A hypothesis: a condition of crisis can be thought of as a displacement in the relationships between beliefs and ideologies, soft and/or hard infrastructures and material conditions. In such moments, a breach opens in what is ‘normal’, what passes for ‘second nature’, allowing us to see these relationships in a new light and creating an opportunity for already existing dynamics to realign in ways that may create a new constellation.
Crises modulate the network of relationships that define our world at that time with greater or lesser force in different parts of that network, but they do affect the entire network to some degree. Crises can intersect as for example in the ways the climate crisis inflects the refugee crisis or indeed the Covid crisis itself.
Crisis as reconfiguration
The crisis we are living through now emerged at the micro-level of a virus entering the human world. It led to the most extensive biopolitical experiment ever carried out, and for most Europeans of post-WW2 generations the past months have perhaps seen the most disruptive experiences of their lives. The virus is invisible, inodorous, impalpable. But it spread through networks of trade, transport and social interaction that are the basis of our globalised lives and had consequences that are massively visible and palpable: lives cut short, hospitals overwhelmed, morgues overflowing, streets and skies empty of cars and airplanes, work patterns transformed or eliminated, inequalities exacerbated, the freedom to move and congregate curtailed and surveilled.
