1
DRAFT, PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE WITH PERMISSION
ON THE GENEALOGY OF STRATEGIES
Nicholas Michelsen
Kings College London
Abstract:
This article examines what it might mean to write a genealogy of the strategy of ‘resilience’. The paper notes
that scholars writing critically about Resilience tend to refer to their work as operating under the influence of
Foucault or a Foucaultian method. This paper begins by asking how and to what degree genealogy forms the
coherent method or even set of method in three Foucaultian analyses of Resilience thinking. Identifying some
questions for the literature in this context, the paper examines the place of strategies in Foucault’s work, and
how this relates to genealogical method. Having suggested that genealogy must not ignore the history of
strategies of confrontation, I illustrate my argument by looking at the role of resilience in revolutionary
strategy. This paper centrally argues that lack of clarity about genealogy’s key methodological principles has
meant that reification is a recurrent problem in Foucaultian scholarship in this specific context, and has
precluded study of the strategic potentialities of resilience.
Introduction: Resilience and Politics
Resilience concerns the inoculation of a system or body from fatal degradation through enhancing its ability
to both withstand and bounce forwards from the experience of crisis. Encouraging or facilitating resilience,
whether in a critical infrastructure, a community facing economic or social stresses, or an ecology operating
amidst climate change, is a way of folding future risks into the system or body in question, so that its
openness to the unexpected (threats and dangers) become a source of productivity in the form of beneficial
adaptation. The more resilient you are, the better able you are to learn from and adapt to negative external
stresses. It has been widely inferred that resilience cannot, therefore, be political. It is a conceptualisation of
acquiesce and surrender to existing conditions. In this sense, it seems, the political debate around resilience
has become rather degraded in recent years
Clearly, resilience is not a thing, but a conglomeration of concepts, which may be deployed for a wide
range of different ends and purposes in a wide variety of contexts. Concepts are the tools by which we
orientate ourselves so as to act in the world. But, as the Frankfurt School noted, it is all too easy to confuse
our tools for the world they provide access to.1 A risk of reification seems clearly visible when critics of the
concept of Resilience almost universally conclude that it is, as an “ideal type,” a governmentality that
constitutes subjects as objects of depoliticised administration, but also recognising its “empirical diversity” or
performative multiplicity.2 Having said that, Resilience thinking does seem, quite intuitively, not to be
sufficiently concerned with ensuring we have a space to act and build the kind of polities we might want.
Rather, our polities, if they are to be resilient, must surely be organised by the stresses they must potentially
1
Daniel Levine
Ben Anderson, What kind of thing is Resilience, Politics, 2015, vol 35(11) 60-66. Brassett, James, and Nick VaughanWilliams. "Security and the performative politics of resilience: Critical infrastructure protection and humanitarian
emergency preparedness." Security Dialogue 46.1 (2015): 32-50.
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face. It is not therefore difficult to see why authors might argue that Resilience cannot be a politics, and
constitutes rather a logistical economistic rationale for identifying mechanisms by which a profit may be
gleaned from innate market uncertainty. Resilience appears highly resonant of the technology of
Schumpeterian creative destruction in the marketplace, wherein the potential for being outcompeted
enforces the efficient management of the system.
The key intuition here is that radical concepts like solidarity, resistance, contestation, revolt or
revolution, all of which assume a political negotiation of what a community of agents might wish to be
otherwise, seem to be rendered subservient to the demands of what must be done, if we are to be resilient,
in an environment of permanent insecurity. For example, the ‘Third Way’ claim that social democratic states,
if they are to be made resilient to the pressures of global capital flows, need to become nimbler, better
adapted to compete, so will need to scale back their safety net in some way for the sake of their own long
term adaptation.3 So, the critical claim that promoting Resilience is not and cannot be a matter of affirmative
politics makes a good deal of sense; since the concept seems to accept extant structural conditions rather
than potentially seeking to change them. There are good reasons for suspicion of the concept of Resilience.
What I take issue with in this paper is the conclusion that the concept of Resilience has no riotous political
possibilities whatsoever.
In the following sections, this article will suggest that discussions of politics and resilience have fallen
afoul of reification for some very simple methodological reasons related to the ways in which Foucault has
been read and mobilised. The result is that discussions of resilience have tended to disregard the possibility
of insurgent, disruptive, energetic, and political deployments of the concept. My argument will proceed in
three steps. In the first step I will review three influential accounts of resilience, each drawing from Michel
Foucault. In the second step I re-read Foucault on the relationship between Power, Strategy and Genealogy.
In the third step I develop a reading of Latin American counter-state strategists through the prism of
resilience thinking, briefly demonstrating that such discussions remain alive today. I will conclude that there
is clearly more to be gained from discussions of the radical potentialities of strategies of resilience than has
been allowed in recent literatures.
Genealogies of Resilience Thinking
Widespread suspicion about the political consequences of resilience thinking is linked to Foucaultian
approaches that expose an ‘intuitive fit’ between resilience and Neoliberal modes of governance. In this
section I will summarise three significant works in this tradition and pick out some general comments about
the methodological principles of the approaches found therein. The argument I shall put forwards is that
there are two general kinds of arguments about resilience in evidence; both are genealogical. The first marks
how resilience emerges in contemporary discourse first as a form of resistance or counter-conduct, exposing
the limitations of dominant modes of resource management in the biosphere. Such genealogies of resilience
expose the axiomatic incorporation of critiques such that they now becomes operative to neoliberal
governance. The second form of genealogical thinking posits the stronger claim that resilience, wherever we
see it today, embodies the signature of neoliberal powers’ operation. This may be because of its inherent
qualities as a concept - its fundamental nature, or because it is a second order concept - the
operationalisation of which is conditioned by the strategy of Neoliberal Power. There are valid elements to
these claims. My concern relates to how the latter genealogies claim to reveal a singular, lamentable,
apolitical content of the concept ‘resilience’.
3
See Habermas
3
The first work I will discuss is Walker and Cooper’s 20114 Genealogies of Resilience. This paper
appears in almost every critically-minded article published in the Journal Resilience: International Policies
Practices and Discourses. For Walker and Cooper, Genealogy allows identification of the “evolution” of
“resilience thinking” from a Leftist/Environmentalist formulation with Holling, to “one of collusion with an
agenda of resource management that collapses ecological crisis into the creative destruction of a truly
Hayekian financial order”. Genealogy is mobilised to articulate the story of the neo-liberalisation of modern
society, in the rise to hegemony of such logics across multiple fields of thinking. Walker and Cooper argue
that the early critical ambitions of Resilience thinking failed to result in the hoped-for political effects, due to
its “intuitive ideological fit” with the “Neoliberal philosophy of complex adaptive systems”. By implication,
whilst Resilience thinking was invented with the be nst of intentions, it integrally carried the seeds of a
regressive politics. Walker and Coopers article views genealogy as a means by which to show how complexity
science increasingly dominates social thought where energy physics or first-order cybernetics once held
sway. Resilience thinking is indicative of the new, if “tacit”, union of nature and society which overdetermines thought in fields from critical infrastructure protection to sustainable development.
Whilst Walker and Cooper are keen to emphasise the originally antagonistic concerns of Holling and
Hayek, and as such, to note the ambivalence of the original sources of resilience thinking, genealogy allows
us to tell the story of how ‘Resilience thinking’ moved from an early “position of critique (against the
destructive consequences of orthodox resource management), to one of collusion”, thereby becoming the
signature of the operation of Neoliberal governmentality. The movement mapped by genealogy is of a
procession, from a critical function to its opposite. Where Resilience thinking operates within a wide variety
of fields, we can adduce an increasingly unified contemporary meaning, function and politics, expressive of
Hayekian ontologies of market self-organisation. Where we see the signature of Resilience thinking today,
the point which Walker and Cooper conclude on is that we should develop critiques that refuse categorically
to draw on the terms of complex systems theory, and instead seek to think against the Resilience framework.
This has very much set the tone for subsequent works.
