Anderson 1983

Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983 (rev. 2006). Web.

• Focus on Ch. 1-3, 9-11
• nationalism from the OED: "Advocacy of or support for the interests of one's own nation, esp. to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations. Also: advocacy of or support for national independence or self-determination.

Whereas patriotism usually refers to a general sentiment, nationalism now usually refers to a specific ideology, esp. one expressed through political activism. In earlier use, however, the two appear to have been more or less interchangeable."

Intro

• 3 The reality is quite plain: the 'end of the era of nationalism,' so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.
  • the modern congruence between state and nation owes its origins at least in part to the nationalist movements of the mid C19 - see Timothy Snyder, The Red Prince
• mismatch between the political influence of nationalism and a dearth of theory about it
• 4 national bourgeoisie
• intervention: My point of departure is that nationality, or as one might prefer to put it in view of that word's multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind. To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy. I will be trying to argue that the creation of these artefacts towards the end of the C18 was a spontaneous distillation of a complex 'crossing' of discrete historical forces, but that, once created, they became 'modular', capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations. I will also attempt to show why these particular cultural artefacts have aroused such deep attachments.
• 5 Definitions:
  • first, contradictions: nations are a modern historical development, but nationalists perceive them as ancient; everyone 'has' a nationality (like 'gender'), but local, concrete manifestations of it are sui generis; nationalism is politically powerful but philosophically impoverished (there have been no great nationalist thinkers)
  • 6 a Nation is an imagined political community
    • "imagined" because members don't know most of their fellow members, but they clearly perceive their "communion"
    • not necessarily negative: "In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined."
  • 7 a nation is limited: it has "finite, if elastic, boundaries"
  • a nation is sovereign: "nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so" (post- Enlightenment and Revolution)
  • a nation is a community, a "deep, horizontal comradeship"

Cultural Roots

• especially useful for gloss on Benjamin's "messianic time" and the novel and newspaper as analogues for nation, 23ff
• 10 in its concern with death and immortality, nationalism "suggests a strong affinity with religious imaginings"
• The extraordinary survival [of world religions] attests to their imaginative response to the overwhelming burden of human suffering[.] ...The great weakness of all evolutionary/progressive styles of thought, not excluding Marxism, is that such questions ["Why was I born blind?"] are answered with impatient silence.
• 11 he connects rise of nationalism with "dusk of religious modes of thought" but Charles Taylor would push on that narrative
  • 12 but he carefully does not argue for the production of nationalism by secularization or supercession, but rather that it aligned itself with "the large cultural systems that preceded it," the religious community and the dynastic realm
• Religious community
  • 12-13 the religious communities of Xianity etc "were imaginable largely through the medium of a sacred language and written script."
  • 13 distinction: these communities' "confidence in the unique sacredness of their language" [vs modern nation]
  • 14 depended also on the "non-arbitrariness of the sign": "...ontological reality is apprehensible only through a single, privileged system of re-presentation: the truth-language of Church Latin, Quranic Arabic, or Examination Chinese."
  • 16-17 the decline of the "unselfconscious coherence" of the "great religiously imagined communities" post Middle Ages, due to "explorations of the non-European world" which "abruptly widened...men's conception of possible forms of human life" [quoting Auerbach Mimesis] and the "gradual demotion of the sacred language itself" -- to which "print capitalism" was central. "...The fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized." (19)
  • In the C17 Hobbes was a figure of continental renown because he wrote in the truth-language. Shakespeare, on the other hand, composing in the vernacular, was virtually unknown across the Channel [he cites Febvre and Martin 1958 330]. And had English not become, two hundred years later, the pre-eminent world-imperial language, might he not largely have retained his original insular obscurity?
• Dynastic realm
  • 19 [arguing it's difficult to imagine ourselves into the mindset where dynastic realm is the only imaginable political system] In the modern conception, state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimetre of a legally demarcated territory. But in the older imagining, where states were defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another. Hence, paradoxically enough, the ease with which pre-modern empires and kingdoms were able to sustain their rule over immensely heterogeneous,and often not even contiguous, populations for long periods of time.
  • 20-1 ...royal lineages often derived their presige, aside from any aura of divinity, from, shall we say, miscegeneation? ...It is characteristic that there has not been an 'English' dynasty ruling in London since the eleventh century (if then); and what 'nationality' are we to assign to the Bourbons?
• Apprehensions of Time
  • can tie to other sources that deal with time/history: Griffiths 2016, Underwood 2013, Bowen 2009, Brake 2001 and Beetham 1990 print angles
  • 23-4 the change from a simultaneous model to a causal chain -- he quotes Auerbach:
    • [example: the sacrifice of Isaac prefiguring that of Christ] these events aren't linked temporally or causally, but rather "vertically linked to Divine Providence...the here and now is no longer a mere link in an earthly chain of events, it is simultaneously something which has always been, and will be fulfilled in the future; and strictly, in the eyes of God, it is something eternal, something omnitemporal, something already consummated in the realm of fragmentary earthly event." (24)
    • this simultaneity is close to Benjamin's Messianic time, "a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present"
  • What has come to take the place of the medieval conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Benjamin, an idea of "homogenous, empty time," in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by a clock and calendar.
    • the horizontal-along-time versus the vertical-cross-time seems helpful here
  • transformation in apprehending time and the novel and newspaper, "...these forms provided the technical means for 're-presenting' the kind of imagined community that is the nation" (25)
  • Novels: time chart on 25, events that happen in a plot with A who has a wife (B) and a mistress (C), who has a lover (D):

