Existential uncertainty, not just political economy, enabled national imagined communities

Evidence

Before outlining the origins and infrastructures of the first national imagined communities, Anderson (1991) described the temporal circumstances that prepared the ground for their emergence. Of fundamental importance was the loss of a temporality “in which cosmology and history are indistinguishable” (36), unsettling previous certainties around temporal continuity and “simultaneity across time.” The newly arrived type of social time gave a new, sociospatially defined, “horizontal” meaning to existential questions of life, death, loss, and servitude. The great achievements of print capitalism, most notable among them the commodification and acceleration of communications, “drove a harsh wedge between cosmology and history” and impelled people “to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways” (36). It was against the backdrop of this heightened existential uncertainty that the “revolutionary vernacularizing thrust of capitalism” (39) originally developed, generating a new sense of simultaneity among members of imagined communities. For Anderson, therefore, the collapse of precapitalist certainties was just as crucial as material political economy in this process. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 95

Categorization

• XREF: Establishes the historical precedent (pre-modern cosmology collapse → imagined community) that the 2008 uncertainty collapse parallels, keying the reader’s causal chain. — connects to: Uncertainty deepens societies’ need for narratives and makes finance their model — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 36; Shared uncertain futures are central to how imagined communities bind people together — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 158