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In a Pomegranate Chandelier
T.J. Clark
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict
Anderson
Verso, 240 pp, 12.99, September 2006, ISBN 1 84467 086 4
Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination by Benedict Anderson
Verso, 224 pp, 14.99, January 2006, ISBN 1 84467 037 6

Writers only pretend to be embarrassed at the small fame a book sometimes brings them,
but there is nothing assumed about the irritation they can feel at having a new line of
argument, and a universe of unfamiliar examples, reduced to a single phrase. Great titles
are especially dangerous. Imagined Communities is one of the greatest, and I shall be
arguing that the cluster of concepts it sums up deserves still to be central to our thinking
about the world. But it is understandable, and touching, that the first footnote to Benedict
Andersons afterword to his new edition should read, in explanation of the trimming of the
title in his text: Aside from the advantages of brevity, IC restfully occludes a pair of words
from which the vampires of banality have by now sucked almost all the blood.
Night has fallen, and I gather my cloak about me. Part of the force of Imagined
Communities as a title as an idea comes from the way the two words immediately set
the reader wondering whether they are meant as oxymoronic, and if they are, with what
degree of irony or regret. The words bring to mind the true strangeness, but also the
centrality, of the human will to be connected with others of ones kind whom one will
never meet, and never know. Connected with them in the present, by blood or language or
difference from a common enemy (or combinations of all three); and connected through
time by a shared belonging to something that seems to emerge from a steadier, thicker,
more grounded past and be on its way to an indestructible, maybe redeeming future.
Anderson is the very opposite of an atheist in the face of this religion; or, if he is an
unbeliever and one senses in all of his writings an extraordinary final outsidedness to
the worlds he has studied and clearly often loves it is very much in Santayanas spirit,
with the old philosophers There is no God and Mary is His mother. For the first move in
Imagined Communities is of sympathy, and therefore a full recognition of nationalisms
ability to provide answers to the questions that previous religions had made their own. The
nation gives form to a shiftless and arbitrary being on earth, it offers a promise of
immortality, it is oriented time and again towards and beyond the individuals death.
With the ebbing of religious belief Anderson was writing in 1983 the suffering which
belief in part composed did not disappear. Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes
fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity
more necessary. What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into
continuity, contingency into meaning. For a moment again it is hard to be sure of the tone
here. Composed is an interesting choice of word. The syntax that follows is lapidary, but
brutal. There is a tension in the sentences, which I think is productive in Andersons work
as a whole; he is sometimes accused of being a Romantic, yet I hear Diderot constantly
debating in his pages with Rousseau and Herder; but nonetheless it is sympathy a
determination to pose the question of nation at the level of creaturely pain and

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vulnerability and fear of the grave that prevails. The great weakness of all evolutionary/
progressive styles of thought, he writes, not excluding Marxism, is that such questions are
answered with impatient silence.
Not excluding Marxism. The fascination of Andersons approach lies in the way the initial
leap of understanding in 1983 was made to coexist with a strong (Marxist) commitment to
materialist explanation. In many of his books and again, currently, in Under Three
Flags he becomes, necessarily, a teller of particular national histories and a recorder of
all the unlikely things that went to make a Filipino or an Indonesian. But in the
beginning, what Anderson wanted to clarify (and keep hold of in subsequent storytelling)
were the conditions of production of imagined communities of the new kind. What
technologies of representation did they depend on? And who did the representing? From
what classes and professions did nationalists come, and how did their particular interests
and social styles inflect the great thing represented? How did the invention of the printing
press and the imperatives of early European capitalism interact to make nations possible?
