Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion interrogates the aftermath of Argentina’s 2001-2002 financial crisis. Among the Buenos Aires middle-class, that event quickly came to be recognizable not as rupture, but rather as the uncannily familiar repetition of the country’s long-term history of political-economic crises. It thus entailed a widely shared sense of disillusion, not only with the failed promises of neoliberal capitalism, but also with the promises of crisis itself to enable historical transformation. That dwelling in the negativity of crisis had profound consequences for people’ ... More

Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion interrogates the aftermath of Argentina’s 2001-2002 financial crisis. Among the Buenos Aires middle-class, that event quickly came to be recognizable not as rupture, but rather as the uncannily familiar repetition of the country’s long-term history of political-economic crises. It thus entailed a widely shared sense of disillusion, not only with the failed promises of neoliberal capitalism, but also with the promises of crisis itself to enable historical transformation. That dwelling in the negativity of crisis had profound consequences for people’s daily lives as well as for their political imaginations. In this sense, post-crisis middle-class Buenos Aires was structured by a chronotope of routine crisis, with disillusion serving as a generalized meta-stance that people took up as they navigated all manner of interactions. Key to the production and regimentation of this chronotope of routine crisis and stance of disillusion were everyday practices of critique in which people employed suspicious approaches (such as those found in psychoanalytic and conspiracy theories) to interpret the hidden reality structuring social life. Across sites ranging from domestic households to national political discourse, from civil society organizations to neighborhood cafés, Routine Crisis tracks the chains of semiosis through which disillusion came to orient social life, and the unsettling consequences of that orientation.