Resilient Life

The Art of Living Dangerously

Brad Evans, Julian Reid

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780745671536
  9780745671529
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745682839
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What does it mean to live dangerously? This is not just a philosophical question or an ethical call to reflect upon our own individual recklessness. It is a deeply political issue, fundamental to the new doctrine of 'resilience' that is becoming a key term of art for governing planetary life in the 21st Century. No longer should we think in terms of evading the possibility of traumatic experiences. Catastrophic events, we are told, are not just inevitable but learning experiences from which we have to grow and prosper, collectively and individually. Vulnerability to threat, injury and loss has to be accepted as a reality of human existence.

In this original and compelling text, Brad Evans and Julian Reid explore the political and philosophical stakes of the resilience turn in security and governmental thinking. Resilience, they argue, is a neo-liberal deceit that works by disempowering endangered populations of autonomous agency. Its consequences represent a profound assault on the human subject whose meaning and sole purpose is reduced to survivability. Not only does this reveal the nihilistic qualities of a liberal project that is coming to terms with its political demise. All life now enters into lasting crises that are catastrophic unto the end.

1

Anthropocene

All Too Human

Friedrich Nietzsche once insisted that the surest sign of living was to forever be in danger.¹ Only now are we beginning to appreciate the political significance and consequences of this claim. As liberal regimes move beyond the security imperative so foundational to modern politics for over two centuries, along with the bounded sense of community this engendered, the dream of lasting security is being seconded by a catastrophic imaginary that promotes insecurity by design.² There is a long tradition of scholarly criticism of the concept of security as a political construct. Moving beyond the illusion of political neutrality, numerous authors have illustrated how security has been central to the technologies of subjectification through which liberal regimes have governed historically. But we are now in a new and distinctly different political era, defined by the emergence of a different kind of liberalism, less easy to recognize through the critical lenses of the past. As the belief in the possibility of security, once integral to the rise of the modern state and international system of states gives way to a new belief in the positivity of danger, new technologies for rule and subjectification are appearing, themselves based upon a suspicion of security, but which are no less problematic in their guiding assumptions, rationales and implications. The very concept of security itself is being shod by liberalism as it embraces not simply forms of endangerment, but a new ideal of resilience. Resilience is currently propounded by liberal agencies and institutions as the fundamental property which peoples and individuals worldwide must possess in order to demonstrate their capacities to live with danger. This book is the first substantial study of the significance and impli­cations of this shift within liberalism, whereby it has seemingly embraced the Nietzschean imperative to ‘live dangerously’.

Our aim, especially, is to politicize this shift by interrogating its implications for political subjectivity. What kinds of subjects do demands for resilience produce? To what kind of work is the resilient subject tasked? And what forms of life does resilience authenticate and disqualify? Answering these questions requires us to confront the ways in which resilience is aimed explicitly at encouraging subjects to live by maxims which are insecure by design. Our critique of resilience thus begins from the premise that liberalism is aimed today not at solving or preventing the manifestation of dangers and threats to security, but at making us forego the very idea and possibility of security, through the embrace of the necessity of our exposure to dangers of all kinds as a means by which to live well.

It is a fact, of course, that the future of the human species is deeply uncertain. We know ourselves to be the biggest threat to our own existence. That the earth would positively flourish were human life to be removed from it is a realization we are now forced to confront. And yet the human, it seems, has never been more important and powerful. Humans are today recognized to profoundly shape their living environment, for better or worse, more than any other species. Scientists tell us that this is not simply tied to the emergence of a new-found political sensibility or intellectual awakening. We are entering the Anthropocene – a distinct geological epoch that is defined by the scale of human activity. Etymologically conceived by the ecologist Eugene Stoermer, the Anthropocene was popularized by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen. For Crutzen, it is undeniable that the human species is the principal source of impact on its own lived environment. As he explains in a co-authored article with Christian Schwagerl, ‘For millennia, humans have behaved as rebels against a superpower we call “Nature”. In the 20th century, however, new technologies, fossil fuels, and a fast-growing population resulted in a “Great Acceleration” of our own powers. Albeit clumsily, we are taking control of Nature's realm, from climate to DNA.’³ Not only does this imply that ‘humans are becoming the dominant force for change on Earth’. It finally affirms the ‘long-held religious and philosophical idea’ of ‘humans as the masters of planet Earth’. Hence, as the human, natural and moral spheres merge, and indeed, forcefully collide, into a consolidating framework for understanding the human's position in the world, new ethical sensibilities and modes of governance are critically sought.

