsia’s ‘anti-politics’ in opposition to the socialist state found in criminal ‘anti-society’ a kind of countercultural utopia rigidly opposed to all norms embodied in society and the state. The criminal code of ‘covert prestige’ was built a complex set of hierarchies, ironically structured both by resistance to the system of ‘overt prestige’ of positively valued state structures (education, jobs, employment, political participation) and private ones (family life, marriage), but also by participation in negative valued state structures (prison) (Chalidze 1977, Halliday 1976, Varese 2001: chapter 7, Humphrey 2002: chapter 5). According to the maximally antinomian version of the thieves’ code, a true thief should participate in none of the former (i.e. education, jobs, marriage and family) and spend practically all his time in prison. Such a hierarchy of covert prestige that is the precise inverse of the Soviet official hierarchy of prestige would naturally produce a rich normative ground for opposition to the Soviet State. With the reform of thieves’ law, authored by Jaba Joseliani himself in 1982, which eventually would allow thieves to participate not only covertly in official socialist state structures, but overtly in post-socialist ones, this covert moral capital could be converted into overt moral capital legitimating political opposition to the socialist state.

In addition, as Gvasalia has suggested, the thieves’ code also expressed on a more covert level other aspirational aspects of the intelligentsia ideology, in respect not to the state, but to the people, such as a sort of urban cosmopolitanism (opposed to normative nationalism rooted in the village) and aristocratic elitism (inasmuch as the as the Georgian intelligentsia grew out an urbanizing aristocracy and to this day this is an important part of the intelligentsia genealogy (Manning 2004)). The anti-society of thieves is based on fundamentally aristocratic principles, that is, a strict hierarchy (here in opposition to the egalitarianism of socialism), and moreover, a principle that part of society should work, and another part should live off the work of others, a romanticization of the aristocratic economic principle of war and pillage (Gvasalia 2001) which is obviously opposed to socialist ideology, but brings it closer to the aristocratic ideology underlying the Georgian intelligentsia. Such a recrudescence of aristocratic economies of pillage, of course, marked the reign of terror of Jaba Ioseliani’s paramilitary organization the mkhedrioni, who bore an obviously aristocratic name (mkhedrioni means ‘mounted warrior, knight’), who had many intelligentsia members, but are remembered by villagers of Georgia, urban Armenians, and many intelligentsia as bandits.

The result of the coup period was that these articulated identity categories grounded in narratives of national unity (‘Georgianness’) and functional and residential complementarity (intelligentsia versus people, urban versus rural) lost their imagined ‘symbiotic’ quality and ended up being concretely opposed, both in the coup, as well as in the period of ‘aristocratic pillage’ that ensued in the following years. Opposed to Georgianness as imagined in Georgian ‘mythopoetic’ nationalism is the identity category of Tbilisian, a category of urban identity which implies no set ethnicity. Tbilisians are no more necessarily ‘Georgian’ than Georgians are necessarily Tbilisians. However, insofar as Georgians were primarily peasants, and intelligentsia primarily Tbilisians, the Tbilisi intelligentsia can be seen as torn between the ideal puristic ethnolinguistic identity in whose name they spoke and the real privileges of their urban life which kept them separate from the nation for whom they spoke. The coup made these covert possibilities overt.

Museums, Passports: Nationality, Residence.

There is no better unintentional illustration of the problematic relationship between Georgianness and the city than the Georgian ethnographic museum, which confronts the actual lived space and habitations of the modern city with the traditional Georgian life of the rural village. The museum, located on a hillside above the city, consists of a ‘village’ street along which are arranged typical (and authentic) houses from different Georgian villages, the village is a ‘metavillage’ consisting of houses from all the different kinds of villages in Georgia. In the museum, Georgia is represented as a diagrammatic icon represented by houses from each region, laid out spatially both as a village and as a map of Georgia’s village regions. The operation of typifying Georgianness as a set of categories of identity rooted in villages is built up from typifications of having each type of house represent a type of Georgian (typical Rachan houses, Mingrelian Houses, Kakhetian houses). Moreover, the houses are laid out on the hillside as if a ‘map’, a diagrammatic icon, of Georgia: The Svan tower representing highland Georgia is located highest on the hillside, for example. Georgia is represented as a diagrammatic icon consisting of regions of Georgia represented by houses from each region. In effect, the museum is a semiotic amalgam of two central technologies of nationalist imagining, the map and the museum (Anderson 1991). There are gaps and erasures, of course, most important being the absence of the city of Tbilisi and its architecture from this map/museum of Georgia. Ironically, then, for the ‘map’ of traditional village Georgia faces the modern Georgian city itself; from the prestigious neighborhood of Vake (once the home of the Socialist elite caste, the intelligentsia, now the home of new elite classes) one can see this ‘metavillage’ in a glance, and from the ‘metavillage’ one can see much of Tbilisi. In eliding the city from this representation of the Georgian totality as being a peasant village writ large, the builders of this model and the larger imaginary it condenses, the Socialist intelligentsia, render their own position as ideal viewer invisible. For their own real homes are located just at the base of the hill, in the city, able to view the ideal homes of the Georgian peasant peasant village from their balconies (see Pictures 1 and 2).

