 The social sciences are unprecedented, I think. But more than that, I think that is really a leading scholar on Asia, the Southeast Asia. He's written many books in this area. And he combines, I think, his successory theoretical work and empirical work. And he has a particularly distinct way of writing, appealing to his coloring, and also appeals to different disciplines, social sciences, humanities. And it's really a great opportunity to have that here and you talk about nationalism in time. Apologize to you all for my synillity, really synillity. Everything was done, printed out, sitting on my bed, the lecture, and this afternoon, I reached into the suitcase to say, OK, I'll run it over. It turned out I didn't, but it didn't. So it will come tomorrow, but that would be for glory, not for here. So what I've done in the past hour is to try to re-imagine what it's like. So it's not going to be elegant or anything like that. But I think the main things are there. So please bear with me. And one thing's about it's not so much nationalism in time, but what the relationship is how people conceive time, and how they conceive nations, and which kind of nations see time in a certain way, which others do not. And this is a progression, as you were, from the late 18th century until the present. Well, one can start by thinking about some of the obvious sociological or economic things that start to create a new kind of idea about time. And the striking thing is that the last quarter of the 18th century, which, on my origin, had taken to be a period of the beginnings of national consciousness in the modern sense, there were already over 500,000, half a million clocks were produced in Europe for export and interchange. And the number of clocks would go steadily wider and were assisted by mathematical formulations of longitude and latitude. So the world was getting divided up in a sort of rational way, if you like, on space. But it was also longitude was crucial for organizing in some way time. And the actual idea, of course, is that there will be a common time. And it wasn't easy to achieve. But it was clearly behind the whole idea of the nation, which is that you know you have 50 million brothers and sisters, as you were, any more country you come from. But you will never meet them. You don't know their names. So it's good to have a kind of wall of time and space around that community. And that depends on an idea of simultaneousness. That is, you go out in the morning to buy the newspaper. You are conscious also, or not quite, but perhaps conscious that in Kork or in Limerick or someone, people are doing the same thing at the same time. It is a kind of simultaneity, which you don't find in pre-nationalist literature very much, but it's not in prose. It's also the time when newspapers and novels are very important or becoming more and more important. And as you know, the curious way in which newspapers divided themselves up in almost any newspaper you find in the 19th century, you find as if a part of the newspaper is domestic hours. And then everything else is foreign news. That's quite a standard distribution, which is the nation has its own separate space, and the rest of the world has another one. But it isn't segregated by time. The assumption of the newspaper is that time is time, and where this has come from. Well, there are two ways of thinking about it. One is the famous phrase of Moldaveini, where he says that it's the end, but the end of, what's the word I want, the kind of messianic time where we're all waiting for the day when the Lord will come back or somewhere over the heaven or where they're not the helens of good, is gone. And what takes its place, or is not gone, that is going down. What you get then is what he calls homogeneous empty time, but it's the same time everywhere. And it's empty. It's like a file in a computer, which was nothing in it yet. It's waiting for you. And that's a rather, both exhilarating idea and rather daunting one. The idea that time is basically man-made, and it works by clocks. And this kind of thing is what's taken of in a bad mood, called, yes, this wonderful phrase, which I can never forget, bad infinity. It just goes on and on and on and on without any point. So it's this general change. It's part of the framing of early and middle period, I think, of nationalism. And it created some two complications. And I'll just mention very quickly. The first problem was once they've been called it homogeneous empty time, but people who are aware of this kind of thing without giving it its name, then started to worry about how to think about past time. And the crucially crucial thing there is that the concept of a time before Christ, for Christians, easy, from another, only appears in the early 19th century, whereas the Gerdwijn law in AD was there from the 5th century or 4th century already. And the fact that you could have a pre-Christ and a very soon geology and studies of antiquity and so forth and mammals and amoebas meant that the space of the time of pre-Christ is infinitely larger and longer than, as you were, after Christ. So this is creating a problem. You can see it if you talk to Muslims and Buddhists. They also began comfortable in siding on a pre-Buddha time and a pre-Muhammad time. I mean, there are ways of getting around it, but the fact is it's difficult to know what to do with it. So some kind of secular alternative is necessary because everything now is in the single big time. The second thing that's very striking doesn't show up in a new word until the 20th century but it's already there. And that is the fear of the mortality of the nation. That is, in a strange way, what nationalism does, especially in a mental period, what national does is to offer a peculiar kind of immortality. Yes, you're going to die, but you'll be in after and you're going to be buried in Ireland and the ancestors are