DOVRAT, Chalozin. Crisis in Modernity

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Author’s version*

* The final version of this text appeared as an introductory chapter in “Discourse and Crisis: Critical perspectives”and is under copyright (John Benjamins, 2013). To cite this chapter:

Chalozin-Dovrat, L. (2013). ’Crisis’ in Modernity: A sign of the times between decisive change and potential irreversibility. In A. De Rycker & Z. M. Don (Eds.), Discourse and Crisis: Critical perspectives (pp. 69–97). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins (DAPSAC).

‘Crisis’ in Modernity

A sign of the times between decisive change and potential irreversibility

Lin Chalozin-Dovrat

Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), Paris, FranceTel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

1. Introduction

Since the mid-20th century the concept of crisis has gradually gained the attention of political

thinkers and historians. “The general crisis that has overtaken the modern world everywhere and

in almost every sphere of life”, wrote Hannah Arendt in 1958, “manifests itself differently in

each country, involving different areas and taking on different forms” (2006: 170). “That this is

an ‘age of crisis’ seems the least controversial of statements”, remarked historian Randolph Starn

in 1971 (p. 3). These observations, identifying crisis as the sign of the times, are probably not

less pertinent today. ‘Crisis’ is a frequently used term, and it often expresses a general sentiment

towards our contemporaneous world. But when we describe our times in terms of crises, what

exactly do we want to say? What does ‘crisis’ mean?

The high rate of appearance of the words ‘crisis’ in English, ‘crise’ in French and ‘Krise’ in

German, has generated an ambiguous attitude among researchers. On the one hand, the growing



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use of the term since the mid-18th century, particularly in the social and political realms, is too

significant to ignore and is deemed to reveal important information on Western European

cultural history. On the other hand, ‘crisis’ and its counterparts are often used loosely, they

appear in the most varied contexts and do not seem to have a stable signified. As it was recently

put by the writer Michel Surya, discussing the discourse on the global economic crisis: “ “Crisis”

: every day, everywhere, on all possible tones. [...] In fact, most of the time, we don’t even see

any more what we talk about when we talk of crisis, so much we’ve talked about it, while

referring to all matters [...]” (2009: 5).1

The aim of this chapter is to explore the semantics of ‘crisis’ in light of its diachronic pathand in view of the cultural, political and scientific arenas in which it played a part. I will argue

that the history of ‘crisis’ is a valuable case for showing the development of our cognition of

change in modern times, and conversely, that critically acknowledging the historical dimensions

of our perceptions of change may lead us to a more accurate understanding of the semantic array

of the term in its present-day usage. Thus, it is important to point out that the chapter is not a

corpus-based study in historical semantics or in critical discourse analysis (CDA). Rather, the

main objective is to discuss the notion of crisis within the much broader frameworks of political

theory and the history of ideas, both of which, among other theories, inform CDA as a scholarly

endeavour.

I will further claim that the allegedly obscure nature of the signifier ‘crisis’ is the result of

the specific semantic processes of abstraction the term was subject to. Beginning in the mid-18th

century, the word was favoured by political writers and philosophers, and during the 19th

century, it was also adopted by the emerging social sciences in their successful attempt to

1. “« Crise » : tous les jours, partout, sur tous les tons. […] On ne voit plus en effet, la plupart du temps, de quoion parle quand on parle de crise, tellement on en a déjà parlé et à tout propos […].”



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consolidate new types of knowledge about change. Adapting to the rapid transmutations in the

awareness of change, ‘crisis’ was abstracted from the realm of the immediate experience of

action and became a general abstract notion. Serving various interests at an era when the very

conception of temporality underwent radical changes, ‘crisis’ and its intricate semantic history

thus expressly demonstrates to which degree the formation of meaning is a political

phenomenon. Moreover, it shows how the construction of knowledge, and especially knowledge

about the human experience of time, is set within a cultural and political context and interacts

with it (Foucault 1969). In the final analysis, ‘crisis’ was and still is an expression of the concrete

experience of decisive change. It conveys this particular aspect of temporality related to abrupt,unexpected and vital transformation, and it forewarns of a crucial development in the state of

affairs. These semantic traits also made the classic notion of crisis compatible with the modern

awareness of time.

The German historian Reinhart Koselleck devoted an extensive work to the evolution of the

concept of crisis in Western European languages, and in many respects his seminal work is the

basis of the present chapter. Since the late 18th century, and particularly following the French

and American revolutions, argued Koselleck, ‘crisis’ has become “an expression of a new sense

of time which both indicated and intensified the end of an epoch” (2006: 358). This sense of time

is specifically modern: according to Koselleck, ‘crisis’ heralded a new conception of historical

time that was deeply embedded in the political conditions of 18th-century Western Europe. But

how did the term ‘crisis’ proper emerge as a subject matter for wide intellectual attention? In the

next section, I will describe key moments in the developments in Western European thought that

lead to the mid-20th century scholarly interest in the word ‘crisis’ and its political functions.



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While the successful dissemination of the term during the past two centuries has drawn

much attention, it also produced reserves. “[T]he concept remains as multi-layered and

ambiguous as the emotions attached to it”, commented Koselleck (2006: 358), and many

commentators share his impression that the noun ‘crisis’ conveys too many diverse ideas about

time and historicity, and it might be nothing more than a catchword (Bally 2004 [1930]; Starn

1971; Holton 1987; Hauser 2009, among others). The trouble with ‘crisis’ – the concept’s

notorious resistance to analysis – will be examined in a third section. I will contend that the

embarrassment provoked by the concept does not simply result from the term’s polysemous

nature or its inflationary use. ‘Crisis’ genuinely defies common ideas about time semantics andtime conception, because it does not match one unique visual image of temporality. Contrary to

Koselleck’s initial intuition, ‘crisis’ shows that time expressions do not entertain a one-to-one

correspondence with visual images, and that time imagery is not fixed, but rather changing.

In fact, the diachronic trajectory of ‘crisis’ indicates that the vagueness attributed to the term

is the flip-side of semantic abstraction. In a fourth section, I will examine the history of ‘crisis’

from classical times to modernity and will suggest detailed analysis of the semiotic, cognitive

and epistemic aspects of the phenomena of abstraction. ‘Crisis’ was involved in the emergence

of the image of time as History and in numerous scientific efforts to determine the regularities of

historical change. Consequently, the term took on a significant role in abstracting time from

human action, and participated in the modern endeavour to transform change into an objective

observable fact epitomized by graphic representations. In other words, the consecutive processes

of semantic abstraction that ‘crisis’ went through, also yielded the analytic idea that ‘crisis’

should be expected to univocally match one graphic representation. Encapsulating the



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inextricable association between cognitive, epistemic and political processes, ‘crisis’

demonstrates in which ways semantics and the history of ideas mutually correlate.

The analysis of the trends of abstraction affecting the meaning of ‘crisis’ brings forward

several central semantic attributes that are still dominant in the current uses of the term. In the

fifth section, I will expressly relate to these salient clusters of meaning, and will examine their

synchronic interrelations in light of the findings of the diachronic analysis. The synchronic

outlook on the semantic network that ‘crisis’ has fashioned over time emphasizes the positive

functions of abstraction: abstraction engenders not only the erosion of meaning, but also new

ways to mean. Finally, the evolution of the term’s signification from the classical notion ofdecisive change to the abstract statistic idea of potential irreversibility nowadays, reveals the

power of political motivation in the schematization of our common conceptions of change, and

respectively, the role of ‘crisis’ and its semantic history therein.

As observed by Koselleck (2006), the modern histories of the terms ‘crisis’ in English,

‘crise’ in French and ‘Krise’ in German are strongly interrelated. While it is evident that there

are certain differences in the use of these words in their respective languages (specifically in

lexical compounds such as the French ‘crise cardiaque’, meaning heart attack in English), I find

that the discussion of the questions at hand would benefit more from a unified approach, such as

the one that has been employed by conceptual historians. Consequently, in what follows, the

signifier ‘crisis’ will also be taken to stand for its French and German equivalents ‘crise’ and

‘Krise’. Italics will be used for the concept that the noun denotes (crisis).



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2. The concept of crisis in Western European thought

Around the time of the American and French revolutions, the theme of crisis started to register in

both popular and philosophic literature. Crisis Thought , the philosophical enquiry about the

concept, had first emphasized the acute experience of overwhelming change. Beginning in the

mid-19th century, the growing yet undefined awareness of a cultural and epistemic crisis

gradually generated a literature identifying the state of crisis as an actual historical condition – a

state of affairs that was produced in a concrete time and place. By the mid-20th century, it also

led to an explicit scholarly interest in the term ‘crisis’ and its political functions. The present

section will examine this evolution in two parts.

