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POLITICS: 2015 VOL 35(1), 78–84

doi: 10.1111/1467-9256.12078

Security and the Politics of Resilience:

An Aesthetic Response
Kevin Grove
Aberystwyth University

Peter Adey
Royal Holloway, University of London

Introduction
Last year’s Politics Special Issue on Security and the Politics of Resilience contains an important
set of articles that excavate the development and deployment of resilience in a range of
contexts. The articles open up resilience to some critique while offering in-depth analysis of
how resilience is animating different policy communities, from peace building to cyber-
security. There are important empirical qualifications of resilience throughout the articles
which puts most meta-political critique into some relief given the way it can breeze over
important differences and detail. Furthermore, the dissonances established within some of the
articles is perhaps more subtle or nuanced than we have seen before. For example, the
interview with Helen Braithwaite OBE (Brassett and Vaughan-Williams, 2013) highlights
some of the debate internal to civil contingencies planning, while articles such as Coaffee
(2013) and Rogers (2013) provide more affirmative critique.

Our response is to explore the way in which the Special Issue performs a particular kind of
resilience which we would like to elucidate further. In response, we offer some alternative
conceptual and methodological approaches that develop a quite different line of engagement,
specifically as a form of critique, to that in the Politics Special Issue.

Before we sketch these approaches, we would like to emphasise what we see as one of the
dangers inherent in analysing resilience. One of the troubling aspects of resilience, as the
editors set out in their introduction, has been its promulgation (as creep or colonisation).
However, critical scholars can inadvertently perform such a promulgation. This is something
the editors recognise, yet seem unable to halt. For example, even though they recognise that
‘there is still relatively little empirically grounded academic commentary on the extent to
which resilience should be accepted as an organising principle to be inculcated, invested in,
and striven for throughout society’, they nonetheless argue that, ‘most commentators agree
that, like it or not, resilience is fast becoming the organising principle in contemporary political
life (Brassett, Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2013, p. 222).’1 The danger of this argument is that
it does not merely denote the spread of resilience, but also reproduces the inevitable realisa-
tion of resilience into existence. Indeed, later on they note that ‘the rationality of resilience
begins to take on an inevitability and universality that critics would otherwise demur’
(Brassett, Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2013, p. 225). Reading this we believe that care
should be taken not to overwrite diverse accounts and disparate versions of resilience – of
which many appear in the Special Issue – as an inevitable, universal resilience project.

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The articles that form the Special Issue do not necessarily perform this inevitability or
universality. Some explore how resilience as a type tends to be organised through a particular
set of definitions and working concepts drawn from outside the contexts within which the
papers are working or are focusing. Most are quite tightly focused upon a closer set of domains
within security or emergency planning. Nevertheless, we want to suggest here that some of
the careful empirical analysis within these papers can work both against and towards some of
the self-reinforcing proclamations that performatively enact resilience’s ‘inevitability and
universality’. Such attention to the contextual specificity of the various interventions that
operate under the banner of resilience can draw out the limitations of the concept, and its
perceived application. In what follows, we pull on this thread further, to tease out some of the
methodological, epistemological and ethical issues the Special Issue raises, by considering
resilience in terms of aesthetics and genealogy.

Aesthetics, genealogy and resilience

We want to suggest that an aesthetic tends to dominate many writings on resilience, which
means that disparate ideas, concepts and doctrines can be compared or brought into associa-
tion and equivalence with each other in a way that they might not have been otherwise. In
other words, it may be in the way it has become common to write and represent resilience that
we can actually identify the performance of a creeping colonisation. That is to say, many
authors tend to flatten the more subtle differences of resilience out of objects of comparison,
prioritising certain similarities. This has enabled not a plurality of versions of resilience to
co-exist, but several dominant ideal types that erase those quieter differences. More will be
said on this below; for now, it is important to recognise that at stake is the ability to think
resilience in ways that work against the tendency towards totalising closure and all-
encompassing explanation that resilience thinking enacts (cf. Walker and Cooper, 2011).
What do we mean by ‘aesthetic’? Here, we draw on Rancière (2004, p. 8), who defines
‘aesthetics’ as,
the systems of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sensory experience. It is a
delineation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that
simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.
Aesthetics thus refers to partitions, or distributions, of sensible experience that assign every-
thing to its ‘proper’ space and time. Politics, in turn, involves action that transgresses a given
distribution of the sensible: ‘politics exists when the figure of a specific subject is constituted,
a supernumerary subject in relation to the calculated number of groups, places and functions
in a society’ (Rancière, 2004, p. 48).
A key point we take from Rancière’s work is that sensory experience is not given, but is
instead contingent, an effect of power relations that give each person and thing their proper
space and time (see also Rancière, 2009, 2010). This genealogical reading of aesthetics helps
us interrogate a certain style deployed by resilience proponents and critics alike to understand
and discuss resilience. Such a style partitions sensible experience in a way that allows singular
events to be slotted into specific orderings of time and space that make ‘sense’ through the
language, imagery and codings of resilience thinking. For instance, resilience tends to be
described in the terms of fast and responsive systems organised by state policy making,
wherein the speed or agency of response or threat is emphasised as a challenge to a