there and the future is coming, the future Irish people, that is, you will be there. And the fear is always then what we now call genocide, which is the worst possible crime because it means that a nation cannot be, this nation cannot be immortal. So the idea is this is the most criminal and ghastly thing that could possibly happen, but it's a very real fear. And this has one other curious effect, which is when the first good thinkers or serious thinkers try to retrieve in some way, we, everybody's aware that being a national is a kind of sudden change of consciousness. They're probably aware of that. But then what to do with what was already gone before? And this is wonderful passage in Michelet, which I quoted on numerous occasions, writing in the middle of an ancient century, when he says, you know, it's my duty as a historian to give life to those who are dead. I'm going to give the dead the help that I myself one day will need. Somebody's going to have to help me from disappearing into obscurity. And he said, this is our job, is to bring the dead to life so that they can be with us in one community, as if they were our family and were around still. It's a very strange kind of animist conception of things. But he does something even more interesting, which is what he says when he says that, I have to talk for them because they didn't understand the words that they used themselves. And what this means is that these Frenchmen didn't know they were Frenchmen. They were French women, but they didn't know who these are. I have to tell them, from back to life, that they're the same as us and belong to the same thing. And there's no limit to that. And they push further and further back into the time of the Gauls and so forth and so forth. So that the conception that it's the first time you see something really saying directly, they don't understand us. And we're going to have trouble understanding them what they are. And here you see for the first time the kind of crack in time that nationalism actually gets to feel uneasy about. Now, I'm going to switch to talk about these are the general things that appear as anxieties, expectations, and so forth of time in relation to it. Time is now, there's a big question mark over it. And I want to turn to something else which is really the second part of this discussion. And the best place to look for the change that happened is very dramatic and very, as it were, filming, if you like. In Japan, just after 1868, when the Chobunit was finally overthrown after 250 years, and the nationalist regime, so-called Meiji regime, took over. And almost immediately, there was a huge change in relation to, what we would say today, minorities. And these two are the so-called Harry, Ainu, who looked more like people from Siberia than anything close to Japanese physique and everything else, who, over time, were gradually kicked out of the main central island of Japan and pushed into the North, where they still are. And the extreme south was the Ryapuku Islands, which are in semi-tropical environment. And this was a group which had its own kingship and which paid tribute both to Japanese emperors who were all the Chobunit and to China. Now, the interesting thing is this, and it's well described by a colleague of mine, who most recently, a historian, studied this, that in the old days, which is pre-1868, the Japanese governments or Japanese elites had an idea about how to think about the world was horizontal, not vertical. That is, they looked out from their core and they see around them circles, wider and wider and more and more distance circles. And this can be Koreans here, Ainus there, Chinese there, whatever it is. They get more and more remote. But that's how they're thought about it. They are, as they were on the flat, as if the world was flat and you just, you know, go at the center and you grab and take a look at them. And of course, they were always less good, intelligent, brave, et cetera, et cetera. Then of course, Japanese themselves, that's it, much more. And what's interesting in this older concept was that the rulers in Tokyo insisted to the Ainu, they were forbidden to speak Japanese, they were forbidden to speak Japanese food, forbidden to dress like Japanese, had to have houses of their own time, and so forth. That is, they were definitely not Japanese and were forbidden to try to speak Japanese. In the same way, when the tribute bearers came from the Ryokukuro Islands, they were instructed to dress as weirdly as possible, straight in real hats and bright pink, yellow, green clothes of all kinds in Japanese rather, conservative and with better taste, probably. Otherwise, they wouldn't be received. That is, they had to show that they were not Japanese. After 1968, all of this changed completely and very fast. And this is partly the result of what's going on, European thinking, and it's near the beginning of social Darwinism. But nationalism is a key thing, that is, if they are part of the state, then they must be Japanese. But they are backward and we have to rush them up through the, what is it called? The time machine to get them. They are unfortunate younger brothers and younger sisters. And we have to give them Japanese names, they learn to speak Japanese, they have to have Japanese food, everything has to be Japanese. With the idea that they belong with us, but they didn't know they belong with us, we didn't believe it. And this kind of transformation of geographic frontiers or various views is in the process of being put on a vertical axis, an axis of time. And you can think about that axis eventually as a kind of autobahn where everybody's got to rush, rush, rush, rush, to leave ahead, to catch up with other people, not to fall behind and so forth. And this is quite important, and you find it in many post-colonial or ex-colonial bodies, groups who wanted to show they were very up to date and so