If there was such a thing as print capitalism such a contingent, but in the end decisive
and creative thing then exactly what were its effects on the vernacular languages, on the
segmentation of elites and non-elites, on the look of the map and the sense of belonging to
a bounded place? Are not nations always, from the start, one moment in a complex drive to
explore and exploit the totality of the globe to make a new world-system? So that
nationalism and internationalism, or Gemeinschaft and globalisation, go together. The
pioneers of nationhood were the Creole elites created in the Americas by Spanish and
British colonialism. Europe, when its time of nation-forming came, pirated New World
models without a second thought. Long-distance nationalism is a term Anderson has used
lately to characterise the new claims to identity ethnic, religious, fiercely convinced of the
pains of exile born of the latest waves of migration and diaspora. But all nationalisms
are long-distance, as we shall see in Under Three Flags. What differs is their willingness
to recognise the fact.
This is a cruel summary of some tremendous chapters, full of convincing fact. Reading
them again in 2006 is an unsettling experience, because it begins to dawn on one that
several of Andersons key analytic co-ordinates may have altered in form and altered in
relation to one another even in the brief period since he first laid them out. This would
be very remarkable if true, because the structures he pointed to as generative of nations
have survived (through various recastings) for five centuries or thereabouts. Take print
capitalism, especially considered in relation to the production of imagined solidarities and
kinds of being-through-time. If we were to say that the last 25 years have seen the
implanting and diffusion of a screen capitalism one in which print and image and map
and diagram are made available to individual users in what seems an equalised and
immensely speeded-up field of symbolic production would that lead us to make
connections between the new technics (with its old driving force) and the coming into
being of new imagined communities that now put the nation under pressure? We Are All
Hizbullah, as they say in Jakarta and Grosvenor Square. I chose to write the coming into
being of new communities, but of course it might be the new communities believe it to
be, and work to convince us of their belief that what we are witnessing is the coming
back into being of the old: the very old on which Andersons original Marxist analysis
turned. For it was axiomatic with him that the religious community he has some
unforgettable pages on the subject, working with ideas from Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre
was the model of togetherness that the nation displaced. Or whose historical authority
whose productivity and plausibility the nation took up into itself.
I am not a partisan of the idea that the age of the nation-state is at an end. Nor do I think
that screen capitalism is on its way to assembling human totalities of an utterly
unprecedented kind. So let me put the argument cautiously. It seems to me that a complex

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rejigging of the balance of forces between nation and ummah, nation and congregation,
nation and jihad, nation and chosen people, is underway in many parts of the world and
not only under the banner of Islam. And this has something to do with the new
opportunities offered by screen capitalism. Of course, it has just as much to do with the
ruin of actual secular national projects in the context of Cold War, resource imperialism,
the attentions of the IMF. But actual shipwreck could have elicited no more than despair
and anomie. These exist, no doubt, but also elation, inventiveness, ruthlessness, dedication
to death. Certain religions believe they are once again a productive, history-making force.
They look on the nation as a dead carapace, which one day soon they may make armed and
animate again. Or they may discard it, in favour of other unities. The relation of Hizbullah
to Lebanon a non-state within a non-state, as its supporters are fond of saying is to be
generalised. (Perhaps a better formulation from our point of view would be a non-nation
within a nation all too typical of the breed.)
We shall see. Even Lebanon may rise from the dead. Those who made it a nation may
make it so again. But something fundamental is happening. A shuffling and grating of
imagined communities is taking place. And this is connected, as I say, with the arrival of a
new technics of representation. Imagined Communities gives us the beginning of a way to
think about just such matters, in its treatment of the effect of print capitalism on the
day-to-day imagining of those things called languages, and its reflections on the role of
the newspaper and the novel. In a rather special sense, the book was the first
modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity. The newspaper is merely an extreme
form of the book, a book sold on a colossal scale, but of ephemeral popularity. Might we
say: one-day bestsellers? After reading Anderson, one never opens the paper over breakfast
without somehow remembering:
The significance of this mass ceremony Hegel observed that newspapers
serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers is paradoxical. 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. Furthermore, this ceremony is
incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar.
What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined
community can be envisioned?
