Agency, Affect, and the Immunological Politics of Disaster Resilience

Abstract

Resilience has become a foundational component within disaster management policy frameworks concerned with building ?cultures of safety? among vulnerable populations. These attempts at social engineering are justified through a discourse of agency and empowerment, in which resilience programming is said to enable marginalized groups to become self-sufficient and manage their own vulnerabilities. This paper seeks to destabilize this political imaginary through a critical analysis of participatory disaster resilience programming in Jamaica. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Jamaica's national disaster management agency, I argue that resilience operates through an affective economy of fear, hope, and confidence that enacts an immunitary biopolitics. The object of this biopolitics is excess adaptive capacity that results from affective relations between participants and their socioecological milieu. Participatory techniques such as transect walks, focus groups, and education programs attempt to encode and manipulate these affective relations in order to construct an artificial and depoliticized form of adaptive capacity that does not threaten neoliberal order. Recognizing the immunological logic at the heart of disaster resilience opens up new ethical and political imperatives in disaster management that value adaptive capacity as the vital force of new socioecological futures, rather than as an object of governmental intervention and controlPeer reviewe

Exercising emergencies: Resilience, affect and acting out security

“…In that vein, the state is also found to exercise distributed forms of power over the subject (Lentzos and Rose, 2009). These are less visible precisely because they appear in the shape of training modules (Grove, 2014) or psychological instructions (Howell, 2015). Grove (2014) describes the entirety of these governmental practices as 'resilience programming': resilience is being mediated through affective policies and immunizes the subject in a way that poses no threat to hierarchy and neoliberal order.…”

“…These are less visible precisely because they appear in the shape of training modules (Grove, 2014) or psychological instructions (Howell, 2015). Grove (2014) describes the entirety of these governmental practices as 'resilience programming': resilience is being mediated through affective policies and immunizes the subject in a way that poses no threat to hierarchy and neoliberal order. While he suggests increasing the focus on those techniques that 'manipulate affective relations in ways that produce agential subjects' (Grove, 2014: 245), he also asks whether resilience actually is 'something to be technocratically managed, an object of disaster management's liberal will to truth … [O]r can it be allowed to flourish in whatever direction it may take?'…”

“…Asking whether the resilient subject is only ever 'programmed', this article offers a closer, empirical look at how the supposed self-organization comes about. Despite the fact that resilience locates the responsibility to act out security within the subject, thus invoking specific bodily states to secure life itself, affect and a focus on the physical have only lately entered the critical discussions on resilience (Adey and Anderson, 2012;Grove, 2014). In addition, only a few authors have challenged the criticism that resilience creates only trained forms of self-organization (Adey and Anderson, 2012;Schmidt, 2015).…”

“…The subject is trained through specific resilience practices, such as exercises, that seek to conduct the conduct of emergency populations (Zebrowski, 2009; see also Duffield, 2012). This eventually instantiates active subjects, which do, however, act in an automated fashion (Aradau, 2010) and are robbed of their agency (Grove, 2014;Howell, 2015;Oels and Methmann, 2015).…”

“…United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), 2010). Critics refer to the way in which the 'responsibilization' of the threatened subject becomes an expression of neoliberal governance (Reid, 2012;Joseph, 2013), while the subject itself is 'programmed' to react in a fashion that internalizes neoliberal values (Grove, 2014). The subject is trained through specific resilience practices, such as exercises, that seek to conduct the conduct of emergency populations (Zebrowski, 2009; see also Duffield, 2012).…”