The Downside of Up, or: What's the Matter With Resilience?

“The Downside of Up; Or, What's the Matter with Resilience?” Susie O'Brien, McMaster University Delivered at Underground Ecocriticism Conference, London, ON: Western University, Nov. 2-3, 2012 In this paper I use Lydia Millet’s novel 2009 How the Dead Dream as a way to look at the usefulness and limitations of resilience as a concept to work with in the ecological humanities. I discuss what Millet calls an "agenda of empathy", along with Eric Cazdyn's notion of "palliative time", as possible directives towards a better conceptual framework to make sense of the complex adaptive systems we live in. In using the word "better"--I almost said "more humane"--I enter the terrain of the questions the organizers asked us to think about, including "Is ecocriticism synonymous with ethical criticism?", "What. . . is the role of the ecocritic towards the public and the social?" Though hard to answer, these questions were useful force me to examine my investments in working in the environmental humanities. So I'm using the phrase "environmental humanities" in place of the term "ecocriticism" around which this meeting has been organized, and I'll talk about this briefly as a way into the subject of this paper. When I look back at my own descriptions of my work, I noticed that I'm inclined to use the word "ecocriticism" as often as not. However as I tried to work through the questions, I realized that my difficulty in answering some of them seemed to lodge partly around the term “ecocriticism”, and my reluctance to identify with that. What I’m about to say is reductive, and doesn’t fairly describe the huge range of work that has come to be identified, and might self-identify, with the term “ecocriticism,” which is defined in The Ecocriticism Reader simply as "the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (Glotfelty xviii). Though I think much work that goes by the name of ecocriticism goes different places, what is implied here, and maybe in some of the questions, is the possibility if not the desirability, of bracketing the problem of the human so as to place criticism in direct communications with that realm and those lives that have been historically excluded from the privilege of humanness. While the critique of anthropocentrism is warranted, my concern is that--and here I'm talking specifically about the questions we were asked to think about for today--there is a risk of going too far in our efforts to divest our work of some of its obdurate humanness, including things like sentimentality, morality, and emotion (affect's disreputable cousin), that get in the way of pure critique. Partly because I think it is impossible and in fact undesirable to get rid of those things, I prefer the designation Environmental Humanities to ecocriticism. I think this does two things: first, in the tradition that I think ecocriticism supports, it highlights the embeddedness of its critical perspective in a particular material context—a particular institutional context, which ecocriticism often seems to be less keen to talk about except in a lamenting kind of way (I realize that by endorsing this location, I’m leaving out the kind of ecological cultural work that goes on outside the university. This is a problem, but one that the term “ecocriticism” doesn’t get away from either). So by highlighting the location of the Humanities, this formulation puts the problematic right out there—that the putative uniqueness of the human, which has worked traditionally to exclude others on the basis of sex, gender, race, species, etc.—is being qualified by, necessarily decentered by, ecology, at the same time as it retains a determining role in it; the Humanities, we might say, describes the habitat that we are both working in, and trying to escape. But not entirely. So here’s the thing I like about the “humanities”, which is precisely the thing that makes it suspect from the perspective of other disciplines: In a way that can legitimately be accused of being at once soft and subjective and paternalistic and imperialist, the Humanities has historically been inspired by a sense of mission to redeem, or to nourish or to emancipate via culture an always insufficiently inclusive collectivity of beings. The name “humanities” is inadequate to the ethical sphere ecological criticism seeks to articulate. However it does name a structure of power, and a corresponding obligation for those of us who enjoy the comforts of that structure to advocate for those who do not. So this is a roundabout way of addressing some of the questions, by saying that there is not just an ethical but also a normative, a moral component to work in the ecological humanities (in fact it is fair to say there is a normative component to all kinds of academic work, but that the Humanities and Social Sciences are more reflexive about it). I would go farther to say, in response to the question "What. . . is the role of the ecocritic towards the public and the social?" that it is in part a role of advocacy in the sense defined by Lorraine Code of "speaking on behalf of, supporting, vindicating someone, some project, some policy, in respect to a particular point of view. . . [and] in order to counter patterns of silencing, discounting, incredulity and other egregious harms" (Ecological Thinking 165). I'm taking an enlarged view of the public and the social here to include human and other-than-human beings, and focus here on a fairly narrow sense of advocacy, conveyed in attitudes and practices of care.  