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Crisis is everywhere: in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and the Congo; in housing markets, money markets, financial systems, state budgets, and sovereign currencies. In Anti-Crisis, Janet Roitman steps back from the cycle of crisis production to ask not just why we declare so many crises but also what sort of analytical work the concept of crisis enables. What, she asks, are the stakes of crisis? Taking responses to the so-called subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008 as her case in point, Roitman engages with the work of thinkers ranging from Reinhart Koselleck to Michael Lewis, and from Thomas Hobbes to Robert Shiller. In the process, she questions the bases for claims to crisis and shows how crisis functions as a narrative device, or how the invocation of crisis in contemporary accounts of the financial meltdown enables particular narratives, raising certain questions while foreclosing others.
Crisis is everywhere: in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and the Congo; in housing markets, money markets, financial systems, state budgets, and sovereign currencies. In Anti-Crisis, Janet Roitman steps back from the cycle of crisis production to ask not just why we declare so many crises but also what sort of analytical work the concept of crisis enables. What, she asks, are the stakes of crisis? Taking responses to the so-called subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008 as her case in point, Roitman engages with the work of thinkers ranging from Reinhart Koselleck to Michael Lewis, and from Thomas Hobbes to Robert Shiller. In the process, she questions the bases for claims to crisis and shows how crisis functions as a narrative device, or how the invocation of crisis in contemporary accounts of the financial meltdown enables particular narratives, raising certain questions while foreclosing others.
Taking the so-called subprime mortgage crisis as her case study, Janet Roitman analyzes "crisis" as a narrative device, explaining how the term enables some narratives and questions while foreclosing others.
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. What Is at Stake? 1
1. Crisis Demands 15
Judgment Day
The Moral Demand
The Test
2. Crisis Narratives 41
Bubbles
Houses
Finance
Subjects
3. Crisis: Refrain! 71
Noncrisis Narrations
The Crisis that does not Obtain
Conclusion: Dreams 91
Notes 97
References 133
Index 153
Janet Roitman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa.
"Anti-Crisis incisively illuminates a core blind spot of modern understandings of history: the coupling of critique & crisis. Janet Roitman sunders this couple revealing the ties that have bound us and thereby opens up welcome new horizons for thought and action. Once the complacency of the self-importance of living in a crisis epoch is gone, then prophecy, denunciation and the speaker's benefit can be bundled with other toxic waste and pawned off on those looking for assurance at bargain rates." - Paul Rabinow, coauthor of Demands of the Day: On the Logic of Anthropological Inquiry "Anti-Crisis will become an instant classic. It is that good. Seeking to understand why crisis has become an 'omnipresent sign in almost all forms of narrative today,' Janet Roitman analyzes the constitution of 'crisis' as a privileged object of knowledge, a ground to 'critical theory' and the human sciences more broadly, and an instigation to various modes of action in the world. Along the way, she makes crucial interventions in debates about what is critical about critical theory, what the critical human sciences are for, and how they ought to be sustained, or not, in the wake of the restructuring of U.S. higher education. This is a stunning, paradigm-shifting achievement." - Bill Maurer, author of Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason "For Roitman, "crisis" is not simply a cliched label for - among other things - recent economic developments, but a fraught and dubious concept. The word itself has roots in an ancient Greek medical term referring to the phase of an illness which will either kill the patient or end in recovery." - Scott Mcleme, Inside Higher Ed "On Thursday 18 September 2008, Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, warned: 'We may not have an economy on Monday.' [...] Roitman responds by asking philosophical questions. What does it mean 'not to have an economy'? What is signified by the 'collapse of the world economy'? Critical to an extreme, Roitman has no faith in such terms. Her complaint is that anti-capitalist activists - involved in campaigns such as Occupy Wall Street - take crisis at face value. Instead of stepping back to 'consider what is at stake with crisis in-and-of-itself', they unconsciously accept the grammar of crisis narratives, viewing the world in binary-digital terms - capital versus labour, use value versus surplus value, politics versus morality and so forth. Internalising such antinomies, they end up by simply taking sides - allocating blame, for example, or insisting on a redistribution of wealth and power. Roitman soars above all that. In her view, 'the point is to observe crisis as a blind spot, and hence to apprehend the ways in which it regulates narrative constructions'." - Chris Knight, Times Higher Education
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