Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition

By Stathis Gourgouris

Against the backdrop of ever-increasing nationalist violence during the last decade of the twentieth century, this book challenges standard analyses of nation formation by elaborating on the nation's dream-like hold over the modern social imagination. Stathis Gourgouris argues that the national fantasy lies at the core of the Enlightenment imaginary, embodying its central paradox: the intertwining of anthropological universality with the primacy of a cultural ideal.

Crucial to the operation of this paradox and fundamental in its ambiguity is the figure of Greece, the universal alibi and cultural predicate behind national-cultural consolidation throughout colonialist Europe. The largely unpredictable institution of a modern Greek nation in 1830 undoes the interweaving of Enlightenment and Philhellenism, whose centrifugal strands continue to unravel the certainty of European history, down to the internal predicaments of the European Union or the tragedy of the Balkan conflicts.

This 25th Anniversary edition of the book includes a new preface by the author in which he situates the book's original insights in retrospect against the newer developments in the social and political conditions of a now globalized world: the neocolonial resurgence of nationalism and racism, the failure of social democratic institutions, the crisis of sovereignty and citizenship, and the brutal conditions of stateless peoples.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Sep 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781503630642

Stathis Gourgouris

Stathis Gourgouris is Professor of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He is author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece; Does Literature Think?: Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era; Lessons in Secular Criticism; and Ενδεχομένως αταξίες (Contingent Disorders). His most recent book is The Perils of the One.

Book preview

Prologue

The mortality of dreams lies not in their being forgotten but in their being interpreted. The forgotten plunges back into the dark pools of the psyche; the interpreted seals the fate of whatever rises to the surface and is exhausted. Hence every emergence into waking consciousness, every morning after the anarchic ordeal of the night, involves a struggle against the order of interpretation. Nations seem to disobey this path. In the temporal scale of human history, nations do seem to arise overnight, evoked like perfectly transparent dreams whose interpretation requires no particular effort—this sense of effortlessness being fueled by the often enormous cost in human life involved in the making of a nation. Nations come into historical consciousness precisely by articulating their own self-interpretation while relegating to damned oblivion the historical time of their nonexistence. It would seem that nations put oblivion in the service of interpretation and, unlike dreams, die when they can no longer successfully interpret themselves.

But the life of nations depends just as much on nourishing those elements that once sustained them, in the social imagination, as dreams. All nations were once dreamed as such at a historical moment prior to their emergence, which is to say that their emergence—their institution—already stands as the initial event in the course of their dream’s interpretation. A nation is a historical form because it cannot but replace its dream state with its interpretation (history understood here as the force that brushes society’s dream against the grain). History makes the pain of society’s dreams sensible. Whether a nation will survive as a dream or not depends on how long it can sustain its self-interpretation as a sensible symptom of its existence. Dream and nation are thus implicated in a paradoxical complicity of form, their antagonism over the significance of oblivion and interpretation being consubstantial with their structural affinity as social forces in human history.

This dreamlike appearance of the nation is generally deemed a contemporary condition, its flashing image contrasted to the longue durée that gathers its meaning from the premodern (and precapitalist) civilizations that display a relative lack of interest in mechanisms of both forgetting and interpreting. The lightning speed by which nations are instituted in history (as true of France as it is of Algeria, Slovakia, Pakistan, or the United States) surely matches the swiftness with which nations seem to pass from making history to gracing the pages of history books. Speed is an epistemic condition of both modernity and capital and goes back, beyond the theorizations of either Benjamin or Virilio, to, say, the debilitating tourist experience of Montesquieu’s Persians or the shooting down of the French bourgeoisie from its balconies, as Marx so vividly describes, by drunken mobs acting in the name of property, family, and order during the coup of Napoleon III. A modern sense of time obeys the order of rupture, of radical reinstitution, which is why modernity is often thought to underlie the formal configuration of the nation. The language of modernity, in the context of the Nation-form, may act as a wedge between dream and history, but it is also what remolds the act of history’s brushing the dream against the grain into a story that can be told.

