“All the Old Illusions”: On Guessing at Being in Crisis

Abstract

Models of culture and action argue that crises can be generative of change, with changing contexts setting off reflexivity—a view of crisis as self-evident that is echoed in comparative historical work. Looking to the beginning of the Cold War in Romania and France, this article elaborates two instances when crises did not produce reflexive recognition. This echoes performative approaches that highlight actors needing to interpret crises into being yet underscores that crisis claims nonetheless take place in contexts potentially marked by shifting sociocultural scaffoldings. Rooted in the empirical finding that actors can live through—and be affected by—structural transformations without thinking of themselves as being in crisis, I put forward a conception of crises as unclear as they are taking place. Actors can guess at being or not being in crisis, with no guarantee their guess is fortuitous. Crisis management will be the result of these guesses: some informed, some lucky—and some, indeed, disastrous.

“Utopia shut up shop”: Hopeless Futures, Populism, and the American Dream

“…This dynamic can certainly lead us to better consider the repercussions of the breakdown of cultural scaffoldings for action. While shifts in socio-cultural scaffoldings can engender both uncertainty and a creative rethinking of strategies for action [Bourdieu 1990, 2000; Lizardo and Strand 2010; Sendroiu 2022a, 2022b, 2023; Swidler 1986, 2004], here we see that the loss of the American Dream as a collective temporal scaffolding for action can have deeply felt political effects. Political narratives such as “America first” effectively fill the gap as individuals struggle to orient action in the absence of cultural scaffoldings such as the American Dream.…”

Modernity and the Politics of Newness: Unraveling New Time in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966 to 1968

“…5 Antecedent hermeneutic ambiguities. In the summer of 1966, actors entered a scene where they had to engage in the guesswork (Sendroiu 2022) of determining the temporal anchoring of the "cultural revolution" between the second and third meanings, between carnival time and new time. The party media that propagated the official message and the concrete party organizations in charge of interpreting it suggested mixed and conflicting guesses: The former seemed to suggest a radical break, whereas the latter suggested a reiterative party rectification and purification.…”

“… 3. As mentioned earlier, Jansen (2016) theorizes political innovation as stemming from actors’ creative response to problem situations. Sendroiu (2022) introduces the concept of “guesswork” for understanding the politics of uncertainty: Actors, even highly placed actors, may not fully grasp a fraught and unfamiliar political situation. Our work articulates these aspects while incorporating the insight from Glaeser’s (2011:118) Political Epistemics , which approaches the contingencies of politics, and indeed the collapse of the East German state, as occurring through a “more or less regular or irregular thicket of crosscutting and intersecting differentiations and integrations, that is, of understandings.” Into Glaeser’s (2014) “hermeneutic institutionalism,” we inject a distinctively performative dimension and emphasize how power dynamics in the pursuit of newness can depend on the felicitous, if temporary, resolution of hermeneutic ambiguities, “crosscuttings,” and contradictions.…”

“…-Zhu Xueqin, interviewed in Morning Sun documentary (Hinton, Barmé, and Gordon 2003) Revolutions are capricious times, when actors engage in enormous guesswork (Sendroiu 2022), including the temporal horizons of their actions. Are we, the actors, involved in or witnessing an occasional food riot?…”

Clustered Vulnerabilities: The Unequal Effects of COVID-19 on Domestic Violence

“… 14. This last point suggests that new interpretations emerge during crises that may be “generative” of social action (Sendroiu 2022; see also Swidler 1986). …”