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DRAFT, PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE WITH PERMISSION
ON THE GENEALOGY OF STRATEGIES
Nicholas Michelsen
Kings College London
Abstract:
This article examines what it might mean to write a genealogy of the strategy of ‘resilience’. The paper notes that scholars writing critically about Resilience tend to refer to their work as operating under the influence of Foucault or a Foucaultian method. This paper begins by asking how and to what degree genealogy forms the coherent method or even set of method in three Foucaultian analyses of Resilience thinking. Identifying some questions for the literature in this context, the paper examines the place of strategies in Foucault’s work, and how this relates to genealogical method. Having suggested that genealogy must not ignore the history of strategies of confrontation, I illustrate my argument by looking at the role of resilience in revolutionary strategy. This paper centrally argues that lack of clarity about genealogy’s key methodological principles has meant that reification is a recurrent problem in Foucaultian scholarship in this specific context, and has precluded study of the strategic potentialities of resilience.
Introduction: Resilience and Politics
Resilience concerns the inoculation of a system or body from fatal degradation through enhancing its ability to both withstand and bounce forwards from the experience of crisis. Encouraging or facilitating resilience, whether in a critical infrastructure, a community facing economic or social stresses, or an ecology operating amidst climate change, is a way of folding future risks into the system or body in question, so that its openness to the unexpected (threats and dangers) become a source of productivity in the form of beneficial adaptation. The more resilient you are, the better able you are to learn from and adapt to negative external stresses. It has been widely inferred that resilience cannot, therefore, be political. It is a conceptualisation of acquiesce and surrender to existing conditions. In this sense, it seems, the political debate around resilience has become rather degraded in recent years
Clearly, resilience is not a thing, but a conglomeration of concepts, which may be deployed for a wide range of different ends and purposes in a wide variety of contexts. Concepts are the tools by which we orientate ourselves so as to act in the world. But, as the Frankfurt School noted, it is all too easy to confuse our tools for the world they provide access to.[1] A risk of reification seems clearly visible when critics of the concept of Resilience almost universally conclude that it is, as an “ideal type,” a governmentality that constitutes subjects as objects of depoliticised administration, but also recognising its “empirical diversity” or performative multiplicity.[2] Having said that, Resilience thinking does seem, quite intuitively, not to be sufficiently concerned with ensuring we have a space to act and build the kind of polities we might want. Rather, our polities, if they are to be resilient, must surely be organised by the stresses they must potentially face. It is not therefore difficult to see why authors might argue that Resilience cannot be a politics, and constitutes rather a logistical economistic rationale for identifying mechanisms by which a profit may be gleaned from innate market uncertainty. Resilience appears highly resonant of the technology of Schumpeterian creative destruction in the marketplace, wherein the potential for being outcompeted enforces the efficient management of the system.
The key intuition here is that radical concepts like solidarity, resistance, contestation, revolt or revolution, all of which assume a political negotiation of what a community of agents might wish to be otherwise, seem to be rendered subservient to the demands of what must be done, if we are to be resilient, in an environment of permanent insecurity. For example, the ‘Third Way’ claim that social democratic states, if they are to be made resilient to the pressures of global capital flows, need to become nimbler, better adapted to compete, so will need to scale back their safety net in some way for the sake of their own long term adaptation.[3] So, the critical claim that promoting Resilience is not and cannot be a matter of affirmative politics makes a good deal of sense; since the concept seems to accept extant structural conditions rather than potentially seeking to change them. There are good reasons for suspicion of the concept of Resilience. What I take issue with in this paper is the conclusion that the concept of Resilience has no riotous political possibilities whatsoever.
In the following sections, this article will suggest that discussions of politics and resilience have fallen afoul of reification for some very simple methodological reasons related to the ways in which Foucault has been read and mobilised. The result is that discussions of resilience have tended to disregard the possibility of insurgent, disruptive, energetic, and political deployments of the concept. My argument will proceed in three steps. In the first step I will review three influential accounts of resilience, each drawing from Michel Foucault. In the second step I re-read Foucault on the relationship between Power, Strategy and Genealogy. In the third step I develop a reading of Latin American counter-state strategists through the prism of resilience thinking, briefly demonstrating that such discussions remain alive today. I will conclude that there is clearly more to be gained from discussions of the radical potentialities of strategies of resilience than has been allowed in recent literatures.