Picture 1. The Georgian ethnographic museum seen from the city

Picture 2. The city seen from the museum

The broader contrast between the museum of rural life and modern city life is an unresolved contradiction, producing a larger model of Georgianness that stands in simple opposition to the city to which it is displayed. Under socialism, this imagined opposition was partially constituted reinforced and regulated by the state with a number of other semiotic technologies that, unlike the museum, circulated with, or regulated the circulation of, socialist citizens. Since the early 1930s rural populations were indeed ‘rooted’ in their villages by the system of internal passports and regulation of urban populations by residence permits, just as nationalities were ‘rooted’ in national republics and regions, with privileged access to resources, jobs, education, promotions, often given to titular nationalities via an official policy of ‘taking root’ (korenizatsiia) or indigenization of elites (Slezkine 1994). The internal passport system (introduced for urban populations in 1932, extended to rural populations under Krushchev in the 1950s), then, created and regulated essentialized categories both of nationality (the official nationality of the bearer [Picture 3]) as well as residence (the propiska or residence permit [Picture 4] that regulated right to reside in a specific urban district, residence having many entailments for access to rights and privileges to socialist services, including limited rights of inheritance (Dragadze 1988:33)). The only difference between the two was that the propiska could be changed with difficulty, one’s nationality could not. But until the 1950s, residence was almost as essentialized a distinction as nationality: having a passport at all (and hence ability to move) was a privilege granted urbanites and denied villagers. The propiska system (abolished in 1996 in Georgia, retained in Russia) was introduced in the first place for urban locations to prevent massive immigrations into urban space, and to keep rural populations rooted in villages as socialist serfs. If the contents of the passport (nationality, propiska) were categories of ‘rootedness’, having a passport at all was a precondition to mobility: rural dwellers were twice-rooted, on the one hand, the propiska in the internal passport was introduced to regulate urban residence, on the other, rural dwellers were not given passports at all for quite some time, rendering them unable to move at all (Shelley 1996: 131-136).

Socialist Internal Passport: categories of identity

A) Front, including registration of natsionalnost B) Registration of residence

(Nationality: Here: ‘Georgian’) (Here: ‘Dolidze street 78’ [Urban residence])

Pictures 3-4

Alongside the semiotic technologies of maps, museums and passports, the socialist state was an avid builder of monuments. By the system of monuments, the state ‘rooted’ the intelligentsia in the city in other ways, turning accidental facts of residence into the essence of urbanity. Not only are there the two pantheons, the Mtatsminda pantheon consisting only of graves of the intelligentsia (and until recently, not political figures), Didube, where Jaba Ioseliani is buried, having a more ‘mixed character’, but also the bodies of intelligentsia are buried here and there in front of public buildings as mythic founders. Not only are such public burial sites of intelligentsia corpses valuable tools of legitimation (compare Gal 1991, Verdery 2000), but also their biographical facts of residence during life. If the ethnographic museum consists of typifications of kinds of homes of anonymous folk (paralleling the typification in the passport of ‘nationality’), the rest of the city is littered with monuments to individual residences of prominent members of the intelligentsia (in effect, monumental versions of the propiska in their passport). Doorways in intelligentsia neighborhoods can be literally surrounded by plaques indicating prominent erstwhile intelligentsia residents. Everywhere, the intelligentsia’s ‘rooting’ in the city is evidenced by the plethora of monuments to their residence there [(color?) Picture 5].

Picture 5: Tbilisi doorway with plaques recording famous intelligentsia erstwhile residents.

The net effect of these different semiotic technologies was that socialism reinforced and reproduced the residential opposition between countryside and city, the very distinction that was to be effaced under communism, in much the same way as it regulated and reinforced essentialized distinctions of official nationality between titular nationalities of each republic (Georgians) and ‘others’ whose national ‘home’ was elsewhere (Armenians, Russians, Azerbaijanis) (Suny 1998: 284-290), another distinction that was sometimes expected to ‘wither away’ in the communist future.

‘Cultured’ comportment and uncultured spectacle: kultura, goimoba, mariazhoba.