2.1 The emergence of Crisis Thought

Towards the mid-19th century, the awareness of a radical change shaking the accepted belief

systems started to show in Western European thought. At the time, the German-speaking

intelligentsia was largely preoccupied with the philosophical legacy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

Hegel, who died in 1831. It was principally among the debaters of Hegelian optimism that Crisis

Thought took shape. In his ironic critique of Hegelianism, the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard

was a precursor in articulating the experience of crisis as a philosophical problem (Guest 1990).

Kierkegaard attacked Hegel’s conviction in the virtues of European civilization, and his

unbounded confidence in the prospects of a positive philosophical system. Unmasking the false

promise of affirmative knowledge, Kierkegaard’s writings opened the way for a thought

stressing the absurd in human existence.

While Kierkegaard’s work focused on the critical dimension of the individual’s religious

experience, the term ‘crisis’ first became pivotal to another important critique of Hegel’s works,



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directed at the social condition of men. In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist

Manifesto (1848) and in Marx’s Das Kapital (1867), crisis was regarded as the major mode of

historical change. Though the word was principally mentioned in an economic context,

according to Marx and Engels the dynamics of crisis bore general and decisive consequences for

the political and social realities of European history.

The image of an existential and irreparable rupture achieved its full expression with the

writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, associating the metaphysical, religious, historical and cultural

factors of the European crisis. Nietzsche demanded of his readers a new form of philosophical

realization, and required repudiation of traditions and exuberance in the face of the loss ofcontinuity. His thought thus placed the experience of crisis at the centre of Western

consciousness.

Hence, by the end of the 19th century, the notion of crisis established itself in European

thought as an inescapable fate that should be accepted as a cultural identity. Careful reading of

the central works of 19th century thinkers and novelists allowed philosopher Karl Löwith (1995)

to portray this identity as a particular temporal consciousness: European civilization was

condemned to a state of seemingly unending historical disruption. With its downfall being

unavoidable, Europe was either doomed to decay, or admit its condition. In fact, the chief trait of

the cultural experience of crisis was discontinuity, afflicting the permanence of time and

meaning. After a century of frequent political upheavals and accelerated technological

developments, nostalgia could not obliterate the understanding that there was no going back to

the times before the French and American revolutions. The repeated images of History in the

cultural production of the last quarter of the 19th century’s show that the familiarity of time itself



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seemed perturbed: the past bequeathed only void to the future, and as a result, the intelligibility

of the present was put at risk (Arendt 2006 [1960], 1990 [1963]; Löwith 1995).

By the turn of the 20th century, Europe was facing utterly new and unknown cultural,

political and technological realities. However, the ideal of progress did not compensate for the

experience of shattered continuity. The discordance between the grand promises of science and

the actual needs of humanity carved an incommensurable fissure between a perpetually

anticipated future and the image of a forever-gone glorious past (Arendt 2006 [1958], 1990

[1963]). While historical time and temporality were recurring themes in the work of thinkers,

writers and artists, crisis well expressed the sense of malaise placed in Western Europeanconsciousness. Since what was said about the world inexorably failed to restore the world’s

meaningfulness, philosophy was assigned a daunting task: to inquire what was the meaning of

the crisis.

It was in this climate that Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, made an explicit

attempt to address the notion of crisis, both as an object of philosophical investigation and a

pressing question of the present. In the wake of the Great War (1914–1918), philosophy had to

direct its attention to the way knowledge was produced, he claimed. “Especially after the war”,

wrote Husserl in 1930, the younger generation felt that “[i]n our vital need – [...] science has

nothing to say to us” (1970: 6). Since science “excludes in principle precisely the questions

which man [...] finds the most burning” (1970: 6), the idea of science itself had to be diagnosed.

Hence, within Husserl’s thought, crisis was set as the axis of a necessary reflection on the human

relation to knowledge. Crisis, an effect of the historical conditions, demanded from philosophy a

responsible response, and thus became the principle of an urgently needed new way of thinking.



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2.2 The thought about ‘crisis’

Whereas up until the end of the Second World War Crisis Thought had focused on the

experiences of crisis, in the late 1950’s the concept itself emerged as a subject matter for first

investigation. In the writings of Hannah Arendt (2006 [1958], 2006 [1960], 1990 [1963], 1969),

the term ‘crisis’ was inserted within a conceptual web sketching the political sentiment of

modernity. Related to the mode of temporality instated by the French Revolution, crisis is

depicted as a political and aesthetic phenomenon: a human-size concrete experience, common to

the individuals living together in the community. Crisis, observed Arendt, conceptualizes the

loss of shared meaning, the demise of the political community’s immediate relation to its own

reality: “In every crisis a piece of the world, something common to us all, is destroyed. The

failure of common sense, like a divining rod, points to the place where such a cave-in has

occurred” (Arendt 2006 [1958]: 175).

Writing at about the same time, Koselleck devoted his attention to statements about crisis

and their political function prior to the French Revolution. According to his analysis, the concept

played an important role in the efforts of the 18th-century bourgeoisie to take political power,

while masking its political motivation by a prolific philosophical project. In fact, claimed

Koselleck, the concept of crisis linked the two major intellectual and political oeuvres of

Enlightenment – the Philosophy of History and the French Revolution. The political crisis was

veiled by the utopian discourse about the momentum of History, anticipating the political events.

“The political prognosis of revolution and its historic-philosophical concealment”, wrote

Koselleck (1988: 137), “are two aspects of a single phenomenon: crisis”. Koselleck’s meticulous

study of salient occurrences of ‘crisis’, ‘crise’ and ‘Krise’ in 18th-century writings (2006)

inspired a generation of scholars, who recognized in the term its political potential.



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With Michel Foucault’s work in the 1970s, the political signification of crisis transcended

the realm of verbal action, and entered the sphere of governmentality – the devices and practices

of organized political power. For Foucault, the term ‘crisis’ outlined a problem that preoccupied

sovereignty in 18th-century France: how to administer the oscillation between scarcity and

affluence? This difficulty concerned many aspects of life in the city: from the circulation of

grains to the changing rates of mortality caused by epidemics (Foucault 2004: 59–68). The large-

scale management of urban populations demanded the regulation of flux, and gradually

fashioned security devices for measuring and monitoring the dynamics of fluctuation. Some of

these devices took the shape of statistics and graphs, and formed disciplines of knowledgepreoccupied with the regulation of populations and resources. In fact, to this day, sine/cosine

graphs (with their peaks and valleys) serve as an iconic representation of crisis, and represent

these technologies of control.

Understood by Foucault as an array of political practices, the concept of crisis turned into

the modern modality par excellence, not only of temporality, but also of the control of life. While

Koselleck saw in ‘crisis’ the conceptual artifice of the governed, following Foucault, the word

became identified with the instruments of sovereign power. This shift may be noticed in recent

analyses, such as Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine (2007), portraying crisis as an apparatus of

economic governance on a global scale.

3. The trouble with ‘crisis’

The general sense of crisis striking the spiritual, cultural and political aspects of European life

transformed throughout the 20th century into an inquiry about the term itself. Now that crisis had

been recognized as ‘the sign of the times’ for more than a century, it was time for theorists to ask



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what the word ‘crisis’ meant, and why there were so many of it. The present section examines

the semantic problems raised by the term with reference to the relevant literature on ‘crisis’. Is

‘crisis’ simply worn out with use, or does it present specific semantic difficulties related to its

signified?

3.1 Worn out with use?

A renowned Swiss linguist may well have been among the first to observe the problematic

inflationary use of the term. In 1930, Charles Bally, a professor of general linguistics at the

University of Geneva, was invited to give a series of talks on the crisis of the French language

(Chiss & Puech 2004). The theme of ‘the crisis of language’ had drawn the attention of several

French linguists before (Chiss 2006). By the late 1920s, it preoccupied the French-speaking

minority in Switzerland, expressing concerns about the preservation of the Suisse romande

French and the quality of the local linguistic education. The public debate was passionate. Bally,

however, chose to open his lecture series with an ironic reference to the ubiquity of the term:

“One does not need to take too tragically these little dramas”, he commented, “in Geneva we

brushed off five ‘crises’ in thirty years; here is the sixth, I await the next one” (2004: 18). 2

But Bally was not the only one to observe the problem. From the 1930s onwards, discourse

on ‘crisis’ increasingly expressed scepticism of the word and its meaningfulness. It seems that

whenever one turns one’s gaze upon it, ‘crisis’ provokes discomfort: ‘crisis’ is over-used; it is

either over-dramatic, sensational for the sake of it, simply vague, or maybe even void; it is used

to achieve other ends than the ones avowed by its enunciator; ‘crisis’ is everywhere, and the

more we hear of it, the less we are able to determine what it means.

2. “On ne doit pas prendre trop au tragique ces petit drames ; à Genève, nous avons essuyé cinq « crises » entrente ans ; voici la sixième, j’attends la suivante.”



