Global Discourse • vol 12 • no 3-4 • 692–696

© Author 2022 • Online ISSN 2043-7897

https://doi.org/10.1332/204378921X16376650676641
Accepted for publication 23 November 2021 • First published online 18 March 2022

Special Issue: Critical Explorations of Crisis:

Politics, Precariousness, and Potentialities

RESEARCH ARTICLE: AFTERWORD

The ends of perpetual crisis

Janet Roitman, Roitmanj@newschool.edu
The New School, USA

We now live in perpetual crisis: ‘an age of crisis’, ‘times of crisis’, ‘chronic crisis’ and so on.
These expressions seem to merely describe a state of affairs, but they are foundational claims.
The concept of crisis qualifies a world: it determines what gets to count as an event and what
gets inscribed as history in the ongoing stream of competing phenomena. Crisis is a naturalising
category that subsumes specificity. It has colonised the life-worlds of communities across the
globe and become foundational to knowledge production despite its Christian-European
genealogy. Analyses that attempt to gain insights by elucidating discourses of crisis, or how
people use the term ‘crisis’, and the experience of crisis, or how people narrate crisis, disregard
the constitutive questions that make crisis a primary means of qualifying the observable world.
Asking those constitutive questions has political import because they raise the long-standing
problem of representation – of the Other, of alterity, of language and of experience. The
problem of representation has been a central topic of epistemology and the principal subject of
critique in the social sciences and humanities. It should not be ignored, and it compels us to
ask: what becomes of the concept of crisis when we problematise practices of representation?

Key words crisis • anti-crisis • epistemology • representation • decolonisation

To cite this article: Roitman, J. (2022) The ends of perpetual crisis, Global Discourse,
12(3-4): 692–696, DOI: 10.1332/204378921X16376650676641

The essays collected in this special issue of Global Discourse remind us that we live in
perpetual crisis. This is a way of indexing the state of human affairs: ‘an age of crisis’,
‘times of crisis’, ‘chronic crisis’ and so on. These expressions seem to merely describe
a state of affairs or an experience of time, but they are foundational claims: they are
declarations that give structure to amorphous phenomena. In other words, the claim
‘We are in times of crisis’ qualifies history in the ongoing stream of phenomena. The
concept of crisis is also a primary means to constitute the significance of events in this
constant flux of experience (‘This is a crisis; therefore, it is a historical event.’). Put
succinctly, the concept of crisis qualifies a world: it determines what gets to count
as an event and what gets inscribed as ‘History’ (Roitman, 2014).
Crisis is a concept. As such, it has a particular genealogy. The contemporary
concept of crisis is said to have emerged, in succession, from Hippocratic medical

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 The ends of perpetual crisis

grammar, Aristotelian legal language, Christian theology and European traditions

of historiography and critical theory. It has migrated between these discursive
domains and has contributed to the articulation of their various practices (medicine,
historiography, critique and so on). Koselleck examines the theological entailments
of the concept of crisis (a term of Christian supersession) and reviews the mutual
constitution of critique and crisis as cognate terms. That particular conceptual
history has engendered the deep-seated presumption among social theorists that
crises are the result of inevitable tendencies. These include contradictions between
opposing forces (labour versus capital in Marxist theory) that engender supersession or
transformation – that is, discrepancies between competing realities (the world versus
human knowledge of the world for critical theory) that engender new subject positions
and transgression. Here, we see the Christian term of ‘supersession’ alive and well
in social theory. Generally speaking, for contemporary social theory, crisis has come
to signify epistemological rupture, or the failure of forms of knowledge to account
for our worlds: it is assumed that critique requires crisis. Thus, although Michel
Foucault (1970; 1972) illustrated, repeatedly, how concepts have heterogeneous
genealogies, Reinhardt Koselleck’s (1988 [1959]) overpowering history of the concept
of crisis is nonetheless consistently taken to be the definitive account. It is taken to
be the orthodox account of the concept of crisis, which partakes of one particular
epistemology and philosophical tradition – European and Christian.
Crisis is a concept that seems to colonise our manner of positing the significance
of events. It is not an exaggeration to say that every aspect of human and non-human
life is today qualified in terms of crisis. A quick look at our news feeds and a survey
of academic journal articles makes that plain. Crisis is a concept that also seems to
colonise various communities in their approach to the vicissitudes, the calamities
and the brutality of life. The articles in this special issue attest to the ways in which
various communities apprehend those phenomena, or the ways that they give form to
myriad observations and encounters – modes of narrating lives, livelihoods, relations
and milieux. ‘Crisis’ is said to be the term that captures the fundamental experience
of people in widely disparate geographies and extremely diverse situations and
circumstances. It is said to be either acute (an incident or a shock) or enduring (an
ongoing state). ‘Crisis’ is a term that is mobilised to denote, to capture, to index and
to seize upon all of those distinct and incongruent situations and circumstances. Crisis
is a naturalising category that subsumes specificity. It has colonised the life-worlds of
communities across the globe and become foundational to knowledge production
despite its Christian-European genealogy.
Various forms of expertise – that of academic scholars as well as certain practitioners,
such as those working in mental health or humanitarianism – approach this ever-
expanding claim to crisis as a problem of experience. These experts’ view is that
people are living crises, they experience crises, and so we must make those experiences
more visible, more legible; we must study and represent people’s experiences of
crisis. In doing so, they produce accounts of crisis – more discourses of crisis. In
that way, experts claim to represent people’s experiences of crisis without reflecting
upon the status of ‘experience’ as an object of knowledge. They fail to ask: to what
extent can I know your experience? Of course, one can take note of an account of
an experience – that is, your account of your experience of a war, or an account of
your experience of losing money, or an account of your experience of forest fires.
However, that account is a second-order observation. Moreover, my account of your

