Crisis

Abstract

Owing to its prominence in everyday life, media, culture, economy and politics, we follow the lead of Marie Moran in taking a keywords-as-method approach to ‘crisis’. In doing so, we explore its changing meaning from a decisive moment to something more permanent. We argue this change is because of the proliferation, proximity and visibility of numerous interlocking, converging crises that are being experienced by a greater number of people across a range of spatiotemporal scales which produces a political imagination defined by incipience. Taken together, these illuminate how the changed meaning of ‘crisis’ is both a response to, and constitutive of the material conditions of lived experience, as well as our social, cultural and political imaginaries in the contemporary moment.

Introduction

This essay is an attempt to understand ‘crisis’ and what its use to narrate our current moment tells us about the times we live in. From this starting point, we approach ‘crisis’ as a keyword and follow Marie Moran’s (2021) keywords-as-method approach. Consequently, we explore how:

Language change generally, and meaning change specifically, forms part of and provides insight into the nature of social and cultural transformation. (p. 1022)

We hope to provide some productive means of how to think through ‘crisis’ – in the context of an increasing number of crises including: the cost-of-living crisis, the climate crisis, the crisis of the global order, the crisis of neoliberal hegemony or indeed that our times are defined by ‘perma-crisis’ (Moe et al., 2024). This is to understand what this tells us about how the meaning of crisis itself has changed and how this is a simultaneous outcome and constitutive element of the material conditions of contemporary culture, economy and society.

Keywords ¹

Drawing on Raymond Williams’ (1976) pathbreaking book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Marie Moran (2021) understands it as a process to:

Identify and analyse those words whose evolving meanings seem somehow to capture, express and legitimise the politics and sensibility of their sociohistorical context. (p. 1021)

Keywords are well known and familiar (Moran, 2021) with their ‘arbitrary’ inclusion premised upon them ‘being used in quite general discussion in what seemed to [be] interesting or difficult ways’ (Williams, 1976: 14). Focussing on the historical production of words, how language changes over time, innovations on its use, the contestations over meaning between the powerful and powerless and its situating in everyday life, he contextualises language and words within the ‘actual means and conditions of their production’ (Williams, 1981a: 64–65). Keywords show us the meanings of words are not ‘natural’, nor ‘imposed’. Rather, they reflect, constitute and express those conditions of production. Thus, this approach can be thought of as a:

Practical exposition of the more sophisticated cultural materialist philosophy he (Williams) developed, that, when read alongside it, gives rise to a fruitful method of socio-cultural analysis. (Moran, 2021: 1025)

It is from this starting point we start our analysis of ‘crisis’ as a keyword.

Understanding ‘crisis’

Curiously, ‘crisis’ is not one of the keywords in Williams’ (1968, 1981b, 1983) book given its frequent use in his other writing and is instead included in the entry for criticism. He writes:

Critical has another specialised but important and persistent use, not to describe judgment, but from a specialised use in medicine to refer to a turning point; hence decisive. Crisis itself has of course been extended to any difficulty as well as to any turning point. (Williams, 1976: 85, bold and italics in original)

This understanding has its roots in Ancient Greek – specifically the word Kpinein, meaning to sift or decide, which in turn referred to discrimination or decision (O’Connor, 1981: 329). This relates to the Greek word krino – meaning a moment of decision or judgement where radically different outcomes are possible – initially regarding battle – before becoming used in medicine (Gamble, 2014: 22–23). John Eldridge et al. (1991: 1) elaborate further, explaining how crisis originally referred to the turning point in an illness where there is hope of recovery, as well as the possibility of succumbing to it. In all of these understandings, decisiveness is central to its meaning. This decisiveness speaks to what can be considered the temporal character that commonly has defined crisis as a ‘temporary’ condition (Beer, 2024).

What is important to note here, the decisive moments – the points of intervention, the experience and management of crisis – are driven by human agency (Gamble, 2014: 23). Indeed, O’Connor (1981: 329) points out that in Classical Greek history a crisis was understood as a moment of truth where the importance of people and events was made clear. Of course, this agency is enabled and constrained by power and the locatedness of people within broader social and institutional formations. The experience of crisis driven by the impacts of systemic racism (White, 2020), heterosexism and other reactionary gender politics (Kay, 2023), class inequality (Paton, 2024), and the unequal distribution of risks tied to the climate crisis (McVeigh, 2023) and the interventions to alleviate or exacerbate these illustrate this.

Crisis has been used as a metaphor to analyse Capitalism more broadly (Eldridge et al., 1991). Critical and ‘complimentary’ understandings have seen it as defined by crisis with social, economic and political transformation the outcome of a given crisis (Grossberg, 2019; Hall and Massey, 2010). In other words, capitalist development has been driven by a crisis of each successive phase (Davidson, 2023). This can enable Capitalism to ‘carry on’ more ‘efficiently’ (Gamble, 2014) or to produce a new ‘social settlement’ (Hall, 1988). On the left, this is often defined by a shift towards socialism while on the political right, this involves a reactionary turn to an ‘imagined’ past way of arranging social and economic life (Gilbert and Williams, 2022). Satnam Virdee (2023) outlines how the ‘crises’ that pattern Capitalism are constitutive of racialised, classed and geographical inequalities that are tied to the operation of colonialism and its ongoing impacts.