It's from this perspective that I examine the use and the danger of resilience, which has become increasingly salient concept in ecology and beyond. Resilience refers to the capacity of a system or an organism to work through disruption (Walker and Salt xiii). So, a resilient system or organism is not one that maintains a stable state in the face of external challenges; rather, it is one that subsists by undergoing constant processes of change and adaptation. In recent years, resilience has come to be invoked as an unquestionable value, perhaps the unquestionable value, to which environmental policymakers businesses, governments, social organizations, institutions and individuals aspire. More than simply a measure of viability in the face of change, it has come to function as a sign of the fitness, even the moral worthiness, of things in and of themselves. Resilience thinking emphasizes the constitutive link between turbulence and creativity. For example, in his 2006 book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization, Thomas Homer Dixon highlights the positive elements of what he calls "catagenesis", or “the creative renewal of our technologies, institutions and societies in the aftermath of breakdown” (23). Without wanting to argue that the positive value attached to resilience is entirely misplaced, I suggest that we need to critique the way it has come so comfortably to align itself with the ideals of neoliberalism, and to superimpose over the dynamics of social justice the framework of “creative destruction” and associated values of flexibility, deregulation and social Darwinism. Resilience is a productive concept to think with in environmental humanities work for a number of reasons, including its recognition of multiple scales and temporalities, its acknowledgment of the interdependence of human and natural systems, and the invitations it offers to rethink the relationship between integrity and accident, being and becoming.1 However it also presents problems, consistent with what Melinda Cooper and Jeremy Walker describe as its “intuitive ideological fit” with theories of natural volatility that inform neoliberal economic policy (144). The coalescence of these theories has occurred in spite of their quite different origins: resilience theory, and ecology more generally, emerged in the 1960s in part as a challenge to the abstract, hierarchical epistemology that informed the equilibrium model of environmental science (Cooper and Walker 146). At the same time, but proceeding from radically different political premises, the economist Friedrich Hayek challenged the Keynesian welfare state, a variant, as he saw it, of central planning, to predict or manage economic conditions. Far from forestalling serious crises, he argued, these policies were more likely to cause it by stifling its inherent variability. The market, in Hayek’s formulation, assumes the unquestioned priority of a natural ecosystem, for which volatility is not an external threat to be managed, but an inherent feature of its resilience. Within the resilience model, “the catastrophic event (natural, social or economic). . . becomes a sign not of the occasional failure to predict, prevent and manage crisis but of the systemic limits to public management and state planning” (Walker and Cooper, 153-154). Resilience here, Walker and Cooper note, “risks being the measure of one’s fitness to survive in the turbulent order of things” (157). There is a non-coincidental relationship, as Paul Hoggett has shown, between the rise in the value of "resilience" and the dismantling of environmental and social welfare programs. 1 Resilience ecology is complex, and the way I am presenting it here is necessarily reductive. I would be happy to talk about it in more detail in question period.  As a conceptual framework, resilience has staying power. The resilience of resilience thinking, highlighted by Cooper and Walker, is both political, in its amenability to neoliberalism, and epistemological, in its capacity for infinite expansion and reflexivity, such that the critique that characterized resilience ecology is reabsorbed into the workings of systems theory itself (Walker and Cooper 157). “’Resilience thinking’, Walker and Cooper conclude, “cannot be challenged from within the terms of complex systems theory but must be contested, if at all, on completely different terms, by a movement of thought that is truly counter-systemic” (157). I want to turn now to Millet's novel, which offers a way of thinking that isn't actually counter-systemic, but that focuses on the contradictions at the heart of systems. How the Dead Dream disturbs the elements of resilience thinking by reframing them. Instead of looking at the relationship between survival and change in complex adaptive systems, Millet's novel focuses on death as the problem that threatens and compels our relations and attachments, in ways that can't easily be systematized. The novel tells the story of T., a day trader turned real estate developer, whose amazing financial success by the time he reaches his late twenties reflects his ability to smoothly skirt the line between sharp and prudent risk management and scam artistry. In spite of a superficial sociability, which he uses to cultivate advantageous relationships, he is more or less free from emotional attachments, his energies invested instead in the flows of the market. When he is a child, he holds coins in his mouth for safekeeping. "As he grew up," we're told: his love became sophisticated. . . .he found his satisfaction in surges of energy, in the stream of contact between machines that processed binary. He learned to like abstract money better than its physical body. The solid house that money built  sheltered him and he felt keenly that money was both everything and nothing, at once infinite, open potential and an end in itself. (13) T's personal resilience is one with the resilience of the market, to whose movements he adapts his life. Throughout the course of the novel, T. undergoes a gradual change, instigated seemingly by an accident, in which he runs over and kills a coyote. When he goes to move the dying animal, he is caught momentarily by uncontrollable emotion, "the sense of a rising pity he could not repress, in which he sank like a stone and could not get to the surface again" (38). Though he quickly returns to his regular life, dominated by plans to build a resort on an island off the coast of Belize, the incident is followed by