Surely, one can counterpose to the nation’s privileged access to modernity a long variance of events across the pathways of culture that tell the tale of national institution as the simultaneous subjectification and subjugation of a society’s dream. All things being equal, Dante’s exhortation of the eloquence of a vulgar (popular) idiom is replayed in Kemal Atatürk’s nomination of a vulgar (foreign) script to convey a defeated imperial eloquence. Likewise, the attempt of Renaissance theologians in France to fashion a prisca theologia that would insert the druids of ancient Gaul into the narrative of Christian revelation and bring to France the cultural cohesion that comes with the blessing of being the origin is replayed in Walter Scott’s lending a medieval imaginary to the nineteenth-century historicist demands of British national fiction. All these mythological reiterations try to bend the past out of its eternal shape and are thus utterances of assimilation. Whether the myth involves Charlemagne or Ibn Saud, or Borges’s taciturn gaucho from the South, the gathering of the tribes into the national fold (Gothic or Bedouin, Norman or Creole) cannot but mobilize the assimilative forces of the dream of civilization, whether that is to be positively or negatively exercised. If the Aeneid were indeed an example of a national-historical epic, this would be due less to its narrative of cultural foundation than to its being a chronicle of the enemy’s assimilation into the integrity of this foundation, carried out by the epic narrative’s sensitivity to the eloquence of the conquered.

Reading history is in this respect an extravagant exercise, and placing the Nation as a form in history partakes necessarily of this extravagance. Yet there are certain delimitations in the history of the Nation-form, particularities and contingencies that cannot be outmaneuvered. So this book, given the demands of its particular object of historical inquiry, respects Eric Hobsbawm’s thesis that the basic characteristic of the modern nation and everything connected with it is its modernity (1990: 14), albeit with a crucial qualification. My inquiry stands on the premise that the nation is rooted in the epistemic shift that made the Enlightenment possible. Only if the Enlightenment can be said to have introduced the problematic of modernity can the Nation as a form be considered intertwined with modernity. This is a big if, and one that the present study could elucidate only symptomatically.

The nation exemplifies the predicament of the Enlightenment insofar as it bears its central philosophical paradox: it is at once particular and universal. The exclusivity of nationality is spoken through a universalist anthropological utterance, in what is not only a doubling of meaning but a dubbing. (This is precisely why one’s national enemies, on the other side of the border, are always treated as subhuman.) Such doubleness (and duplicity) demands an ambivalent mode of interrogation that weaves a morphological concern with the radical contingency of its terrain. In taking the risk of sketching a theory of the Nation as form, a philosophical task by definition, I am only furthering the need to make the murky processes of social and historical institution more palpable. Form is the implicit content of history, which is not a paradox at all, were we to take seriously Theodor Adorno’s daring recognition of the transhistorical sedimentation of content.

For this reason, such a study stands askew relative to the more celebrated sociological approaches to the phenomenon of the nation and the problems of nationalism. It recognizes a different terrain of interrogation and therefore does not address them. The Nation is a social form that exceeds any possible jurisdiction of social science, unless it is the kind of science that recognizes as its archē the force of historical contingency. The nonlogic of history is precisely what led me to contemplate the Nation as a form. In the midst of history’s most dramatic discontinuities, a form of social organization is imagined and instituted that breaks down cultural boundaries even as it intransigently cements them.

This is indeed a curious matter, and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is the first to take it seriously, not just in its overall conception but in the very idiom that it employs. Delving into the labyrinthine ways of the social imagination is merely living up to the nature of the issue. In this sense, a strictly and exclusively empiricist and positivist approach to the phenomenon of nationalism (not to mention the emergence of the Nation as a form) is at this point finished business. I risk the apparent absolutism of this assertion in full cognizance of the epistemological dangers of collectivizing the methods of psychoanalysis or of the philosophy of subjectivity. Talking mass psychology is, by definition, walking on a tightrope, and doing so to doubtful purpose. This book perhaps does assume such a risk insofar as it incorporates Freud’s methods of dream analysis into a social-historical problematic, but it ultimately resides a great epistemic distance away from the vision of mass psychology. All the same, it means to expose (and work against) the great and unacknowledged fear that the psyche might enter the sanctuary of social analysis, an unfortunate remnant of nineteenth-century rationalism.

The methodological contention of this book is that the psychic paragon of the national(ist) phenomenon emerges from the deepest stream of history and requires the most precise historical vision. My attention is thus focused on the nation’s operative force as social fantasy, which is what adheres to those invisible and intangible forces that make history itself sensible (which does not at all mean comprehensible): forces that enable us to identify history, even for a fleeting moment, without ever enabling us to give history an identity. My wish to elucidate the nation’s dream-work does not mean to provide an interpretation of a dream but to account for the dream lying in ambush behind every historical inscription.