With the fall of socialism, this division between villager and urbanite is no longer regulated by the state, as residence has become regulated by private property relations and a market in land. This has produced two major changes in the city, both of which relate to the way that city life is no longer subject to the hegemony of cultured norms of socialist consumption, k’ult’ura, but instead of uncultured displays of villager behavior, goimoba, or superficial displays of theatricalized conspicuous consumption, mariazhoba. On the one hand, the post-socialist period has witnessed an unprecedented rural immigration into the city, as erstwhile villagers abandon the defunct rural economy for the city, and, at the same time, erstwhile city-dwellers flee the defunct national economy as guest-workers abroad. Some villages, indeed, have more or less lost their entire populations, just as some city neighborhoods are now populated primarily by recent ex-villagers. ‘Real’ Tbilisians, many of whom themselves have genealogies in the city that are no more than 2-3 generations deep, find themselves faced by a horde of socially alien Georgian villagers, who bring with them behaviors once statically associated with village life. This is true even for those many urban Georgians who engage in a transhumant lifestyle, begun by the Georgian gentry in the nineteenth century, of summering in their natal village. The status distinction and corresponding behavioral distinctions between villagers and city-dwellers under socialism was, for such cyclically urban-rural Georgians, converted into a stylistic distinction, with behaviors acceptable in the village strongly sanctioned in the city. Thus, a child who yells loudly or otherwise engages in impolite behavior might be reprimanded with a remark like ‘What, do you think you are in the village?’, or, equivalently, one might be called a ‘villager’. With the influx of culturally unassimilated villagers into the urban core, particularly large numbers of refugees from Abkhazia who until recently resided in all the available socialist period hotels, the complaint is that ‘Tbilisi has become a big village’. At the same time, erstwhile urban populations, particularly ethnic Russians and other old Tbilisian populations, have left Tbilisi en masse, leaving streets and neighborhoods once regarded as having a distinctive urban culture now populated with rural strangers to the city. When I asked one friend about the distinction between villager and Tbilisian behavior, he ruefully explained, ‘the problem is there no longer is a distinction.’ A wide range of behaviors, linguistic and other semiotic phenomena characteristic of Tbilisi today are one and all categorized as ‘villager’ behavior (goimoba): ranging from wearing Nikes with a formal suit, not knowing how to eat at the table, to parking one’s car halfway across the street. Goimoba implies homologies across a wide range of semiotic behaviors, a broadband broadcast of unculturedness. Strangely, the equally novel phenomenon of keeping of farm animals in urban space is not universally categorized as ‘villager’, linked instead to economic changes that have forced many to retreat to subsistence strategies. The various derogative terms for villagers each draw attention to a lack of knowledge of cultured comportment. The lack of culture is at the center of the term goimi, ‘hick’, Bregadze’s slang lexicon (2005:46) gives goimi as ‘backwards, uneducated’, similar to an almost equivalent term for villager, gorsala meaning ‘uncultured, ignorant and at the same time pretentious person’ (converging with the semantic space of mariazhi, see below). Other synonyms for goimi involve metaphors involving horned creatures: rkiani (‘horned one’, lack of culture with connotations of unreasonable aggressiveness), kaji (‘[usually horned] devil’, defined as ‘an aggressive goimi’ by a friend) and jikhvi (ibex, mountain goat). In the estimation of many of my informants, these terms denote not villagers per se, but ‘villagers out of place’, villagers in the city, villagers with pretensions to cultured urbanity.

Goimoba is first and foremost marked by a lack of kultura, something it shares in common with the uncultured parvenue superficiality of the new elites in the city. The old city culture of the socialist intelligentsia was governed by a commitment to a concept of kultura, classicizing cultural canons fostered under Stalinism, semiotic displays related to consumption and behavior that focused on maintaining both cultured interiorities (appreciation of national classics) and exteriorities (civilized public comportment and private consumption). Culturedness had as much to do with memorizing Georgian classics as with bodily hygeine, labor efficiency, and maintaining a cultured home with white tablecloths, decorative lampshades and curtains (Dunham 1976, Kelly and Volkov 1998, Fitzpatrick 1992: 216-256; 1999: 79-83). The new city culture, at least for new elites and their imitators, is by contrast one of superficial theatricalized display of consumption, mariazhoba, as visible in the investment of Georgians in visible forms of consumer display, restaurants on the main street whose expansive windows allow elite consumption to be rendered visible and displayed amidst poverty, expensive clothes and foreign automobiles, as well as new forms of domicile whose dominant principle is not only exterior display but ‘quantity of style’ (Oushakine 2000; on similar kinds of homes among the ‘new Russian’ elites see Humphrey 2002: chapter 9, Lovell 2003: chapter 7). Mariazhoba implies theatricalized displays of wealth, implying exteriorized consumption without interior kultura, as well as excess beyond the norms of kultura, but also the subterfuge of putting on a public show of wealth when private means are lacking. If Goimoba is behavior out of place, unstudied villager behavior on the city stage, Mariazhoba can only be at home in the theatricalized space of the city, in which each stranger is at once both spectator and spectacle.

Under post-socialism, categories of population and culture regulated and kept distinct by the socialist political economy have imploded, an empty countryside and a city that exhibits the lack of ‘culture’ that characterizes the village (see also Manning 2007b, N.D.). The uncultured villagers have not only displaced the cultural canons of taste that characterized urban intelligentsia and workers, but for many of the new villagers, their new models of emulation and prestige do not follow this existing cultural hierarchy, but those of the new capitalist elites. On the other hand, the advent of a capitalist political economic market, property relations, and the resulting alienability of residences as property, has created unprecedented mobility of populations both between urban neighborhoods and between the country and the city. New social distinctions and new categories of persons based on wealth and property have emerged, distinctions between ‘owners’ and ‘renters’ that are the locus of some of the most discussed and fraught relations, as well as new categories of persons, the so-called ‘new Georgians’ with the capacity, based on newly acquired wealth and despotic rights of ownership over personal property, not only to own urban space but also to change it in new ways. Since ownership of property in residences was by and large transferred to the residents at the end of socialism, city-dwellers, real Tbilisians, by and large are net owners of real-estate property, and newly arriving villagers are net renters, so relations between villager and city-dweller are at the same time cast into a new political economic mold of conflict between renters and owners, a conflict only problematically regulated by the state, since economic ownership presupposes a state structure able to constitute, regulate and enforce it, and stories abound of renters who have co-opted owners by bribery, or renters that could only be evicted by private use of force. The situation after the Rose Revolution is, if anything, worse, as the new laws affecting improperly privatized spaces give immense scope for jealous neighbors to appropriate external spaces like gardens as being ‘improperly privatized’ (as happened before my very eyes literally ‘in my own backyard’ [or rather, that of my hosts] during fieldwork in 2006-7), even as the government evicts whole buildings of apartment owners on behalf of investors, and aggressively evicts small shop keepers and whole urban bazaars in an attempt to purify the cityscape of non ‘European’ elements.

