Recently, the world has been assailed by a multiplicity of crises, including the climate crisis, the financial crisis, the corruption crisis, the cost of living crisis, the housing crisis, the crisis of trust, the migrant crisis, the international crisis (manifested in various regions), and, within the UK, the political crisis (featuring imploding governments), the policing crisis, the prison crisis, the schools crisis, the sewage crisis and many more. Two things strike me about this list. The first is the proliferation of different focal points for crises; the second concerns the frequency with which commentators now reach for the word crisis to describe an unsettled, troubled or troubling situation.

In the meeting of these two issues lies a crucial analytical point: crises are not just naturally occurring phenomena. Rather they combine material events and definitional work in shifting combinations. But the definitional work – the naming and parsing of crises – is always in play and is always critical. The idea – the image – of crisis is a potent one, typically conveying threat or danger, and implying a sense of urgency: the feeling that “something must be done”. This sense of urgency has ensured that ideas of crisis have been mobilised by very different political projects, from the Left’s investment in the crises of capitalism or the Right’s recurrent mobilisation of the “crisis of Law and Order” (Hall et al, 1978/2013/2026).

In this respect, I propose to treat crisis as an “object” (as framed by Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan’s 2023 distinction between “les crises comme contextes, comme objets ou comme enjeux”). Here, I treat crises as discursively constituted objects - ways of naming situations – which are interventions into political-cultural milieux. In particular, I focus on the rise of ideas of polycrisis and permacrisis as ways of naming and explore the political-cultural implications of their deployment and circulation. I will concentrate on the definitional work of naming these phenomena, rather than contributing to the effort to name, enumerate, define and analyse the multiple crises they signify, in part because there is already a massive literature about each of them, but more importantly because too little attention has been paid to how ideas of crisis are created and deployed. Yet the terms polycrisis and permacrisis have circulated extensively in both academic work and more popular accounts of the present moment and have an impact on how we (their multiple audiences) are invited to understand our current conditions – and how we are invited to feel about them.

There has been growing interest in discursive/narrative/definitional approaches to the idea of crisis (for example, Boletsi et al., 2021; and Roitman, 2014; 2022). Roitman has recently written of the way in which ideas of “perpetual crisis” are

“a way of indexing the state of human affairs: ‘an age of crisis’, ‘times of crisis’, ‘chronic crisis’ and so on. These expressions seem to merely describe a state of affairs or an experience of time, but they are foundational claims: they are declarations that give structure to amorphous phenomena. … The concept of crisis is also a primary means to constitute the significance of events in this constant flux of experience (‘This is a crisis; therefore, it is a historical event.’)” (Roitman, 2022, p. 1).

Such uses of ideas of crisis involve, she insists, “practices of representation” and, as a result, such practices that must always be “problematised”. My own encounters with the challenge to problematise such practices emerged through a distinctive intellectual formation – that of British cultural studies and my recurrent starting point is Raymond Williams’ approach to what he terms “historical semantics” in Keywords (1976). Williams’ work stresses the ways in which historical, social and cultural struggles determine which meanings come to be taken for granted – and how they may become contested. That is, the potential for other meanings always exists, even in the face of the most apparently fixed or naturalised meanings. This contestation of meanings lies at the heart of political discourse, in which meaning and power are always entangled. Here I will develop this foundational understanding of the entanglement of meaning, power and politics and the discursive/narrative view of crisis into an argument that crises are made up in the double sense of that phrase: they are imagined as matters of social anxiety; and they are assembled as objects of political concern. Audiences are addressed and invited to subscribe to authoritative accounts of the crisis-ridden character of the present.

In this view, crises require political-cultural work to summon them into being and to pull together the forces to make them serve as an agent of change or consolidation. In such political-cultural work, crises are continually anticipated, announced, predicted, discovered, denied, calibrated, managed, resolved or not. Diverse projects recognise and try to mobilise the value of projected threats to either the existing order of things or the order that they believe should exist. One specific example of such political labour and the discursive practice that goes into cultivating crises can be found in Naomi Klein’s analysis of the shock doctrine and disaster capitalism (2008). Klein argues that US capitalism (and its global reach) has been geared to seizing the potential that crises (natural disasters, wars, economic crises) offer for the imposition of new solutions, and for the creation of new alignments of power and profit. I have tried to indicate something of the scope and significance of the idea of crisis and its continuing contestation but at this point I turn my attention to distinctive elements of the present state of crisis – the rise of ideas of polycrisis and permacrisis. In what follows, I first explore the rise of ideas of polycrisis and permacrisis and some of the critiques to which they have been subjected, focussing on the ways in which they frame crises as political-cultural objects. Subsequently I turn to two other dimensions of the political-cultural work performed by these concepts – their affective impact on framing how we feel about crises and the pedagogic ways in which they seek teach us about crises, including how to ‘tell the time’.