You will notice that the crucial form of words here is vivid figure for rather than effective
cause of. But not only literary critics and media buffs have leapt to the conclusion that
Andersons argument in the end exceeds his careful (Marxist) framing. Well yes, print
capitalism is a function of capitalism, and newspapers and novels issue from and are
informed and altered by an evolving bourgeois culture in which the styles of individuality
and citizenship are very far from being created out of words on a page alone. No
newspapers without clubs and coffee houses, no novels (or not the novels we have) without
the great vagaries of class. Nonetheless, the question of technical, representational
efficacity the bias of certain means and relations of symbolic production towards some
forms of imagined identity in preference to others will not go away. Do we think that the
novel and the newspaper were more effective, for instance, at generating nationhood than
class consciousness? (A hard question, I know, since bourgeoisie and nationality are so
much transforms of one another.) If so, why? For reasons wholly, or even largely,
independent of the nature of the apparatus in each case?
I do not think so. Hegels world-historical sarcasm rings in my ears; and it too, in 2006,
threatens to turn back on those (like me) who wish it were still true. For newspapers are

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less and less a substitute for anything, and in much of the world morning prayers are no
longer to be substituted for by any such private (public) form of representation. Screen
capitalism is dissolving the very structure of private (public) being-together. It is wrecking
the quiet simultaneity of clock-time. Atrocity happens NOW. The now that language
inevitably conjures away into repeatability and abstraction, the image preserves for ever in
what seems to be its mere being. The event on the screen is unique and eternal. It belongs
again to God or Satan. The website and the cellphone video are paths to the sacred.
Morning prayer is everywhere.
Of course this imagined community is counterfactual, and interfered with at every point by
the realities of the secular world. But insofar as those realities turn on death and
humiliation, they feed the imaginary as opposed to undermining it. Especially when
nation presents itself, by contrast, as humiliation personified. When nation can no longer
lay claim to death when it cedes death to its new-old opponent a form of life has grown
old.
Under Three Flags is a study of the forces that went to make the imagined community of
the Philippines. This means it is fiercely, movingly local, concentrated on a handful of
remarkable men and fateful years, but also expansively at times bewilderingly global.
Things begin in 1887, in Berlin and Manila, with two brilliant young Filipinos bringing
out books on opposite sides of the world: an astonishing first novel of colonial life, and a
massive study of island customs and forms of words. The former was Noli me tangere, the
latter El folk-lore filipino. The author of the novel (shivering in Bismarcks capital) was
Jos Rizal, aged 25; that of the folklore compendium Isabelo de los Reyes, two years Rizals
junior. Rizal had nine years to live. He was executed in the public square in Manila in
1896, at the hands of Spaniards by then fighting off a national uprising. Isabelo was jailed
the same year, and subsequently shipped off to Spain. He spent a year in the torture
chambers of Montjuich, and had to wait out the bloodbath of US liberation, returning in
1901 to found the Unin Obrera Democrtica putting into practice ideas of anarchist and
syndicalist organisation learned in Barcelona. In 1887 he had prided himself on being a
scientist, with parts of his book already published in German in Globus and Ausland.
When he went back to Manila in 1901 his small travelling library centred on Aquinas and
Voltaire, Proudhon and the Bible, Darwin and Marx, Kropotkin and Malatesta.
Like all Andersons books since 1983, this one aims to put the aphoristic clarities of
Imagined Communities under pressure. Nation is a comparative concept by its very
nature, and studying any one nation involves putting it into a firmament of similarbut-different. The earlier book was marvellous at this. Its great map of types and
apparatuses and models and kinds of copying made many things clear. But it was a map,
and for the Anderson of recent years its object of study looks, in retrospect, too much like a
firmament, not an archipelago. The stars in the 1983 sky were apparently stationary, and
therefore too beautiful. Such is the Chaldean elegance of the comparative method, which
allowed me once to juxtapose Japanese nationalism with Hungarian, Venezuelan
with American, and Indonesian with Swiss. Each shining with its own separate,
steady, unitary light. Is it possible to write a history of nations, then, that stays true to the
original astronomical impulse Anderson is more and more convinced that no one
nations history makes sense except in the broadest, most world-encompassing optic but
has its particular nationalisms be hybrid through and through, and always on the move?
