Abstract
An email arrived today from the global consulting company McKinsey, alerting me of the need to build ‘value and resilience’ through strategic decision-making and an effective risk operating model, enhancing ‘risk appetite’ to construct a robust ‘risk organization’. 1 This lexicon of risk, testing, and resilience is now utterly common place and prosaic, a sort of Gramscian ‘common sense’ of contemporary rule and governance. Resiliency has become what Raymond Williams would refer to as a keyword—a capacious, mutable and above all normative and performative term. Deployed in a legal sense by Ovid, Seneca, and Pliny in classical times, resilience is not an invention of ecological theory but arose within science in the 17th century through none other than Francis Bacon. It came to refer to the notion of rebounding but was also employed in the fields of mechanics, engineering, and medicine to mean elasticity, fortitude, and fickleness. By the 20th century, it was central to the rise of systems theory, cybernetics and was adopted in psychology and psychiatry. Now in the 21st century, one can say that resiliency has become a—the—powerful technology of contemporary governance and neoliberal rule. Building resilient persons, communities, and institutions is the sine qua non of 21st-century forms of liberalism. Systemic risk and adaptation are the avatars of resilience thinking; it entails securing life by self-consciously embracing and taking risks which is central to life itself (to all living systems). Resilience now stands as something like a unified field theory or paradigm and is nothing if not capacious in its remit. So expansive is the prescriptive reach of resilience and its deep institutionalization globally that it resembles what Paul Nasaday calls a ‘gospel’. It is not simply that resilience training is something of an epidemic, it is that its theoretical and practical ambition is positively Olympian.
None of what I have sketched here is a surprise to Kevin Grove whose excellent book Resilience starts from, and to some degree charts, the very ubiquity and promiscuity of the word itself. His project is not to nail down its true meaning—which is impossible given what Grove calls its ‘elasticity’ and its ‘essentially contested nature’ (p. 62)—but rather to examine the work that it does in a variety of settings, and to approach resilience through a ‘genealogical sensibility’. Grove is attentive to two threads of what is now a very large academic literature on resilience. The first is the incorporation and integration of ecological resilience thinking (centered on CS Holling) into Geography and particularly into political ecology, a field whose very genesis and development stands quite awkwardly in relations to systems theory, cybernetics, and evolutionary theory, all constitutive components of any understanding of what one might call the Holling project. The second is the now significant critical body of work—one thinks of the acute provocations of Nikolas Rose, Brad Evans, Michael Dillon, Melissa Cooper, David Chandler, Julian Reid, William Davies—that sees resilience not simply as a discourse and practice of liberal governmentality and biopower but, as Grove puts it, as an expression of an ‘easy elision between resilience and neoliberal rule’ (p. 178). It is as if Hayek and Holling are joined at the head.
In light of these two threads, Grove takes on two major tasks. One is genealogical in the Foucauldian sense in which Grove seeks to write a history of the resilient present always attentive to its political rationalities and to the construal of subjects. Grove sees his project as exposing a method of ‘truth telling’, of ‘aestheticizing’ resilience, and of doing the archaeological work to demonstrate that ‘the ties that bind’ resilience theory is in fact ‘the will to design’ (p. 5). Resilience is, says Grove, a boundary object which permits the interdisciplinary and the systemically complex to coexist through (i) the production of rational abstractions amenable to functional synthesis, and (ii) socio-ecological control via the cybernetic regulation of system performance through ‘feedback driven adaptive management strategies’ (p. 265). Grove’s account of genealogy is spatial, beatified (chock full of potentials), and bellicose (it reveals conflict and division while emphasizing the de- and re-composition history). Resilience emerges as a counterweight and reaction to the recalcitrance of social and ecological complexity (and related governance failures), a site of struggle and contest over truth-telling, a sort of ‘resonance machine’ (the language is David Chandler’s) appropriate for modern ‘generalized complexity’.
In Grove’s genealogical account, a key figure is Herbert Simon. He influenced three key resilience figures (Holling, Elinor Ostrom, and Kai Lee) who in quite different ways each contributed to the intersection of socio-ecological systems, complexity, institutions, and adaptive governance/management. Within this lineage, Grove identifies an epistemologically profound insight: namely, that socio-ecological systems are too complex to be fully grasped and acted upon, information is always incomplete, rationality is bounded, and any truth is partial and situated and thereby antithetical to the totalizing gaze of the God-trick. Simon, and indeed on Grove’s read much of resilience theory, is draped in the cloth of a sort of post-structural epistemology. Simon was neoliberal, says Grove, less because he promoted free market capitalism than his updating of liberalism according to distinctive 20th-century space-time compression and generalized complexity.
A second thread in Resilience is what I would term redemptive or recuperative. Namely, if the evidence is accumulating that resilience is in the service of the very worst of the neoliberal thought collective (evidence to which Grove himself has contributed), resilience still contains some sort of critical alternative, even emancipatory potentiality. As Grove puts it, resilience might offer up ‘a foothold for subversive action’ (p. 7); resilience is ‘an abstract relation’ which lacks meaning (a mere signifier) and can be mobilized in specific contexts and through specific modalities to produce a raft of different effects. Some of these effects, says Grove, not only holds out the prospect of ‘recalibrating’ Geography around ‘designerly aesthetics’ (p. 19) but offers up the prize of ‘pragmatic improvement’, a pragmatism which need not be rooted in neoliberalism because the relation between resilience and neoliberalism is, he says, ‘contingent’ rather than ‘necessary’. Even if resilience is one response to the insecurities of global capitalist development, it is possible to ‘move beyond its constituent limits’ (p. 267). Resilience is ‘more than neoliberal’ (p. 270), capable of harnessing ‘cybernetic forms of empowerment’ (p. 269). In its political ‘pliability’ (p. 269), it offers opportunities, ‘however limited in practice’ (p. 274) to transform ‘not revolutionize’ modern life. De-futuring, un-grounding and geontologies, hacking and transition design—Grove offers a thinly sketched Deleuzian inspired set of strategies—is the way to ‘un-world’ resilience offered through the ‘prism of categories such as social learning, institutional design, traditional ecological knowledge and social memory’ (p. 222).
