UN COUNTRYBALLS Vs. the NATION STATE WHAT ARE
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The age of Salvini, Wilders, Lucke and Le Pen needs flag, interacting in often broken English (with the NATIONALISM IS AN INFANTILE THING. national identities to exist even if outdated, and the exception of countryballs that speak English natively), Countryballs’ format, even if often used to laugh at usually with regional and/or national variations (e.g. IT IS THE MEASLES OF HUMANKIND. presumed national identities, actually naturalizes their France’s Engrish is interspersed with French words). A. Einstein ft. Clusterduck very existence, once again demonstrating the extreme The characters poke fun at national stereotypes and resilience and pervasiveness of the cultural technology international relations, as well as historical conflicts. we call “nation-state”. So how to escape this rusty iron Countryballs have also been used in videos and cage? How to formulate an alternative? comics involving alternate and speculative history. It is an Internet meme which originated on the /int/ board The first step would be to demonstrate that national of German imageboard Krautchan.net in the latter half identities don’t exist – or, more precisely, they exist of 2009. The comics style may be referred to both only as long as our discourses and their constant as Polandball (by convention, even in cases where Clusterduck presents: reiteration allow them to do so. They are ‘imagined there is no Poland among the cartoon characters) and UN_COUNTRYBALLS vs. THE NATION STATE communities’, as Benedict Anderson showed in countryball (or, collectively, countryballs). his eponymous masterpiece. We need to imagine Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polandball#Background alternative communities, capable of satisfying the We live in times of hate and division. human desire for social connection and belonging while Uncertainty and fear are pushing an increasingly transcending old divisions and obsolete identities. fragmented social body towards shallow and polarizing ORIGINS AND HISTORY: answers, while the scattered remnants of late Polandball is a cartoon character drawn in the shape of Clusterduck Collective wants to use and subvert the modernity are seeking protection behind the ancient a ball with the color schemes of the Polish flag (white & Countryball format to explore alternative notions of walls of abstract identities: the eternal return of ‘blood red). It was originally featured in the multi-pane comic identity. Whether they are based around gender, and soil’. series that became popular in /INT/ (international) politics, pop-culture or post-national institutions: the board on Krautchan, a German-language imageboard ‘UNCOUNTRYBALLS’ show that different collective But like the fascists of yesteryear, today’s community similar to 4chan. These user-generated identities are not only possible, but already existing. neoreactionaries are ruthless tacticians, cynically cartoons typically follow the lives of ball-shaped exploiting the very technologies they claim to despise. creatures representing different countries (also known To favour their circulation and reflect the channels Social Media Platforms and digital communication as Countryballs) and “international drama” surrounding and tools used by the original Countryballs, the technologies have become essential tools of their their diplomatic relations. UNCOUNTRYBALLS are being presented both as a political propaganda. In this context, even (or Origin: digital Telegram sticker set and as a real-life sticker especially) seemingly innocent formats have proven Polandball comic strips were created by a British pack to be spread in public space. very effective at inoculating neoreactionary views into individual known as “FALCO” in the /INT/ board of the unknowing public. Memes, in particular, have lately Krautchan[1] around September 2009. Unlike other The UNCOUNTRYBALL project is part of Clusterduck’s shown to be powerful vectors of social change, shifting image-boards on the German-language site, /INT/ EMAP-EMARE residency at IMPAKT. global narratives. board[2] is frequented by English-speaking netizens from the rest of Europe and the world. According to With their new work, Clusterduck want to take a look several sources[3], FALCO’s original comics were at an important example of such a seemingly trivial decidedly apolitical and aimed to poke fun at a fellow format, the so called “Countryballs” (or “Poland- WHAT ARE POLANDBALLS? Polish /INT/ user “Wojak”, who frequently posted in less balls”): very simple, comic representations of national Polandball, also known as countryballs, refers to user- than perfect English. One of his memorable quotes “I identities and stereotypes, which in their interactions generated visual art, typically manifesting