Poly and Perma: proliferating crises and the politics of crisis talk

I begin with the concept of “polycrisis” which has its roots in the complexity theory of Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern. They used it to argue that the contemporary world is not confronted with just “one vital problem, but with many vital problems, and this complex inter-solidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes and the planet's general crisis constitutes the number one vital problem” (Morin & Kern, 1999, p. 74). Emerging from their approach to complex systems, polycrisis has come to refer to multiple interconnected crises that interact synergistically and thus create complex effects greater than the sum of their parts. The idea of polycrisis was perhaps most famously deployed by Jean Claude Juncker in 2016, when serving as President of the European Union:

“I have often used the Greek word ‘polycrisis’ to describe the current situation. Our various challenges – from the security threats in our neighbourhood and at home, to the refugee crisis, and to the UK referendum – have not only arrived at the same time. They also feed each other, creating a sense of doubt and uncertainty in the minds of our people” (Junker, 2016).

Since then, the term has proliferated – coming to refer to the intersecting dynamics of the multiple crises that commentators identify (see the overview by Alexander, 2022 and the critical distinction between a polycrisis and the polycrisis made by Lähde, 2023). The crises which are invoked in specific accounts vary, but the idea of polycrisis insistently points towards a multiplicity of interconnected crises whose interconnections may be mapped (see, for example, Tooze, 2022a). In a 2022 Financial Times editorial titled “Welcome to the World of Polycrisis”, Tooze defined the emergence of polycrisis:

“[i]n the 1970s, whether you were a Eurocommunist, an ecologist or an angst-ridden conservative, you could still attribute your worries to a single cause – late capitalism, too much or too little economic growth, or an excess of entitlement. A single cause also meant that one could imagine a sweeping solution, be it social revolution or neoliberalism. What makes the crises of the past 15 years so disorientating is that it no longer seems plausible to point to a single cause and, by implication, a single fix… Meanwhile, the diversity of problems is compounded by the growing anxiety that economic and social development are hurtling us towards catastrophic ecological tipping points… Our tightrope walk with no end is only going to become more precarious and nerve racking” (Tooze, 2022b.).

The concept has attracted increasing attention, being used to mark a new era in which crises are entangled, affect one another through feedback loops and resist approaches to political intervention inherited from the past. It has also attracted critical scrutiny which has focused on its bundling together of not necessarily commensurate phenomena (e.g., the financial crisis of 2008 and the environmental crisis) and on its blurring of time scales and temporalities. There are also significantly absent crises in this busy list, notably the crisis in care (for example, Dowling, 2021) In a thoughtful response, the anthropologists Henig and Knight have argued that

“[p]olycrisis draws attention to a set of knotted events, providing a landscape of meaning while becoming a narrative form in its own right. As a term with rapidly increasing popularity, it delivers eventedness by packaging overwhelming social and environmental processes into a sleek, commercially simple and intensely complex category” (2023, p. 5).

Indeed, they suggest that “[p]olycrisis, while building on complexity theory and systems thinking, might qualify as a theory oversimplifying complexity” (p.5), proposing instead that anthropology might temper some of the simplifications of polycrisis approaches by paying attention to “historicity, temporality, scalarity and intersectionality” adding “much-needed texture to the polycrisis theory” (p. 4).

Tooze’s work on polycrisis has also been the focus of more sustained ideology critique (for example, Ganz, 2023; Parmar, 2023). Ganz attacks Tooze’s weak conceptualisation of polycrisis, suggesting that it fails to develop a rigorous analytical account and instead offers a “Keynesianism of despair” that fuels a technocratic managerial orientation. In a similar vein, Murphy argues that

“[m]anagers of the existing configuration of power and wealth in our societies find the concept of ‘polycrisis’ intellectually attractive because they recognise that the world-spirit of the 1990s (globalisation and liberal democracy) has stalled. But the polycrisis allows them to describe this breakdown without seriously addressing any of the structural inequalities or injustices embedded within the unipolar, market-liberal world of the recent past” (2024, p. 42).