The second Foucaultian analysis of resilience I will examine is Jonathan Joseph’s 2013 Resilience as
embedded neoliberalism: a governmentality approach. Joseph argues that “it is through a Foucaultian
understanding of governing that we learn most about what the concept of resilience is actually doing” (40),
and therefore, implicitly, draws from the genealogical method which underpins Foucault’s work on
governmentality. He argues, in a manner that resonates with Walter and Cooper’s analysis, that Resilience is
an indicator of the dominant forms of neoliberal governmentality: “the recent enthusiasm for the concept of
resilience across a range of policy literature is the consequence of its fit with neoliberal discourse. This is not
to say that the idea of resilience is reducible to neoliberal policy and governance, but it does fit neatly with
what it is trying to say and do. A brief glance at the concept’s origins shows it to have certain ontological
commitments that make it ideally suited to neoliberal forms of governance.5” Whereas its origins in ecological
writings emphasised the possibility for change and restructuring, Joseph argues that the general disposition
to adapt to and absorb social shocks of all kinds fits neatly into a broader pattern of social theorisation,
which takes place under the aegis of new materialism, complexity and network analysis, which seeks to
“render the world governable in certain ways”6.
The issue at hand for Joseph is also that resilience thinking has a neat fit with the ontological
commitments of Neoliberal power (39). It is adopted by governments and other agencies as a consequence.
4
Walker, Jeremy, and Melinda Cooper. "Genealogies of resilience from systems ecology to the political economy of
crisis adaptation." Security dialogue 42.2 (2011): 143-160.
5
38
6
39 (See also Patricia Owens)
4
The spread of resilience discourse is explicable because it serves and promotes visions of the world which are
distinctively neoliberal. Resilience supports and reaffirms the kinds of social relations, systems of governance
and responsible autonomous subjects which neoliberalism wants (40). Joseph thinks that philosophical
discussions of Resilience miss the (Foucaultian/Genealogical) point, since “its rise to prominence is the result
of being in the right place at the right time. Contemporary conditions have given rise to certain practices of
governance by which the idea of resilience finds a home”. To understand Resilience we must place it within
the “the emergence and embedding of specifically neoliberal forms of governance” which seeks to limit
government and ‘govern at a distance’ (41).7 The point, therefore, is governance finds Resilience a useful
concept for intervening to promote “private enterprise and individual initiative” (42) as well as a range of
other things neoliberalism likes.8 Neoliberalism is the “logic behind the rise of resilience” (42).
A clear vision of genealogical method is in evidence here, as tracing the capture of the concept by the
broader governmentalities that deploy it (40). Joseph argues that he does not collapse resilience into
neoliberalism at the level of meaning. Rather his method is to show how “the effects of the use of the
concept” by neoliberal discourse (44). Scepticism about the concept amongst governments on the European
continent is due to the less pervasive quality of neoliberal ideas (49). Joseph concludes that “resilience does
not really mean very much and whatever meaning it does have changes depending on the context.” (47). The
concept of resilience itself is a “shallow” buzzword, and its presence little more than an epiphenomena of
the “rolling-out [of] neoliberal governmentality” (51). Politically speaking, however, we should seek to
oppose and resist this process. Since the concept resonates with the idea that we need not change the
Neoliberal reality but must rather learn to adapt to it (42-3), we need to be rid of resilience, for its continuing
presence is symptomatic of neoliberal depoliticisation (52).
The final text is a 2014 book length work by Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Resilient Life: the art of living
dangerously.9 Unlike Joseph’s article, this is a resolutely philosophical text. It is also set from the start as a
critique of the ‘resilience agenda’, which the authors see as approaching a “universal dogmatism”. As for the
previous authors, resilience is understood as a form of political intervention which assumes insecurity and
vulnerability is the natural order of things, and as such, that “resilience strategies… [are] intuitively in keeping
with neoliberalism and its systems of rule” (31xi). Resilience precludes any attempt to remake the world, or
rather imagine the conditions of its remaking. Resilience thinking is surrender to Neoliberalism.
This is an account which is similarly explicitly genealogical, as “an exercise [that] positively embraces
what Foucault termed the history of the present” (24). The central pivot of the analysis is the claim that it is
the underlying principles of Liberalism that have changed, and the purpose of their analysis is to show how
and understanding of life itself as resilient is at the heart of this. Where once Liberalism was built around a
security imperative, the dream that the bounded community may be secured has been replaced by “a
catastrophic imaginary that promotes insecurity by design”(2). The “ideal of resilience” (2) is, they argue,
linked to an abandonment of the security imperative. Now “exposure to danger” has become a “planetary
obligation” (2,4). The result is an utter desolation of political reason, and affirmative resistant politics, in
place of systematic reactionary pursuit of survival. The rise of resilience thinking is the end of all potential for
a political challenge to Neoliberal doctrine. The new normal is one in which a “sense of endangerment” (8) is
naturalised, alongside the normalisation of market rule. We are thus cheated or any means to die
affirmatively in the pursuit of ethical or political projects (13). In abandoning the security impulse, instead we
are expected to live in a normalised state of “petrified awe”. Resilience is a vision of the community as
“insecure by design” (21). This ideology of error makes politics, and certainly revolutionary politics, outdated,
7
(42).
(50).
9
Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously, Polity, 2014, Cambridge UK
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replacing it with technocratic rule (24-25). In this way Resilience offers a “key strategy in the creation of
contemporary regimes of power” (32).
Contra Joseph, Resilience is more than a utile tool of Neoliberal doctrine. The doctrine of Resilience is
an inherently and essentially reactionary vision of life (37). Evans and Reid build on Foucault’s Genealogy of
liberal biopolitics (38), but go beyond it. Resilience arises with the “changing cartography of liberal power”
(41). Unlike Joseph, for whom Resilience is captured by complex systems of Neoliberal rule but has little
content of its own, for Evans and Reid it is “this biologised notion of the subject is shaping the practices of
liberalism contemporarily” (my emphasis 40). It is “Resilient Life” which is the mover of the shift from
Liberalism to Neoliberalism, and concomitant shift from fostering security seeking subjects to resilient
subjects who are required to accept insecurity. Their argument is that the “terms of legitimacy of liberal
regimes have changed in accordance with a much altered account of the life whose existence is now said to
be endangered” (44). Neoliberal subjectivity (60) cannot stand still, and can only embrace its exposure – it is,
therefore a fortiori resilient subjectivity. Evans and Reid seek to demonstrate that the compatibility of
Resilience with neoliberal rule is based on a deep ontological link (75-76). This tension is explained via
Agamben, who they read as saying that economics was always “praxis of governance that functions naturally
by adapting to the nature of the object of governance”(76). Evans and Reid argue that “if there is anything
fundamental to liberalism then it is this: one cannot understand how liberalism functions, most especially
how it has gained the global hegemony that it has, without addressing how systematically the category of life
has organised the correlation of its various practices of governance, as well as how important the shift in the
very understanding of life, from the human to the biospheric, has been for changes in those practices” (77).
Genealogy here is the mapping of fundamentally discontinuous, but nonetheless systematic conceptions of
life, which are diagrammatically prevalent at different points in time. What has changed is the understanding
of life which defines Neoliberalism. And this understanding is resilient. Here it is ecological reasoning, and
the new account of life it creates, which is the enabler for entrepreneurial capitalism (77).
If differing in their causal claim regarding the significance of resilience, like Joseph, Evans and Reid
lament the attack on the social state (47) by “strategically promoting continual adaptation” (48). This logic
“is politically debasing, for it is on account of such an arrogant transfer of assumptions that the subject is
denied the capacity to demand of the regime that governs it that it provides freedoms from the dangers
which it perceives are threatening it” (62). In the strongest sense, “the resilient subject is not a political
subject” (42). Calling for a return to security and visions of freedom that do not collapse into exposure.(64)
Evans and Reid call for a return to social responsibility (65); a “re-articulation of a vernacular concept of
security is essential to such a purpose” (72). There are also links, in Evans and Reid’s case, to Walker and
Cooper’s analysis, in their recognition that Neoliberalism appropriates the emphasis on sustainability from
critiques of neoliberalism (71). Clearly, the rise of resilience thinking is linked to the success of critiques of
security thinking, but it is clear that Evans and Reid genealogy is making a far more ambitious claim, that the
Resilient subject embodies “the futility of resistance” (82) under the account of life that defines neoliberal
discourse.10
Evans and Reid reject categorically any idea that there might be a mode of resilience that emerges
somehow actively and politically ‘from below’.11 The concept is inherently reactionary.12 In this light,
unsurprisingly, Evans and Reid call for us to reject resilience (119). Rather we should seek to imagine roads
to transformation, by imagining new political worlds (136). Evans and Reid seek an “alternative and more
poetic vocabulary” to bring in a new politics of finitude, and claim that resilience cannot help us here:
10
(89)
(90)
12
(102)
11
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“strategies of resilience… put the very question of death into question by removing it from our critical gaze,”
which inhibits political imagination (170). Resilience leave us without “a subject capable of conceiving the
possibility of worldly transformation” (194-5).
