A public opinion poll conducted in February 2015 found that over 73% of Russians described their country’s situation as a “crisis” (Interfax 2015). 1 It is perhaps unsurprising that Russians would describe their country as being in the midst of crisis, given recent economic and political history. What is interesting, however, is that while there was overwhelming agreement that there was a crisis, there was no clear consensus on what had caused the crisis, why it was happening, and what Russia would be like if it was not in a crisis. This was evident in the variety of explanations that poll respondents offered for what had caused the crisis. These included: external pressure from the USA and EU, falling oil prices, poor economic management, a lack of investment in Russian industries, a lack of democracy, and some even suggested it was caused by the laziness and fecklessness of Russian character. Neither was there agreement on whether the Russian government was successfully responding to the crisis or making it worse, or who was to blame, and what could be done about it. While most could agree that there was a crisis, there was little agreement on what had caused it, who was responsible and what could be done to stop it. There were similarly diverse results when it came to the respondents’ explanations of what the crisis meant, or what its symptoms were. These symptoms proposed included inflation, falling living standards, growing unemployment, among other things. The survey suggested that while most Russians could agree there was a crisis, they did not agree on what it was that was in crisis, or even what crisis meant.
This ambiguity not peculiar to Russia. Since the onset of the “Global Financial Crisis” of 2008 academics, economists, politicians, journalists as well as the wider public have been arguing about the cause of that crisis, its meaning and its consequences. For many on the political left, the crisis seemed to confirm the bankruptcy of neo-liberal economic doctrines, which had dominated Western democracies since the 1970s and 1980s. To them, the crisis had exposed the unsustainability and injustice of these doctrines, and demonstrated the need for social reforms or the return of anti-capitalist political movements. For others, the crisis was the outcome of poor regulation of the financial sector, which just needed stimulus and regulatory fine-tuning. Still others saw it as a moral failure; evidence of greed, opportunism, reckless consumerism, or as the exploitation of vulnerable home-buyers by predatory bankers. Many on the political right focused on the fiscal pressure placed on the state and argued for renewed efforts to reduce government spending, especially when it came to social expenditure such as welfare provisions or education.
Amid this noisy public discussion, the idea of “the crisis” worked as a kind of semantic anchor, around which a plurality of political narratives competed for discursive space. The ability to define “the crisis” according to one’s own terms and one’s own political outlook became a matter of decisive political consequence. Battle-lines were drawn between rival policy approaches calling for either “fiscal austerity” or “social investment”. These approaches often developed theoretical and empirical explanations of “the crisis” which, if the evidence was accepted, necessitated specific courses of political action (Blyth 2013; Walby 2015). Moreover, the dramaturgy of “the crisis” further intensified this debate: The use of crisis to describe a situation suggests some sort of decisive and corrective response is urgently required. In such situations, political actors move to take advantage of a crisis; to try and monopolize its meaning and thereby validate their agendas and projects, lest their opponents do the same. In this way, the idea of crisis has the ability to define the contours of political discourse, to absorb rival positions in a struggle over its meaning and consequence. The concept of crisis thereby functions as a “legitimation device” (Maton 2013, pp. 45–47); a discursive means by which symbolic control can be exercised over a domain of facts. The stakes can be high because “crisis” is able to describe situations where decisions are needed, and the way a situation is described also prescribes how those decisions are to be both framed and settled. “Crisis” creates an “arena of struggle”, whereby opposing parties attempt to gain a monopoly over the way it is defined. To gain such a monopoly allows the consolidation of legitimacy for prescriptive agendas that are implicitly embedded within the way a crisis is described.
This book is concerned with how theorists within the humanities and social sciences have used the idea of crisis. As I will demonstrate, much of the ambiguity and rhetorical force of the concept, in its popular use in politics and public life, is also present in its academic theorizations.
