Notes on corona crisis and temporality
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Notes on corona crisis and temporality Josep Maria Antentas 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
The coronavirus crisis has put the discussion of the notion of crisis itself back at the center of the debate. The concept of crisis is derived from the Greek verb krino that means to “separate,” “choose,” “judge,” or “decide,” As Koselleck (1988, 2012) has explained its different meanings in ancient Greece, all somehow suggested the absence of time and a moment of truth and decision—its medical Hippocratic meaning being the one that historically prevailed, referring to the critical moment when illness could get worse and lead to death or could ease off and lead to recovery. Crisis was, in that sense, a turning point with opposing possible outcomes. A crisis marks a milestone in a society’s trajectory, whose depth is proportional to the crisis itself. Returning to the original meaning of the term is useful to take into account that every crisis is settled by a process of reorganization of social (and geopolitical) relations, whose concrete outcome depends on the balance of forces between the different sociopolitical projects at stake. That is the crucial question regarding the debates on the world after the pandemic. In its contemporary conventional uses in politics and social sciences, crisis no longer refers to this turning point towards different dénouements, but rather a moment when a given situation worsens. Crisis thus merely describes the opposite pathological state to the normal. But the fact is that the normality of capitalism is already pathological, first because it regularly leads to crises and second because it creates everyday suffering and inequality. Walter Benjamin (1999[1927-1940]:473, [N9a,1]) in his Passagenwerk noted this everyday twosided pathological normality of capitalism when writing that “the concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given. Thus Strindberg (in 10 Damascus?): ‘hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now’.” The topological figure of bifurcation is critical to understand the historic meaning of crises as they represent a turning point towards the uncertain where alternative paths become possible. Several authors have recently made use of the concept to explain the dilemmas of global capitalism in terms of competing future possibilities. The cases of Wallerstein, Balibar, and Bensaïd are noteworthy. All of them rest upon certain usages of mathematics bifurcation theory associated to catastrophe theory, whose main exponent was mathematician René Thom * Josep Maria Antentas [email protected]
1
Department of Sociology, Centre d’Estudis Sociològics sobre la Vida Quotidiana i el Treball (QUIT)-Institut d’Estudis del Treball (IET), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Bellaterra, Spain
J. M. Antentas
(2014[1980]), and to the theory of dissipative structures in the study of complex systems out of equilibrium done by Ilya
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