Present experience reencounters the past-as-once-imagined-future, shaping reorientation back

Evidence

Modern history clearly links time past to time present, and orients its narratives to the future. But present experience is also, as Koselleck points out, a reencounter with what was once imagined as the future. The disappointment or delight this may occasion therefore prompts a reorientation to the past that is more complex than the notion of “invented tradition” allows. The simultaneity of time that this generates is not to be confused, incidentally, with what Benedict Anderson identifies as the premodern religious imagination in which cosmology and history are confused, or as the modern secular imagination that links together disparate events on the one hand and nationwide readers on the other hand—two kinds of linkage mediated through the daily newspaper. Koselleck’s notion of simultaneity relates neither to a confusion of religious imagination nor to coincidences apprehended within homogeneous time. It is intrinsic to the structure of time itself. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1068

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts Koselleck’s simultaneity against Anderson’s print-capitalism secular imagination — a clean distinction useful for the secular-modernity argument. — connects to: Pedagogical reinvention begins by questioning the status quo and re-experiencing the ordinary. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 49
• QUESTION: Is Asad implicitly relocating ‘the secular’ within Koselleckian time such that Cooper’s Christian-coalition argument could be restated in temporal (not doctrinal) terms?