imaginary

Imitation, Simulation, and Repetition – How We Imagine Ourselves

Imitation, Simulation, and Repetition

Madan Surap’s Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World is the most expansive and impressive examination that I have encountered around the issues of societal conception and cultural identities. His basic assertion, which is expanded as the work progresses, is that “ identities are not entirely determined … we do not have homogenous identity but (instead) have several contradictory selves”. By interacting with such historic figures as Lacan, Baudrillard, Foucault, Said, and Kristiva, Sarup provides a tour-de-force of elements contributing to a modern conception of self, identity, community, and culture.

Identity has a history. At one time it was taken for granted that a person had a ‘given’ identity. The debates round it today assume that identity is not an inherent quality of a person but that it arises in interaction with others and the focus is on the processes by which identity is constructed.[1]

The construction of someone’s identity involves a process of selection as to which elements will receive consideration and emphasis. “Social dynamics such as class, nation, ‘race’, ethnicity, gender and religion” are then organized into a narrative.

[2] This is the process by which a subject’s story emerges for both presentation (by them) and evaluation (by others). Sarup utilizes a three themed approach for illustrating the transitional nature of one’s identity:

the meaning of home
the journey of the migrant and
the crossing of the border.

It is clear from the above three keys that Sarup is employing a moving motif. There is transition of movement built into the conception of self and community. By articulating this framework as one expecting migration, he provides an inherent instability and liquidity within the process of conceptualization. Identities within this expectation “do not remain static, but they change according to the strength of social forces, the dynamics of class, nation, religion, sex and gender, ‘race’ and ethnicity”. [3]

The reality that becomes available within this approach is that each of those contributing elements also is a moving target that can, at times, be as transitionary as the personal identities that are framed within it.

It is not difficult to isolate any one of the contributing elements and illustrate how that one category has undergone layers of adjustment, adaptation, evolution and challenge:

class (Marx, the Royals of England, modern India),
nation (from the French Revolution to post-colonial movements),
religion (historic drift of the Methodist from Wesley to today),
sex and gender (Foucault, Kinsey, and the feminist revolution),
race and ethnicity (see How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev).

The points on which the web of constructed identity are anchored seem themselves to be migrating and moving elements – albeit at a tortuous pace in comparison to personal identity markers.

In order to address the underlying influences and their contribution to the process of formation, Sarup asks a set of leading questions:

How do frames of culture, for example, hold the individual personalities in place?
How are places imagined and represented?
How do they affect people’s identities?
How do the worlds of imagination and representation come together?[4]

I find the questions as helpful at this point in the address as any polished explanations. It is precisely the presumed ‘giveness’ of both identity and community that has triggered my abandonment of former inherited constructions and a subsequent willingness to explore the nature of socially conditioned conceptions of oneself as well as constructivist theory of knowledge (which will be touched on at the conclusion).

Sarup’s three themes introduced earlier (the meaning of home, the journey of the migrant and the crossing of the border) provide a way forward in examining the frameworks associated with a mobile or transitory conception. To clarify, he is saying that “identity is to do not with being but with becoming”.[5]

While home is always a place, notions of home are not the same in every culture.
Immigrant communities may have home-land but essentially home is a place rooted into one’s family.
We are always born into relationships and those are always based in a place.
Frontiers are places of separation and articulation.
In contrast, boundaries are constitutively crossed or transgressed.
Strangers are both aware of their strangeness within and unclassifiable to those without. They are undecidables. The stranger blurs boundary lines.[6]
Many strangers attempt to erase this stigma by assimilating.
A foreigner is one who does not belong to the group, the other.

These markers and designations form the structure in which Sarup explores the evolving landscape of contemporary global communities and individual conceptions of self and belonging. Ultimately he concludes that:

Identity is a construction, a consequence of a process of interaction between people, institutions and practices and that, because the range of human behavior is so wide, groups maintain boundaries to limit the type of behavior within a defined cultural territory. Boundaries are an important point of reference for those participating in any system.[7]

The transitory nature of the cultural boundaries and increasingly fluid conception of personal identities that are framed within them – or in contrast to them – make addressing either the stable elements that exist or the migrating ones difficult without a historic referent or a narrative frame. I am pleased that with a historic approach like social imaginaries/ imagined communities (Taylor and Anderson) and several narrative frames (like the one provided by Sarup) that some progress can be made in examining this issue of socially constructed notions of self, identity, belonging and community.