Resilience clearly offers the reader some ambitious claims, sometimes little more than sketches. But some seem to me to run awfully close to the standard forms of managerialism, and Ostrom-type governance talk characteristic of mainline neo-institutionalism. In the world I know something about—development theory and practice—Grove’s signage and framing is utterly in vogue with the ‘politically smart development’ push seen in the World Development Report 2017 on governance. Needless to say, there is much to talk about here and my response does not do justice to the book’s strengths and originality. Grove’s account of ecological resilience theory through Holling’s famous 1973 intervention and its subsequent elaboration and institutionalization, and the gradual shift from adaptive management to adaptive governance to panarchy and the four phase adaptive cycle, is exceptionally well done. That said, in a genealogical account one would have expected more about Holling and his epistemic community, how the networks were constituted, how the ideas became both globally networked and institutionalized (the Stockholm resilience institute, the Resilience Alliance), and whether in fact the ambitious effort to integrate social and ecological systems really escaped the sorts of organic analogies and neo-evolutionism which has beleaguered other efforts of this sort. When panarchy begins to import notions of exploitation from ecological science into what appears to be a resilience theory of capitalism, I at least want to know more about whether this is an empty signifier (resilience) really doing the work of Marxism? If Grove is certainly alert to what is smuggled into socio-ecological systems analysis through resilience, I do think he is a little soft on the vexed question of how power shows up in adaptive governance. To be told by resilience theory in the 2000s that power matters is hardly a great insight, and I for one am still waiting for the granular sort of institutional politics stories (in which multiple forms of power are in play) that resiliency theory purports to offer up.
Grove also offers new insight on the key role of Herbert Simon and his science of the artificial. While I am not entirely convinced of the argument that Simon deeply influenced Hayekian thinking (the core Hayek ideas on individuals, the limit of understanding of complex systems and the notion of spontaneous orders were in place long before Simon was awarded his PhD), Grove shows powerfully how Simonian decision-making and notions of bounded rationality were key bridging mechanism (this is my language) in the shift from ecological to socio-ecological resilience.
As a genealogical account, I have two observations. One is that Simon is only one part of the story. Grove mentions in passing cybernetics and the Macy Conferences but this is a hugely important and very complex story about which much has been written. It is unfortunate that Grove does not work through Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain on the context of the World War II and the Cold War and the cast of characters from Wiener to Gordon and Stafford Beer. Gregory Bateson for example was key in the development of another line of resilience type thinking (which preceded Holling), namely the adaptive systems of Roy Rappaport’s Pigs for the Ancestors (1967), as I have argued elsewhere. In its first phase, cybernetics laid the foundations for a theory of life and living systems. This was developed in the second phase (something Grove passes over) into complexity theory and computational models of social life where autopoesis and self-organization take on another lease of life driven by neurological and molecular sciences.
A second issue is what Grove calls the ‘will to design’ (rather than the will to truth), which is the deep story in Simon and resilience and its apparent transgressive potential. Grove does an admirable job of sketching this field, but I find much of the work to be frustratingly vague, and when it comes to Simon and his legacy, unable to break from a sorts of functionalist pragmatism and managerial ethos which has always been so central to social scientific critical of inter- and post-war behavioralism. The designerly geography Grove offers us is perhaps necessarily brief and undeveloped (a little Povinelli, a little Whatmore) but more importantly is explicitly an account of tinkering and experimentation, with a dose of ‘social learning’ (something which was again in vogue in the business world in the 1970s and 1980s through another cybernetician Donald Schon). The watchword is ‘pragmatic utility’ (p. 18)—which seems unable to break from what I would call ‘the will to manage’. Maybe this isn’t a bad thing, but how we get from here to de-futuring for example is not clear.
Finally, there is the vexed question of the relation between resilience and neoliberalism. It is contingent says Grove; there are other potentialities. This is at one level true. But contingency is a tricky word. To me that what Simon and Hayek have in common is a deep epistemological connection about the ability to understand and control social complexity and how they think about decision-making. For Hayek this was clear in his debate over socialist calculation and what planning was doomed. For Simon it is wrapped up with boundedness and design. But let’s also recall that Hayek himself thought in design terms, through the law, and forms of constitutionalism (see Quinn Slobodian’s magnificent book Globalists). Which is to say that the relation between the two men and resiliency is a very particular type of contingency: a deep isomorphism, an elective affinity, a profound family resemblance. Nobody says Haykeian thought necessitated the emergence of resilience, but a true genealogical account would offer up a much more robust understanding of what is actually contingent about their relation. And it would suggest perhaps that the potentiality and transgressive alternatives which Grove so assiduously, even desperately searches for, might be quite chimerical.