I am, as I have elaborated elsewhere, not unsympathetic to the claim that “political truths are told by
subjects that risk life”.13 My concern, rather, is methodological. Joseph makes the claim that resilience is a
mobile concept that shifts according to the needs of exterior users, yet has a curious fit to neoliberal
doctrine. Walker and Cooper also argue that resilience is comprehensible via media of Neoliberalism’s
contingent capture of initially hostile critiques, on the one hand, whilst also noting the ‘intuitive’ ontological
fit between Resilience thinking and Neoliberalism, on the other. What is distinctive about Evans and Reid’s
claim is that they claim to have found the explanation of this intuitive fit; an ontology of life itself. The belief
that resilience tells us something intrinsic about life is clearly a problematic reification, but there is a danger
here, and also in Walker and Cooper and Joseph’s texts, that resilience becomes reified. All three analyses
mobilise Foucault to make relative claims about the peculiarly Neoliberal political content of the term
‘Resilience’. For all three texts, thinking with resilience today is thinking with and for the strategy of
Neoliberal power. It seems clear that the strong claim that this is a necessary relation is only present in Evans
and Reid, but there is certainly an implicit appeal to it in the other two texts. This is clear in that all three
texts are united in their call to resist neoliberalism by standing apart from and opposing the logics of
resilience it adopts. Is it necessarily the case that where we see the concept of resilience we see the
operation of a Neoliberal strategy of power? Is it necessarily the case that resistance to power must take the
form of a conceptual opposition to its strategy, that is to say acting from a position external to its logics? In
the following section I will examine the relationship between power, genealogy and strategy in Foucault, and
suggest some reasons why we might resist such a claim.
Foucault, Strategy and Genealogy
At the end of Michel Foucault’s 1982 article The Subject and Power he set out his understanding of how
“relations of power” are associated with what he called “relations of strategy”. In this text, Foucault also
spelt out his distance from the Frankfurt School’s critique of Instrumental Reason.14 Foucault makes clear
that he is interested in investigating the “links between rationalisation and power” only in specific contexts. 15
Whereas Charles Taylor read this as a progression on to Frankfurt School,16 Foucault is more commonly read
as making a radical break from their model of critique: “What we have to do is analyse specific rationalities
rather than always invoke the progress of rationalisation in general”.17 This new model of critique requires
analysing the history of “power relations through the antagonism of strategies”.18 What is at issue, Foucault
argued, is how relationships of power have become defined by a strategic struggle to determine the
conditions of free action or conduct.19
Foucault defines the exercise of power (786) as “an ensemble of actions which induce others to
follow from one another” (786). Power is not a matter of consent or domination, violence or passivity, it is
“an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or future” (789).
13
(198, 199, 202, see Michelsen forthcoming
Horkheimer, Max. Critique of instrumental reason. Verso Books, 2014.
15
Michel, Foucault The Subject and Power, Critical Enquiry Vol 8, no 4 1982 P779
16
Taylor, Charles. "Foucault on freedom and truth." Political Theory (1984): 159.
17
Michel, Foucault The Subject and Power, Critical Enquiry Vol 8, no 4 1982 P779
18
780
19
Taylor, Charles. "Foucault on freedom and truth." Political Theory (1984): 158.
14
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Foucault thus understands power as a strategic relationship.20 Power influences conduct understood as a
way of behaving “within a more or less open field of possibilities” (789). Foucault argues that power is
exercised when it acts upon that field of possibilities; as such, it is impossible to think the nature of power
without also thinking about the “complicated interplay” of strategies. It is worth observing that Foucault is
precisely not concerned to determine a ‘kind’ of action which conducts conduct and another ‘kind’ of action
which counter such conducting of conduct, but rather to demonstrate that relations of power of all kinds,
including forms of resistance, are strategically engaged in the determination of the field of action.21
Foucault argues that strategy may be understood in three ways, as i) “a question of rationality
functioning to arrive at an objective”, ii) “the way in which one seeks to have the advantage over others”
and, iii) “of the means destined to obtain victory” (793). He recognises that the defining locations for
strategic interactions and though, which combine all three, are “war or games”.22 Foucault goes on to say
that in other situations “the distinction between the different senses of the word ‘strategy’ must be
maintained” (793). In these three different understandings of strategy we see three different relations of
power. It is worth quoting Foucault at length:
“Referring to the first sense… one may call power strategy the totality of the means put
into operation to implement power effectively or to maintain it. One may also speak of a
strategy proper to power relations insofar as they constitute modes of action upon
possible action, the action of others. One can therefore interpret the mechanisms brought
into play in power relations in terms of strategies. But most important is obviously the
relationship between power relations and confrontation strategies. For, if it is true that at
the heart of power relations and as a permanent condition of their existence there is an
insubordination and a certain essential obstinacy on the part of the principles of freedom,
then there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight.
Every power relationship implies, at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle, in which the
two forces are not superimposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not finally
become confused. Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of
possible reversal (793-4).”
Foucault argues that such confrontations or “points of insubordination” show that struggle is integral to
power relations.23 Foucault concludes his piece by claiming that “the locking together of power relations with
relations of strategy” is a central marker of the history of societies, and must be the object of genealogical
analyses (795). In his lectures, Foucault puts this in relationship to what he refers to as counter-conducts,
which underpin his genealogy of governmentalities and their resistance around the Christian pastorate.24
Recent literatures concerned with elaborating the concept of “counter-conduct” have done an excellent job
of demonstrating how problematic imaginations of resistance in term of “standing apart from, and in direct
confrontation with, the power they oppose” are in light of Foucault’s analysis. In particular, the assumption
that concepts, movements or actors can be “categorized as either revolutionaries or collaborators, on the
side of either governors or the governed” has been critiqued inasmuch as it fails to acknowledge that
20
(789
Davidson, Arnold I. "In praise of counter-conduct." History of the Human Sciences 24.4 (2011): 25-41.
22
“where the objective is to act upon an adversary in such a manner as to render the struggle impossible for him. So
strategy is defined by the choice of winning solutions” (793).
23
(794).
24
“See Foucault, 2007b: 44).
21
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Foucault understood power and its confrontation as a complex interrelationship of strategies. 25 Clearly the
reification of one kind of action, as being essentially a form of power or counter-conduct, is not Foucault’s
point. We should not to confuse a specific strategic relationship for an essential political meaning. In their
emphasis on developing analytics by which we might examine contemporary resistance and protest
movements,26 literatures on counter-conduct have, however, by and large failed to develop the
methodological significance of Foucault’s point and its debt to the genealogical research programme
invented by Nietzsche. This is to say that genealogies are not genealogies unless they acknowledge the
primacy of lines of escape, or confrontation strategies, which Deleuze identified as the methodological pivot
of Foucault’s work.27
As Foucault put it in a 1976 lecture; Genealogy is “the union of erudite knowledge and local
memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge
tactically today.”28 Examining the relationship between strategies of confrontation and strategies of power,
and placing this connection at the driving seat off the history of the present, is the apparent motivation for
Foucault’s turn from archaeological to genealogical analysis in the 1970s and 1980s.29 The seriousness with
which he read Nietzsche, and his connection of “the analyses of systems of signs with the analysis of forms of
violence and domination”, is very clearly articulated in lectures to the College de France he gave in 19701971.30 Here ‘the will to know’ is, following Nietzsche, divided off from the illusion that we can find truths in
history, which, of course, is to identify another kind of truth that is “freed from this truth-lie” (the truth of
truth as lie) which opens up the possibility of tactical intervention in the present.31 Though it is certainly the
case that, in the lectures he gave just before his death in 1983-1984 on the Stoics and Cynics, he emphasised
the role of truth-telling in ancient philosophy, it seems unlikely that his aim was to identify a new
transcendent meta-methodology for Zarathustra-like prophetic interventions given his previous
statements.32 If there is a principle difference between their understandings of the ‘truth of the truth-lie’ it
appears to be that, whilst for Nietzsche, genealogy offers the vehicle for a universal will to the transvaluation
of values, which would later take the form of the conceptual personae of the prophetic Zarathustra, Foucault
remains clear that critique remains always bound to the specificities of the dispositif/assemblage of powerrelations in question.33 As such, the deployment of genealogy is tactical, local and specific, for Foucault, not
strategic and generic, as it might appear to be for Nietzsche. Having said that it is following Nietzsche that
Foucault argues that the purpose of genealogy is not to allow “the past to present itself as itself” but to make
25
Death, Carl. "Counter-conducts: a Foucauldian analytics of protest." Social Movement Studies 9.3 (2010): 240-1.