This is the new books question.
The Philippines in the 1890s ought to provide a good testing ground for non-Chaldean
astronomy because in them the unique and the world-historical are so vividly face to face.
Rizal looms over the tragic scene: he is its voice, its victim, its epitome of death and
resurrection. The paradox of national language is writ large: Rizals great verses of farewell
to his homeland in 1896 are written, like his novels, in exquisite Spanish, though they

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were very quickly rendered into Tagalog. (The translator was Andrs Bonifacio, leader of
the Most Illustrious, Most Respectable League of the Sons-and-Daughters of the People.
When he had heard, months earlier, of Rizals decision not to join what he saw as a
premature revolution, he had exploded in anger at the novelists cowardice. Bonifacio in
turn survived until May 1897. He was executed for treason to the revolution by a rival
nationalist leader.) Over the next century the poem was translated into 49 Philippine
languages.
This book is one of several in which Anderson has taken the measure of Rizal as Father of
the Nation, and of his literary achievement. Noli me tangere is in many ways the very
model of anti-colonial realism, conjuring the space and time of Spanish-ruled Manila with
easy, sardonic confidence. It is anti-clerical, satiric, erotic, melodramatic and it
establishes its reader (its Illustrious Son-or-Daughter of the People) with all the certainty
of Fielding or Stendhal. Already in Imagined Communities, Rizals first book is Andersons
preferred example of all that a novels way of world-making can do, and what the mass
ceremony of its reading (through the years) made thinkable. But Rizal presents a problem,
which a large part of Under Three Flags is intended to solve. Four years after Noli me
tangere, a second and final novel by Rizal appeared, with the untranslatable title El
filibusterismo, published in the grimness of Ghent. (Revolutionary buccaneering is about
as close as English can get, and nothing will quite dispel the image of bores in the Senate.)
The book is a sequel to the earlier story, but a bizarre and catastrophic one. The dead hero
of Noli me tangere reappears, resurrected, hiding behind a pair of dark blue spectacles,
and sets off this time to drag the whole of Philippine elite society into the abyss. They are
to be blown to pieces finally, at a lavish wedding feast in Manila, by a bomb concealed in a
pomegranate chandelier. The police get the whiff of nitroglycerine just in time. The hero is
mortally wounded, and dies, talking to the end, on a lonely beach.
I have to take on faith from Anderson that El filibusterismo, like many another late
19th-century novel, has immensely more aesthetic energy than its silly story would suggest.
And Under Three Flags certainly succeeds in placing the novel and its author in a world of
late 1880s literature and politics. By 1891, Rizal read German and French as well as a
smattering of English. He had lived in Paris, Berlin and London. Madrid he looked down
on as backward and parochial. El filibusterismo has a French vaudeville outfit turning up
in Manila, a local Chinese planning to set up a consulate, and a Yankee called Mr Leeds.
The book is littered with casual references to Egypt, Poland, Peru, Germany, Russia, Cuba,
Persia, the Carolines, Ceylon, the Moluccas, Libya, France, China and Japan.
This casually (but chaotically) international frame of reference is important, because it
dovetails with Andersons whole sense of the last years of the century as witnessing the
onset of what one could call early globalisation.
The near-simultaneity of the last nationalist insurrection in the New World
(Cuba, 1895) and the first in Asia (the Philippines, 1896) was no serendipity.
Natives of the last important remnants of the Spanish empire, Cubans and
Filipinos did not merely read about each other, but had crucial personal
connections and, up to a point, co-ordinated their actions the first time in
world history that such transglobal co-ordination became possible.
And final sign of the new age both revolutions were eventually beaten senseless by
Theodore Roosevelts big stick.
