Representative Subjects, Modes of Representation in Anderson's Imagined Communities Lawrence Needham, Affiliate Scholar, Oberlin College
My beginning is a mythos of origin and/or story of vocation: Benedict Anderson's account, in the "Introduction" to his Language and Power, of the fits and starts of an intellectual "project--imagining the nation as an imagined community--offered by way of an apology for his efforts. In a sometimes embarrassed, self-deprecating fashion, replete with modesty and inadequacy topoi, his narrative nonetheless centrally concerns his attempt to authorize himself and garner authority through constructing a coherent self and project, after the fact (after, that is, the surprisingly huge success of Imagined Communities) much the way that chance events and the accidents of history are recovered as the destiny of the nation. For Anderson presents himself as an unlikely intellectual hero, his career beginning in an act of abasement: encountering a group of "dark-skinned students" who are listening to an "Indian or Pakastani orator" denouncing Prime Minister Eden's decision to invade the Suez Canal in the national interest, he watches as they are assaulted by a group of English students singing "God Save the Queen"; attempting to intervene, he loses his spectacles in the ensuing melee and joins "the column" of the assaulted.This opening scenario of ineffectual activism introduces the recurring motifs of his story of vocation--the dialectical interplay of blindness and insight in his view of the world; expulsion from Paradise as a fortunate fall. Concerning the former, in losing his spectacles and becoming "blind with rage," he achieves a sudden, if curiously belated, insight into the violent workings of "imperialist politics"--curiously belated since his biography mentions, on one side, a grandfather in the service of the Imperial Army and a father in the employ of the Imperial Maritime Customs, and on the other hand, numerous Irish forebears active in nationalist politics. Further, in losing the spectacle(s)--the students' agitation initially is compared to a puppet show that he observes from a safe remove--he gains political insight at the loss of a comforting, because distant, perspective (or aestheticized attitude--his education, Anderson tells us, was largely confined to studying the classics, and French and English literature). After these losses and his separation from "Eden" with its compensatory gains, his challenge in the world of experience and political turmoil is threefold: 1)to find the appropriate distance from which to observe and analyze political events--to be too distant is to run the risk of perpetuating comfortable illusions or adapting a transcendent perspective overlooking injustices; to be too close is to lose oneself in the spectacle and/or shadow play of history, to fail to look and see what is behind the curtain; 2)to link "the splendors of the imagining life," tarnished with his fall from innocence, "with the remorseless engines of global and technological life" (8) while "preserving" the humanist subject; 3)in attempting to do both, to determine the exact nature of the relationship of the actual and virtual, of the material and immaterial, of content to structure.
He addresses these challenges by adopting--of necessity or by accident--what he describes as an "idiosyncratic method"--arising from his specific personal and professional situation. Exiled from the object of his analysis--Indonesia--, consigned to the study of written texts, and at home nowhere, he develops a comparative, grammatical method for analyzing what in retrospect he seemed destined to study: the nation and nationalism as discursive formations. As he puts it, referring to Imagined Communities, "As I look back on it now, it seems an odd book to be written by someone born in China, raised in three countries, speaking with an absolete English accent, carrying an Irish passport, living in America, and devoted to Southeast Asia. Yet perhaps it could only be written from various exiles, and with divided loyalties" (10). The same could be said of the method supporting his analyses. His "Introduction" to Language and Power , then, constitutes an apology not only for his professional pre-occupations and cosmopolitan stance, but also (and relatedly) for his comparative method and structural approach, or what might be called his "grammatical method," which elaborates the principles and rules that explain, in general systematic terms, the widespread phenomena of nation-making and nationalism. What follows is a critique of Anderson's method which focuses on its insights and blind spots in order to identify some of the limitations of his influential account of the nation as an imagined community.
