Crisis Ordinariness

How we differ from the generations of modernity is in our inheritance from those generations: we have inherited a world in crisis. We speak regularly about the “climate crisis”, “labour crises”, and “military crises”. Indeed, one of the things that comes ready-made in our inheritance is a grammar of crisis. It seems obvious what crisis is, it is a matter of fact, a ‘state of exception’ that appears to us because it violates the grammar of daily life. Yet the language we have inherited — the language of crisis — renders us acutely unequipped to think and live in a time of crisis. This is foremost because the time of crisis should not be livable, and yet our daily lives and ordinary problems impossibly unfold within a permanent state of exception — a state of exception that violates the rules of life permanently and therefore becomes the rule.

This course asks how we can understand and describe critical thought and political agency in the time after crisis. “Crisis Ordinariness,” a phrase from the late scholar Lauren Berlant, captures the challenge to this intellectual and political labour: how can we seize “moment[s] of danger” when they appear to us not as interruptions to daily life, but as daily life  If the grammar of crisis has changed, then our inherited coordinates—how to “manage” crisis, how to live within it, and how to imagine a world not in crisis — must also change. How they must change is not obvious: living ordinary lives within a time of crisis means experiencing the unpredictability of the future itself as a matter of fact, as the ordinary unfolding of life.

How do we understand our inheritance as such — the past, writ large — if we live in an ongoing present in crisis? How do we understand our relation to the future if it comes only as the terminus to present crisis — as the moment that crisis can no longer be borne or passed on? This course will mobilize philosophies of time, ecological thought and media studies to develop a grammar of ordinariness in a time of crisis. We will use this scholarship to describe the labour of thinking and living within crisis ordinariness.

Watch the course on YouTube.