The Times of Crises

The notion of crisis seems as frustrating as it is appealing. We seem to live in times of crises, but this observation always provokes more questions than it clarifies. Is there always crisis? Is there a crisis (or many) at all? Are crises real or invoked? Is crisis always political? Why are we so attracted to the notion of crises when we also reject it for its easy politicisation? While this paper cannot answer all of these questions, it seeks to shed some light on the discussion by developing a typology of crisis. The paper explores three different types of crises: the activating crisis, the fatalist crisis and the postapocalyptic crisis, and pays special attention to their temporal regimes. The paper takes its cue from an observation by German historian Rüdiger Graf (2020) that the notion of crisis is fundamentally modern and links to a distinctive perception of time (Habermas 1984). From high to late modernity, Graf observes, the notion of crisis has undergone a remarkable change from an earlier understanding of crisis as promising and activating to an understanding of crisis as deterioration, insecurity and catastrophe. The activating crisis is an openly discursive, humanist construct that is not only diagnostic but prognostic. It describes an acceleration of time towards the revelation of a new reality. The activating crisis tells humans they can and need to participate in the acceleration of time by bringing about a decision moment. The fatalist crisis of insecurity, deterioration and catastrophe, in turn, does not demand a decision but a response. It is no longer purely humanist construct but the result of human-nonhuman entanglements. Its temporal gaze is directed towards the past. There is an acceleration of the past into the present. That is, in the fatalist notion of crisis, the unintended consequences of human actions appear in and shape this more materialist world of entanglement. The paper argues that these two notions of crisis need to be supplemented by a third type to better grasp our contemporary time (of crisis). This is because the distinctive features of today’s crisis – variously described as the Anthropocene, polycrisis, or (again) crisis of modernity – is not the intersection of multiple crises or their merging into a more systemic crisis. As Graf convincingly shows, this understanding of pervasiveness also already characterised both activating and fatalist notions of crisis. Rather than the co-occurrence, extension or pervasiveness of crises, the paper starts from the hypothesis that today’s distinctive feature is a change in the perception of time. Crisis, it seems, no longer accelerates time. Engaging with Giorgio Agamben’s work on messianic time – the time it takes to end time – the paper therefore explores whether the current crisis is best through the lens of a different temporality, a non-chronological order, in which nothing about the past or the future is revealed. The paper seeks to draw out the conditions and implications of this potentially different temporal regime.