Get the latest tech news

Parochialism in time and space (2021)

When people who haven’t been to America talk about it, they get their ideas from the distorted cliches of the media.

There is an enigmatic quotation from Michel Foucault: “certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendants of time and the determined inhabitants of space.” I think what he was referring to was this double-sided process. Sometimes it feels as if there has been a wholesale break, so that people describing even the quite recent past talk as if they are anthropologists visiting a strange country. In the end, as our understanding of historical differences deepened, the question seemed irrelevant, so that the nineteenth century, with its breakneck progress, could still show a deep fascination with the past.

Get the Android app