Davidson, Arnold I. "In praise of counter-conduct." History of the Human Sciences 24.4 (2011): 25-41.
26
See Foucault 2007a: 357. Rosol, Marit. "On resistance in the post-political city: conduct and counter-conduct in
Vancouver." Space and Polity 18.1 (2014). Massey, Ruth T. "Exploring counter-conduct in upgraded informal
settlements: The case of women residents in Makhaza and New Rest (Cape Town), South Africa." Habitat International
44 (2014): 290-296.
27
Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. U of Minnesota Press, 1988.
28
Foucault, Genealogy, History Wilson, Timothy H Philosophy Today; Summer 1995; 39, 2; Periodicals Archive Online pg.
157
29
Steve Smith, ‘The Self-Images of a Discipline: A Genealogy of International Relations Theory’, in International
Relations Theory Today, eds. Ken Booth and Steve Smith (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1995),p4
30
Foucault, Michel. Lectures on the Will to Know. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. p214.
31
Foucault, Michel. Lectures on the Will to Know. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. p219
32
Foucault, M. "The courage of truth (The government of self and others II). Lectures at the Collège de France 19831984, Palgrave Macmillan." (2011): 350
33
As he set out in the Subject and Power when critiquing the Frankfurt School.
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an “intervention in the present”.34 Whilst Foucault’s approach to Genealogy is distinctive,35 and clearly differs
from Nietzsche’s formulation, it is also clear that Foucault did not claim any break from the key
methodological associations that Nietzsche gave to the term.36
In this light, a return to Nietzsche’s original Genealogy of Morals, in particular, the essay “Guilt, Bad
conscience and the like,” will be helpful. This is the essay that inspired the most famous elements of
Foucault’s genealogical turn, and sets up criterion for the study that became Discipline and Punish. Here the
central function of Genealogy, or “Real History” as Nietzsche calls it, is clearly anti-systematising; a
reintroduction of difference, contingency, and the accidental play of forces as drivers for history, and in
particular the history of ideas. Foucault explicitly takes these points in his discussion of genealogy as the
rejection of any and all stories of origin, through the study of lines of descent, and of the constitutive process
of historical emergence through confrontation on that line.37 These confrontations take the form of a
procession of “dominations”, but “the fact of domination may only be the transcription of a mechanism of
power resulting from confrontation and its consequences”38. It is clear, for Foucault following Nietzsche, that
“every strategy of confrontation dreams of becoming a relationship of power”,39 as such, historical analysis
cannot make the assumption that power precedes, somehow, resistance to it. The success of resistance is
the creation of a new power relation. Power-relations are indissociable from relations of strategy.
To bring this back to the subject at hand, to think the strategic function of resilience, for example,
requires that we distinguish between, but also recognise the shifting historical relations between: 1)
Resilience as a “power-strategy”, 2) Resilience as a “strategy proper” and 3) Resilience as a “confrontation
strategy”. Clearly, Evans and Reid are concerned to identify Resilience with the totality of the contemporary
strategy of power, and the texts written by Walker and Cooper and Joseph are more inclined to view
resilience as a contingent strategy proper to Neoliberal power relations. Foucault, however, makes it clear
that it is the latter which is “most important”, in that it defines and orientates the former two by marking the
constitutive points of insubordination within any strategic relationship. In this light, it seems reasonable to
ask why Resilience’s active role within the history of confrontation is assumed to have relatively little
relevance to struggles today. Must the role of resilience in political confrontations be limited to its early
development as a critique of resource management in Holling’s ecological theory? Must we infer that it no
longer carries any confrontational or critical heft, as Reid and Evans, Walker and Cooper, and Joseph all
claim, and that we must simply oppose Resilience? Nietzsche can offer us useful methodological signposts for
answering these questions.
34
Timothy Wilson, Foucault, Genealogy History. Philosphy Today, Summer 1995 39, 2 p169. Tamboukou, Maria.
"Writing Genealogies: an exploration of Foucault's strategies for doing research." Discourse: studies in the cultural
politics of education 20.2 (1999): 202
35
See Sax, Benjamin C. "Foucault, Nietzsche, history: Two modes of the genealogical method." History of European
Ideas 11.1-6 (1989): 769-781. For Sax, it is clear that the adoption of genealogy is the refinement of Foucault’s project,
clarifying how intervention in the present was possible. See p780. Other authors, Rorty for example, have seen the
Neitzschean turn in the late Foucault as a break in his work: See Richard Roorty, Beyond Nietzsche and Marx, London
Review of Books 1981. See Mahon, Michael. Foucault's Nietzschean genealogy: Truth, power, and the subject. SUNY
Press, 1992, for a good discussion of the relationship.
36
Foucault, Michel. "Nietzsche, genealogy, history." Semiotexte 3.1 (1978): 78-94.Timothy Wilson, Foucault, Genealogy
History. Philosophy Today, Summer 1995 39, 2 p157.. Tamboukou, Maria. "Writing Genealogies: an exploration of
Foucault's strategies for doing research." Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education 20.2 (1999): 201-217.
For some dispute see, Sax, Benjamin C. "Foucault, Nietzsche, history: Two modes of the genealogical method." History
of European Ideas 11.1-6 (1989): 769-781. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism
and hermeneutics. University of Chicago Press, 2014.
37
Foucault, Michel. "Nietzsche, genealogy, history." Semiotexte 3.1 (1978): 78-94.
38
Michel, Foucault The Subject and Power, Critical Enquiry Vol 8, no 4 1982 P795
39
Michel, Foucault The Subject and Power, Critical Enquiry Vol 8, no 4 1982 P794
10
Nietzsche wrote The Genealogy of Morals in explicit opposition to texts that assume we can uncover
the fundamental meaning of systems of religious faith by identifying the signature of its origins in its
contemporary forms.40 Nietzsche sets out to unpack where Christian morality comes from, but is radically
opposed to such a search for original or fundamental meanings.41 What makes Genealogy a ‘real history’, for
Nietzsche, is its refusal to identify a single origin, meaning or event, which lets us know the fundamental
truth or essence of, say, Christian morality. Christian morality is seen as the result of a conjugation of a
number of diverse lines of development, and the moral system is seen to include multiple concepts –
including, guilt, resentment, shame, cruelty, conscience, obligation, responsibility, sin and punishment. This
moral architecture emerged from a wide variety of different processes, including, the turning of aggression
inwards with urbanisation, the resentment of slaves against their masters, the links between debt-collection
practices and cruelty in primitive societies, priests’ will to dominate, and so on.42 He argues that morality is
the result of the continent assemblage of all these different processes, each forming a different element of
the moral machinery, linking together sin, ought, punishment, duty, and so forth, through largely incidental
processes wherein particular socio-historical agents or actors found particular use in constructing each
concept or element in a particular way in relation to particular practices. The point is to see how power
relations are diversely involved in this assemblage. So, Nietzsche is not genealogically seeking out a
fundamental truth residing in the contemporary concept of morality. He is making the opposite claim; that
the meaning of morality is subject to a history of permanent hijackings by all kinds of social forces. Genealogy
recounts the episodes of struggle between different wills, each trying to impose an interpretation, use or
significance on the conceptual object (punishment, duty, etc.) that go into a ritual, social practice, system of
belief, or moral order, and thereby disentangle the separate strands of meaning that have come together in
contingent unity in the present.43 To quote Nietzsche directly: “We want historians to confirm our belief that
the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms
our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference”. Clearly Resilience
thinking, much like Christian morality (indeed, Evans and Reid argue that it is a kind of moral order) similarly
assembles a variety of diverse concepts including adaptability, flexibility, mobility, bouncing-back in the face
of adversity, learning from disaster, and decentralised decision making, which also have emerged from a
multiplicity of sources, practice, processes and disciplines. It should be clear why a generic location of
‘Resilience thinking’ within a historical progression from sovereignty to biopolitics, or with a progression
from critical ecological thinking to a neoliberal ideological hegemony might be problematic. The principle
danger, with respect to the Genealogies of Resilience reviewed above, is that expressed by Alberto Toscano
with respect to Agamben’s recent work, that they fail to “attend to the possibility … that the resilience of
certain thought forms… might be less relevant than their redeployment to radically different ends, within
incommensurable contexts”.44 The resilience of Resilience, that is to say, its presence across numerous
disciplines and contexts, is likely to involve a number of distinct and incommensurable forces or processes of
capture and mobilisation.
