The Crisis in Crisis

In this essay I consider the current logics of crisis in American media cultures and politics. I argue that "crisis" has become a counterrevolutionary idiom in the twenty-first century, a means of stabilizing an existing condition rather than minimizing forms of violence across militarism, economy, and the environment. Assessing nuclear danger and climate danger, I critique and theorize the current standing of existential crisis as a mode of political mobilization and posit the contemporary terms for generating nonutopian but positive futurities.