2011.NOV.18
Chapter
6, Media in Everyday Life
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
Nationalism arises between a
“vanished past” and a “limitless future”
Constructs a
narrative of loss, to promise some
undefined future gain
First
edition written as world changed, late 1970s, inter-socialist wars China / Viet
Nam
Asian
history never about socialism: entirely nationalistic
Collapse
of ‘communism,’ and of internationalism, defeat for those with illusions
Nations
persist; but defeat for the great economic
idea of shared wealth (i.e. socialism)
Do we all have a nationality? Is it given or chosen? What is it based on?
A powerful,
but without grand thinkers: no major philosopher makes argument for it
Famous
definition of ‘nation’: “an imagined political community, imagined as both
inherently limited and sovereign” (6)
inherently limited and sovereign” (6)
We never meet
most other members of nation, we have to imagine
them (and they define us)
Nations not
become self-conscious, aware of
something that pre-exists: nations invent themselves
Not
falseness, but creativity seen in this process
Limited: not
entire humanity, always an ‘other,’ even nationalists don’t want one nation
Sovereign: not religious, divinely ordained
from one true god, but plural nations
Cultural roots of nationalism
Nations arose in 1700s as
religions lost power, to provide continuity,
endless future
Religious communities were/are immense, based in symbols and language
European exploration and contact
showed plurality of cultures, hence contingent
Also rise of
vernacular languages meant Arabic and Latin not the only language of the sacred
Two other keys to rise of nation:
loss of strict hierarchies (economic changes)
Realize earth has a material
history, fossils, history not fixed or fated; future is open, changeable
Books were
the first modern, mass-produced industrial commodity, tens of million in first
50 years
Foundation of capitalism, international
search for markets
From Latin, which you had to learn
(made you bilingual), to local languages
Reformation,
Protestants: huge rise in printing and thirst for ideas, basis of unique
nations
Split single, international ‘catholic’
church with new writings, Luther a popular
best-seller
Many haphazard news language
regions and nationalities emerge, through print
à how might graphic design play
these roles? Can it? Is there continuity in it?
Written languages unified nations,
not as changeable as local spoken dialects
Print lasts, visible link to national, linguistic past: languages stabilize, become modern 300 years ago
Languages and
print created ‘imagined communities’
and nations, i.e.
Huge rise of
self-declared, post-colonial nations in North and South America, 1776 – 1838
Language not key to nations in New World: creole, spoke language of colonial masters
Haiti: Toussaint L’Ouverture,
massive slave revolt, second republic in West Hemisphere
Empires used
natives to hold on to Empire against the
creoles, new nations
Colonies often developed national
idea before many states of Europe
Sudden split of Spanish empire, 3
centuries old, large native populations, into 18 parts
Like revolution in America: heavy
burden on colonies; and Enlightenment ideals
Present world grew out of
administrative boundaries of the old Spanish and English Empires
___________
Guy
Debord, “The Society of the Spectacle” 1995 (original 1967)
An angry, highly political text about visual culture,
direct experience is now “mere representation”
He puts it very bluntly: the “former unity of life is lost
forever” —a high price to pay for images!
“The spectacle is not a collection of images;
rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”
(12)
Images mediate
and shape (and falsify, i.e.) the
fundamental social relationships in our lives
As if everything that appears is good, and everything that
is good will appear
(like Facebook:
everything appears there, looks good, and is assumed to be good)
“A negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself” (14)
Through the domination of the economic over all
aspects of life, being becomes having
In a fashion not unlike Foucault, he sees power as
generalized, everywhere, through spectacle
Visual practices self-generate, make their own rules, create
illusion of freedom and leisure
We ‘see ourselves’ at the beach, or in a dream home:
images are concrete alienation
In his most famous phrase, spectacle is “capital accumulated to the point where
it becomes image.”
He is also carrying on an argument with the global
communist states, like China or Russia
Sees them they as just “concentrated” spectacle: a bureaucratic capitalism
Everyone dresses like Mao “because there is nothing
else to be,” no alternative images
The West is no better: “diffuse” spectacle, masking “class divisions on which the real
unity of the capitalist mode of production is based.”
Long middle section gets explicitly political, history of
failed revolution through 20th Ce.
Hidden ‘prize’ in the middle of the chocolate egg: people
read this essay because of the term spectacle, in the context of visual culture
studies, but it is really about defeat of workers’ revolutions
Looks to “criminality,” local self-organization, “the only
undefeated aspect of a defeated movement”
Arjun
Appadurai, Modernity at Large (1996) (Ah-PAD-da-rye)
Modernity a claim to universality,
Enlightenment a “self-fulfilling, self-justifying” idea
Looks at Western modernism from Bombay (Mumbai):
“synaesthetic and… pretheoretical”
See, hear, and smell pages of Life magazine and Hollywood films: US replaced colonial England
Culture and media shifted his sense of nationality
and identity
Media and migration determinates of modern imaginary, especially electronic media
“Electronic mediation transforms preexisting worlds of
communication and conduct” (3)
Movement of people and vast circulation of images destabilize
subjectivities, create “irregularities”
Should modernity be seen as a rupture, a step to something
bigger and better?
Modern media and migrations do something new, a
trans-national, even post-national
effect
Many societies still experience modernity from afar,
through global media, not as a national narrative
But interrogated, rewritten on local level through
“subversive micronarratives,”
opposition forces
à Like design? We learn an
international history, but adapt and apply it wherever we are
And Diasporas bring changes of their own to global
urban centres
Chapter
2, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”
Modern world “now an interactive system in a sense that is
strikingly new” (27)
Pull of larger groups – religious, commercial,
political – replaced by smaller-scale, local loyalties
Benedict Anderson: “print capitalism” brings promise and
power of mass literacy, shrinks distances
But is it a “global village,” or a rootless,
schizophrenic, alienated, even rhizomic
non-space?
à Do we not feel most at
home in what we know, in our skills, in design?
________
Deleuze and Guattari, rhizomes
Important post-structuralist philosophers, D&G
were looking for new forms of knowledge, opposed to linear and causal
explanations, which only reinforced existing ideas and institutions of power.
Their writing follows suit, being very dense and complex, making many unexplained
references and connections. Rhizomes
suggest we need to think in much looser, less structured and determined ways.
From
Wikipedia:
In botany and dendrology, a rhizome
is a characteristically horizontal stem of a plant that is usually
found underground, often sending out roots
and shoots from its nodes.
Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari
use the term "rhizome" and "rhizomatic" to describe theory
and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points
in data representation and interpretation… the rhizome resists chronology and
organization, instead favoring a nomadic system of growth and propagation. 