The particular historical inscription I examine consists, first, in the national formation of Greece as a particular (and peculiar) moment of social history and, second, in certain instances of Greece’s national-cultural idiom (Neohellenism) that reenact this formative scene in order to revisit the realm of the nation-dream. The chronological focus initially spans the period from the 1780s to the 1830s, a terrain shadowed by the Enlightenment’s revolutionary acquaintance with the nineteenth century (chapters 2 and 3), and subsequently extends to those instances in the 1860s and 1940s-1950s when the literary and historiographical (re)production of Greece partook of the demands of romantic history and modernist aesthetics respectively (chapters 5, 6, and 7). Embracing these specific instances is the foundational complicity between the Enlightenment and Philhellenism, whose relation hinges both on their specific historical intersection and on their variant negotiation of the battle between identity and alterity (Chapter 4). The extant bits of this conversation are gathered up in the inevitable tangential flights of thought that I identify here as excurses. The overall voyage is prefaced by a long essay on the nation’s dream-work (Chapter 1), which is also a meditation on the nation as a social-imaginary institution in Cornelius Castoriadis’s sense of the term.

The terrain that allows such reflections to pose themselves in this way is already marked by an exigency altogether proper to itself. In my attempt to ground this interrogation of Greek national culture within a more or less concrete social-historical contingency and not rely on some prefabricated theory or some ethnically indigenous knowledge, I discovered that no precise situation of contingency was ever possible. My link to the entity modern Greece was, at one level, bound to a precisely specified necessity. At the same time, paradoxically within and by virtue of this necessity, I also found myself exterior to the logic of this entity, to the Neohellenic logos. This became the primary level of understanding Greece as a social-imaginary signification, in the sense that it remained stubbornly beyond reach, interposing itself between the moment of necessity and the moment of contingency that linked me to it and gave my relation to it its meaning. This subjective straddling, on the one hand, and this objective displacement, on the other, constitute the radical conditions that pressure this text toward its interrogation.

What such an interrogation must seek—as an inevitable consequence of an ambiguous relation to an already displaced object—is not the what of Greece, which would inescapably plunge us into essential-ontological determinations (what is), but the very conditions of possibility in conceiving Greece. In other words, what must be brought into question is the how of Greece, in order perhaps to catch a glimpse of its where. The point is to draw out the difference between the essential-ontological and the onto-genetic moment in the process of signification, a moment that is constantly recirculated and reinstituted, and that is as such not a moment at all, but can only be, by its very nature of institution, a social-historical process. To cast the point in the current philosophical idiom: this study is interested not in the Being of Greece but in the situation of its being.

The particularity of modern Greece is conceivable only in terms of its location within a wider range of historical formations. This project enacts a topological or, in Antonio Gramsci’s sense, a geographical understanding of contending social forms. Reading Greece and Neohellenism as national-imaginary institutions means also to read them as succinct expressions of the interceding sociocultural relations between Europe and the Balkan or Eastern Mediterranean region from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. As such, this study contributes to an elucidation of the resurgent nationalist forces in the Balkans today by retracing and reevaluating their formative institutions in the wake of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. In this process, an inquiry into the national formation of Greece, whether as a sociopolitical phenomenon or as the work of signification, problematizes directly the very institution of Europe as a geographical, historical, and discursive entity. And by the same token, it engages and expands the project of current postcolonial theory by reflecting on a nation forever situated in the interstices of East and West and ideologically constructed by colonialist Europe without having been, strictly speaking, colonized.

This latter concern may not appear to cover the greater part of the text, but it is the most trenchant and underlies the entire framework. I need not insist on the obvious: the boldest and most incisive contemplations of the problem of the nation come from the wider domain of postcolonial studies. This is owing not merely to the coincidental arising of some great thinkers in these disciplines but to the very experience of decolonization, which brought the revolutionary politics of national liberation (and its sad demise with official nationhood) face to face with the nationalist passion that was inherent in the colonialist imaginary throughout its administration. It is a disturbing and explosive mirroring that nonetheless made possible an altogether different and subversive insight into the implicit elements of the problem. Homi Bhabha and Partha Chatterjee, among others, have spoken eloquently about this exact implication, as has the entire Subaltern Studies project through the years, with which (if I am allowed the conceit) this project’s purpose has particular affinity.