This critique is also developed in the “symptomatic reading” offered by Cant (2025) who traces the tendency to map the crises (drawing their chains of association and the ways in which they form an “assemblage”) rather than analysing their specific conditions and dynamics. Cant then explores how both crisis in the singular and the polycrisis are understood by Tooze in relation to an imagined subject:

“Tooze opens his account of the concept by defining its simplest element: a singular crisis. ‘A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity’ (Tooze 2022b). This definition implies a subject without describing it. The threshold between problem and crisis is defined in relation to this subject. Only when the implied subject has their identity threatened does that boundary get crossed. What makes the polycrisis a polycrisis is that the subject in question faces multiple such threats, and so has to react to multiple crises at once” (Cant 2025, p. 552).

But who is this subject that is implicated in the recognition of crisis? Cant argues that this is a collective subject in which we are all invited to recognise ourselves. Indeed, it is our old friend, the State – here understood as both a Hegelian state involving

“objective universality as realised in a concrete social organisation, and more specifically, a Keynesian state where, quoting Mann’s view, “[t]he state is seen as a social organisation operating above and separately from classes as ‘the great “reconciler” of individual and collective interests . . . which can harmonise the particular and the universal, materially and ideologically, without sacrificing either” (Mann 2016, p. 124).” (Cant 2025, p. 555).

This elucidation of the collective subject (and empowered agent) of the polycrisis underscores other critiques of Tooze’s anti-structuralism and Keynesianism. For Cant, an alternative account needs to be grounded in a Marxist understanding of the intersecting crises of capitalism but that is not the focus of my attention here.1

Rather, I propose to turn now to the rise of “permacrisis” – the Collins Dictionary’s choice as 2022’s Word of the Year, about which David Shariatmadari (2022) observed that it is “a term that perfectly embodies the dizzying sense of lurching from one unprecedented event to another, as we wonder bleakly what new horrors might be around the corner”. It (re-)emerged in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and like polycrisis, permacrisis attempts to capture – and name – an era. Katsikas, Del Tedesco Lins and Hoffman suggest that

“[w]e live in a world shuddered by multiple and profound crises. From the global financial crisis and the Eurocrisis that followed, to the pandemic, Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, the consequent energy and inflation crises, the continuously evolving climate crisis, and the brewing tension among the world’s major powers, the last few years have been marked by political and economic instability, leading many to talk about a new era in the world’s history. New concepts have emerged to describe this era. ‘Permacrisis’ is one of these concepts” (2025, p. 1).

Katsikas and his colleagues capture both the sense of proliferation and the weight of their impact (“shuddered by”) expressed in the imagery of permacrisis. Permacrisis differs from polycrisis in two important ways. First, the multiplicity of crises is now a taken for granted point – what is at stake is a matter of temporality: the crisis is characterised by its permanence: we (whoever we may be) are stuck with it. Crisis has moved from a moment (of danger/possibility) to a condition (this is what we live with/in). Permacrisis has featured both as a global phenomenon and as a descriptor for particular sites and sectors where it conveys persistent troubles and perceived impasses; for instance in housing (Soni, 2024), policing (Hohl and Stanko, 2024; Bradford, Jakson and Taylor, 2024)), The European Union (Betivori et al., 2025), rural living (Jayne et al., 2024); consumer behaviour (Ingram et al, 2024); aviation safety (Airguide Business, 2024), supply chains (Leyland, 2022), healthcare and health workforces (Burau et al., 2024), welfare states (Padakis, Tzagkarakis, 2024) and teaching (Galvin et al., 2025). 2

Here, though, I will focus on how the permacrisis has been articulated as a troubling and intractable global phenomenon, apparently beyond the reach of existing forms of political and governmental agency that are ill-suited to the complexity and intensity of the present. One approach to mapping the permacrisis and proposing ways to resolve it was the 2023 book Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World authored by Brown, El-Erian and Spence (Gordon Brown was a former Prime Minister of the UK and its Chancellor during the 2008 financial crisis; Mohammed El-Erian was a Chief economic advisor at Allianz, while Michael Spence was a Nobel Prize winning economist who subsequently worked at the Hoover Institution). In a podcast, featuring two of the authors, El-Erian and Spence, El-Erian spoke of the way the book had emerged:

