T
o note the ubiquity of the term resilience in scholarship has become somewhat of a cliche. The pervasiveness of resilience is apparent as much in geography as it is in civil engineering, ecology, economics, psychology and, as Grove’s Resilience demonstrates well, design studies. Resilience has featured in—and sometimes exemplified—some of the most innovative, rigorous and creative thinking that has heretofore characterised the 20th and 21st century’s attempt to depart from earlier ‘modernist’, Enlightenment-inspired conceptualisations of the dynamics, processes and multi-variant relations that make up the complex lifeworlds of non-human and human milieus. At the same time, the extensiveness of resilience has, at least in some of its incarnations, proven its superficiality; being deployed by so many confounds any coherent meaning that we might attribute to it. Taking its multiple renderings into account, the political implications of ‘pursuing resilience’, ‘governing through resilience’, ‘cultivating resilience’, ‘instilling resilience’ or organising world making projects around resilience are fraught with ambivalence (Chandler, 2014, Hutter etal, 2014). For every argument asserting resilience as a governmental motif adept at addressing global challenges, there are as many critiques of its efficacy to both sustain neoliberal political-economic conditions and proliferate the illusion of individual sovereignty in an era of dwindling state resources (Anderson, 2015, Evans and Reid, 2014).
Acknowledging resilience’s ubiquity and conceptual ambiguity, Resilience by Kevin Grove appears all the more commendable in its ambition, its scope, timeliness and, in the end, how it illuminates possible lines that might be pursued to reorient the potential of resilience for critique and practice alike. The prevalence of resilience, and its possible existence as an empty signifier, is occasionally the grounds for its dismissal in the eyes of some scholars. But for Grove it is this popularity that is motivation for his engagement with resilience in the first place. For Grove, the potential of resilience as a critical mechanism is different from other concepts that we might adjudge to be in its proximity (sustainability, adaptive management, complexity, anthropocene and so forth). Grove argues that we should forego attempts to capture resilience in any permanent form that provides the grounds for diagnosing and critiquing a reality. In other words, we cannot say what resilience is and, in turn, make declarations of what is or is not ‘resilient’. Instead, we should direct our gaze to what resilience does. Grove’s approach is to show how resilience instantiates a specific style of thinking generative of particular framings of the world that both shape the actions taken to govern events within it and are reflective of power relations that define the contours of historically specific circumstance.
Grove develops a compelling commentary of resilience as a performative epistemic device by offering an impressive excavation of its growth, grounded initially in CW Holling’s groundbreaking work on predation in ecological systems science. The book affords here a comprehensive account of resilience as a notion associated closely with attempts to address how ecological systems maintain order through the adaptation and change by which species continually adjust to their surroundings. One might expect Holling’s work to appear in any book on resilience. But Grove’s purview stretches far beyond this work in tracing the development of resilience by engaging with a range of lesser known, somewhat secreted, influences. For example, Grove engages in-depth with the work of Herbert Simon, demonstrating how the emphasis in much work on resilience on interdependent complexity and adaptability through interfaces between objects within and without systems owes much to conceptual steps that were made during second order cybernetics in the 1940s and 50s. Along with Simon, Frederich Hayek’s arguments concerning the supposed market compulsion towards shrinking state functions is recognised in terms of its weight on the proposals for self-governance that emerge where people are told to be resilient. At the same time, Grove reveals how the aesthetic modelling of complexity cognized frequently through resilience has multiple and intimate resonances with Bauhaus attempts to integrate the form of artefacts within their function.
Bringing to life the often unseen and always fuzzy emergence of resilience as a style of thinking rather than a fixed concept, Grove does not rely on a simple recounting of resilience’s flight through time, however. Taking his lead from a very well detailed account of genealogy in the work of Michel Foucault instead, Grove enframes resilience’s motion through time’s past to emphasise important points about its expansion and deployment now. Grove draws on genealogical method to undertake a task more useful than conducting a search for so-called origins where the kernel of resilience rests or imposing a teleological trajectory towards its pre-determined realisation in some governmental arrangement. Instead, Grove depicts the development of resilience as bellicose. It is a concept whose turbulent history is the result of its determination according to circumstantial power dynamics. Drawing on Stephen Collier’s description, Grove argues that the “field of adversity” (2017, 29) in which resilience’s development takes place must be perceived as multi-valent. Resilience, the book claims, stems from a critical analytic tradition that sought to confront complexity and indeterminate futures in a way departed from modernism’s neat ordering of reality into discrete categories of nature/society or body/mind and the belief that positivistic, objectivist science and societal progress are necessarily entwined.
