Abstract
Drawing loosely on Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope (1981), this chapter revisits the struggle over the meaning of the French Revolution, understood as a symbol of a new politics of time and space, in order to understand what is distinctive for the contemporary meanings of revolution. Moving to an analysis of new social movements and revolutions, associated with global moments of protest such as 1968, 1989, 2003, and 2011, the author argues that these phenomena should not only be understood as symptoms of the crisis of Enlightenment modernity as a hegemonic historical experience. They have also brought new forms of political subjectivity, involving novel time-space experiences as manifested in the instantaneous protest time of nowtopia and the articulation of antropo-/capitalocene as a new modern movement narrative. Importantly, these changes need to be understood in relation to globalized capitalism and a new hegemonic mode of historical experience, which the author calls advanced globality.
The astonishment which the French Revolution has caused throughout Europe should be considered from two different points of view: first as it affects foreign peoples, secondly as it affects their governments.
—Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1792, p. 6)
The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content.
—Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire (1937 [1852], p. 6)
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Notes
- 1.
This number is based on data from the following sources: Freedom House, Cross-National Times-Series Data Archive; Distributive Conflict and Regime Change Dataset; World Protest Dataset/GDELT http://fas-polisci.rutgers.edu/kaufman/HKT_Dataset_v1.1.pdf
- 2.
GAL (Green-Autonomous-Libertarian) and TAN (Traditionalist-Authoritarian-Nationalist) represent the two poles on the new political scale introduced by Hooghe et al.
- 3.
Two different positions have argued that the beginning of the Anthropocene as a geological epoch should be dated to (1) the beginning of the industrial revolution, or (2) the end of the Second World War. The first position tends to be defended by historians and social scientists (including those who prefer the concept Capitalocene), while the second is mainly defended by geologists and climate scientists. There are two motivations for the later date: it is after 1945 that we see “the great acceleration” of energy consumption and environmental destruction. Further, for geologists the fact that the postwar “bomb pike” caused the most pronounced marker in the bedrock in one million years is also important support for the relevance of this periodization (Hamilton 2017).
- 4.
Pleyers uses the concepts “The Way of Subjectivity” and “The Way of Reason,” and his definitions are not identical with Boltanski’s “artistic” and “social critique” but they refer to phenomena that are sufficiently similar that one could argue that Pleyer’s research and analysis contradicts Boltanski’s argument.
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Thörn, H. (2019). Revolution as a Politics of Time-Space: From Enlightenment Modernity to Advanced Globality. In: Namli, E. (eds) Future(s) of the Revolution and the Reformation. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27304-0_4
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