Once we grant the unequaled scale of heterogeneity inherent in India and look to the bare forces that frame its national history, we can see that there is actually a point where the story of India and the story of Greece coincide. Both are burdened with a classical past, a similar trap for the nationalist phantasm: modern malaise to be overcome and ancient glory to be regained. And in both cases, though in decidedly different ways, the trap is fed by Europe’s own self-serving and autoscopic investment—self-serving because autoscopic. This is the great historical and institutional co-incidence of Philhellenism and Orientalism, Sanskrit and Greek being philology’s bread and butter. In this respect, if the story of India is the paradigmatic condition of the colonialist imaginary, then the story of Greece is the paradigmatic colonialist condition in the imaginary (since modern Greece is after all history’s sole witness of the consequences of what I call the colonization of the ideal). These two stories have a common history: the refracted history of Europe, and hence the refracted history of the Nation as a form, all from the vantage point of this form’s potential for hybrid incarnations.

To posit the fundamental connection between the historical production of the Nation-form and the ideological reproduction of Europe is not to suggest that the nation is one more great Western invention and product for export. It is to suggest something much graver: that the power of the nation, just like colonial power itself (and indeed the remarkable collusion between the two), is not merely incidental to the development of modern power but necessary to its consolidation. The refracted mirroring of Europe will inevitably arise behind any effort to contemplate the imaginary of the nation, settled there undaunted to mark the dim horizon with its broken light. Likewise, no serious effort to confront the implicit and allegorical structures of the national imagination can succeed without the conceptual tools of postcolonial thought—Lauren Berlant’s The Anatomy of National Fantasy (1991) or David Lloyd’s Anomalous States (1993) are paradigmatic in this respect.

This project, therefore, in which Greece may be construed as a temporary and transitional landmark, is ultimately part of a much wider and constantly renewable project: the elucidation of the very processes of social institution in a post-Enlightenment world whose story is the ubiquitous story of capital. Chatterjee is right when he situates in the narrative of capital not only the internal problematic of the nation but the key to Europe’s monopoly of the universal (1993: 235-39). He is particularly insightful in recognizing that the narrative of capital rendered all the communitarian forms that preceded it and engendered it a matter of prehistory. The battle between community and capital is no doubt central to the process of every national institution. Still, the Nation as a form would not have become so unassailable if it had not sat so comfortably with the social imaginary that made capitalism possible. For the nation goes so far as to borrow from this archegonous prehistorical narrative precisely those elements that, once incorporated in the dynamic of capital, make possible the notion of the national community (the nationalization of society), the political hypostasis of the modern nation and state.

In these political terms, this work is implicated in the matter of contemporary history, being a meditation on the imaginary of the nation and on the writing of national history at a time when a large part of world culture is contemplating itself openly in transnational terms, while an equally large part of it is embracing what seems to be a mutation of nineteenth-century nationalism. However, unlike many of the works it respects and follows, this text is explicitly and by design a study not of modes of resistance but more of the formal means by which the Nation appropriates and outwits resistance. What remains consistent through most of the texts and figures studied here is an attempt to read that hole in their many folds that may make these texts and figures—inadvertently, unwittingly, accidentally—possible agents of resistance. It is an attempt to read the duplicitous language of a form as a cipher for the intangible ferment of history and the inscrutable ways of societal institution. Above all, this text enacts the writing-scene of a particular instance in the work of history, the history of the Neohellenic imaginary and, therefore, the history of modern Greece itself. This hardly makes it a national history, however, with all the repressed repudiations of fiction that a national-historical confession entails. Rather, this book aspires to a writing imbued as much by the fictional spirit that marks, say, C. L. R. James’s remarkable history The Black Jacobins as by the historical spirit that swirls through Balzac’s formidable fictional world in his Comédie Humaine.

Such a spirit recognizes that the problem of history is a problem of the present. But since the sense of history is always retroactive, the problem of history concerns the topos of refolding. History, though unaccountable, is indelibly present as time frame. This very fact renders the meaning of present history absent, and therefore constitutes history, as presence (as experience), retroactive. Hence, to write history is inevitably to put into question one’s unaccountable present while giving a form to one’s intangible past. To make the nation the focus of a historical writing is to underline this quandary, the same methodological quandary that in the fictional world of another historical moment made of Sherlock Holmes such an endearing hysteric. For the nation is an entity that, as Hobsbawm realized, escapes classification and ultimately resides beyond a simple subjective/objective reasoning. What a nation is, pure and simple, shall always remain just one step ahead of our inquiry as to what it is. In this respect our research into the phenomenon of the nation cannot but abandon any ambitions as to its identity, which entails that writing about the nation cannot but be, simultaneously, both historical and speculative, both empirical and sophistic.