Given Capitalism is understood as defined by crisis, with their form ‘mutating’ according to the specific conditions of its emergence (Tooze, 2018: 14), it might be argued Capitalism is a ‘permanent crisis’. However, what is distinctive about our current conjuncture is that unlike previous crises in Capitalism, ² the crisis of 2007/08 did not produce a radical transformation of economic or social relations (Davidson, 2017). Neil Davidson (2017) called this period ‘crisis neoliberalism’, which he understood as a social settlement defined by diversionary scapegoating of marginalised and subaltern groups as a stand-in for the lack of political solutions to the problems of neoliberalism. He argued the lack of ‘solutions’ are the outcome of the ‘success’ of the short-termism of financial capital (Davidson, 2017) while others have pointed towards the coalition of big tech and finance capital as driving neoliberalism (Gilbert and Williams, 2022). But it is not only the crises of Capitalism generally or neoliberalism specifically that have been experienced since the crash. We have had the global pandemic, the intensification of the climate crisis, the cost-of-living crisis as well as the crisis of the western-led global order. Each of these are given their specific ‘character’ through their articulation within neoliberal social and economic relations.

These converging crises coming together to be lived, felt, experienced, seen and narrated in everyday life across the realms of culture, economy and politics produce a sense of ‘permacrisis’. Hallvard Moe et al. (2024) define this as ‘an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially resulting from a series of catastrophic events’ (p. 1). The idea of crisis being defined by instability and insecurity, or a sense of ‘generalised precarity’ (Banks, 2020: 650) speaks to the accumulation of crisis tendencies while the ‘extended’ nature of this in contemporary society points to the difficulties in speaking of decisive turning points. The temporal character of ‘crisis’ within the long durée of capitalism as crisis is disrupted. Crisis at our current conjuncture seems to be less a decisive turning point, but rather the ‘ordinary’ state of affairs.

Rather than a ‘crisis in the concept of crisis’ (Osborne, 2022: 12), it has become the ‘new general form of the social’ (Osborne, 2022: 38). Consequently, it becomes a temporally extended and intensifying constitutive element of social, economic, political and cultural relations within post-crash neoliberalism. This produces a range of effects and affects at various global scales in differential ways based on the social positioning of those within contemporary capitalism. Crisis is less a decisive, singular moment where multiple crises become articulated as one crisis that produces change (Grossberg, 2019) but an unfolding, uneven and ‘slow’ generalised social form that acts as a key constituting principle of current social relations.

Proliferation

By proliferation we mean the seemingly unending production of crisis, and their naming as such by the media (Gamble, 2014) and their multiplying effects from ‘margins’ to ‘mass’ (Hoff, 2022). By this, we mean those were shielded from the impacts of previous crises are now suffering, albeit in still unequal ways when compared to those who have always suffered.

Those in the Global North are starting to feel the impacts of climate change, but those in the Global South are being driven to migrate to escape its more immediate impacts (Miller, 2020: 973). Young people in the United Kingdom experience precarious work as a ‘normal’ part of their transitions to adulthood (Hoff, 2022) while the working classes in the most economically deprived areas ‘remain’ in this work as the more advantaged move onto relatively stable and better paid employment (MacDonald et al., 2005). Young people struggle to attain homeownership, with many living with parents longer or living in substandard, insecure privately rented accommodation (Hoff, 2023). However, in the United Kingdom, Black people have long been more likely to be ‘ghettoised’ in insecure accommodation (White, 2020) while those who come from family backgrounds where asset-ownership is immediate can draw on that to support buying, whereas those who do not cannot (Adkins et al., 2021).

All of these relate to crises that have been exacerbated by the policy, economic and social logics of neoliberalism (Gilbert and Williams, 2022). This has produced a situation whereby more are suffering, and more crises are happening. Taken together, both produce a sense of crisis constantly unfolding and happening without resolution. As such, we can see how the changed understanding of crisis is borne out of the experience of crisis from margins to mass.

Proximity

Proliferation produces proximity to the impacts of crisis and between those who are ‘newly’ and ‘long’ struggling. Consequently, this has implications regarding when something ‘counts’ as a crisis and whose experiences of crisis demand a resolution. Through this, we can look towards issues of inequality and potential solidarities as well.

The ‘slow’ but increasingly intensifying impacts of the climate crisis in the Global North makes a crisis that was once ‘distant’ spatiotemporally more proximal and the need to ‘rein in’ spending in the ‘cost-of-living’ crisis make the experience of going without more common. Experiencing the impacts of the climate crisis can produce a shared ‘experience’ and potential solidarities between the ‘newly’ and ‘long’ suffering both nationally and globally. Equally, cutting back on consumer goods, not having the heating on for as long or at all can work to mitigate against narratives that blame and individualise hardship on the perceived fecklessness of working-class people (Jensen, 2014). This proximity can enable the bringing together of these disparate groups to construct a bloc which works together to further shared interests to combat the impacts of these crises (Gilbert and Williams, 2022).

