Night has fallen, and I gather my cloak about me. Part of the force of
Imagined Communities as a title – as an idea – comes from the way the two words immediately set the reader wondering whether they are meant as oxymoronic, and if they are, with what degree of irony or regret. The words bring to mind the true strangeness, but also the centrality, of the human will to be connected with others ‘of one’s kind’ whom one will never meet, and never know. Connected with them in the present, by blood or language or difference from a common enemy (or combinations of all three); and connected through time by a shared belonging to something that seems to emerge from a steadier, thicker, more grounded past and be on its way to an indestructible, maybe redeeming future.
Anderson is the very opposite of an atheist in the face of this religion; or, if he is an unbeliever – and one senses in all of his writings an extraordinary final outsidedness to the worlds he has studied and clearly often loves – it is very much in Santayana’s spirit, with the old philosopher’s ‘There is no God and Mary is His mother.’ For the first move in
Imagined Communities is of sympathy, and therefore a full recognition of nationalism’s ability to provide answers to the questions that previous religions had made their own. The nation gives form to a shiftless and arbitrary being on earth, it offers a promise of immortality, it is oriented time and again towards – and beyond – the individual’s death. ‘With the ebbing of religious belief’ – Anderson was writing in 1983 – ‘the suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear. Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity more necessary. What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning.’ For a moment again it is hard to be sure of the tone here. ‘Composed’ is an interesting choice of word. The syntax that follows is lapidary, but brutal. There is a tension in the sentences, which I think is productive in Anderson’s work as a whole; he is sometimes accused of being a Romantic, yet I hear Diderot constantly debating in his pages with Rousseau and Herder; but nonetheless it is sympathy – a determination to pose the question of nation at the level of creaturely pain and vulnerability and fear of the grave – that prevails. ‘The great weakness of all evolutionary/ progressive styles of thought,’ he writes, ‘not excluding Marxism, is that such questions are answered with impatient silence.’
‘Not excluding Marxism’. The fascination of Anderson’s approach lies in the way the initial leap of understanding in 1983 was made to coexist with a strong (Marxist) commitment to materialist explanation. In many of his books – and again, currently, in
Under Three Flags – he becomes, necessarily, a teller of particular national histories and a recorder of all the unlikely things that went to make a ‘Filipino’ or an ‘Indonesian’. But in the beginning, what Anderson wanted to clarify (and keep hold of in subsequent storytelling) were the conditions of production of imagined communities of the new kind. What technologies of representation did they depend on? And who did the representing? From what classes and professions did nationalists come, and how did their particular interests and social styles inflect the great thing represented? How did the invention of the printing press and the imperatives of early European capitalism interact to make nations possible? If there was such a thing as ‘print capitalism’ – such a contingent, but in the end decisive and creative thing – then exactly what were its effects on the vernacular languages, on the segmentation of elites and non-elites, on the look of the map and the sense of belonging to a bounded place? Are not nations always, from the start, one moment in a complex drive to explore and exploit the totality of the globe – to make a new world-system? So that nationalism and internationalism, or
Gemeinschaft and globalisation, go together. The pioneers of nationhood were the Creole elites created in the Americas by Spanish and British colonialism. Europe, when its time of nation-forming came, pirated New World models without a second thought. ‘Long-distance nationalism’ is a term Anderson has used lately to characterise the new claims to identity – ethnic, religious, fiercely convinced of the pains of exile – born of the latest waves of migration and diaspora. But all nationalisms are long-distance, as we shall see in
Under Three Flags. What differs is their willingness to recognise the fact.
This is a cruel summary of some tremendous chapters, full of convincing fact. Reading them again in 2006 is an unsettling experience, because it begins to dawn on one that several of Anderson’s key analytic co-ordinates may have altered in form – and altered in relation to one another – even in the brief period since he first laid them out. This would be very remarkable if true, because the structures he pointed to as generative of nations have survived (through various recastings) for five centuries or thereabouts. Take ‘print capitalism’, especially considered in relation to the production of imagined solidarities and kinds of being-through-time. If we were to say that the last 25 years have seen the implanting and diffusion of a ‘screen capitalism’ – one in which print and image and map and diagram are made available to individual users in what seems an equalised and immensely speeded-up field of symbolic production – would that lead us to make connections between the new technics (with its old driving force) and the coming into being of new imagined communities that now put the nation under pressure? ‘We Are All Hizbullah,’ as they say in Jakarta and Grosvenor Square. I chose to write ‘the coming into being of
new communities’, but of course it might be – the new communities believe it to be, and work to convince us of their belief – that what we are witnessing is the coming back into being of the
old: the very ‘old’ on which Anderson’s original Marxist analysis turned. For it was axiomatic with him that the religious community – he has some unforgettable pages on the subject, working with ideas from Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre – was the model of togetherness that the nation displaced. Or whose historical authority – whose productivity and plausibility – the nation took up into itself.
