Abstract
I was in the United States on 15 September 2008 which, as you will recall, was the day that Lehman Brothers – then the fourth largest financial services firm in the world – collapsed. I remember being riveted to CNN, watching with disbelief as events unfolded on Wall Street. It appeared to me – as it did to most of the media commentators – that the global financial system was shaking to its very foundations. The next day, together with University of Kentucky colleagues, I began speculating about what these unprecedented events might mean for the US economy more generally. Two weeks later I was back in Bristol, giving a seminar on the geographies of globalization, when I mentioned my initial disbelief at the events that had unfolded in recent days, and suggested that this financial crisis was indicative of profound changes that would require hard analytical attention. One of the people in the audience challenged my impromptu comments. Why, they asked, was I surprised by these events when economic geographers had long been predicting the downfall of global capitalism? Uncharacteristically, I found myself reacting strongly to this challenge; infuriated by the ‘I told you so’ subtext of his comments – my first experience of what Becky Mansfield identifies in her commentary as the ‘we’ve seen it all before analysis’ – and also by the complacency of this position given that it was already apparent that large numbers of Americans would lose their jobs, savings and homes. In responding to this challenge I found myself vehemently rejecting the idea that most critical academics had accurately predicted these events; not right then, not right there, not like that.
In the two years that followed I was regularly asked by geography colleagues when my ‘crisis paper’ would be published (and declined various invitations to write such a contribution for other journals). Because of the experience above I was wary of forming judgements too soon and, more generally, as the ‘subprime crisis’ gradually morphed into the ‘global financial crisis’ I remained unclear as to how best to conceptualize the economic changes I was living through. During those years I also took up a new job as my Faculty’s Research Director which saw me engaging much more extensively with academic colleagues elsewhere in the university who, I discovered with interest, were having their own debates about the nature of the changes that characterized the present and the implications for their research and knowledge strategies. Whereas I was concerned with political-economic processes, they were focused on geological and ecological processes on the one hand, and social and cultural processes on the other. During this time I also watched with interest the resurgence of more orthodox forms of Marxism, and listened to a great deal more hubris about the inevitability of capitalist crisis. Finally, I spent three important months in Frankfurt where I learned a great deal more about the Anglo-American specificities of my disciplinary and theoretical knowledges, as well as having the opportunity to workshop the ideas in this article with my German students. In part, this is my ‘crisis paper’ but it is also a reaction to those two years of reading, talking, listening and then, but only then, writing.
What the article attempted to do was draw together the reading, talking and thinking I did during that time in order to set a new research agenda for me and, perhaps, Dialogues in Human Geography readers. Unusually for me, this is a programmatic article, one that should be strongly qualified by the adage ‘do as I say, not do as I do’. Most often my approach is to develop my conceptual claims about the need for a poststructuralist political economy through the analysis of empirical research projects. Prior to my move to Bristol six years ago, these analyses were most likely to be based on New Zealand case studies, although more recently I have begun work on new UK-based initiatives. This article does not do that. Instead it is a somewhat polemical attempt to argue for the rethinking of geographical knowledge production strategies through the lens of ‘assemblage thinking’, and to identify (albeit in sketchy and preliminary ways) the potential such knowledge production strategies might have in the current conjuncture.
Fortunately for me, the insightful commentaries offered by Becky Mansfield, Charlie Mather, Hugh Campbell, Marc Tadaki and colleagues, Pauline McGuirk, Christine Tamasy and Guy Baeten begin to do the work that I was not able to do in the article itself (even in 11,000 words!). Most immediately, Charlie Mather helps me understand why it is that increasingly I am convinced that ‘assemblage thinking’ may be more useful than ‘deeper analyses’ when it comes to understanding the present. He too has been reading the provocative writings of sociologists Mike Savage and Bruno Latour, who challenge colleagues who remain committed to ‘depth models’. That said, before reading Mather’s comments I had not realized I was making an ontological move; his making this point explicit for me is both exciting and intimidating. It also encouraged me to re-read the Savage article he refers to. Given where my work is now positioned, I was interested to note that the examples of ‘descriptive assemblages’ that Savage (2009) discusses are situated in a broader reorientation of sociology away from the humanities and towards the natural sciences. Obviously the disciplinary trajectory is different for geography, but I suspect it is no coincidence that more robust conversations between social scientists and natural scientists are taking place at the same time as ‘assemblage thinking’ is gaining intellectual traction within the discipline. And is it just coincidence that four of the seven commentaries on my article are from colleagues working on the science/social divide and who are keen to examine how intellectual formations are beginning to shift and change through these interactions?