Sarup warns against several mistakes that those who try to address issues of identity often make:
– One danger is in focusing on an influence or social dynamic in isolation. By isolating only race, or nationality one overlooks the “multiplicity of factors”[8] that contribute to the construction of one’s identity.
– Another danger is found in over simplifying the view of social structures that frame an issue and not analyzing them as significantly complex issues. Among his other cautions, an important aspect to consider is negotiation of “the past-present relation and its reconciliation”.[9]

The past is important because it is though narrative that people represent themselves to themselves.

The representation of the past to oneself becomes vital especially in an American context. Baudrillard has a vicious critique of America’s lack of (perceived) history and how that lack creates an environment where everyone is expected (and has the opportunity) to re-create themselves everyday. He says that America has no ‘ancestral history’, no roots ‘except the future’, and that America is ‘weightless’.[10]

America, according to Baudrillard, is a realization of the hyper-real that is an idealized imagining of an anticipated reality.

In the next post we will begin to get religious.

[1] Sarup, Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World, 14.

[2] Ibid., 15.

[3] Ibid., 171.

[4] Ibid., 6.

[5] Ibid.

[6] This is where Sarup interacts with the work of Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves.

[7] Sarup, Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World, 11.

[8] Ibid., 39.

[9] Ibid., 40.

[10] Jean Baudrillard, “America After Utopia,” New Perspectives Quarterly, Fall 2009, 1.

April 4, 2014 0

How We Imagine Ourselves: Technology

I am fascinated by how we both image ourselves and imagine ourselves. The connection between them is significant and the implications are even more so.

In March I wrote about how conceptions of a ‘people’ and a ‘nation’ have come through historic transitions in the past 2 centuries. More recent authors extend that concern beyond just text to the escalated pervasiveness of electronic media. Appiah frames it this way:

The worldwide web of information – radio, television, telephones, the Internet – means not only that we can affect lives everywhere but that we can learn about life anywhere, too. Each person you know about and can affect is someone to whom you have responsibilities: to say this is to just to affirm the very idea of morality. The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become.[1]

This radical re-formation of belonging, obligation and security holds major opportunities as well as obstacles to conceptualizing social identity and participating in imagine community for the 21^st century globalized existence. [2] Arjun Appadurai pins media and migration as the two interconnected (and similar) effects that work on “the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity” because “they offer new resources and new disciplines for the constructed imagined selves and imagined worlds.” [3]

The rate of change provides a rupture – not merely a transition but an exponential increase in connectivity and complexity.

The power of this new media, according to Appadurai, is not only as a direct source “of new images and scenarios for life possibilities” but in that fact that “imagination has now acquired a singular new power in social life.”[4] Think back to Taylor’s earlier assertion that those in previous centuries not only didn’t have the ability to conceptualize themselves with a life outside of immediate connections but that it probably would have never even dawned them to try.

The capacity to conceptualize or imagine oneself in a radically different place, group or life scenario has not only become possible but it the primary realm of constructing an imaginary.

This shift is facilitated by media technology and is “one of the principle shifts in the global cultural order”. [5]

Technology is radically changing the way that we conceptualize (imagine) everything from identity, belonging and who we are connected to as well as in what way that happens.

In the next 3 posts I begin to flesh out what this change looks like.

[1] Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xiii.

[2] It is worth noting that a walk down a large avenue in a major city would “have within sight more human beings that most of those prehistoric hunter-gatherers saw in a lifetime.” Even Greece at its heyday or Rome at its peak would have paled in comparison. Ibid., xii.

[3] Appadurai, Modernity At Large, 3.

[4] Ibid., 53.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 115.

[7] Ibid., 117.

[8] A similar case might be made for women who have been disgruntled based on the patriarchal remnants still influencing them and their sisters even though they are aware that they are 51% of the population as a whole. A great deal is made out of the number ‘51’ in juxtaposition to matters of access, equality and compensation. Much is made of that number. What if, one might ask, if that number was changed. Would the case be harder to make? What if only 42% of the population was women? Or what if it turned out that an error had been made and actually 64% of the population was women. Would that make the current inequalities and unjust practices more grotesque?