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The objections against ‘crisis’ often revolve around four semantic features: (1) the

commonness of the word’s occurrence; (2) the wide range of semantic fields in which it appears;

(3) the polysemous nature of the noun; and (4) the vagueness of the signified. Some of the

writings on ‘crisis’ recognize the interrelatedness of these phenomena, and see in the

pervasiveness of the term a central problem, affecting the power of the term to signify. Richter

and Richter (2006: 354) mention Antoine Meillet’s observations on the relation between

repetition and loss of expressivity.3 Reiteration certainly wears down the denotational value of

expressions: the more we repeat a phrase and use it freely in different contexts, the less it means

(Meillet 1905/1906, 1913). However, this phenomenon which primarily concerns compounds ofwords (e.g. ‘starfish’ or ‘for a change’) does not usually affect independent units of the lexicon;

the widespread use of ‘star’, ‘fish’ or ‘change’ on their own did not lead to their semantic

attrition (Lehmann 1985).

It is yet unclear under what conditions high frequency of use may lead to semantic attrition

of simple lexical units such as ‘crisis’. We can infer from Bally’s remark that the word ‘crisis’

cannot be reiterated indefinitely: had the 1930s’ ‘crisis of French’ been a true crisis, a crisis in

the real sense of the word, it would not have recurred that often. In other words, for a change to

genuinely qualify as a ‘crisis’, it must be singular, or if not, at least fairly exceptional or unusual.

Hence, the trouble with ‘crisis’ is probably not a mere accidental malfunction, automatically

generated by the rate of occurrence, but a semantic problem related to the meaning of this

specific word.

3. On the contribution of Meillet to general linguistics and the relevance of his work to contemporary research,see Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot (2008, 2013).



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3.2 Defying analysis

In fact, the correlation between loose use, recurrence, and dilution of meaning seems particularly

relevant to a term which is coupled with disruption or discontinuity: the idea of disruption

presupposes established duration, and similarly, there is no discontinuity without a prior sense of

continuity. ‘Crisis’ is expected to denote an unusual experience of time, an intervention within

permanence. If it is applied to all things all the time, (which is largely the impression), crisis is

no longer opposed to normal continuity. Observing this problem, Starn (1971) pointed out that

the indiscriminate application of ‘crisis’ to different intervals of time, varying from moments to

centuries, had eroded its specific sense of temporality. Holton went as far as demanding

proactive intervention to halt the semantic demise of the term, and called for the reinstatement of

the distinction between crisis and normality in the social sciences (1987: 502).

The occurrence of ‘crisis’ in a range of academic disciplines led to several attempts to

characterize the term and classify its different uses. Yet, since the boundary between crisis and

non-crisis is indecisive at best, the concept does not provide researchers with a reliable analytical

category. Subsequently, the literature on crisis often wonders whether ‘crisis’ is a conceptual

category, a professional term, or simply a catchword, selling newspapers and adding drama to

political speeches (Bally 2004 [1930]; Starn 1971; Koselleck 2006 [1982], 2002; Holton 1987;

Hirdman 2002; Richter & Richter 2006; Hauser 2009, among others).

However, the exceptional dissemination of the term did not leave theorists indifferent. The

word spread phenomenally since the end of the 18th century and became highly common in the

20th century. This semantic trend drew specifically the attention of historians. Reinhart

Koselleck maintained convincingly that the propagation of ‘crisis’ is a symptom of a larger

cultural phenomenon: the emergence of the modern conception of time. Koselleck was



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preoccupied with the conceptual role of ‘crisis’ all along his career; yet, his work kept running

into the same obstacle: ‘crisis’ conveys converse metaphors of time and is used differently in

various fields. Moreover, neither the polysemous nature of the noun nor its uses in different

domains are strictly modern phenomena. If the evolution of the concept sketched the history of

time itself, what exactly was the new idea of time designated by ‘crisis’ since the 18th century?

Koselleck was particularly interested in showing that crisis was the concept by which

Western Europe devised the idea of historical time. The idea of History as an abstract force,

intervening in human actions and steering it, could be portrayed in several ways. While it was

clear that since the 18th century ‘crisis’ had to do with ‘time’, ‘change’ and ‘history’,occurrences of the term did not illustrate a distinctive idea of time progression. Since the analysis

of both the diachronic lineage of ‘crisis’ and its synchronic usages hardly drafted a clear

conceptual picture, Koselleck sought to establish a typology of the metaphors suggested by the

term (Koselleck 2006 [1982], 2002; Richter & Richter 2006: 355–356). However, these efforts to

salvage the concept’s coherence did not prove successful: not only is the imagery suggested by

‘crisis’ inconsistent, contradictory images of time may be found in exemplary instances of Crisis

Thought. The writings of Marx and Engels are a case in point. On the one hand, crises constitute

a recurrent phenomenon that characterizes the circular progress of capitalism. On the other hand,

at one point the system must succumb to its own historical dynamics, and this final necessary

crisis will then produce a revolution, i.e. a political crisis (Koselleck 2006: 393–397). The notion

of crisis indicates here both circular repetitive motion and a unique event heralding the

predestined end of history.

As Koselleck himself admitted, ‘crisis’ does not make it easy on researchers: it does not

evoke a standard set of images (2006: 370). During different periods, in various political



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contexts, from the mouths and pens of the most diverse figures, ‘crisis’ has indicated both

repetitive and singular change; momentary and epochal turning points; final conclusions and new

beginnings; history as a whole and the end of history. In fact, ‘crisis’ still depicts exclusive

turning points and recurring transformations alike, and may evoke both the image of linear time

progression and circular repetitive one. While different critics have adopted diverse approaches

towards the semantic phenomena presented by ‘crisis’, they all seem to be united in the view that

the obscurity of the noun is a puzzle which calls for a solution. But what if vagueness were not

the absence of signification, but a proper semantic quality, deserving scholarly attention?

4. The meanders of abstraction

A careful look at the history of ‘crisis’ shows that the trouble with ‘crisis’ is not a mere regretful

contingency, but important evidence of the semantic functions of the noun. As a matter of fact,

the attractiveness of the term and its broad semiotic spectrum, perceived as vagueness, are two

aspects of the same historical process that I will hereby characterize as abstraction. Abstraction is

a common semantic phenomenon, involving both expansion of use, verifiable through growth in

frequency, and attrition in the signifying power of the word. In order to generalize, we extract

certain properties of the abstracted notion and discard the rest of them (Langacker 1999; Talmy

2000). The rejection of composite properties enables simplification, and as a result facilitates

semantic transfer to different domains. In other words, an abstracted lexical item can appear in

different contexts, gain more general use, and consequently becomes more common. At the same



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time, since the word no longer carries the rich signification that tied it to its original context, it

becomes more vague, or abstract .4

‘Crisis’ has gone through consecutive processes of abstraction since the 18th century. While

these processes diminished the term’s precision and reduced its power to signify, they allowed it

to expand into new semantic domains. However, the diachronic trajectory of ‘crisis’ shows that

abstraction is not necessarily a mere technical process, and it may engage discursive phenomena

rendering semantics and politics inseparable. When and how these processes of abstraction had

started to register in the use of ‘crisis’? And what was their motivation? This section attends to

these questions in two parts. The first part will briefly summarize a few historical moments in therich pre-modern diachronic semantics of the term, necessary for the understanding of its modern

evolution. The second part will analyse the particular processes of abstraction that ‘crisis’ went

through in modernity. Using typical examples, it aims to demonstrate how the two facets of

abstraction, generalization and subtraction, created out of ‘crisis’ a powerful schema modelling

the modern experience of change.

4. It is important to distinguish between different processes of loss of signifying power, and specificallydifferentiate between abstraction and desemanticization, also known as ‘semantic bleaching’. Abstraction involves

separation from context, subtraction of semantic properties and generalization. It usually concerns nouns or nominaland prepositional compounds, and may involve operations such as metaphoric extension and metonymy. Van deVelde (1995), for instance, uses the term in a similar way when she critically defies the traditional divide betweenconcrete and abstract nouns. Desemanticization, however, is the gradual loss of semantic substance related togrammaticalization, i.e. the processes of linguistic change by which lexical and grammatical items become more andmore grammatical (Lehmann 1985: 4). The term would well describe the way in which the verb ‘have’ in thesentence ‘You already have a red dress’ loses its semantic substance in a sentence such as ‘You have already readit’. While both abstraction and desemanticization describe processes of semantic attrition, each of them producesdifferent effects and relates to different phenomena engaged in different levels of linguistic change.