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bureaucracy or system of administration. Elsewhere, systems are described, far too frequently,
as complex or contingent. Other metaphors pervade: including fluidity, brittleness or fragility.
The flexibility of resilience appears ‘new age’ in the face of hard, macho systems. The
imposition of policy appears instrumentally deployed, ‘grasping’ at communities, breaking
down silos. For Coaffee (2013), discussing urban security policy, resilience comes in waves
that progressively engulf existing policy regimes. Likewise, the events that challenge security
or emergency responses are punctual events characterised by external or internal ‘shocks’.
These shocks create disruptions that can cascade through negative feedback loops, causing
disruption and even systemic collapse.

This style gives every ‘thing’ under the umbrella of resilience – human and non-human,
natural and social – its proper space and time: each body is cast a role in the part of complex,
adaptive systems; vectors of information exchange within feedback loops that can speed up or
arrest cascading change. In our reading, the problem here is that this aesthetic takes for
granted precisely what a genealogical analysis undermines: the givenness and inevitability of
resilience, its unhooking from other contexts, and the unproblematic efficacy of state policy
in enrolling almost everything into resilience systems, plans and practices.

A pertinent example can be gleaned in Brassett and Vaughan-Williams’ (2013) interview with
Helen Braithwaite, who hints at the contingency of resilience when she remarks that,
‘planning is co-ordinated in relation to the process of defining risks’ (p. 232, emphasis in original).
This process is what creates a sensorial regime that enables individuals, communities, and
state and civil society agencies to sense the ‘risk’ that inheres in complex systems. Defining
risks involves more than simply creating new categories of knowledge (although this is
certainly an important area for critical analysis; see Amoore, 2013; Aradau and van Munster,
2011); it also stages social and ecological life in a specific way. For instance, certain places are
deemed to require more or less staffing according to the level of risk they are determined to
have. Human, informational and financial resources are accordingly redistributed. Likewise,
community resilience programmes place individuals within relations of responsibility and
mutual support on the basis of their defined risks. In disaster management planning, for
instance, the resilient community is one in which people have been educated to rely on each
other, rather than the state or relief agencies, for aid and assistance in the first 72 hours after
an event strikes (Grove, 2013). Definitions of risk in terms of complexity are at once material
and discursive: they reconfigure material life, and produce new forms of subjectivity, as they
resonate throughout governmental assemblages.