Anderson's structural, or "grammatical" approach draws from Marxist criticism and media theory, both of which, as Ronald Deibert notes, employ a base/superstructure model in their analyses. So doing, both, as well, are subject to charges of monocausal reductionism, that of economic determinism, on the one hand, and technological determinism on the other. Anderson avoids both charges by considering economic and technological variables in his account of nation-making, as well as other determinants, including, significantly, the human subject, possessing a consciousness capable of being transformed by economies and technologies, yet able to transform them as well. The "consciousness" that he posits as both discrete and integrated, and which, to some, may appear as a quaint formulation (a residual term from both Marxist theory and early media theory) refers both to a collective mentality, or set of conceptual predispositions and, less often, to an individual property, with the exact relationship between the two never precisely specified It is the collective consciousness, or mentalite, that Anderson refers to when speaking of the societal transformations effected by technologies of communication and transportation, and the changes are envisioned as epochal, catastrophic, definitive, constituting radical breaks with the past. This view of things is a long view, with little attention paid residual, resistant cultural formations and social epistemologies or overlapping modes of apprehending the world. (For example, not only the persistence, but the importance of oral modes and their intermixture with written modes in shaping national consciousness, not to mention their interplay with visual ones). It is of one piece with Anderson's "grammatical" method, which is historical in considering social epistemolgies and cognitive biases as historically contingent, but is profoundly ahistorical in segregating epochs and studying them sychronically as integrated, seamless wholes. His is, again, a structural method employing basic oppositions, or binaries, (premodern/modern; sacral/secular) as a mode of explanation that in many cases raises more questions than it answers.
For example, he dichotomizes sacral and secular cultures in much the same fashion that media scholars have conceptualized the much-debated, widely repudiated Great (Cognitive) Divide between pre-literate and literate cultures, the former envisioned as tied to an immediate, sensuous aural/visual apphrension of "reality" and thereby consigned to the eternal return of the same, the latter conceived as producing the ironic, alienated consciousness required of a secular subject "free" or condemned to pursue ideals of his or others' making, including an ideal community such as the nation. Notwithstanding the existence of a literate clerisy (whose existence Anderson acknowledges, but subordinates to the illiterate masses, the only instance in which he writes history from below) capable of abstract thinking and intricate logical reasoning, it is difficult to imagine a field hand or burgher unfamiliar with temporal co incidence or unpracticed in serial logic and cause-effect reasoning said to characterize modern cultures, living the whole of their existence sub species aeternitas. That is, as in "primitive" cultures (the structural "other" of modern, civilized societies), the inhabitants of predominantly aural/visual culture may be said to employ competing rationalities, which are nonetheless fundamentally rational and logical for all that. And it may not be so much a matter of his overstating the case here as mis stating it: the experience of the simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present--the Messianic time of sacral cultures that Anderson contrasts to the homogenous empty time of secular society- may be, in fact, not a condition of a predominantly aural/visual culture, but an effect of writing, that is, a way of reading the world typologically (wherein Job is fulfilled in Christ who prefigures the resurrection to come) based on textual practices of annotation and exegesis. (Such practices persist, for example, well into the age of print culture.) The crucial idea may not be the absolute opposition of aural/visual culture and print culture, but rather, the relationship of orality to literacy and how it has been established and maintained throughout all periods of nation-building.
The transition from sacral to secular culture marks, politically, the shift from dynasties, legitimated by appeal to divine authority, to self constituted nations; for Anderson, print culture plays a significant role in this development. Initially, it operates as one of many solvents contributing to the disintegration of trans-European Christendom through promoting and disseminating vernacular languages that both displace the centrality of Latin as the "universal signifier" and undermine its auratic quality as texts circulate and are in the hands of a steadily increasing number of people. But for Anderson, print capitalism as "an agent of change" plays a much more positive, or productive, in laying the foundation for national consciousness. First, print languages "created unified fields of exchange below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars." This included processes of standardization and homogenization. Second, print languages "gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation" (44). On both counts, print culture is the adhesive that defines and gives coherence to a disarticulated society through manifold operations that bind alienated consciousnesses by the power of logos.
