Description
It has become increasingly commonplace to characterise the present as an ‘age of crisis’. This paper investigates how this ‘age of crisis’ is affectively encountered and processed as a global political condition that simultaneously appears disorienting in its multivalent eventfulness yet stagnant in its irresolution towards alternative futures. We argue that while crises have always been central to the discipline of IR, they have not been significantly treated as felt phenomena that constitutes, and in turn constituted by, a dense political atmosphere which resonates affectively in the lives of political subjects who experience it. To understand crisis, we argue, requires thinking about how the crisis feels in the present, and how it structures and transforms everyday political subjectivity.
In this paper, we attend to the felt dimension of global crisis through conceptualising the term ‘static time’. We use ‘static time’ to denote an ambivalent political atmosphere that is doubly determined by both stasis (by repetitive and horizonless political action) and by a constant deluge of crisis-events that overwhelms subjectivity beyond legible perception, which we metaphorise through the image of ‘radio static’ noise. We argue that the affective co-presence of these ambivalent senses of crisis, as felt in the everyday, increasingly obstructs political agency and creates a suspension of collective-care infrastructures through which political subjects can orient themselves in the present. We navigate the emergence of this felt ‘static time’ of contemporary global politics through the circulation of three popular memes – doomscrolling, ‘I support the current thing’ and ‘I am tired of going through historical events’ – which reflect ordinary affective experiences of the present as articulated through everyday digital media.