If Tbilisian ‘owners’ find the hordes of villager ‘renters’ to be problematic, they also find the new category of owner, the ‘New Georgian’, that is, new wealthy elites emergent under capitalism, to be equally so, having some of the same properties. The villagers can transform the social and semiotic landscape of the city only morally, by importing country ways into city life, goimoba, but these new Georgians can transform the cityscape materially, with their monstrous new homes, and by now, whole neighborhoods, decked out with the latest eclectic mixture of styles, sometimes called ‘Tbilisi Post-Modern’, post-modern skyscraper townhouses rising up behind their imposing ‘Neo-Feudal’ defensive walls, like some sort of post-modern version of a Norman moat-and-bailey fortress. The new architecture of Tbilisi, both its focus on exteriorized display of wealth and quantitative style, post-modernism as the architectural equivalent of hypercorrection, mariazhoba, as well as its architectural embodiment of the rigid separation, atomization, of social relations stand in contrast to respectively to classicizing norms of kultura and the traditional cityscape as well as to the normative ‘openness’ of the courtyard based communality of Old Tbilisi, in different ways expresses the changing values of the new elites versus those of the old city dwellers.

Both groups represent, for Tbilisians, different aspects of a broader problem of the future of Tbilisi, with different domains of semiotic displays that each in their way threaten the urban landscape, one by their villager-like way of being in and appropriating the material surrounds of the city, the other by their frighteningly unconstrained ability to destroy and transform this urban space materially, remaking prestigious neighborhoods in their own image, one house at a time. Both groups also share their lack of commitment to continuing and reproducing the cultural canons of taste that once characterized urban culture, displacing the once uncontested hegemony of the kultura of the urban intelligentsia with either a wholesale importation of uncultured Georgian village ways into the city, goimoba, or a superficial outward display of consumption without cultured taste, mariazhoba.

Kajis and their Fortresses. From among all the slang terms for new elites, the term kaji (‘horned devil’) is perhaps the most revealing, as it can collect under it both goimoba and mariazhoba, the lack of culture of the incoming villagers and the lack of culture of the new elites, and can refer to both moral and material (architectural) displays of unculturedness. Friends of mine would frequently say that the erstwhile president of Georgia, Shevardnadze, like many members of the nomenklatura intelligentsia promoted under Brezhnev drawn from technical specialist elites educated in the provinces, who became part of the city in the massive expansion of city population of the 1960s, was a ‘typical village kaji’. The same people refer to the ‘Tbilisi post-modern’ style of architecture of the new elites as ‘Modern-kaji style’. The term kaji can embrace all forms of bad taste and false consciousness: the urban population and new elites who support the Rose Revolution government of Saakashvili are represented in the parodic cartoon Dardubala 2 as being normal people who have been transformed by the government into iconographic hybrids of zombies (they have grey, featureless faces) and kajis (represented by the otherwise inexplicable iconographic attribute of having ibex horns) (Picture 6).

Picture 6: Mikheil Saakashvili (holding a rose) leading his Zombie-Kaji supporters (Dardubala 2007)

In such usages, the term kaji moves from denoting an object of false consciousness (superstitious peasant beliefs in horned nature spirits) to the subject of false consciousness (deluded followers of the Rose Revolution government). In the nineteenth century, rural villagers were defined in opposition to the urban intelligentsia by their animistic beliefs that the woods, caves, and rivers were inhabited by semi-monstrous (with long hair, horns or spine covered bodies) sprites called kajis, who formed a society of nature opposed at every point to society of humans. If peasants defined human society in opposition to such creatures, for the urban intelligentsia, beliefs in such creatures in turn defined peasant society. Accordingly, in twentieth century urban slang, the term kaji moved from denoting an object of superstitious belief to denote the category of people who believed in them, the peasants. In effect, rural society is viewed as standing in opposition to urban society in a manner analogous to the way these sprites of the wild stood in relation to the village community: a figure expressing the opposition between human society and the anti-society of nature is retooled as the opposition between urban society and rural society. A whole set of slang terms, including kaji, rkiani (horned one) and even jikhvi (ibex), associated villagers with the dominant iconographic feature of such creatures (horns). But even here, the meanings are not entirely independent. Puns connecting between the two senses of ‘kaji’, (1) magical or demonic otherworldly being of the wild (as in the poem Vepkhistqaosani by Rustaveli) and (2) city-dwelling hick, can suggest a kind of ‘enchantment’ of the city as a place defined not only by the absence of kultura (sense 2), but also the haunt of strangers who are mysterious and dangerous (sense 1).

This pun on the double meaning of the word kaji is at the center of a satirical fantasy story (written by a talented youngster, Luka Gordadze [2005], on a literary website in Georgia (literature.ge), whose basis is a dialog between the great epic poet Rustaveli, somehow transported into the present day, and a little contemporary Georgian boy, who has difficulty explaining contemporary Georgia to its most famous son, who finds a way to quote himself at every turn. When they decide to walk around the neighborhood, a neighborhood in Tbilisi, the boy warns the legendary poet that this is a city full of dangers presented by ‘strangers’: ‘They could rob you, or stab you with a knife’. From the mysterious powers of these ‘strangers’ to change their appearance and disappear at will, the poet concludes that the city, like his own famous poem, is full of magical kajis:

“Yes, at the same time they wear masks, they change their appearance. They commit horrible crimes and then disappear.”

