Crisis Ordinariness | Devin Wangert

How we differ from the generations of modernity is in our inheritance from those generations: we have inherited a world in crisis. This course asks how we can understand and describe critical thought and political agency in the time after crisis.

We speak regularly about the “climate crisis”, “labor crises” etc. 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. 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.

Devin Wangert<.a> is a Canadian scholar who holds a PhD from Harvard University in Visual Studies. He also holds an MA in Media and Communications from the European Graduate School and a BA in Film Studies and Cultural Studies from McGill University. Devin’s research interests include the study of automation, new media theory, banality and neutrality, slavery and social death, anesthetics and non-representation, and Marxist political economics and financial theory.

Course Schedule:

• Lecture 1: Introduction
• Lecture 2: Attrition and/as the “Good Life” – Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant, excerpts and “Necropolitics” by Achille Mbembe
• Lecture 3: The Oppressed Become the Perpetrators / The Perpetrators Become the Beneficiaries – After Evil by Robert Meister
• Lecture 4: Historical Materialism (or the Tragedy of Inheritance) –“On the Critique of Violence”, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama by Walter Benjamin
• Lecture 5: Canceling the Future, Redeeming the Present – No Future by Lee Edelman and Red, White & Black by Frank Wilderson
• Lecture 6: The Two Termini of Ecological Thought – Carbon Democracy by Timothy Mitchell and Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani
• Lecture 7: Speculating on (Our) Futures – Justice is an Option by Robert Meister, “Genealogies of Resilience” by Melinda Cooper and Jeremy Walker, and The Politics of Large Numbers by Alain Desrosières
• Lecture 8: Trauma in the Time After Crisis – Dead Time: Intolerable Images and the Politics of Banality by Devin Wangert