Revolution as a Politics of Time-Space: From Enlightenment Modernity to Advanced Globality

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.