INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES SPRING 2016
see all moments as equal ( revolutionary moments , are more important , for example ). 108 In History , Benjamin establishes this distinction to critique the idea of historical progress held by the Left 109 , as he sees it as opening the door to Fascist technocracy . According to Lunn , Benjamin sought to reduce the remnants of liberal progressivism latent in Marx , replacing it with a ‘ hope in the past ’, 110 or in Benjamin ’ s own words , rather than being future-oriented and motivated : ‘ our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption ’. 111
Anderson puts the notion of the empty time of modernity to his own use . The nation is an imaginary possibility that was embedded in the experience of time as homogenous and empty that was not accounted for by Marxist theory , including by Benjamin . 112 Benjamin never located nationalism in the category of cultural ideas alongside the idea of “ progress ”. Anderson does ; and following from this re - categorisation , he argues that the imagining of events as taking place simultaneously in time , rather than allegorically ( as part of a cosmological experience of time ) constituted ‘ a fundamental change … in modes of apprehending the world , which , more than anything else , made it possible to ‘ think ’ the nation ’. 113
This ‘ fundamental change ’ was from a consciousness that understood the present as a ‘ simultaneity of past and future ’ – ‘ something close to what Benjamin calls Messianic time ’ 114 to a consciousness that saw time as horizontal , flat , a series of events , though one in which different actors may be doing different things . 115 Simultaneity of events moves from being seen as prefiguration and fulfilment to a temporal coincidence . The formal features of the novel and newspaper , two key print commodities , promoted a sense of flat , progressive time . Thus , they contributed to the breakdown of cosmological imaginings . In contrast to Benjamin ’ s pessimism towards the “ progress ” of homogenous , empty time , Anderson finds a silver lining in its facilitation of the imagining of egalitarian communities .
The Angel of History
The metaphor of the Angel of History also comes from Benjamin ’ s History . Anderson quotes the ninth theses in closing Imagined Communities , and also begins with a quote from it in the most recent introduction to Imagined Communities . 116 As
108
Ibid ., 261-2 .
109
His critique is directed at the German Social Democrats . Ibid ., 260 .
110
Lunn , Marxism and Modernism ., 228 . This position made Benjamin more like an anarchistic Nietzsche ; this is something of a return to his intellectual roots .
111
Benjamin , Illuminations ., 254 and 260 .
112
This is why Anderson quotes Tom Nairn , ‘ The theory of nationalism represents Marxism ’ s great historical failure ’, at the beginning of Imagined Communities . Anderson , Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism ., 3 .
113
Ibid ., 22 .
114
Ibid ., 24 .
115
Here Anderson is also drawing heavily on Eric Auerbach . His unreferenced example of the importance of ‘ meanwhile ’ in modern as opposed to mediaeval literature – and the concomitant consciousness of each , is from Erich Auerbach , Mimesis , trans . William Trask ( Princeton : Princeton University Press , 2013 )., 180 .
116
Anderson , Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism ., xi and 161-2 . ‘ His face is turned towards the past . Where we perceive a chain of events , he sees one single catastrophe which
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