Crisis
Kathryn Furlong
In an era increasingly defined by crisis, rethinking how we understand and approach this term is key. Emphasizing the everyday nature of crisis and situating the origins of crisis in the everyday, thereby drawing the focus away from the macro-scale to the real and lived, is central to developing creative and collective ways to confront the seemingly insurmountable crises multiplying before us. Dominant approaches to crisis are stuck at the macro-scale, where something akin to a crisis arms race has taken hold, one from which none will be left unscathed. This imagined call to action results in demobilization. This is what Joseph Masco (2017, S65) calls the “crisis in crisis,” whereby “[t]he power of crisis to shock and thus mobilize is diminishing because of narrative saturation, overuse, and a lack of well-articulated positive futurities to balance stories of end-times.”
The problem with “crisis” as a macro phenomenon
Today, crisis is everywhere. Surrounding us, weighing down on our minds and our futures. We are drowning in the coming catastrophe, the mounting crises, from climate and the environment to the economy and finance, migration, and housing, to name a few. For many, it is no longer enough to talk of distinct crises. The world is defined by poly-crisis, signifying the interconnectedness of the world at the abyss. The poly-crisis underscores the overlapping and interlocking nature of the manifold crises at our doorstep. These crises cannot be understood independently; they reinforce one another, feed off each other, spiraling into ever greater vortexes of unpredictability and pain. Upending the world as we know it, our imagined pre-existing stability is a “nexus of reciprocally entwined crises characterized by complex feedback loops, blurred boundaries, cascade effects, and (in many cases) mutual amplification” (Albert 2024, 2).
There is a certain sense to all of this. We witness it. The repeated financial meltdowns. The forest fires that poison our summers, forcing us indoors, or on the run, as the flames increasingly encroach on human settlements, that are themselves ever more flammable, filled with plastics and synthetics that do not burn but burst into flame (Vaillant 2023). Droughts followed by catastrophic floods. People on the move, from violence, war, climate disaster, and poverty: conjured as a migration crisis rather than one of produced inequality. Housing prices are climbing ever upwards, financialized, nowhere to live, and salaries, ever more precarious. Viruses, more virulent, spread through habitat loss as cities gobble up more and more land, leaving less and less room for the non-human world. Crisis is everywhere. We are living it. Yet, worse is to come. It is on the horizon, imminent. 2030, 1.5°C. A matter of time. No avoiding it. It is beyond our grasp, out of control.
Yet, we must do something. But what? For many, a crisis is a call to action. As Barry Gills (2010, 279) shows, definitions of crisis – from medicine to Marxism – emphasize a moment when the established order is destabilized, a turning point is reached, “provok[ing] a historical opening” from which a paradigm shift may emerge. Crucially, however, the outcomes are indeterminate; the contemporary rise of right-wing authoritarianism is likewise occasioned through crisis. Indeed, for Janet Roitman (2014), crisis is inherently conservative. Rather than a breaking point that is generative of change, time and again, “crisis” serves to reinforce the status quo and hold established hierarchies in place. Tying these insights together, Bruno Latour argues that our collective paralysis before the overwhelming nature of the environmental crisis has led to a surge in nativism, a longing for the old order, a situation he refers to as “the great regression” (interviewed in Latour et al. 2018).
Crisis: reinforcing the status quo
A rethinking of crisis is in order. It begins with a recognition of crisis as a political tool used to frame particular sets of circumstances and thereby produce meaning. While we may think we know a crisis when we see one, following Janet Roitman (2014), a crisis is better understood as a signifier, a descriptor, a denunciation. In her book Anti-Crisis, she argues that crisis is not an observed fact, but a “second-order” description. Drawing extensively on the work of Reinhart Koselleck (2002, 1988), she builds the theoretical claim that crisis acts as “a starting point for narration;” it is “an observation that produces meaning,” it is “claimed” (Roitman 2014, 34, 39). The associated rhetorical shift refocuses attention on crisis management, obscuring more fundamental questions about the processes at work. The effect is to shore up the system, not reform it.
Numerous studies show this to be the case. From the debt crises of the 1980s to the 2008 financial meltdown, and even the devaluation of the German coal sector, crisis has been “capitalised on” to bolster what was apparently in crisis in the first place, be it neoliberal financial capital or coal plants (Krippner 2011, Tooze 2018, Lazzarato 2015, Furnaro 2023, Crouch 2011, de Goede 2005). To do so, moreover, those most affected by crisis – those facing debt, unemployment, and precarity – must sacrifice to right the ship and stabilize the system (Armingeon and Baccaro 2012, Tooze 2018); here, racial tropes are mobilized to justify the subjugation of groups of people to extractive policies like austerity that are discursively mobilized as a necessary response to “crisis” (Mavelli 2017). Indeed, as the theory of accumulation by dispossession shows, a “crisis” of capital is necessary for its continued accumulation (Harvey 2005), whether through urban blight, deindustrialization (Smith 2017), or shipbreaking in South East Asia (Sibilia 2019).