Genealogy is the history of in-commensurabilities, of redeployments to radically different ends
within quite different contexts, by radically different powers. As an anti-systematising method, it precludes
any kind of historical progression. It allows only for the “succession of processes of subjugation, more or less
profound, more or less independent, which operate on the thing”. In this sense, Genealogy will always find
40
Think of Frasers The Golden Bough, which argued that all Religion originated in the harvest ritual –
Though, of course, he famously concludes that Christian morality is custom-fitted for slavery.
42
Reference I THINK: RAYMOND GEUSS, NIETZSCHE AND GENEALOGY in European Journal of Philosophy 1994 vol 2
issue 3 pp 274-292
43
ibid
44
Toscano 230
41
11
that, as Nietzsche put it, the “the form is fluid, the meaning is even more so”, as they emerge and evolve
through and in capture by the constant play of historical forces.45 Genealogy’s most important feature is that
it does not claim that the history of a concept, system of beliefs, social practice, ritual, etc., provides any
indication as to its current meaning, form, or political utility, since all modes of thought, social practices,
belief systems, etc., are multiplicities defined by histories of the capture and contingent assemblage of their
constituent parts by historical forces of diverse kinds. The point Foucault draws explicitly from this is that our
genealogies should focus on the struggles that define that history. My central point is, therefore, that whilst
Resilience is clearly a good candidate for genealogical research, it cannot be genealogically found to have an
essential contemporary meaning or political content, say, as Neoliberal – after all, Neoliberalism is its own
shipwreck of conceptual associations.
The political content of a concept is assembled through its capture and use by historical forces. This
is something which Joseph recognises. The inference Josephs then draws, with only limited caveats, is that
resilience must be rejected forthwith as a corrupted concept. We cannot, of course, fail to recognise the
utility and function of resilience thinking under Neoliberal rationalities, but we should problematize any
neatness and finality with which this is posited as the marking essential political meaning upon the concept.
Foucaultian studies of resilience see themselves as identifying the systematic spread of a ‘kind of thinking’
across numerous fields of concern, unifying them around a particular system of ideas or political diagram
(Neoliberalism), that is therefore showed to constitute the dominant formation of power/knowledge. The
signature of the concept is an identifier of this transcendental political content: ‘Resilience thinking’ becomes
the irrevocable signature of the operation of Neoliberal power. To read Resilience as Neoliberal in this way is
to achieve the precise inversion of the methodology which Foucault adopts from Nietzsche. Genealogy
becomes a means to identifying the truth inhering in a concept today, marking a concept with a signature
that over-codes all its previous or subsequent meanings. It appears to be in this vein that Josephs suggests
that all new materialism, network thinking, carry the irrevocable seeds or signature of neo-liberal power.
Evans and Reid put this claim even more strongly, in asserting that resilience is inherently neoliberal. The
point of genealogy is that the political meaning associated with a particular use of a thing, whether it is a
concept, a ritual or an object, does not have any universal qualities.
Tracing “signatures” is the methodological heart of Agamben’s work on the Political Theology of the
market (providential Oeikonomia) in The Kingdom and the Glory. In this text, Agamben traces the concept of
the market back to early Augustinian discourse on the holy trinity and identifies therein the emergence of a
concept of the “divine economy”. In doing so, he adds an addendum to his famous work on the biopoliticssovereignty nexus, ambiguating his account of the theological roots of modern politics and society:
“Agamben paints political modernity as trapped in mechanisms fabricated by Christian modernity” (Toscano
229), drawing on the concept of “the signature” to genealogically identify the hidden theological machine
that underpins all the operations of our supposedly secular world. If, as Toscano suggests, we must better
attend to the genealogy of redeployments and struggles within different contexts (230), we must attend to
the history of “means of escape or possible flight” that define the emergent descent of a thing, whether it be
a concept, social practice, ritual, etc. (794 Foucault). We should be concerned with unpacking the genealogy
of the multiplicity of conceptual forms, practices, and ideas that assemble into “resilience thinking” so as to
determine its relevance to the confrontation strategies by which power relations are continually confronted.
To think this means ‘reaching a judgement on whether resilience is good or bad’ is really to completely miss
the genealogical point. The same critique applies to histories of concepts like ‘The Social,’ which have
undergone similar kinds of ‘analysis by reification’ in recent years.46
45
46
Nietzsche
Patricia Owens, Forthcoming
12
The point here is not that we shouldn’t be interested in how Neoliberal rationalities find uses for
Resilience thinking, but that Resilience thinking itself does not have any integral political meaning. Use does
not indicate essential meaning, only a place within relations of strategy. As Price noted, “the starting point
for drawing from the insights of methods such as genealogy is… their value in opening up insightful,
important, and fruitful avenues of inquiry.”47 The danger, therefore, is that the mode of deployment of
genealogy ends up closing off avenues of inquiry into resilience and its tactical utility to the present rather
than opening them up. All concepts carry a history of confrontation over their meaning and use, as do all
social forms, rituals, practices and institutions. Analytic and political dead ends arise when genealogy
becomes solely concerned with telling the story of a supposedly coherent strategy of power, and fails to be
concerned with uncovering the history of confrontation that remains integral to it. 48 To write the genealogy
of resilience thinking requires we take seriously its history as a confrontation strategy, not because this tells
us what the term ‘really means’, but because this is the only way to avoid reifying our conceptual object, that
is to say, confusing a specific use for an essential meaning.
On resilience in revolutionary strategy
Urban resilience has been a subject of varied study in recent years, with particular focus on the
governmental project to promote an infrastructure that is resilient to shocks of multiple kinds.49 An emphasis
on the networked quality of the urban environment is seen as central to Neoliberal governance strategies.
The problematization of the urban environment in terms of resilience is not, however, unique to Liberalism
or Neoliberal discourse. We find a significant strand of thought on the city as a problem of resilience within
Latin American ‘counter-state’ and ‘counter—liberal’ revolutionary strategy. Of course, there is also a long
history of military strategic thinking on resilience and urban infrastructure, which carries its own complex
genealogy of learning through interaction between insurgents and counter-insurgents.50 My purpose in
looking at a particular body of counter-state thinking around the city and resilience here is to show, as clearly
47
Price, Richard. "A genealogy of the chemical weapons taboo." International Organization 49.01 (1995): 103.
Indeed, the danger of reading Foucault’s genealogy in this way may well be laid by Foucault himself, since, unlike
Nietzsche, he tended to establish “definable historical periods” and tended towards flatter genealogical progressions
which contrasted with Nietzsche’s discoveries of “over-lappings, strange continuities and terminological confusions”.
See Sax, Benjamin C. "Foucault, Nietzsche, history: Two modes of the genealogical method." History of European Ideas
11.1-6 (1989): p772.
49
McDaniels, Timothy, et al. "Fostering resilience to extreme events within infrastructure systems: Characterizing
decision contexts for mitigation and adaptation." Global Environmental Change 18.2 (2008): 310-318. Boin, Arjen, and
Allan McConnell. "Preparing for critical infrastructure breakdowns: the limits of crisis management and the need for
resilience." Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 15.1 (2007): 50-59. Coaffee, Jon, and David Murakami
Wood. "Security is coming home: rethinking scale and constructing resilience in the global urban response to terrorist
risk." International Relations 20.4 (2006): 503-517. Vale, Lawrence J., and Thomas J. Campanella. The resilient city: How
modern cities recover from disaster. Oxford University Press, 2005. Campanella, Thomas J. "Urban resilience and the
recovery of New Orleans." Journal of the American Planning Association 72.2 (2006): 141-146. Godschalk, David R.
