Although a comparison of Anderson's print capitalism and the production of imagined communities with Dean's communitve capitalism and a fantasised unified public might be very fruitful, the drive of the theories seems very different.
To me, Anderson's print capitalism displaces peoples vertically organized down from the king with horizontal connections where people are organized by an awareness of people who might read the same things and have interchangeable administrative positions. Then this imagined community becomes an entity and reproducible model that mobalizing peoples and resourses for various ends (independence, centralization....). The imagined nation is a productive force that gathers power, it need not be democratic (imperial russia and japan both harnessed the idea of nation for example).
Within Dean's communitive capitalism, on the other hand, Democracy and not nation is the illusions. Today the "public" that constitutes democracy feels "that the more information we have, the less we think we have. This inablility to know if and when we are satisfied ndermines the normative claim for publicity as it reminds us of
power's decisive intervention, of the point of decision. The public sphere rests on the constitutive impossibility of a politics without, outside of, beyond, power, a politics in which decision is postponed in favor of a consensus that has always been already achieved...the public was never there. The public is a fiction, a wish that "fantasizes a unified 'people' where there is in reality, a heterogeneous citizenry"" (43). Then the "public" hides the threatening split with in democracy which might easily relate to how anderson's nations are held together. However i think it is more important to Deans argument that the public, created by a limited knowledge, seeks to know and thus allows for communicative capitalism to sell its wears: "the presumed value of information- the public must know- morphs political action into compliant practices of consumption" (35).
Deans fiction of the public seems to maintain the status quo within "democracy" and capitalism. To reiterate, Andersons nation is simply a model to organize peoples no matter what form of goverment exists.
Some questions ensue:
Does "communicative capitalism" displace print capitalism in today's world? Are they really different? Where is the nation in Dean's post technocratic regime? Is it obsolete as an imagined community? Do imagined virtual communities configure as productive forces or do they all fit into Deans matrix of technoculture and consumerism? If I kept a nation secret from the "public" could i still sell them souvenirs?
posted by chr15 at 2:06 AM
One more thing?
Dean's discussion of the dissemination of a singular, central power (Big
Brother), and the formation of a network of Little Brothers and power as operating like an "assembly language" (86), reminded me of something that came up during our Panopticon seminar. It seems like this destruction of "centralizing, paternalistic authority" could be seen as a result of an expanded knowledge of the mechanism of power - of the way power, discipline, etc., operate. Once the public is allowed access to the Panopticon's central tower, they are free to appropriate it's ideas/methods for their own use, and architecture/visibility perhaps become unnecessary. Power is "de-placed" into several (endless) individually operating cells; but is the result "confusion" or just a broader application of order? Whether these cells form a constellation or a pattern - a unit, a network, a whole - is, i suppose, left to the conspiracy theorists and bloggers.
But -- Dean's discussion of hackers on p99(ish) as having access to esoteric knowledge, and using said knowledge to disrupt the system reminded me alot of some discussions we had regarding hackers in "Media Archaeology". So once we are able to form an accurate idea of how power/control operate today - once we are allowed access to the central tower, and are free to do what we will with this information - could this idea be utilized/turned against the system? What would this entail/look like? Like theyrule.net or Mark Lombardi's spheres/webs? Are these a sort of hacking, or just a display of the mechanisms at work? A wrench or a photo?
posted by josh_g at 12:57 AM
And..
I thought one of the strongest moments of Dean's text was the close of chapter 2, where she discusses how the Web may change our notion of prior conceptions of the public sphere. Dean: "...perhaps all along the public sphere was only 60 minutes, Nightline, and the evening news. Perhpas we were never more a public than when we gathered around our television sets watching a giant step for mankind or hearing about the state of the union.
When we sat there and believed" (77).
I'm wondering if anyone else saw connections between Dean's text and
Imagined Communities, both here and when she discusses the public as a "fiction" (43). Why wasn't Anderson dealt with directly?
posted by josh_g at 10:22 PM
Something that got me thinking from Dean’s
Publicity’s Secret, is her discussion of Zizek’s notion of ideology as separate from knowledge, of actions/acting materializing a set of beliefs. Dean: “So, in Zizek’s account of ideology, actions and belief go together. They stand apart from knowledge. Actions manifest an underlying belief that persists, regardless of what one knows” (5). In the face of the contemporary subject’s reliance on cynicism and irony, adopting a critical distance from her/his environment/behavior, and incessantly vocalizing a lack of belief, belief becomes “radically exterior,” to be determined by connecting a set of individual actions/decisions that “fly in the face of what one knows” (6, 5). Belief becomes a constellation of sorts, drawn between crossed fingers or swiped grocery cards, between knocking on wood and buying a copy of
US magazine.
I was confused, however, by Zizek’s notion of ideological identification being strengthened, or confirmed precisely by our awareness of it and our attempt at separation, of maintaining a sense of otherness (38). Dean suggests that this awareness, this knowledge, “attaches us all the more firmly” to whatever it is we claim to be separate from (in this case “the media of publicity”) – as she says: “now we know” (38). But then she jumps to the idea that “media believe, so that we don’t have to,” which I guess confuses me. And this seems like it’s a central point for her argument, but when she discusses Hillary Clinton later, and how conspiracy dissolves the notion of distinction/division that the public sphere relies on, and the way the web turns everyone into experts, puts everyone in the know, how is it that media believe? Or technologies believe?
Dean: “Recall that the system of publicity is supposed to convince the public-supposed-to-believe to believe in the public-supposed-to-know. Information can’t solve the problem because the problem is one of belief, not knowledge. And the collapse of this belief is what’s at stake in contemporary technoculture…” (40). Right. And when the public realizes/materializes itself it negates itself. Understood. But media believe? Who/what do they (does it) believe? Us? Do they (does it) believe in our knowledge? Or in their (its) own power/knowledge/meaninglessness?
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On another note.
The most interesting conspiracy circulating semi-recently that I can remember was during election time, when all of the stuff surrounding Bush’s bizarre behavior in the debates started. Most notably, Dave Lindorff’s article on “Bush’s mystery bulge” on salon.com.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/10/08/bulge/index_np.html?x
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Oh, and this site might be interesting to consider: http://postsecret.blogspot.com/
"I am just going through the motions."
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and - i think i get the belief thing now. the cameras/media do the believing for us, believing in the necessity/usefulness of their presence, of information, excess, visibility.........................................
posted by josh_g at 8:33 PM 