forth. At the same time they had all these brothers and sisters who didn't speak the same language, who they had now to try to turn into whatever it happens to be, whether they're news or some other news or whatever it might be. So time is creating a, this vertical axis of time is putting pressure on everybody to get ahead as fast as possible because the big automobiles already whizzing down a highway towards where we don't know. And this intellectual conception, everybody, almost everybody in the far country has to be a citizen, sort of public, and we have to at least make a motion. Did we send it to the party also because if we don't do it, then we will be contaminated. That is, Burma is making themselves wonderful and highly advanced, but everybody looking at Burma said, well look, Burma has all these people who still can't speak on literates and so forth. This is shameful for the Burmese, it's how they have to show that they are on this, on the big highway. And while this is going on, communication is also sort of making empty time more visible and concrete. And you know about the mechanisms of this. I mean, first of all, the rise of steamships, railway systems and so forth, all of which made by rapid movement of people and written materials in a sick way. I sort of say, well, the boat will come on Tuesday and you'll have your Irish times, whatever it happens to be. I mean, it's all clocked in some way. But the crucial one actually is not, I think, for the late century transformation. The crucial one is the successful creation of under ocean telegraphic wires, not wires, whatever the others. What's the technical term for those things? Yeah, and the interesting thing about those things is that they were not actually owned by any state. The people with the enterprise that set up these, actually astounding things in the 1870s, maybe, were private corporations, mostly British, Burmese entirely. And this had a very striking effect because had it been in the hands of the states, probably there had been strict, very strict limitations on what the citizenry or the population that had access to it, because it was a commercial thing. It was available, really quite cheaply, for all kinds of people in the beginning of the 1870s. You can find the novels of that time. People sort of say, well, I just have to send a wire to my mother who is on the Riviera and I told her the chef to come home with this and the other, it's really almost instantaneous. So a friend of mine who knows the history of computers on the websites said, actually the early telegraph was faster than the internet until, maybe around 1998. And you get an idea of what's involved as a famous story of Teddy Roosevelt being so proud of himself that when he became president, he sent a telegram to himself going round the world to him and he got the paper came back to him within eight minutes. Not bad. But all kinds of people communicate in this way and what is striking is that across national boundaries, it was very useful for socialists and anarchists and all kinds of people with some kind of transnational ideas. The messages could be very short, they had to be properly sometimes disguised or coded, but they put people in the kind of the sense of immediacy. The book that I wrote about the uprisings in Cuba and the Philippines, these are very far away from each other by the spouse you can go. But already in the early 1990s, 1890s, they were busy emailing not exactly, not emailing the telegraph to each other. We are asking for help getting some guns, asking for help, how do you do guerrilla warfare? Where are you going to be next week? And so forth and so forth. And this had a very strong influence and the striking thing is that each and today, this is amazing to think about, there's still a lousy and quite important newspaper in London called The Daily Telegraph. It's a sign from the back time actually, Holland has also a pretty lousy newspaper called The Telegraph. So the wrinkles from the past are there. And this, as it were, internationalization where there was very interesting cross connections between universal ideologists, Marxists and socialists and so forth actually had a lot of connections with anti-imperial nationalism, even if they actually didn't agree on a lot of things. But this sense of having this kind of connection, you could think in some way, all these different nationalisms naturally fit together. But because they're in the glue of internationalism as well, international works in certain ways, they get accustomed to something which eventually will be the League of Nations or the United Nations. The idea that you could be as brothers comes out of this transformation of communication, methods, and the fact that at that time internationalism was really doing very well or told. Okay, the effects of this new kind of time were felt, I think, much more strikingly in the colonial world than in the imperial sentries themselves. And here I want to use, to show you some things, the way in which the life of colonial people or colonial elites shows some very striking things. And I'm going to say a few things about the Philippine national hero Jose Rizal born in 1962, executed in, sorry, 1862, executed in 1896. He was a brilliant novelist and writer. And in his first great novel, there is an extraordinary passage where the young hero has just come back from Europe and come back home, takes a carriage and goes past the municipal gardens, such as they are in Manila. And he sees it's a horrible mess. I mean, if he takes care of it, it's both the end, run down and so forth. And what he does then is immediately to think of the gardens that he's seen in Paris or London or Berlin and so forth. And he cannot look at this, his own garden as he were, anymore, as if it was just there like mother. He's already under the spell of what he calls in this marvelous phrase, which is el demonio de las