others, in which he is overwhelmed, first briefly, but then in a more sustained way, with a pull of empathy, expressed variously as a feeling of concern, grief, love and responsibility. I said this change was instigated “seemingly” by the accident with the coyote, because the chapter that begins with the sentence: “He killed her driving to Las Vegas” (34) follows from one that ends with a sentence describing the inarticulable longing he noticed in people (including himself though he doesn’t register it), for “a mother who loved them with a love that never changed” (34). So the pronoun "her" that begins the next chapter connects his mother and the coyote, his relation to both informed by longing and violence, and then grief. That ambivalent tangle of affects/effects characterizes T's growing sense of attachment to others. Longing for a mother's unchanging love is childish and selfish, arguably, but also fundamental in its resistance to the ultimate change, which is death. T's relationship to his mother changes throughout the novel. What starts with his wounded adult recognition that he is no longer the absolute centre of her world alters when she arrives on his doorstep one day to tell him that his father has left her, and shortly afterwards suffers a stroke. T starts to care for her, practically and, increasingly, emotionally. Things shift again when T’s girlfriend Beth dies of a heart attack, and his mother, now recovered, helps T. to deal with the loss of the woman they had both loved. Falling in love with Beth marked another critical shift in his orientation to the world: their meeting, he feels “was how he lost his autonomy—he had moved along at a steady pace and then he was flung” (58). But back to the coyote. It is important to note that the dissolution of T’s autonomy corresponds to reorientation away from the flows of money towards, not just family or people, the tug of a multitude of beings. So his grief over the coyote’s death spills over into love for a dog he picks up at a shelter shortly afterwards, and later towards concern for the endangered kangaroo rat, whose habitat will be destroyed by the resort he’s building on Belize, and then to endangered animals in general, whom he takes to visiting surreptitiously in zoos, breaking in at night, then just lying in cages and watching. A metaphorical extension of the night he sat with the dying coyote, the zoo visits stretch the bonds of what Judith Butler calls grievability from individual to species. A key movement, this is also a tricky one, whose difficulties emerge on the level of genre. I will come back to this subject, but want to turn first, as a way of framing T's expanding practices of care, to the suggestive possibilities of what Eric Cazdyn calls “palliative time”. Cazdyn’s 2012 book, The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture and Illness explores what he sees as “new and radical possibilities” (46) for a politics derived from palliative medicine, a still marginalized mode of care that operates within a cultural dominant he calls the “new chronic”2. Based on the development of life-prolonging treatments of once inevitably terminal diseases such as certain cancers and HIV-AIDS, the new chronic describes a condition that is at once physical, psychological and social, in which the threat of death is deferred, and the prospect of cure is abandoned in favour of management. If we think about resilience science, we can liken this approach to health to a shift away from the focus on death—and the concomitant desire to find radical fixes--in favour of an acceptance of turbulence as the norm. Palliative care, while isn’t antithetical to the principles or immune to the managerial strategy of this approach, remains marginalized (and herein lies its radical potential, according to Cazdyn) because of its acceptance of death, in both its naturalness and its absolute alterity. For Cazdyn, modern medicine cannot countenance death, in its commitment to maintaining the chronically ill. In both an analogous and a structurally encompassing way, we have come to accept—and even to embrace—a social and economic life defined by a now permanent sense of crisis--"the dull soreness of a meantime with no end" as Cazdyn puts it (14), at the expense of imagining the end of this social order, and what that might entail for the way we live together in the present, 2 Palliative care, defined by the WHO as “the active total care of patients whose disease is not responsive to curative treatment. . . [affirms life and regards dying as a normal process. . . [it] neither hastens nor postpones death. . . [but] provides reief from pain and other distressing symptoms. . . [and] integrates the psychological and the spiritual aspects of care” (45) and move towards a radically unknown future. The enabling force of palliative time, for Cazdyn lies in its capacity to open new ways of caring for and investing in the present. . . . The way that we care for our species, the nation-state or for the planet, for instance, would no longer be limited by reactionary fantasies of salvation or cynical strategies of sustainability, but the palliative present would be care for and opened up by creative engagement. (46) In Cazdyn’s formulation, the acknowledgment of death not only upends the logic— simultaneously resigned and optimistic—of mangerialism; it also has the potential to reactivate the utopian desire for cure. Cazdyn reads palliative time politically; the social embodiment of cure is revolution. I find this idea really suggestive, but want to go back a step, to dwell a bit longer in the meaning of death as a literal event, that reverberates from the level of the cell to the individual to the social, and the relations of care that dwelling asks us to think about. This does not mean a retreat from the political. It's really important, in Millet's novel, that T. isn't redeemed by his compassion for the coyote, or by his love for his dog, but rather that those moments create openings that lead to a recognition of his