Negative 1nc

Resilience (Evans and Reid)

2ac – resilience

Their alternative is anti-political and is just another form of reinforcing the resilient subject – seeking change through traditional politics is a better way of overcoming resilience. We can accept vulnerability AND act to prevent threats we can change

Juntunena and Hyvönen, 14 - *School of Management, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland AND **Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland (Tapio Juntunen & Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen (2014) Resilience, security and the politics of processes, Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, 2:3, 195-209, DOI: 10.1080/21693293.2014.948323
Arendt’s emphasis on the public and collective nature of political action also sets our approach somewhat apart from the tentative suggestions made by Evans and Reid on the topic of going beyond the resilient subject. Their approach builds on the idea of the ‘poetic subject’, capable of ‘thinking the atmospheric-aesthetic-affective register differently’.68 As with Chandler above, we tend to agree with the general lines of their argument, such as the call for ‘reintroducing political meaning back into the world’.69 However, when it comes to Evans and Reid’s notion of the poetic subject, the above reservations apply here as well. Furthermore, our worry is that the Nietzschean–Foucauldian ‘art of the self’ promoted by them is not adequate to the task of rescuing politics proper from the perils of resilience.70 We fail to see how the politics of the ‘art of the self’ manages to overcome an individualistic bias in order to take the necessary step towards changing the structures and political institutions of the world. While it is important to resist resilience on the same ground where it makes its principal interventions – on the construction of the individual subject – it is even more crucial to act against the undoing of political structures and institutions – the processualisation of everything – by resilience policies. It is in the safeguarding of these shared structures of meaning that the Arendtian approach can make its foremost contribution.

This brings us to the assessment made by Evans and Reid according to which resilience can be seen as an anti-politics of nihilism, a political will to nothingness. To us, this seems to hit the mark. From an Arendtian perspective, this is because practices of resilience intensify the process whereby public spaces and the shared world of meaningful structures disappear. Arendt argued that ours is the ‘objective situation of nihilism where nothingness and nobodyness threaten to destroy the world’.71 However, the problem of resilience is thus not so much that it ‘cheats us of the notion of learning to die’,72 as it is that resilience is the latest phase in the long process steadily depriving us of the possibility of a second birth, the birth of the public self. This loss is not unrelated to our conceptions of life, death and immortality, however. Resilience-centred liberalism is able to go on ‘living without death’ because the societal life process has taken the part of the individual, whose lifespan is limited. In our society, the only thing that can be ‘potentially immortal, as immortal as the body politic in antiquity and as individual life during the Middle Ages, [is] life itself, that is, the possibly everlasting life process of the species mankind’.73 However, for Arendt, ‘learning how to die’ is not the solution. Neither care for life (or ‘making life live’74) nor coming to terms with death is in itself political. What matters is the establishment of a public space where neither of these concerns constitutes the focal point of attention. In Heidegger’s and Arendt’s footsteps, we argue that death is always mine individually. In other words, there is no political potential in coming to terms with death. While fostering the life process surrenders politics to necessitarian-processual attitudes, the care for death is a question of the existential (Arendt says metaphysical), rather than the political, since it is essentially a question of the self and not of the world.75

Nihilism, then, derives from a deterioration of a meaningful common world and politics. As Arendt put it in a powerful passage:

The answer to the question of the meaning of politics is so simple and so conclusive that one might think all other answers are utterly beside the point. The answer is: The meaning of politics is freedom [ . . . ] Today this answer is in fact neither self-evident nor immediately plausible [ . . . ] Our question is thus far more radical, more aggressive, and more desperate: Does politics still have any meaning at all?76

While such questions as free will and choice are no doubt important for human liberty, Arendt is steadfast in holding that the experience of freedom proper is only possible among equals in a public space. As she puts it in another succinct statement about the theme: ‘the raison d’eˆtre of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action’.77 Without the human artifice and human institutions – public space in particular – any meaningful action is not possible. As Chandler has also pointed out, the exercise of freedom is only possible if we can ‘conceive of ourselves as acting meaningfully in the world – i.e. in relation to temporal and spatial structures’.78 As we already pointed out above, the public world, like every relationally constituted in-between, has the double function of bringing people together and separating them simultaneously; it gathers us together, and ‘prevents our falling over each other’.79 Consequently, as Margaret Canovan explains, without the world human beings cannot be plural individuals but merely interchangeable members of a species.80 Since the world is seen as a product of meaningful human interaction, it is also possible to change it. By acting together as a collective, human beings can change the structures of this world and start new endeavours within it.81 This Arendt-inspired conceptualisation is in stark contradiction to the image of human capabilities painted by the resilience-based security discourses, one of the key tenets of which is the belief that, amidst the demand to cultivate individual adaptive capacities and social cohesion, we cannot change the world in any meaningful sense. No radical departures from the societal life process are possible. Yet, if we consider humans as acting, instead of behaving beings, it is exactly the disruptions of processes that matter. Each political act, as Arendt explains,

. . . bursts into the context of predictable processes as something unexpected, unpredictable, and ultimately causally inexplicable – just like a miracle. In other words every new beginning is by nature a miracle when seen and experienced from the standpoint of the processes it necessarily interrupts.82

Conclusion

In this article, we have traced the emergence of the resilience discourse from ecology and complexity thinking to politics, and the area of security policy and governance in particular. We have noted that the modes of thinking derived from these sciences, when brought to the realm of politics, have detrimental consequences for the basic activities of politics as acting and for the exercise of public freedom. In ecology, resilience is understood as a capacity of a system to absorb disruptions, and it not only maintains its functions but also renews and reorganises as a result. In this kind of thinking, the processual nature of living systems becomes an all-embracing fact of life. We then moved to the analysis of the consequences of this kind of thinking for the concepts of security, public freedom and political action itself, emphasising the problematic nature of reactivity and vulnerability implied in resilience thinking.

Towards the end of the article, we provided preliminary thoughts on the possibility of surpassing this predicament. We argued that what is needed is not another philosophical idea, or even a return to a previously articulated idea. As Chandler notes, we need to develop a ‘practical political approach’.83 Resilience invites us to accept that we are fundamentally vulnerable and that the world is a complex bundle of emergent and overlapping socio-ecological processes to which we can only respond by societal adaptation and assimilation, not through political structures in a traditional manner. We see this as an indication of actively promoted, self-imposed powerlessness. This is detrimental for a plurality of reasons, beginning with the fact that it prevents us from effectively tackling the political issues behind the insecurities we face. Our wager is that what is needed in today’s global and seemingly complex world is keeping open the agonistic spaces of political contestation, of public spaces where problems, challenges and threats to the common world can be addressed.

Building resilience enables politics – refusing it generates greater anxiety

Kolers 15 - professor of philosophy at University of Louisville (Avery, “Review of Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously.” 2015. https://www.academia.edu/9999493/Review_of_Brad_Evans_and_Julian_Reid_Resilient_Life_The_Art_of_Living_Dangerously)//CB
Evans and Reid’s answer is that the politics of resilience foregrounds our continuous vulnerability, which has deeper, more corrosive consequences (170). What exactly are we afraid of? Death? Extinction? These are inevitable. If climate change doesn’t get us, eventually something will (151-2). So the anxious pursuit of resilience is self-deceptive. What liberal resilience wants to save us for is worse than what it purports to save us from.

The authors instead insist “that there is more to life than this ongoing survival” (167); we can “live through the source of our endangerment” (169). This attitude frees us for creativity, for life as poetry or work of art. “The political task of our times, remains learning to … thrive beyond the catastrophe of our times … and welcome with confidence a more poetic subjectivity” (203).

This is insightful and even inspiring, though underdeveloped. What does it mean to say that life is art or poetry? The authors promise all good things (174), but provide no rules of the craft. Is life as poetry really incompatible with resilience or liberalism? The authors claim that the resilience industry stokes our anxiety such that “the prevailing mode of contemporary affect is a state of normalized anxiety” (92) which dulls our creativity and renders us docile workers and consumers. But they do not offer any evidence for this causal claim, or even for believing that this “mode of affect” is indeed “prevailing.” To the contrary, it seems to me that resilience’ is principally the concern of academics and policy-wonks. Most people just don’t think about it, and hence, are not anxious. Moreover, resilience — whether as fact or as discourse — can enable creativity, politics, and activism. Insofar as I have confidence in my children’s resilience, I eschew ‘helicopter parenting’ in hopes that they will grow to be resourceful and courageous. More broadly, insofar as California’s infrastructure is resilient to earthquakes, Californians are free to not think about it. They can live creatively while others, whose infrastructure is more precarious, are busy rebuilding and burying the dead.

