Modernity and the Politics of Newness: Unraveling New Time in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966 to 1968

Abstract

This article develops a new approach to the sociology of time by examining how the contentious politics of newness shapes modern revolutionary politics. It goes beyond the prevalent dualistic conception of social time and develops a tripartite model by distinguishing two kinds of unordinary time—carnival time and new time—that are conflated in the dualistic conception. We analyze the Chinese Cultural Revolution (CCR) as a crucial case for understanding the importance of new time to modern revolutionary politics. The effort to forge an ongoing, widely experienced “new time” created a series of contradictions and difficulties in the CCR regarding the power dynamics and boundaries of the experiences of radical newness. The eventual failure of the Jacobin politics of the CCR conditioned the post-CCR suspicion of mass movements and political changes. More broadly, the politics of the interpretation of time provides a different angle on the sociology of political modernity.