participation in wider systems of violence and care. This recognition expresses two separate but related concerns that Millet has identified as informing her work more broadly. The first is what she calls an "agenda of empathy",3 where empathy expresses a 3 In response to a question in an interview of whether she considers herself to be a cultural critic, she says: "I think any writer of substance is a critic by nature. I think books "recognition of the self and its relation to the not-self, to the community, to the species, another species, to being-ness. It’s the pain of being individual selves, of being isolate [but also] social beings always straining for communion. (89). How the Dead Dream poignantly describes that straining for communion, at a scale that transcends individual relationships to reach towards what Millet calls the "macrosocial", which is the self in relation to the larger mysteries of the world" (Warner). This returns us to the problem of genre. The task of describing the individual's relation to the world is difficult, in part because those mysteries are, by definition and for various reasons, inaccessible to imagination of the individual. Bridging the gap between the personal and the macrosocial, and between the individual and the species, the latter which likewise confounds the imagination,4 strains the limits of the realistic novel, which may account for reviewers' hesitancy or ambivalence around classifying Millet's work. How the Dead Dream is frequently described as a "parable" (Falkowitz, Kellogg, Smith)- -a genre that sits uneasily with quotidian realism, to which it is often regarded as inferior. 5 Mixing the parabolic and the real produces interesting writing effects, making How the Dead Dream at once "odd and compelling", according to one reviewer, who also notes that (in a mostly positive review), while Millet's writing can be "portentous and overdone, . . . it can equally be surprising and funny" (Ness). This unevenness, which I'm should have an agenda. . . . It should be an agenda felt by the reader, sensed by the reader, but not fully known" ("Interview," 84) 4 See Chakrabarty. 5 In response to a question in an interview about whether she would call her novel Oh Pure and Radiant Heart "realist", Millet responds: "I don't know what realist means to you. . . People use "realistic" to mean "good," basically, though I am not one of those people, clearly" ("Rumpus") suggesting emerges from the effort to represent the macrosocial, is reflected in resonant but only half believable images, like T. "secreting coins on his person, a thick and powerful quarter lodged under his tongue or discreet dimes tucked into the cheek pouches. He never swallowed and he never choked" (3) What comes across as a funny but somewhat unlikely expression of an individual's love of money makes sense metaphorically as a representation of a relationship to capitalism that isn't just idiosyncratic but general. Illuminating the connection of the self to "the larger mysteries of the world" (Warner) is a problem, and not only because of the challenge of working between scales. It's also a problem of representation, and the crucial but always in some ways futile effort of language to capture the "mysteries" of difference and change. fundamental to the work of representation more generally. "We can't see without naming. There's no complete vision of the self or of others but the way we make sense of the world is to create objects. . . . There's a way in which it's really hard for us not to make totality into things, if that makes any sense. . . . It's a form, obviously, of objectifying the world around us that we seem unable not to perform. We can't escape it. But there's nobility in the struggle to try, I think. Because otherwise, once every being is classified as a thing, we've experienced a great loss in understanding, even our attempt to understand ourselves as a part of the world" " because nature's constantly changing. . . we can't rely on it the way we can the things that we've created, even if they're beautiful. We can't rely on it to remain  the same. We can't "thingify" it entirely. And by nature, I mean the entire world that we life in, that we inhabit. . . We're dying as we speak. We're changing, our cells are changing, we're not are; we're not made, but being. We're nature, so we're also things that can't be relied upon to remain the same. (103) The view of change here resonates with that of resilience theory, but with a couple of key differences: first, it focuses on fragility and the inevitability of death, rather than the buoyancy of transformation; second, it acknowledges the necessity, but also the impossibility, of imagining systems, and thinking across scales. This is the kind of work I think the Environmental Humanities can usefully do, and an agenda of empathy might serve as a guide. There's not much room for agendas in resilience theory, where the reality of constant change requires infinite flexibility rather than principled planning, and arguably even less room for empathy. Both seem to me to be crucial, and they are at the same time kind of incompatible: an agenda implies a conscious direction, while empathy engages more affective, less containable energies. But I think this incompatibility is helpful in the end, suggesting something of the constitutive friction of doing this kind of work, where we are constantly brought up short against the limits of our individual and species thinking, but spurred to think otherwise, towards the beings with whom we share the accidents of life and death. Works Cited Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Print. Cazdyn, Eric. The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture and Illness. Duke UP, 2012. Print. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197-222. Print. Code, Lorraine. Code, Lorraine. Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location. NY: Oxford UP, 2006. Print. Dixon, Thomas Homer. 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