Genealogies of Resilience Thinking
Widespread suspicion about the political consequences of resilience thinking is linked to Foucaultian approaches that expose an ‘intuitive fit’ between resilience and Neoliberal modes of governance. In this section I will summarise three significant works in this tradition and pick out some general comments about the methodological principles of the approaches found therein. The argument I shall put forwards is that there are two general kinds of arguments about resilience in evidence; both are genealogical. The first marks how resilience emerges in contemporary discourse first as a form of resistance or counter-conduct, exposing the limitations of dominant modes of resource management in the biosphere. Such genealogies of resilience expose the axiomatic incorporation of critiques such that they now becomes operative to neoliberal governance. The second form of genealogical thinking posits the stronger claim that resilience, wherever we see it today, embodies the signature of neoliberal powers’ operation. This may be because of its inherent qualities as a concept - its fundamental nature, or because it is a second order concept - the operationalisation of which is conditioned by the strategy of Neoliberal Power. There are valid elements to these claims. My concern relates to how the latter genealogies claim to reveal a singular, lamentable, apolitical content of the concept ‘resilience’.
The first work I will discuss is Walker and Cooper’s 2011[4] Genealogies of Resilience. This paper appears in almost every critically-minded article published in the Journal Resilience: International Policies Practices and Discourses. For Walker and Cooper, Genealogy allows identification of the “evolution” of “resilience thinking” from a Leftist/Environmentalist formulation with Holling, to “one of collusion with an agenda of resource management that collapses ecological crisis into the creative destruction of a truly Hayekian financial order”. Genealogy is mobilised to articulate the story of the neo-liberalisation of modern society, in the rise to hegemony of such logics across multiple fields of thinking. Walker and Cooper argue that the early critical ambitions of Resilience thinking failed to result in the hoped-for political effects, due to its “intuitive ideological fit” with the “Neoliberal philosophy of complex adaptive systems”. By implication, whilst Resilience thinking was invented with the be nst of intentions, it integrally carried the seeds of a regressive politics. Walker and Coopers article views genealogy as a means by which to show how complexity science increasingly dominates social thought where energy physics or first-order cybernetics once held sway. Resilience thinking is indicative of the new, if “tacit”, union of nature and society which over-determines thought in fields from critical infrastructure protection to sustainable development.
Whilst Walker and Cooper are keen to emphasise the originally antagonistic concerns of Holling and Hayek, and as such, to note the ambivalence of the original sources of resilience thinking, genealogy allows us to tell the story of how ‘Resilience thinking’ moved from an early “position of critique (against the destructive consequences of orthodox resource management), to one of collusion”, thereby becoming the signature of the operation of Neoliberal governmentality. The movement mapped by genealogy is of a procession, from a critical function to its opposite. Where Resilience thinking operates within a wide variety of fields, we can adduce an increasingly unified contemporary meaning, function and politics, expressive of Hayekian ontologies of market self-organisation. Where we see the signature of Resilience thinking today, the point which Walker and Cooper conclude on is that we should develop critiques that refuse categorically to draw on the terms of complex systems theory, and instead seek to think against the Resilience framework. This has very much set the tone for subsequent works.
The second Foucaultian analysis of resilience I will examine is Jonathan Joseph’s 2013 Resilience as embedded neoliberalism: a governmentality approach. Joseph argues that “it is through a Foucaultian understanding of governing that we learn most about what the concept of resilience is actually doing” (40), and therefore, implicitly, draws from the genealogical method which underpins Foucault’s work on governmentality. He argues, in a manner that resonates with Walter and Cooper’s analysis, that Resilience is an indicator of the dominant forms of neoliberal governmentality: “the recent enthusiasm for the concept of resilience across a range of policy literature is the consequence of its fit with neoliberal discourse. This is not to say that the idea of resilience is reducible to neoliberal policy and governance, but it does fit neatly with what it is trying to say and do. A brief glance at the concept’s origins shows it to have certain ontological commitments that make it ideally suited to neoliberal forms of governance.[5]” Whereas its origins in ecological writings emphasised the possibility for change and restructuring, Joseph argues that the general disposition to adapt to and absorb social shocks of all kinds fits neatly into a broader pattern of social theorisation, which takes place under the aegis of new materialism, complexity and network analysis, which seeks to “render the world governable in certain ways”[6].