“Then, they must have been kajis!” The poet concluded. (Gordadze 2005)

The pun on the two senses of kaji is continued in application the new urban architecture, the walled palaces of the New Georgians, and their mysterious, unseen inhabitants. In Rustaveli’s poem the kajis dwell in an enormous citadel (‘The fortress of the kajis’ (kajetis cixe), under socialism a slang term for the Government building), the well-known illustration of which, in the socialist realist edition of the poem by Sergo Kobuladze, indeed looks like an otherworldly experiment in modernist architecture (Picture 7).

When we passed by some walled palaces, built with the newest architecture, perched on hilltops, only then did he [Rustaveli] raise his voice:

“Are those the palaces of kings or men of the great lineages?”

“No, it’s like this, if you were to ask on the other side of the walls ‘Who lives here?’ they would tell you ‘We don’t know’.”

Here Rustaveli again expressed his suspicion about the presence of kajis in the city. His doubts grew especially strong at seeing one palace in particular, which actually really did look like the Sergo Kobuladze’s illustration of Fortess of Kajeti. (Gordadze 2005)

Picture 7: Sergo Kobuladze’s “Fortress of Kajeti” (1937)

The city has new, strange people haunting it, and the term kaji covers both common street criminals and the unseen inhabitants of the new palaces in a veil of mystery, using the term kaji in both its pejorative sense and its magical sense.

This pun between the two senses (pejorative and demonic) of the term Kaji is used elsewhere. Some Georgian writers have mobilized an Old Georgian etymology of the term ‘citizen’ (mokalake, city-dweller) as a moral category, not merely the empirical fact of being in the city, but as a category of moral behavior, a way of being in the city:

To this extent, citizen-ness (mokalakeoba) is not defined by being in the city, by duration of dwelling within its boundaries, not even by living there over many generations, or by the ownership of immobile and mobile property. (Abrahamishvili and Bolkvadze 2003: 29)

Such a definition in terms of active engagement, ‘public work’, tends to make the intelligentsia the true ‘citizens’ of the city, regardless of duration of life in the city, or ownership of property in the city. Such a ‘moral’ definition of the term also is opposed to those who lack the moral commitment to reproducing the norms and culture of the city, notably village kajebi ‘horned devils, hicks’ as well as new Georgians. Abandoning such ‘civic’ commitment by the citydwellers leaves the city up’at’rono ‘abandoned’, in the sense of either ‘without an owner’ and ‘without a patron’, and reworking an Georgian proverb that abandoned churches become the home of devils (eshmak’ebi), so too the abandoned city becomes the home of kajebi (‘horned devils; hicks’):

And, if citizens (in the non-political sense of the term) are not equipped with a morality fitting the rules and order of city life and a desire for good works for the city, as the Georgian proverb puts it, if devils (eshmak’ebi) take over (ep’at’ronebian ‘become a patron to’) an abandoned (up’at’rono ‘having no patron’) church, an abandoned (upatrono ‘without a patron’) city becomes the property of kajebi (lit. ‘horned devils’, also ‘hicks’) (Abrahamishvili and Bolkvadze 2003: 29)

The kaji haunts the city when the city itself has become a kind of wilderness. The kaji is not only a figure for the absence of kultura from public places, but a figure for public places that have become demonic, mysterious and wild: the dark streets of the city are full of dangerous and mysterious strangers, building mysterious fortresses whose unseen owners do not seem to live in them as much as haunt them. The kajis and their fortresses are figures for a chaotic post-socialist city in which the term sajaro ‘public’ have taken on the connotations of the term gareuli ‘wild; savage’ (Tuite 2005: 16-17).

Balconies, Courtyards, and the Fortresses of the new Georgians

The coup of 1992 was not the first time Tbilisi has experienced a violent transformation of its architectural space. In fact, for a city that is sometimes claimed to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited urban areas on the face of the earth (more than 6 thousand years according to Bolkvadze 2003: 28), very little in the way of architecture remains that predates the 19th century aside from the famous baths and a few churches. This is because the city was razed almost entirely prior to Russian occupation by the Persian invasion of the late 18th century, so much so, that a European observer at around 1812 remarked that Tbilisi at that time presented little more than a ‘mass of ruins’ (Freygang 1823[1812]:128). Unlike many ‘Oriental’ cities that underwent ‘European’ colonization, such as Tunis (Messick 1996: chapter 12), the opposition between ‘Oriental’ and ‘European’ architecture that developed in Tbilisi under Russian rule was not entirely an opposition between the old and the new, but rather, the two architectural streams developed almost simultaneously. Even though the construction process was nearly simultaneous, by mid-century Tbilisi already presented an image of continuous opposition of ‘Old’ ‘Oriental’ and ‘New’ ‘European’ elements:

The mixture of Oriental and European structures gives a very peculiar character to the town. It is well known that eastern nations are partial to narrow, shady streets, whilst the Russians like the contrary. These contrasts are presented in many parts of Tiflis. In all parts where Russian builders have been employed, you find space, air, sun and a free prospect; whilst, wheresoever the old architecture has remained untouched, the streets and squares are narrow and dark, although not to the same extent as in genuine Moslem cities. (Wagner 1856: 123-4)

Now, in opposition to even newer socialist architecture, both these different architectural styles characteristic of the colonial period city are aggregated together as ‘Old Tbilisi’ and face some of the same fates. The tragic earthquake of 2003 lade bare the infrastructural neglect of old architectural monuments under socialism compared to the stolid durability of the ugly, but serviceable, 16 story ‘corpus’ buildings erected in the socialist period. As if following some vulgar marxist division of the universe into ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, new buildings erected under socialism made up for in infrastructure what they lacked in ‘superstructural’ decoration, while Old Tbilisi was reduced in socialist planning to a purely exterior, cultural, superstructural phenomenon (Qipiani 2003). The result was the architectural ‘theatricalization’ of Old Tbilisi, whose exterior ‘extra-utilitarian’ aspects were assiduously tended to, virtual ‘potemkin villages’ for socialist holidays, tourism and sightseeing, while the ‘utilitarian’ infrastructure of the old buildings was let go to rack and ruin (Qipiani 2003).

