From Revolution to Development: Chronotype, Metapragmatics, and Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour

Eugene Yu Ji, The University of Chicago

This article integrates the concepts of chronotype and metapragmatics from contemporary linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics to advance the recent progress in the sociology of time and the politics of newness (Xu & Reed 2023). Drawing on Bakhtin's notion of chronotype (Bakhtin 1981) as conceptualizing socio-political space-time, the paper proposes a necessary linkage between the sociology of time with the sociology of place (Gieryn 2000). Employing metapragmatics (Silverstein 1993) as a higher-order hermeneutic tool, the paper develops a new methodology to analyze the dynamic shifts between different social time conceptions (Xu & Reed 2023). Empirically, the paper investigates texts and events within and surrounding Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour as pivotal for the shift from modern revolutionary to modern anti-revolutionary politics. I analyze how Deng’s Southern Tour marks and stabilizes developmentalism as a new spacetime conception for post-Cultural Revolution and post-Tiananmen modern China. The new conceptualization of China’s socio-political spacetime as anti-revolutionary developmentalism is further performatively enabled and legitimized by metapragmatic tactics such as anti-ideology and pro-action discourse. Together, I argue that the politics of newness through social spacetime and metapragmatics are crucial for comprehending the ethotic transformation in the socio-political conception from a reactive suspicion of revolution and mass movement to a proactive projection towards modernity as development, such as in the early-1990s China. References: Mikhail Bakhtin. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press (1981). Gieryn, Thomas F. “A Space for Place in Sociology.” Annual Review of Sociology 26: 463–96 (2000). Silverstein, Michael. "Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function." In J. Lucy (Ed.), Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, 33-58. Cambridge University Press (1993). Xu, Xiaohong., & Reed, Isaac. A. “Modernity and the Politics of Newness: Unraveling New Time in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966 to 1968.” Sociological Theory, 41(3), 229-254 (2023).

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 Presented in Session 28. From Nomadic Imperialism to Imperial Patronage: Rethinking Power Dynamics in Historical Contexts