Yet, despite its profound impact, for Anderson, print culture merely sets the stage for the emergence of imagined communities dispersed in time and space, is simply a necessary condition for national formations, but by no means a sufficient cause of nation-making. What, then, is the motor of history? In a curious, albeit common move--common to the logic of modernity--Anderson rehearses the story of expulsion from, and loss of, "Paradise" and subsequent self-awareness of time, separation and death (the bitter fruit of the Tree of Knowledge) to account for the existence of alienated individuals who, having lost the certainties of religion, look for "the transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning." (For a sense of the importance and persistence of this trope, consider the following: 1)the first sentence of the "Preface to the Second Edition" of Imagined Communities--"Who would have thought that the storm blows harder the farther it leaves Paradise behind?"; 2)the epigraph to the "Introduction" to Language and Power, which begins "That was no true Paradise. . . "; 3) in "Exodus," his quoting with approval Lord Acton's comment, "Exile is the nursery of nationality.") What is curious about his formulation is not his particular account--the dusk of religious modes of explanation and the need for a secular substitute (though in his epochal account of the shift from sacral to secular culture, the question of religion remains a vexed one: not only do religion and religious modes of thought persist in national formations, they are actively enlisted as support, or even foundation, for the nation state), but rather the appeal to individual consciousness as the deus ex machina accounting for the necessity of the imagined community that is the nation. What generally is a (broadly) historical and structural analysis, becomes at this juncture an overgeneralized and psychologized account of alienated individuals facing existential crises. Whence this alienated being?
The question can be approached from the other direction, from the nation as an effect of modernity. The social contract theory underwriting the constitution of nations presupposes/depends on the existence of autonomous, sovereign individual actors in the political sphere. The disintegration of sacral communities or dynastic realms in no way accounts for the emergence of such a "figure," especially in Anderson's account wherein pre-modern communities function as collectivities comprised of individuals understood as "indivisible samples of the human species," not the "independent, autonomous, and thus (essentially) non social moral being, as found primarily in our . . .ideology of man and society" (Dumont; qtd. in Deibert, 65). The genesis of the ideology of individualism and its figuration in the atomistic, self-possessed individual should be sought elsewhere, in the operations of print culture itself.
The relationship of print to individualism has been explained variously: 1)that printing, by presenting the words of a writer in a definitive or final form set off from other works as a unit of its own, encouraged the idea of the single authoritative voice and hence the concept of single authorship; 2)that the mass production of small, portable books stimulated an interest in silent reading and private meditation. Donald Deibert sums up the connection as follows: "The mass production of printed material favored newly circulating notions of authorship, copyright, and individual subjectivity, while the portability of printed books facilitated the trend toward silent, private reading and intellectual isolation and reflection" (Deibert 100).
Of interest here, I believe, is the idea that while print culture facilitated the consolidation and management of the extended geopolitical spaces (regional, national, international) it helped "create" (along with developments in economics and transportation), in the process of contributing to the formation of individual subjectivities through the interiorization of speech and the privatization of reading, print culture also extended and managed (not remediated) the interior spaces between individual consciousnesses. These interior distances, which the newspaper, novel, and other print formats are said to overcome in their modalities of representation and reception, are, in fact, maintained by them and depended on to ensure the integrity of "imagined communities of interest" among isolated individuals. That is, actual agreement over the meaning of particular representations does not matter so much as the sense that there is agreement, despite--or because of--the absence of evidence to the contrary or any significant means of confirmation due the isolating effects of print media and institutionalized modes of reception. This trust in a shared commonsensical reality, guaranteed by the knowing silence of whatever "goes without saying" and predicated on the belief in representative subjects and universal values, is the effect of the machinery of modernity (its economies and technologies--print capitalism, for example) that produces and re-produces abstractions of reality--typical and/or statistical persons and situations, as well as normative, predictable behaviors--as "the real." The importance of print media--the newspaper, the novel, advertisement--for imagining the nation or other imagined communities (civil society, the public sphere) rests, then, not with the circulation of any particular set of representations alone, but with the circulation of the idea of re presentativeness itself.