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4.1 How classical ‘crisis’ turned modern

The history of ‘crisis’ is amply documented and enjoys wide agreement in numerous studies (e.g.

compare Starn (1971) and Koselleck 2006 [1982], 2002). The story of the word ordinarily

commences in Ancient Greece. The Greek noun ‘’ (‘krisis’) derives from the verbal radical

‘’ – meaning to distinguish, sift, decide or judge. The word was neither monosemous nor

constrained to one specific field (Starn 1971; Koselleck 2006). In general descriptions, it often

related to a crucial development, such as a decision point in battle, or an abrupt change in nature,

bearing imperative outcomes for humans. In the legal domain, it designated judgement, ruling or

verdict. Once the term had become a general title for the legal code, its political significance was

enhanced: ‘krisis’ could refer to a variety of deliberations vital for the good of the polis, ranging

from electoral decisions to government resolutions. As a medical term, ‘krisis’ described any

turning point in the course of a disease – whether it was critically intensifying, transforming into

another malady, or reaching its end.

In his quest for the origin of the modern notion of ‘crisis’, Koselleck took particular interest

in a later twist of the Greek word: in the Christian biblical cannon, written between the 1st and

3rd centuries, the word ‘’ stood for the Last Judgment (2006: 359). Apparently, the first

Christians loaded the original Hebrew notion of divine judgment with the concept of apocalyptic

expectation, and expressed it in Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean

basin at the time. Koselleck argued that the word blended the classical idea of judgment with the

novel Christian concept of anticipation for salvation, and thus created a new conceptualization of

time. The theological notion of brought the end of time together with true justice. By

guaranteeing deliverance from biological time at an undefined future time, ‘krisis’ shaped the



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present as a permanent trial. A horizon of expectation, directed at the apocalyptic gateway of

eternity, krisis designed the world’s general framework of temporality.

Of all the different meanings present in classical Antiquity, medical ‘crisis’ proved the most

successful in crossing the centuries (Starn 1971; Koselleck 2006; Shank 2008). The term

entrenched in 2nd century Latin following the work of the prominent physician Galen, who

elaborated the notion of classic Hippocratic medicine into a comprehensive crisis theory.

Signalling a decisive stage in the course of a disease, ‘crisis’ could be qualified as ‘good’, ‘bad’,

or ‘imperfect’, that is, failing to lead to definitive recovery. These attributes attached to the noun

indicate that the classic medical world understood crisis as a modality of the development of adisease. ‘Crisis’ was a type of progression which was critical, and could lead to either ‘good’ or

‘bad’ consequences for the patient’s health. Thus, the medical ‘krisis’ remained in full agreement

with the Greek use of the term, which saw in crisis an aspect of change: a specific impression of

time, related to the experience of decisive change. This signification of ‘krisis’, stressing the way

we sense this specific modality of change, subsisted in the medical traditions of Western Europe

for centuries to come (see for instance the 1st edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie

française, 1694,5 or Quesnay 1753/1767).

The national languages of Western Europe gradually adopted the Latin word between the

14th and the 16th centuries (Koselleck 2006). By the 17th century, the medical signification had

started to appear in the political field, with celebrated occurrences such as Sir Benjamin

Rudyard’s exclamation in the House of Commons: “This is the Crisis of Parliaments; we shall

know by this if Parliaments live or die [...]” (1627, in Frankland 1681: 244)6. With this

statement, Sir Rudyard had hoped to persuade Parliament to reconcile with Charles I, the then

5. See ‘Crise’, p. 286: http://artfl.atilf.fr/dictionnaires/ACADEMIE/PREMIERE/premiere.fr.html6. According to the OED (The Oxford English Dictionary), the earliest appearance of the citation in writing datesto 1659. See “Crisis, n.”, OED online, www.oed.com



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King of England, for the sake of the Commonwealth. However, neither the addresser nor the

addressees (who were both members of Parliament) come out in the sentence as active agents.

What ‘crisis’ enabled here was to forge a powerful rhetorical instrument rendering the partakers

passive. This type of medical metaphor referring to the body politic is most probably the

precursor of the modern use of ‘crisis’. The application of ‘crisis’ to a general collective entity

turned the body politic into a definite entity, an organism seen from the outside. The conception

of the political community as a living unit, systematically designed and observable from the

exterior, was to play a significant role in the emergence of the social sciences.7 Employed this

way, ‘crisis’ was bound to abstract the experience of decisive change from the realm of humanaction, and transform it into an objective, quasi-natural phenomenon.

7. Whereas the body politic metaphor is an old-timer in the Indo-European societies’ gallery of political images,its role in shaping the modern idea of the Social was decisive. As the elaboration of this important question exceedsthe scope of the present chapter, I will only suggest here further useful readings. In his incisive critique of

democracy, Jacques Rancière (1992) analyses the contemporary functions of such Classical and early Christianmodels of the Political, involving images of the body politic. As stressed by Hanna F. Pitkin (1967), in the 17thcentury, Hobbes contributed to political science a particularly elaborate image of the body politic via the figure ofthe Leviathan, the representative of the multitudes’ political will. Since they were dependent on such totalizingimages of the body politic, medical metaphors such as crisis heralded new types of knowledge about society. In hislectures in the Collège de France, Foucault (1997 [1975–1976], 2004 [1977–1978]) circumscribes a field of relationsand affinities tying together practices of power and the emerging forms of scientific knowledge about society. Suchties are particularly visible through the concept of crisis, binding together the political authorities’ specific need toaddress the plague in the modern city and the introduction of the statistic form of demographic knowledge (seeSection 2). However, the ‘Society’ we have in mind today – an object of scientific inquiry detached from ourexperience of social practices – required the advent of an explicit discursive regime of scientific knowledge. K. M.

Baker (1964), among others, indicates the role of Condorcet (1743–1794) in the creation of the concept of a socialscience. While comparing the new projected scientific endeavour to the physical science, Condorcet demanded fineobservation and precision in politics as we would expect to find in physics. Hence, Bruno Latour (1993 [1991])points out that the construction of the social sciences in modernity was in fact paradoxical, since it had consisted onthe one hand in the reification of social relationships and in the net separation between Society and Nature, and onthe other hand in the hybridization of the two categories. Relying on Latour, J. B. Shank (2008) insists on the role ofthe concept of crisis in these developments, and specifically on the function of the medical metaphor of crisis in theconstruction of society as “an extant object out there in the world”, allegedly pre-existent to the attempts to study“the objective empirical effects it is said to produce” (Shank 2008: 1095).



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4.2 The crises of modernity

The accelerated phenomena of abstraction which ‘crisis’ displays from the 18th century on are

directly related to the extension of the medical metaphor into the social and political domains.

However, the abstraction commencing with the medical metaphor constituted a long and multi-

layered semantic process. In order to distinguish its different modes of operation, I will refer in

the following to three complementary levels of analysis, viz. the semiotic, cognitive and

epistemic levels:

(a)

The semiotic level: Following the dissemination of the medical metaphor in political and

social contexts, the lexical item ‘crisis’ was subject to abstraction on the semiotic level: the

signified was generalized, and certain semiotic properties of the sign, related to its previous

contextual environment, faded away. The more visible effects of this level of abstraction

include the disappearance of the attributes signaling the effect of the crisis (e.g. ‘good’,

‘bad’, ‘imperfect’). With ‘crisis’ being detached from its medical diagnostic context, these

adjuncts became superfluous.

(b)

The cognitive level: ‘Crisis’ originally related to an aspect of change – the term ‘aspect’ here

referring, as it does in grammar, to the temporal quality of the experience. The aspect of

change ‘crisis’ denoted was a decisive, often salutary, abrupt mode of development. This

very specific modality of temporal cognition was subjected to radical abstraction: decisive

change was extracted from the immediate experience of action in time and isolated from its

concrete tangible sense. With crisis being dissociated from the intimate experience tying

cause and effect in time, decisive change was transformed into an objective event that could

be split from its experiential record and observed externally. Nevertheless, the specific



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aspectual properties of the noun – the “temporal constituency” of the critical event (Comrie

1976) – did not vanish, and experiential features such as decisiveness and abruptness

remained active in descriptions of objective events.

(c)

The epistemic level: Knowing meant different things to people living in different historical

eras. While the concept of knowledge went through important changes in modernity, the

knowledge of and about time transformed dramatically (Poulet 1949). Hence, whereas

‘crisis’ formerly represented acute awareness of the temporal quality of decisive change, with

the growing demand for measurable knowledge, the experiential intuition of time was

stripped from its epistemic status. As the 20th century progressed, ‘crisis’ enduredintensifying epistemic pressure: in order to know what critical change was, enunciators were

expected to be able to count it and represent it visually.

Diachronic analysis of occurrences of ‘crisis’ since the mid-18th century demonstrates the nexus

of successive momentums of abstraction, revolving around interdependent cultural trends.

Among the trends motivating abstraction, we should specifically notice (1) the idea of History,

(2) the emergence of the scientific theory of change, and (3) the analogy between time and space.

In what follows, I will discuss a few exemplary cases of each of these semantic dynamics, and

consider their interactions, while relating to the semiotic, cognitive and epistemic analytic levels

of abstraction detailed above.

