MSTU4016-08/Discuss 10

From Studyplace

November 5
Interrogating the Past VII: The Construction of Civic Imaginaries

Discussion Question

Discussion leader: Dino Sossi

Required Readings

• Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991) pp. 1-46. Read.

Supplemental Reading

• Charles Taylor, Modern social imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) pp. 23-30 and 155-173. Read

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Contents 1 Introductory Reflection 2 Benedict Anderson - Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism 2.1 Main Theme 2.2 Key Points 2.3 Discussion Questions 2.4 Key Terminology 3 Charles Taylor - Modern social imaginaries 3.1 Main Theme 3.2 Key Points 3.3 Discussion Questions 3.4 Key Terminology 4 References

[edit] Introductory Reflection

What exactly does it mean to be American?
Taiwanese? Canadian?
Or another nationality for that matter?

In an American election year, political idealists would prefer that discussion revolves around the nature of what an informed citizenry would like their society to become. Policies act as surrogates for the values informing them. The passion, anger and sometimes even vitriol invoked when discussing polarizing issues can be incredibly strong. And rightfully so. What I believe in terms of a policy speaks strongly about who I am as a person and what is important to me. It can activate deeply held emotions that touch our essential core.

Much has been said in the press about "red states" and "blue states". And this division raises some interesting questions. Is there a unified vision of what it is to be American (or from another nation)? Was this in fact ever the case or was the homogeneity implied by slogans like "Mom, apple pie and GM" just a fiction of our imaginations? If it was indeed a coherent whole, has it been irretrievably split into a binary or fragmented into an even greater number of pieces? How did this occur? Is it a good thing? Where will this lead in the future?

As a person who has lived in North America for most of his life but has enjoyed the privilege of living and working abroad, it has been interesting to see the evolution of my own thoughts about personal identity and how they interweave, almost imperceptibly, with the idea of nationalism. From being away from home and among people from other nations, it has helped clarify the values I hold most dearly. When you are with friends and family, there is little reason to reexamine rules and conventions that serve your interests. By spending time away, the value that I have thought about most deeply is equality rights.

But where did I learn to value equality?
I am sure part of it has to be that I find this issue innately important. In this case, I would like to believe that my propensity to think about these issues is initially more nature than nurture. Some people find some subjects inherently interesting, others just don't.
But I was also raised in an environment that promoted the collective, where sharing was a part of daily life.
It was fostered in my family. Being one of seven kids born to blue collar immigrant parents who worked their way up to middle class fostered the belief that we should be respectful of others regardless of class. Growing up in a household where religious values were important forced me to think more of others than just myself even when my baser instincts screamed otherwise.
My community social environment also played a significant part. Living in the more personal milieu of a leafy neighborhood in a smaller working class town with community-wide organizations promoted the idea of an integrated whole where each helped the other.
But it was also promoted by a religious school environment complemented with text books as well as classroom discussions speaking of morality.
Finally, the larger political climate also had an effect. I was born in a place where access to health care is a point of national pride. Also, the federal government implemented laws that directly mandated equality rights for the provision of governmental services in terms of “race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability” (Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 1982, section 15). These ideas have inevitably made there way down to businesses and other institutions that interact with the government and permeated society.
Slowly but surely, the idea of equality rights that were held by a small group of politicians were enshrined in law, disseminated to different governmental agencies, argued in legal contexts and the results reported in the press. What was once the dreams of a few became the guidelines for many. Diverse messages disseminated in a variety of forms by the media became the vessels for the spread of equality ideal which, woven together, became a part of our national shared identity.
At least for some...

[edit] Benedict Anderson - Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

[edit] Main Theme

The Nation as an Imagined Political Community

• Anderson proposes that “the nation” be defined as an “imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” (pp. 5-6)
  
• Limited because they have “finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.” (p. 7)
  
• Sovereign because the “concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm.” (p. 7)
  
• Community because “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”
  
  

[edit] Key Points

• Nationalism needs to be understood in terms of the large cultural systems preceding it, not “self-consciously held political ideologies” (p. 12), the relevant systems being the religious community and the dynastic realm.
  
