[lit-ideas] The time of nations (was Re: Peace Mystics)
- From: "Torgeir Fjeld" <phatic@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2008 23:44:28 +0100
"Mike Geary" wrote:
> Technology and economics are fast eroding the very notion of
> nationality
To offer a point from Benedict Anderson here:
What nationalism offers is a new conception of time. (To Anderson nations are
not eternal entities, as they are to writers such as Anthony Smith.) While
under dynastic governance time was considered linear and unitary, and
telological -- London or Madrid, as the case may be, was the locus in which
events passed. Things going on in the provinces being reflections of the
imperial center. The center consequently being the beginning and end of all
possible events on a linear time scale.
Nations were formed as entities with indigenous time scales. News papers made
it possible to think events happening simultaneously, transverse-time, as
Anderson puts it. Not only did events take place in Sao Paolo while other
events took place in Lissabon, but events took place in Buenos Aires, others in
Lima, and yet again others in Madrid.
This was among the mechanisms that finally eroded the empire: It was no longer
possible to convince its subjects that all events in the provinces was a mere
reflection of the official time scale that occured in the emperial center. Once
lost, the unitary, teleological conception of time prevalent under dynastic
rule could not be retrieved.
Now if this was a cruical historical shift to nationalisms, how do we imagine
tempooral-spatial relations in a post-nationalist world order?
Best regards,
Torgeir Fjeld
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