Reviewed by: Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion by Sarah Muir Yazan Doughan Sarah Muir. Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 200 pp. This is an ethnography of Argentina that weaves together two concerns of contemporary social theory: late- or post- neoliberal temporality and the status of critique in academic and broader intellectual practice. The book's proximal focus is a particular structure of feeling that informs the historical and practical sensibilities of middle-class Argentinians in Buenos Aires in the period immediately succeeding the economic crisis of 2001–2002. Among this milieu, Muir notes, the "dashed promises of twentieth century progress" have given way to a "widespread sense of foreclosed futures," whereby people felt they were now living "an after-ward in which no new beginnings were in sight" (8). This historical sensibility has become "the grounds on which people grappled with all manner of practical issues, both public and intimate" (8). Following the 2001–2002 financial crisis, middle-class Argentinians in Buenos Aires, Muir shows, have come to understand their biographical and national history as a series of repeating crises that continue to unfold in the present. This understanding informed how they lived their everyday life and how they interpreted their own and other people's behaviors—in friendship, marriage, public behaviour, electoral politics, and the politics of solidarity. In all these spheres and others, moments when one's expectations or aspirations are not met tend to elicit discourses of excruciating self-criticism, narratives of lament about the status of the middle class, and a sense of disillusionment about the world and with the promises of one's national and class membership. Key to the argument here is the central place accorded to the Argentinian middle class, particularly in the capital Buenos Aires, in [End Page 895] narratives of national progress and international development, whereby it stands as a synecdoche for the whole nation. The book's five substantive chapters illustrate the historical sensibility of routine crisis in Argentina, its emergence, and how it operates at different scales. The first chapter discusses public discourses on the middle class prior to, during, and after the 2001–2002 financial crisis. It traces the emergence of what Muir calls "the middle-class consensus," a structure of feeling and habitual interpretive practices that came to define middle-class subjectivity. If the crisis as a historical event was experienced in vivo as chaos and disorder, later discursive practices on that event served to render this disorder meaningful. In this later representation, crisis became the "real" reality of Argentina that would rear its head every now and then. Moreover, the ability to see crises as the "really real" and any semblance of order simply as a veneer came to be constitutive of middle-class subjectivity. In this way, Muir argues, members of the middle-class could assure themselves of their class membership through their practice of critique, or the ability to penetrate through orderly appearances to reveal the ugly reality that lurks behind them. The rest of the chapters develop and elaborate on this core argument. Further, Chapter 2 situates the sensibility of the Argentinian middle class in the context of a longue durée history of the country's political economy and public culture, particularly in relation to two salient genres of critical interpretation, psychoanalysis, and conspiracy theory, both of which produce a suspicious form of critique that questions its own efficacy. Chapter 3 situates their sensibility in the context of the devaluation of the national currency during the crisis. The last two chapters look at how the suspicious sensibility of the middle class informed their interpretations of their daily lives at the time of Muir's fieldwork (2003–2007). Chapter 4 focuses on corruption as a folk concept by which the middle class apprehends the apparent loss of virtue, even the ability to know what virtue is, in Argentina. Middle-class Argentinians, Muir argues, see themselves as compulsive participants in their own national and personal undoing by simultaneously condemning corruption and taking a certain pleasure in it—a situation that she calls "historical exhaustion." The final chapter shows how even social initiatives that seek to...
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Dec 22, 2023
Alba Valenciano-Mañé 
Open Access