Changing Perceptions of Time

The most interesting notion in Imagined Communities, for me, was Anderson's assertion that how people in general perceive time and their place in history changed drastically (probably somewhen between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries; he doesn't go into much specific detail, as it is tangent to his main argument), in part due to and in part causing a drastic shift in the narratives handle time, from essentially linear stories centered around the continuous life of a single individual or cohesive group to stories about multiple characters acting in parallel.

The shift in perceptions of history and the shift in narratives are related, but on the surface seem quite different, even at odds with each other. After all, Anderson describes pre-modern conceptions of history as a hodgepodge of the old and the new, with no boundaries between cause and effect, no strict segmentation into eras and epochs. It was this very lack of structure, he argues, that allowed painters to see nothing odd about dressing historical figures in contemporary garb, or adding a patron to a nativity scene. How can such simultaneity correspond with strictly linear narratives, and a later, more regimented conception of history with parallelism in fiction?

A starting point in thinking about this contradiction for me was the distinction between 'everything-always' simultaneity, and 'these-things-now' simultaneity.

The former label applies to the premodern historical soup that gave rise to those anachronistic paintings. Such an image did not conjure up what for a modern viewer is automatic - the assumption that that guy, there, in those clothes, was kneeling by that manger there, next to those three wise men, at a particular moment captured in the image. The participants in the scene were individually understood to have chronological life stories, but those stories themselves were lumped together into a temporally flat ontology. The painter could then easily pick out the wise men and the patron as equals in their devotion to Christ, regardless of their (to us) obvious temporal separation.

The 'these-things-now' system of thought, by contrast, quantized people's lives into temporally located moments. Where once it might have been of interest that a man read all the works of Plato over his lifetime, now it was of interest that that man read this newspaper this morning. Where before each person was evaluated as a whole and individually, now people were evaluated by parts, and in relationship to others.

It is easy to see how this change helped to bring on the age of imagined communities/networks - it is exactly a change away from disconnectedness and towards connection, an acceleration in the production of the very stuff of networks.

I would love to discuss in more depth how this change came about. It's a pretty remarkable thing, for the population of a planet, more or less, to fundamentally change the way they process the world around them. It reminds me quite a bit of the Babel event as described in Snow Crash - that too was a global change in perception, from unthinking reliance on practical nam-shubs to creative invention and reflection on the nature of the tasks once mindlessly performed. These two shifts are quite different in their content and import, but are nevertheless intriguingly similar.