Perhaps this, more than anything, explains why while Tbilisians love the architecture of the old city, seemingly no one actually wants to live in such buildings (Suramelashvili 2003), ‘corpus’ style buildings having several advantages over older ‘non-standard’ buildings, among them communication infrastructure (such as running water), earthquake-proof solidity, and the fact that they are already detached in such a way from their neighbors so that lengthy negotiations and outright conflicts regarding improvement, ownership of common walls, bringing in lines of communication, are already solved. Ironically, corpus apartments built under socialism have ‘built in’ the detachability from context needed to serve as ready made transactable, alienable, property in a capitalist market, whereas Old Tbilisi buildings, built under ‘capitalist conditions’, are neither detachable as commodities or property, nor do they have the internal infrastructure of the corpus apartments. The fact of the prestigious location of Old Tbilisi confronts the fact that the interiors of such buildings lack these two features, features that allow them to serve as private property and a comfortable secure domicile isolated from ones neighbors in a dangerous and uncertain urban environment. Indeed, this distinctly ‘non-romantic’ view of Old Tbilisi as a place defined by poor infrastructure (narrow streets) as well as the uncomfortable proximity to neighbors because of the proximity of balconies (the ‘second storey’ of the narrow streets) is already captured in socialist period cartoons (Cartoon 1)).

Cartoon 1

On Old Tbilisi’s Narrow Streets

Residents-- When will they widen this street and move you further away from me, you wine-bag, you!

Driver to the passerby—I ran into you again on this narrow street? (Doni 1957:34)

Now, in the years immediately following the fall of socialism, Tbilisi seems to be undergoing a new and radical architectural transformation that threatens the material landscape, both Russian and ‘Oriental’, that survived the massive growth of the city under Tsarism to Post-socialism from a city of a few more than 16,000 at the beginning of the nineteenth century (1803) to a city of almost a million and a half of today (Beridze 2003: 35). If much of the socialist period was additive, whole new neighborhoods like Saburtalo (1965), the new architecture is often transformative, destructive changes to the old architecture being replaced by the new. This destruction is not the pure material destruction wrought by wars and coups, but a destruction that is more threatening because it is wrought by the wheels of commerce, visible everywhere, the aggregate irrational and destructive product of the individually rational and creative actions of newly-liberated liberal subjects.

In various ways, the opposition between these two forms of architecture, neither of which are particularly characteristic of Tbilisi, have come to be polarized as ‘reflections’ of differing types of sociability. The architecture of Old Tbilisi reflecting a balance between openness and closure that makes it a reflection of a kind of ‘open society’, indigenous ‘civil society’ avant la lettre (Suramelashvili 2003: 7), opposed to the closure and separation from context, both physical and architectural that characterizes the homes of the new Georgians, surrounded by walls that demarcate them as property even as they display post-modern combinations of styles that demarcate them stylistically from their context, reflecting a class of property owners obsessed both with theatrical displays of wealth and its protection.

The Tbilisi of art is one that consists entirely of balconies, a Tbilisi from which 70 years of socialism is erased. This is Tbilisi as portrayed in the watercolors one can buy along Rustaveli prospect or at the Dry Bridge, representing a specific genre of representing the city from the Nineteenth century as if it consisted entirely of the picturesque balconies of Old Tbilisi and nothing else. The ‘theatricalization’ of balconies and facades over internal infrastructure leads to the balcony itself being semiotically detached from the house to become an autonomous and ‘self-sufficient’ emblematic image of Old Tbilisi. An example of this ‘self-sufficient balcony’ motif is a kitschy decorative collage prominently displayed near Old Tbilisi on Freedom Square which literally reduces Old Tbilisi to a kitschy collage of superimposed balconies (Picture 8).

Picture 8: The city of balconies (and only balconies) (Collage, Tbilisi 2007)

Old Tbilisi neighborhoods are quite prestigious, and yet the buildings there, while picturesque, do not make safe, isolated or reliable residences. As a result, the prestige of the neighborhood becomes autonomous from the architectural aesthetics of its buildings (the original source of the prestige). The hierarchy of neighborhood prestige under capitalism, expressed in US dollars per square meter, echoes the hierarchy of prestige under socialism, in which erstwhile intelligentsia neighborhoods (the most prestigious being Vake) and Old Tbilisi (Mtatsminda, Vera) outrank socialist period neighborhoods like Saburtalo and Didube. People want to live in a prestigious ‘old’ neighborhood, in a prestigious and comfortable ‘new’ home. The ironic result is that prestigious new ‘post-modern’ homes tend to be erected precisely in those neighborhoods that were originally prestigious because of their distinctive pre-modern architecture.

