ABSTRACT
The concept of resilience has found an upsurge in both academic writings and public policies. Its instrumentalist modes which often urge cities and communities to adapt to distress have colonised multiple areas of public policy. There are now multitudes of toolkits, indicators and metrics about how to achieve and measure resilience. Resilience has become a travelling concept that is spreading far and fast. However, its pervasiveness does not indicate common understanding of the concept or a deep engagement with institutional arrangements – neither those that have precipitated the need for resilient subjectivities, nor those that benefit from the need for resilient subjectivities. On the contrary, resilience risks being an empty signifier which serves conflicting interests. Despite, or maybe because of this discursive ambiguity, resilience appears to have offered a common, albeit contingent and temporary, platform which binds and unites otherwise pluralistic interests. We see a ‘resilience machine’ in the making. In this chapter, we trace the genealogies of the two concepts ‘machine’ and ‘resilience’ that define the tenet of this volume and discuss how the resilience machine may be better understood as an ‘assemblage’. We argue that narratives of resilience can mask the structural conditions that perpetuate the need for resiliency in the face of exploitation.