The issue at hand for Joseph is also that resilience thinking has a neat fit with the ontological commitments of Neoliberal power (39). It is adopted by governments and other agencies as a consequence. The spread of resilience discourse is explicable because it serves and promotes visions of the world which are distinctively neoliberal. Resilience supports and reaffirms the kinds of social relations, systems of governance and responsible autonomous subjects which neoliberalism wants (40). Joseph thinks that philosophical discussions of Resilience miss the (Foucaultian/Genealogical) point, since “its rise to prominence is the result of being in the right place at the right time. Contemporary conditions have given rise to certain practices of governance by which the idea of resilience finds a home”. To understand Resilience we must place it within the “the emergence and embedding of specifically neoliberal forms of governance” which seeks to limit government and ‘govern at a distance’ (41).[7] The point, therefore, is governance finds Resilience a useful concept for intervening to promote “private enterprise and individual initiative” (42) as well as a range of other things neoliberalism likes.[8] Neoliberalism is the “logic behind the rise of resilience” (42).
A clear vision of genealogical method is in evidence here, as tracing the capture of the concept by the broader governmentalities that deploy it (40). Joseph argues that he does not collapse resilience into neoliberalism at the level of meaning. Rather his method is to show how “the effects of the use of the concept” by neoliberal discourse (44). Scepticism about the concept amongst governments on the European continent is due to the less pervasive quality of neoliberal ideas (49). Joseph concludes that “resilience does not really mean very much and whatever meaning it does have changes depending on the context.” (47). The concept of resilience itself is a “shallow” buzzword, and its presence little more than an epiphenomena of the “rolling-out [of] neoliberal governmentality” (51). Politically speaking, however, we should seek to oppose and resist this process. Since the concept resonates with the idea that we need not change the Neoliberal reality but must rather learn to adapt to it (42-3), we need to be rid of resilience, for its continuing presence is symptomatic of neoliberal depoliticisation (52).
The final text is a 2014 book length work by Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Resilient Life: the art of living dangerously.[9] Unlike Joseph’s article, this is a resolutely philosophical text. It is also set from the start as a critique of the ‘resilience agenda’, which the authors see as approaching a “universal dogmatism”. As for the previous authors, resilience is understood as a form of political intervention which assumes insecurity and vulnerability is the natural order of things, and as such, that “resilience strategies… [are] intuitively in keeping with neoliberalism and its systems of rule” (31xi). Resilience precludes any attempt to remake the world, or rather imagine the conditions of its remaking. Resilience thinking is surrender to Neoliberalism.
This is an account which is similarly explicitly genealogical, as “an exercise [that] positively embraces what Foucault termed the history of the present” (24). The central pivot of the analysis is the claim that it is the underlying principles of Liberalism that have changed, and the purpose of their analysis is to show how and understanding of life itself as resilient is at the heart of this. Where once Liberalism was built around a security imperative, the dream that the bounded community may be secured has been replaced by “a catastrophic imaginary that promotes insecurity by design”(2). The “ideal of resilience” (2) is, they argue, linked to an abandonment of the security imperative. Now “exposure to danger” has become a “planetary obligation” (2,4). The result is an utter desolation of political reason, and affirmative resistant politics, in place of systematic reactionary pursuit of survival. The rise of resilience thinking is the end of all potential for a political challenge to Neoliberal doctrine. The new normal is one in which a “sense of endangerment” (8) is naturalised, alongside the normalisation of market rule. We are thus cheated or any means to die affirmatively in the pursuit of ethical or political projects (13). In abandoning the security impulse, instead we are expected to live in a normalised state of “petrified awe”. Resilience is a vision of the community as “insecure by design” (21). This ideology of error makes politics, and certainly revolutionary politics, outdated, replacing it with technocratic rule (24-25). In this way Resilience offers a “key strategy in the creation of contemporary regimes of power” (32).