This material transformation of the city is simultaneously a transformation of urban elites, one of which acts materially, the other morally, one with deeds, the other with words. Two elites find themselves in conflict, each with their own imagination of the city, their own emblematic form of architectural expression, the permeable ‘openness’ of enclosed spaces of the balcony and the courtyard faces off against the isolated, walled off, outward display of wealth of the ‘post-modern fortresses’ of the New Georgians. The inheritors of the intelligentsia tradition find themselves able to do little more than write about their city (Suramelashvili 2003: 6, Andronikashvili 2003: 32), in the absence of a socialist state an activity without an effective addressee (Lominashvili 2004). Meanwhile the city is being destroyed by another group of elites who act anonymously and silently, but more influentially, changing the material fact of the city in their own image. These new elites (‘the client’) have no commonly accepted name in Georgia: ‘In Europe they call them ‘Nouveau Riche’, in Russia ‘New Russians’, among us they still remain nameless. But aside from anonymity their handwriting is strangely similar in every country.’ They do not speak publicly, they have no ideologues, they seem not to need them, their buildings ‘speak for themselves’ for all to see (Lominashvili 2004).

This new type of person tries to acquire the most expensive plots of land in (historically constituted as) prestigious neighborhoods and on acquired plots insolently, they brazenly destroy any buildings they encounter: whether it is a monument, or made of planks, is not of principle importance. Then they try to transplant in Tbilisi houses that are in their opinion ‘elegant and beautiful’, more intelligible to themselves or seen in Latin-American soap operas. (Andronikashvili 2003: 33)

These new nameless elites leave anonymous autographs on the cityscape in the form of their houses, but this autograph remains quite legible, for all to see. Their ‘white Brazilian villas’ exteriorly stand in sharp contrast to the cityscape of Tbilisi, and from the interior, it can only be imagined, they remain texts stylistically isolated from their urban context, save by the fact that their context is prestigious. The interior view, like the motives, of the anonymous ‘customers’ can only be imagined, but it is easy enough to imagine:

And so what, if it is built in an old neighborhood of Tbilisi? When you wake up in such a house, when you step out on its reinforced concrete balcony proudly, and when you see somewhere three stories below the warped roofs of old Tbilisi card-houses, you will entirely forget that you are in Georgia and you will think that you are on the shore of the Mediterranean or the ocean (there could be the rustling of palms and you might even hear the squawking of parrots). In short, your life-long dream has come true. And (besides) you are in your own house, and...you are abroad. Your house, neither inside or out, resembles nothing and goes with nothing in its vicinity. (Andronikashvili 2003: 33)

Such a complete divorce from urban context is itself taken to be a sign of the nouveau riche way of being in the city, in which urban context is evaluated as little more than a way of conferring prestige on an integral architectural object otherwise completely isolated from its surrounds interiorly and exteriorly (Qipiani 2003).

If the new elites act silently, they ‘write’ texts with the authority of money, buildings which the old elites, the intelligentsia, can only ‘read’ and write about. And read them they do, for in their buildings can be ‘read’ the psychology of the new classes, one not only emphasizing the autonomy of property owners and their property expressed in the spatial divorce of their homes from the cityscape, but also their lack of temporal connection to the city. Qipiani (2003: 11) calls these new elites ‘lumpen-capitalists’ whose identity is expressed in the form of their buildings ‘as a symbol, a sign and a metaphor’:

The strange psychology of a strange social class … was materialized as a fact in house-building, in its forms, in its dimensions, in the inter-relationship of the whole and the parts. It can be said that this class represented and gave form to its own intellectual-psychological situation in the very houses it has erected, which are an interested and rich material for a psychoanalyst, and a tragedy for the city. (Qipiani, 10 original emphasis)

The Tbilisi balcony, like the Tbilisi courtyard, are taken as signs of the existing Tbilisi order, the opposite of this divorce of architectural figure from urban ground, one in which ‘openness’ of social relations are encoded in architectural form by the way in which exterior spaces are ‘interiorized’ (traditional Tbilisi courtyards) and interior spaces ‘exteriorized’ (Tbilisi balconies), very differently from the unmediated separations of interior and exterior exhibited in the walled and separated compounds of the new elites, or the reinforced iron doors with multiple locks in vogue amongst corpus-dwellers. Note that here Tbilisianness is linked to Georgianness of architecture:

The Georgian, and to that extent, Tbilisian historically constituted home also speaks volumes; such a closed-doored-ness did not characterize the culture of our everyday existence…. The Georgian house (if it was not a fort designed for fortification) neither in the city, nor in the village was built with the principle ‘My home is my fortress’....The Tbilisian balconied house, often with one face looking from the courtyard to the street, indicates openness, open relationships; on the other hand, the facades and the principals of internal planning and organization of space also attests that the openness is not absolute. The Georgian character has always been distinguished by its balance of individual diversity and universal interdependence and this in our psychic and material activity, in our culture of everyday life and communication is portrayed, and correspondingly in our residences (Qipiani 2003: 10)

If Tbilisi balconies and courtyards are represented as being part of a general Georgian tradition including both the bani (a flat roof which doubles as a balcony for the house above characteristic of some rural architecture) and the balcony, expressing a balance of open and closed, interiority and exteriority, this ‘lumpen-capitalist’ privatized separation and esthetic superficiality, the architectural equivalent of ‘mariazhoba’, is given a genealogy in the socialist ‘theatricalized’ ‘stylized’ and ‘folklorized’ appropriation of national culture on the one hand, resulting in an ‘asocial, pseudohistorical, and formalist mythologized culture’, which realized itself both in the psychological shallowness and lack of spatial awareness and reflexiveness characteristic of the ‘lumpen-capitalist’ mariazhi, as well as in the architectural ‘theatricalization’ of old Tbilisi, a program that emphasized superficial external upkeep of visible balconies and building exteriors while neglecting the interior infrastructure, communications, and foundations of these same buildings (Qipiani 2003: 12). During the restoration of Old Tbilisi attention was paid to national forms (balconies and facades), the literal ‘superstructures’, at the expense of socialist contents (plumbing, communications, interiors), the literal ‘base’, just as in new projects the reverse was the case.