“Mohamed El-Erian: Look, there’s a reality and a perception that we’re living in a world where we seem to go from one crisis to another. The G-20 called it ‘cascading crises.’ And we simply can’t get out of it. I remember Mike [Michael Spence co-author] warning us a few years ago that they’re going to become, and I remember that phrase so well, ‘More frequent and more violent’. And that’s because the underlying resilience of the system is being eroded. The human resilience, the financial resilience. What we were trying to do is to understand why it is that we seem to be going from one crisis to another, and whether we can correct it. I have to tell you, Michael, that my favorite title wasn’t Permacrisis. My favorite title was Changing the Equation, because at the end of the day, we came down to something very easy. The dependent variable were the crises, and the three independent variables, the ones that were causing this, were the inability to grow in an inclusive, sustainable, and durable manner. That was number one. Two, repeated policy mistakes in domestic management. And three, the lack of sufficient global coordination.
I had this very clear image that you have a rather simplified equation, but that explains quite a bit of what’s going on. And if only we can address each of these three. And the reason why it’s not permanent is there’s nothing God-given about bad domestic management, about the inability to grow, and about the inability to coordinate. This can be fixed by decisions, by vision, by leadership, and by coordination” (McKinsey Global Institute, 2024).

The book explores each of these challenges – how to create “inclusive growth” (while explicitly challenging the emergence of “degrowth” politics), how to build strong domestic (economic) management and how to develop competent processes of global coordination. Given the depth of the crisis it names, the proposals seem strangely sanguine about rising to the challenges of overcoming it, beginning with a remarkably cheery commitment to growth: “You see, growth is progress. Growth is what has given the world the tablet you’re reading this book on, the medicines by your bedside, the economic breakthroughs that have lifted billions out of poverty” (Brown, El-Erian and Spence 2023, p. 14). If there is indeed a problem about growth, it is associated with old ways of thinking: “the old unsustainable “profits over people” methods of the past have outstayed their welcome and today are not just failing individuals and our environment but national economies” (Brown, El-Erian and Spence 2023, p. 14).

This conceptualisation of the crisis and the proposals for overcoming it feel oddly out of step with the projected depth and intensity of global challenges. And, as Slobodian has argued:

“[t]he ‘antidote’, as they put it, is growth. The only question is which ‘growth model’ we choose. While ‘inclusive growth’ is frequently invoked, how that inclusion is to happen is unclear. Progressive taxation is rarely mentioned, and neither is the expansion of state-provided social services. Instead, we have the slightly comedic spectacle of a Hoover fellow, an investment guru and a New Labour politician blaming everything bad on ‘neoliberalism’ while also praising the IMF and the virtues of managing the world’s finances as though it were a household” (2023).

Both Slobodian and Dorling have drawn attention to the ambiguous positions occupied by the authors of the book, with Dorling arguing that they “believe that it was economic growth that “lifted billions out of poverty” (2023). This view, along with the other core beliefs in Permacrisis, goes entirely unquestioned. Rather, Brown, El-Erian, and Spence suggest that,

“with a little more management by people like them, a little more of their kind of consulting, a little more of what they view as careful investment and better directing the trillions held by the world’s super rich, that we can somehow end the unsustainable ‘profits over people’ behaviour of global economics. For them, the crisis is that they are not being listened to enough” (2023, p. 3).

Slobodian similarly highlights the authors’ locations in the centres of global economic power:

“[t]his book implies – and its authors embody – a convergence of interest between the heads of G20 delegations and those advising top investment firms. It is no coincidence that the 2009 summit was the one moment where their model seemed to work: turning on the firehose of liquidity saved the world economy while also irrigating the gardens of the rich and powerful. The effects were predictable” (2023).

There are many reasons for treating the concept of permacrisis – especially in this form – as another form of ideological/discursive work. It is a narrative that summons us to put our faith (again) in the hands of the Masters of the Universe and their successors. They are members of the club who know how to put things right if only we give them the chance. As McBride has argued

“[p]olitical and economic elites continue to claim that markets, left mainly to self-regulate (but pumped with public subsidies to incentivise the private sector) will naturally stabilise matters. This is the formula that has led to the edge of catastrophe. Returning to “normal” is a recipe for disaster” (2023a, see also 2023b).

McBride’s attention to the dangers of the normal highlights the political-discursive closures involved in such narratives, echoing the Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn’s observations on “the trouble with normal”: noting, despite claims that: while we are often advised that “we will all get back to normal if we put our nation first”, “The trouble with normal is that it always gets worse” (1981).

Feeling like a crisis?