4.2.1 The Historical trend of abstraction

The emergence of the idea of History during the 18th century played an important part in the

abstraction of ‘crisis’. On the semiotic level, this development is particularly clear from the

association of the terms ‘crisis’ and ‘revolution’ and their application to the political realm. As



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was observed by Arendt (1990: 42), up until the French Revolution the term ‘revolution’

preserved its Latin denotation indicating the circular motion of celestial bodies. Accordingly, in

human affairs, it could more generally designate an alteration, a dramatic change, similar in its

scale to the motion of stars and planets (see also the OED). When it was used metaphorically in

politics, ‘revolution’ often referred to the restoration of sovereign power subsequent to social

unrest and political upheavals, as it did in the phrase ‘The Glorious Revolution’ (Koselleck 1988:

160–161 note 6, 2004: 43–57). Hence, ‘crisis’ and ‘revolution’ designated two somewhat

different aspects of decisive change: (i) abrupt and unexpected transformation, and (ii) cyclic

repetitive alteration.

8

Both terms signalled a significant and vital kind of change; when usedmetaphorically, both terms designated dynamics affecting human activity in the same manner

they sway nature and the universe.

“[W]e are approaching a state of crises and a century of revolutions” (1817: 181), 9 wrote

Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762, and commentators such as Koselleck (1988: 159) read into this

oft-cited phrase a self-fulfilling prophecy, anticipating the French Revolution. Diachronic

analysis renders this reading doubtful: there is no evidence that Rousseau had meant anything

more than remarking that a decisive social change was in the air (for a similar view, see Bernardi

2008). Obviously, before the American and French revolutions, neither ‘revolution’ nor ‘crisis’

could provoke the images and connotations that they would convey after these events had taken

place. Even so, we can assume that the semantic change was not abrupt, and that the two terms

gradually started to take new meanings as early as the mid-18th century.

8. The British historian Christopher Hill argued that the linear conception of the term ‘revolution’ had started toemerge in English as early as the mid-17th century. The historiographical debate on the matter concerns thelegitimacy of using Marxist terminology (and specifically the term ‘revolution’ in the Marxist sense) when relatingto the events of 1640–1660, which before Hill were usually referred to as ‘The English Civil War’. For a detaileddiscussion of this debate, see Rachum (1999).9. “Nous approchons de l’état de crises et du siècle des révolutions.”



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The association of ‘crisis’ and ‘revolution’ and their projection onto an anticipated political

change indicate a new stage in the functions of these metaphors. All the same, if the two terms

denoted different aspects of change, why did Rousseau put them together in what seems like a

parallel construction [a state of crises ≅ a century of revolutions]? Specifically revealing is the

fact that ‘crisis’ and ‘revolution’ serve here as attributes of the nouns ‘state’ and ‘century’. The

quadruple juxtaposition [état –crises / siècle–révolutions], subjugating the dynamic aspects of

change to a general terminology of time, generated an abstract sense of objective temporality that

was governed by History. Detached from a specific body experiencing the various modalities of

change, ‘crisis’ turned into a historical phenomenon whose abstract nature was enhanced by theassociation with ‘revolution’.

On the cognitive level, we attest here a transposition of the bodily experience of decisive

change onto an objective realm, exterior to the experiencing body and independent of it. While

medical metaphors such as “the Crisis of Parliaments” generalized the experience of critical

change, they retained the collective experience within the scene of enunciation – the Parliament ,

in the case of Sir Rudyard’s phrase. The Historical abstraction took this procedure one step

further: it extracted the political diagnosis from the experience of the participants, and projected

it onto an objective, larger-than-life scale. History thus became a transcendent power that

directed the dynamics of human affairs regardless of people’s decisions and actions. Similar uses

of crisis spread in English, French and German in the late 18th century (Koselleck 2006).

Facilitated by the idea of History, abstract change became one of the central semantic properties

of ‘crisis’.



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4.2.2 The scientific trend of abstraction.

Innumerable occurrences of ‘crisis’ during the 19th century in both popular and scholarly

literature show that with History modelled as an objective force of temporality, agency started to

wither away and a strong sense of necessity started to take its place. Allegedly, objective

necessity arbitrated the affairs of humans in the same way it altered the physical world. This idea

had a reciprocal effect on both spheres of scientific thought: on the one hand, it devised the

systematic thought in the Humanities as a natural investigation (e.g. economics, linguistics); on

the other hand, it conceptualized the study of nature as History (e.g. geology, evolution). By the

mid-19th century, producing scientific knowledge often consisted in presenting a convincingaccount explaining “how things change”. Scientific scholarship in many fields took the shape of

a methodical study of empirical evidence, aimed at developing a comprehensive theory of the

laws of change. Where the object of enquiry involved human actions, change could not be easily

quantified or encoded in algebraic expressions, as it was in thermodynamics for instance. Here,

‘crisis’ turned out to be an extremely useful instrument. As a general term for objective decisive

change, ‘crisis’ could express abstract knowledge about the modalities of change. Soon, the word

was granted a place of honour in the nascent social sciences.

Several influential works published in the long 19th century demonstrate the evolution of

‘crisis’ and its role in scientific theory. In 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus published the Essay on

the principle of population, a treatise in economics that had a magisterial effect on the way we

understand the concept of population. The term ‘crisis’ was absent from the first edition, but the

1826 sixth revised edition, which became the canonical form of the Essay, contained two

occurrences of ‘crisis’ in an economic context. In one of these passages, ‘crisis’ is used in

connection with the “distress” of “the labouring classes”. It describes the malaise as



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“irremediable” and “natural”, and instructs the poor “to bear unavoidable pressure with patience”

(Bk. IV, Ch. VII, §6). Malthus’ Essay expresses genuine concern about the impact of population

growth on poverty. However, aimed at articulating a general theory of the regularities of

economic change, the idea of objective necessity had depoliticized the role of particular policies

and specific actions.

The Essay’s concept of crisis tied together a sense of want, measurable shortage and natural

inevitability. Later on, however, the more processual or aspectual properties of the noun were

accentuated (i.e. in the grammatical sense of the word ‘aspect’, see the beginning of Section 4.2).

Charles Lyell’s Principles of geology (1830) was dedicated to a vigorous defence of the constantprinciples of geological change. ‘Crisis’ hence marked an exceptional event in the otherwise

continuous dynamic of physical transformation. In a passage describing the volcanic activity of

Mount Vesuvius for instance, ‘crisis’ refers to the eruption that destroyed Pompeii, defying

expectations and enabling Man to briefly witness the history of Earth (1837: 66). The scientific

preoccupation with the modalities of objective change brought a certain trend of cognitive

specialization. Here, ‘crisis’ no longer meant plain decisive change, but emphasized a particular

type of dramatic episode: inescapable disruption, a dangerous and unexpected event, set against

the backdrop of the imperceptible, normal course of change. As we have seen earlier (see Section

2), the modern experience of History as it was registered in Crisis Thought motivated this

specialization: crisis ineluctably separated the present from the past, and with the growing

expression of Crisis Thought, the aspectual specialization of the noun increased.

On the whole, Lyell’s general framework of uniform change was indifferent to the

extraordinary instances of sudden events, and crisis did not take up a substantial part in Lyell’s

Principles of geological change (Gould 1987). The transformation of ‘crisis’ into distinct



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knowledge about change was significantly enhanced toward the mid-19th century. It was with

Karl Marx that the phenomenon of crisis explicitly became the impetus of historical necessity. In

Marxian thought, crisis appears as an epistemic category: a specific mode of change explaining

the historical dynamics of European civilization and the regularities that they obeyed. Following

Marx and Engels (Koselleck 2006: 393–397), and from the 1860s on, ‘crisis’ would often be

connected with an irremediable change which only an additional far more dramatic disruption

could possibly cure.

4.2.3 The spatial trend of abstraction

After it had integrated the idea of History and been incorporated by scientific theory, ‘crisis’ was

further transformed by a growing trend of spatial abstraction that first showed in the second half

of the 19th century. Around that time, ‘crisis’ became the mark of a phenomenology of change: a

specific awareness of the effects of decisive change on our world (see Section 2). The abstraction

of this awareness from the intimate experience of transformation permitted the construction of

‘crisis’ as a cross-disciplinary category of scientific knowledge. The cognitive procedure of

abstraction consists in isolation: certain ingredients of the critical experience, such as abruptness,

unexpectedness, disruption, irremediableness, uncertainty, were carved out of the experiential

context and preserved, while others, such as decision making and judgement were eclipsed. On

the epistemic level, this cognitive split allowed reification: crisis became a thing, an epistemic

unit transposable from one domain to another, representing in each of them the scientific

discourse about change. And crisis was not just any change: ‘crisis’ said something about

modernity; it expressed the temporality of a world in progress.

