Our ability to adapt to shocks, traumas or crises is phenomenal. This resilience of humans and all living beings, animals or plants is so powerful that the word itself has a positive dimension, evoking a wonderful ability to go through hardships, even to emerge strengthened. Yet punchy statements like Stop calling me resilient recurrently emerge in communities, in reaction to the “toxic positivity” of an excessively summoned resilience.
In fact, over the past few years, resilience has become a widespread concept both in the fields of psychology and the environment and in financial management (where it has even acquired the status of buzzword). With each new economic, social or environmental crisis, it is invoked to respond to unresolved problems or for which we no longer even attempt to find solutions. Essayist Naomi Klein speaks of a “shock strategy”, which she defines as “a set of brutal tactics that aims to systematically take advantage of the disarray of a population following a collective shock”. Unsurprisingly, capitalism benefits abundantly from these crises and the resilience they generate, as they provoke the implementation of extreme policies that are favorable to it.
By preparing the file Resilience of the magazine esse, we wondered about the ways to respond to the continual assaults of a new reactionary right. Starting from the critical role that we recognize in art, we wondered how, in our reflections, to go beyond a grim portrait of the state of the world in order to manage to fight against the ambient pessimism. We also wanted to observe the possibilities for art to be a guardian of resilience, both for the artists and for the people who come into contact with their works, and thereby question its healing power. However, faced with the idea that there would be in humans a “natural and spontaneous resilience”, the neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik warns us against what he calls a “resigned optimism”. He specifies that “the decreasing part of the sufferings is not the result of a natural virtue, it is attributable to the reconstitution of a solidarity and to the work of meaning carried out during the attempts at explanation. Those who take a long time to recover from the trauma or never recover are those who have been abandoned by the group”. In other words, for there to be resilience, there must first be solidarity… Faced with the human distress caused by the multiple crises, are we lacking in compassion? […]
Rather than praising individual resilience where everyone is both a victim of trauma and responsible for their healing, it is a call for resistance that emerges from the texts in this dossier. “Refusal ends the tokenism associated with resilient thinking, which projects a future based solely on current power structures,” says author Kristen Lewis, clarifying the distinction between the presumed inactivity of refusal and force. which underlies the rejection of an unjust situation. This force, Nathalie Batraville and Ariane De Blois approach it through the concept of disruptive agency, seen as a practice of “empowerment” of people who are victims of systemic oppression. According to the authors, agency, or the power to act, is motivated by both love and rage, both of which are conceived as actions (rather than emotions) that are intimately linked.
[…]
Many artists choose to equip themselves, conceptually and legally, to act against these forms of oppression, including those linked to climate crimes. In this context, Marie J. Jean affirms that “if the neoliberal ideology has recovered the concept of resilience by deploying a rhetoric apparently imbued with good intentions, the imaginary seems a tool more apt to operate a radical transformation of behaviors and acts that have caused the climate crisis”. It is perhaps, in fact, through concrete actions, but not devoid of poetry, that art manages to contribute to real social change and participate in ecological resilience.
Nature’s potential for resilience (and resistance) is a particularly inspiring model for artists. The analogy between marginalized people and weeds — a questionable term in itself, as art historian Giovanni Aloi reminds us — is expressed here in refusal to conform (to a territory or to a policy) and in being able to resist normativity. Finally, in parallel with its critical approach, the dossier Resilience also speaks of social and cultural healing, love and caring. It seems that by agreeing to work for social solidarity and climate justice, we are on the way to restoring resilience to its connotation of hope.
Comments or suggestions for Ideas in Review? write to [email protected].