However, if life is reorganised around understandings of complex, systemic risk and each
individual’s (and agency’s) proper time and place within this system, it is important not to gloss
over a key moment of biopolitical production: the definition of risk itself. The result of such
effacement would be a focus on the placement of people and things within this distribution of
the sensible, and not on how these distributions come to be produced in the first place. For
instance, Rogers’ (2013, p. 329) argument that community resilience can achieve
transformative outcomes through techniques and mechanisms of positive governmentality
that enhance participatory governance leaves in place two assumptions: first, that complexity
requires adaptive and reflexive governance; and second, that change can be managed and
planned through these techniques. Such calls for transformative change can hollow out politics
by turning the political moment – the transgressive production of new life worlds; new systems
of value and meaning and new subjectivities – into processes that can be managed to create
better resilient communities (cf. Swyngedouw, 2009). The possibilities for potentially radical
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politics in the face of widespread insecurity, vulnerability and suffering are foreclosed by the
reduction of political action to the categories of transformation and adaptive management.
In short, what this style of resilience loses is a genealogical sensibility that historicises and
politicises any sense of resilience. This is reflected in problematic tendency of scholars to draw
on centralised, governmental working definitions of resilience examine (e.g. the cabinet office
documentation and guidelines from the Civil Contingencies Act 2004), and then explore how
this particular form of resilience plays out in a range of different contexts and policy com-
munities. Case study driven examinations of central-government doctrine assume some
spread, travel or similarity of ideas and practices in the production of some policy formation
or resilient subjectivities (cf. Malcolm, 2013), leaving little room for far more fractured,
incommensurate and incongruous relations.
So what exactly is at stake in this form of analysis? Slotting discourses and policy together in
this way easily turns attention away from the conditions that give shape to and help legitimise
resilience, such as emergency, long-term environmental change or poverty, and denies the
insights of genealogy which would explore both the conditions for, and circuits of possibility
that enable, resilience to evolve. What is lost is any sense of how certain rationalities spread,
how they confront other rationalities, how they de- and re-code material and affective
relations to reconfigure life in ways that produce apparently ‘resilient’ subjects – and, perhaps
most importantly, the points where these subjectivations fail, where life exceeds discourses of
resilience. Instead, genealogy, for instance, might construct quite different organisations of
knowledge transfer than imaginaries that tend to be characterised as hierarchical, or requiring
linear spatial distribution out from a centre, as opposed to shifting currents in local politics or
global institutional policy shifts, luck or creativity, for example.
In opposition to the narrow aesthetic of this centre-periphery spread from government
departments or the Cabinet Office that blinkers analysis to particular spatial imaginations of
resilience, there are also a wider terrain of aesthetic, sensual and visual practices and experi-
ences to be explored, which constitute the policy and practices described here. Some examples
of research that points in this direction comes from Deleuzo-Guattarian, Foucauldian and
feminist post-humanist scholars who have documented how life is rendered emergent
through a seemingly infinite number of sites – assemblages comprised of affective relations
between humans, non-humans and technology – that produce a sense of complexity through
observational, imaginative, enactive and calculatory techniques. This topological mode of
inquiry signals what we see as the diagrammatic qualities of resilience. Diagrams are opera-
tional rather than representational: they are ideal, abstract sets of relations between relations
that give direction to affective life (Lazzarato, 2014; Massumi, 1992). Their operation does not
rely on a master subject; instead, diagrams are self-organising, autopoietic machines that
produce specific kinds of worlds, and subjectivities that inhabit these worlds, by articulating
material and enunciative contents together in specific ways (Guattari, 1996).
We want to suggest that the concept of ‘diagram’ offers one potentially fruitful avenue into
the aesthetics of resilience. For instance, diagrams of resilience, preparedness and other forms
of anticipatory governance operate in a number of sites of contemporary security practice,
such as wargames (cf. DeLanda, 1991; Dillon and Reid, 2009), emergency scenario exercises
(Adey and Anderson, 2012; Anderson and Adey, 2011), critical infrastructure and airport
security control rooms (Lundborg and Vaughan-Williams, 2011), derivatives trading (Cooper,
2010), adaptive management and participatory disaster resilience (Grove, 2013) and catas-
trophe modelling (Aradau and van Munster, 2011; Grove, 2012). Increasingly, their diagram-
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matic effect is to create certain kinds of order that come to be characterised as ‘resilient’: they
create a time and space for everything, including emergency, that structures sensory experi-
ence (see e.g. Crandall, 2008) around catastrophic potentials, both destructive and construc-
tive, and the imperative to survive these future events. Rain becomes a potential flood. The
neighbour’s chainsaw becomes a source of post-disaster mobility (Grove, 2014). The crowd
becomes real-time social media information. Habits of attentiveness alert individuals to new
broadcasts (Massumi, 2005). Such sensory experiences of being without shelter, forced
mobility, indecision, pain, terror, courage, togetherness underpin the construction of resilient
subjects – individual and collective – that see uncertainty and risk as opportunities as well as
threats, and who take it upon themselves to develop their capacities to live with rather than
revolt against uncertainty, insecurity and suffering (Reid, 2012). These subjects share a new
kind of equality – the equality of insecurity that comes from becoming part of complex social
and ecological systems.