The scientific theory of change was singled out by its capacity to extrapolate lucid

regularities of progression. In those fields where numbers did not serve well the systemization of



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empirical data, verbal accounts aimed at providing images of change. Up till the end of the 19th

century, Positivism in particular stressed the value of general laws of change, based on empirical

observation.10 Auguste Comte, founder of the positivist doctrine, and his followers saw in ‘crisis’

an effective tool for modern science to construct an image of development (see Comte 1842,

inter alia). Inspired by his mentor Comte, lexicographer Émile Littré devised a positivist history

of the French language. “Since all things change by history”, wrote Littré in 1862, “it is

impossible that by that same history languages do not change as well” (Littré 1886: 7).11 The

conceptual framework of historical necessity, common to Natural History and the Humanities,

enabled Littré to draft a scientific theory of linguistic change. Languages are organisms, arguedLittré, and therefore their history proceeds by crises. Hence, Modern French is the product of two

major crises: the one which made it emerge from Ancient French, and an earlier crisis,

generating Romance languages from Latin (1886: 51–53). Littré’s mechanism of major and

minor crises drafted a linear timeline, motivated by consecutive organic disruptions. Crisis,

understood as the product of tension between conflicting forces (such as tradition and novelty),

was construed as the principle of linguistic evolution. While languages were normally ruled by

grammatical traditions, crisis was what pushed them to change (1886: 54).

As in Marxian thought, ‘crisis’ did not only allow Littré to describe change, but also to

explain how things change and to sketch a graphic image of their trajectory. Only, ‘crisis’ was

not perfectly tailored to its new role: since it originally conveyed experiential intuitive

knowledge, it could not illustrate the same visual image each time. Moreover, the way it was

used by Marx and Engels and many others, it could confer several images of progression

10. For a mid-19th century account in English of Positivism and its principles, see Mill (1865/1866). Hisdescription of Comte’s ‘Science of Society’ (pp. 83–86), particularly stresses laws of historical change.11. “Il est impossible, toute chose changeant par l’histoire, que, par cette même histoire, les langues ne changentpas aussi.”



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throughout the same passage. In Marshall and Marshall’s economic theory, for instance, ‘crisis’

relates the contraction of credit to the fall in the price of gold (1879: 151–152). The term is used

to analyse the course of economic fluctuations over time, and the description ends with the

statement that the prices are “now (1879) as low as they were in 1850” (1879: 152). This

discursive construction of ‘crisis’ invokes the image of a graph oscillating between glut and

depression, but ‘crisis’ also refers to the depression itself. For several decades economic theory

used ‘crisis’ both as a violent phenomenon to be diagnosed (1879: 136) and an objective outlook

on the variability of the economic system, delineating its cyclical regularities (Besomi 2011).

‘Crisis’ was never fully detached from the medical metaphor, and was never entirelyabstracted from the immediate experience of change. The metaphorical shift embedded in the

political use of ‘crisis’, along with its rich cultural baggage, constructed it as an inherently

blended experience. By the turn of the 20th century, the resistance of ‘crisis’ to clear-cut

spatialization eventually undermined its usefulness as an analytical category. With its built-in

metaphor and its intuitive awareness of decisive change crisis seemed like naive knowledge,

unbefitting the scientific promise of precise calculation. As the pressure on scientific theory

increased, the term itself was no longer able to meet the demands of maximal abstraction. By the

first decades of the 20th century, economic theory had gradually abandoned the discourse about

crises and replaced it with the more attractive theories of business cycles (Besomi 2011: 105).

Its loss of epistemic usefulness in the realm of science was well compensated for by the

growing popularity of ‘crisis’ in the socio-political and cultural domains. Apparently, the

aspectual knowledge carried by crisis was perfectly compatible with the mentalités of the first

half of the 20th century. By the eve of the Second World War, following the Great War and the



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worldwide economic depression, the term reached a pinnacle of unprecedented popularity.12

While ‘crisis’ captured well the modern sentiment of change, it was also under continuous

epistemic pressure. With the vulgarization of modern physical theory, the abstract discourse

about time crossed the confines of scientific scholarship. Expressions such as ‘Time’s arrow’,

popularized by astronomer Arthur S. Eddington (1928), impregnated everyday language with the

idea that time could be thought of as an abstract dimension, analogous to space, and detached

from the experience of human action. In the four-dimensional world of physicists, explained

Eddington, “the events past and future lie spread out before us as in a map” (1929: 68). For

scientific disciplines preoccupied with human-scale phenomena of change, this was wonderfulnews, as spatialized time abstracted the most troubling feature of the experience of action in

time: its resistance to prediction.

By the mid-20th century, spatial representation was conceived of as the ultimate response to

the scientific requirement for accuracy. In their rush to consolidate their epistemic status,

disciplines such as linguistics enthusiastically adopted spatial-like analyses of the linguistic

system. By the time linguistic theory turned to exploring cognition in the late 1950s, the analogy

between time and space was already well-established in the scientific imagery, and had also

become accessible to the general public. It hence seemed only natural that research into temporal

cognition should rely on the time–space analogy (Wierzbicka 1973; Traugott 1978). Since the

late 1980s, the cognitive sciences have taken a salient spatial turn, and today they tend to base

their program of research on a specifically non-critical version of the analogy between action in

time, on the one hand, and space, on the other (e.g. Langacker 1987/1991, 1999, 2009; Lakoff

1993; Picoche & Honeste 1993; Boroditsky 2000; Richardson et al. 2001, among others; cf.

12. There are minor differences between English (American and British), German and French in that respect, butNGram Google Books search in the three languages suggests that between 1932–1939 ‘crisis’ enjoyed a peak ofoccurrence.



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Walsh 2003). Paradoxically, this program, though aimed at advancing the scientific knowledge

about time cognition, impedes the research of those aspects of our cognition that are specifically

temporal (Chalozin-Dovrat 2010). Consequently, present-day semantics would have difficulty in

explaining the polysemy of ‘crisis’. If temporality was to be described in spatial terms only, then,

what could ‘crisis’ possibly mean?

5. What does ‘crisis’ mean?

The way in which we understand crisis today is the temporary endpoint of an infinite number of

cultural intersections. Diachronic evidence of the evolution of ‘crisis’ shows that since antiquity

to the present day the notion of decisive change has remained a stable signified. However, our

concept of decisive change has surely changed significantly since classical times. What can we

learn from the information presented so far about the meaning of ‘crisis’ today? This section will

attempt to draw from the diachronic account useful conclusions for the understanding of the

functions of contemporary ‘crisis’. For that sake, I will reorganize the historical narrative in a

synchronic manner, around five semantic clusters which are still active in contemporary uses of

the term: decisive change, evenementiality (i.e. the sense of event), abnormality, inevitability and

potential irreversibility.

More generally, the synchronic overview highlights that the loss of signifying power

associated with abstraction is positively compensated for: abstraction might not add to the term

new meanings in the traditional sense of the word, but it does generate new layers of

signification. In other words, it is true, as its detractors claim, that the term ‘crisis’ is attributed

today to a spectacular range of events and situations and that its loose use renders it abstract.

However, when we use ‘crisis’ to mean that irreversible consequences might be underway in no



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matter what aspect of our life, we may simply use it differently from the way people used it

before.

Finally, I will argue that these semantic transformations signal a noteworthy change in the

experience of time that accommodated new political patterns. From both a diachronic and a

synchronic points of view, the semantic path leading ‘crisis’ from decisive change to potential

irreversibility has important political implications that will be briefly discussed in the last

subsection.

5.1 From decisive change to potential irreversibility

In order to understand what ‘crisis’ means and what information it can give us about the

utterances in which it currently appears, let us reconsider some of the central attributes of the

word in regard of the diachronic processes described above.

Decisive change

With its acute awareness of momentous conclusion and its sense of vital transformation, the

English expression ‘decisive change’ has well captured the aspect of ‘crisis’ and the experience

of critical temporality. In fact, the adjective ‘decisive’ combines the two central ideas ingrained

in the classical term ‘’: conclusion and deliberation. These two significations emanated

from the Greek verb ‘’ (to distinguish, sift, decide, judge), which gave us through Latin

both ‘crisis’ and ‘critical’ (see also Section 4.1). Yet, whereas the adjectives ‘decisive’ and

‘critical’ still tie together conclusion and deliberation, the modern notion of crisis lost the idea of

decision or judgment . Modern Greek preserved this sense of the classical verb through nominal

derivatives such as the noun ‘’ (‘kritis’), meaning ‘a judge’ (in a contest), as English did



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with ‘critic’ and the adjective ‘critical’ in the sense of “expressing critique”. However, it seems

that the semantic relation between ‘crisis’ and ‘critique’ is no longer evident to contemporary

speakers of Western European languages. Hence, while we nowadays think of crisis as a critical

change or decisive transformation, we do not intuitively associate it any longer with a human

decision or judgment .13

In that sense, contemporary occurrences of ‘crisis’ record the responses of the sign to the

semantic pressures it was subject to over time. The three trends of abstraction we examined

previously took part in turning ‘crisis’ into a more and more objective notion. Accordingly, the

idea we currently have of ‘crisis’ as a decisive change often evokes historical or naturalnecessity. As the abstraction of the term progressed, decisive change took on the image of a point

in a time dimension which is external to the actions and the events referred to.14 Spatial

metaphors of objective turning points and decision points then gradually transformed the

prevailing imagery from one based on participation to one of observation, recasting social actors

as spectators, and effectively relieving the notions of change and crisis from the weight of

subjective resolve (see also Section 5.2 below).