I am not a partisan of the idea that the age of the nation-state is at an end. Nor do I think that screen capitalism is on its way to assembling human totalities of an utterly unprecedented kind. So let me put the argument cautiously. It seems to me that a complex rejigging of the balance of forces between nation and ummah, nation and congregation, nation and jihad, nation and chosen people, is underway in many parts of the world – and not only under the banner of Islam. And this has something to do with the new opportunities offered by screen capitalism. Of course, it has just as much to do with the ruin of actual secular national projects in the context of Cold War, resource imperialism, the attentions of the IMF. But actual shipwreck could have elicited no more than despair and anomie. These exist, no doubt, but also elation, inventiveness, ruthlessness, dedication to death. Certain religions believe they are once again a productive, history-making force. They look on the nation as a dead carapace, which one day soon they may make armed and animate again. Or they may discard it, in favour of other unities. The relation of Hizbullah to Lebanon – ‘a non-state within a non-state’, as its supporters are fond of saying – is to be generalised. (Perhaps a better formulation from our point of view would be ‘a non-nation within a nation all too typical of the breed’.)
We shall see. Even Lebanon may rise from the dead. Those who made it a nation may make it so again. But something fundamental is happening. A shuffling and grating of imagined communities is taking place. And this is connected, as I say, with the arrival of a new technics of representation.
Imagined Communities gives us the beginning of a way to think about just such matters, in its treatment of the effect of print capitalism on the day-to-day imagining of those things called ‘languages’, and its reflections on the role of the newspaper and the novel. ‘In a rather special sense, the book was the first modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity.’ ‘The newspaper is merely an extreme form of the book, a book sold on a colossal scale, but of ephemeral popularity. Might we say: one-day bestsellers?’ After reading Anderson, one never opens the paper over breakfast without somehow remembering:
The significance of this mass ceremony – Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers – is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?You will notice that the crucial form of words here is ‘vivid figure for’ rather than ‘effective cause of’. But not only literary critics and media buffs have leapt to the conclusion that Anderson’s argument in the end exceeds his careful (Marxist) framing. Well yes, print capitalism is a function of capitalism, and newspapers and novels issue from – and are informed and altered by – an evolving bourgeois culture in which the styles of individuality and citizenship are very far from being created out of words on a page alone. No newspapers without clubs and coffee houses, no novels (or not the novels we have) without the great vagaries of class. Nonetheless, the question of technical, representational efficacity – the bias of certain means and relations of symbolic production towards some forms of imagined identity in preference to others – will not go away. Do we think that the novel and the newspaper were more effective, for instance, at generating nationhood than class consciousness? (A hard question, I know, since bourgeoisie and nationality are so much transforms of one another.) If so, why? For reasons wholly, or even largely, independent of the nature of the apparatus in each case?
I do not think so. Hegel’s world-historical sarcasm rings in my ears; and it too, in 2006, threatens to turn back on those (like me) who wish it were still true. For newspapers are less and less a substitute for anything, and in much of the world morning prayers are no longer to be substituted for by any such private (public) form of representation. Screen capitalism is dissolving the very structure of private (public) being-together. It is wrecking the quiet simultaneity of clock-time. Atrocity happens NOW. The ‘now’ that language inevitably conjures away into repeatability and abstraction, the image preserves for ever in what seems to be its mere being. The event on the screen is unique and eternal. It belongs again to God or Satan. The website and the cellphone video are paths to the sacred. Morning prayer is everywhere.
Of course this imagined community is counterfactual, and interfered with at every point by the realities of the secular world. But insofar as those realities turn on death and humiliation, they feed the imaginary as opposed to undermining it. Especially when ‘nation’ presents itself, by contrast, as humiliation personified. When nation can no longer lay claim to death – when it cedes death to its new-old opponent – a form of life has grown old.
—From
T.J.Clark, The London Review of Books.
