An Inspiring Guide for de-Ontologizing the Crisis

The post credit-crunch epoch is inundated with conceptualizations of reality as ‘crisis’. Different approaches to the financial crisis identify and underline different causes for it, but they never question the ontological and epistemological presumption of the claim on crisis. As with all other theoretical concepts which are commonly accepted and deeply embedded in our understanding, crisis is difficult to challenge. That is to say, the conditions of the conceptualization as well as the way the term operates usually stay unilluminated. This is a starting point of the Janet Roitman's (2013) book Anti-crisis, an immensely rich, atypical and inspiring account of the calculus of crisis.

Roitman draws on Reinhart Koselleck's (1988 [1959]) seminal book Critique and Crisis in order to set the territory for a discussion concerning the complex constellation of ‘crisis’ in general and in the financial sector in particular. So, Roitman points out that the concept was initially historically contextualized and philosophically elucidated towards the end of eighteenth century, when crisis had started to be perceived as diagnosis of time. At that time, the philosophy of history was born out of the understanding that the representation of events and the ‘underlying’ historic reality could diverge. As Roitman asserts, Koselleck's ‘central thesis is that, with the French Revolution, the conviction that conclusions about the past are necessary to an understanding of the future is challenged by the idea that the future is to be apprehended as indiscernible’ (p. 29). Consequently, the relation between the historical representation and understanding of events, on the one hand, and the very historic reality, on the other, should thus be rethought and brought into harmony through a different historical conceptualization. However, Koselleck has established that the concept of ‘crisis’ is also always a blind spot from which one criticizes the ‘misleading’ and ‘inaccurate’ representations or knowledge that led to the crisis, because the very concept does not reflect its own epistemological condition of possibility. As Roitman emphasizes in the book by drawing on Koselleck, a sense that something unprecedented or unexpected happened had propelled theorists to rethink philosophy of history. But she also shows how this is an epistemological paradox both in history and now in financial reality, given that an a priori concept (crisis) is imposed a posteriori on an epoch of intensive disturbances.

As I have suggested above, if the representation of a historic (or financial) reality no longer corresponds to an underlying structure, how we can constitute our knowledge of the ‘wrong’ representation if we are also no longer able to draw on the previous representational registers? This is also why ‘crisis’ and ‘critique’ are cognates. Epochs of intensive economic and political turmoil usually demand that a crisis is to be addressed via a critique of previous understandings and the establishment of a new form of knowledge or paradigm. It is in analyzing this that Roitman and Koselleck begin to diverge: while Koselleck (1988) accentuates critique in the ‘critique-crisis’ constellation, Roitman accentuates crisis and interrogates the premises of its conceptualization.

In the second part of the book Roitman therefore perspicaciously draws on and adapts Koselleck's various epistemological presumptions and questions in the contemporary context of financialization, the credit crunch, credit proliferation, credit derivatives, risk management and toxic assets in order to elucidate what stays uncontested when we make claims about the financial (or any other) crisis. She points out that representational approaches to the crisis – for instance, referring to some risk mismanagement or misunderstanding of value as causes for the financial meltdown – are based on the presumption that representations of values or risk through financial instruments, on the one hand, and economic reality (real value, real risk, etc.), on the other, have not corresponded. Analogies with the first part of the book and the horizon of epistemological limits in the field of history are obvious. Roitman asks: if the concept of crisis is always an a priori structure, then what do we miss in questioning, challenging and understanding financial, economic and political domains by ultimately relying on the concept? She in fact warns that the concept is usually used as ‘political denunciation of particular situation’ (p. 49) within the existing constellation, rather than to challenge both the ontological status of the reality of the situation itself and the very concept which describes it. To put it differently, the approach of addressing such situations through the concept of crisis actually ends up ontologizing it (p. 35).

In addition, the use of retrospective analysis in order to locate ‘when the things went wrong’ is always associated with a specific periodization of time. So, Roitman (p. 28) emphasizes that this conceptualization of reality is at the same time also a conceptualization of time – there is a before and after the crisis, a before and after the disjunction of reality and our knowledge about it.

However, Roitman suggests that readers, instead of thinking about how value was misrepresented, should try to suspend the dualism of crisis versus normality and consider how a value is always structured, generated and produced through socio-technological assemblages. To put it simply, Roitman suggests of thinking of assets and debt as two sides of the same coin in different periods of time. As she emphasizes, ‘discerning true value in the materiality of the universe (houses, labour), as an a priori, is distinct from discerning the ways in which forms of value are produced by material systems and technologies’ (p. 52).