13. The OED hence expressly signals denotations involving ‘judgment’ and ‘decision’ as obsolete. See “Crisis, n.”,OED online, www.oed.com.14. The idea of a point in time and the expression ‘turning-point’ are often related to ‘crisis’ and mentioned bydictionary entries of the term in English. The word ‘point’ first appear in Middle English in the early 13th century(see “Point, n.”, OED online). When related to time, it designated a unit of measurement : a small portion or division

of time, a moment or instant. Probably by derivation, ‘point’ could also refer to a moment before or during action, orto the awareness of a critical moment in the developments. The pre-modern and early modern examples provided bythe OED all show that the use of ‘point’ in relation to time used to be inseparable from the experience of action intime, unlike its later modern uses that often evoke a distinct image of an objective time-line. The image of a point intime (where ‘time’ is considered to be analogous to a spatial dimension) is most probably modern. In pre-modernand early modern occurrences, ‘point’ was often used with no complements (e.g. ‘at point’; ‘in this point’, as in ‘inthis moment’) or followed by the preposition ‘of’ (rather than ‘in’, e.g. ‘at point of dede’). Nevertheless, the OEDuses the expression “a location in time” in order to describe some of the temporal uses of ‘point’, including manypre-modern and early modern ones.



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Evenementiality

Following its historization and scientification, ‘crisis’ seemingly conceded to the trend of spatial

abstraction. However, it did not surrender to any exclusive spatial representation: an isolated

point in time; a repetitive cycle; a linear progression with breaking tips; oscillating graphs and

unidirectional arrows – since the mid-19th century, ‘crisis’ could evoke all these and more (see

Section 3). As a matter of fact, with increasing epistemic pressures across a range of new

scientific disciplines, ‘crisis’ soon embraced virtually any conceptual or visual image that could

communicate the experience of decisive change.

The modern occurrences of the term seem to indicate that since the medical metaphor wasimplemented in political affairs, ‘crisis’ was motivated to schematize evenementiality – the

perception of time connected with the sense of event – and it shaped and reshaped the experience

of criticalness according to the changing demands. Hence, analytical efforts such as Koselleck’s

were doomed to fail (Koselleck 2002, 2006 [1982]; Richter & Richter 2006). Relying on a

geometric-like logic of time, Koselleck tried to sort out the different images conveyed by the

term and to establish a nomenclature of crises. Frustratingly enough, ‘crisis’ seemed indifferent

to the contradictory features of some of the images it selected (see Section 3). However, if we

follow Koselleck’s own accounts, and bear in mind that the medical metaphor was primarily

selected in order to express a certain experience of time, i.e. the evenementiality of decisive

change, then its different distributions make perfect sense. The way we sense the texture of time

before and after the critical event was the element which ‘crisis’ sought to convey. Simply, the

experiential content of aspect is that specific quality of change which is profoundly temporal,

and cannot be reduced to graphic representations.



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Abnormality

The aspect of critical transformation connected ‘crisis’ with notions such as abruptness,

disruption, discontinuity, unexpectedness, suddenness, urgency, and at times even patent danger .

To a certain extent, this was already the case in many of the strictly medical occurrences of the

term in early modern Western European languages.15 When ‘crisis’ was torn from the medical

context and applied to the body politic, the medical metaphor lost the adjuncts qualifying it as

‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘imperfect’ (see Section 4.1). Political crisis no longer referred to either positive

or negative developments; rather, ‘crisis’ became a general sign of precariousness.

With the propagation of the idea of a medical norm (Canguilhem 1966) and its introductioninto the thought about the social, the term also came to signify the deviation from the normal

state of affairs. Consequently, the unexpected , unusual, and extraordinary features of decisive

change received during the 19th century a new diagnostic articulation: social and economic

crises were considered abnormal.16 However, from the 1910s on, occurrences of ‘crisis’ became

more and more common, and by the late 1950s the interest in the term itself was already starting

to register in scholarly literature (see Section 2). Thus, the trouble with ‘crisis’ – the critical

discourse on the value of the term and its meaningfulness – should also be understood as a

reaction to the phenomenal growth in frequency and its inevitable effects on the term’s sense of

abnormality (see Section 3). Critical comments on the use of ‘crisis’ have been specifically made

by historians and social scientists concerned about either the analytic value of the term (Starn

1971; Holton 1987; Shank 2008) or the political effects of its inflationary use (Bally 2004

[1930]; Koselleck 1988 [1959], 2006 [1982], 2002; Hirdman 2002; Hauser 2009; Surya 2009).

By the 1970s we can attest a very different reaction to the commonness of the term: the

15. In English, see for instance: “Crisis sygnifyeth iudgemente, and in thys case, it is vsed for a sodayne chaungein a disease” (B. Traheron tr. of J. de Vigo, 1543, In “Crisis, n.” OED online).16. On the pathological qualities attributed to the concept of crisis in 19th century economics, see Besomi (2011).



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emergence of the concept of crisis management (or crises management in the plural).17 With the

abnormality of crisis being diluted by high frequency and loose use, social scientists also started

to overtly normalize it.

Inevitability

Early political uses of the medical metaphor, such a Sir Rudyard’s or even Rousseau’s (see

Section 4), show that its meaning of anticipation or presentiment already had an admonishing

ring to it before the American and French revolutions. Crisis was that unfortunate development

which was about to occur , but since it was yet imminent it could be warned about. In the 19th

century, however, this sense of premonition took a more concrete turn: its co-occurrence with

‘revolution’ connected ‘crisis’ more closely to the specific political events of the French

Revolution. Hence, in the post-revolutionary era, crisis was even more evidently perilous, but

since it had already happened it was also deemed inexorable.18 Dictated by History and quasi-

natural necessity, decisive change was more and more understood as inevitable or inescapable.

As a result of these semantic developments, the notion was caught in a determinist limbo: on the

one hand, decisive change became a natural law of History; on the other hand, crisis was

dangerous and had to be prevented. In other words, the social and political upheavals of the long

19th century forged a conception of crisis that locked societies into a paradox of having to

prevent the unpreventable.

17. According to NGram Google Books, significant frequency of the term ‘crisis/crises management’ started toshow as early as the 1970s.18. Although they do not provide explicit semantic analysis of this type, the works of both Lowïth (1995) andKoselleck (2006) indicate a similar semantic evolution.



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Potential irreversibility

Whether social or economic crises could truly be prevented, was and still is a matter of debate.

Dedicated to calculation, what scientific theory could contribute to this question was the power

of prediction. With the development of statistics and the rise of its epistemic authority,

evenementiality could be thought of as a matter of probability. The potentiality of the

unexpected disruption of time was at stake: crisis might bear hazardous, irreparable

implications, but the actuality of the event could now be anticipated.

This paradigm of prediction and prevention of crises, already ostensible in the late 19th

century, continued well into the 20th century. Yet, in the aftermath of World War II, when man-made global catastrophe beyond repair turned into a most probable scenario, the scientific

optimism of prediction was greatly shattered (Arendt 1969). Moreover, the involvement of

scientific inertia in the production of crises cast a dark shadow over its capacity to prevent them.

The rising trend of spatial abstraction, finally, replaced the ideal of prevention by the ideal of

crises management .19 With crisis represented as a dynamic graph, scientific rationality could be

applied to it (see also Foucault 2004, in Section 2). It is the wisdom of our era that if the

temporal modality of crisis cannot be barred from our lives, at least it may be controlled and

managed.

The potentiality of crisis, the conceptually awkward co-existence of necessity and

premonition, is not the only paradox in which contemporary crisis seems to be caught. Around

the turn of the 20th century, irreversibility became an accessible spatial articulation for the

19. The relations between the notions of prevention and management are complex, and the net distinction betweenthe two probably developed over time. During the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when the paradigm of crisismanagement emerged, the two terms, ‘crisis prevention’ and ‘crisis management’, were not yet fully distinguished(see for example: “Only thus, in a period of tension between East and West, can Crisis Management, or – asPresident Nixon recently and more accurately described it – Crisis Prevention , be exercised by the North AtlanticCouncil in the interest of peace”. [NATO letter, 1971, Vol. 19–22, p. 14]). A more specific historical study, devotedparticularly to the discourse of crisis management, is required in order to determine the precise relation between thetwo notions and its particular political signification.