These conditions certainly do not make for an efficient discourse, nor, might I add, for a sufficient one. The task is polymorphous; therefore the path is polyvalent—circuitous, I would want to say in a straighter language. Indeed, opting for a circuitous path lays bare the scaffolding upon which all inquiries are based but which they usually prefer to repress—which is another way of saying, from the other end of the spectrum, that the author must remain attentive and alert to the various ways in which the labyrinthine object of inquiry engraves its own passage. The result is that the actual process of interrogation is implicated in a constant conversational barrage, forging a path through the crossfire between discourses that may not be necessarily rivals but are often unyielding companions. This precludes resolution and often postpones the exegesis of a particular theorization until it is tested by the specific demands of the problem at some other point in the text, a process that admittedly risks being perceived as the forwarding of rather dogmatic assertions. However, this perception would materialize only if the argument were engaged in linear fashion, with an inveterate faith as to its progress. This text grows instead by a process of unraveling, delineating the argument as it is posed retroactively by the elisions of the problem itself. Like the desire whose dream it is, the national fantasy cannot be ultimately analyzed; it can only be traversed.

This project adheres, by design, to a narrative without center, or more precisely, to a narrative whose own reality is an ever-wandering phantasm. Thus, the choice of characters, of places, of stories, of motifs, as objects of study, is a choice of chance.¹ The narrative/theoretical logic remains entirely incidental, and as such the very form of each section invokes the geography of its particular ways of passage. It is like certain of Hanns Eisler’s musical settings for Brecht’s short meditations: the melody winds persistently elsewhere, until the lyric passage abruptly confronts its passing. As is inevitable for this kind of voyage, my narrative traverses the same ground over and over, with the uncanny compulsion that characterizes wrestling with any fantasy. Yet with each return the tracks were lost, and with each loss the ground emerged intractable. What can perhaps be contemplated as a recurring landmark may be precisely the signs of this text’s inevitably asymptotic approach to neohellenizein, to that practico-poietic activity of the modern Greek imaginary that can only be expressed in the verb’s infinitive form.

The voyage of writing thus hinges on its becoming the subject to the creative verb of history, which does not at all mean that this writing succumbs to being seduced into making the voyage from subjectification to subjugation, to the petrifying allure of some historical law. Indeed, thought plays the game of history, as it were, precisely in order to stop being medused. In this game, no one’s cards are laid on the table, for the game is played without cards, which is to say that on the table are laid bare, interminably, only the gestures.

Note

1. If chance did not exist, history would be magic, said Marx. In this, Marx understood well the radical contingency of history. (By implication, he also vocalized the strictly systemic nature of magic.)

CHAPTER I

The Nation’s Dream-Work

‘The Great Wall of China’

Perhaps the most astonishing discovery American astronauts made in space during NASA’s pinnacle years was that, in looking back at the earth, the only trace of humanity they could discern was the Great Wall of China. From the point of view of outer space, the miracles of antiquity, even if delegated to a single representative, had prevailed over twentieth-century science in their hold on both time and distance. In the marketplace of signs, the astronauts had traded their sparkling metallic armor for a dark winding shadow, like a worm poised on a silk blue surface. It is of no consequence that the global memory from those days is distilled down to an American flag and some small steps. The Great Wall of China reemerged in the modern technological imagination by the sheer force of its mythic magnitude. Not surprising, for throughout history, whatever propels the grand scheme of technology has never ceased to yearn for the legendary.

That the Great Wall of China was someday to grace the radio waves in outer space could well have been a secret fate shielded in the walls of the imperial logic which had given it shape. But the articulation of this fate, the language that bridged ancient time with technological time, could only have been found in the dissimulating imagination of Franz Kafka. In The Great Wall of China (1917), Kafka opts for a narrative cast under the spell of the formal element of legend, endowing it specifically with that uncanny atmosphere of myth that makes the imaginary of history palpable. Here, as in most of his works, the space-time dimension remains fabular; yet the mysterious and invisible mechanism of terror that prevails, for example, in his sketches of the institution of law gives way to an ineffable, infinitely prolonged surveying gaze that matches the vastness of the landscape.