Ultimately, Resilient Life provides a powerful challenge to the discourse of resilience. The book does repay sympathetic engagement, but the reader must indulge an excess of jargon and point-scoring. The authors promise future work developing their Nietzschean conception of life as poetry; it will be welcome, but I hope it will be more generous and less narcissistic.

No epistemic basis for the K and the alternative won’t have political salience

Kolers 15 - professor of philosophy at University of Louisville (Avery, “Review of Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously.” 2015. https://www.academia.edu/9999493/Review_of_Brad_Evans_and_Julian_Reid_Resilient_Life_The_Art_of_Living_Dangerously)//CB
Their critique has two connected, but distinct, core elements. The first is a challenge not to the concept itself but to its function in ‘neoliberal’ regimes. What could explain the sudden popularity of ‘resilience’ ? What makes it so useful not only for scholars but for governments, security firms, and so on? The merits of the concept as such cannot answer this question; that requires a political analysis of its uptake. The second element is a challenge to the concept itself, i.e., to the attitude toward life and politics that it engenders. Evans and Reid claim that ‘resilience’ closes us down as political and creative subjects.

Each of these challenges deserves careful attention. Unfortunately, the authors’ style is the enemy of the substance. They obfuscate causal claims by both using the passive voice to ascribe actions to no one in particular, and also imputing agency to constructs like ‘neoliberalism’, ‘the species’, even ‘Life’. They thereby treat complex, multifaceted phenomena as unitary agents working in concert. Nor do the authors give evidence for causal claims or empirical assertions; though to be sure, their subject is not the world itself but the contemporary ‘imaginary’ , so perhaps the scholarly and literary works they cite count as evidence. And in place of arguments they tend to deploy praise and blame, dividing the academic world into teams of “intellectuals worthy of the term” (xiv) who see clearly what “the Left today is forced to think against” (107), vs. “those who only reason to teach mediocrity on account of their intellectual limitations” (xvi) . The risk is that those who most need to engage with the authors’ genuinely valuable critical analysis will understandably roll their eyes and ignore this book.

Their alternative is rhetorical conjecture not strong enough to overcome their criticism

Mitchell, 14 – Department of Politics at the University of York (Audra, Review of Resilient Life, Antipode, https://radicalantipode.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/book-review_mitchell-on-evans-and-reid.pdf.
More broadly, Resilient Life makes a substantial contribution to the radical social sciences and humanities. In particular, it does an excellent job of demonstrating how contributions from the Left, in an effort to respond ethically to disaster, often collapse into a mood of mourning and become (unintentional) accomplices of liberal rule. But does Resilient Life itself escape this trap itself?

In order to avoid fuelling nihilism, a project of this kind needs to confront its readers face-on with the enormities that poison the backgrounds of their lives, which the book does quite effectively. However, it also needs to bring its readers through the ‘wall of fear’ and activate within them a genuine sense of the possibility of radical change. In other words, it needs to give concrete indications of how humans might ‘live dangerously’ in the second sense of the term: that is, in defiance of resilience, and in the embrace of becoming-other. This does not necessarily require prescriptions for action, but it should entail a strong sense of what alternatives might look or feel like. As it stands, the invocations of affirmative sensibilities come across as largely rhetorical, and do not seem strong enough to counter the weight of the analysis that precedes them. Here, the authors could have drawn more on the work of authors such as William Connolly (2011), who gives a much more detailed (if still abstract) account of the micro-politics of responsiveness, attachment, and becoming that might help humans to overcome ressentiment. In the latter sections of the book, Evans and Reid make appeals to imagination, the artful cultivation of the self, an ethos of ‘welcoming’ catastrophe, and a poetic sensibility; but what might it be like to exist in this way? Are there any examples actually existing in the world that we might draw from? And what might it feel like to ‘live dangerously’ in this second, more affirmative sense?