[D66] Reformism and Melancholia: Fordist Ghosts, Keynesian Spectres and Representations of the Crisis

[Antid Oto]

http://cartographiesoftheabsolute.wordpress.com/2012/10/18/reformism-and-melancholia-fordist-ghosts-keynesian-spectres-and-representations-of-the-crisis/

[Text of a talk given at the BSA conference Understanding the Financial 
Crisis, 8 October 2012]

I.

‘Today, anyone opening a newspaper often bumps up against the word 
“crisis”. It indicates insecurity, suffering and uncertainty, and 
alludes to an unknown future whose presuppositions cannot be clearly 
elucidated’. These lines are not my own, but are taken from a political 
dictionary published in France in 1839. In what follows, I want to 
approach the question of how we reckon sociologically and theoretically 
with the financial crisis from a somewhat oblique angle, that of crisis 
as a mode of historical and temporal experience, which is also to say a 
structure of feeling. I then want to sketch some of the ways in which 
the idea, and the structure of feeling, of ‘reform’ can serve as a 
hindrance to our sociological imagination of crisis.