The book propels us into rethinking the concept of financial crisis as a blind spot and into asking what the conceptualization of a series of economic and financial events as a crisis actually blinds us to. That is to say, how the conceptualization paradoxically prevents us from addressing the relevant events differently, outside of the box of ‘representational error’ that is to be retrospectively discovered and consequently rectified. Roitman suggests that the most common question – ‘when things went wrong’ – indirectly legitimizes the system it looks to challenge, because it presupposes some normality of the system before the deviation. She also asserts that:

‘crisis’ is a distinction that transcends oppositions between knowledge and experience, or subject and object; it is a distinction that generates meaning precisely because it contains its own self-reference … crisis is claimed, but it remain a latency; it is never itself explained because it is necessarily further reduced to other elements. (p. 38)

This is because the approach which searches for an error cannot conceptualize a system that generates imbalances without an error in representation, a system that produces catastrophes when operating immaculately. As Roitman underlines, ‘an appreciation of how risk is produced and pursued as a form of value is crucial to thinking about possible alternative accounts of contemporary financial practice’ (p. 51). Consequently and even more importantly, the book discusses how the meaning, signification and narrative of the crisis operate inside the machinery of finance and change the value of particular assets without any noticeable change in it. To put it simply, how the narrative of crisis has, for example, changed credit-related securities into toxic assets. Finally, the book asks us to stop only investigating backwards in order to find the fundamental ‘error’ in a valuation, behavior or structure, but to rather think of the socio-technical constellation which enabled a form of risk calculation and value production to prevail and proliferate and to consider how the system is structured rather than trying to localize errors in representation. This is why Roitman singles out Martha Poon's analyses of risk in the context of the credit crunch, given that Poon does not search for immanent flaws in risk management, but on the contrary argues that ‘we do not face financial risk, we make financial risk within controlled environments’ (Poon, 2012, in Roitman, p. 63).

However, to think in the mode of anti-crisis is not at all easy. It is not just a matter of being immersed in the different givens of the crisis, but also a matter of a specific training in the philosophy of anti-crisis, in which we must ask questions in order to understand the approach. So, if we think of Roitman's elaboration of Poon's (2010) risk analysis in the context of credit scoring in the USA, and the transformation from control-by-screening to credit-by-risk, Roitman is of course right that the analysis has moved away from any idea of error or mispriced risk. Nevertheless, a reader might still ask: if the substantial transformation itself is still localizable in time, is it consequently susceptible to the same common question – when did things go wrong?

From my perspective, the book reaches its highest heights when the analysis of the critical re-conceptualization of crisis opens up new avenues for thinking politics in relation to economy. As Roitman points out, by drawing on Foucault:

moving beyond this politics of crisis, one might insist that effective forms of critique would instead engender new forms of knowledge such that, for instance, the very boundary between ‘the economic’ and ‘the political’ would be reorganized or transformed. (p. 69)

However, this is also the moment at which the book's complex theoretical constellation reaches its most intense point – and where, I would suggest, Luhman's system theory and concept of crisis as ‘second-order observation’ (p. 38) should be reconsidered in the context of non-representational, Foucauldian or Deleuzian registers. But this is just hinted by Roitman at the very end of the book, where she points out that non-representational registers are still based on narratives (p. 95), so that they are still limited with language and representation. This is undoubtedly true, but we should keep in mind that Deleuze and Guattari, for example, understand semiotic machines differently, and, according to them, language operates within the machines just as one mechanism along several others. Nevertheless, to think the crisis outside the domain defined by narratives and language brings significant and challenging questions into the debate and potentially changes the strategic course of the discussion – what would a non-representational understanding of the crisis be and is it even possible to think the crisis outside the narrative/discursive practices? What would in that case happen with critique as part of the above-mentioned cognate ‘crisis – critique’? Lazzarato (2014) shows us in his new book, by drawing on Guattari's and Foucault's late works, that it is possible to think about the ongoing crisis beyond representational registers. In addition, Lazzarato underlines how the most powerful effects of the crisis are not related to system of powers which operate inside language, but are related to the (re)production of subjectivities established as existential (as opposed to discursive). Existential flows, both material and immaterial, both human and non-human, operate as predominant, asignifying constellations, which later interact with the discursive domains.

Anyway, the dilemma about the potential non-representational horizon of ‘crisis’ is just a final thought in the book which, throughout, shakes our deepest understandings of something so common and given – the ongoing crisis. It does so inspiringly, perspicaciously and also paradoxically plays with statements about the crisis to discover what they actually hide. We should understand in-depth how the concept ‘crisis’ operates if we are to find a way to address all the dilemmas of the contemporary epoch.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Radman Selmic

Radman Selmic, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK.