The Nation in Heterogeneous Time

Abstract

Benedict Anderson, in his now classic Imagined Communities (1983), has made famous the argument that the nation lives in homogeneous empty time.¹ In this, he was, in fact, following a dominant strand in modern historical thinking that imagines the social space of modernity as distributed in homogeneous empty time. A Marxist could call this the time of capital. Anderson explicitly adopts the formulation from Walter Benjamin and uses it to brilliant effect to show the material possibilities of large anonymous socialities being formed by the simultaneous experience of reading the daily newspaper or following the private lives of popular fictional characters. It is the same simultaneity experienced in homogeneous empty time that allows us to speak of the reality of such categories of political economy as prices, wages, markets, and so on. Empty homogeneous time is the time of capital. Within its domain, capital allows for no resistance to its free movement. When it encounters an impediment, it thinks it has encountered another time — something out of pre-capital, something that belongs to the pre-modern. Such resistances to capital (or to modernity) are therefore understood as coming out of humanity’s past, something people should have left behind but somehow haven’t.