All of the commentaries underline the point that academics are situated agents, and ask how we might help contribute to creating new worlds in which to live. If our analytical work is both constitutive and performative, how should we identify key ‘rooms and moments’ (to use the wonderful phrasing of Richard Le Heron) in which we might intervene? Guy Baeten is worried that in arguing for multiplicity, unevenness and complexity I risk losing sight of the need for a strong analysis that would underpin unambiguous political goals. In this regard he is right, although if there were not already a large number of high-profile commentators developing such strong analyses then my position might be different. My former colleague Adam Tickell jokes about the academic world being divided into ‘clumpers’ and ‘splitters’, and I am definitely in the latter group. It seems to me the answer to the question of where and how we intervene will be very different in different contexts, and that some degree of ambiguity is inevitable. Indeed it is telling that Hugh Campbell, Marc Tadaki and colleagues, and Pauline McGuirk all demonstrate what such an approach might mean through grounded examinations of particular cases. They stress that such examinations may require us to bracket initial assumptions about ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and engage in careful evaluation as to what is actually happening in particular ‘rooms and moments’ and what the performative possibilities might be. There are also tantalizing glimpses of ways in which my argument might be further developed; for example, I was fascinated to learn that it has been argued that the role of scientists and experts becomes attenuated during crisis (Tadaki et al.). Surely this is what is also happening to the social sciences, even though the imaginary of social science knowledge has become more central to the ambitions of policy-makers and research funders seeking global solutions to ‘grand challenge’ problems.
Perhaps inevitably there are some misunderstandings, both about the five domains I have identified as worthy of further consideration, and how I understand contemporary invocations of crisis. As I stressed in the article itself, I am not arguing that these five Cs are pre-eminent or alone in being discursively constructed as crises. Tamasy is right in that if I was writing it today I might be tempted to include ‘critical infrastructure’ (Duffield, 2010) as a further C in the wake of what we have learned following earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan, and the renewed appreciation of the risks associated with the nuclear industry. Baeten is also correct in underlining the point that some of my five Cs may not be interpreted as crises by others; indeed I fully accept his challenge of ‘whose crisis?’. As one of the initial referees of the article pointed out, and this still troubles me, there is a real risk that the imagined audience for this article is comprised of western academics. But it is not only that I may have unwittingly lapsed into some form of hegemonic reasoning; it is notable that my identification of religion resonated for Mansfield as the only American commentator, whereas my sense is that this C may have less traction for those elsewhere. Likewise it is interesting that the Australian commentators are less concerned with the politics of austerity than they are with climate change. More generally, this is Sidaway’s (2008) point about the credit crunch or ‘subprime crisis’. In a pithy editorial he compared it to the so-called ‘Asian crisis’ of the late 1990s, arguing that this most recent financial crisis could be seen as an ‘American crisis’, even though it is not named as such. The question of positionality is, of course, key here.
But the point about assemblage thinking is that it encourages us to focus more explicitly on the ‘how’ and ‘where’ of naming and framing (and performing) (see Clarke 2010, for example, for a useful discussion of different forms of crisis talk). I focused on these five Cs because they are described as such in the academic debates, disciplinary literatures and institutional configurations within which I am currently enmeshed. In the contexts I work in they are also explicitly politicized as ‘crises’ whereas, for example, earlier ‘crises’ such as structural unemployment and overpopulation are no longer as often framed in these terms, and more recent examples such as precarity and migration are still the subject of contestation when they are described as such. And I absolutely take the point that academics naming particular issues as ‘crises’ is, in part, constitutive of crisis itself. Does writing a ‘crisis paper’ – even one that aims to contest the very notion of crisis – contribute to the wider uncertainties associated with our as yet unknown (but certainly not unprecedented) futures? How else might we conceptualize the politics of the present?