Yet it is precisely in these periods of rupture that critique is often called upon to render legible sudden disruptions in the prevailing organization of power relations. Critique is therefore integral to the experience of crisis as an endemic condition of modernity (Boland, 2013; Koselleck, 2006). As Janet Roitman (2014) argues, crisis occasions critique by interrupting the normativity of history and serving as a moral diagnostic of the incongruity between past and present, between historical events and their representations. She thus calls the invocation of crisis “necessarily a post hoc interrogation” which self-referentially produces crisis as an a priori condition for historical consciousness. However, while Roitman’s critique rightly challenges the deceptive historicity of crisis as a sociological category, it leaves the epistemic certitudes of critique itself relatively untroubled. As a provocation to thought, I want to flip this proposition on its head and suggest that crisis is precisely that precipitous juncture of ontological uncertainty which momentarily obscures the moral contours of imagined worlds. It is a state of radical liminality and potentiality which—to borrow analogically from Benjamin’s (1996) discussion of divine violence—briefly escapes the dialectics of history, before being eventually folded back into the familiar grids of determinative critique (Guzmán, 2014).

With this argument, I do not mean to discount that crisis can serve as a contextualizing metaphor to describe chronic contradictions which normalize the experience of liminality (Vigh, 2008)—think of the “permanent crisis” of capitalism or the “forever wars” of empire—nor, conversely, to deny that crisis narratives problematically reinscribe temporal exceptionalism as an analytical frame, ultimately occluding shared structural conditions from view (Ramsay, 2020). Here, I am simply interested in recuperating the emergent, aleatory register of ethnographic objects, which is crystallized most palpably in moments of crisis when the futurity of politics as we know it is thrown into doubt. Take, for example, the unexpected demise of US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which sealed the Court’s rightward tilt for an entire generation. While progressives had been urging her for years to retire during Obama’s presidency, the news of her death on the evening of September 18th, 2020, rent apart the fabric of social justice in an instant and beckoned to another world requiring new moral strategies, alignments, and practices of critique, to guard against future destructions that we cannot, even now, fully grasp.

One could of course argue that ethnographic objects are intrinsically emergent, unstable, and subject to (re)assemblage, as Bruno Latour (2005) proffers through Gabriel Tarde’s sociological method. However, these objects gradually lose their traces of emergence as their semantic heterogeneity is sedimented into the dead letters of the archive. Ariella Azoulay (2019) thus calls for “potentializing history,” disrupting the archival conditions that make the disasters of our present appear a foregone conclusion, and recovering the ruptures that at one time gestured to the possibility of other worlds—or in her words, “an archival point zero from which one could begin to see that which could not have been seen” (Azoulay 2013, 551). While such ruptures signify for Azoulay the reconstruction of unrealized political possibilities, there is also an essentially tragic tone to potentializing the long catalogue of historical foreclosures which have brought us to our present. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1976) is perhaps one of the finest examples of history written in the tragic mode, where tragedy references not simply a chronicle of violence foretold—which inevitably leads European political theory to the figure of the death camp—but the persistent sense that history could potentially have been otherwise (Cabot, 2016).

The project of potentializing, however, operates differently as an ethnographic imperative than it does as Azoulay’s historiographic one, for ethnographic objects—and the analytical commitments undergirding their study—are incessantly contemporary. If Johannes Fabian (1983) once accused anthropology of suppressing the temporality of emergence by freezing it in an “ethnographic present,” anthropologists of crisis are frequently confronted by objects whose contours change shape before the ethnographic gaze can fix them in place. Potentializing the contemporary thus calls for an attunement to politically open-ended objects whose logics are not yet discernible and whose systemic ends are not yet mapped. The philosophical mood of this attunement can be tragic in its own right, as moments of crisis invariably portend the destruction to come. And yet, determinative critique too often requires prematurely resolving and synthesizing the meaning of emergent formations by filtering them through a priori ethico-political grids of intelligibility. By contrast, what one might call an indeterminative mode of critique must resist such temptations to totalize its object and, divested of its epistemic certitude, afford space for utterances of moral irresolvability that concede: “we know not what is to be done.”

So, what would an indeterminative critique of resilience look like? Anthropological responses to resilience discourse are unsurprisingly suspicious of its neoliberal echoes—characterized by a normative emphasis on adaptability, self-reliance, and risk management (Lenner & Turner, 2019; Omata, 2023)—mirroring theoretical arguments proffered by critical international relations scholars (Chandler & Reid, 2016; Duffield, 2013; Evans & Reid, 2014; Joseph, 2016; Neocleous, 2013; Welsh, 2014; Zebrowski, 2013). As I have argued elsewhere (Firoz, 2022a), such critiques of resilience frequently draw their critical thrust from an overdetermined history of the demise of the welfare state, and as such, are invariably prone to diagnose resilience as little more than an extension of neoliberal ontologies to international aid. While there are certainly important resonances between neoliberal and resilience-building strategies, the espousal of resilience as a programmatic principle in humanitarian work poses a very different problem-space because humanitarianism does not harbor the responsibilities of a traditional welfare regime, nor are its beneficiaries politically addressed as rights-bearing subjects of this regime. Rather, the Resilience Agenda advocates for expanding public infrastructure in asylum states precisely in response to the aid sector’s situated history of minimalist interventionism and the perceived need for more long-term structural solutions to mass displacement.

An indeterminative critique of humanitarian reason acknowledges both the neoliberal echoes of resilience discourse as well as the need to transcend the limits of humanitarian minimalism. It suggests that the integration of humanitarianism with development complicates the former’s ethical commitments, while also recognizing that such integrations may be crucial for addressing displacement at the scale we will witness in our lifetimes. It challenges the constriction of traditional refugee rights under the aegis of resilience, but holds that moral exhortation in productive tension with the contemporary dilution of the meaning of citizenship itself. More generally, an indeterminative critique recognizes that to be resilient is both a political act of vitality, resistance, and survival, as well as an indictment of the forms of juridical abandonment that render such capacities necessary. Among all of these agonistic possibilities, indeterminative critique is acutely aware that the archive of resilience humanitarianism has yet to be settled. That is why—in a somewhat tangential twist on Fabian—such ethnographies of crisis can only be written in the past tense, not only to disavow the ethnographer’s sovereign purveyance of coevality, but to acknowledge that the present perpetually outstrips the ethnographer. Ethnographic critique has but a fleeting temporality which always already belongs in the past.

Works Cited