May Day Supermarket: Crisis, Impasse, Medium

De Abreaue examines the May Day events in 2012 in Portugal, with regard to the conservative nature of crisis discourse by introducing what Joseph Masco calls an effective "crisis in crisis." He discusses how the fluency of the notion has also made it into a stumbling block, preventing an understanding of what is going on--indeed, of the goings-on of crisis itself. Such an endeavor involves making an analytic distinction between the crisis lexicon and what Lauren Berlant calls an "impasse." An impasse, he suggests, is not a crisis. It is rather what Janet Roitman calls "anti-crisis" the aporias of decision-making rendered explicit. As Roitman explains in her study of the term, the use of crisis as a diagnosis entails a form of judgment. The ultimate purpose of such a judgment is to restore, or indeed maintain, a particular social order.