Contemporary crisis saturation only makes matters worse. For Joseph Masco (2017, S67), crisis “has become a counterrevolutionary idiom,” whereby “the crisis in crisis today marks a new political modality that can experience repeated failure as well as totalizing external danger without generating the need for structural change.” He sees this as emanating from a strategic crisis “saturation,” whereby the latter loses its power to shock and mobilize. Bombarding the public with crisis is “a means of stabilizing an existing condition rather than minimizing forms of violence across militarism, economy, and the environment” (Masco 2017, S65). In Don’t even think about it: Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change, George Marshall (2014) relates the story of a British judge who, faced with early eye-witness revelations of the scope of the Holocaust, responds that he believes the victim’s testimony and yet cannot believe it; he is incapable of grasping and assimilating the overwhelming magnitude of the horror. For George Marshall, climate change and how we discuss it present a similar paradox. Faced with something insurmountable, the broader public is left with little to do but wait for Le mal qui vient [the coming evil], as Pierre-Henri Castel’s essay on living in the end times is titled. He argues that, as climate catastrophe progresses, societal collapse is much more likely to ensue than collective action, as people struggle over the last remnants of possible survival (Castel 2018).
Emphasizing the everyday nature of crisis
As such, it is of urgent necessity to extricate ourselves from the crisis paradox. That is, the imagined call to action that demobilizes in the face of apparently insurmountable hurdles, reinforcing the status quo. To recover “crisis,” we need a new narrative. A key strategy is to refocus the narrative from the macro scale of imminent, unimaginable, and interlinked catastrophes to that of the individual, the household, and the everyday. For Lauren Berlant (2011, 10), crisis is not exceptional, “but a process embedded in the ordinary.” Like Janet Roitman, she challenges the idea of crisis as a break, emphasizing that it is an amplification of processes already in motion. For the vast majority of people living under neoliberal precarity and increasing government austerity, crisis is ever looming in the form of debt, unemployment, divorce, illness, and so on. In response to the continuity of everyday crises, people adjust, adapt, and circumvent in an effort to cope. Taking the notion of the everyday elaborated by Henri Lefebvre (2004) and Michel de Certeau (1990), whereby practice is structured through capitalism, Lauren Berlant flips it on its head, emphasizing that practice develops instead in response to the disorder and precarity generated by capitalism. Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman (1995, 326) come to a similar conclusion. For them, state crises in the Global South ought to be approached as “lived experience.” In such contexts, the everyday experience of crisis is “limitless,” it is constant, such that the response is “the routinization of a register of improvisations.” That is, in response to the omnipresence of everyday crises, people adapt and invent.
The general view is that the crisis originates at the macro-scale and permeates through society (Walby 2015), engendering widespread household and individual crises of debt, unemployment, illness, displacement, and so on. But what if the crisis was better understood as emanating from the everyday, from the individual and household scales? Here, what comes to be understood as a crisis is actually a manifestation of everyday crises that have exceeded state or elite control. Following Gills (2010, 282), for example, to stave off a fiscal crisis, the state must increase wealth extraction from the “base.” This arguably creates a myriad of everyday crises as people struggle to absorb a variety of payments in the form of taxes, user fees, and cuts to services. The state enters a fiscal crisis when the base is no longer able to meet the increasing levels of extraction. This means that for the ordinary citizen, an everyday crisis is a weighty reality long before the broader crisis sets in. It is when everyday crises can no longer be contained that a broader crisis is declared (Furlong forthcoming). Indeed, everyday crises of debt and precarity have been shown to build into broader crises, not only of state debt, but of environmental degradation and health epidemics, such as the spread of AIDS in South Africa (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987, Cooper 2008).
Rethinking crisis involves scaling it down from the macro scale and understanding it through its lived realities. This brings “crisis” to a manageable scale, on which it is possible to act, and which is less amenable to obfuscation through discursive reworkings of the status quo. Crisis needs to be seen and addressed from the realm of the everyday. Such an approach likewise underscores the crisis of living and getting by, or exposure to hazard – environmental or other – long before a macro crisis takes shape. By working on crises from the everyday, not only are manageable strategies possible, i.e., reducing precarity and enhancing equity, but one can build on and learn from the creativity of everyday coping that is already widespread. Thinking the crisis from everyday shows that social justice is a key path out of our raging and compounding crises.
References
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