A Timely Topic
Crisis has now become a “timely” research topic. And most of the scholarship on crisis thus far has had political motivations. Since 2008, there has been a burgeoning of academic “interventions” which have described the Global Financial Crisis in various ways and thereby proposed corresponding prescriptions. Many hundreds of books and articles in this vein are now available, and they show little sign of abating soon. What the majority of these texts have in common is the unquestioned starting premise that there is a crisis, and that the existence of a crisis is what makes the research opportune. The crisis is presupposed as an object, ready to be understood. This presupposition serves as the ontological starting point for investigations into the crisis, and the account may then proceed by way of theoretical or historical explanations of the crisis. This is the ground upon which “crisis theories” routinely do their work. It is reasonable to argue that theory and research is required in times of crisis, and it has become something of a routine amongst some academics to proclaim crises in the very phenomena their work is most concerned with. It is through constructing a narrative account of the causes and symptoms of a crisis that scholars generate evidence which points towards solutions, remedies, or lessons. The question of the discursive constructing crisis in the first place—the question of crisis as a concept—is habitually eluded (Roitman 2014). Usually, if the conceptuality of crisis is questioned, it is done with the aim of operationalizing “crisis”: attempting to clear up conceptual ambiguities in order to achieve a working definition which better corresponds to the reality of the crisis that is already under investigation.
A rather stark example of the above is Silvia Walby’s baldly titled book Crisis (2015). The text is intended as a feminist and social democratic intervention by way of sociological explanation, and it is from Walby’s description of crisis that her prescriptive advice follows. The book begins by asking, reasonably enough, “what crisis?”. With this, Walby establishes clearly that the interpretation of crisis is a thoroughly political matter, and the struggle to publicly interpret crisis is driven by political agendas. However, for Walby the interpretation of crisis is assumed to be a problem of representation. The crisis is presumed to be real—it exists a priori—and the problem of crisis boils down to the political interests of those doing the interpreting. In other words, Walby begins within the unquestioned assumption that there is a crisis, and accepting the argument of her book depends on the reader also adopting this assumption. The apportion of guilt and innocence is a strong theme in Walby’s account. She draws the battle lines between two rival camps of crisis interpretation each with their own conceptualisations of economics and progress. On one side are the forces of neo-liberalism and especially the UK Conservative Party who, guided by self-interest and free-market ideology, have unleashed a “cascade” of crises across society. As Walby recounts it, the crisis began with the deregulation of the finance industry, developed into risky and unstable markets, caused a collapse during 2008 which brought about recession, unemployment, and then a fiscal crisis, which was then used by David Cameron’s Conservative government to justify undemocratic austerity measures. The other side are the forces of social democracy and feminism, who have long fought for gender representation and social justice and have thus far succeeded to a degree in destabilizing the “gender regime”. However, to resolve the crisis caused by the neo-liberals they must push their fight for gender representation (as well as a list of other nominal intersectional categories) into the organizations of the finance industry itself, from where they will “re-gender” the economy, “re-regulate” finance, and presumably save the day. Underneath Walby’s jargon about “complexity” and “contested modernities” her crisis theory amounts to a rather conventional account set against a familiar narrative of good versus bad (see Streeck 2016). It is about a world that has gone wrong because of the misguided decisions and dubious interests of guilty parties, but which can be restored by the superior insights and good intentions of Walby and her allies. The prescribed path out of the crisis has been encoded into the narrative structure of the crisis itself.
My intention here is not to claim that Walby is wrong, nor is it to criticize the social democratic or feminist politics of the book. Rather, the point here is to bring attention to a narrative structure which the concept of crisis enables in her work. It is the description of a world marked by failure; from which causes and solutions, villains and heroes, the rational and the irrational, justice and injustice, the real and the ideal, can be distinguished.
Talking about “crisis” like this, as language that has a performative capacity, points to another growing stream of research. This second stream has asked questions of the formal or conceptual nature of “crisis” itself: Its origins, its meaning, the way it performs as a linguistic or conceptual device, and its role in constructing world-views and political narratives (see e.g. Brunkhorst 2011; Roitman 2014; Cordero 2016; Esposito 2017). This book is situated within, and contributes to, this stream of research. It is a research stream which tries to make new sense of a problem which Reinhart Koselleck once identified:
Koselleck’s words capture well a cluster of criticisms which are frequently levelled at “crisis” as a concept: Th...From the nineteenth century on, there has been an enormous quantitative expansion in the variety of meanings attached to the concept of crisis, but few corresponding gains in either clarity or precision. (Koselleck 2006, p. 379)