Drawing on Foucault’s famous essay on Kant, Grove elaborates resilience thinking also in terms of its entanglement in processes of subjectification and how it reflects a shift in our position in relation to the wider world. Here, the impact of resilience thinking springs forth from a repositioning in which ‘institutions are as much part of the problem as they are the solution’ (106, 2018). In the age of the anthropocene, Grove convincingly argues that resilience arises where global problems are perceived to emerge as much from human endeavour as they can be attended to through human action. Rather than reserving his analysis just for more philosophical issues, however, Grove indicates how this transformation in our positionality leads to practical fallout, particularly in terms of how it re-problematizes the modes of governance enacted to govern events in the world. Grove demonstrates here how, in a world that eschews human mastery, old modes of command and control and long-term planning must be replaced by power relations that operate through ongoing attunement between different, albeit interdependent, agents that act to co-produce the world together.
Despite exhibiting expert application of Foucault’s ideas, Grove extends our understanding of how genealogical method might be applied by tracing the spatialization of regimes of knowledge over time. Here, Grove elaborates on the topological character of resilience thinking. Substantiated through depictions of Holling’s ecological models and Simon’s orchestration of cybernetic hierarchy, Grove casts resilience by its ever-continuing permutation. Resilience evidences emergent qualities in terms of the form it takes. With each formative reiteration, resilience comes to encapsulate new practices and functions, addressing new issues. Grove draws on topology to do more than articulate the dynamic of resilience. In addition, Grove shows how the development of resilience has witnessed processes of transference whereby ideas concerning ‘resilience’ from one discipline arise, are consolidated and, in turn, impose their efficacy on thinking in other disciplines.
It is amidst this novel, topologically inflected genealogy that Grove expands upon the central concept of the book: a will to design. A will to design might be best described as the set of knowledge creation practices that underpin the enactment of resilience as a mode of governance. In another move that represents both nod to and critique of Foucault, Grove contrasts a will to design with Foucault’s will to truth. Grove impressively, and necessarily, differentiates the two according to the contrasting conditions for the generation of knowledge that prevail in each and how such conditions affect differing ontologies for those governing through them. Grove argues here that a will to truth reflects power-relations in which those governing assume some kind of top-down overview over the world governed. A will to design, in contrast, starts from an entirely different position in which government agencies and rationales are located within and feedback into the surroundings in which they practice. Rather than determining what is true and what is not, Grove draws on a fascinating review of literature that inaugurated design studies to show how a will to design synthesises and stitches together ideas from a range of perspectives to both comprehend and inform pathways towards addressing a common ‘problem’. Grove describes the processes of synthesis that characterise a will to design, showing how such an epistemic motif will confront problems and events, render them abstract and insert them into systems and models that rearticulate them as a global issue that can be attended to through mechanisms premised on adaptation, scalability and an acceptance of complexity.
With his development of a will to design, Grove moves to consider the range of broader implications that accompany the enactment of resilience. It is here that Grove engages and elaborates on the critical potential that thinking through and with resilience offers. A number of issues that feature at the centre of debates around resilience across different disciplines are engaged with here, including issues concerning the processes of subjectification that resilience sets in motion and the questions it raises for the management of the commons in times of crisis. In so doing, the critical intervention that Grove’s Resilience makes are writ large. Grove’s critique captures the confounding tension that appears at the heart of resilience. For whilst acknowledging and elaborating with much rigour the importance of resilience as a mechanism that sometimes acts to justify the ruination brought about for the sake of maintaining the pursuit of specific interests, he also emphasises the constant potential that must be associated with resilience; a potential to recalibrate thinking about the stakes of specific governmental practices that promise to remake the world anew. But it is also in the development of another register of critique in evaluating resilience that the book shows its excellence. Beyond its effects and application, Grove reiterates the importance of understanding resilience specifically by what it does: as a style of thought that is imposed upon us with its calling forth. Rather than exploring its mobilisation as a supporting device for this or that regime or indeed the innovative ways it both constructs and attends to problems, one of Grove’s greatest achievements in a book of many is to detail how resilience exerts itself on the parameters through which we intellectually encounter the world overall. What needs to be emphasised for Grove is that, along with its effects, we must consider the world-view that incubates where resilience is applied and the opportunities that it always holds without necessarily revealing. The book stands to make a lasting contribution to resilience studies and will be of interest to those concerned with critiquing the governance of global crises and how such practices might be renegotiated anew.
References:
Anderson, B (2015) What kind of thing is resilience?. Politics, 35(1), pp.60-66.
Chandler D (2014) Resilience: The Governance of Complexity, Routledge, London
Collier SJ Neo-Liberalism and Rule by Experts pp 23-45 in Higgins V and Larner W (2017) Assembling Neo-Liberalism: Expertise, Practices and Subjects, Palgrave Macmillan, London
Evans, B. and Reid, J (2014) Resilient life: The art of living dangerously. John Wiley & Sons, London
Hutter G, Liebenath M, Mattissek A (2014) Governing Through Resilience? Exploring Flood Protection in Dresden, Germany, Social Sciences, 3, 273-287