But why are these being positioned as crises now? Societies in the Global South have long been living with the effects of climate change, even though they have been less ecologically destructive than those in the Global North (Banks, 2022: 13). Working-class people, ethnic minorities and women ³ have arguably always been in a ‘cost-of-living’ crisis which has only intensified. Fundamentally, ‘winners’ from the neoliberal settlement are now no longer reaping its benefits (Gilbert and Williams, 2022) and so what have not been crises for many are now. Here, we can see how intersecting subject positions of advantage that have long shielded those groups do not do so to the same extent. As such, these issues become a ‘crisis’ that needs to be addressed, or at the very least appear to be being dealt with by the political establishment given the more advantaged tend to exercise their democratic rights more than the marginalised (Evans, 2023). Fundamentally, proximity is a key factor in things starting to ‘count’ as a crisis while speaking to the operation of long-standing inequalities whereby some people’s experiences and lives are considered more important than others.

Visibility

Proximity and proliferation of ‘crisis’ illustrate the visibility of ‘morbid symptoms’ of our contemporary social settlement. Antonio Gramsci (1971) wrote that

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. (p. 276)

The visibility of morbid symptoms has political consequences. The surge of the far-right in recent European elections (Adler, 2024), the lack of voter confidence in politics (Easton and Burns, 2024) and reactionary backlash to progressive causes (Kay, 2023) as well as progressive social movements protesting long-standing, persistent national and global inequalities show how people are looking for change. It is apparent to many that things as they are do not work given the morbid symptoms are seen and experienced by many. Despite that, the direction of travel regarding the kind of change that is longed for, and which may happen, is never predictable and is always contested (Davidson, 2023).

The visibility of the ‘morbid symptoms’ at numerous spatiotemporal scales shows ‘crisis’ as existing and demanding a response. This visibility then lends itself to constituting a more permanent state of ‘crisis’ given responses are posited, or at least attempted to be. Given that debates around transformation revolve around what comes after neoliberalism (Gerbaudo, 2022 [2021]), the future-facing imaginaries that are posited by progressives become even more crucial to articulate and make ‘realistic’ so as not to surrender the future to the most reactionary formations.

Incipience

Although coined by Williams in 1960 (Kay, 2021), Mark Fisher’s (2014) argument that we have seen a ‘slow cancellation of the future’ captures the relationship between crisis, morbid symptoms and the future. Fisher’s (2014) juxtaposition of rapid political, economic and technological change since the late 1970s alongside cultural ‘stasis’ is an instructive means to think through this temporal relationship. Things do change, but the pace and scale of it constitutes a cultural terrain unable to ‘grasp’ the present leading to a reliance on past forms to produce contemporary culture (Fisher, 2014) rending a situation where the ‘new’ is not born.

Arguably, this has led to political ‘futurelessness’ (Tutton, 2023). On the one hand, we see an adaptation to anticipated crisis conditions as something to be managed rather than overcome to gain a strategic advantage (Williams, 1983 on Plan X) and neoliberals looking to ‘hang on’ (Gilbert and Williams, 2022). Nativist right and far-right futures are rooted in imagined white, nationalist ‘pasts’, elements of which are becoming more ‘mainstreamed’ (Brown et al., 2023). This has accompanied by a concerted assault and rollback of reproductive rights (Faludi et al., 2020), an increasingly hostile environment for migrants (Griffiths and Yeo, 2022) and ‘organised transphobia’ (Amery and Mondon, 2024). On the other hand, there are those who do articulate a just and progressive future in imaginative ways seen in the Green New Deal as the basis for socialist economic transformation (Gilbert and Williams, 2022) and abolitionist politics – particularly in the United States – which seeks to abolish carceral (and other) institutions to transform broader social relations (Ritchie, 2023).

Despite these numerous articulations of the ‘future’, they have not come to pass. This is a consequence of the long-term imaginative and political work needed to make these realisable coupled with the intense and visible contestation between visions of change. The levels of contestation we see within and between the aforementioned political movements coupled with their visions for change not being put into sustained material practice produces a kind of stasis. It is a stasis defined by a ‘stunted’ incipience, a sense of always nearly becoming. With the ‘becoming something else’ not happening, the crises to which these movements are both articulating and addressing are not resolved contributing to the ‘permanency’ of crisis.

Conclusion

In this essay, we have explored the changing meaning of ‘crisis’ as a contemporary keyword. We have traced its changing meaning from a temporally bound moment of exception to something that signifies a long-term, more permanent state of affairs constitutive of social, economic and cultural relations that produces unequal impacts and affects at numerous spatiotemporal scales. We then explored what this change in meaning speaks to in contemporary culture by exploring proliferation, proximity, visibility and incipience. Given the proliferation of the impacts of crisis from margins to mass and their visibility, these all have profound political consequences regarding future imaginaries and the ability to put these into practice to resolve the crises that beset us. With the growing strength of reactionary politics, this makes winning the crisis even more crucial for progressives today.