Materializing the Nation by Robert J. Foster

Author:Robert J. Foster [Foster, Robert J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253215499
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2002-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

5

The Commercial Construction of “New” Nations

INTRODUCTION: FROM CITIZEN TO CONSUMER?

Almost all the questions and issues that I explore in this chapter were raised, as is often the case, by a cartoon in the New Yorker magazine. A man in pajamas lies propped up in bed, a companion sleeping soundly at his side. He stares ahead with glazed eyes at a television set, one finger poised on the remote control. The caption reads: “Ladies and gentlemen, our national commercial.”

I read the cartoon two different ways, but to the same effect. In the first reading, the viewer is watching the start of a late-night baseball game; the stadium announcer alerts the crowd not to the singing of the national anthem, but rather to the playing of the national commercial. In the second reading, the viewer is watching late late-night television; the station is about to sign off, but with the national commercial instead of the national anthem. This alternative reading, however, seems less likely, or at least less available to all readers. How many young Americans, I wonder, having grown up in a world where there is no end to the broadcast day, simply do not get the reference to the old convention of opening and closing television transmission with the national anthem?

Both readings nevertheless suggest that a series of aligned shifts has taken place in contemporary American society. The substitution of advertisement for anthem implies a move from political ritual to commercial ritual that, in turn, betokens an eclipse of the state by the market as the reference point for national belonging. In other words, viewers who were once appealed to as citizens are now addressed as consumers; their sense of national belonging derives less from common membership in a polity and more from common participation in a repertoire of consumption practices. The New Yorker magazine, again, offers apparent confirmation. A 1997 article about marketing efforts to identify innovative trends in “cool” sneakers reports that among youngsters in Philadelphia, “Reebok Classics are so huge they are known simply as National Anthems, as in Til have a pair of blue Anthems in nine and a half’ ” (Gladwell 1997:84).

How should we take the following claim: “We are witnessing the swift debasement of the concept of ‘citizen’—the person who actively participates in shaping society’s destiny—to that of ‘consumer,’ whose franchise has become his or her purchasing decisions” (Ewen 1992:49). What might such a displacement of agency tell us about the production of nationality as a dimension of collective and personal identity? If nation-ness and nationality no longer necessarily refer to political identities—to a state legitimated by a people—then to what sort of imagined communities, if any, do they refer?

I want to address these questions by considering the instrumental role of commodity consumption in nation making—that is, in the production of nationality. In this regard, I follow but one of the many leads offered by Benedict Anderson’s (1991) discussion of print capitalism as a force that enabled, through the activity of reading, the imagination

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