The Ambivalence of Crisis

David W. Janzen
University of Waterloo

In rhetorical terms, to declare a “crisis” is to create a distinction

between an exception (the crisis) and normalcy (non-crisis); that is,
between how a specific situation is actually functioning and a projection
of how it ought to function under “normal” circumstances. Put another
way: crisis marks out a moment as an exception—as something that, like
the master signifier, organizes a symbolic field—and it does so against a
norm that is external to the crisis itself. Thus, economic crisis can only
be defined against an understanding of an “economic normalcy”; an envi-
ronmental crisis can only be defined against some definition of a “normal
environment”; and so on.
The distinction between crisis and non-crisis requires judgment. This
idea is embedded in the concept’s origins, the Greek “krei-”, the root for
both crisis and critique. In its original context, ancient Greek medical
theory, crisis is a deviation from the body’s normal (healthy) state defined
not by the presence of illness itself, but by subjective process of judgment
the illness invokes. As Janet Roitman writes: “crisis denoted the turning
point of a disease, or a critical phase in which life or death was at stake
and called for an irrevocable decision. Significantly, crisis was not the
disease or illness per se; it was the condition that called for decisive judg-

ESC 44.3 (September 2018): 19–23

 ment between alternatives.” By calling for “decisive judgment,” the crisis
condition links the experience of the illness that the patient undergoes
(Habermas 1) and the diagnostic process of discernment and judgment
David Janzen (a physician diagnosing the cause and prescribing the remedy), to the
is Lecturer of trajectory of the illness (the patient will either recover or not) (Koselleck
Communication Arts 358). In its long history, “crisis” has lived varied discursive lives—from
at the University of Greek medicine and Roman law, to Christian eschatology, to modern
Waterloo where his socio-political upheavals, to contemporary economics. But the subjective/
interdisciplinary work objective dimension remains: crisis is condition that necessitates judgment
explores intersections and intervention, and therefore some kind of subject.
of environmental Here, the political dimensions of crisis rhetoric are clear. First, if crisis
communication, cultural rests on a distinction between exception and norm, and if that distinction
and decolonial studies, requires judgment, then the logic of crisis depends on who or what has
and crisis theory. His the legitimacy to declare the exception.1 Moreover, because this judgment
current project “Soil as necessitates intervention—because it is not descriptive but prescriptive—it
a relational media” uses has material effects. To declare a crisis is to mobilize resources toward a
community-engagement specific outcome. For example, the effect of declaring a public health crisis
and critical theory to (the current pandemic, for example) is not merely to quantify risk but to
examine soil and land as legitimate and mobilize a greater-than-normal response to mitigate risk,
expressions of human- or to return to normalcy.
nature entanglements. Second, and more importantly, crisis judgment is historically con-
watch?v=c6714jdWCcE ditioned. It rests on historical processes of normalization; most promi-
nently, this includes systemic forms of inequality that make some lives
more significant than others. This is most obvious when we ask: Why are
some events recognized as crises while others of equal magnitude are
not? In Canada, clear examples are found in Indigenous communities:
ongoing housing shortages, the water crisis in Attawaspikatt, suicide rates
among northern Indigenous youth, the missing and murdered Indigenous
women epidemic—in quantitative terms, these tragedies constitute crises.
Yet, despite repeated and urgent declarations from local and commu-
nity leaders, these events were belatedly (if ever) recognized as such, and
unlike officially recognized crises they have received very few resources.
This pattern fits well-documented global patterns in which the critical
endangerment of some lives simply doesn’t count as crisis (Giroux). In
the crisis logics of colonialism and late-capitalism the disposability of
some lives—Indigenous, racialized, imprisoned, impoverished—is not
an exception but the norm.