This critical ‘reading’ of Old Tbilisi finds in the new elites of the city a kind of deracinated socialist genealogy, a ‘pseudo-culture’ whose characteristic architectural forms, ‘Tbilisi post-modern’, so far from being yet another form of post-modern ‘hybridity’ to be celebrated in the flux, hybridity and novelty of ‘the city’ as a universal category, in fact registers a ‘theatricalization’ of national culture filtered through socialism, culture become kitsch. In turn, the Old Tbilisi architecture is now re-rooted in the Georgian tradition, the Tbilisi Balcony and Courtyard now find their analogs in the Georgian village, in the bani, and both reflect a constant, essential characteristic of the Georgian character. The two aspects of the intelligentsia discourse, the celebration of the specificities of Tbilisi and the Georgian national character, are reconciled by a segmentary logic of opposition to the new moneyed elites. Moreover, the content of the imputed Georgian character reflected in Georgian architecture is one which positions Georgian culture and architecture somewhere between closure and openness, indigenous doubles of desirable ‘European’ characteristics (‘open society’) without the European excesses (found in the homes of the New Georgians). In this intelligentsia discourse, Tbilisi architecture is the very image of an ‘open society’, a balancing of individual and collective, openness and closure, so that the freshly imported discourses of ‘civil society’ of the ‘new intellectuals’ too find themselves a traditional home in the ‘City of Balconies’.

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Zurabishvili, Dato. 2002. dzveli int’eligentsiidan axal int’elekt’ualebamde. In Gia Nodia (ed.), Dzveli int’eligentsia da axali int’elektualebi. Sazogadoeba da polit’ik’a 4. CIPDD: Tbilisi, 47-5.

� In contemporary Georgia ‘new intellectuals’ are distinguished from ‘old intelligentsia’, the former having Western educations, receiving Western grants, and speaking Western liberal discourses of ‘civil society’ and markets, in opposition to the Socialist educations, state funding and nationalist discourses of the intelligentsia (Nodia 2002).

�The figure of the intelligentsia is not only defined as mediating the vertical dimension of a social imaginary (standing between the ‘people’ and the ‘state’, or more generally among estates), but also on the borderland of an Orientalist social imaginary (Asad 2003; Said 1976, 2001) in which Georgia, particularly the people, or the state, are in ‘Asia’ (conceived of as being chaotic, backwards, ignorant, violent, static, etc.), and the historic role, ‘civilizing mission’, of the intelligentsia is bring them into ‘Europe’, mediating national particularity and the universal claims of European modernity. The short answer to the question ‘What is the intelligentsia?’ in the nineteenth cnetury would have contained some statement as follows: ‘Among us the mission of the Georgian intelligentsia after the end of serfdom was—the development of the diverse national life (mravalperovan erovnul cxovreba) into European forms (europeaul pormebshi)’ (Jorjadze 1901:2). This particular Orientalist imaginary is also characteristic of the ‘new intellectuals’ currently in power in ‘Rose-Revolution’ Georgia as well (see Manning 2007a, 2008).

� Drawing here from a Peircean semiotic framework, if an icon is any sign that stands for its object by virtue of resemblance, a diagrammatic icon is an icon like a map or a diagram, where the individual parts do not resemble the objects they stand for, as much as the relations between those parts.

� Susan Brazier � HYPERLINK "http://www.nelegal.net/articles/propiska.htm" ��http://www.nelegal.net/articles/propiska.htm�; � HYPERLINK "http://www.nelegal.net/articles/oldpropiska.htm" ��http://www.nelegal.net/articles/oldpropiska.htm�

� See � HYPERLINK "mailto:tova.hojdestrand@socant.su.se" �Tova Höjdestrand� ‘The Soviet-Russian production of homelessness: Propiska, housing, privatisation’ (2004, � HYPERLINK "http://www.anthrobase.com/Txt/H/Hoejdestrand_T_01.htm" \t "_top" �http://www.anthrobase.com/txt/H/Hoejdestrand_T_01.htm�); ‘The Institution of the Propiska (Residence Registration) and its Evolution’, Svetlana Gannushkina (2004, � HYPERLINK "http://refugees.memo.ru/For_All/RUPOR.NSF/0/210846301ae745efc3256da100762cb3?OpenDocument" ��http://refugees.memo.ru/For_All/RUPOR.NSF/0/210846301ae745efc3256da100762cb3?OpenDocument�;

(Revaz Gachechiladze, ‘Population Migration in Georgia and Its Socio-Economic Consequences". Discussion Paper Series - UNDP, 1997 (� HYPERLINK "http://www.ceroi.net/reports/tbilisi/issues/population_and_social_conditions/impact.htm" ��http://www.ceroi.net/reports/tbilisi/issues/population_and_social_conditions/impact.htm�). In Russia the propiska category has not been fully abolished in practice and has been revalorized as a way of producing ethnic distinction against non-Russian (often Caucasian) ethnicities, dubbed ‘blacks’, by proxy (Vladimir Malakhov 2003, ‘Racism and Migrants’, http://www.eurozine.com/article/2003-03-14-malakhov-en.html ).

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