The Anthropocence represents a significant departure from the homely comforts of the Holocene that was defined more by geological settlement. This is what some authors have termed the Holocene's ‘stability domain’.⁴ As we move into the new epoch – what we may begin to define as the ‘destabilized realism of planetary endangerment’ – there is no going ‘back to safety’ as if that ever was the lived reality of yesteryear.⁵ Instability and insecurity are the new normal as we become increasingly attuned to living in complex and dynamic systems which offer no prospect of control. Our entire sense of what the ‘life-world system’ entails is invariably being transformed. As Slavoj Žižek writes:

For the first time in history, we, humans, collectively constitute ourselves and are aware of it, so that we are responsible for ourselves: the mode of survivability depends upon the maturity of our collective reason. The scientists who talk about the Anthropocene, however, are saying something quite the contrary. They argue that because humans constitute a particular kind of species they can, in the process of dominating other species, acquire the status of a geological force. Humans, in other words, have become a natural condition, at least today.⁶

Although humans have long since reasoned themselves to be at the centre of the universe, never before have we assumed the role of the principle architect. This comes with a formidable burden. Since this foregrounds a political imaginary of threat to create a global sense of community out of the prospect of its own planetary endangerment, humanity is bound to a formative logic that is lethally supplemented by its potential ruination. Insecurity underwrites its very existence. This gives sure impetus to a new ‘responsibility of vulnerability’ which stakes the future survivability of the human species on the successes/failures of its political strategies. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Managing the Risks to Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (2012) report explains: ‘Climate extremes, exposure, and vulnerability are influenced by a wide range of factors, including anthropogenic climate change, natural climate variability, and socioeconomic development. Disaster risk management and adaptation to climate change focus on reducing exposure and vulnerability and increasing resilience to the potential adverse impacts of climate extremes, even though risks cannot fully be eliminated’.⁷ Becoming resilient, then, requires more than simply taking care of our individual precariousness. It is a planetary obligation as all forms of local instability become global cause for concern.

Vulnerability is defined as ‘the propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected’.⁸ This includes ‘the characteristics of a person or group and their situation that influences their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist, and recover from the adverse effects of physical events’. The notion of propensity is significant here, as it highlights a progressive (yet somewhat schizophrenic) orientation that looks towards the extreme ends of potential survivability. And the notion of predisposition is significant here as it suggests some already existing data (the guiding political presumptions) about the vulnerability of the subject. This brings together the uncertain with the certain as we encounter ‘subject-centred events’ in which (a) the event in all its catastrophic permutations cannot be known in advance and (b) assumptions about the subject's capacities to deal with the occurrence foster behavioural claims to empirical truth. Disaster management as such does not simply entail an ecological mode of thought, but an anthropology that, fully committed to anthropocentric reason, situates the vulnerable subject within a political drama of catastrophe which renders it the author of its own planetary endangerment. Echoing Žižek once again:

With the idea of humans as species, the universality of humankind falls back into the particularity of an animal species: phenomena like global warming make us aware that, with all the universality of our theoretical and practical activity, we are at a certain basic level just another living species on the planet Earth. Our survival depends on certain natural parameters which we automatically take for granted. The lesson of global warming is that the freedom of humankind was only possible against the background of stable natural parameters of life on earth … The limitations of our freedom that become palpable with global warming is the paradoxical outcome of the very exponential growth of our freedom and power, that is, of our growing ability to transform nature around us, up to and including destabilizing the very framework for life. ‘Nature’ thereby literally becomes a socio-historical category.⁹

