Imagined communities arose from the collapse of precapitalist temporal certainties, not just print capitalism

Evidence

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: Gives the reader the structural parallel between Anderson’s collapse of cosmology-history certainty and financialized capitalism’s collapse of temporal certainty as the precondition for speculative communities — the historical scaffolding for their causal argument.
• QUESTION: The parallel is doing analytic work: does financialized capitalism’s wedge between stable future and vertiginous present function analogously to print capitalism’s wedge between cosmology and history? Worth pursuing.