CRISE COMO CONCEITO DE HISTORICIZAÇÃO

Crises estimulam historicização

1. “One of the themes linking diverse crisis experiences across national boundaries is how people
contemplate their present conditions and potential futures in terms of the past.” (KNIGHT; STEWART,
2016, p. 2)

2. “Crises thus stimulate historicization, for example, by prompting actors to assemble information in
order not only to comprehend phenomena, but also to establish their reality” (KNIGHT; STEWART,
2016, p. 3)

3. “[Suzana Narotzky] has written ... about the production of present political mobilizations in relation to
particular memories of the past, rendering certain future-orientated actions legitimate while excluding
others. [...] Her informants refer to history (a historical consciousness) as a constructed and structure
account of a causal nature where working class agency and collective solidarities ar paramount and
need to be recuperated in order to preserve the “conquests” of past struggle and to be able to produce
futures for younger generations. She examines the relationship with the past as manifested in two
distinct grassroots mobilization movements, showing how in one case the future is imagined based on a
break with the past and the creation of a new moral economy. Conversely, other forms of resistance
strongly articulate with past struggles and conquests of the working class and nostalgic notions of
prosperity based firmly within “futures past”. (KNIGHT; STEWART, 2016, p. 12)

4. “[...] the uncanny present appears to portend the future to the extent that it is either a repetition or a
return of the past. That past, however, is not any past but is the traumatic past that here had been
retained as a visceral experience of the relationship between past and future that emerges at particular
moments” (BRYANT, 2016, p. 21)

5. “Crisis is intertwined with a specific view of history, and, more specifically, modernity” (CUTTICA;
KONTLER; MAIER, 2021, p. 2)

6. “According to some historians, crisis was not only injected into Europe’s social, cultural and political
predicament by the Enlightenment (in whatever guise), so as to trigger the Revolution, but it also
remained endemic to it during the subsequent phases of modernity” (CUTTICA; KONTLER, MAIER, 2021,
p. 16)

7. “[...] crisis is not merely a description of events and moments in history that are deeply disruptive, but a
view of history itself” (CUTTICA; KONTLER, MAIER, 2021, p. 2)

8. “Some even go as far to claim that whilst ‘[f]or most of the past two centuries, the key concept used to
synchronise multiple temporalities between different polities has been progress’, in our days that of
crisis is about to replace it as ‘the main tool of historicisation in the Western world and beyond’.
However, our historical analysis shows how long crisis has been a decisive term for political discourse as
well as historical conceptualisation. Thus, it appears that rather than superseding progress as a tool for
historicisation, crisis and progress have been conceptually interdependente since at least the
eighteenth century” (CUTTICA; KONTLER, MAIER, 2021, p. 5).
Crise como revelador de temporalidades
9. “In moments of extreme crisis, time becomes elastic—the time waiting for a bomb to explode or a fist
to land can seem like an eternity, or a blink of the eye” (KNIGHT; STEWART, 2016, p. 3)

10. “In this respect, crises turn ordinary daily routine inside out and expose the seams of temporality to
view” (KNIGHT; STEWART, 2016, p. 3).

11. “This article posits that the vernacular understanding of crisis as existing in a different sort of time
needs to be mined for what it tells us about social perceptions of temporality” (BRYANT, 2016, p.19)

12. “[...] the meaning of crisis has become more uncertain: from indicating stark alternatives and non-
negotiable demarcations, it has assumed vague overtones, which might be seen as a sign that the
current historical era is deeply marked by instability and lack of clear direction(s).” (CUTTICA; KONTLER,
MAIER, 2021, p. 8)

Crise como “evento histórico”

13. “Crises are a type of “event” and as such, they are the basic units of history – moments in need of
explanation. They exceed or defeat the expectations of “structure”, or routine—the sphere of what is
anticipated under normal circumstances. Events occur when structure cannot replicate itself in the
expected way [referência a Sahlins]” (KNIGHT; STEWART, 2016, p. 4)

14. “Critical events may be collectivizing, unifying, or points of division” (KNIGHT; STEWART, 2016, p. 5)

15. “Following Roitman’s (2014) reading that an event becomes a crisis because it shows how the world
could be otherwise, Bryant [2016] maintains that crisis represents a critical threshold outside of normal
time” (KNIGHT; STEWART, 2016, p. 8)

16. “In Roitman’s reading, an event becomes a crisis because it shows that the world could be otherwise.
The implication of this for Roitman, however, is that we must have a particular philosophy of history in
order to see certain moments as decisive turning points, and much of the attention of her meta-
narrative focuses on the effects of discursive claims to crisis” (BRYANT, 2016, p. 20)

Crise e tempo passado

17. “Contributors to this collection dedicate particular attention to people as they “bounce around”
through the past disregarding temporal distance, condensing events that are separated by decades and
even centuries of linear time, and making them into meaningful moments in the present” (KNIGHT;
STEWART, 2016, p. 6)