1 To borrow Giorgio Agamben’s term, it is a question of sovereignty.

20 | Janzen
 Third, crisis cuts the social fabric with a double-edged sword. On one
hand, as a state of exception, crises legitimate and expand existing forms
of power and inequality. In times of crisis, democratic freedoms are sus-
pended and limitations on the exercise of power are lifted, often lead-
ing to violence, exploitation, and increased precarity. On the other hand,
however, crises often destabilize and potentially de-legitimize entrenched
forms of power, potentially opening up new forms of subjectivity, action,
collaboration, and meaning.
The 2008 financial crisis is a key example. On one hand, it provided
ideological legitimation for widespread implementation of austerity eco-
nomics. Across the west, governments eradicated shared public services,
enforced individual and public debt, and slashed public spending—all
while providing corporate incentives and tax breaks to the wealthy, bailing
out banks, and using police and military to quell civil unrest. As a plan
to rebuild the economy, austerity economics was, in the words of Nobel
Laureate, Paul Krugman, a “terrible mistake.” As a strategy for expanding
social, political, and economic inequality, however, it succeeded. In the
wake of the crisis, it became clear that “temporary” austerity measures,
layoffs, and cuts were not in fact temporary; for many, unemployment,
precarity and poverty remained the norm. Meanwhile, corporate profits
rose (in the U.S., by around 20 percent a year), reaching all-time highs
within five years. In short, the crisis legitimated exceptional action that
enriched economic elites at the expense of the poor and working class.
On the other hand, however, the post-2008 moment was defined by a
resurgence in collective political experiments that included Occupy Wall
Street, student strikes, the Arab Spring, and others. Despite many short-
comings, these developments were significant insofar as they organized
sustained and widespread attempts to challenge the basic assumptions
about how society should be organized. For decades, the “end of history”
seemed a foregone conclusion: some version of “market capitalism + lib-
eral state” was the ultimate, natural order of things. After 2008, as Chris-
topher Nealon writes, “  ‘capitalism’ was pronounceable … as the name, not
of an inevitability, but of a contingent economic form.” In other words, the
post-2008 political antagonisms reintroduced the originary link between
crisis and critique. They did so by insisting on historical contingency (the
fact that there are alternatives). They also revealed that the financial cri-
sis was not an unfortunate hiccup, nor was it reducible to a “sub-prime
mortgage crisis” resulting from overzealous lending practices. Rather, it
was a cycle of destruction endemic to the capitalist system. While par-
liamentarians and annalists debated strategies for economic “recovery,”

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collective political experiments asked a different set of questions: Do we
really want to return to normalcy? Or, more pragmatically, which aspects
of normalcy do we wish to recover? For all the many failures, many of
post-2008 experiments rightly insisted on one point: that crisis is precisely
the right time to decide.
The same thinking should guide our response to current and future
crises. At the time of writing (late April 2020), much of the world is situ-
ated between two crises—awaiting a third. The first, the public health
crisis induced by sars-CoV-2, appears for now to have plateaued. But
only to be outstripped by a second: the economic fallout that results when
capitalism—a system that depends on constant movement and growth—
is slowed. The austerity ghosts have already emerged: the financial elite
that organized post-2008 austerity are back, the deep-pocket donors that
funded the Tea Party are organizing anti-quarantine protests, and provin-
cial governments are irreparably axing public services and workers.
Recent history suggests a third crisis looms. Early research shows that
marginalized populations suffer the harshest effects of the virus, exacer-
bating health disparities between higher and lower income communities
(Fisher and Bubola). The push to “restart the economy” will amplify these
disparities by placing vulnerable workers at risk in retail, factory, and care
work, while the more affluent continue to isolate. At the same time, if the
economic fallout and response are as severe as projected, many more
will be made superfluous. And if austerity and precarity coalesce with an
ongoing pandemic, the effects may be devastating.
Crises necessitate immediate, on-the-ground response. The threats
posed by sars-CoV-2 are real, and lives depend on our shared capac-
ity to mobilize medical science and resources, to organize and support
front-line health workers, and to participate in strategies that reduce viral
transmission. The day-to-day struggles are equally real—loss of income,
social isolation, caring for children, sick, and elderly without support, and
so on. Amidst all this, crisis is also an exceptional, rare moment to decide.
Not to bicker about strategy—how do we return to normalcy?—but, much
more importantly, to decide on the future: to what normalcy do we wish
to return?

22 | Janzen
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
“Epidemiological Sociology and the Social Shaping of Population Health.”
rwjf. 1 December 2008. www.rwjf.org/en/library.
Fisher, Max, and Emma Bubola. “As Coronavirus Deepens Inequality,
Inequality Worsens Its Spread.” The New York Times. 15 March 2020.
NYTimes.com.
Giroux, Henry A. “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Bio-
politics of Disposability.” College Literature 33:3 (2006): 171–96.
Habermas, Jürgen. Legitimation Crisis. Polity Press, 1988.
Koselleck, Reinhart. “Crisis.” Journal of the History of Ideas 67:2 (May
2006): 357–400. Trans. Michaela Richter.
Nealon, Christopher S. The Matter of Capital. Harvard up, 2011.
Roitman, Janet. “The Stakes of Crisis.” Critical Theories of Crisis in Europe:
From Weimar to the Euro. Eds. Poul F. Kjaer and Niklas Olsen. Rowman
and Littlefield, 2016.

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