What then actually links A to D? Two complementary conceptions: First that they are embedded in 'societies' (Wessex, Lubeck, Los Angeles). These societies are sociological entities of such firm and stable reality that their members (A and D) can even be described as passing one another on the street, without ever becoming acquainted, and still be connected. Second, that A and D are [26] embedded in the minds of the omniscient readers. [...] The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.

• • He invokes Wessex so you could connect to The Woodlanders (Hardy, 1887) (who meets and who doesn't?), but also Bleak House (1853): is D at such pains to connect everyone because he's trying to apprehend the nation? Also, qua Armstrong 2005, the novel then facilitates the imagination of individuals but also nations of them
  • 26 [note] Nothing better shows the immersion of the novel in homogenous, empty time than the absence of those prefatory genealogies, often ascending to the origin of man, which are so characteristic a feature of ancient chronicles, legends, and holy books.
  • 30 [Example of de Lizardi's El Periquillo Sarniento, The Itching Parrot, Mexico, 1816] Here again we see the 'national imagination' at work in the movement of a solitary hero through a sociological landscape of a fixity that fuses the world inside the novel with the world outside.
  • the boundedness of the horizon by "sociological solidity" - an important formal feature
  • 33 Newspapers: ...if we now turn to the newspaper as cultural product, we will be struck by its profound fictiveness.... Why are these events so juxtaposed? What connects them to each other? Not sheer caprice. Yet obviously most of them happen independently, without the actors being aware of each other or of what the others are up to. The arbitrariness of their inclusion and juxtaposition...shows that the linkage between them is imagined.
    • linkage derived from "calendrical coincidence" (and the novelistic assurance that the "character" "Syria" "moves along quietly, awaiting its next appearance") and "the relationship between the newspaper, as a form of book, and the market."
      • as with Brake 2001, no modern print culture without linking the book and the periodical
    • 34 in a rather special sense, the book was the first modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity. The sense I have in mind can be shown if we compare the book to other early industrial products, such as textiles, bricks, or sugar, for these commodities are measured in mathematical amounts (pounds or loads or pieces). A pound of sugar is simply a quantity, a convenient load, not an object in itself. The book, however -- and here it prefigures the durables of our time -- is a distinct, self contained object, exactly reproduced on a large scale [bibliographical differences not withstanding]. One pound of sugar flows into the next; each book has its own eremitic self-sufficiency.
    • 34-5 ...the newspaper is merely an 'extreme form' of the book, a book sold on a colossal scale, but of ephemeral popularity....curious that one of the earlier mass-produced commodities should so prefigure the inbuilt obsolescence of modern durables[.]
    • ...each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs [of reading the morning paper] is being replicated simultaneously by thousands...of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.... What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?