We are told right off that nothing about the Great Wall can ever be verified, since the Wall’s relationship to time is inexhaustible. This is a structure that may take hundreds and hundreds of years to complete, absorbing the labor of an indefinite number of generations. So, these architects of legend decide that the Wall should be built in segments that are not built consecutively but are simultaneously executed in various distant parts of the empire. In reducing and localizing the mythic scale of this building process, the point is to make the idea of completion attainable and experiential, to make sure that the desire for building will not give in to the obliterating ghost of futility. In this sense, the Wall is a series of fragments that are supposed to be united into one whole structure at some point in time. Although this projected point in time is logically perceptible (by imaginary extension), it is ultimately inconceivable, for it undoes the structure of time itself. The Wall partakes of both infinite and fragmented time, which makes it both timeless and historical, strictly speaking. In the building of the Great Wall, historical order embraces the legendary; this is Kafka’s profound mythistorical core.¹

This dissolution of time may be what lies behind Kafka’s famous parable of the imperial message. The messenger, who is entrusted directly from the dying Emperor’s lips with the one message exclusively reserved for you—a lone subject somewhere out in that abyssal imperial terrain—never succeeds in breaking through the infinite folds of the imperial court, not even after an effort of a thousand years, carrying a message from a now long-dead man while you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself (Kafka 1971: 244). The impossibility of completing the singular route of the message, projected from Emperor to subject, is merely another image of the impossibility of building the Wall itself. For infinite time requires infinite space, and the Wall needs to occupy infinite space since it belongs to the order of the mythistorical.

What does this mean? The nominal reason for building the Wall is to protect the Emperor from the enemies of the North (241)—although, in another version, it is also deemed to protect the Emperor from demons with black arrows (249), hardly a practical proposition. But we soon discover that the Emperor is himself merely a figure, meaning he may or may not exist in reality (246). In fact, whether he does so or not is irrelevant, for he has no reality (even if he exists); that is, his reality resides in his being an imaginary institution. This is signified by the parable, but also by a view of the empire as a terrain of such magnitude that time itself is exhausted in attempting to cover it: So vast is our land that no fable could do justice to its vastness, the heavens can scarcely span it—and Peking is only a dot in it, and the imperial palace less than a dot. The same regime of mythic proportions exerts its force on the Emperor as well:

The Emperor as such, on the other hand, is mighty throughout all the hierarchies of the world: admitted. But the existent Emperor, a man like us, lies much like us on a couch which is of generous proportions, perhaps, and yet very possibly may be quite narrow and short. Like us he sometimes stretches himself and when he is very tired yawns with his delicately cut mouth. But how should we know anything about that—thousands of miles away in the south—almost at the borders of the Tibetan Highlands? (243)

Given this predicament, a structure built to protect something legendary can only be itself legendary—or fabular, whichever word we might choose. The Wall is like the Emperor; indeed, it is the ceaseless building of the figure of the Emperor, the interminable creation of the Emperor (while various Emperors and dynasties come and go, an inconsequential succession of mortal bodies, much like life itself). The Great Wall is thus the people’s own creation (and not just because the people build it), erected in order to mask precisely the fact that the Emperor is also, ultimately, the people’s creation. The Great Wall is built in order to occlude the fact that the Emperor is himself an object—the Sublime Object—of the people’s imagination.

This self-occultation is necessary, for were the fact of the self-creation of society to rise to the level of consciousness, it would be utterly devastating to the sustenance of the social order. Thus, the Wall is also built in order to act as Emperor in the strictest political sense, to be Emperor, to make certain that humanity’s radical imagination—the anarchic impulse that reveals humanity’s abyssal creative/destructive force—is contained. It is not surprising then that the initial stages of construction were enveloped in a theory proclaiming the Wall an extension of the Tower of Babel project—or better yet, a correction of the foundational weaknesses of the Tower of Babel project (239). But neither is it any less surprising that this theory was soon perceived as a wild idea, hence an obstacle to successful building and thus swiftly abandoned. The self-containment of social imagination is a triumph of social order, for it nourishes power’s legendary (fabular) status. In the end, the Great Wall is built not to defend the empire against its enemies—there are no enemies, Kafka tells us, or if they do exist they can easily bypass the Wall’s piecemeal structure. Instead, the Wall is built so as to defend the empire against its own people, against their self-consciousness as archogenetic agents, as autonomous beings. In order for this self-defense—or rather, defense against the self—to be effective, enemies from the North (or wherever) must be invented.

