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The Downside Of The Resilience Discourse

By Dr Chris James

21 November, 2011
Countercurrents.org

We are being asked to power down and build resilience against the impacts of climate change and peak oil, but what does ‘resilience' really mean? Resilience is touted as a suitable method for bringing about optimism and averting a sense of helplessness in adverse situations, but resilience is about making do; it is not about change. Resilience has strong connections with positive psychology and behavioural modification. In this respect resilience is being offered as an alternative to resistance . Resilience places the responsibility for a sick world onto the individual.

Resilience is a boundary object. Boundary objects bridge the tensions between conflicting ideas and they can alter the way we view the world. Boundary objects are things that connect other things. Resilience is borrowed from a number of disciplines that include metallurgy, physics and ecological science, but the word resilience has taken on dimensions that are heuristic, metaphorical and ambiguous and which shift the clarity and meaning of the word. Resilience comes from the scientific genre, and it has gained a wide perspective linking social-ecological systems, but no clear definition of social resilience is exists. Rather, resilience is predicated on a series of ideas about how to read complex systems. Resilience acts as a catalyst linking a number of ideas and objectives without ever having to reach a consensus or give consideration to the differing needs and aspirations of individuals, groups and communities. This in turn imprisons our way of thinking and leads to an error in understanding.

Boundary objects are politically very effective for alluding to a general consensus because they dilute the precise meaning of terms. They blur the lines of comprehension; especially when they come from familiar canons and become embedded into new discourses. Boundary objects highlight the positive elements contained in the word without revealing the ambiguities. It is for this reason that boundary objects are frequently used to bridge the gap between science and policy. [1] The wide range of interpretations offered by boundary objects lends opportunity for a power relation to be arbitrarily attributed to a word giving it both legitimacy and leverage to a more illusive authority. [2]

For the neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik [1937] resilience explained being able to extricate oneself from the past in order to recover from injury; otherwise to ‘bounce back'. [3]

Resilience is tied to the ability to learn to live with ongoing fear and uncertainty, namely, the ability to show positive adaptation in spite of significant life adversities and the ability to adapt to difficult and challenging life experiences' . [4]

Once resilient behaviour is learned it is not always easy to ‘bounce back'. Does this mean we must accept poverty, exploitation, violence, slavery, war and the rest?

The point about boundary objects is they are free-floating and able to contain messages and meanings we may not agree with if they were made clear. For this reason boundary objects suit the pertaining interests of those who use them. Boundary objects hold us in stasis creating their own chain of signifiers and like other cognitive behavioural schemas in order to maintain the feeling of satisfaction we get from boundary objects we need to keep increasing our purchase. Boundary objects therefore can easily lead to obsessions, aversions, fantasies and addictions and they never address the problem at hand.

The notion of resilience has historical links with political propaganda. During the Second World War the word resilience became a way of injecting stoicism and patriotism into the population. In Britain during the Second World War people were asked to make sacrifices in an effort to stop a German invasion. Households gave up their jewellery, their pots and pans and anything else that could be melted down for weaponry. After the War they had nothing left upon which to build resilience ; or recoup their lives. Creating resilience requires some resources. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher drew on British resilience to initiate massive cuts to social programs. Resilience makes something bad sound positive.

After the Second World War how to increase resilience in the British population became an important question and the answers were drawn from the War experiences of British children. Children accounted for one in ten deaths in the bombing of London, two million children were evacuated from their homes. The impact on children was phenomenal, but so too was their level of resilience and it prompted researchers to investigate what it is that gives rise to these hidden strengths in such formidable circumstances. In the 1950s educational reformers were set the task of guiding and institutionalising resilience as a means of social control. There were several aims underscoring this action:

1. The delivery of systems required for modern industrial economies.

2. The constraint of the dissident working classes.

3. The corporate uniformity of business values and the educational state.

4. The transformation of all complex social relations into an impersonal docile consumer society. [5]

Post War resilience worked to achieve these aims so what might we expect from the new wave of required resilience ?

[1] Turnhout E [2009] The effectiveness of boundary objects: the case of ecological indicators. In Science and Public Policy. June 2009 36 [5] 403-412 and www.fnp.wur.nl/.../Turnhout2009boundaryobjectsScienceandPublicPolicy Accessed 29 th April 2011.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Cyrulnik B http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Cyrulnik Accessed 29 th April 2011.

[4] Meichenbaun D [n/d] Understanding Resilience in children and Adults The Melisa Institute for Violence Prevention and Treatment, Miami Florida.

www.melissainstitute.org/documents/resilienceinchildren.pdf

Accessed 29 th April 2011.

[5] Gintis H [1976] Towards a Political Economy of Education: A radical critique of Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society in Schooling and Capitalism [Eds] Dale R, Esland G and MacDonald M London Open University Press Routledge and Paul Kegan pp8-20.

Dr Chris James is an artist, writer, political activist and psychotherapist currently researching the Transitions Movement at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. She lives on a property in country Victoria, and can be contacted at: Email [email protected]

Website www.doctorchrisjames.com

 

 

 



 


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