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I focus on genres of crisis here because the sensorium
created by chronic crisis produces the present as a constant
pressure on consciousness that forces consciousness to
apprehend its moment as emergently historic. As an
aesthetic it foregrounds the work and the world of
adapting to a situation and desiring to force certain forms
of adaptation normatively onto the scene. Crisis reveals
and creates habits and genres of inhabiting the ordinary
while reconstituting worlds that are never futures but
presents thickly inhabited, opened up, and moved around
in. (848)
Berlant’s idea of crisis in the everyday underscores, firstly, the
threat concealed in the banal and the ordinary. For her, what is
taken as the good life might pose an obstruction to its own
realization. Secondly, it foregrounds the subjects’ affective response
to this crisis through adaptation and improvisation. The historical
present therefore presses upon the individuals to remake intuitions,
form new habits, and produce “a personal, political, and aesthetic
ambit that pushes the ongoing event into something that never
quite becomes a bounded event” (849).
Berlant’s elaboration on
the crisis in the everyday seeks to excavate the alternative
imaginaries arising from the lived moments of the historical
present and redefine “the historical novel as the aesthetic
expression of an affective epistemology”
4
(64).
Berlant’s conceptualization of crisis in everyday life as the
core of writing history links specifically to the promise of the good
life contemporary liberal-capitalist societies seem to offer but
which is never really actualized. In such societies, what is troubling
and challenging is not the exceptional events that lead to trauma,
but the crisis in the ordinary that is often caused by our pursuit of
the good life. Even though Rosca’s novel is contextualized in a
4
Berlant’s article “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event” first appeared in
American Literary History
(2008), a revised version of the article was
incorporated into her monograph
Cruel Optimism
(2011). The term “affective
epistemology” did not appear until the second version (Berlant, 2011: 64).