The Great Wall of China is really the constitutive object of fantasy that holds a society’s imaginary together. Before it even begins to operate as a cultural symbol, it has already sealed the operation of the symbolic field. Which is to say, it is itself the condition of possibility for its own signification, whatever that might be at a given time. In this respect, the Great Wall of China provides a condensed but lucid illustration of the formal characteristics of the nation as a social phenomenon in the modern world. Every nation is a social-imaginary institution, delineated in each case by specific historical markings. But in addition, the Nation is in a formal sense a social-imaginary signification that presides over the historical terms in the institution of every nation. This is a basic premise in my investigation.²

The social-historical domain of every nation is located in the ensemble of discourses and figures that institute and then adhere to or hinge upon an exclusive axis of allowed versus forbidden national articulations. This axis is not written down as law, that is, textualized in some already posited representational structure. When it does surface as such in the various utterances (literary or otherwise) that signify the workings of a national canon, it is merely an afterword to its already implemented (instituted) state. The play along the axis of what is culturally allowed/forbidden cannot be actually perceived, since it cannot even be presented. It is a play of shadows, of phantasms and phantoms, inexhaustibly generated and projected beyond our individual subjective orientation within that national culture—despite the fact that, in order to orient ourselves within it, we must identify (and often identify with) its boundaries. In Castoriadis’s words, "social imaginary significations do not exist strictly speaking in the mode of representation. . . . They denote nothing at all, and they connote just about everything. It is for this reason that they are so often confused with their symbols, which leads people to attribute to those symbols a role and an effectiveness infinitely superior to those they certainly possess" (1987: 143).

It is in this respect that social-imaginary signification is itself the condition of possibility for signification. A society’s imaginary is the ground of that society’s institution—a ground in the sense of the generative flux signified by the pre-Socratic notion of chaos: a signifying abyss. Moreover, while providing the ground for society’s coherence, this social imaginary cannot ever exist outside the bounds of that society; it is, in other words, also instituted by that society. The institution presupposes the institution; it cannot exist unless the individuals made by it make it exist (Castoriadis 1982: 119). Castoriadis calls this simultaneous and mutual institution the primitive circle of creation, a creation that does not have in any positive sense an origin, a source, a cause, an end, a history; it is a creation ex nihilo. In this sense, the creation of signification—thus, of society itself—has nothing to do with the theological notion of creation, which presupposes, by definition, a source outside itself, a quintessentially heteronomous origin (see Castoriadis 1982; 1984b: 146-47).

It is the work of every national imaginary, however, to present this process of auto-institution as a heteronomous structure, covered in most cases by an array of national symbols and ritualistic practices that serve the wants and demands of a national idolatry. Presiding over this ritual of self-occultation is the State itself, which is not, as is usually believed, the energy source of every nation but rather the chief representative of each nation’s symbolic order in the geopolitical stock exchange. In defiance of the hyphenated couple that is so endearing to political scientists, the State is to the Nation what the Emperor is to the Great Wall. In both cases, it is the latter element that safeguards social order, insofar as it constructs the necessity for an Emperor or a State to which it delegates the organization of society’s symbolic order. Like the Great Wall, the nation creates the notion of the external enemy in order to lend to the State (Emperor) legitimacy of rule.

And like the Great Wall, the nation too is an object of social fantasy, more abstract perhaps in conception but no less concrete as a historical force. That the Great Wall of China, as I have invoked it here, has little to do with that miraculous achievement of Mandarin logic and is rather an imprint of Franz Kafka’s astonishing imagination merely attests to literature’s great capacity for theory. And if Kafka’s Great Wall makes for such an uncanny image of national fantasy, it is precisely because the Nation is such an elaborate mythistorical form. But the Great Wall of China exceeds not only its imperial conception but even Kafkas reconstitution of it; it is itself a historical entity of profound mythical force. It is astonishing to hear of the astronauts’ discovery that the Great Wall of China is the only human trace on the earth’s surface visible from outer space. But can it be more astonishing than hearing of NASA’s later admission that it had in fact penned this discovery into the space script? Of course, no rule was sacred in the media buildup of the American space program as part of its Cold War propaganda. Except that there is something uncanny in both the object and the timing selected for this fantastic representation. The Great Wall of China, the mythical emblem of the great enemy from the East, the yellow hordes in a sea of red scarves, rises right out of the greatest cultural mystery in the eyes of twentieth-century Western history: Mao’s Cultural Revolution. A splendorous trick of the Cold War imaginary, and we cannot but stand in awe before its inevitable logic: the fictionalized image of the most forbidden alone breaking the limits of the earthbound.