comparaciones, which means the demon of comparisons. And the demon of comparisons is exactly what is behind people on the autobahn of nationalism heading right into the future. So he, this is really weird. He says that the gardens are over there, which is over the horizon. But anybody reading the book knows that the person who wrote this book is also Allah. He's sitting in Belgium. And his student, I mean his young hero, thinking about this Allah, but he himself is thinking about Manila, which has become over there because he's been living in Berlin and France and so forth for a decade. So as you look at this novel, it's a very weird, it's like looking in a hall of mirrors. You don't know exactly which is where, what is far off and what is near. It's actually quite exciting to watch this process happen. Because the reader, it depends on who the reader is. If the reader is a Frenchman or the reader is a Latina, what will come to their mind as over there will change almost immediately. So you get an instability very visibly in the idea which is caused by self-conscious comparison making. What is here and where is there? Am I here or am I there? There's another interesting moment in his letters where he takes the train from Madrid, which he hated, because that was the colonial prior, and he went across the border by train into France. And there's an extraordinary letter where he says, you know, it was so fantastic, the minute I crossed the border into France, what I saw was cleanliness, good hygiene, prosperity, free speech, democratic forms, and modern ideas. And what I am leading behind me in Spain, which is my imperial master, is filth, poverty, arch-reactionary Christianity, and fake democracy, actually run by an oligarchy with a monarchy attached. So this 15 minutes, as he crosses the boundary, he's moved up in time, and he's very conscious of it. He talks about his imperial master's ass backward. Here the demon of comparisons actually comes to his rescue. He's going to be in Paris, and he bought this garbage behind him. It's actually very, very fascinating. Then there's also the feeling that something was breaking up time in a certain way and also consolidating it, really beginning from the 1840s, 1838 and afterwards. This is the time when electricism, anarchism, nationalism, various kinds, socialism and so forth, start to operate from an industrial base. That is, this is the time of the bomb, which was a so-called Finian bomb, almost killed Emperor Neprovila III, who was very lucky not to have been killed in 1852. But the killings really start on a big scale. In the early 70s, the Tsar of Russia is bombed, actually suicide bombed, it was the first bombed in actually Kyroman. So the bomb throw took the second bomb and war took places according to the Tsar and they were both blown to pieces. But there were also a lot of French presidents, attempts to normalize the Germans. Ireland has a rich history of terrorist bombing, of course. And Italy, king was killed, Portugal was killed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, there's a lot on the move. And what's behind this is a change in the very concept of human history or it's beginning this way, which is not a kind of descent from a golden age, Eden and so forth and so forth. And the sins, the initial sin of human beings, which of course controls what the fate of everything that's going to come. So history is written from the back, as we've understood so. But this form works the opposite around. It's pulling people towards the future and the future is the crucial idea of the 19th century nationalism. I mean, Michel is even trying to grab the spirits of the 13th century French and pull them into the future within where they won't realize that they really are French. And this obsession with a time that has not yet come but is pulling us towards it. And here we might think about ecological doom or nuclear boom as being something that's pulling us towards some kind of an end. So there's a strong idea that something's coming, something's coming, something's coming and you don't know where it's going to come next. And sometimes with enormous energy and happiness. A very curious example that I want to just give of this era is a very curious business. One of Spain's best novelists of that period around the time of the 18th, 19th centuries, or 20th century, Pierre Barroja wrote a famous book about anarchists and radicals in Spain called Aurora Roja which is nice red dawn. And dawn is very important, something's coming. It's going to be good. And this is where all these, there's a little, the name of the clock where these characters hiding from the authorities hang out and drink beer, et cetera, and chat about this. And it's clearly set in the year of 1901, published in 1904, it's in 1901. And in that, one of the anarchists who comes from Catalonia is asked by the others, what's going on in California, it's like saying, what's going on in Seattle if you're in America? And this guy says, well actually it's been good that people who are doing the bombings are making these gorgeous little bombs in the shape of prunes, pomegranates, which is going out there in Spanish, so you know it uses to grenade apples and so forth, oranges. And some of them have little glass bubbles inside them so that when they blow up, it's like shrapnel effect, all kinds of bits of iron inside go in every kind of direction, it goes bonitas, which is really cute in bombs, they're doing it. And the strange thing is this, that in his second novel, which is written in 1890, and it was published in 1991, and the whole edition, which was very small, the center of the Philippines, where it was confiscated by the regime, the crucial element in this novel is a plan by desperate and intelligent people to blow up the entire ruling class of Spanish ruling class in Manila at a wedding. Hi, sir, ready. And the way it's gonna be