There is a second thread in Slobodian’s critical review of Permacrisis which opens another dimension of how to think about crisis – and perma/polycrisis in particular – as keywords in political-cultural work. He noted that

“[a]nxiety and even panic characterise many people’s response to the permacrisis, but none of this emotion seeps into these pages. Instead, we are held in the sheltering hand of leadership and encouraged to think that the world is run by reasonable people who respond to reasonable arguments and can be guided towards conclusions that work best for everybody” (2023).

This directs our attention to a more affective concern with a sense of crisis, since something more than a discursive practice (the making of meaning) is in play in these practices of representation. Writing about proliferating crises, Ang has argued that a sense of crisis condenses reactions to “globally significant phenomena” - such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter mobilisations - that take place alongside “the multiplicity of other social, political and environmental crises erupting around the world, large and small, giving many people a sense that ‘the world is falling apart’” (Ang, 2021, p. 599; my emphasis). Crises need to be felt – that is, inhabited and experienced as traumatic or unsettling – for them to have political-cultural effects (whether these lead to mobilisation or paralysis). For Grossberg (2018 and elsewhere), the field of culture is contested by different articulations of meanings, identities and affective intensities that combine to produce “mattering maps” that articulate both what is at stake in the present and why people should be affectively invested in these things. So, how do the ideas of polycrisis and permacrisis work to address, mobilise or even generate a popular sense of crisis? Papp’s discussion of the ideological work of such narratives draws on Berlant’s reflections on the “chronicization of crisis” (2011) to suggest that

“[t]he narratives of ‘permacrisis’ and ‘polycrisis’ operate at cognitive and affective levels. They construct a specific emotional climate, a combination of anxiety, political fatigue, and resignation, all characteristics of ‘post-democracy’ (see Crouch, 2004). Their usage is meant to generate an affective attrition of the citizen and a state of mind characterized by the normalization of fear. The continuing crisis becomes a hegemonic narrative framework by invalidating alternative options and labelling them as ‘unrealistic’ or even ‘dangerous’ to social stability, a.k.a. the status quo.… When ‘everything is interdependent’, political failure can be shifted to the systemic level, and political and administrative responsibility is diffused. These affective states produce a post-democratic subject: adaptive, cautious, passive, rather than rebellious or vindictive” (Papp, 2025, p. 85-6).

Papp’s work directs attention to the affective dynamics of permacrisis (and it might equally be applied to polycrisis narratives). They do not just reflect, but also craft or mobilise popular feelings about how things are. In particular, the validation of a sense of being “overwhelmed” by the sheer scale, density and persistence of this object – the perma/polycrisis – is a crucial element in how “we” (the many publics being invoked in these discourses) are invited to feel. For example, these crises are entangled with ideas - and feelings – of political failure (of both established parties and governing institutions) which may take the form of popular sentiments of frustration, anger and distrust. In such conditions of despair and disaffection two possibilities come into play: perma/polycrisis may lead to trusting the experts (the economic/financial wizards) or it may lay the ground for alternative politics, most evidently in the form of authoritarian-nationalist-populist mobilizations which promise above all to be “different” (see, inter alia, Maskovsky and Bjork-James, 2020; Clarke, 2023).

Tooze’s work on polycrisis also articulates a profound affective dimension, stressing “our” destabilization and disorientation:

“[i]n the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts. At times one feels as if one is losing one’s sense of reality… If you have found the past few years stressful and disorientating, if your life has already been disrupted, it is time to brace. Our tightrope walk with no end is only going to become more precarious and nerve-racking” (Tooze 2022c).

Murphy picks up the political-cultural affective implications of this framing:

“[w]hen one bundles these challenges together and narrates them in this way, the polycrisis can seem terrifying. It’s revealing that, when Tooze deploys the concept, he liberally uses words such as ‘disorientating’, ‘nerve-wracking’ and ‘precarious’, and has talked about polycrisis thinking as a kind of ‘therapy’ (Tooze 2022, 2023)” (Murphy 2024, p. 42).

Murphy argues that this affective dynamic, coupled with the conceptual blurriness of the polycrisis discourse is likely to dampen and hinder the possibility of developing progressive alternatives. Discourses of poly/perma crisis both invoke popular feelings (despair, frustration and the sense of things being “out of control”, for example) and lay the ground for different resolutions.

Telling the Time?