as online Know That Feel” also became a meme in May 2010. reflect widespread cliches and an overly simplistic comics, where countries are personified as (typically) Source: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/polandball view of world history. spherical personas decorated with their country’s know every person in a nation, just as one cannot which places in contiguity news of events that share COMMUNITIES AND RELEVANCE: know every aspect of its economy, geography, history, only their temporality. (...) countryball comics have become a global internet and so forth. But as Anderson is careful to point out It was the establishment of print culture, firstly through phenomenon, with multiple internet platforms being (contra Ernest Gellner) imagined is not the same thing the mechanical production of Bibles and then even dedicated to the peculiar characters. On Facebook, the as false or fictionalized, it is rather the unselfconscious more strongly through the distribution of newspapers, POLANDBALL page has gathered over 400.000 likes, exercise of abstract thought. that was the most important causal factor in creating and other Facebook pages such as USABall, EUBall The imagined community is limited because the cultural conditions needed for the idea of nation and Germanyball also gained a fair share of followers. regardless of size it is never taken to be co-extensive to become the political norm. Print had three effects Apart from these usual suspects, the countryball with humanity itself—not even extreme ideologies according to Anderson: first, it cut across regional culture on Facebook is quite a deep rabbit hole of such as Nazism, with its pretensions to world idiolects and dialects, creating a unified medium obscure countryballs, with pages dedicated to Ancient dominance, imagine this; in fact, as Giorgio Agamben of exchange below the sacred language (Latin in Empires (SPQRball), meta-pages (The Polandball has argued such ideologies tend to be premised on Europe) and above the local vernacular; second, it Report) and religions (Christianityball). The Polandball a generalization of an exception. Its borders are finite gave language a fixity it didn’t previously have, and Wiki is another bastion of countryball information, but elastic and permeable. The imagined community slowed down the rate of change so that there was which features 12.779 page-entries, 480.159 page- is sovereign because its legitimacy is not derived far greater continuity between past and present; and edits and 30.380 media files. In China, the Polandball from divinity as kingship is—the nation is its own thirdly it created languages of power by privileging page on Baidu Tieba forms an alternative to the often- authority, it is founded in its own name, and it invents those idiolects which were closest to the written form. blocked Western platforms. its own people which it deems citizens. The nation Anderson’s emphasis on the print culture in all its forms, (...) the most prominent Polandball-sphere on the can be considered a community because it implies but particularly the newspaper and the novel, has been internet [is] r/polandball on Reddit. This ‘subreddit’ (a a deep horizontal comradeship which knits together extremely stimulating for a number of scholars working subplatform on Reddit) has gained significant traction, all citizens irrespective of their class, colour, or race. in a wide variety of different disciplines. and (...) has seen a sudden increase in attention in 2017. According to Anderson, the crucial defining feature of In the current day, Polandball is especially interesting in this type of comradeship is the willingness on the part Source: https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/ authority.20110803095958187 light of (1) an alleged increase in geopolitical drama, (2) of its adherents to die for this community. memes being used for political meme-ing and meme The nation as imagined community came into being warfare, which awkwardly positions the countryball after the dawning of the age of Enlightenment as both a Download the telegram stickerpack: comics who have been satirizing politics for a longer response to and a consequence of secularization. It is time and (3) Polandball in comparison to omnipresent the product of a profound change in the apprehension ‘regular’ internet memes. of the world, which Anderson specifies as a shift from sacred time to ‘homogeneous empty time’, a notion he Source: https://networkcultures.org/longform/2017/11/15/ #uncountryballs polandball-is-of-reddit-how-rpolandball-transcends-memes- borrows from Walter Benjamin. In sacred time, present through-carefully-curated-geopolitical-satire/ and future are simultaneous. Because everything that #clusterduck occurs is ordained by God, the event is simultaneously something that has always been and