Do crises in political and financial domains mean the suspension of business as usual, or simply its consolidation?

How does one resign himself to existing affairs? What sort of self-deception must he engage in to be able to say to himself, “Truly, my condition is mete and just?” Goethe once wrote, “None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.” I wonder, however, if this maxim admits of its inverse: “None are so hopelessly free as those who falsely believe they are enslaved.” But what possible hopelessness could one possibly find in freedom? Even the mind-bendingly obscure German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel believed that history moved toward the goal of human emancipation, while the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that freedom ameliorates despair. It does not cause it.

Citizens of the United States pride themselves on their historically unprecedented degree of political freedom. They consider themselves — perhaps justifiably — the embodied telos of a certain conception of history, wherein sovereignty passes from nature to god to chief, to king to eventually the people themselves. What a blow it would be, then, to learn that in truth individual sovereignty has instead passed into the annals of history along with spontaneous generation, phlogiston, the philosopher stone, and other such fanciful chimeras.

For years it seemed that the U.S. managed to preserve something of the form, while all the while jettisoning the substance, of individual liberty. Recently, however, the form itself, having become too ragged and threadbare to conceal Oz any longer, has more or less been dispensed with. Someone of a strict Marxist bent might claim that the contradictions characteristic of capitalism have heightened to an unsustainable point, and now the bourgeois ranks simply find themselves whipsawed by the resulting tensions. I find it hard to disagree with this assessment. The entire economy, now financialized to an absurd extent, has moved to what I like to call a “Whaddya-gonna-do-about-it?” stage. The cops have arrived. They’ve restored power to the bank building and the lights therein, exposing the robbers in the vault. Yet the robbers know that all is not lost — though they will have to raise the stakes. The heist, according to the robbers’ assessment, has taken twist for the worse, but it hasn’t necessarily gone bad. Take hostages. Kill a few to show the cops they mean business. Head for South America with the loot.  A dicier, bloodier and more difficult proposition than straightforward safecracking, certainly, but not an impossible one. Or so the thinking goes.

In the financial sector, where capital of every stripe is king, the beneficence of crisis is somewhat of an axiom, even a business model.

The analogy here highlights the peculiar rationality characteristic of extraordinary circumstances — a sort of logic of crisis, one might say. This rationality generally finds one those with sufficient nerve; in a crisis, only the coolest heads prevail, while most others tend to go to pieces, regarding the unfolding catastrophe as upsetting the game board, scattering the pieces. One can perhaps attribute this reaction to the fact that the onset of a crisis carries the bulk of the crisis’s significance and force, just as a storm front brings the greatest fury of a storm. The onset of a crisis, in other words, people tend to consider equivalent to the crisis as completely realized fact.

But those in the know understand the central tenet of what one could call the gnosis of crisis: a crisis is an event that occurs in time and space. This may strike one as a trivial insight, but it nonetheless carries serious implications. The Wall Street Journal, in a story appearing in the January 28, 2009 edition, quotes Rahm Emmanuel, then newly named chief of staff for President Obama, as saying: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.” Emmanuel was speaking, of course, of the Great Bank Bailout of late 2008 and its immediate aftermath, a deep recession which beset the U.S. despite the assurances of those who pushed for said bailout. (Most I’m sure know the details by now, so I will refrain from rehearsing them). Emmanuel thus recommends himself as just one of these gnostics of crisis. While most everyone else raged at at colossal swindle of the whole affair, circled their financial wagons for a long bout of dearth, or feverishly burnished résumés in anticipation of impending layoffs, Emmanuel delighted over the uncommonly good luck that found him. To individuals of Emmanuel’s turn of mind, crisis is capital. Inaction during crisis, meanwhile, amounts to squandering of this capital.