April 4, 2014 0

Jihad v. McWorld (part 4)

A Second Shift

In the previous 3 parts we established that a significant shift took place in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. This initial shift in modernity has subsequently created the possibility of a second, more contemporary, move that I want to explore. Taylor provides the context of this potential when he says:

In earlier societies, this ability to imagine the self outside of a particular context extended to membership of that society in its essential order. That this is no longer so with us, that many of these … questions are not only conceivable but arise as burning practical issues … is the measure of our disembedding. Another fruit of this is our ability to entertain the abstract question even where we cannot make it imaginatively real.[6]

It is in this potential that citizens of the 21^st century already have, or likely will, move beyond national identities to something more potentially abstract, disembodied, plural and wrapped in multiplicity. Issues of citizenship, sexuality, race, ethnicity and religion are increasingly complex in an inter-racial, cross-cultural and multi-national globalized context.

Tomorrow’s posts will explore works by Kwame Anthony Appaih, Arjun Appadurai, Umberto Eco and Madan Sarup. Then we will address thoughts by Jean Buildrillard and Saba Mahmood as they relate to imaginaries and conceptions of community, the physical body and spirituality.

In a section entitled ‘Global Villages’, Appiah points out that,

“People who complain about the homogeneity produced by globalization often fail to notice that globalization is, equally, a threat to homogeneity.”[7]

This is the same tension that was developed in the earlier section between secular and religious thought. Each sees the other as both the problem and a threat to their program – not realizing that in another sense, they actually give rise to each other and propagate each other’s reach.

It is addressed again in such examinations as Jihad v. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World by Benjamin J. Barber. Forces that seem to be in conflict with each other are, in reality, dependant on each other in a complex interplay. Barber explains:

McWorld cannot then do without Jihad: it needs cultural parochialism to feed its endless appetites. Yet neither can Jihad do without McWorld: for where would culture be without commercial producers who market it and the information and communication systems that make it known?[8]

The complexity of the combative nature of the symbiotic relationship is found in the evolving nature of the situation. Barber’s pairing of the phrases ‘Jihad’ with it’s perceived nemesis with ‘McWorld’ is deliberate.

What I have called the forces of Jihad may seem then to be a throwback to pre-modern times: an attempt to recapture a world that existed prior to cosmopolitan capitalism and was defined by religious mysteries, hierarchical communities, spellbinding traditions, and historical torpor… Jihad is not only McWorld’s adversary, it is its child. The two are then thus locked together in a kind of Freudian moment of the ongoing cultural struggle, neither willing to coexist with the other, neither complete without the other.[9]

This juxtaposition is even more precarious than a simple ‘clash’ or ‘combat’ language would seem to provide. There is obviously an adversarial component but without addressing how McWorld gave rise to Jihad – and how Western constructs of religion gave rise to secularism – there is a falsity that exist for those who participate in the inflammatory dualism on both sides (as if there were only two). Conceiving of one’s identity within this fictitious and fracturous is layered in complications related to the imaginary employed.

An outgrowth of this increasing complexity is, as Appiah describes it, a “distinctively cosmopolitan commitment to pluralism”.[10] Cosmopolitan people know that we are different than each other – this is apparent at every turn – and they recognize that we have much to learn from our differences.[11] One theme that emerges repeatedly in the work of these authors is the centrality and role of media. Benedict Anderson addressed it through the textual nature of transmission that united disconnected people in the imaginary.

What Anderson coined as ‘print capitalism’ created permanent change in the way people conceived of their personhood and selfhood. Its power was housed in the dual developments of mass literacy coupled with technological innovation that allowed for ‘large-scale production of projects’. The result was release from the need for face-to-face communication or even indirect connection between people or groups.[12]

You can see how, in these 4 posts, we live in a very different world than the one we have inhereted in our religious traditions. This helps to explain the baffling disconnect that can occur between our ancient documents and their ongoing implementation in our contemporary religious expressions.

In part 5 we begin to explore the lived and embodied implications of religion in the modern-contemporary context.

_______________

[6] Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2003), 55.

[7] Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 101.

[8] Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad Versus McWorld (Ballantine Books, 2001), 155.

[9] Ibid., 157.

[10] Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, 144.