While there are a number of ways to reduce vulnerabilities, including reduced exposure, transfer and sharing of risks, preparation and transformation, resilience is key to this new ethics of responsibility defined as ‘the ability of a system and its component parts to anticipate, absorb, accommodate, or recover from the effects of a potentially hazardous event in a timely and efficient manner, including through ensuring the preservation, restoration, or improvement of its essential basic structures and functions’.¹⁰ What is truly significant here is the effective blending of the terms resilience and resistance: ‘This shifting emphasis to risk reduction can be seen in the increasing importance placed on developing resistance to the potential impacts of physical events at various social or territorial scales, and in different temporal dimensions (such as those required for corrective or prospective risk management), and to increasing the resilience of affected communities. Resistance refers to the ability to avoid suffering significant adverse effects’.¹¹ So resistance is not a political claim that demands any form of affirmative thinking; it is a purely reactionary impulse premised upon some survivability instinct that deems the nature of the political itself to be already settled. As the subject is tasked to bounce back from the experience of catastrophe unscathed, what we encounter is a full-scale logistical enterprise wherein the human form is reduced to the barest levels of meaning. Not bare life as commonly understood in the Agambenesque sense, by which subjects are denied sovereign protection via their juridical inclusion.¹² More bare living in an organically connected sense, premised upon life's wilful exposure to that which makes us vulnerable.

The conflation of resistance and resilience signals the absence of any self-confidence in the liberal subject's disposition towards the world. No longer positively assured, or for that matter unrepentant in its hegemonic (sometimes portrayed as universal) vision, everywhere it appears to be under siege. Resistance is, after all, a pedagogy of relative subjugation. Much of this undoubtedly owes to the exposed relations between liberalism and its violence, which highlighted the lethality of its attempts at imposing freedoms elsewhere. What subjugates here, however, is no simple dialectical binary by which liberalism has been displaced by some greater hegemonic force. There has been no singular replacing of one system with another. Liberal societies instead are besieged by their own narcissistic impulses, which, having failed to realize the limits to their rule, has led them to a wilful abandonment of their foundational truths claims, such that their very own normative bases for rule are now riddled with self-doubt. We may argue that such universal claims to power were always a deceit, as economic rationalities continually trumped the order of the political. The imaginary has, however, radically transformed. Rather than openly declaring some vision of the future that overcomes the plagues of suffering engulfing the human species, what we encounter is a veritable landscape of projected images that is littered with corpses of our catastrophes to come.

Anthropocentric thought speaks to the emergence of global challenges. That is to say, it seeks to make sense of our radically interconnected life world system and the types of planetary threats this connectivity produces; threats which respect no geographical boundaries or disciplinary conceits. What marks a significant departure here is the debt now attributed to humanity as both a problem to itself as well as to the biosphere. The increasing political prominence given to global challenges has not only altered perceptions of national security. It is driving increased collaboration between the physical, natural and social sciences, such that previous distinctions between the natural and social worlds have been largely erased. Human life is no longer understood as distinct from any other life form. Neither can it think itself greater or lesser than the complex structuring of the universe most broadly conceived. Human problems are biospherical problems and vice versa. We only have to evidence the gradual merger between underdevelopment, security and the environment to evidence this shift towards full spectral thinking.¹³ No longer is poverty, for instance, seen to be locally dangerous as it promises to exacerbate the causes of conflict. Environmental catastrophe has been added to the toxifying mix to heighten localized tensions, further decimate economies, which in turn may have unforeseen global impacts as they spill over sovereign divides. We have, then, all become part of an interconnected catastrophic topography of endangerment of which the likes of Carl Schmitt could have had no inkling, let alone credible foresight of or solution to.

There is a sophisticated life-politics at work here that disguises detailed assumptions about the quality of lives. Life, quantitatively speaking, has never been more human in terms of its number. At the time of the Christ event, the world population has been put at 200 million. Now there are some 6.1 billion of us by conservative estimates, with the expectation that this will grow towards a ‘threshold peak’ of some 9.2 billion by 2075.¹⁴ This represents an increase of over 50 per cent in the human stock. How this species chooses to live undoubtedly leaves a particular planetary footprint. Some time between 2008 and 2010, a profound historical moment occurred when more of us began living in urban locations, i.e. rapidly changing environments as opposed to rural environments. This represents a challenging shift in migratory flows that is projected to rise to 70 per cent by 2050. In 1800, only 3 per cent of the world's population lived in city spaces. That figure now tops 3 billion city dwellers. More than having a profound impact upon dominant modes of production, as the consumerist logic of markets triumphs over localized self-sufficiencies, it radically alters the dominant matrix for political rule as neat demarcations that once held over sovereign dominions give way to forms of networked power that are globally distributed and complex in design. This has a number of importan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1: Anthropocene
• 2: Insecure by Design
• 3: The Poverty of Vulnerability
• 4: Living Dangerously
• 5: Atmos
• 6: Endgames
• 7: The Art of Politics
• Select Bibliography
• Index