In the financial sector, where capital of every stripe is king, the beneficence of crisis is somewhat of an axiom, even a business model. Movers and shakers in the financial class, perhaps plagued by impulse control problems, perhaps drunk with the arrogance of power, even engage in what magicians or spell casters call “revelation of the method.” These grandees of lower Manhattan give away the game, revealing everything involved in their misdeeds, albeit in a subtle, casual manner (so as not to arouse suspicion or alarm). Titans of finance often remark dryly, almost off-handedly, this bromide: “There’s money to be made on the way up, and money to be made on the way down.” Business cycles and crises set in motion a version of what French theorist and historian of philosophy Michel Foucault calls “microphysics of power,” an opportunity of a particular duration resulting from what one says or does and its effects. A commonplace of stock-market trading is that there’s money to be made on “the way up” (as a stock price ascends) as well as “on the way down” (as a stock price descends). This saying gets closest to what “microphysics of power” entails — a kairos, a seasonability to a particular advantage which from moment to moment undergoes alterations and variations until such time as the advantage disappears. The concept of microphysics of power considers an opportunity’s specific duration as a concatenation of moments, each of which is a complex of particular configurations and possibilities for action whose outcomes are more or less predictable. When, for instance, a sponsoring senator or congresswoman insists that a particular legislative bill must be passed into law in two weeks because she knows that beyond such time other legislators will have had time to study the bill and consider its more distasteful elements, she is employing a strategy that proceeds from microphysics-of-power type calculations.

Profits of doom: crisis as capital.

Considered holistically as an event which in it particulars arranges a sequence of moments each with its own kairos, a crisis presents unprecedented opportunity in how it configures circumstances, situations and actors. Ordinary protocols speed up, slow down, break down, or indeed, disappear altogether, and as they do they strip away familiar contexts. This acceleration or suspension typically disorient those involved (except, of course, those like Emmanuel who have been wishing for just such an event). Actors and institutions find themselves in peculiar situation: exposed, confused, but also empowered, provided they have the presence of mind to seize the initiative presented by crises. French philosopher Alain Badiou gives this phenomenon a more theoretical articulation. In Metapolitics he writes:

[W]henever there is a genuinely political event, the State reveals itself. It reveals its excess of power, its repressive dimension. But it also reveals a measure for this usually invisible excess. For it is essential to the normal functioning of the State that its power remain measureless, errant, unassignable. The political event puts an end to all this by assigning a visible measure to the excessive power of the State.

Crises in the political domain tend to throw a spanner in the works of government. The institutions thereof, which regulate, modulate and constrain the exercise of political power fall into disarray. Power thus springs free the mechanisms of governmental institutions, showing just how excessively saturated these institutions were with it in the first place. This is another way of saying that, in the political arena at least, the opportunities presented in a crisis usually come at the expense of the existing constitution. Opportunists like Emmanuel, true gnostics of crisis, understand this intuitively, in much the same manner as Thulsa Doom of the 1981 film Conan the Barbarian understands “the riddle of steel.”

Generation Y, word has it, though they do perhaps reject the impositions of the dominant ideology, seem extremely reluctant to reject its splendors.

Those prophets of the computer age who frequently claim that the various wefts of the World Wide Web will ineluctably entangle us all in a global village whose economy is that of information exchange — and thus one can only assume that with the establishment of this village will come increased understanding and a great info-commonwealth of humanity — I find go against the constructs currently promulgated in contemporary discourse. The folks at the magazine Adbusters recently joined the fray (which includes my fellow GenBubchiks Rob Horning and Ylajali Hansen) of commentators knocking the so-called Millennials, or Generation Y. Generation Y, word has it, though they do perhaps reject the impositions of the dominant ideology, seem extremely reluctant to reject its splendors. They want the butter, but they don’t want to do the necessary churning. Instead of inventing a new iconography of cool, instead of elaborating new categories of meaning, they remain content with sign system into which they’ve emerged.

The constant refrain of the ideology of the self-esteem movement which underwrites the child-rearing strategies of Gen-Yers parents is not “You deserve better than capitalism,” but rather, “You deserve better than the jerks exploited to serve the interests of those to whom falls the lion’s share.” The broad tendency among the popular-culture-derived Gen-Y outlook is that singular specialness as an a priori (again, an ideological construct of the self-esteem movement) finds its only just correlative in some sort of rentier position in the socioeconomic hierarchy. After all, those t-shirts popular a few years ago among teenage girls read “Princess,” not “Paper-pusher.”

In Cyberia, everyone is a petty despot, a tinpot dictator, exploiting crises as they fall his way.

Anton would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at generationbubble [at] gmail [dot] com.