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 Janet Roitman

account is a stylised narrative account, which includes a beginning and an end, an

argument, claims to causality, and, for academic scholars, the terms of social theory.
This is an intractable problem of representation, which has been noted repeatedly
(see, among many others, Said, 1979; Fabian, 1983; Clifford and Marcus, 1986).
Nonetheless, even though the vexed problem of representation – not only of the
Other, but also of alterity and experience – has been a central topic of epistemology
and the principal subject of critique in the social sciences and humanities for many
decades, today, anthropologists and sociologists pursue and give credence to a mode
of ethnography that takes representation to be unproblematic (on this point, see
Rabinow and Stavrianakis [2019: 2] and Roitman [2021a]). Practices of representation
must be problematised, and in doing so, the question arises: what becomes of the
concept of crisis when we problematise practices of representation?
One possible reply would be to inquire into the ways that the concept of crisis is
practised. As I noted earlier, Reinhardt Koselleck, for instance, produced what is now
taken to be the definitive history of the concept of crisis; however, his account is an
instantiation of a particular practice of European historiography. He is therefore not
the definitive account; he is an exemplar of how the concept of crisis is practised (see
Davis, 2008; Roitman, 2014). Furthermore, as also noted earlier, this practice takes
the form the form of narration in terms of crises that define ‘History’ – or what gets
to count as an event – and critique, or a particular mode of normative judgement
(which is, as an aside, most legible to academic scholarship).
There are other examples. For instance, as Andersson (this volume) indicates,
theoretical macroeconomic models posit stable states of equilibrium as a standard,
denoted as ‘stability’, which establishes the basis for comparison, or deviations from
a norm, denoted as ‘crisis’. This is another exemplar of the practice of the concept
of crisis by those designing models and by the operations of modelling. Even though
those models do not predict crises, they are formulated as part of the conceptual
apparatus of crisis as an object of knowledge, or as an event that is constituted and
can be acted upon (see Roitman, 2021b).
This practice of a concept is distinct from mere discourse, or how people use the
term ‘crisis’. Naming a set of events or a situation ‘a crisis’ seems to be a mere semantic
act. However, the claim ‘This is a crisis’ is not merely semantics, and this claim is not
an empirical observation. Instead, ‘This is a crisis’ is a logical observation. In that
sense, it is a conceptual claim. This distinction between an empirical observation,
on the one hand, and a logical observation, on the other, is extremely significant
because it helps answer the question, posed earlier, regarding the problematisation
of practices of representation.
To demonstrate that point, let us say we have an empirical observation, ‘virus’. That
observation is based on a distinction, ‘virus/not virus’. That is a first-order observation.
A virus can only be known (observed) based on distinctions that define what it is not.
We can have another observation: virus present – meaning that there is a virus in my
presence or a virus not in my presence. That is a second-order observation based on
the first-order observation of virus/not virus. Building from that, the claim ‘Virus in
my presence is a crisis’ qualifies an observation and is conceptual. In other words, the
empirical observation ‘virus’ is different from the conceptual claim, ‘virus is a crisis’.
The point is that a virus is not naturally occurring as a crisis. Saying that it is one
– claiming that the virus is a crisis – is a way of qualifying an empirical observation.
In this way, we bring an empirical observation into the conceptual realm.

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 The ends of perpetual crisis

It matters that we recognise that crisis is a claim because, as a proposition, it is

our primary means of qualifying the observable world, of qualifying a situation, of
qualifying history. Our contemporary world seems to be fundamentally defined by a
situation of protracted crises, each of which corresponds to empirical observations. For
instance, we have declarations of economic crisis, which correspond to the empirical
observations ‘debt’, ‘gross domestic product’ or ‘deficit’. We have declarations of
a global health crisis, which correspond to the empirical observations ‘virus’ or
‘SARS-CoV-2’ or ‘COVID-19’. We have declarations of environmental crisis, which
correspond to the empirical observations ‘fires’, ‘floods’ or ‘warm ocean temperature’.
We then carry out research on these crises in order to better understand them and
hopefully correct them. For example, when it is determined that there is a financial
crisis, as in 2007, scholars and investigative journalists seek to describe the impact of
the crisis on various populations. Then we have (necessarily post hoc) publications
on how the financial crisis impacted people. A very different approach would stop
to first ask constitutive questions about the concept of crisis.
Asking those constitutive questions has political import. For instance, if a tree
falls silently in the forest, how and when does it qualify as an indicator of climate
change? How and when does a tree falling in the forest without a witness become
an indicator and evidence of environmental crisis? If there is no witness, the tree
falling silently in the forest is not inscribed in the annals of history; it is not accounted
for as a signifier, as an index, as an event. Trees falling silently in forests for decades
were not taken to be indicators of environmental crisis. However, there were, of
course, witnesses: indigenous residents and indigenous communities, and custodians
of lands, who, while not necessarily claiming ‘environmental crisis’, articulated
propositions and explanations for the dying trees and changing ecosystems. Their
terms are salient. There is much to learn from their terms and modes of reasoning,
which give insight into alternative manners of apprehending ecosystems and socio-
ecological transformation. We increasingly now narrate human history in terms of
environmental crisis (the Anthropocene) – that is, as a fundamental premise of our
history-as-crisis – despite decades, if not a century, of warming atmospheric and
ocean temperatures, trees falling silently in forests, and millions of witnesses speaking
on their terms. Clearly, the claim to crisis renders certain forms of knowledge legible
and others illegible or unaccounted for.

Conflict of interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

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