Crisis, Temporality, and Alternative Languages

Probing the historically overdetermined and currently omnipresent concept of ‘crisis,’ the first part of this workshop will explore how ‘crisis‘ is interlaced with experiences and conceptions of time. The term ‘crisis’ can denote choice, decision, judgment or critique; it can mark a turning point, but also a permanent state without prospect of resolution. Experiences of ‘crisis’ can involve a sense of disorientation or a collapsing of linear temporality. But crisis can also function as a chronic, paralyzing framework of living that contracts the future. Since the universalization of neoliberal capitalism in the early 1990s, many thinkers have diagnosed such a “slow cancellation” of the future as a generalized experience, producing a “frozen present” without real alternatives – an experience that is exacerbated by the threat of environmental disaster. In this context, ‘crisis rhetoric’ is often mobilized as an instrument of rule, legitimizing ‘states of emergency’ that limit people’s rights and agency. Crisis, however, can also yield a heightened awareness of the present or a haunted temporality – in line with what Jacques Derrida termed a practice of hauntology – that could activate other understandings of history, the present, and futurity. In the second part of the workshop we will ask which alternative narratives or practices could counter hegemonic mobilizations of ‘crisis’ and foster the imagination of alternative futures. To that end, we will explore the fate of utopianism today. We will also test literature’s potential to provide alternative narrativizations either of ‘crisis’ or of what Janet Roitman has called “noncrisis”—narratives that disavow ‘crisis rhetoric’ and shape alternative visions of the present and future.