"Urban hazard mitigation: creating resilient cities." Natural hazards review 4.3 (2003): 136-143. Williamson, Matthew
M. "Resilient infrastructure for network security." Complexity 9.2 (2003): 34-40. Chernick, Howard, ed. Resilient city:
The economic impact of 9/11. Russell Sage Foundation, 2005. Godschalk, David R. "Urban hazard mitigation: creating
resilient cities." Natural hazards review 4.3 (2003): 136-143. Brassett, James, Stuart Croft, and Nick Vaughan‐Williams.
"Introduction: An agenda for resilience research in politics and international relations." Politics 33.4 (2013): 221-228.
Aradau, Claudia. "Security that matters: Critical infrastructure and objects of protection." Security Dialogue 41.5 (2010):
491-514. Coaffee, Jon. "Rescaling and Responsibilising the Politics of Urban Resilience: From National Security to Local
Place‐Making." Politics 33.4 (2013): 240-252. Heath-Kelly, Charlotte. "Securing through the failure to secure? The
ambiguity of resilience at the bombsite." Security Dialogue 46.1 (2015): 69-85.
50
Rinaldi, Steven M. "The Military Roots of Critical Infrastructure Analysis and Attack." Wiley Handbook of Science and
Technology for Homeland Security (2009). The coming of Age of the Urban Guerrilla, Kilcullen
48
13
as possible, that this discussion also has a revolutionary lineage in this context, and thereby lay down some
elements of a genealogy of resilience as a confrontation strategy.
It is clear that resilience thinking, with particular respect to the urban milieu, plays an important role
at a particular moment in the evolution of revolutionary strategic theory during the 1960s, where Latin
American Communists were debating the relative importance of the party vs. military leadership of the
revolutionary movement, mobile vs. sedentary practice, and, most importantly, the urban vs. rural milieus of
struggle drawing on tropes that are characteristic of ‘resilience thinking’. This matters not simply because it
constitutes a counter-state or revolutionary footnote in the genealogy of Resilience, and so allow us to
gesture towards the methodological value of prizing lost events, incommensurability and ambiguity over
elegance and order when embarking on conceptual histories. It matters because it provides concrete
indicators towards how the concept has and may be used otherwise than in support of neoliberal
governance strategies.
Whilst many articulations of focoist thought (a theory of revolution by way of guerrilla warfare) have
linked it determinately to the Maoist tradition, the writings of Ernesto Guevara, Regis Debray and Carlos
Mariguella, offer us insights into a unique period of revolutionary thought, during which a ‘practice turn’
drove revolutionaries away from abstract theoretical discussion of Marxian principles of historical-materialist
teleology, to the tactical pragmatics of revolutionary success. An important corollary of these developments
was the rejection of Party leadership in place of Guerrilla leadership of the revolutionary struggle. Focoist
theorists deemed the urban environment a tactical realm, in which actions are always in support of the
strategic rural mobilisation to encircle and then, at the final stage of the revolutionary process, capture the
towns as the seats of established political authority. The arguments deployed by these thinkers bear all the
hallmarks of Resilience thinking; emphasising the capacity to bounce back from failure, the necessity of
developing personal tenacity in the face of hardship, extreme mobility, and tactical flexibility/adaptability in
the face of losses. This ‘resilience thinking’ orientates subsequent revolutionary strategic thought, as I will
develop in the following section.
Revolutionary theorists in 1960s Latin America noted that a guerrilla revolutionary movement,
particularly in its early stages, was highly vulnerable to encirclement. Supply lines and communications are
too easily disrupted, as such establishing and holding static independent territories is a dead end. Seizing
ground and occupying it invited catastrophe. Regis Debray argued that establishing independent
revolutionary territorial entities, as advocated by preceding revolutionary theorists, have insufficient stickingpower to survive their inevitable attraction of the focussed attentions of larger, well organised and better
armed state army. In this sense, resilience thinking runs very clearly throughout Debray’s Revolution in the
Revolution. Indeed, he sets out his critique of prior revolutionary strategy in terms that prioritise learning
productively from the mistakes of the past: He begins his classic indictment of Communist theoretical naivety
by advocating flexible and reflective practice (21). Flexibility is critical, Debray argued, because it allows the
revolutionary to recover in the face of inevitable tactical and strategic errors. He notes that the most
important lesson that Fidel learnt from Bolivar was “Tenacity” in the face of defeat.51 This is also the lesson of
the Cuban revolution, which Debray argues is as a “lesson in tenacity”. Fidel found himself “more than once
on the brink of disaster”. The essence of the revolutionary spirit is to be able to survive “false starts and so
many errors”. The new strategic orientation advocated by Debray assumes that “all decisive revolutionary
processes must begin and have begun with certain missteps... because the existing points of departure are
those left by the preceding historical period, and they are used, even if unconsciously” (23). Success in
revolutionary practice is not about applying abstract models blindly, but of learning through disastrous
51
p22
14
failure, as in Colombia: “for a revolutionary, failure is a springboard. As a source of theory it is richer than
victory: it accumulates experience and knowledge” (24).
In this regard, Debray is reading Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara closely, who argued that “the positive quality
of this guerrilla warfare is precisely that each one of the guerrilla fighters is ready to die, not to defend an
ideal, but rather to convert it into reality” (12), and that “this fighting attitude” is defined by an attitude of
“not being dismayed at any time”. Perseverance in the face of adversity is critical, and drives the necessary
tactical and strategic innovations in revolutionary practice. The critical lack of resilience possessed by
guerrilla forces at the beginning of their struggle is expressed and examined on a number of fronts. Guevara,
and Debray following him, are absolutely clear that the state forces that they face will be stronger, better
armed, and better organised than they. The state enemy has a disciplined professional army and
bureaucracy, and is thus highly resilient to any damage inflicted by the revolutionary forces. At the early
stages, the guerrilla army, by contrast has almost no capacity to suffer damage. Its highly limited arms
supplies mean that every lost gun is a disaster. The guerrilla must, for example, always retrieve weapons
from fallen comrades. The guerrilla’s limited numbers mean every fallen comrade is a catastrophe: Where
every “enemy loss is always repairable”, they recognise that repair to a guerrilla unit takes great effort and
time. When the Guerrilla force is young, it is peculiarly vulnerable to complete obliteration in a frontal attack.
To maximise its ability to engage in the struggle, the guerrilla must therefore avoid any frontal engagements.
The guerrilla movement begins by restricting its actions to limited hit and run attacks – so early the struggle
takes on a “negative quality an attitude of retreat” (11).
The guerrilla must constantly be able to flee encirclement, luring the enemy into traps, retreating to
attack from different points continuously, making the most of the cover of darkness. Radical mobility and
tactical flexibility are the only way that the guerrilla can counter the reality that losses are never equal
between the guerrilla and his or her enemy. For this reason, the urban environment must be avoided at all
costs, since it precludes mobility. The guerrilla foco needs time to develop until it takes on the (resilient)
characteristics of a regular army: “At the outset, the essential task of the guerrilla fighter is to keep himself
from being destroyed. Little by little it will be easier for the members of the guerrilla band to adapt
themselves to their form of life and to make flight and escape from the forces that are on the offensive an
easy task because it is performed daily”. The critical issue here is the capacity to vary ones tactics according
to circumstance, necessitating continual readjustment, in response to the actions of the enemy. Given this
differential, the “most fundamental” characteristic of the guerrilla is “flexibility”, he or she must adapt to all
circumstances: “against the rigidity of classical methods of fighting, the guerrilla fighter invents his own
tactics at every minute of fight and constantly surprises the enemy” (17). Tactical elasticity, diversion, and
then sudden attack which rapidly “converts itself to total passivity”, allowing the enemy to relax before
striking again. This allows the guerrilla to balance the greater resilience of its foe. This “nomadic” flexibility,
implies a strategy of revolutionary resilience. To achieve this, one must never enter the cities - they are a
space which is antithetical to the movement’s resilience.