• visual representations of sacred communities (e.g. reliefs, church windows, paintings) as well as aural creations changed the "modes of apprehending the world" (p. 22). Imagined communities of nations did not occur by "simply growing out of and replacing religious communities and dynastic realms" (p. 22)
  
• a key ingredient in the creation of the imagined community was the idea of simultaneity. “It views time as something close to what Benjamin calls Messianic time, a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present.” The novel and newspaper “provided the technical means for 're-presenting' the kind of imagined community that is the nation.” (pp. 24-25) Further, “The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, 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.” (p. 26)
  
• Hegel observed the mass ceremony of reading newspapers as a replacement of morning prayer. Anderson commented on the paradoxical nature of reading newspapers as a replacement of morning prayer “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. ... What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked imagined community can be envisioned?” (p. 35)
  
• Anderson believes that three old “fundamental cultural conceptions” needed to become loosened to foster the imagined community of the nation. First, “that a particular script-language offered privileged access to ontological truth, precisely because it was an inseparable part of that truth” (p. 36), thus calling into question the religions that offered them. Second, the natural organization of society “around and under high centres” leading to “hierarchical and centripetal” (p. 36) relations to the ruler. And third, “a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men essentially identical” (p. 36). Anderson believed that when they were combined they offered redemption from the fatalities of existence.
  
• Capitalism's “revolutionary vernacularizing thrust” (p. 39) was further propelled by three extraneous factors, the latter two, in Anderson's opinion, helped give rise to national consciousness. One, the change in the character of Latin, two the impact of the Reformation, and three, “the slow, geographically uneven, spread of particular vernaculars as instruments of administrative centralization by certain well-positioned would-be absolutist monarchs.” (p. 40)
  This led to “a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity.” (pp. 42-43)
  
• Anderson believes strongly in the idea of print as a fundamental base for the creation of a national consciousness in three ways. First, by creating a more holistic and integrated field of communication and exchange. Second, by fixing language that allowed the building of an image of antiquity which is important to the subjectivity of the nation. And third, it created “languages-of-power” (p. 45) different from “older administrative vernaculars” (p. 45)
• “the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation. The potential stretch of these communities was inherently limited, and, at the same time, bore none but the most fortuitous relationship to existing political boundaries (which were, on the whole, the highwater marks of dynastic expansionisms).” (p. 46)
  
  

[edit] Discussion Questions

• What are the essential elements of a community?
  

• What are the essential elements of an imagined community?
  

• Is there an imagined community of America?
  

What are its elements? (e.g. cultural, economic, political, social, spiritual, etc.)
Is this imagined community unified or fragmentary?
Is an imagined community defined individually or as a group?

• What is your most prevalent imagined community?
  

More specifically, if you have to identify yourself with a community, which one do you most readily identify with? And at what level?
For example, if you define yourself in a political way, this could be further divided into other levels:
National level: American, Taiwanese, Canadian
State level: Pennsylvania, Taiwan Province of the Republic of China, Ontario
Municipal level: New Yawker, Taipei resident, Torontonian
Local level: an “animal” from the Bronx zoo, a hipster from Kensington market
Party affiliation level: Republican, Kuomintang, Liberal
Ideological level: Marxist, Communist, Socialist
Advocacy level: Animal rights advocate
Engagement level: activist, part of the "silent majority"
As a result, it appears that you could be a part of a number of different imaginary communities at a number of different levels.

Or do you define yourself most strongly in terms of imagined community by “race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability”? (from section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms)

How about according to your interests or talents (e.g. musician, athlete, writer, intellectual, journalist, environmentalist, book binder, photographer), profession (e.g. student, teacher)?

• If we can come to agreement in terms of the essential elements of a community, given that many of these communities have been “real” (e.g. with fixed borders, face-to-face interaction, etc.), are we able to foster “virtual” communities? Are real and virtual communities mutually exclusive? Complementary? Is the idea of creating a virtual community a “good” one?
  

• What is the role of communications in fostering an imagined community?
  

Is text the primary way of fostering these types of communities? Or is text more of a historical precedent that has opened the door to alternative forms of creating imagined communities?

• What is the role of education in fostering an imagined community?
  

Should schools tacitly have a political agenda in terms of the imagined they are trying to create or perpetuate? (e.g. national pride)

• With globalization, do you believe there will be a time when the concept of “nation” is no longer a useful term to describe a community? More specifically, if we begin to define our communities at a more macro level (e.g. internationally) and/or micro level (e.g. regionally, municipally, locally), does the community created by a nation become completely devalued?
  

• Quote: “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” (p. 3)
  

Question: With globalization trends such as free trade zones, will nationalism give way to larger continental-wide forms of political union and the end of the nation state? What kind of conditions would be necessary for this to happen?