done is that somebody has created an enormous lamp in the shape of Faberge pomegranate, but inside it is absolutely laced with nitroglycerin. And when the right moment comes and all the guests are there, then somebody will press the button and everything will be destroyed. Well, it doesn't work out quite that way. But the interesting thing is that a beautiful bomb has already been written about in 1890, but Pierre Roja doesn't find an anarchist doing this until over a decade later, which is very strange, because if Giselle had actually jumped ahead on the autobahn, and this is what's happening, and you guys haven't got there yet, but they will come. So you can see in this, it's almost futuristic, because in fact, there was never any bombings in Manila, and there were never mass demonstrations. The regime was very tough. So all this sort of violent revolutionary activity actually comes from Spain, but it's put into the national space of the still colonial society. Now, I think this is not coming to an end now. There's something about being in the situation, being colonized, or having formerly been colonized, that seems to show you the same effect of the kind of accelerating time. And I'm just thinking of three famous examples. First is Melville's, maybe Dick. Which has the best opening sentence of any novel that I've ever seen, call me Ishmael. What's striking about calling me Ishmael, this isn't a normal sentence. It says, call me Ishmael, I'm Ishmael. I know, you don't know who I am. So in the future, call me this, without any explanation. It's a command to the future, the readers after you get the book, or you get the book. It's very difficult to imagine that being the opening sentence of any body in civilized Europe. Secondly, there's this really miraculous and wonderful novel, written by a Brazilian, much idolatrousist in the 1850s, and a bit off in Melville. And the most famous of his books is Trans from the Translated, as the posthumous memories of bascudas. But they have memories costumously. The character in the book, actually, it is dead, but he's talking to you, and describes what has gone through in his life, and so forth. I mean, it's a fantastic idea. And again, you can simply not imagine, you know, Jane Austen, or Dick Hiddens, or Balzac, anybody else doing this kind of playing with time. And it's quite busy sometimes, because you're really not sure of which time you're in, the time of his death, of his disease, or something being pulled in from another place. And another example, not just the last one out here, is from Rizal's first novel, which ends up in tragedy, of course. But he has an epilogue, and the epilogue is very odd. He says, probably some of my readers would like to know what has happened to my characters. This is the day we're still around. And he said, well, some of the my readers know, and there are a lot of fondness that I would really like to kill, starting with character, so forth, and ending with character, so forth. And there are some ones that, you know, okay, I know what they are, and so forth. It's very strange, because suddenly, all these fictitious characters get killed, or, but don't get killed. And it's as if they have a life. It's supposed to end with Finnish, the novel ends. But there's a very rare case of a novel, which, as it were, jumps over Finnish. Yeah, it's not right here for a moment, but actually, I can tell you, when I quit, maybe I will kill one of them one day. It's a very extraordinary kind of expansion of the novel's time. Outside the actual boundaries of the novel itself. And this kind of experimenting, because in a way, what is being experimented with is the future of the characters, who are actually sort of real, even not so real, like them. Now, the final curiosity of all this, and it's very difficult, and I'm not a good expert in this book, but one of the curious things is that all these books, and this includes today's sci-fi and so forth, are still, oh my whole, stuck with the idea that any story has to be presented in the past tense. So you could say you're writing a book about the year 5,000 or something in the future, but the book is going to be written in. It was like that and she told her a friend, et cetera, et cetera. That is the command of the past tense and to some extent the present tense is very, very strong. And if you ask literally people, whether it be possible to write a novel in the future tense, usually the American moralists say no, no, no. That would be limiting the choice of the characters. There'd be no interest in reading the book because the future has already been decided by the future tense. The characters don't have to have any choice at all. That's why the past is necessary. Well, maybe, maybe not, I'm not quite sure. But I think that there are tenses like the future perfect where you can write something like, you have arrived in Dublin 10 days after the wedding. So it's a future act, but it's written in, it's already been decided previously, would have. But it's a very uncomfortable tense to use very often and continuously. The question is why, what is the control mechanism where this is not happening? I think that you can see in some of this anti-colonial stuff, something which is, I mean you can find all these novels, things that actually didn't take place at the time they were writing. They could read about it happening in Paris, but it hadn't happened in Venezuela, as you say. And so what happens is in some way that Paris has moved to Caracas or something of that type, that is the imagining of institutions which already is somewhere but haven't come to where we are. You can still write about those in the present tense, even though they're not there yet. So the language is impregnated with the future and with the anxieties about the future. And I'm just gonna have one small paragraph just to end on a more cheerful note. I first started to watch