The asymmetrical anthropocene: resilience and the limits of posthumanism

In this article we critique resilience’s oft-celebrated overcoming of modern liberal frameworks. We bring work on resilience in geography and cognate fields into conversation with explorations of the ‘asymmetrical Anthropocene’, an emerging body of thought which emphasizes human-nonhuman relational asymmetry. Despite their resonances, there has been little engagement between these two responses to the human/world binary. This is important for changing the terms of the policy debate: engaging resilience through the asymmetrical Anthropocene framing shines a different light upon policy discourses of adaptive management, locating resilience as a continuation of modernity’s anthropocentric will-to-govern. From this vantage point, resilience is problematic, neglecting the powers of nonhuman worlds that are not accessible or appropriable for governmental use. However, this is not necessarily grounds for pessimism. To conclude, we argue that human political agency is even more vital in an indeterminate world.

Psychology in an Indeterminate World

By sharing their world, humans and other animals sustain each other. Their world gets determined over time as generations of animals act in it. Current approaches to psychological science, by contrast, start from the assumption that the world is already determined before an animal’s activity. These approaches seem more concerned with uncertainty about the world than with the practical indeterminacies of the world humans and nonhuman animals experience. As human activity is making life increasingly hard for other animals, this preoccupation becomes difficult to accept. This article introduces an ecological approach to psychology to develop a view that centralizes the indeterminacies of a shared world. Specifically, it develops an open-ended notion of “affordances,” the possibilities for action offered by the environment. Affordances are processes in which (a) the material world invites individual animals to participate, while (b) participation concurrently continues the material world in a particular way. From this point of view, species codetermine the world together. Several empirical and methodological implications of this view on affordances are explored. The article ends with an explanation of how an ecological perspective brings responsibility for the shared world to the heart of psychological science.

The shifting status of failure and possibility: Resilience and the ‘shift’ in partnership-organized prevention in Sweden

Based on a study of prevention politics in Sweden, this article probes the turn to resilience in its institutionalized form: cross-sectorial partnerships. It interrogates how resilience proponents strategically deploy the semantics of the shift in policymaking, arguing that they perform the ‘shift’ (in mind-set) to criticize a long-established welfare-state governmentality, associated with professional ‘silos’, to create new possibilities for partnership-organized intervention. Part I draws attention to how resilience policy mobilizes partnerships around the indeterminate problem of ‘problem setting’. Based on the idea of limited knowledge and governance in an indeterminate world, failure is considered inevitable and potentially productive, if handled appropriately – which is an issue of problem design or framing. It is considered particularly important to handle problems of coordination and communication internal to partnerships, since failures here risk jeopardizing collaboration and hence the whole enterprise. Part II demonstrates how partnership-organized resilience initiatives bracket-off risky failure by strategically reframing problems and bringing new visions of the future into being – through the semantics of the shift. In characteristically epochal terms, the ‘shift’ casts partnership formation as an improvement of the future, although the strategists’ belief in future visions is apparently shot through with cynicism.

Dramaturgies of the Left-Behind: Mobility and Stickiness inThe Disappearances Project

In the verbatim theatre performanceThe Disappearances Project(2011–13), Australian company Version 1.0 explored the state of unresolved loss felt by those left behind by missing persons. Rather than relying on verbatim testimony to simply ‘tell’ the stories of the left-behind, directors Yana Taylor and David Williams sought to immerse the audience in an indeterminate world, characterized by pathologies of endless searching and waiting, and a sense of paralysing loss. In this article, I argue that the performance hinged on dramaturgical practices of stillness, slowed movement and friction to produce the disturbing sense of ‘sticky’ indeterminacy characteristic of the experience of the left-behind. To develop this interpretation, I turn to the post-disciplinary field of mobility studies, which highlights the movement (or otherwise) of people, objects, information and capital, as well as embodied experience and sensory and kinesthetic environments. This provides ways to identify and analyse mobility-as-dramaturgy as well as the co-production of affective atmospheres within Disappearances and the wider field of performance.