• Quote: “These days it is perhaps difficult to put oneself empathetically into a world in which the dynastic realm appeared for most men as the only imaginable 'political' system. For in fundamental ways 'serious' monarchy lies transverse to all modern conceptions of political life. Kingship organizes everything around a high centre. Its legitimacy derives from divinity, not from populations, who, after all, are subject, not citizens. (p. 19)
  

Question: Was it possible for a true democracy to flourish before a monarchy? (e.g. similar to ancient Athens) Is it an easier to understand progression from monarch to democracy than the reverse?

• Quote: * “As with Noli Me Tangere, fiction seeps quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations.” (p. 36)
  

Question: What role does the mass media and the narratives they create help/hinder the creation/maintenance of a nation?

[edit] Key Terminology

• nation – “it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” (pp. 5-6)
  
  
  
  

[edit] Charles Taylor - Modern social imaginaries

[edit] Main Theme

The Social Imaginary - Definition and Nature

• “By social imaginary, I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” (p. 23)
  
• “Our social imaginary at any given time is complex. It incorporates a sense of the normal expectations we have of each other, the kind of common understanding that enables us to carry out the collective practices that make up our social life. This incorporates some sense of how we all fit together in carrying out the common practice.” (p. 24)
  
  

The Social Imaginary vs. Social Theory

• “There are important differences between social imaginary and social theory. I adopt the term imaginary (i) because my focus is on the way ordinary people "imagine" their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends. It is also the case that (ii) theory is often the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society. Which leads to a third difference: (iii) the social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.” (p. 23)
  
  

[edit] Key Points

The Direct-Access Society

• Taylor characterizes the “modern horizontal society” as consisting of members equidistant from its center, immediacy to the whole, impersonal egalitarian ordering of interpersonal links existing in secular time(p. 155)
  . "High points" such as privileged persons or agencies (e.g. kings, priests) are not recognized(p. 157)
  
• “Nations, people, can have a personality, can act together outside of any prior political ordering. One of the key premises of modern nationalism is in place, because without this, the demand for self-determination of nations would make no sense. This is the right for people to make their own constitution, unfettered by their historical political organization.” (pp. 156-157)
  
  

Agency and Objectification

• Taylor presents the ideas of agency and objectification in opposites “So the new horizontal world in secular time allows for two opposite ways of imagining society. On one side, we become capable of imagining new free, horizontal modes of collective agency, and hence of entering into and creating such agencies because they are now in our repertoire. On the other, we become capable of objectifying society as a system of norm-independent processes, in some ways analogous to those in nature. On the one hand, society is a field of common agency, on the other a terrain to be mapped, synoptically represented, analyzed, perhaps preparatory to being acted on from the outside by enlightened administrators.” (p. 164)
  
• “The modern social imaginary is thus both active and contemplative. It expands the repertory of collective action, and also that of objective analysis. But it also exists in a range of intermediate forms. In speaking above about the typically modern, horizontal forms of social imaginary, in which people grasp themselves and great numbers of others as existing and acting simultaneously I mentioned the economy, the public sphere, and the sovereign people, but also the space of fashion. This is an example of a fourth structure of simultaneity.” (p. 167)
  
  

[edit] Discussion Questions

• Quote: “In order to see how this new idea of collective agency, the "nation" or "people," articulates into a new understanding of time, I want to return to Benedict Anderson's very insightful discussion. Anderson stresses how the new sense of belonging to a nation was prepared by a new way of grasping society under the category of simultaneity: society as the whole consisting of the simultaneous happening of all the myriad events that mark the lives of its members at that moment. These events are the fillers of this segment of a kind of homogeneous time. This very clear, unambiguous concept of simultaneity belongs to an understanding of time as exclusively secular.” (p. 157)
  

Question: Following the logic of this quote, do you think it would be possible to create a nation state without this notion of simultaneity? Is simultaneity the essential characteristic for creating an imagined community such as a nation? If not, what other qualities, characteristics, events, etc., would promote the formation of an imagined community?

• Quote: “The principle of a modern horizontal society is radically different. Each of us is equidistant from the center; we are immediate to the whole. This describes what we could call a direct-access society. We have moved from a hierarchical order of personalized links to an impersonal egalitarian one; from a vertical world of mediated access to horizontal, direct access societies.” (p. 158)
  

Question: Does modern society consist of a truly non-hierarchical order of personalized links, or is this just a matter of degree? (e.g. this is less true than before) Also, does the idea of an “impersonal egalitarian” society ever occur?