a door, black and white Hollywood cowboy movies when I was a kid in Waterford around 1947, every opportunity I ran down to, even if my mother didn't like it. And what the theme of these cowboy movies, obviously it was good versus evil, and for people of my generation, it was good, it's the Lone Ranger and his Indian buddy Ponto. And the normal story about that you watch is that bad people, villains, the ugliest and so forth, have just done something terrible, some criminal act is arson or loot, robbery or murder, whatever it is. And the Lone Ranger is always late. That is, the time he's arrived on the scene, the bad guys have headed off into the, over the horizon, getting away from all the loot as much as possible. So the Lone Ranger is back. He wasn't there in time for the crime and he's going to have to try and follow. But then he tells Ponto, these guys are about three or four hours ahead of us. The only way that we can get to them is to cut through the mountains by a shortcut that you know is difficult and nobody else knows. And then we can cut them off at the pass at the top. That's the way to do it. And this is really the energy behind anti-colonial nationalism. So they rush off, take the shortcut through the mountains and of course they arrive just in time, just as the bad guys are reaching the top of the pass. And then you get this interesting thing is that the robbers, and you can read this as imperialists if you want, believe they know their future, they're ahead, by four hours, they're gonna be okay. But it's the Lone Ranger and Ponto who knows their future better. And what their future is, no future. So they appear in the last part of the movie, with guns standing there, or in the right places, and they start gunning down all these bad people. And there in that moment, where they have cut history off of the past, they are the people who are the future and who destroyed the past. That is, these people who think they know where they are, exactly the people who don't know where they are, which is gonna be dead. And it was very comfortably mentioned from the message, but I think this kind of leapfrog, when you reuse the phrase, cutting history off of the past, that the past is another form of this organizing time. Future as something imagined, as something claimed, but it's the future that's really important. The climate service is important, but the real thing is that those who are ahead, so these are lots of mixed up spans. I'm afraid it's not very lucid, but because of my own stupidity and sonority, I didn't get the crystal clear original text. Thank you very much. Questions, comments? Thank you, David. Egyptian novelist Ahadath Swayh has a novel called The Knack of Love, published in 1999. It's about a century long history of anti-colonial and anti-over-terrorism as a future. At one point one of the main characters is reflecting about the possibility of the end of the date issue, at the end of 20th century poetry that she says, but not yet, and she repeats, not yet, but it is a time to come, but not yet. And yet is a very important book throughout the novel. And I was wondering if you would like to say something about nationalism and the time with the cultural and not-know-ya of the Arab uprisings, right now, or the anti-colonial and anti-over-terrorism? I wish I could. Unfortunately, I'm going to be Arabic. I would love to. I'm missing myself, so I'll come back in the next few minutes. I'm able to read Chinese and Arabic. Actually, it's actually English. She's British, Egyptian. Very good. I mean, you could compare the Arabic and English. Sorry. How do you compare the two? No, no, it is published originally in English. It writes from English on other editions. I have to look at the tenses. I'm just wondering, I think, I hope I've got it right. I think in your book you talk, you mentioned that it's not language that invents nationalism more, but it's being able to write. It's writing down a language, and obviously the motif for your talk today and through the book were not made to write all, but you will fare a lot to novels. But a lot of them are, you start novels where the writers also don't engage politically. And, well, my area of interest would kind of be France. And you see Victor Hugo, when he died, was two million people at his funeral, whatever, and then he had Zola, who was very engaged politically, and he had to share an evening in England with Dickens, who was a superstar. And I'm just wondering, now it seems that the novel is something more personal. It's less openly political. We don't have any of those superstars anymore, and that's possibly due to the rise of film and now internet and all these other ways of communication. And if this is true, it's a novel, as you talk about it, no longer has it, has this role. What does that mean for the imagined communities and what does it mean for how we conceive our older novels? Well, that's a big, big, big question. I'm not sure, I think, the kind of, you know, big-bomb novel, if it exists, it's going to be a spout of novels or something like that, or a space novel. But I think in that period, in the 19th century, the number of countries that actually were producing novelists at all, you know, to then, it's basically France and Britain, and then it's being pushed by Russia, and I guess another book is a terrific one, I think. But I think that sometimes I wrote a long article about Marcus Jose's El Havlendor, which actually had to be fascinating, historical novel, and it's creepy at one level and fascinating at another. And he does a lot of political novels, and some of them are terrible, and some of them are quite brilliant. So I didn't even thought that it's completely dead. Maybe in America, you'll find more than anywhere else. But it seemed to me, I was thinking that you could not imagine the people of the 19th century of Europe writing Cornish Nile or my hierarchies