«Ժամանակավոր ծայրամասի վտանգները» - Կարեն ԱՂԵԿՅԱՆ

Karen Agekyan's article "The Dangers of the Temporal Periphery" is devoted to analyzing a fundamental problem of Armenian thought — the impossibility of being simultaneously modern and genuinely Armenian — as well as the risks associated with Armenianness's position on the "temporal periphery" of world history.

Introduction and Methodology

The author rejects explaining the weakness of conceptual thinking among Armenians through natural causes and instead proposes a systemic approach: the problem does not arise for a thinking person in general, but for one who views their thought as a link in specifically Armenian thought, bound up with the fate of the people. The key methodological tool is the concept of "temporal periphery," which supplements the well-known idea of territorial periphery, along with the principle of emergence from systems theory: the properties of a community cannot be reduced to the sum of the qualities of its individual members.

Key Proposition: Temporal Periphery as a State of the Community

The author identifies a paradox: while physically existing in the modern world, Armenianness continues to grapple with tasks inherited from the past — state-building, coming to terms with the Genocide, demography, art. The fact that individual Armenians possess modern technologies, education, and professional success does not mean the community has escaped the temporal "pit" — this is a systemic, not an individual, quality.

The Vulnerability of the Periphery Under Conditions of Global Connectivity

It is shown that the intensification of contacts between the temporal periphery and modernity does not ease but rather aggravates the periphery's condition:

increased vulnerability to military-political, economic, and ideological aggression;
historical examples — the destruction of Native American tribes and the Armenian Genocide as consequences of the collision between archaic communities and the modern world;
the metaphor of the "sacred cow" (referencing a story by A. Platonov) to describe the exploitation of patriarchal Armenianness.

The Magnetism of Modernity and Its Consequences

Particular attention is given to the attractiveness of global intellectual trends — science, philosophy, art — which set the standards and markers of "modernity." The author identifies two symmetrical fetishisms of the periphery: unconditional imitation of the mainstream and, conversely, aggressive rejection of modernity. Both options, in the author's view, merely mask the community's inability to develop its own language for comprehending its situation.

Historical Illusions of the "Leap"

The article examines attempts by the Armenian intelligentsia of the 19th–20th centuries (Freemasonry, Marxism) to apply foreign ideologies to Armenian reality without actually passing through the corresponding historical stages. The author shows that such attempts regularly ran up against the incompatibility of borrowed concepts with local conditions, and that hope for a "leap" through the adoption of others' experience proved untenable time and again.

The Trap of Preserving Tradition

The opposite strategy — the cult of preserving "primordial" values — is likewise recognized as a dead end: in the absence of political instrumentalization, it preserves not values but the subordinate position of the community itself, depriving it of the tools for genuine struggle.

Conclusion

The article's key conclusion is that a community's situation of being "outside modernity" while simultaneously "outside the past" requires a distinctive mode of thinking and a distinctive language, one that cannot be reduced to either modern terminology or archaic forms. Real political power, meanwhile, remains beyond the reach of the temporal periphery, since control over it is effectively exercised from outside — from modernity. The author considers the only productive path to be neither the consumption of modernity's benefits nor the mechanical borrowing of its ideas, but the development of one's own conceptual apparatus capable of adequately comprehending the specifically Armenian historical and social situation — in this context, the Mekhitarist project is mentioned as a model of authentic national enlightenment.