Updates, Individuals, Angel Wings in Oldboy

In reading Imagined Communities, I found myself particularly interested in "updating" Anderson's theories, or rather, finding the relevant new media technologies that either support the continued patronage of nationalist ideology or are beginning to undermine it. When Anderson discusses his "deep, horizontal comradeship" (7), he so in partial connection with cultural elements like the novel and the newspaper that enable a communal sentiment and understanding. Moving from these modes of cultural representation, where does the internet, social networking, blogging, and web 2.0 bring us? While some features of the internet, namely facebook, myspace, and other webware that literally defines communities and communal belonging, other sites seem to reinforce the individual: does not the specific, unique, personalized soapbox of the blog seem to package the individual? Or do mass-blogs like cough, cough, blogger, enable a sort of generic thought forum that continues to unite and communalize, what might otherwise be separate and individualized?

Essentially, how is that Anderson or any understanding of the Imagined Community assess the radical, the interloper, or the outsider? Are these figures a shade of gray that help to mark and delineate the imagined community, thus serving the interest of community preservation, or could the outsider authentically hope to create an identity outside of a community? Perhaps this is what is truly imaginary?

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On another note, after watching a film as arrestingly powerful as Oldboy, I find myself quite seeing LOTS of Anderson sprinkled throughout the film text. Dae-Su's conditioning through television for one thing, especially in the expedited chronology of his imprisonment (complimented with an abbreviated video history of Korea), shows that even as Dae-Su is isolated from physical interaction with his community, he is still enveloped its culture and progress, arguably as Korean as any other Korean.

But at what point does Dae-Su's perceptible individuality take over? Does it ever? As Dae-Su moves through the streets of Seoul after his imprisonment, does the audience feel he has been distanced from the community of people around him, or has he been returned? What does Park suggest with his use of clear Korean iconography throughout the film?

Also, I couldn't help but enjoy the image of the angel's wings at the beginning and end of the film. I was very much reminded of Benjamin's eloquent personification of history: when Dae-Su first puts on his daughter's wings at the beginning of the film, he is entirely facing away from the turbulence of his future, but is blown backward towards it cognizant only of what has already transpired with him. At the end of the film, he can be said to have be turned around, painfully aware of the difficulty of the future, and the strong winds of history that propel him. At this point, Mi-Do takes up the wings, herself only aware of her past, but not sure of the dark future threatening her progress.

Anderson writes that one of many reasons that conceptions of nationalism developed in creole communities before they developed in their European counterparts was a combination of restricted lateral and vertical movement within the creole imperial administrative unit and the arrival of print-capitalism (60-61). Still, the spatial restriction, he writes, had no consequences until the newspapers gave people a sense of shared possession of the local economy and politics and an idea of a “steady, solid simultaneity through time” (63). Newspapers’ temporality, then, is worth considering. Anderson writes that newspapers are obsolete on the morrow of their printing, which lends itself to simultaneous consumption that is paradoxically done in “silent privacy” (35). This, he writes, is one of the most perfect examples of a “secular, historically clocked, imagined community” (35).
In class, Professor Chun raised the question of the temporality of the blog, which she said followed the chronology of the newspaper but carried an archive of older posts like a novel. A couple of posts have already brought up the question of whether bloggers/internet community users can also feel rooted in a virtual place/space or a part of a new type of “nation.” However, it seems to me that the blog has the potential to alter the temporality of Anderson’s original American nationalism rather than the spatiality. While Anderson does declare that a “fertile trait” of the early American newspapers was their “provinciality,” the provinciality is reliant less upon geographic boundaries than it is on the ability of the newspapers to frame events based on a specific way of thinking that happened to be common to the locals who read the paper. Anderson writes that, for example, while a Mexican might read about events in Buenos Aires, “it would be through Mexican newspapers … and the events would appear as ‘similar to’ rather than ‘part of’ events in Mexico” (63). He writes that what originally brought newspaper readers to come to think of this imagined “we” was the “structure of the colonial administration and market-system,” not any particular tangible space.
If the newspaper allowed the perfect clocked imagined community, the blog, with its dependence on a peculiarly temporal archive that leads to what Professor Chun called the “non-simultaneousness of the new,” completely breaks down exactly what it was that made the reading newspaper the archetype of that imagined community — the temporality of the ceremony. If the potential for reading blogs/ en masse is tenuous, then what becomes of Anderson’s nationalism?

Shared Language

One of the themes running through the selections of Imagined Communities we read that I found most interesting was that of national language (or lack thereof). In “The Last Wave”, Anderson specifically argues that the origin of nationalism does not require a shared language, and that what language is used to represent that nationalism s not, in itself, important. Although sacred languages were once the basis for imagined communities of religious groups, nationalisms are shared among people with different “mother-tongues”. Anderson writes that “It is always a mistake to treat languages in the way that certain nationalist ideologues treat them – as emblems of nation-ness” (133). The idea that specific languages are not important in nationalist movements strikes me as strange, although perhaps only because I am thinking of precisely the “nationalist ideologues” Anderson is trying to refute. For example, I am wondering about the contemporary movement to have English named as the official language of the United States, and ongoing debates about bilingual education in public schools. It seems to me that in this case some people are trying to use language to set the boundaries of their imagined community in a way Anderson dismisses. And while it may be quite true that “anyone can learn any language” (134), such learning often takes time and energy such that language does, in many cases, seem to stand in for a certain kind of imagined community, one that at this moment seems to me at times to trump nationality, or at least coexist with it. So, I suppose my question is whether the idea that “nations can now be imagined without linguistic communality” (135) is somehow starting to be threatened, and if so, how is that related (if it is at all) to growing global communities which can more and more easily bypass language barriers thanks to new technologies.