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notion of decisive change, in both English and French.20 Over time, the trend of spatial

abstraction transformed the necessary and the irremediable into the irreversible. Qualifying what

cannot be reversed, or ‘moved backwards’, irreversibility was the image selected by theories of

change for describing human temporality. Since physicists have thought of physical time as a

dimension comparable to space, it seemed only reasonable to apply the spatial metaphor to the

corporal and psychological experience of time as well. Hence, proceeding with the spatial

metaphor, one could logically maintain that unlike physical time, our experience of time is

unidirectional (Savitt 1995). ‘Crisis’ could then be pictured as a breach amidst the continuity of a

time-line, an image that corresponds well to the historical experience of crisis communicated byCrisis Thought (see Section 2).21

Semantically speaking, however, the notion is expressly paradoxical. As a metaphor,

irreversibility spatializes the one feature of time which is not compatible with space: our

experience of it as an inescapable, tragic limitation. In other words, when understood as a plain

spatial metaphor, irreversibility is an image of this very specific human experience of time that

by definition is not analogous to space, and hence cannot be subject to our visual perception.

It seems that the puzzling nature of the notion of irreversibility stems from the basic

incompatibility between our cognition of change and the scientific demand to express our

20. There are, however, notable differences in the history of these words in French and in English. In French,‘réversible’ had been used in the domain of jurisprudence since the 18th century, and designated a decree or a courtdecision that could be undone. ‘Irréversible’ and ‘irréversibilité’ was probably only admitted in the late 19th centurythrough the scientific discourse, and denoted a spatial reference to an external time dimension (see FRANTEXT,

and the dictionaries of the Académie française). In English, the diachronic data is more complex: ‘irreversibility’,‘reversibility’ and the respective adjectives ‘irreversible’ and ‘reversible’ entered English as early as the 17thcentury and served in various contexts. When they appeared in the legal domain their use was similar to the Frenchone, i.e. a legal act that can or cannot be revoked. However, they could also be used more loosely, in relation to Fate that could be sensed as either mutable or immutable (see OED online).

21. Interestingly enough, Modern Hebrew chose to express the modern concept of crisis by the noun MASHBER( ), a modern derivative of the verbal radical SHAVAR, meaning ‘to break’. Severed from the medical metaphorand the intricate history of the Western European lexicons, MASHBER intends to evoke the visual image of arupture or crack.



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experiential knowledge in spatial terms. However, the frequency of ‘irreversibility’ since the

mid-20th century demonstrates to which extent spatialization was successful. Currently,

‘irreversible’ is interchangeable with medical metaphors such as incurable, as well as with

adjectives from other conceptual domains: ‘irremediable’ (economics); ‘irrevocable’ (the law);

‘irreparable’ (craft, mechanics); ‘irretrievable’ (hunting, sports), and others. By the second half

of the 20th century, most if not all types of occurrences of ‘crisis’ could be summed up by the

concept of potential irreversibility, encapsulating both the series of radical abstractions ‘crisis’

was subject to, and the avowed cognitive limitations of these semantic processes.

5.2 The political utility of ‘crisis’

The way we conceptualize temporality affects the way we understand our political reality.

Temporal patterns govern the way we experience events, the arrangement of cause and effect in

discourse and the narrative that would thenceforth set up the experience in collective memory for

years to come. The trends of abstraction ‘crisis’ was subject to generated specific political

effects, some of them mentioned in the previous sections. In this subsection I would like to

recapitulate these effects in view of the semiotic, cognitive and epistemic processes involved.

On the sheer semiotic level, the abstraction of ‘crisis’ led Western European languages to

schematize change by selecting certain aspects of decisive change, like conclusion and necessity,

while disregarding others, such as deliberation and judgement . These semantic changes also

fashioned the inter-subjective realm of critical temporality: when the lexicon does not allow

speakers to ascribe causality to the events discussed, or to relate them to specific actors,

decisions and actions, the discursive exchange becomes inexplicit and ill-defined. The

application of the medical term to the body politic was bound to enhance this effect on the



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cognitive level: conceived as a malaise of the organic system, crisis tends to obscure agency,

release actors from their individual responsibility and blur the accountability of the political

agents involved (see Section 4). Henceforth, ‘crisis’ renders the narrative about situations and

developments more and more nebulous.

The political value of ‘crisis’ thus primarily lies in the potential of the term for

depolitization. Whereas this effective potential was ingrained in ‘crisis’ early on, the extensive

procedures of abstraction the noun was to undergo during the 19th century greatly enhanced its

capacity to eliminate agency. Above all, once crisis became an epistemic unit explicating the

impetus of change, its capacity to depoliticize increased. With the historization, scientificationand spatialization of time, ‘crisis’ could now describe decisive change as independent of human

decisions and actions but also, and more importantly, it could explain in what ways humans were

not responsible for that change. Hence, the incorporation of the term in scientific theories of

change endowed the effect of depolitization with the power of scientific knowledge: if the social,

economic and political systems as a whole were governed by natural law and obeyed mechanical

regularities, then it was not only possible, but also justified, to construct a plausible narrative of

change that no longer allocated a significant role to human agency.

Whether it was formerly used by the governed (Koselleck 1988 [1959]), or by sovereign

power (Foucault 2004), from the mid-19th century on, ‘crisis’ could bestow on the discursive

agents employing it the authority of scientific certainty (see Section 4.2). What turned ‘crisis’

into a powerful tool of de-responsibilization was the split it created between subjectivity and

objectivity (Latour 1993). While decisive change was classified as an objective natural fact, a

serious matter involving graphs and figures, the intuitive awareness of crisis was the subject’s

own worry. In this way, ‘crisis’ became a valuable artifice in the modern regime of truth: to put it



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bluntly, the ‘objective’ truth was that crises just happen; the subjective sense of distress

associated with crisis merely concerned isolated subjects, and as such, did not belong into the

domain of ‘social facts’. By putting up such a barrier between politics and subjectivity, the

modern concept of crisis often had the effect of lifting the burden of responsibility for social

change from the agents involved. The downside of these semantic shifts was the loss of agency,

still relevant today: with subjectivity severed from collective change, individuals cannot easily

acquire faith in their power to bring about social change, or even imagine that social change is

possible.

While it consecrated an objective domain of political phenomena, suitable for scientificinvestigation, the term itself kept on carrying the immediate awareness of the modern experience

of time. It is possibly this undisclosed duality, between dissociation and fusion (Latour 1993),

severing and then tying together the scientific empirical evidence of crisis and the intimate sense

of critical temporality, that endowed ‘crisis’ with such an expressive force. These political traits

of ‘crisis’ may also explain its appeal in modernity, as they demonstrate the strong connection

between the proliferation of the term and the processes of abstraction it has undergone. The irony

of modern abstraction is that it pushed the objectification of ‘crisis’ to the limit of the cognition

of time. Understood as potential irreversibility, ‘crisis’ presents us with a double paradox: on the

one hand, we are forced to try and reconcile necessity with prevention, and on the other hand, to

spatialize the non-spatiable sense of decisive change. This double paradox neatly demonstrates

the durable resistance of the aspectual knowledge of decisive change to the semantic pressures of

modernity. The concrete material of the awareness of critical temporality is still there, deeply

rooted in the sign of crisis.



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6. Concluding remarks

The story of ‘crisis’ is not straightforward but one that is closely intertwined with the way in

which temporal cognition has developed in modernity. As such, it demonstrates the intricate and

subtle intersections of history, politics, science, culture and language, and offers a complex

picture of the relations between the biological constraints of our time perception, the exploits of

political culture, and the interests of the production of knowledge. The trouble with ‘crisis’ – the

peculiar vagueness of the term, its resistance to analysis and its allegedly disproportionate

popularity – exposes some of the key traits of the modern semantics of Western European

languages.

As a final point, the centrality of crisis in the modern conception of time is curious: ‘crisis’

treasures the arcane knowledge of decisive change and unfolds the procedures of modern

abstraction. Despite its political and epistemic effectiveness, ‘crisis’ discloses one of the secrets

of modern science: we currently know very little about our cognition of change, maybe not much

more than people did in ancient times. Nonetheless, ‘crisis’ is still with us, not only as an isolated

lexical item but also as a phenomenon that shapes discourse, and is shaped by it.

Though this chapter was restricted to the discussion of 'crisis' and the studies of its specific

history, the theoretical problems that it poses are of a larger nature, and concern the

correspondence between linguistic and conceptual categories; the relation between semantic

theory and the history of ideas (in semantics as well as in many other fields); and the interface

between mental imagery and visual perception. It is inevitable that such a general and broad

analysis cannot properly address all the questions that arise or support all details in the

argumentation with suitable empirical substantiation. Nonetheless, it is hoped that the present



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introductory discussion will help contextualize the more narrowly focused analyses of crisis and

discourse that make up the bulk of this volume.

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