had just head off and had to kill them, and they said, you can see people. And I think in that sense, the past tense is the natural tense for the big dogs, even if you're a French-Mero German or an Englishman, talking one day past. And maybe the thing is that when this sort of starts to, and really after the world war II, not very much in the way of good British-English writers anymore, and sort of packed with bags from, so that the interesting cases come from Indians or Japanese or whatever that are living there. So in the sense that you probably never solve, which is how did the nation and an alternation at the same time, but it's a bad day damaged by the psychological disease, he says. Yeah, just before you died, Patrick Pierce was a corn-colored mother in which he projects a disembodied voice into the future. He basically says, I do not have grudge on Lord, my two strong sons that I have seen go out, they have a few for the glorious cause. And he puts into the mouth of the mother almost the manner by which he should behave in that future, from which he has now been abstracted, from which he proceeds to do that. But also interestingly what it seems to do is it seems to pull into the future the alibi for his own guilt that he is abandonment of the mother and leaving her there on this precipice of history. So it's both forward-facing and I would say backward-facing simultaneous. Have you thought about those kind of chots? No, I think that's a pretty fine example, I think, exactly. But the thing that's really pulling is the future. I mean, this kind of rebellion, I mean, it may not really succeed, but at least it's going to light the fires. I mean, it's going to come next. But it's the public and the private in some way also. And do you talk after teaching? I'm sorry, apologies. And then raising a question, but you know, there's an interesting case among nations that don't have a state, so for example in the Basque countries, the famous novelist, Savio Nandia, who wrote a novel called The Frozen Man, only in Basque. And now the interesting thing about Savio, as he is known in the Basque country, is that he was at one point a prisoner in a Spanish prison for a membership of a terrorist organization that was smuggled out by a rock band through the last week. And it was inside he had disappeared and writes from wherever he is. And about five years ago, the Basque critics who can nominate the prize from Madrid for the National Literature Prize, nominated him as the best novelist. But the novel that only appeared, and it's called The Frozen Man, right, to remember that, only appeared in Basque. So nobody else was able to see that. The nominee in the Spanish critics took on the advice, as they should, and nominated this guy as the best Basque novelist of all time, of all time, of that particular year. The interesting thing is, once the name came out, people pointed out that he was on the most wanted list from the Spanish police and the radio station. He was awarded the prize in the end, but he couldn't take it. But maybe, you know, there's still a future for the novel. I mean, in this case, talk to Bessa, and get it on every bookstore in Bilbao. It's never been translated to Spanish until now. And it's one of the great mysteries. So maybe there's still a future for the great novel. But he couldn't have accepted the prize. I mean, how could he accept the prize? His sister won't, I think, will see. I know, but the point is, that's a backwards slip. And what's that? Well, you should say, you know, like, you know, such slip, and they're never broken in. It seems rather tame to be a terrorist in them. But on behalf of the people who took the prize, I think this room is a counselling room for them. I'm thinking about your beginning and your reference to Benjamin and the notion of revolutionary movements being interspersed with messianic time or a defensive time. And I've always thought that there's an element of that in the anti-colonial movement. Again, and it's where it isn't simply the pulling of hands up to the present, but the redemption of the last past. And do you see that in anti-colonial? Do you see it in anti-colonial movements? Yeah, at certain times. I mean, that is his idea. What breaks, he's not happy about 100 genus anti-colonial. Is there not an ambiguity in the pulling up of I happen to get the novels you were talking about, that the claimed time, the claim of how much he is anti-colonial has a certain, you know, one that almost leads back as a pedantic to the claim of future plans and so on. Is that only possible with anti-colonial movements? Is that not also pulling up some time rather than pulling up a redemption of the last? Well, when he talks about it, I'm not sure I wrote this right, but it's something that comes suddenly. It's not planned. It's like an awareness of the time that's behind this. There's something that wouldn't have been foreseen, and so forth and so forth. So it necessarily is a kind of punctuating moment. It doesn't mean that everything will be at any time, but it is at the other end. I mean, that's going to be this kind of time. To pick up on your earlier response to the question about looking backwards and looking forward simultaneously, and also the final remarks in your paper about the pool of the future, I was thinking that in the utopian tradition, in particular, from Moore to the present day, and in particular the radical utopian tradition, there's a very similar emphasis on reclaiming the future. And yet, when one looks at aspects of the utopian tradition, the idea of a future tense towards which we constantly strive makes the idea this idea of a reaction of will and reason against and away from the here and now in the past makes the idea of a habitable present an impossibility. And so it seems that in some senses that radical utopian tradition mirrors aspects of what you're criticizing. You see