The radical nomadism of the early stages requires selection of the most favourable ground
(Mountains, etc.) which allow the retention of lines of communication. The more unfavourable the ground,
the more mobility and speed must be emphasised, and the smaller the revolutionary groups must be. For
example, when fighting on plains it is hard to avoid encirclement. It is urban and suburban warfare however,
which is the most unfavourable ground. The groups must be even smaller to retain survivability, as the group
cannot move far from the area in which it operates, speed must be emphasised as there are inherent
limitations on distance of withdrawal. Near or in cities, the foco must be nocturnal in extreme since
encirclement will almost always lead to death. Debray quotes Fidel Castro (Debray 63) that “the city… is a
cemetery of revolutionaries and resources”. The Urban milieu is such unfavourable ground that
15
revolutionaries should stay out, at all cost, and that it is only the urban location of party elites that brings the
guerrillas there – an excellent reason that leadership should shift to the guerrilla forces. Indeed Debray
makes an even stronger case than Guevara for the abandonment of the urban space. Its only value is
potentially in tying up enemy forces (74) but in the main, any resources used in the urban milieu are wasted,
due to the risk inhering in entry into the urban milieu.
Regis Debray is explicit; at the nomadic early stages, the only advantages of guerrilla force over
repressive army are his “mobility and flexibility”. The aim is to disperse enemy’s expeditionary force out into
the countryside – reduce its manoeuvrability, ensure its rear guard is never secure. To scatter it so it loses
strength and constantly attack and weaken its elite forces. The guerrilla must attack the “idea of
unassailability”, so as to degrade the enemy army’s morale. The problem is that “the guerrilla forces are
weak everywhere and the enemy, however scattered he may be, is strong everywhere”. Here an
environmental grand strategy must arise from “series of experiments of a tactical nature” 6. 60. This is
described as a “practical apprenticeship” built out of specific knowledge of the environment of struggle. The
enemy will seek always to destroy the foco in early stages before it can “adapt to the terrain or link itself
closely with the local population or acquire the minimum of experience”.52 Guevara similarly argued that the
rural environment is key, both in hosting inaccessible positions and giving access to supportive populations,
whose knowledge of the countryside will help guerrillas to hide in the wilds. Acquiring such intimate
knowledge of the environment will allow the guerrilla to combat the superior strength of the enemy with a
rural strategy of exhaustion: “Blows should be continuous” (13), aiming to deprive enemy of sleep, and
attack morale by giving them the impression of being surrounded on all sides. Through sabotage and
organising strikes, “it is possible to paralyse whole armies”, suspend the industrial life of a zone, leave
inhabitants of city without factories, light, water, communications, and unable to travel at night. All of this
attacks morale, until “the fruit ripens for plucking”. The Guerrilla must act like a “swarm” 14, spreading out
gradually, and eating away at the resolve of the enemy state.
The benefits of the rural milieu are also explicitly framed in terms of developing psychological
resilience, in the development of the right personal ‘guerrilla’ characteristics, for Guevara. The difficult life of
the guerrilla in the wilds ensures the development of individual characteristics that are constitutive for the
struggle at large. The Guerrilla learns to carry only the indispensable, leaving his or her family behind, and
this establishes the necessary devotion and firmness. Guevara explicitly emphasise the willingness to
experience suffering: “staying in the wildest zones, knowing hunger, at times thirst, cold, heat, sweating
during continuous marches, letting the sweat dry on his body and adding to it new sweat without any
possibility of regular cleanliness”. All these are essential to the Guerrilla ‘spirit’. Individuals need to be
trained to suffer “formidable privations” 82, to live in open air, suffer inclemencies of weather. The guerrilla
is a demanding life, as such, “no rigid scheme can be offered for the organisation of a guerrilla band, there
will be innumerable differences according to the environment in which it is to operate” (42) Only the
development of these individual characterises will allow the guerrilla struggle to sustain itself through the
nomadic period long enough to develop into a semi-nomadic stage, and then finally shift to a war of
movement that can capture the towns. That what is in question here is a mode of ‘resilience thinking’ seems
clear: “to survive in the midst of these conditions of life and enemy action, the guerrilla fight must have a
degree of adaptability that will permit him to identify himself with the environment in which he lives, to
become part of it, and to take advantage of it as his ally to the maximum possible extent... adaptability and
inventiveness (34)”
Guevara, much like Debray, emphasised revolutionary strategy’s contingency on the analysis of the
resources of the enemy. Flexibility and openness to constant modification are key (13). The movement must
52
Debray
16
go from small to large, from one foco to expand: the “small motor sets the big motor of the masses in
motion”. Only by having that foco lead from the rural battlefield can a “large measure of tactical
independence” be achieved. Party leadership is unsuited, due to its propensity for academic talk fests and
politicking, to the strategic needs of guerrilla warfare. Debray will also argue that the urban politician simply
lacks the personal characteristics necessary to lead the struggle, and relies rather on abstract positions of
theoretical faith. He or she is highly vulnerable to politicking and talking-shops, and is very easily targeted by
the state. In this sense, an urban political leadership is a source of vulnerability, and inhibits innovation.
Debray argues that a unified rural leadership is nonetheless necessary. It is critical, he argues, that
the “concentration of resources and men in a single foco permit the elaboration of a single military doctrine,
in the heat of the combats in which men receive their training”8. A hierarchical leadership is needed to
innovate tactically and develop strategies fitted to the contingent circumstances. The rural leader possesses
resilient personality traits, makes the struggle more resilient, and is able to bounce back from defeat by
innovating from a safe place far from urban vulnerability. The discussion is tightly bound up with concepts of
adaptability, flexibility, mobility, willingness to learn from failure, and indeed, explicitly seeing failure as a
chance to bounce back stronger with a better designed revolutionary strategy. It seems clear that both
Guevara and Debray are strategists of resilience.
The problematization of urban resilience in these texts clearly influenced the writings of Carlos
Mariguella53, author of the infamous Handbook of the Urban Guerrilla. Mariguella launches his engagement
with revolutionary strategy from a disagreement with Debray and Guevara on the need for a single founding
foco, on the dangers of decentralised leadership and above all, on the need to avoid at all costs the urban
milieu. These critiques are all framed in terms of resilience thinking. Indeed, in making a case for drawing
struggle back into the urban space, Mariguella seems to radicalise the role of resilience thinking in
revolutionary thought. Mariguella argues that urban terror often precedes and sparks wider rural guerrilla
war (32): indeed this is a “basic principle of revolutionary strategy” (46). But after this spark, the city remains,
for Mariguella, an essential (though not decisive) area of “complementary struggle”(47). The city is a
necessary location for the implementation of diversionary techniques to create tension and sidetrack armed
forces, so as to prevent concentration on and encirclement of the rural guerrilla. The urban space is a space of
vulnerability, but it is also such for the state. Whereas there can be no mass urban struggle, small urban
groups involved in lightning strikes, ambushes, assassinations and sabotage, strike at a unique vulnerability
for the state. Without this urban action to “confuse and divert the enemy, the rural foco is doomed” by its
lack of resilience to the focused predations of the state.54
Only a turn to resilience thinking can make the city a viable location for such diversionary struggle.
The vulnerability of urban guerrillas can only be tempered by radical decentralisation: “we have kept our
organisation free from complex command systems depending on internal hierarchies and a numerous and
immobile bureaucracy at the top.”55 Innovation by small groups to engage in highly flexible revolutionary
action is essential to countering the inherent vulnerability in the city (30). Mariguella advocates no complex
chain of command, rather highly mobile independent groups engaged in perpetual local initiatives: this is a
“new experiment in revolutionary organisation and leadership” emphasising radical decentralisation (p5558). This decentralisation allows the “decisive moving force in the movement” to be “the initiative of its
revolutionary groups” 59 64. Mariguella thus put even greater emphasis on resilient pragmatics over ideal
54
55
Mariguella (122)
(p 40)
17
theory: “It is better to act mistakenly than to do nothing for fear of doing wrong; you cannot be an urban
guerrilla without spirit of initiative” 65. This is the “most important quality” of the urban guerrilla, and
requires developing the right kind of personal dispositions: a psychological resistance “to fatigue, patient,
calm, clear headed in even the worst predicaments” (65).
