Dossier

Today, the nature of crises and the ways in which they disrupt and resume the rhythms of everydayness differ from those of the recent past. The catastrophe that struck northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011, was a portent of this change: a natural disaster colliding with the spread of capitalism. In so doing, it demonstrated that eventfulness can no longer be limited to a specific locale. While such a collision echoes an older conviction that natural disasters and peasant uprisings inevitably signify a failing political order, we know today that such crises invariably derive from conjunctural configurations on the global stage. Configured in space, global spatialization entails and demands a respatialization on local terrain. In this regard, there are no local crises any longer, nor crises that can be localized.

The essays collected here focus on the diverse ways that temporalization is rescued, remade, or renounced in everyday crises. As a rhythm analysis of both crisis and the everyday, we draw on the work of Henri Lefebvre and what he called “qualitative moments.” In recalling forms of memoration, residues, remnants, and reminders of the past, such embodied specific temporal tenses can be put to work repairing breaks in the rhythms of daily life and constituting the building blocks of a renewed sense of everydayness.