{"id":17893,"date":"2014-01-17T10:09:05","date_gmt":"2014-01-17T14:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=17893"},"modified":"2014-01-17T10:10:02","modified_gmt":"2014-01-17T14:10:02","slug":"resilience-as-labor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2014\/01\/17\/resilience-as-labor\/","title":{"rendered":"Resilience as Labor"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

\"\"
from a flyer for a program run by ecotrust<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is a cross-post from my research blog, Its Her Factory<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

This week in my graduate seminar we talked about resilience discourse. I\u2019ve written about resilience<\/a> before<\/a>, and the concept is a key theme in my forthcoming book with Zer0 Books. It’s also, as I understand, a trendy and common concept in programming<\/a>\u00a0and IT. For an introduction to the concept, you can refer to the blog post I cited a few sentences ago, or Mark Neocleous’s article<\/a> in Radical Philosophy.<\/p>\n

Here I want to focus on the question of critical alternatives to resilience. Resilience is and has long been a way that marginalized and oppressed people respond to, survive, and thrive in the midst of oppression. But now that resilience has been co-opted so that it\u2019s a normalizing rather than a revolutionary\/critical\/counter-hegemonic practice, how does one respond to, survive, and thrive without being or practicing \u201cresilience\u201d?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In class we talked about the specificity of resilience as a concept (we\u2019re philosophers, we like to narrowly define our terms!). Resilience isn\u2019t just \u201crecovery\u201d or \u201cbouncing back\u201d in general. It\u2019s a technical term for a specific discourse or ideology. Here are some of its features:<\/div>\n
    \n
  1. \n
    \u201cResilience\u201d means recovery that is profitable for hegemonic institutions, like capitalism and white supremacy. Individuals and groups can recover, survive, cope, and flourish in ways that don\u2019t (adequately) support hegemony–but those don\u2019t count as \u201cresilience.\u201d Resilience is a specific form of subjectification that normalizes individuals and groups so that they efficiently perform the cultural, affective, and social labor required to maintain and reproduce a specific configuration of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. More simply, resilience is the practice that makes you a cog in the machine of social reproduction.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
  2. \n
    It is totally possible to deal with damage and trauma in other ways. People do that all the time. But these ways don\u2019t count as \u201cresilience\u201d because they\u2019re not generating surplus value for the means of social reproduction. That is to say, these alternative methods of \u201cdealing\u201d don\u2019t perform the cultural, ideological, and material\/economic labor that produces the surplus value hegemony needs for its continued growth and health.\u00a0For example: In a nominally post-feminist society, patriarchy demands that women demonstrate their agency, their strength, their overcoming of traditional patriarchy. We demand women \u201clove\u201d their bodies rather than hate it; women who have different relations and attitudes toward their bodies (e.g., Muslim women who veil or otherwise practice modesty) are both unintelligible as (real) women, and widely viewed as pathological. In overtly and vocally \u201cloving\u201d their bodies, women demonstrate that \u201cnegative female body image\u201d is no longer a problem our society has to solve; they\u2019ve solved it for us. Individuals are responsible for overcoming institutional problems.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
  3. \n
  4. \n
    But what does that mean, that a resilient system or person is virtuous? It means that they maintain a consistent overall state of virtue–by practicing resilience as a habit, they maintain a virtuous character. This shows us that resilience is a method for maintaining overall balance over, above, and amid micro-level variability. No matter what shit happens, we can make diamonds out of those turds and maintain if not grow our overall profits\/wealth\/health.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
  5. \n
    Resilience is a practice that maintains overall stability. It is, as Jason Rines pointed out in class, a method for preserving a status quo. Resilience is in this way quite different from something like a dynamic system, in which all elements change and adapt. In dynamic systems, the macro- and micro- levels both change in mutually-responsive interactions. In resilience discourse, the micro-level phenomena change for the purpose of stabilizing an unchanging macro-level. (I\u2019ve used the metaphor of an audio equalizer to describe this process.)<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
  6. \n
    Humans are pretty good at adapting (i.e., in participating in dynamic systems). Well, \u201clife\u201d in general is pretty good at adapting. (This is another point Jason made). So perhaps we don\u2019t need to find alternatives to resilience so much as keep doing what we\u2019ve always been doing: adapting. At some point, if we refuse to do the social, ideological, and economic labor to which resilience interpellates us, the overall balance of profits and losses (i.e., profits to hegemony, losses to the most precarious) will be upset, maybe?\u00a0This might look something like: take care of yourself, but not for the purposes of being a \u201cgood,\u201d \u201cvirtuous,\u201d or \u201chealthy\u201d person. It might mean being boring, average, and mediocre.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Robin is on twitter as @doctaj.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      This is a cross-post from my research blog, Its Her Factory. This week in my graduate seminar we talked about resilience discourse. I\u2019ve written about resilience before, and the concept is a key theme in my forthcoming book with Zer0 Books. It’s also, as I understand, a trendy and common concept in programming\u00a0and IT. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1929,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[245,55,26542],"class_list":["post-17893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-feminism","tag-gender","tag-resilience"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1929"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17893"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17896,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17893\/revisions\/17896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}