Narrative as a Meaning-Forming Element of Political Symbolization

Abstract

The article deals with a theoretical analysis of the concept of political narrative as a political reality, which is not reducible to a set of positivistically established facts. In the context of political symbolization, narratives as elements of interpretation of politics implicate political meanings through verbal situations that develop as an interaction of judgments. Political narratives function as mediators in social activities and not only communicate information, but do it incrementing new meanings, as political narratives are conveyed through deliberation. The “narrative identity” is formed as a reference to metanarratives and their creators. The author shows that any symbolic political reality is a constellation of involvement narratives that create verbal situations of interactions between community members and the collective history as a narration. Therefore, a narrative introduces individuals into a political context. This enables to fix the narrative “footprint” of joint social practices that are named “culture”, “nation”, “country”, etc. At the same time, the author substantiates that the form and the content of political narratives have the meaning of retrospective inner causality, since the inherited array of political interpretations is constantly «retold» in the present reality. It is concluded that in the context of political symbolization, narrative can be an analytical solution of the problem of interaction between individual consciousness and a society.