Crise e tempo presente

18. “She [Rebecca Bryant] argues that “at a time of crisis we acquire a sense that what we do in this
present will be decisive for both the past and the future, giving to the present the status of a threshold”
Crisis, she claims, becomes such precisely because it brings the present into consciousness, creating an
unusually overburdened perception of present-ness. For Bryant, the present becomes uncanny due to
this social interrogation of the “now” and its usually unquestioned links between past, present and
future” (KNIGHT; STEWART, 2016, p. 8-9)

19. “I propose here a notion that I call the uncanny present to refer to a particular sense of present-ness
produced by futures that cannot be anticipated. The uncanny present, as I use it here, refers to
 moments when the present that I usually do not perceive as such becomes anxiously visceral to us as a
moment caught between past and future” (BRYANT, 2016, p. 20).

20. I describe these moments as critical thresholds to emphasize the sense of these moments as both
decisive and liminal, or outside ordinary time. As Roitman argues, they emerge from the sense that
things could be otherwise, but I want to suggest that one of the reasons they become moments that we
call “crisis” is because they bring the presentness of the present to the fore. [...] We acquire a sense
that what we do in this present will be decisive for both the past and the future, giving to the present
the status of a threshold (BRYANT, 2016, p. 20)

21. “Crisis, I claim, becomes such precisely because it brings the present into consciousness, creating an
awareness or perception of present-ness that we do not normally have” (BRYANT, 2016, p. 20).

22. “This sense of the present-ness of the present, its role as a node between past and future, is one that I
do not normally experience except when I stop philosophically to reflect on the question of
temporality. Sitting at my desk, I have no more sense of a “now” than I have of a “here”. After all,
where do “here” and “now” begin and end? But I may become aware of both in moments of what we
call crisis, moments when contingency comes into play and interrupts my intentional relation to the
world” (BRYANT, 2016, p. 25)

Crise e tempo futuro

23. “[...] what makes the present uncannily present in moments of crisis is the inability to anticipate the
future” (BRYANT, 2016, p. 21)

24. “What made these moments something that we might describe as “crisis” was the experience of the
present as a moment of uncertainty about the future” (BRYANT, 2016, p. 23)

Crise como condensador de tempos

25. “In the current crisis, heterogeneous historical moments are knitted together to form the “whole” of
contemporary experience. The multiplicities are qualitative in nature and are sourced from many
temporal points, yet they are fused together to form an assemblage of contemporaneity” (KNIGHT;
STEWART, 2016, p. 6)

26. “The heterogeneous nature of multiple temporal moments makes for an uncertain and unforeseeable
future not necessarily bound to the present or to any singular specific historical era” (KNIGHT;
STEWART, 2016, p. 6)

Crise como conceito historiográfico

27. “As a historiographical tool, it [concept of crisis] is sometimes employed to study how people in the
past perceived an unusually harsh time in their (public or private) life due to political, religious, social or
economic strife. In this respect, historians often question the usefulness and validity of the category as
a legitimate prism through which to approach a bygone historical moment.” (CUTTICA; KONTLER,
MAIER, 2021, p. 7)

28. “Besides its decisionist bent, crisis attained a new historiographical, even historical- philosophical,
dimension in the course of the twentieth century. This is most evident – again – in Koselleck’s own
rather prescriptive depiction of the concept’s history. [...] Crisis as a historical- philosophical concept in
 this sense brought seemingly unrelated historical events and undertakings into contact with one
another and enclosed them in a single analytical frame. Joining together the political struggles of the
early Enlightenment with the abysses of Nazi rule might have been a popular interpretation of recent
German history in 1954, but it is certainly not a self evident or indeed a plausible one now. This history
of the concept of crisis in political thought is, nonetheless, marked by just such a view of “history”.”
(CUTTICA; KONTLER, MAIER, 2021, p. 18)

Crise: conceito descritivo/performativo

29. “The distinction between crisis as an empirical reality and crisis as a form of analysis, as a rhetoric, is
crucial if we look at the concept’s history in modern political thought. Framing and making a historical
moment, or indeed an entire epoch, into what it need not be, is the hallmark of crisis talk in the
nineteenth but even more pronouncedly in the twentieth century. Speaking of crisis becomes a way of
marking out an issue – whether political, social, cultural or other – as decisive. It is a rhetoric which,
drawing on the word’s potential from the realm of medicine, makes an issue (and the action which is
urged on it) ultimately a matter of life and death. As such, crisis describes an entire mode of politics
that in itself needs to be examined as ideologically fraught: a crisis calls to action in an entirely different
way than, say, a question – another term which was gaining, as Holly Case has shown, increasing
popularity in political language from the nineteenth century onwards. Whilst a question demands an
answer, this answer might be sought in a somewhat drawn- out process. A crisis, however, demands
immediate action. It was this specific mode of politics, implied by the rhetoric of crisis, that has made it
such a popular term in modern political and economic analysis” (CUTTICA; KONTLER, MAIER, 2021, p.
17)