‘I always keep a couple of empty oil barrels in the basement’, said Sigrún sitting comfortably on the sofa, ‘they’re great for making some noise, so you know, they’re very useful in case something’s happening’, she added with a sneaky smile. Sigrún made this rather surprising remark during our talk about the lingering effects of the economic collapse that hit Iceland in 2008. It was a clear reference to the so-called ‘pots and pans revolution’, which began in Reykjavík in January 2009. Icelanders took to the streets to express their angst and outrage resulting from the broken promises of the bright future made by the Icelandic political and economic elites in the years preceding the financial meltdown. Indeed, the crisis came as a sudden rupture in Iceland’s otherwise prevailing neoliberal mantra of economic progress, rapid modernisation, and drive for the accumulation of wealth and unlimited growth. The neoliberalisation of Iceland’s political economy ran parallel with the country’s colonial resentment and nationalism, which were translated into Viking-ridden discourses about Icelandic pioneering, expansion, and exceptionalism. The financial meltdown, however, shattered the dream of becoming ‘the best in the world’ (Loftsdóttir, 2019) and the subsequent ‘pots and pans revolution’ was a clear message of social discontent. Although it did not lead to any substantive changes in political economy, it certainly left a significant mark on Iceland’s social history. Sigrún’s remark, however, shows something else; something more visceral and unexpected. It indicates a sense of alertness, a particular affective state of understanding, which sometimes surfaces, making her vigilant and ready to act.

Sigrún is not alone in being alert. In Iceland, alertness seems to be a common, yet contingent, vertiginous state of experiencing temporal disorientation. Alertness is vertiginous, because it creates dizziness and bewilderment; it makes people see and sense the present as it becomes replaced by the social experiences of the past, which now begin to serve as the template for forecasting the immediate future. Alertness highlights the contexts in which the past and future co-exist vertiginously in the present. It stems from the affective encounters with the unexpectedly emerging matters and materialities – objects, items, landscapes, issues, practices, habits, and conducts – which are somehow known and recognisable as already once lived, experienced, and supposedly belonging to the past. Their emergence makes the ordinary uncanny; the past repeats itself and informs social reasoning about the anticipated future. This often takes a surprising form. For example, the numerous construction cranes cramped in Reykjavík’s skyline, which in the local imagination are not simply steel building contraptions, but also ‘national birds’, which forecast an uncertain future. It might also be induced by the luxury cars on the city’s narrow streets, as well as the sudden increase in consumption and the promotion of lavish lifestyles, or even by the excessive waste production and high-quality goods found in charity shops. These seemingly insignificant matters and materialities fuel the social understandings by vertiginously bringing back the lived experiences of the past; they make people shift between different temporalities and orient their actions to the immediate future. After all, these were the harbingers of the crisis that permeated the Icelandic social, economic and political scene on the very eve of the previous financial collapse. Today, their re-emergence, movements, frequencies, and scales create anticipatory moods and actions, which unravel the local understandings of the crisis-future in the making. It seems that only a few years after the crash, the Icelandic economy is once again on the rise and the current atmosphere resembles the times just before the previous collapse. ‘It’s happening again’, ‘They’re doing it again’, ‘The crisis is coming’ are common ways of expressing the growing feeling of alertness, which highlights the temporal logic of repetition as well as the contingent interplay between the already known past and the unknown, yet anticipated as possible, crisis-future.

Image 1. Crane in the lava field near Grindavík. Credit: Marek Pawlak

In order to unpack alertness as a vertiginous state, I turn to Sara Ahmed (2004, 2010) and her work on orientations, affects and emotions. For Ahmed (2010: 245), it is orientation that makes particular matters and materialities significant; whilst orienting the self, amidst the everchanging environs, we tend to give meanings to experiential, corporeal and sensual subjects and objects that emerge on the horizon. Importantly, one of the crucial aspects of orientation in social life is the feeling of repetition (Ahmed, 2010: 246). However, it is not only the ‘what’ that is significant in the repetition, but also ‘how’ this repetition ‘takes us in certain directions’ (Ahmed, 2010: 246). ‘If orientations are an effect of what we tend toward’, Ahmed (2010: 246–247) argues, ‘then they point to the future, to what is not yet present. And yet, orientations are shaped by what is behind us, creating a loop between what is toward and behind’. As such, orientations engender affective understandings and actions, which does not include merely individual feelings, but also collective ways of making sense and responding to ongoing situations. This is what Ahmed (2004) calls the ‘affective economy’, that is, the movement of emotions and its impact on the ebbs and flows of the ordinary. Following Ahmed (2004: 119), I thus argue that alertness has a ‘rippling effect’, which moves bodies and in between bodies; it does not simply reside ‘in’ individuals, but also ‘aligns’ them ‘with communities – or bodily space with social space – through the very intensity of their attachments’. Alertness surfaces, resonates, creates attachments, transcends the individual and binds subjects together in the ‘effect of a collective’ (Ahmed, 2004: 119). In doing so, it shows its ‘stickiness’ and unfolds the contextual and relational ‘associations between signs, figures and objects’ (Ahmed, 2004: 120).

Cranes, cars, consumption, and waste, all those emerging matters and materialities in Iceland have been ‘stuck’ with the affects and temporalities of the economic collapse. They move ‘sideways’ and ‘backward’, highlight the attachment to meanings and ‘reopen’ the ‘past associations’ that impact the present. They provoke the vertiginous by being multi-trajectorial and multi-temporal. As the embodiments of the localised understandings of time and temporalities, they are significant; they haunt the present and induce a vertiginous feeling of alertness that ripples and makes people anxiously orient and act upon the looming crisis-future.

Alertness temporalises the social atmosphere; it charges public moods, envelopes people’s understandings and presses them to respond in action. It makes people react to the future that is sensed as already inhabiting the present. Sigrún is ready to act and to once again hit the streets, if needed, to protest a time of crisis. Alertness also provokes young Icelanders to terminate their rent agreements and move back to their family homes. In doing so, they aim to save rent money and use it in times of the future collapse to purchase cheaper apartments. At the same time, the migrant communities in Iceland closely follow the currency rates and, just in case, transfer large amounts of money to their saving accounts back home. These future-oriented actions, resulting from the feeling of alertness, show how possible futures already inhabit the present. In this sense, alertness engenders agency and is a form of affective future-making. In bringing back the past experiences and pulling in the speculative future happenings, alertness creates time vortices, which induce ‘intense confusion’ driven by the idea of ‘going back in time’ and show how the past is used as a ‘direction, comfort and justification to the present and for the immediate future’ (Knight, 2016: 33).

Alertness is an affective pivot of temporal vertigo (Knight, 2021). As a form of anticipation, which is based on repetition of the past, alertness becomes a contingent aspect of social life. It ‘depends on the history that “sticks”, and which does not need to be declared’ (Ahmed, 2004: 127). This seems to be particularly relevant in Iceland, where the state of alertness is interlaced with local understandings of cyclical times – not only the social experiences of ups and downs of Icelandic economy, but also the history of environmental uncertainties, such as volcanic eruptions and severe storms. To be alert is to pay attention to swirling warning signs. Unpacking alertness in everyday life points to the vertiginous moments where the past meets the future in the present, bringing about social dizziness and perplexity. Our attentiveness to alertness and the vertiginous processes of active meaning-making helps us better understand the contingent and intricate temporalities of the present.

References

About the author(s)