Non-hierarchical organisation into small independent groups of no more than five is also critical for
promoting such a spirit of initiative and experimentation (71). Such radical decentralisation will instantiate “a
vast and indestructible network” (72). Every attack will be followed instantly by withdrawal. Such
decentralised swarming is “essential if the guerrilla forces are to survive”. The aim is harassing, disheartening
and confusing enemy force, thus gradually eroding its capability, and encouraging it to overreact. This is a
instantiates a “war of nerves” (90), in which the aim is to out-compete the enemies. Mariguella’s approach is
predicated on decentralisation and flexibility, but rather than emphasising perseverance in the face of
weakness, he attempts to organise for resilience. Fragmentation allows the guerrilla to out compete the
resilient stat.56 The larger and more centralised the organisation, the less able to sustain themselves. The city
thus moves from being a site of pure vulnerability for the guerrilla, to being a site of vulnerability for the
state also, where confusion, fear and uncertainty can be fostered.
This is, of course, not a full genealogy, only a fragment. What this fragment suggests, however, is a
revolutionary problematization of the city in terms of the strategy of resilience. The urban milieu is theorised
precisely so as to enable a struggle against the state understood in terms of a conflict of resiliences. This
suggests that resilience is not without riotous or revolutionary potentialities, indeed, it seems to be heir to a
rich history as a confrontation strategy from which contemporary tactical and strategic insights for revolt
might be drawn. This kind of mobilisation of resilience thinking in counter-strategic contexts is clearly in
evidence today. The Tarnac Nine were arrested on 11 November 2008 on the grounds that they had been
involved in a series of sabotage actions against high-speed train-lines.57 In lieu of substantive evidence, the
key plank in the prosecutors’ case was their alleged authorship of a book entitled The Coming Insurrection,
which had been published anonymously under the pen name of a group referring to themselves as The
Invisible Committee.58 What is interesting for my purposes here is that it is the text itself which is viewed as
threatening to the state. The text only justifies such a reading inasmuch as it apparently radicalises an
understanding of the urban milieu as a space from which a confrontation of resiliences may be established. It
writes within and from the perspective of the thought of power as resilience. What is distinctive about this
analysis is the understanding of the contemporary society we live in is one determined by an “architecture of
flows” which leaves it “one of the most vulnerable human arrangements that has ever existed. Supple,
Subtle, but vulnerable… The world would not be moving so fast if it didn’t have to constantly outrun its own
collapse”. Their analysis reads modern society as defined by its pursuit of resilience through decentralised
networking.59 The logics of resilience, the cybernetic “science of control” (71), are read as the vulnerability of
the strategy of power. Indeed, they argue in a number of places that networking produces counter-conducts
building on its precise logics.60
Two explicit arguments appear to be present in the text which justifies this reading. The first is that
the text claims its unifying strategic principle is to “jam everything” (125). The claim made here is that even
the most resilient networks are not (112) “invulnerable to all destruction”. In recognising that “every
56
Guerrilla tactics are flexible and never bound by fixed principles: guerrillas attack and then retire, harass and retreat,
occupy and vacate (113
57
Jason Burke http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/04/france-government-left-wing-extremism
58
Alberto Toscano, criminalising dissent,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/jan/28/human-rights-tarnac-nine
59
60
60
61
18
network has its weak points, the nodes that must be undone in order to interrupt circulation, to unwind the
web”, they call explicitly for a continuing campaign of sabotage that attacks the very networks that modern
society believes underpin its resilience: “the technical infrastructure of the metropolis is vulnerable. Its flows
amount to more than the transportation of people and commodities… sabotaging the social machine with
any real effect involves re-appropriating and reinventing the ways of interrupting the network. How can a
TGV line or an electrical network be rendered useless. How does one find the weak points in computer
networks, or scramble radio-waves and fill screens with white noise”(112). Their very pursuit of resilience
through decentralisation: the proliferation of “just in time production” links for example, is what makes them
open to strategic confrontation (125). Continuous interruption replaces major interruption. Reading the city
in terms of its resilience, gives birth to a strategic injunction (124) to “block the economy”, (125) whilst
avoiding at all costs any “direct confrontation” with the state. This goes beyond the logic of urban “guerrilla
warfare” developed by Mariguella. The inherent qualities of urban protest strategy are, however, now placed
utterly centre stage in creating “a moving multiplicity that can strike a number of places at once and that
tries to always keep the initiative” (116).
The second point however involves an even greater movement beyond Mariguella, understood in
terms of a radicalisation of resilience thinking. The authors of the Coming Insurrection seem to advocate
adopting the logic of resilience itself, indeed, rather than simply analysing for a lack of resilience in networks,
they suggest building a counter—resilience. The claim is that whilst interrupting the fundamental logic of the
system, its “perpetuum mobile”, alternative networks can be constructed (61). This parasitic strategic
response is seen as a radicalisation of the self-organisation that occurs in moments of crisis (83), such as that
witnessed in New Orleans. Islamist groups like Hamas or Hezbollah are also referenced approvingly as
responding to crisis by building counter—state structures, alternative sources of aid and education that
occupy the same territory as the states structures. The authors of the Coming Insurrection read the logic of
collapse integral to the current political order as the grounds for a new strategic confrontation of
resiliences.61 Moments of crisis are opportunities to simultaneously add to a “total interruption of the
flows”, whilst putting in their place a network that prevents their reestablishment (105). By making (119) the
most of crises, precisely those “moments of instability” where the state reinforces its power understood in
terms of resilience, we see “these are, in turn, opportunities for other forces to consolidate or strengthen
one another as they take the other side” (119). Crises are thus not simply opportunities to interrupt the
networks of the state, but to replace one resilient network with another. This is precisely, they argue, why
Islamist movements like Hamas or Islamic State are so successful, they mobilise crisis for self-organisation providing assistance, education and social support, such that the states’ networks cannot reform 123. They
refuse any suggestion that territory must be occupied, rather arguing that resistance builds only from a
strategy of mobile resilience: 108 “increasing the density of the communes of circulation, and of solidarities
to the point that the territory become unreadable, opaque to all authority”. The revolution must outresilience the system.
The figure of (112) anonymity is the key to achieving this full counter-resilience according to the
authors of the Coming Insurrection: “to be visible is to be exposed, that is to say, above all, vulnerable” 113.
The advise against seeking visibility for one’s cause 113, and instead, through invisibility, to seek “an
invulnerable position of attack…. No leader, no demands, no organisation, but words, gestures, complicities.
To be socially nothing is… the condition for maximum freedom of action” (113). To out-resilience the system
they advocate not becoming a subject of any kind, the invisible cannot be touched, eroded or destroyed:
61
Say “its useless to wait… to go on waiting is madness… the catastrophe is not coming, it is here” 96 but we are not
injoined to leave and act upon this reality “we are already situated within the collapse… it is within this reality that we
just choose sides”
19
Because “power is no longer concentrated in one point in the world; it is the world itself, its flows and its
avenues” (131), the flows themselves must be the object and method of attack. Here, the project to confront
the resilience of state with a counter-resilience seems to reach a certain strategic apogee; as a confrontation
between flows. The city becomes a milieu for the instantiation of a strategic confrontation of resiliences.
Conclusion
If politics is simply the continuation of war by other means, then, when faced by a new concept, as Deleuze
put it, the operative question is never ‘Is it true? But, does it work?’ What thoughts does it make possible to
think?’ Conducting a genealogy of the strategy of resilience should help us to ask what it might ‘do
otherwise’. It strikes me as odd to say the least that radical theory today sees in resilience no tools worth
consideration. Whilst I accept Evans and Reid’s point regarding the recurrent role of the willingness to risk
life in the history of resistant and revolutionary politics, I am less convinced that resilience is necessarily a
politically degraded concept because, under a particular reading, it seems to be concerned with avoiding
death. We should know by now that risking life does not guarantee an emancipatory politics or necessarily
promise creative insights.62 If we are to argue that resilience is a key strategy of power today, as the authors I
have engaged with do, it is surely necessary to engage in discussion of what this has meant, in tactical and
strategic terms, for the practice of its confrontation.
This is not to advocate we nostalgically reread the revolutionaries of the past, or necessarily see in
texts that mobilise resilience thinking, like The Coming Insurrection, a viable ‘plan of action’ for radical
politics. This paper has simply observed that there is a genealogy of resilience thinking within radical politics.
This is a polemical way of making a rather more staid point. Thinking against resilience won’t help us to
decide how the strategic action upon action that is Neoliberal power may be confronted. There is no need
for “fear or hope”, as Deleuze put it in his famous discussion of the rise of ‘Societies of Control’, only to look
for weapons in the strata as we find it.
62
See Michelsen 2015