Crisis narratives frame our response
Half the seats on many of the Titanic’s lifeboats were empty. The tragedy of the Titanic is an event retold over and over not only because the unsinkable ship shocked the world, but also because "it didn't have to be that way." It didn't have to end with turning individuals aways from half empty lifeboats, but the constructed scarcity crisis was deployed. Since then, it's become a cautionary tale about hubris, human nature, and constructed scarcity.
"This is the thought experiment of a thousand sci-fi stories: When the chips are down, will your neighbors be your enemies or your saviors? When the ship sinks, should you take the lifeboat and row and row and row, because if you stop to fill the empty seats, someone’s gonna put a gun to your head, throw you in the sea, and give your seat to their pals?"
-Cory Doctorow, “The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories.” Slate Magazine. October 13, 2020.
Yet, "Stories of futures in which disaster strikes and we rise to the occasion are a vaccine against the virus of mistrust. Our disaster recovery is always fastest and smoothest when we work together, when every seat on every lifeboat is taken. " (Doctorow, C. “Disasters Don’t Have to End in Dystopias.” Wired, April 5, 2017. https://www.wired.com/2017/04/cory-doctorow-walkaway/.)
In this genealogy, we will examine the role of crises, especially constructed crises, and the power of "no."
As articulated by Bert Spector in Constructing Crises: Leaders, Crises, and Claims of Urgency (2019), crises are a powerful tool for leaders. These crises can be both real and constructed. Real crises look like natural disasters or a global pandemic, while constructed crises are often utilized to claim (or hold onto) power and resources, especially in an urgent or 'exceptional now' manner. Constructed crises tend to fall into different smaller narratives (such as "A once glorious kingdom under threat"), but can be utilized in conjunction with real crises to form a larger narrative. These can be used for a wide-variety of reasons, but are typically manifestations of urgency, and always stem from the desire for power.
Crises, especially those which are constructed to tell a narrative, are “intended to attract attention and assert urgency” (Spector, 22). While Spector articulates a number of different types of crises narratives, their unifying characteristic is:
the exercise of power built into the process of constructing a claim and embedding it in a narrative. That act of construction is intended to de-contest the meaning of a crisis by fixing the understanding of the narrative. When a particular narrative becomes nonnegotiable, it intends to assert itself as the controlling frame for any and all subsequent discussions and responses. (Spector, 161).
In other words, in constructing crises and weaving a narrative, leaders leverage their power to control future conversations within the specific framework of the crises. (add a thought here)
Of particular relevance to library literature is the crisis type Spector refers to as the “Once-glorious-kingdom-under-threat” narrative. As the name suggests, this narrative is used to suggest that the current state of things is (or recently was) illustrious and beneficial, yet is besieged by external forces. In addition to this premise is the implicit assumption that “the leader is the protagonist who will confront that threat and return the kingdom to its glory” (Spector, 151). In academic libraries, this narrative likely feels familiar: in addition to claims that libraries were once noble, grandiose entities serving a higher purpose, are the calls for innovation at the hands of a protagonist, charged with changing things for the better. Most critically, though, Spector notes that leaders can use multiple crises to construct larger narratives: for example, instead of leveraging only the “Once-glorious-kingdom-under-threat” narrative, effective leaders could compound with others, such as “forces beyond our control” narrative, to reinforce both urgency and claims for power.
In librarianship, these crises have leveraged by administrators, politicians, and others to argue that "There just aren't the resources", or "there just isn't the time to wait!" This mentality is one that libraries have used as a rallying cry, attempting to do more with less, and repeating calls for resilience in the face of adversity. And while these may indeed be noble goals, they stem from the myth that resources are scarce, that the matter at hand is urgent.
As you, dear reader, explore this project, we invite you to consider: Is there actually a crises? Are resources in fact scarce? Should we do more with less? Is it ok to simply exist? Instead of thriving, can we focus on surviving? And, in the words of Leah Zaidi, can we design our way out of a cyberpunk dystopia?
