Post-Crisis Reckoning: Making Sense of Early 21st-Century Civilizational Ruptures

As the world is struggling with the Covid crisis and its numerous aftereffects, it is easy to forget that the present pandemic is only the latest of a whole series of paradigm-changing 21^st-century crises. Indeed, the word “crisis” has become one of the key concepts for the understanding of the early 21^st century. Thus, crisis seems very much to be the default position of the 21^st century, the new norm. In this paper, I argue that the 21^st century has a recognizably different cultural logic from what the previous one had: most of our social, ideological, political, financial, and ecological paradigms are either changing or will (or must) change soon. As most of our critical concepts, intellectual tools, and ideological frameworks were made during the boom years of the late 20^th century, they are clearly outdated and inadequate today. Thus, in this paper, through taking account of these shifting intellectual and artistic paradigms, I attempt to indicate how the present crisis of knowledge and sense-making may be turned into a process of knowing and making sense of crisis, and thus help us meet the challenges of the new century. It is often through these fault-lines, breakdowns, and inconsistencies of our narratives that one may recognize those pre-crisis assumptions that we have to critically re-evaluate and update in order to understand the new century.¹