Critical Theory and Political Modernity by José Maurício Domingues

Author:José Maurício Domingues
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030020019
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.4.2 Crisis and Breakdown

Problems really start when conflict overflows the limits in which liberal institutions are supposed to contain it. There is, as a consequence, a tendency towards the de-institutionalization of social, particularly political, relations. Situations become more fluid and agents have trouble identifying the reaction of others. Contingency takes over and leads to further, more open, conflicts and sheer confusion. Routines fall apart and improvisation takes over, with unexpected and unusual answers from all agents exponentially fostering contingency and engendering an increasingly complicated situation, with issues, agents and energy from other areas of social life pouring into the political dynamic.46 This happens evidently with variable intensity and duration, depending on the depth of the crisis that triggered the original crunch. Social creativity escalates at least in some, again variable, measure, concerning practices, the imaginary and institutions, which does not mean that collective solutions are found. The world may be turned upside down. Liberal institutions, in short, have trouble to keep functioning as they do in ‘normal’ conditions.

This may be a passing problem, which may be surpassed by small or incremental changes, new strategies and concessions; in other cases, a more far-reaching breakdown sets in, which sometimes looks sudden, its symptoms usually showing up for a while before the crunch. The crisis of hegemony, with consensus abating, may unfold and deepen, with no agents seemingly having a solution at hand or solutions being repressed by dominant forces. Agents then start to look for their own interests alone. The old dies hard and the new takes time to rise, morbidity ensuing from this sort of stalemate or just a lack of actual alternatives.47 In the formal political system, in particular, ‘rules of the game’ stop working and ‘elites’—or oligarchies, as we will discuss later—stop recognizing legitimate interlocutors in adversaries; or they are so desperate to defeat opponents that they push too hard and may blow things apart, themselves included.

This means that the abstract institutions of the liberal state—or liberal at least to some extent—falter in their expected reiteration. Even worse is the situation if shadow institutions, for instance linked to corruption, are laid bare in the course of crisis. In other words, the agents that reiterated those features can no longer do so, either because they lack the capacity for that or simply because they lose direction in the face of the snowballing mess. The upshot is that specific collectivities or individuals come to the fore. They may pop up from outside the state, as putative political ‘outsiders’, or from within it. With their concrete characteristics, they challenge the supposed neutrality of abstract institutions and agents; or they may even rise as pretending to represent precisely those abstract features, which they vow to sustain, generating an ambiguous situation. At this point, the role of mediators changes or foreshadows unexpected processes. That is, when the relations between abstract and concrete are also altered and the latter raises above the former (without erasing it, by any means). Mediators emerge as autonomous forces, instead

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