The Nationalization of Imagined Communities

What makes nations imagined communities, in Benedict Anderson’s classic description, is precisely what may be termed their mythistorical energy. When Anderson insists on the importance of temporal/spatial simultaneity in the making of every nation, he is describing this same peculiar conflation of past and future into a permanent present that Kafka perceives in his meditations on the Great Wall of China. In every nation, antiquity coexists with modernity but also with infinity; no nation can imagine its death. But it can imagine an existence before its historical birth, an ancestral essence. This essence exists in infinitely reproducible and plural form in one’s fellow Greeks, Americans, Malaysians, and so on. Anderson is right to identify in this phenomenon the signifying universe of the newspaper. Newspapers are daily engaged in building the Great Wall, cultivating both the myth of the Emperor (in what’s newsworthy) and the myth of empire (in the reading public). The Nation is just that social form in the age of Enlightenment (the age of disenchantment/demythification, as Horkheimer and Adorno would say) that evolves a new way of producing myth. Therein lies the rise of the Nation as a new imaginary form—which is not at all to say that it is not real.

This is a point I cannot emphasize enough. A social-imaginary institution is more real than the real. To invoke the notion of social-imaginary institution is to undo the problematic that is woven around a differentiation and counterposition between real and imaginary. It is to enter instead a problematic where the two notions form a nodal point in the chain of signification, whose always partial or tentative fixity opens the domain where history may be (again partially and tentatively) articulated, where it may be rendered signifiable. For, as Castoriadis never fails to point out, the social-imaginary itself has no history because it is what makes history present, but also because it is history in the deepest sense and therefore cannot have a history as a content.

The nation is thus a historical form through and through. It is historical not because it can be pinpointed in a precise region on the historical and geographical map of human civilization (which, in effect, it cannot be), but precisely because it is a social-imaginary institution. This is to say that every nation is instituted by the particular society that imagines itself as a nation. But it is also to say, simultaneously, that this nation institutes its social community as a national community. There is no precedence between these two modes; they are in a literal sense co-incidental.³ This tautological proposition, in which, however, the two terms (the two moments) are never collapsible into one (for they are, after all, grammatically separate, if not antagonistic: to institute/to be instituted), figures as the core element in the advent of all nations and is the shared characteristic in every national imaginary.

A national imaginary, however, insofar as it is given over to the articulation of an indisputable cultural identity, lends itself to an equally indisputable self-occultation. This self-instituted opacity of the logic of cultural identity that figures prominently in the operation of the national imaginary as an instituting force may be said to resemble the workings of a dream. Indeed, by history’s own testimony, nations exist literally as dreams before they become politically and geographically signified as nations, so much so that their initial ideological act is to create institutions that will preserve, and reinvoke when necessary, the originary dream-state. This is the meaning of Benedict Andersons imagined communities, which are "to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined" (1983: 15, my emphasis). Here the question of authenticity/reality is irrelevant; it operates as a displacement. The style is the specific form of self-presentation a given (national) community recognizes as its own and, therefore, as unique. This form is arbitrary in its institution, yet necessary in the terms of that specific community.

Whatever may be the infrastructural forces bearing on the formation of a national community at a given historical moment, it is imprudent to assume that these forces are not themselves subjected to the process of a particular nation’s institution. For there can never be a point from which a precise sense of a national community’s formation (a precise moment of its having been imagined) can be contemplated. As Etienne Balibar would put it, there is nothing in a social formation, no matter what its cohesion, that does not render its representation, its history, problematic, because what is really at stake is not the chronicle of its formation but the means (and ends) of the reproduction of its form.⁴

In this respect, nations are being constantly (re)formed as such, through the constant cultivation and recultivation of whatever signs can be served up as significations of common interest. This process would be provocatively rendered by Balibar’s notion of the nationalization of society (1990: 342–45), were we to let the notion resound in its political-economic sense, as it would traditionally be applied to capital. This process of nationalization, perhaps unlike the one pertaining to privately owned industry, does not take place as a result of some State decree, for the simple reason that the