that, for example, in Moore's utopia and the colonial thrust of Moore's utopia. But when one looks at other aspects of the utopian tradition influenced by anarchism or feminism or indigenous work, there's a very different conception of time which is perhaps more similar to that which was raised earlier of looking backwards and looking forward simultaneously so that the future isn't some horizon towards which we constantly strive but rather, you know, to take a metaphor from an anarchist writer Ursula Le Guin that it's like the porcupine in Indian law which looks forward even as it's moving backwards and so I was wondering, you know, thinking about that, perhaps you know, there is something to that idea of thinking about the interconnections between the past and the future and the relationship to the present, the idea of simultaneity rather than simply, you know, this idea of reclaiming the future puts one on this auto bond that you're speaking about. I hope that this will be let alone the assumption of all these small utopian communities that they never are. I mean, yes, for those community groups which are a lot in the United States actually in the 19th century we're exactly, as you say, forward and looking backwards at the same time but it's not this kind of rush, rush, rush, which you see in generally in anti-colonial nationalism the moment of independence is only a moment because it didn't stop and it got out of her losing at that point and said, we've got it and that's it. Actually, the curious thing is that one of this is actually an old man he actually wrote a story an essay called Philippine's Hundred Years From Now and it's like writing the future. Some of you are very smart in it but there are curious things like, you know, our national character which is great, necessarily and so forth and so on and against self-hidonization but it's very odd, I can't imagine many people in that period maybe in the ancient world not many people would do this there's a kind of faithfulness in this not just by ourselves so in that sense it's not exactly a technique because they have eyes all the time what other people are doing that's the strange thing about the United Nations I mean, every country thinks they're unique but they're only really unique because they got into the one of the concerned countries can all agree that they have one thing in common which is being nation so it's funny when you can't imagine a United religions or united ethnicities united leftist nations is okay and it's interesting to see why it's partly because the claims of ancient nationalism are quite small actually but the crucial thing is they don't expand the Southern American parliament the parliament of Ruda there's written a series of poems in the Israel and the Machu Picchu which she describes as he walks through his sense of regret of what was lost through a great nation do you say the kind of nationalism stands from the regret of what was lost by the colonial power it's a solid point that's regret it's being trashed more and more every day I mean there's thousands and thousands of people trampling around it and so forth I mean you can say well I want to confess that my ancestors destroyed this and destroyed that which is I suppose it's okay anyway but it doesn't mean much actually so I don't know whether this is I mean this is clearly pre-anecolarian period and most of the people who are busy nationalists are actually Spanish people there's not sure whether this is I mean it's obviously a guilty feeling but I'm not sure that it does much except to say well I feel guilty isn't it it's pretty cool that these pre-o-columbian sites are really really really alien interconnectionously and the Michelin effect has to take place you try to summon it from the past but I still think that the capacity to change things by nationalism is really fascinating and how it's done I mean this is a very interesting topic for somebody to write some interesting I mean that's the most obvious place if you go to let's say the one example I usually use is Shad in Paris which everybody knows has the most gorgeous painted dust from this what you find out is that this is a described as a fantastic moment in France's artistic development and then you realize that it's very unlikely that they thought the purpose of this building was to be very good chance that it was done by people who didn't even think they were French and we're doing it for local for God for Christianity of a type so what happens is it's possible to turn all this stuff consciousness is no longer exist on very exist can be then sort of rolled over into aspects of the French genius how artistic we are and understand the other so that's some of the transformations that's already discovered in the 19th century it means as it were making a leap over something that is not to be discussed time maybe for one more question last thing I mentioned is that it's so complicated never run out of difficulties, problems understand the circumstances maybe I can answer can you know if there's a of 19th century nationalism which is associated with the state of fairly organized movements in different hospitals where we talk about international communities and when we compare it with banal nationalism can we talk about different intersections time is this more everyday is it the terminal present when we talk about banal nationalism we're talking about the same I mean maybe I mean it's been followed but we could think that European community one of those things that eventually will all apart on the states the things that it brought we look at the way that you know Scotland and Catalonia and so forth this is the right time to depend on the other states and so forth a lot of it depends on the student that these supra national national organizations can command any depravity can anything else nothing thank you all very much for coming thank you very much