Trying to think of one word that might capture this uneven year, I am yet to fully settle on the right one, but ‘disruption’ feels more appropriate than most alternatives. As with so many things, disruption can have fractal properties. Pandemic waves continue to ebb and flow, albeit increasingly pushed to the side or back of our minds; the war in Ukraine grinds along, with its reverberations across the world becoming increasingly more pronounced; inflation, energy and food are all issues that have been reappearing as sources of concern; the great powers fall deeper and deeper into their self-defeating and destructive narcissism; and meanwhile, people seem content with the distorted facsimile of the world represented through their phones and computers. This unsettling mix of drift and decline is one that has been present in many of my prior notes, including considering Goethe’s observation that ‘it is hard to come to terms with the errors of the times’; and recalling Nietzsche’s warning that, ‘we are skating upon very thin ice, and the warm breeze of a thaw is blowing.’ There are echoes of our growing distress in the past, the challenge is hearing and making sense of them. How to make sense of all this disruption? How to hold onto that growing sense of unease? How to hold one’s gaze on those indications things are not working?
Adam Tooze has become increasingly prominent as a public intellectual and narrator of these points of stress and fracture in the global politico-economic system, most regularly now through his high tempo Chartbook substack. There, and in his real time history of the pandemic, Shutdown, Tooze has dug up and adopted an intriguing term, ‘polycrisis’. It appears to have first appeared in Edgar Morin’s 1999 book, Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the new Millennium:
There is no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem.
The phrase is generally attributed, however, to then European Council President Jean-Claude Junker, who used it once in a speech to gesture towards the existence of a series of major problems occurring at the same time. Tooze has now recovered it, an understandable move given the complicated intersections of various crises and problems currently manifesting themselves. In his book, he notes that, ‘polycrisis neatly captures the coincidence of different crises but it doesn’t tell us much about how they interact.’ Tooze has sought to partly address this by visualising the complexity of the interconnection problems with ‘krisenbilder’ [crisis pictures] here and here. This work has been primarily focused on identifying the different crises and relationships that make up the present moment.
In a new article I’ve co-authored with Mathew Davies, a long-time colleague and friend, we try to move further with developing the term. Polycrisis is certainly suggestive, it connotes the sense of crises powerfully interacting, but there is room for more clearly specifying what exactly it entails. Building on Tooze, Morin, Beck and others, we came up with this outline:
A polycrisis can be thought of as having the following properties:
(1) Multiple, separate crises happening simultaneously. This is the most immediate and comprehensible feature.
(2) Feedback loops, in which individual crises interact in both foreseeable and unexpected ways. This points to the ways that these separate crises relate to each other.
(3) Amplification, whereby these interactions cause crises to magnify or accelerate, generating a sense of lack of control. The way these separate problems relate and connect works to exacerbate and deepen the different crises.
(4) Unboundedness, in which each crisis ceases to be clearly demarcated, both in time and space, as different problems bleed over and merge. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish where one issue ends, and another commences.
(5) Layering, a dynamic Tooze attributes to Yixin’s analysis, whereby the concerns of interest groups related to each distinct crisis overlap ‘to create layered social problems: current problems with historical problems, tangible interest problems with ideological problems, political problems with non-political problems; all intersecting and interfering with one another’ (quoted in Tooze 2021, 18).
(6) The breakdown of shared meaning, stemming from crises being understood differently and from the complex ways in which they interact, and how these interactions are subsequently perceived differently. As each crisis blurs and connects to the other, it becomes more difficult to identify a clear scope and narrative for each distinct crisis, as well as coming to terms with all the interactions between different issues.
(7) Cross purposes, whereby each individual crisis might impede the resolution of another crisis, in terms of demanding attention and resources, and the extent to which they have become tangled together makes it difficult to distinguish and prioritise.
(8) Emergent properties, the collection of these dynamics, which all exhibit a high degree of reflexivity, exceeds the sum total of its parts. The polycrisis is ultimately much more than a collection of smaller, separate crises. Instead, it is something like a socio-political version of the ‘Fujiwhara effect,’ a term used to describe when two or more cyclones come together, morph and merge.
I wanted to highlight this part from the article, as the framing of polycrisis feels like a useful one that can benefit from being more fully worked through. Tooze’s intuition is strong, the term reveals and suggests something about this period we appear to be falling into. Polycrisis captures the awkward and tangled mix of changes, challenges, connections and confrontations, all interacting with one another: bending, blurring and amplifying each other. This is all exacerbated by the way the breakdown of meaning is part of what is occurring. As Tooze rightly notes, it is all messy, complicated and difficult to comprehend:
The polycrisis we are in the midst of, is fast-moving, complex, heterogeneous, interconnected, explosive. One comfort, at least intellectually, is that we are in it together. If you are feeling confused and overwhelmed you aren’t on your own. No one is outside the current conjuncture. There are different vantage points, with different perspectives, but no single point and no single theory that encompasses our reality and provides an absolute point of view.
Part of what our article is proposing is the need to more honestly recognise and reckon with the complexity of the present moment. We do so in reference to the scholarly discipline of International Relations, cautioning against moving too quickly to determine what this all means and simply assign these ambiguous and multivalent experiences to becoming more content for the academic publication mill. For those interested, the full reference is: Mathew Davies and Christopher Hobson, ‘An Embarrassment of Changes: International Relations and the COVID-19 Pandemic’, Australian Journal of International Affairs (2022), and it is possible to download it with this link.