ABSTRACT
Resilience is everywhere; it is the idea and the encounter. It is the root and the branch. It is a
travelling concept, a conceptual ‘rhizome’ that has risen to prominence in debates about how we
seek to understand, manage and solve the wicked riddle of uncertain times. It is assembled for
different purposes, by diverse actors and, as such, is used in many ways. It may be unstable as it
emerges, reconfiguring and reconfigured by the particular materialities and enunciations through
which it is imagined, defined and enacted.1 In this chapter the goal is twofold. First, the origins of
resilience have been widely discussed but rarely discussed well, or with sufficient attention to
detail. That is both bad and easy to fix. This chapter lays groundwork for understanding resilience.
It will cut across the imagined, defined and enacted in order to give the reader a better grasp of
what resilience can be and what it should, perhaps, not be. The second goal is to trace from the
furore of speculation a network of assemblages that show how resilience has operated as a gen-
erator of metaphor, each encounter offering up semantically related fields of understanding used
by different audiences for particular ends. Resilience is complex, it is rhizomatic in that each
re-emergence offers a variation; it is therefore polysemic in nature embedding diverse, and
sometimes contradictory, logics into the practices it informs – each emergent understanding
being thus embedded in the goals of those who encounter it. This chapter provides the greater
depth, currently lacking, in how we understand the foundations of resilience thinking as a ‘mode
of governance’ implemented by real people in real time. It shows how the generative metaphor
shapes the logic of resilience that can then be implemented by particular coalitions of actors. It
shows how the way in which resilience has been operationalised informs the mechanisms by
which it can be implemented, and thus provides a deeper analysis of the necessarily polysemic
logics embedded in the emergent politics of resilience, in its circadean rhythms, in its institu-
tionalisation via affective relationships as the ‘rules of the game’ owned, supported, or subverted
by numerous coalitions – some of common purpose, others of contested purpose. This lays
foundations for a theory of resilience as a complex interplay acted out in our everyday lives.
