In a Pomegranate Chandelier

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
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 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 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 similar-but-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
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, 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-Duncan-with-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 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.