[11] Appiah earlier broke down the intertwined notion of cosmopolitanism into two threads: the first is that our obligation extends beyond ties of family and kind (even citizenship) to those outside our immediate reach. The second thread finds value not just in human lives generically but in particular human lives. This is the loci for enlightenment liberal individualism. Ibid., xv.

[12] Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (U of Minnesota Press, 1996), 28.

March 11, 2014 2

How We Imagine A ‘Nation’ part 3

In the shadow of the Sochi Olympics and the unfolding tension in the Ukraine, we are exploring the theme/thesis that:

‘Nation’ is both sovereign and transcendent.
‘Nation’ is both a social imaginary and an emergent reality.

[Trust me – I am going somewhere with this]

Benedict Anderson explains that the notion of imagined communities was revolutionary because:

“regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship”.[1]

Such an imaginary provides a new capacity for obligation and ultimate sacrifice. Appadurai, in a section entitled ‘Patriotism and Its Future’ interacts with Anderson (among others) and observes that:

Modern nationalisms involve communities of citizens in the territorially defined nation-state who share collective experience, not of face-to-face contact or common subordination to a royal person, but of reading texts together.[2]

There are significant implications to this development because much of the rhetorical energies of the ruling powers are used in order to urge “their subjects to give up … primordial loyalties – to family, tribe, caste, and region” for the “fragile abstractions” called nations which are often “multi-ethnic … tenuous collective projects”.[3] The ability to call for ultimate sacrifice out of loyalty to an abstract imaginary is a defining characteristic of the most recent centuries previously unknown.

Two implications that illustrate the power of imagined community can be found in the examples of:

‘the tomb of the unknown soldier’
the modern conception of French identity in the past two centuries.

Only within the power of national imaginaries can one see the possibility of such a monument as a tomb left intentionally empty or holding the remains of an unidentified combatant. Anderson points out the absurdity of “a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a cenotaph for fallen Liberals.”[4] There is no reserve of belonging that would justify such a display. It would hold little value outside the context of national identity. For what did one give his life? Neither a concept nor a conviction would suffice for such a cemented monument to loyalty and subsequent indebtedness. Only within the confines of a national imaginary does death qualify for such a combination of reverence and pageantry. These are the sole property of nation-ness. One can hardly imagine either the advantage or the desire to make the tomb of an unknown soldier outside that which is called for to preserve a conception such as ‘nation’.

A second illustration of the historic development can be found in France since the nineteenth century. Taylor, working off of Eugene Weber, states that it was only late in the nineteenth century when millions belonging to peasant communities were “inducted into France as a nation of 40 million individual citizens.”

My favorite historian, John Merriman of Yale University, when addressing the same phenomenon of changes in France leading up to WWI comments on the sheer number of dialects (or patois) that were subsumed when ‘citizens’ were conscribed to the French army in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Speakers of Walloon and Basque patois were thrust into defense of something that they barely conceived of themselves as belonging to and in defense of a unified imaginary they would have little reference for called ‘France’. Many (or most) would not have primarily spoken French and may not even have been able to understand their commanding officers.

Merriman often quips that the definition of a ‘nation’ is a dialect with an army.Pastor Holding Bible

One can see how powerful the recent development of conceptualizing the nation as a valid location of sovereignty has replaced both royalty and religion as an acceptable request for this kind of sacrifice. Whereas formerly this authority was reserved for a King or God, now it was conceptualized in a shared identity and responsibility worthy of such obligation. This also had deeply impactful ramifications on areas such as family, property, education and mobility.

Whereas in the past, family and family property were primary sources of security and survival, Nation now provided drastically different possibilities for citizens. Taylor comments that the new (modern) “modes of individualism seemed a luxury, a dangerous indulgence.” [5]

Indeed, to the previously established orders of royalty and religion, these are dangerous developments.

Come back for part 4 where we explore Jihad v. McWorld.

____________________________

[1] Anderson, Imagined Communities, 8.

[2] Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 1st ed. (Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1996), 161.

[3] Ibid., 162.

[4] Anderson, Imagined Communities, 10.

[5] Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 17.

March 11, 2014 1

Imagining a ‘Nation’ part 2

In part 1 I introduced a theme/thesis for this series of posts:

‘Nation’ is both sovereign and transcendent.
‘Nation’ is both a social imaginary and an emergent reality.

