"Perma-crisis", really?

shakahislop

Well-known member
in general there's something going on with the speed of concept and language creation at the moment. It was a practice that I always thought mostly took place within the niche world of social science.it was one of the most notable things about the k punk blog for me, he had a way with finding catchy names for things.

but it has burst out into the rest of the world. everyone is making new names for abstract concepts. it's one of the outputs of the tiktok machine for example
 

version

Well-known member
in general there's something going on with the speed of concept and language creation at the moment. It was a practice that I always thought mostly took place within the niche world of social science.it was one of the most notable things about the k punk blog for me, he had a way with finding catchy names for things.

but it has burst out into the rest of the world. everyone is making new names for abstract concepts. it's one of the outputs of the tiktok machine for example

'The Ick' is a recent one that seems to have stuck.
 

version

Well-known member
"the alarming but common knowledge that we live in a perma-crisis world of economic, geopolitical, technological and climate chaos"
verbatim from today Guardian, do we really??

I feel like it's
a. a great excuse for authorities to do crazy shit "bcos the crisis"
b. a media driven panic, which
c. rubs in our faces distracting tales of constant woe that have no direct effect on us apart from constant elevated anxiety and disempowerment

I'm not especially convinced by the book and they seem up their own arses, but something along these lines just cropped up in something of Tiqqun's I'm reading;

'For more than twenty years, there has therefore been an entire calibration of subjectivities, an entire mobilization of employee "vigilance," a call for self-control from all sides, for subjective investment in the production process, for the kind of creativity that allows Empire to isolate the new hard core of its society: citizens. But this result couldn't have been achieved had the offensive over work not been simultaneously supported by a second, more general, more moral offensive. Its pretext was "the crisis." The crisis not only consisted in making commodities artificially scarce in order to renew their desirability, their abundance having produced, in '68, all too obvious disgust. Above all, the crisis renewed Blooms' identification with the threatened social whole, whose fate depended on the goodwill of everyone.That is precisely what is at work in the "politics of sacrifice," in the call to "tighten our belts:' and more generally, currently; to behave "in a responsible way" in everything we do. But responsible for what, really? for our shitty society? for the contradictions that undermine your mode of production? for the cracks in your totality? Tell me! Besides, this is how one is sure to recognize the citizen: by his individual introjection of these contradictions, of the aporias of the capitalist whole. Rather than fight against the social relations ravaging the most basic conditions of existence, the citizen sorts out his garbage and fills his car with alternative fuel. Rather than contributing to the construction of another reality, on Fridays after work he goes to serve meals to the homeless in a center run by slimy religious conservatives. And that is what he is going to talk about at dinner the next day.

The most simple-minded voluntarism and the most gnawing guilty conscience: these are the citizen's defining characteristics.'


Tiqqun, This Is Not A Program (2011)
 
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