Page 51 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

CULTURALISM

discourse. Less clear, and perhaps thereby all the more suggestive of
the depth of this complicity, is Williams’s own later sympathy, not so
much for British, still less for English, but for Welsh nationalism. If
radicalisms have typically forsworn allegiance to politically dominant
cultural nationalism, preferring rather to lay stress on cultural difference
both within and from the dominant nation, then they have nonetheless
proved much less reluctant to endorse such subordinate nationalisms
as the Welsh or Scottish.
Nationalism, we should note, is not so much an effect of nationality
as its cause. As the social philosopher, Ernest Gellner, observed:
“Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self consciousness: it
invents nations where they do not exist”. Nations are thus not so
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much matters of natural “fact” as forms of collective imagining. That
there is some deep connection between the developing social rôle of
the modern intelligentsia and the creation of such imaginings has
become something of a commonplace. If it is now no longer fashionable
to hold German idealist philosophy entirely responsible for the
subsequent history of nationalism, as Elie Kedourie once argued, 73
then this is so only because attention has shifted, in Gellner’s own
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work and in that of Tom Nairn for example, away from formal,
philosophical systems of thought and toward the needs and aspirations
of intelligentsias, understood as particular, historically specific, social
groupings.
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities considerably advanced
this line of argument through its focus on the specific nexus connecting
intellectuals to the printing industries. A nation, wrote Anderson, “is
an imagined political community…imagined as both inherently limited
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and sovereign”. Nations are imagined in a very particular way,
moreover, that is, as passing through an homogeneous empty time in
which simultaneity is indicated only by temporal coincidence in terms
of clock and calendar. This is a distinctly modern type of imagination,
Anderson observes, the technical preconditions for which are provided
by the novel and the newspaper. Print capitalism has thus been central
to the rise of nationalism: the capitalist publishing industry, driven by
a restless search for markets, assembled the multiplicity of pre-modern
vernaculars into a much smaller number of print communities each
of which prefigured a modern nation. Anderson himself identified
four main waves of nationalism: first, early American nationalism in
which language per se was irrelevant, but in which printer-journalists,

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