Charles Taylor utilizes the term ‘social imaginary’ to refer to god-like capacity described by Anderson. The term encompasses a threefold meaning:

First is the way that ordinary people “imagine” their surroundings both in theory and in images, stories, and legends.
Second is the general acceptance and participation in the imaginary by a population and not simply the theories dominated by a small elite.
Third is empowerment provided from the imaginary for widely shared practices and a sense of legitimization.[1]

These three aspects, illustrated as legs on a table, provide a stability upon which both national identity and personal belonging rest. Expectations for behavior and vessels of meaning are then hosted within that conception.

One impact of this capacity to conceptualize national identity and belonging is in answer to the question “what would make someone be willing to die for their country?” Anderson proposes a model of historic drift where sovereignty, which had previously been located in either religion or king (or both), has shifted decisively to the Nation in recent centuries. This is a dramatic innovation and recognizing nationality as a valid location for sovereignty has significantly altered matters related to loyalty, sacrifice and belonging.

Anderson proposes a definition of the nation as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” The distinction of imagined because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them”.

Communities are limited because there must be some distinguishing demarcation outside of which are other communities (nations), which provide both competition and opportunities for cooperation. This distinction provides a vital function as classifications such as all of us are difficult without the contrast inherent within the project of establishing communities. It is difficult to conceptualize amorphous membership in groups such as everyone and all.

Communities are imagined as 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.” [2] The dissolving social order of caste and class provided more level (if desperately unequal in reality) conception of both membership and participation for the mass of the population. This perceived leveling and opening gave rise to a new capacity for sacrifice on behalf of the imagined entity – an entity that was not solely and externally located in eternity or beyond, but in an ideal which one was associated (belonged) and participated and was thus responsible. To die for a religion (God) or a King was to reinforce that social order which established the hierarchical strata. Locating sovereignty within the conception of Nation – however dispersed and elusive – was a profound change.

In 1922 Carl Schmitt wrote his famous work Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. In this book he makes two extraordinary claims: the first is that sovereign lies with the one who has the power to make the exception, the second is that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”[3] In 2011 Paul Kahn wrote an engagement of Schmitt’s work with four new chapters on the same subject. Kahn’s work is helpful in understanding this initial shift under consideration.

The capacity for the state to ask for this kind of sacrifices, the power to pardon – which is a remnant of Kingly authority, and the symbolic notion of a flag that needed to be defended are all remnants of a religious notion. The very word sovereign is borrowed from religious vocabulary. Kahn explains:

Political theology today is best thought of as an effort to describe the social imaginary of the political… (arguing) that secularization, as the displacement of the sacred from the world of experience, never won, even though the church may have lost. The politics of the modern nation-state indeed rejected the church but simultaneously offered a new site of sacred experience.[4]

In this framing, we understand the constitution as the product of a popular sovereign, one to which we belong and participate. The constitution (law) is the result of an extraordinary act (revolution). Kahn sees this as a deeply theological conception. It is born out of a (extraordinary/divine) moment; it produces a sacred center – the popular sovereign. The constitution is then the remnant that is left behind from that extraordinary moment.

You can begin to see why the constitution is often thought of and talked about as an inspired document (sacred text) and why those who were responsible for it’s creation (founding fathers) are celebrated at patriarchs.[5]

If Schmitt is right – even partially – then all of these similarities are neither trivial nor inconsequential.

The power of the state to ask for death in order to preserve itself and the capacity of people to willingly offer their lives in defense of that conception is profound. The notion of the sovereign holding the power of exception goes all the way from the individual being pardoned (as referenced earlier) to modern realities impacting all of humanity.

The President has the ability to launch nuclear weapons if he or she was to view that the national interest was in jeopardy. Kahn uses this to illustrate his point.

What are we saying about the nation that we are willing to jeopardize human heath, the planet, and subsequent generations for its defense?
What could possibly be above human health and planetary environmental conditions?

The answer is ‘only something that is of ultimate concern’. The modern conception of the state is thus a result of religious conceptions and has replaced (in some sense) religion as the location of sovereignty one is willing to ultimately sacrifice and die for. Nation is a construct of transcendent meaning found in an imagined community.[6]

In the next post we round the corner (part 3) toward Jihad v. McWorld (part 4)

[1] Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23.