Anderson's structural approach is well-suited for describing how print formats and modes of representation construct the "typical" and "normative", as well as standardize the terms--what he calls "quotidian universals"--by which modern subjects come to inhabit, in the abstract, a shared world; it is ill-suited for considering how these abstracting, generalizing, and normalizing functions perform a disciplinary function, subjecting individuals to an increasingly anonymous and invisible social authority under the auspices of "the real." This is especially so, because, for Anderson, print media in the public sphere (that is, neither in the service of the state or its agencies and apparatuses) ultimately is a vehicle for the free expression and free association of individuals and a means of emancipation and transformation. He makes this point in "Nationalism, Identity, and The World-in-Motion" when discussing two basic kinds of serialization present in print media: the bounded series, figured in the census, and the unbounded series, figured in the novel. The first, an instrument of governmentality, in defining closed categories that can be enumerated and totaled (Native American, for example) "fixes" or "monumentalizes" the subject it calls into being and forecloses opportunities for agency; the second, an instrument of the public sphere, in establishing unbounded categories open to the "world-in-motion," offers possibilities for meaningful action by agents free to enlist in the series ("free individual"; "new human being") that summons them. That the terms of those choices are limited and ideologically determined by the system that governs them are considerations beyond the grammatical framework Anderson employs.
Of the numerous print formats (the anthology, the periodical, catalog, dictionary, penny dreadful etc.) that contribute to imagining a nation, Anderson gives special notice to two: the newspaper and the novel. Both, through serialization, enable a conceptualization of continuity, and hence, identity, over time, so fundamental for imagining the nation; both, as well, model the "homogenous-empty-time" of "in the meantime" or "meanwhile," so critical for envisioning the operations of the horizontal community that is the nation. In terms of its powers of dissemination, its saturation of the market, the newspaper would seem to be of primary importance for imagining the nation, though its reach, in terms of numbers, persons, and places should not be overestimated. (As a popular format, it superseded the periodical in England only after 1850). Then, too, although its circulation of a shared vocabulary helped to enjoin an imagined community, there is no necessity that the community envisioned operates or is experienced on the national level; community might be experienced/imagined on the local, regional, or international level, or on the microlevel of the categories the newspaper supplies: the community one belongs to might very well depend on which section of the paper one is reading at the moment. Finally, the mass ceremony of reading the newspaper that reassures its readers that "the imagined world is visibly rooted in everday life" (35-36) is, as Anderson notes, "performed in silent privacy, in the lairs of the skull". This solitary practice, is, of course, what makes the community envisioned an imagined community. For all that, it is a curiously asocial practice in which a typical reaction to anybody reading a person's newspaper over their shoulder over one's shoulder is to fold it over or turn it away from view, the assumption being that one can get their own copy and read the same thing, but also that, having done so, one will read the same thing and read it in the same way. What Anderson understandably omits in his claim that "each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others" (35) is any account of the numerous reading behaviors and regimes of reading every communicant brings to bear on any text.
Besides the newspaper, Anderson identifies the novel as the print format that best provides "the technical means for 're-presenting' the kind of imagined community that is the nation" (25), and, for obvious reasons, literary critics have agreed, focusing on the novel, at the expense of the study of other modes (poems, plays, essays), as a literary vehicle well-suited for representing the nation. For many critics, the novel best objectifies contemporary social life, and its particular style of representation--a "mixture of ideas and styles, themselves representing distinct peoples now forced to create the rationale for the common life"(Brennan 50)--is seen to imitate or copy the constitution of the nation. Indeed, the novel seems almost isomorphic with the nation as Anderson defines it: it is extensive but limited, contained with set boundaries; it is sovereign, or subject to its own rules and imminent standards; it is linear and horizontal, evoking distinctions only to level them on a common playing field. These two constructions--novel and nation--share the same structure because the two share a common geneology in Liberalism's conception of society; it is hardly original to argue that the novel in The Great Tradition is a vehicle of liberal thought, though, in recalling that, we are better positioned to identify the nation as Anderson defines it as itself an ideological formation, imbued with the values of the liberal democratic state.
