Resilience in ruins: the idea of the ‘arrested dialectic’ in art after resilience’s failures

ABSTRACT

This article questions the relevance of the concept of ‘resilience’. It traces the origins of this optimistic social variant of an ecological process that itself can be questioned for its belief in ultimate recovery. In the socio-spatial context, although this is seldom admitted, much of the modern space economy has been abandoned, lays derelict with city fabric often in ruins. The insights of Art History are drawn upon to expose this ‘dark side’ of past urban and regional development. This is because just as art thrives in propitious economic conditions, so it also declines when the money runs out. Certain unpleasant events can be traced to the exhaustion of Utopian practice, Enlightenment ideals and a weakness of states. This led to a fascination with the apparent decay of long-established values formerly expressed in western culture that now share more nihilistic elements with contemporary eastern culture. A proposal that a better interaction between the late capitalist ‘arrested dialectic’ of long-term stasis and the exhaustion of Art’s wellsprings is that a new purpose can be found in fashioning an ‘Art of Warning of Incipient Disaster’.

KEYWORDS:

• Art
• arrested dialectic
• resilience
• resilience’s failure

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Rosella Lazzeretti, Davide Parrilli and Robert Hassink for their thoughtful comments on this narrative. I owe the notion of ‘endarkenment’ to Ray Wiley Hubbard’s 2010 album: ‘A. Enlightenment B. Endarkenment (Hint There is No C)’. The usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The process at play in Jameson’s original notion of the ‘arrested dialectic’ refers to the historic interplay between capital and labour that typifies capitalist sociopolitical and economic class relations. At historical inflection points, this dynamic is arrested by a serious imbalance in favour of one over the other class. The current extended failure of resilience in much of the global economy is one of these. Prodigious social polarisation of wealth to favour the global financial interest under neo-liberal hegemony explains this. It is further expressed in a characteristic exhaustion in art of all kinds, where the creative impulses often historically rooted in contrarian, disaffected and outsider attitudes derive little inspiration from such stasis and arrest. There is naturally a spatial expression to this calcified stasis, found in war zones, refugee peripheries, ‘hollowed out’ manufacturing belts and deindustrialised cities. The current switch to populism in political discourse echoes the broader dissatisfaction. Local manifestations of the crisis in ‘contra-immigration’ from ancestor destinations like Turin back to Sicily capture the experience of crisis, fragility and un-resilience by disaffected youth. The ‘Cultural Farm’ concept in Favara, near Agrigento, expresses their reborn interest in cultural and creative activities, attracting international artists and major tourist flows.