Anderson’s imagined communities remain static whereas imagination is a dynamic act

Evidence

A relevant critique raised by Partha Chatterjee (1991) is that although Imagined Communities highlights the outside domain, the “material” of the imagined community, it ignores the inside domain, the “spiritual” aspect of nation-­state capitalism. Anderson does not follow Max Weber’s judiciousness in illustrating not only the constitution but also the transformation of the capitalist spirit. While the imagined community is “modular,” it appears fixed once formed—­a static outcome of people’s shared imaginings. Crucially for the critique I will develop over the course of this book, although a focus on language and text can be helpful in “pinning down” symbolic collectivities, it also reflects a key limitation of Imagined Communities: its inflexibility to account for the dynamics of change over time and space. By contrast, imagination is an act from which new meanings, rationalities, myths, narratives, and images of capitalism may always spring forth. As I have shown in my previous work, imagination’s complex role has to be understood both as a process (that is, open ended, ongoing, and therefore elusive) and as an outcome (that is, fixed, temporally distinct, and hence more easily legible) (Komporozos-­Athanasiou 2020; Komporozos-­Athanasiou and Fotaki 2015, 2020). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 155

Categorization

• DEFINE: Useful contrast: Anderson’s modular imagined community as fixed text-based collective vs. imagination as an ongoing generative process — an analytical vocabulary the rest of the book builds on.
• XREF: Pairs naturally with Benedict Anderson and Weber’s capitalist spirit literature; the process/outcome duality echoes similar distinctions in reader’s social-capital and trust materials.