It is useful to observe that in describing and establishing as normative the realistic novel in the Great Tradition, Anderson omits a class of "novels" very useful for studying the many ways in which prose fiction helps constitute the nation: historical fiction, gothic novels and romances in general. (One would be hard put to discuss the relationship of prose fiction and nation-making in nineteenth-century America without considering American romance.) Of particular interest is gothic fiction, which often presents the dark underside of nationalism, its exclusivity, or that quality which ensures that it remain limited, sovereign and horizontal. In Alien Nation, Cannon Schmitt presents the argument in the following fashion: "Anderson stresses the fundamental importance of this work of inclusivity, dismissing the prevalent concepts of nations defining themselves against other nations. Mutual love and belonging within nations, not hatred between them, constitute national identity" 'The cultural products of nationalism. . . show this love very clearly in thousands of different forms and styles. On the other hand, how truly rare it is to find analogous nationalist products expressing fear and loathing'(129; emphasis in original). Gothic fictions, I suggest, are just such 'analogous nationalist products.' Often set abroad, they are nevertheless marked by the most virulent forms of xenophobia" (13). Not to mention the most virulent forms of ethnocentrism and racism directed at "internal enemies," whose evocation and disappearance ensures the integrity of the nation.
It is precisely these violent measures and exclusive gestures that Anderson's grammatical method occludes or overlooks in concentrating on the fundamental principles and structures below the surface details. In fairness, Anderson's approach to the novel in the Great Tradition also is not concerned with particular representations, with social realism on the one hand, or with the surface play of specific languages, styles, and images jostling for a place in the national imaginary on the other hand, but rather with abstracted, general forms emerging from the density of phenomenal detail (which arguably--and Anderson certainly would not agree--is elaborated to produce a "reality effect" naturalizing what are, in fact, ideological positions and positionings). At one level removed from the details of represented realities, a grammatical approach might consider the type of "modelling" a novel effects, and, indeed, much has been written on how the novel models the behavior of the "juridical" subject who internalizes the laws and norms of bourgeoise society, or how the novel models the appropriate behaviors and protocols for a "contract society." At a further remove, modelling gives way to enactment, as when, in addition to modelling the appropriate protocols for a "contract society," a novel "includes readers in a dialogue in which judgments of actions are constructed through a process of negotiation and exchange" (Thomas 9), or when, in addition to imitating the workings of a surveillance society and modelling an appropriate concern for how one looks, a novel give way to implicating the reader in the act of surveillance itself. It is at this level that mimesis becomes not an imitation of an object, or form, but of an action, and it is at this level that Anderson's analyses most often operate. At the highest level of abstraction, the reader enacts the role of the narrator conceived as the "collective awareness of the community," not omniscient, but an "extension to infinity ...[of] inclusive consensus" (Ermarth 76), a transcendent solitary consciousness that, containing multitudes and all points of view, becomes the nation, solipsistically maintaining in splendid isolation that "what I assume, you too shall assume." The Whitmanian echoes are meant to suggest that the sublimity of imagining the community that is the nation in the interior, private spaces of print, is as much, if not more so, the product of other modes of writing, is, in fact, the effect of writing as a total system.
Works Cited- Anderson, Benedict. "Exodus." Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994): 314-27.
- ----------. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso, 1991.
- ----------. Language and Power . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
- ----------. "Nationalism, Identity, and The-World-In-Motion."
Deibert, Ronald. Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. Realism and Consensus in the English Novel. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Schmitt, Cannon. Alien Nation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Thomas, Brook. American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
