We live in times of crisis, or so it would seem. News reports daily confirm the intractability of enduring geo-political predicaments (e.g., in Afghanistan and Iraq) and the emergence of new situations announced as historical turning points (e.g., Syria and ISIS, Greece and the EU, Ebola) to say nothing of the variegated, post-facto accounting of decision making and action during emergencies (e.g., the recent political wrangling over the USA Freedom Act or the US Senate’s Report on CIA Torture operations). Political, institutional, financial and humanitarian crises abound and they proliferate at a seemingly unchecked pace. But is this global state of affairs merely a reflection of a historical, empirical moment or is it an expression of the ease and haste with which we label events as critical (and by extension the way we approach the broader category of crisis)?
This is the starting point of Janet Roitman’s striking interrogation and reworking of the concept of crisis. Anti-Crisis is a partial historiography of the idea and the role it plays in the formulation of critique, as well as a thorough exploration of the epistemological premises and assumptions behind crisis narratives. Throughout, Roitman’s aim is to unpack the self-evident nature of the crisis and to denaturalize the claims, narratives, judgments and actions generated by its invocation with particular attention to those actions and judgments the crisis label categorically forecloses. When we call an event a crisis, we designate it as a “moment of truth” (page 4), a turning point against which actions are pursued and decisions made. We locate it within a particular historical trajectory but we also (following the premises of social and critical theory) look at the crisis as a moment with normative significance. Crises are instances where the contingent nature of knowledge claims (and normativity itself) are exposed, opened to critique and challenged. Roitman illustrates both how the logic of crisis and its narration (in the case of the financial crisis) reinforces this broader teleological and normative structure.
In one way or another, most analyses of the 2007-2009 subprime mortgage debacle have been animated by a single question: what went wrong? That is, they take the fact that “this is a crisis” as an a priori and proceed to explain its causes by identifying the representational failures, systemic aberrations or calculative errors—the deviations from the underlying “real” state of affairs—that led to this discrepancy between the world and our knowledge of it. Thus we have narratives that prioritize irrational and rampant speculation in the banking sector, the failure of risk management and forecasting models, or the internal contradictions of the capitalist world-system. Yet despite their different theoretical and empirical starting points, the three main narratives of what went wrong (liberal-economic, neo-Keynesian, and neo-Marxist) produce fundamentally similar analytical structures. These are stories of alienation that “…document a differential between the ‘real economy’, on the one hand, and a ‘fictive’ or ‘overvalued’ state of affairs, which is seemingly immaterial on the other” (page 43).
The problem for Roitman is that despite their ubiquity, such accounts fail to question the ontological and conceptual premises of the crisis claim itself. They read crisis in terms of systemic or ethical failures, rather than as a “blind spot” which regulates narrative constructions (pages 39 and 94). What looms in that blind spot? It is here that Roitman’s account becomes particularly helpful and instructive. She points out that crisis narratives generate judgments over the validity of the institutions and the concepts they seek to describe and explain. They produce moral demands (critiques) that call for a difference between past practices (the causes of the crisis) and a future set of affairs. And, most importantly, they form the basis for a set of political judgments which make certain actions and practices visible (indeed inevitable) and others invisible (and unthinkable).
For example, in a discussion of credit-default swaps and CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) she argues against the dominant narrative that housing prices naturally trended downward, noting instead that the drop in housing prices was the direct result of a series of analyses and decisions “…taken to initiate the transformation of [private] debt via a massive devaluation... Not the reverse”. Rather than a systemic or ethical failure, she identifies it as a “particular (and thus political) solution to what is declared a problem for certain people” (page 49). That solution involved mass foreclosures, devaluations and a dramatic public underwriting of banking debt all justified through the crisis diagnosis and obfuscated by the subsequent “search for deviance from the sure ground of true value and the straight path of uncorrupted history (page 56)”.
Thus what is fascinating about Roitman’s account is that in her reconstruction of the subprime mortgage debacle, crisis works as a kind of financial dispositif capable of stunning acts of transfiguration. She demonstrates how the narrative of crisis and the political judgement that came with it transformed a variety of financial assets into toxic debts without any overall shift in the underlying asset itself:
“The decision by the banking industry and the American government to define economic conditions in terms of crisis at a particular moment remains an unambiguous, unchallenged judgment. Naming this situation ‘crisis’ implies that what was once perfectly intelligible and construed as productive (debt is credit) is now taken to be without basis and construed as a negative value form (debt is toxic)” (page 94).
What brings all of this together is Roitman’s argument that because any invocation of crisis will always imply a normal situation from which we have deviated (and hence a search for the source of that deviation), crisis blinds us to the banal. That is, the very real possibility that the present state of affairs was brought about by the routine, effective and intended functioning of the system rather than some aberration or miscalculation. She makes this point in the context of credit-default swaps—“…the market did not fail and financial instruments were not defective or erroneous. A huge amount of cash was made” (page 53)—, or in the context of the subprime market more generally:
“the financial tools (ARMS [adjustable rate mortgages]) and a particular market (subprime mortgage) worked precisely as they should have—that is precisely as they were designed to work” (page 62).
Roitman’s forensic analysis of the crisis concept and its narrative structure is incredibly effective and she argues her broader theoretical points convincingly. Yet at times, this reader was left wondering about the role of agents and their decision making in her rendering. After all, despite its “sanctified power” (page 64), it is still agents that decide on whether any particular event should be categorized as a crisis. Obama certainly described the economic situation as such, as Roitman points out, but surely a wide constellation of interests across a variety of cultural and economic institutions had to find alignment and consensus to confirm that label. A similar process must have occurred to privilege one interpretation and one trajectory of action over and against any other. Who decides when to label an event a crisis? And how do the different actors with stakes in this decision achieve consensus? Finally, how do these ‘expert’ or elite interpretations find traction among the population which must shoulder the effects of elite action (e.g., foreclosures, public underwriting of Wall Street debt) but also presumably assent to it? Though these questions are perhaps beyond the book’s scope and framing, they seem essential to any in-depth consideration of the politics and praxis of crisis. Despite these small qualifications, Anti-Crisis delivers an elegant, provocative and conceptually rich argument which proves rewarding not just for those interested in the recent financial crisis or the ever expanding logics of risk and financialization but for anyone that has thought, or seeks to think, deeply about crisis and its associated concepts (e.g., emergency, exception, trauma).