• Quote: “In the earlier form, hierarchy and mediacy of access went together. A society of ranks - 'society of orders,' to use Tocqueville's phrase - as in seventeenth-century France, was hierarchical in an obvious sense. But this also meant that one belonged to this society via belonging to some component of it. … By contrast, the modern notion of citizenship is direct. In whatever many ways I am related to the rest of society through intermediary organizations, I think of my citizenship as separate from all of these. My fundamental way of belonging to the state is not dependent on or mediated by any of these other belongings. I stand, alongside all my fellow citizens, in direct relationship to the state, which is the object of our common allegiance.” (pp. 158-159)
  

Question: Is it true that modern society has rid itself of “hierarchy and mediacy of access”? Isn’t there still hierarchy as well as some kind of intermediary in accessing most phenomenon? If hierarchy is present and mediacy necessary, how could a more direct access society be promoted?

• Quote: “There were certainly people in seventeenth-century France, and before, for whom the very idea of direct access would have been foreign, impossible to clearly grasp. The educated had the model of the ancient republic. But for many others, the only way they could understand belonging to a larger whole, like a kingdom or a universal church, was through the imbrication of more immediate, understandable units of belonging - parish, lord - into the greater entity. Modernity has involved, among other things, a revolution in our social imaginary, the relegation of these forms of mediacy to the margins and the diffusion of images of direct access.” (p. 159)
  

Question: Similar to the previous quotation and question, is the idea of a direct access society a fiction to many groups of people? (e.g. the poor, immigrants, etc.) If this is true, is there a way to promote more direct access for these people?

• Quote: “We can see right away that, in an important sense, modern direct-access societies are more homogeneous than premodern ones. But this doesn't mean that there tends to be less de facto differentiation in culture and lifestyle between different strata than there was a few centuries ago, although this is undoubtedly true. It is also the case that the social imaginaries of different classes have come much closer together.” (pp. 160-161)
  

Question: If this is true, why is there such differentiation between classes?
If differentiation between class is a "bad" thing, how could it be minimized?

• Quote: “These modes of imagined direct access are linked to, indeed are just different facets of, modern equality and individualism. Directness of access abolishes the heterogeneity of hierarchical belonging. It makes us uniform, and that is one way of becoming equal. (Whether it is the only way is the fateful issue at stake in much of today's struggles over multiculturalism.) At the same time, the relegation of various mediations reduces their importance in our lives; the individual stands more and more free of them and hence has a growing self-consciousness as an individual. Modern individualism, as a moral idea, doesn't mean ceasing to belong at all - that's the individualism of anomie and breakdown - but imagining oneself as belonging to ever wider and more impersonal entities: the state, the movement, the community of humankind. This is the change that has been described from another angle as the shift from "network" or "relational" identities to "categorical" ones.” (p. 160)
  

Question: This quote makes individualism seem ideal. What are the costs, if any, of moving from a hierarchical system to more direct? By promoting individuals, individualism and impersonal entities, is there a cost to the collective?

• Quote: “On a somewhat more enduring basis, what starts as a mere census category may be mobilized into common agency, making common demands, as with the unemployed or welfare recipients. Or previously existing agencies can lapse into mere passive categories. The modern imaginary contains a whole gamut of forms in complex interaction and potential mutual transition.” (pp. 170-171)
  

Question: Categorization is presented in a positive manner. What costs are there to dividing society into categories? If some categories are agreed upon as being empowering (e.g. advocacy on behalf of the unemployed, welfare recipients, etc.), are there others with less socially progressive ends? Could the process of identifying with a particular category (e.g. a welfare recipient) be initially empowering in terms of economic gains, but disempowering in terms of limiting one's view of self or how society sees you? How do you promote "good" categories and create disincentives for "bad"? Who decides good from bad?

[edit] Key Terminology

• social imaginary – “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” (p. 23)
  
• “Our social imaginary at any given time is complex. It incorporates a sense of the normal expectations we have of each other, the kind of common understanding that enables us to carry out the collective practices that make up our social life. This incorporates some sense of how we all fit together in carrying out the common practice.” (p. 24)
  
• the direct-access society – “where each member is “immediate to the whole.”” (p. 157)
  
  

[edit] References

Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. New York: Verso.
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (U.K.) 1982, c. 11, Constitution Act, 1982, which came into force on April 17, 1982.
Taylor, C. (2004) Modern social imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.