Imagined Communities

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Revised Ed. London: Verso, 1983 / 2006.

Why a book on Nationalism on a reading list focused primarily on Book History? Why a work that spends most of its time discussing the post-Enlightenment manifestation of the Nation-state when my period-of-focus is early modern? Because, despite most of the received wisdom on this work, Anderson posits a beginning of Nationalism in the early modern period, and places the power behind that beginning in the hands of what he terms "print-capitalism." This is actually an excellent example of a study of the impact of text technologies in a wider-theory context.

Suddenly, this seemingly wacky choice is much more "on topic" for me than it first appeared. My focus, however, does reproduce a phenomenon Anderson decries in his preface, a "Eurocentric provincialism" that ignores his chapter on "Creole Pioneers." This is not, however, because I do not think that the colonized peoples of North and South America (his focus for "creole" cultures) didn't contribute to Nationalism. Rather, the nationalisms I'm interested in are the ones he predicates on his theory of "print-capitalism," and he seems to make a fairly clear distinction, himself, between the European self-definitions he claims are spurred by this phenomenon and the Creole Pioneers whose motivations are distinct and whose growth and actions take place later in his historical narrative.

So since I am reading for the purposes of elucidating the cultural phenomenon of print in a European context, I hope my eurocentric predilections will be excused.

To address the question which brought me to this text, then: Why "print-capitalism," and how does Anderson posit it as a fundamentally influential development vis-a-vis the growth of nationalism in Europe?

Language, both written and oral, features prominently in Anderson's definition-scheme. Accordingly, one of his posited primary cultural roots of 'nation' is the shift away from sacred "truth-languages" (e.g. Latin, Quar'anic Arabic, or Examination Chinese), which are designated as a language which functioned as a "privileged system of re-presentaiton" that is the only way of apprehending "ontological reality" (14-19). Basically, only Latin allows you to talk to God, so Latin is a unifying language for Christendom. Challenged by the new peoples, places, and things discovered in the age of exploration, these languages, which used to bind a large, scattered population into a general idea of a unified faith-system, cease to encompass all of the experiences of its people, leading to a gradual fragmentation, pluralization, and territorializaiton (19). This analysis, particularly the latter part describing its fragmentation, seems to be more focused on the western/ Christian model, and it's unclear if all claims equally apply to the other two sacred-language systems (quar'anic Arabic / Islam, Examination Chinese / Confucianism).

As part of his discussion of the 'upset' of these sacred languages, Anderson relies heavily on figures from Febvre and Martin's Coming of the Book to illustrate the rising power of the vernacular. What this brief sketch of the shift in book-markets (less than a page, and wholly taken from Febvre and Martin) fails to mention, however, is the shifting demographics of the market for printed books as advances in technology and availability of materials brings down prices and makes localized markets more feasible. While it's likely true that 77% of books printed before 1500 were in Latin and that figure quite likely reversed by 1550, the early high percentage of Latin books may have been skewed by the necessities of an inherently constrained market. Only the very wealthiest could buy books, so to take advantage of the greatest number of wealthy people, it made sense to publish in the language the greatest number of highly educated, very wealthy people could read. When the market widened even slightly, it made more sense to publish in local vernaculars. Comparing the market for incunabula to the market for books even 100 years later seems rather problematic.

The second aspect through which Anderson ties language to national consciousness is through the consumption of print materials. Anderson specifically mentions the novel and the newspaper as means of changing the consciousness of groups of people to allow for the concept of imaginary shared communities. Both, he claims, shifted human consciousness from a Messianic time-frame ("a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present"), to a clocked, calendrical understanding of time. While 'Novel' and 'Newspaper' both seem a bit late for this, the general gist (readers identify with protagonists in novels and mentally assume their social connections, newspapers are dated and assume a community of concerns) makes sense, if perhaps are also applicable to other genres ("to the Reader" prefaces assume communities of readers long before the novel comes about, news sheets and published letters function essentially the same as the characteristics denoted to newspapers).

The real argument about the nationalizing effect of print, however, comes in chapter 3, when Anderson makes the link between print-as-commodity, with its reproducibility and dissemination-routes, and capitalism. Although he acknowledges that "early printers established branches all over Europe," supported by a quote from Coming of the Book, he then undermines that quote by noting that L'Apparition doesn't contain the words for 'national' and 'international' from the quote, it just mentions "par-dessus les frontières." This translation issue, however, doesn't negate the thrust of the quote, which is that international print-houses *did* work across borders. While I agree that market forces are probably responsible for the rise in vernacular printing (38), this vernacular printing did not respect national borders the way he seems to assume. French books were printed in the Amsterdam, Geneva, and London, all for export to France. While I think vernacular literature did much to define the group consciousness of a given people, it was not necessarily produced by those people, nor was its creation necessarily an act of self-definition. More convincing is his argument that print combined with the Protestant revolution "mobilized [merchants and women] for politico-religious purposes" (40).

Print, he argues, creates a stable realm of communication based on the vernaculars, but with an agreed upon leveling function that unifies dialects (he calls this "print-languages"). While he notes in his footnotes his reliance on Febvre and Martin's more sociological form of print-history, he distinguishes print from print-capitalism as a revolutionary force (contradicting Eisenstein and Steinberg) by noting "although printing was invented first in China, possibly 500 years before its appearance in Europe, it had no major, let alone revolutionary impact -- precisely because of the absence of capitalism there" (n.21, p. 44). The vast differences from the xylographic pages of an ideographic language verses movable type of an alphabetic language may also have impacted this difference, in addition to the differing economic systems.

I feel that while Anderson may be overstating the combined novelty of print and "capitalism" in the late 15th to early 16th centuries, the observations he makes on the sociological impact of printed books seem sound. I'm now conflicted about whether to follow this book with Richard Helgerson's Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England, or D. F. McKenzie's Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. I suppose you'll just have to wait and see...