Why bouncing back is a bad idea. We need a politics of Zebedee too.
Zebedee from the original children's animation The Magic Roundabout. We can be Zebedee in our capacity to bounce back, but we need a ‘Politics of Zebedee’ too that doesn’t individualise and privatise the causes of crisis and our collective power to create a way out
The extraordinary efforts and individual contributions being made by people in the current crisis, such as teachers and schools printing visors and face masks for care workers cannot be celebrated enough. This expression of deep social care and compassion, combined with ingenuity is truly inspiring. We will need these new entanglements of people, practices, tools, knowledges to Re-Public the new corona reality.
It is also noticeable how creative responses by people to the lockdown is being framed by default innovation discourses such as ‘resilience’ for example. Kath’s own research and practice around Kin and Vulner-ability has been driven by developing an approach whose methods and thinking escapes the seductive appeal of ‘resilience’, whose restrictive discourse emerged most strongly after the last financial crisis.
“resilience is the de-politicised character-trait of a good citizen in a crisis”
Having this capacity to ‘bounce-back’ can be incredibly useful, but that’s not the only way to respond. What’s more, in the UK resilience as a discourse became a social/cultural enabler for the austerity economics and sensibility which followed the crisis. In effect, resilience is the de-politicised character-trait of a good citizen in a crisis. Alongside this discourse of resilience as the ‘can-do’ quality of the good citizen enhancing their own well-being is the discourse of the ‘entrepreneurial’ citizen - from the ‘dropout entrepreneur’ of the tech world, to the typology of the self-reliant risk-taker, that has morphed successfully since the 1980s, to its engagement with gender and ethnicity. It’s not to say that the aspirations and desire behind such discourses as the ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘resilience’ aren’t laudable. It’s just that they have tended to value heroic individualism rather than activities embedded with collective concern.
The most compelling account of the dangers of this discourse of resilience is by Dr Kristina Diprose, a lecturer in the Department of Geography at The University of Sheffield. In her paper ‘Resilience is Futile’ from the journal Soundings she writes:
“Resilience is about readiness to cope with crises, but there is only so much insecurity that people can take. Reported incidence of mental illness rose with the recession, and with the rise of resilience rhetoric. Privileged and poor – resilience romanticises the lives of people who are struggling. It casts the plucky proletariat who manage to make ends meet as ‘hard-working families’ while obscuring the personal cost. Until resilience is recognised for what it is – at best a temporary solution for the symptoms of stress and suffering – those who manufacture and profit from crises are being let off the hook, while the burden of risk management falls disproportionately elsewhere…
[…]
It is time to rid ourselves of resilience: to renounce responsibility for the economic crisis; to stop scapegoating people who are struggling; to refuse to submit to stress; to recognise healthy limits and do everything possible to sustain them […] Tracie Washington of the Louisiana Justice Institute makes the definitive case against resilience: ‘Stop calling me resilient. Because every time you say “Oh, they’re resilient”, that means you can do something else to me. I am not resilient.’ Political reform and grassroots resistance can only work towards recovery if we work for the weak as well as the strong; if we promote a culture in which people do not just survive, but thrive.”
Re-Public: Department of Jumping