[2] Anderson, Imagined Communities, 8.

[3] Paul W. Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Reprint (Columbia University Press, 2012), location 37.

[4] Ibid., 360.

[5] CBC Ideas part 5

[6] It is not difficult within this framing to view contemporary movements such as the Tea Party as merely an extreme example of a group calling for a romanticized notion of an imagined past or legacy.

March 7, 2014 0

Imagining a ‘Nation’ part 1

Watching the Olympics was different for me this time. During the past four years I have been in a PhD program and have burrowed down into topics that have deeply impacted me. Within one of my cognate fields (non-core studies) I addressed the issue of nationalism and the modern imaginary.

The news about events that are currently unfolding in the Ukraine-Crimea has given new attention to the old alliances and tensions golden age of nationalism – something that many thought we have moved past in the new global economy / world market-place.

In the posts that follow (8 total) you will find a common theme:

‘Nation’ is both sovereign and transcendent.
‘Nation’ is both a social imaginary and an emergent reality.

We will start with the ‘social imaginary’, move to Jihad v. McWorld in part 4 and finish up with ‘Body and Embodied Practices’.

I resonate deeply with Madan Sarup when after reflecting on and talking to many people about identity he comments that:

The intersections between ‘race’, gender, class, nation and religion, (show) that identity is not something we find, or have once for all. Identity is a process, and that is why it is difficult to grasp it.[1]

There are many disparate elements that contribute to the construction of one’s identity. This paper will engage both the historic shift from pre-modern conceptions of community/tribe/family to modern expression of nationality as well as a secondary (and subsequent) shift from identity as ‘given’ to a more fluid and transitory notion. These two shifts provide a conceptual and narrative framework for addressing the contemporary context of social imaginaries and the hyper-real. The paper concludes with an exploration of the possibilities of embodied practices providing a location for identity and belonging.

Modern Social Imaginaries and Imagined Communities

Charles Taylor (2004) and Benedict Anderson (updated edition from 2006) take a macro-perspective to the issue of social conception of self and national identity.

In this way ‘national identity’ is a helpful entry point from which to examine social conceptions of self.

It is important to distinguish the massive shift that human belonging has undergone in recent centuries.[2] Long before we get the implications of social media, technological advancements, global consumer culture or changes in political, economic, or cultural realities since the Enlightenment, we need to acknowledge the epic change that has resulted since antiquity when it comes to:

What today we would call the “identity” of the human being in those earlier societies. Because their most important actions were the doing of whole groups (tribe, clan, subtribe, lineage), articulated in a certain way (the actions were led by chiefs, shamans, masters of the fishing spear), they couldn’t conceive themselves as potentially disconnected from this social matrix. It would probably never even occur to them to try.”[3]

This drastic shift in both personal and corporate conceptualization is significant for our addressing the potential understanding of another current shift being examined. The transition from pre-modern conceptions like Taylor is describing to modern frameworks of nation, and ones belonging within that national structure, is essential to establish before an analysis can be drawn for a potentially post-national social construct.

Taylor points our that

an American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000,000-odd fellow-Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity.[4]

This reality occurs, obviously, nowhere outside of the reader’s imaginary and exists entirely in their capacity to conceptualize it as such. To say a sentence such as “Americans are _____.” (brave, selfish, innovative, etc.) is impossible. Such a sentence would have to incorporate both a person like myself, and someone I have never come into contact with – for instance a Latino single teenage mom in Florida who has dropped out of school. She and I might have little in common outside the capacity of the speaker to conceptualize both our connectedness within the imaginary and our relative shared embeddeness within a society. This society would be loose and expansive (regionally) at best. The sentence then is impossible outside of the speaker’s imaginary.

Come back for part 2 where the imaginary becomes sovereign and transcendent.

[1] Madan Sarup, Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World (Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 28.

[2] It is an oft quoted maxim the two great errors to be avoided when dealing with cultural history is on the one hand to assume that people of the ancient past were entirely like us and secondly, to make the mistake in thinking that they were nothing like us. Both are ‘gutters’ (to use a bowling analogy) to be avoided in this present examination.

[3] Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Duke University Press Books, 2003), 54.

[4] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New Edition (Verso, 2006), 26.

March 6, 2014 2

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