I am also curious about the assertion in this section that “Nothing suggests that Ghanaian nationalism is any less real than Indonesian simply because its national language s English rather than Ashanti” (133). While I don’t doubt that Ghanian nationalism is just as real as any other, I do wonder if the representation of the national language as specifically that of the colonist makes a difference in the way people understand their relationship to nationalism. Anderson seems to me to be making the case that it makes no difference, but when he mentions that “[t]oday there are perhaps millions of young Indonesians, from dozens of ethnolinguistic backgrounds, who speak Indonesian as their mother-tongue” (134) I have to wonder if this does not suggest some sort of goal of linguistic unity that may be connected to the cementing of an imaged nation. Even Anderson’s example of Switzerland as a multilingual nation seems somewhat unfulfilling to me since by his own admission Switzerland would probably have tried to Germanize if it were not for potential political ramifications (138).

I may well just need a little more convincing to agree that specific language choice for nationalism is unimportant, but I find it interesting that with so much emphasis on the power of language, the shape that language takes is still so easily brushed off.

The Consciousness of the Collective Online

Does Anderson take for granted the ability of each member of an imagined community to have “complete confidence in [other members’] steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity” (26). In the physical world, members might not know each other’s names, but they are aware of their bodies filling the space. They see each other, and this is confirmation of their simultaneous existence. But the Internet complicates this by removing the body. Members can no longer see each other, and they are not always aware that there is anyone existing simultaneously on this website or that website. Presence which is often taken for granted in the real world, needs to be represented online. Early on websites introduced counters and guestbooks to record their visitors, but these failed in creating communities because they fashioned websites as motels rather than community centers. The very notion of a “guest” creates the idea of an outsider and does not seek to incorporate the Internet surfer as part of the website. It did not create a steady stream of returning members but a terminal of passing vagabonds. However, the username incorporated Internet surfers into the website by giving them an identity which they could return to in future visits. They were no longer merely visitors but users of a site. Like the real world, there are places on the Internet where people congregate and places people pass through. How important is the notion of identity when it comes to forming an imagined community online? Can an imagined community even exist without the consciousness of the collective?

the local-global-local

Connecting Anderson’s notion of nationalism to the local/global tension of 9-11.


Anderson says that, while Nationalism has historically specific roots, it is an invention “there, so to speak, for the pirating” (156). In other words, a local (limited) imagining of simultaneity becomes a model which can be used globally. This concept, that a specific representation can have a universally resonant structure is instinctively understood. However, Anderson does not clearly qualify the change the execution of the subsequent global to different local adoption would incur on the previously locally specific event.

Let’s take 9-11 as a tangential example of this local/global tension. I would argue that the collapse of the Twin Towers was an extremely geographically localized event that took on global signification. The event, although broadcast far and wide -- as we viewed in class this past week – was traumatic for the New York City community in a fundamentally distinct way than it was for the rest of the world. In particular, the victims and their families, NY Fire Dept., the people in the geographic vicinity of the dust and debris. 9-11, then, was quickly snatched into the global sphere, a different ballgame of signs. Yes, the local and global were conflated to some extent --- for example, in commemorative trinkets the hero imagery of the NYPD is often inseperable from the American Flag. Nevertheless, in the transition from the local to global, the rights of those locally involved were diminished. One need only look at the current construction battles, and the Victims Families and Lower Manhattan community board oppositions. What is altered, lost, detrimental, in the hyphen between global-local ?

If (according to Anderson), the nation is an imagined community due to the fact that one can never meet every other member of his/her nation, can a community in which everyone knows the other members have "nationalism"?

How Alive is this Blog?

“Thus, the model of official nationalism assumes its relevance above all at the moment when revolutionaries successfully take control of the state, and are for the first time in a position to use the power of the state in pursuit of their visions” (p. 159).

When does nationalism stick to its people? More importantly, when do other groups start recognizing a community’s sense of nationalism? Anderson’s story about the naming of Vietnam makes me think that nationalism is more about a sense of validity than a sense of comradeship between a group of people—China’s understanding of the Vietnam nationality weighed more on a global scale than the state of Vietnam’s idea of what their nationalism should be. Why did revolutionaries need to take over the state to be most effective in reaching their goals? (Why did Moscow have to be the “new” capital?) It seems to be more about validity than an effective organizing idea.

My point is this: how do people know when the imagined space becomes an imagined community? The state could insist on nationalism, but what about the new kinds of imagined communities—the ones without an overseeing state? This is where outside groups are needed to validate an imagined space’s “community-ness”. Look at this blog, for instance. Are we a part of this imagined community because we were informed it was an imagined community for us to be part of (as with official nationalism)? Or are we a part of this community because we post to this blog? Or will we be part of it when we reference it as a community in class or to our friends and peers (all outside groups)? I think that newer imagined communities (versus official nationalism) need to be validated using groups outside the community.