Intentional anachronism as an actual historical experience (on the example of the Internet community “Suffering Middle Ages”)

Abstract

The article formulates the concept of “deliberate anachronism”, which describes the widespread practice in modern culture of a mixing of different layers of time, the rejection of authenticity and the principles of historicism. Using the example of the community of the Suffering Middle Ages, it will be shown how elements of the past are used in the formulation of the present. The Suffering Middle Ages is a community that initially appeared on the Vkontakte social network and then spread widely. The main principle of the emerging materials – pictures with inscriptions – is the deliberate mixing of any medieval image with a short text corresponding to the present time. At the initial stage, the publications were associated with the culture of “funny pictures on the Internet”, ridiculing everyday, domestic situations. However, later, a significant part of the publications began to be made up of pictures that responded to the events taking place in society. This article will analyze this using the coronavirus pandemic as an example. Thus, a deliberate anachronism that “violates” historical time expresses modern historical experience, which, in the words of F.R. Ankersmit is a postmodern historical experience. Postmodern historical experience is understood as a concentration on the gap between the present and the past (some theorists call this phenomenon presentism), which becomes the basis of historical experience instead of the “independence of the past” in historicism. This mode of historical experience allows the materials of the community of the Suffering Middle Ages to become a successful system for formulating the present in the language of the past.