In this sense, resilience might be seen as the latest fold in European modernity’s struggle to
come to terms with contingency and finite life (see Campbell and Dillon, 1993; Foucault,
1994). While modern security technologies such as the sovereign state or the individual
subject failed to provide the security they promised, resilience promises a different kind of
security: the capacity to survive a catastrophic future through becoming adaptive and resili-
ent. It promises not stability and order, but persistent adaptation through techniques such as
adaptive management, reflexive and participatory governance, attentiveness and vigilance,
calculated risk taking, and so on. However, as with all security techniques (Dalby, 2002), these
techniques produce the kinds of life in need of the security they offer.

Paying attention to the aesthetic dimensions of resilience can thus help highlight ethical and
political questions that might otherwise be passed over. The various techniques that enact
resilience all provide ways of ordering the relation with the other, and thus produce new
experiences of self in the process. However, one distinguishing characteristic of resilience
techniques from other security mechanisms is their ability to visualise, operationalise and
modulate affect relations to unprecedented degrees. This is a double-edged sword. Resilience
appears to encompass the totality of socio-ecological life, to account for everything, including
change itself, in the language and imagery of resilience. Taken unproblematically, this has led
many scholars to fail to imagine or provide for no other alternative to resilience, no outside
that cannot be assimilated into a complex and emergent system (Walker and Cooper, 2011).
And yet, attention to the aesthetics of resilience recognises that resilience has no constitutive
power of its own: it produces its diagrammatic effects only to the extent that it is able to
appropriate affective relations and direct their force towards the production of a world of
complex systems and the precarious subjectivities that inhabit these worlds.

Thus, what could be possible in a genealogical and aesthetic reading of resilience is the ability
to think resilience in ways that work against the totalising tendencies of complexity theory,
codified resilience thinking and their representations. An aesthetic sensibility directs our
attention to the limits of resilience. The way that resilience addresses itself to insecurity is
partial and contingent, and is always open to being undermined, subverted or appropriated
within other ways of being together in contingency. These other ways are just that – other,
unknowable and alien (Rose, 2013) – but they remain the source of biopolitical novelty and
creativity, a product of the affective relations that make up the weft and weave of being
together, even as being together is now increasingly thought in terms of complex, interde-
pendent, and emergent social and ecological systems. An aesthetics of resilience is thus ethical
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as well as political, for it is open to the possibility that multiple resiliences circulate within,
through and outside a given governmental assemblage. Teasing out the ways life exceeds
resilience programming requires empirically grounded research attuned to the contingency of
resilience itself, and not simply the contingency of complex, emergent life. What other kinds
of resilience might be practiced? What other kinds of security might be pursued against the
violence and suffering of contemporary neoliberal political economies (and ecologies)? What
other worlds might be created through and against the new experiences of uncertainty and
insecurity resilience technologies produce? And, perhaps most importantly, what
subjectivities might inhabit these worlds?

About the authors

Kevin Grove is a Lecturer in Human Geography in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth
University. His research focuses on the biopolitics of disaster management in the Caribbean and North America, with
a special focus on community-based disaster resilience, reconstruction, and the radical possibilities of autonomous,
self-organised disaster relief activities. His work has been published in a variety of journals in geography and related
disciplines, including Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, the Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
Antipode and Security Dialogue. Kevin Grove, Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University,
Aberystwyth SY23 3DB, UK. Email: keg12@aber.ac.uk
Peter Adey is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway University of London. Peter specialises in the
relationship between mobility and security, particularly at the intersections of the political and the cultural. He has held
several major grants in this area, currently in relation to military cultures (ESRC), and the futures of mobility (Mobile
Lives Forum). Among other works he is author of Mobility (Routledge, 2009), Aerial Life (Wiley, 2010) and co-editor
of the collection From Above (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2013). Peter has worked extensively on the governing of
emergencies in both contemporary and historical contexts, with a particular focus on the arts, technologies and
practices of evacuation which will culminate in a major long-term book project. Peter Adey, Department of Geography,
Royal Holloway University of London, Egham TW20 0EX, UK. E-mail: peter.adey@rhul.ac.uk

Note
1 This line of argument is developed further in Brassett and Vaughan-Williams (forthcoming).

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© 2015 The Authors. Politics © 2015 Political Studies Association

POLITICS: 2015 VOL 35(1)