Over the new interconnectedness of the world-system (this is Andersons final and
pervasive point) loomed an image of a different kind of internationalism, suitably mobile,
intent on taking advantage of the new technologies of round-the-globe communication,

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and ready to make revolution under any and every banner. To wit, anarchism and
pre-eminently, for a while, the anarchism of propaganda by the deed. Table 1 of Under
Three Flags (Anderson is ever the political scientist) is a year-by-year chart of
assassinations from 1894 to 1914, with victim, place and method, assassins identity,
nationality and political orientation. The assassins, some of whom could well be described
as early suicide bombers, understood themselves as acting for a world audience of news
agencies, newspapers, religious progressives, working-class and peasant organisations.
You will notice that El filibusterismo appeared three years before the chart gets going. It is
proleptic, says Anderson. A little uneasy, this. But he has no trouble showing that Rizal
would have read much, and met many with dynamite already on their minds.
Anderson is clearly sympathetic to anarchist internationalism, and he makes the case for
propaganda by the deeds emergence from a texture of desperate struggles, in which the
balance of brutality always lay, overwhelmingly, with the forces of civilisation. The list of
victims in his table elicits few tears. But I have to say again, the fact of my reading this
book in the summer of 2006 may have much to do with this that the table as a whole
seems a chronicle of futility, from which anarchism never completely recovered. (It had
made a spectacle of itself, one might say; and unmaking spectacle is a long process.)
Anderson admires the Cuban creole Fernando Trrida, whom Rizal just missed meeting in
Barcelona, and has a special liking for Trridas Anarchism without Adjectives. I see his
point. Hyphens in politics are often the mark of watering down. But anarcho-syndicalism,
when it came, was certainly better than anarcho-symbolism, or anarcho-decadence or
anarcho-martyrology. It was a necessary antidote to the previous Isadora-Duncanwith-blood. Isabelos Unin Obrera Democrtica sounds to have been anarcho-syndicalist
to the letter.
This disagreement is shadowed, as I say, by the futilities of the present. Some of the points
Anderson makes about the animating force of anarchism within nationalism, and about
the strange networks by which both spread in the 1890s, are persuasive, and some less so.
He has a hard time getting anarchism within a thousand miles of Jos Mart. I agree
finally, but with a shudder, that this fin de sicle reminds us that nationalism regularly
thrives on doom. Apocalypse is one of its modes. No better time for the making of nations
than a time when nations are broken. Out of the shards will be made the genuine article,
and the maker the breaker will be the Nation in its true, transfigured guise.
Thou art my battle axe and weapons of war: for with thee will I break in pieces
the nations, and with thee will I destroy kingdoms;
And with thee will I break in pieces the horse and his rider; and with thee will
I break in pieces the chariot and his rider;
With thee also will I break in pieces man and woman; and with thee will I
break in pieces old and young; and with thee will I break in pieces the young
man and the maid;
I will also break in pieces with thee the shepherd and his flock; and with thee
will I break in pieces the husbandman and his yoke of oxen; and with thee will
I break in pieces captains and rulers.
The last also is hard to bear: it reminds me of a Stalinist bureaucrat making sure he has
ticked off all the class enemies. The Authorised Versions English seems to have no trouble
with the sixth-century BC sentiments. Dont chosenness and nationhood go together
through the ages? And arent nations regularly assembled from the materials Jeremiah
reviews? (I got to the Old Testament via Thomas Hardys great poem written in 1915.) Not
nations alone, of course. I am not meaning to make nationalism, in the finish, the sole

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demon of history. But I see writers with whom I enormously sympathise turning to nation
lately as a last refuge, it seems, from the storm. I study my Bible and El filibusterismo, and
still wonder where the storm comes from.
Vol. 28 No. 18 21 September 2006 T.J. Clark In a Pomegranate Chandelier
pages 6-8 | 4141 words
ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright LRB Limited 2015

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