In a suggestive contribution, Jessop and Knio (2019) have argued that crises are pedagogic devices: they teach us lessons about how things went wrong and what needs to change. In this context, I think it may be more accurate to suggest that crises are made to speak: they are ventriloquised by different political actors, in order to tell us what lessons we should be learning. There are four main elements to this pedagogic process:

• The main features of the crisis have to be defined: its conditions, causes, dynamics and potential consequences.

• These elements have to be made into a compelling narrative: a story that can capture the popular imagination.

• Audiences have to be addressed and summoned to feel themselves as having a stake in this narrative: identifying as a ‘we’ that is in some way at risk. This includes learning how they are vulnerable and how they should feel about the risks they face.

• A possible route through the risks and dangers of the crisis has to be articulated (which may require trusting powerful actors, it might mean pain and sacrifices, or it may involve a scenario of radical transformation).

Certainly, a crucial part of this pedagogic political-cultural work involves the cultivation of the sense of crisis: the feeling of risk, danger or things being out of control. But it is also the case that such emergent definitions, narratives and sensibilities are also open to contestation – other accounts of how we got here, who ‘we’ are and how we might move on. For example, there have been frequent dramatic announcements of a “migrant crisis” in the global north as people move in the aftermath of wars, conflicts, catastrophes and other dislocations across the global south. The “migrant crisis” attempts to name a disorder (people out of place), to dramatize the situation (people overwhelming “our” borders by land or sea), to evoke feelings (of the collapse of the nation – in all its senses) and, above all, to summon “us” (the People) to a defence of our borders, territory and the way of life (see, for example, Cantat and Rajaram, 2018, on the Hungarian version). Here, too, the crisis its definition, its narration and its projected feelings have been – and continue to be – the focus of political-cultural contestation.

Each day, another drama, another sea of troubles and another day without solutions. The sense of crisis has come to feel all pervasive. While each crisis has its own distinctive trajectory, its own conditions and causes and its own consequences, the increasing circulation of new terms – permacrisis and polycrisis – points to something more. They suggest that the current crisis is not singular but multifaceted: entwined, hydra-headed and persistent. Concepts of permacrisis and polycrisis direct our attention to the complexly entangled systems, processes and relationships in play in these proliferating crises. They enable us to move past thinking of crises as though they are separate and singular things: an economic crisis, a political crisis, an environmental crisis, a crisis of the financial system, a cost of living crisis, a moral crisis and so on. Treating crises as distinct and independent things, each operating within its own terrain (the economy, politics, etc) and with its own logic, offered a strange view of societies, imagining them as composed of separate and bounded domains. These new terms – permacrisis and polycrisis – gain political and cultural leverage by virtue of escaping such narrow and bounded framings. And yet, I find both terms problematic both in the way they imagine crisis and in what they seek to teach us to think and feel about the situations in which we find ourselves.

I would not want to dissent from either the idea of a multiplicity of crises, nor the sense that they are interconnected in important ways. Yet, the narratives of polycrisis and permacrisis conceal other problems and I will focus on two here. First, the crises identified tend not to include either the political directions set by dominant blocs (globally, regionally, nationally – for example, the EU was itself implicated in many of the crises mentioned by Juncker) or the dispositions of the apparatuses and agencies attempting to manage them (such as the World Economic Forum, the IMF and the World Bank). Second, discussions of these intersecting crises as a polycrisis tend to take their particular meanings as self-evident: assuming we all know how to recognise an economic crisis, a climate crisis, a migrant crisis – and that we all share the same feelings about them.

Most importantly, the sense of entangled and potentially permanent instability condensed in narratives of permacrisis and polycrisis is significant, not least for the way that it changes the perceived temporality of crisis, replacing an older sense of immediacy (crisis as a turning point) with a sense of intractability and persistence. This sensibility invites us to think that the permacrisis (or the polycrisis) may be beyond our capacities to control or direct. At the same time, these ideas teach us how to feel: inviting us to feel immobilised or frozen in the face of their sheer scale and complexity. It is not enough to think that these words reflect our feelings of dizzily lurching from one thing to the next, rather these ideas tell us how we should be experiencing them and what we should be feeling as a result. They are an affective pedagogy. They aim to work through a projected consensus of feelings: if we are not terrified by these horrors, what is wrong with us, when everyone else is? These are dangerous lessons to learn: they are ways of thinking and feeling that seek to depoliticise both us and the crises that confront us. We need to find collective ways – to borrow a phrase – to take back control.