Crises are the new normal

For modernist discourses of power, crises were one-off exceptions to the norm: although considered to be unavoidable, they were to be “bracketed” off (in the terminology of Carl Schmitt, 2003) and treated differently, as “exceptions” or “accidents”. Risk insurance is a classic modernist form of the bracketing of crises: ensuring that they are to be compartmentalized through a separate mode of calculus and regulation, dissipating responsibility for securing systems of production and exchange. ¹ On the other hand, for discourses of modernist critique, crises – from economic crisis to social breakdown and international conflict – were far from arbitrary or accidental but seen as revealing the systemic or inner contradictions of capitalist social relations. It was the interconnection of forms of crisis with forms of rule that was crucial to critique, which sought to materially ground alternatives through bringing awareness of these connections to the surface. ²