ROBIN KELSEY: Good afternoon, Visitas Thinks Big.
When I was young and my father said, hey, what's the big idea?
He didn't want a big idea, he wanted an apology.
But I'll try to give you a big idea today without an apology,
and I'm going to start with this morning when you got up.
And I suspect within a few seconds, maybe minutes,
you checked your favorite electronic device.
Maybe you went on Facebook, Twitter, posted something on Instagram,
or maybe you used some apps that your parents and I have never heard of.
Your habitual uses of social media probably feel automatic,
but it's worth recalling that every time you get on these apps,
every time you use social media, you are affirming
your belonging in a virtual community.
Whether that's Facebook friends or Twitter followers,
you are asserting your belonging in a virtual community.
A virtual community that is held together electronically by servers,
apps, and so forth, but virtual communities that
are held within you most vividly in your imagination.
These are imagined communities.
I Stole my title.
I Stole it from a book by Benedict Anderson, a scholar who
passed away a couple of years ago.
One of Benedict Anderson's big ideas was that people
tended to overlook the obvious fact that the modern nation is itself
an imagined community.
Americans may be willing to die for America,
but they actually know only a tiny fraction of other Americans.
Their belonging to this community of Americans involves the imagination.
Another insight that Anderson had is that these
imagined communities called nations are finite,
and they are surrounded by other imagined communities called nations
so that these imagined communities are defined oppositionally.
That is to say, if you are Brazilian, that means quite precisely,
especially when it comes to soccer, that you are not Argentinian.
And if you are Canadian, as my Canadian friends constantly remind me,
it means precisely that you are not an American.
Benedict Anderson spend a lot of his career thinking
deeply about why it is in the modern period there emerged these
imagined communities called nations.
Another of his big ideas was that certain technologies and their uses
gave rise to and supported these imagined communities.
In particular, Anderson associated the rise of the modern nation
with the emergence of what he called print capitalism.
When people in the 19th or 20th century sat down to read the morning paper,
that act may have seemed very solitary and private, but in fact,
that act asserted a belonging to an imagined community of people who were
doing the same thing that morning--
reading the paper, digesting matters of common concern.
And with this synchrony, an imagined community formed.
And what Anderson argued is that without this capacity through print
to disseminate this news so readily across a nation,
the modern nation state would not have emerged.
One corollary of this insight is that these nation states
are bound linguistically.
There are German newspapers.
There are Portuguese newspapers.
There are newspapers in Mandarin, right?
And these languages are part of the national self-definition
of these imagined communities.
We can build upon Anderson to talk about the role
that other technologies have played in the formation
and sustenance of imagined communities.
One technology near and dear to my heart is photography.
Alongside print media, photography has played a key role
in the development of imagined communities.
I show you here on the left two album pages from a 19th century photography
album.
These are small photographs on little pieces of cardboard.
They recalled carte de visite.
They were extraordinarily popular--
produced in the millions in the middle of the 19th century.
The figures you see on these cards are all dressed in Norwegian costumes,
and I used this example to show that photography
could reinforce the notion of a national identity, such as Anderson
was concerned about.
On the right, you see a very different album page.
This one from a Victorian English album in which the maker of the album
has cut out people from different photographs
and pasted them together fancifully in this imagined scene in a parlor.
And what this album page can remind us is
that photographs tend to circulate very promiscuously and therefore
able to overcome some of the rigid boundaries
that the album pages on the left would suggest.
Now photography, as an instrument of imagined communities,
had some very particular characteristics.
For one thing, it was not based on language.
And one of the aspects of photography that captivated the social imagination
when photography was first introduced in 1839
was precisely this potential for a kind of universality--
that everyone sitting before the camera would register in the same way
and that photographs were legible to people who spoke different languages
and came from different cultures.
So for these reasons, photography was thought
to be particularly suited to a time in which there
was great democratic fervor, as there was in the 19th century.
Here we go.
I wanted to show you some quotations to give you
a flavor of the various people who, in the early years of photography,
articulated this remarkable quality of the medium
that whereas, in painting and drawing, the making of the picture
tended to be mediated by all kinds of conventions such
that a painter would render the nobility in an idealized fashion
but tend to caricature the poor and the downtrodden--
But that photography treated everyone more or less the same.
And this was a remarkable principle that writers
ranging from the transcendentalist Emerson
to the abolitionist Frederick Douglass noted.
This universalist potential of photography
has surfaced time and again in its history.
After the second World War when the emergence of the atomic bomb
raised the specter of national differences and strife
resulting in the destruction of the planet,
hopes were placed in photography to be an agent of the creation
of an imagined global community.
This universality of photography was thought
to have the capacity to transcend national boundaries and differences.
And in 1955, Edward Steichen, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art,
put on a very famous show called The Family of Man
in which he tried to make a case that we are bonded
across cultures and across these differences
by certain universals of human culture--
whether that be eating together, or dancing, or singing.
And it's crucial that for Steichen, photography
was the medium that would convey that universalism because it itself
was a universal medium.
Now the problem is that technologies rarely
fulfilled their utopian potential, and the same is true of photography.
Although, many writers, and curators, and thinkers have noted the possibility
that photography could bond people in this fashion.
In point of fact, photography has been used time
and again to create imagined communities that
are based on difference, subjugation, and subordination.
So to just give you three examples, on the left,
this is an early mugshot from the late 19th century
to remind us that an imagined community of law abiding citizens
has been generated against those who are considered outlaws.
Or the middle photograph, a long duration photograph
showing the motion of a worker to be used
to try to increase the mechanical efficiency of workers on the assembly
line--
defining an imagined community of managers who would define themselves
against a working class.
Or on the right, a photograph that can remind us
of the complicity of photography in colonialism,
and the defining of a certain imagined community as belonging to the civilized
against those who are allegedly less civilized.
The history of photography, as I have sketched it out in this brief time,
feels very resident to me today where were
undergoing this seismic shift from print capitalism to screen capitalism.
And where we have a technology called the internet which
came with all kinds of utopian dreams, but very recently has evidently
shown a propensity for a kind of echo chamber fragmentation pitting one
imagined community against another.
And to remind us of that, I just put in the upper right
an announcement of the release of Barack Obama's birth certificate--
a very sober, every day document that you
think might be a kind of object of consensus, but in point of fact,
is viewed so divisively by these different imagined communities.
And I leave you with the idea that one of the great challenges
of your generation is going to be to help us figure out
how to foster and sustain the imagined communities that we need
and how to connect them to a reality that stubbornly resides
outside our digital dreams.
Thank you very much
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