(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Brad Evans & Julian Reid: Resilient Life. The Art of Living Dangerously. Polity
In a post-industrial era characterized by permanent insecurity, economic instability and climate crisis, human existence has been characterized by a constant struggle for survival, which, unlike before, demands first and foremost the human functionality og adaptability. Life is guided by projections of the future under the mantra: "Adapt yourself!" Danger and unpredictability have become the very starting point for thinking about the political – and signs of political paralysis are everywhere seen.
Brad Evans' and Julian Reids Resilient Life. The Art of Living Dangerously shows that liberal political philosophy has no counterpart when the survival strategy runs smoothly. The authors advocate a revitalization of imagination to create collective change – and as an introduction to a new art of living.
What is life? Academic books that ask this question often lend themselves closely to the ideas of biology on reproduction and reproduction, physics' preoccupation with life's rise in distant nebulae, or the talk of evolutionism about nature's ecosystems and balance. If you ask a child, life has something to do with discovery and creation. If you ask adults, they talk about life as something about survival, even if they don't use the word anymore – it was something my grandfather's generation belonged to. But perhaps the post-industrial society of the new millennium, with its many precarious factors of uncertainty, has made life a struggle for survival again? The factory worker and the previous generation used words like "survival" and "common struggle"; Today we are talking about having to be adaptable, robust, or resilient. The word "resilient" can mean resilient, resilient, resilient, indomitable and viable – and describes the fact that an organism or a living system maintains a viable level, depending on its ability to adapt to unpredictable and random changes to which it is continually subjected. . This term now migrates from the natural ecology literature to the socially oriented because human life, including social life, has become so vulnerable and unpredictable that the language of biological adaptability fits the way politics, society and man think. But as the living organisms transform and differentiate along the way, thus affirming life in new ways, we see that human adaptability is reactive: We respond to the changes and perils of the environment, while confirming life in its qualitative diversity no longer seems to mind. It is as if we have lost the language, the ability and the courage to seize life as it is in itself, in its marvel, and not just in its externally measurable relationships. By equating life with life adaptation, we have created a closeness and a spiritual neglect. We have forgotten the most important thing: what makes life itself alive.
The art of living dangerously. All our attention is now focused on the threats, risks and unpredictability of life. A new vision of humanity has emerged where the always risky and fragile life is the focus – and it becomes an art to live exposed and dangerous. This has nothing to do with living strong and dying young. It is also not about being touched by a life that does not resemble our own – the stranger and the exposed – from which we could learn something, and which is often the breeding ground for new communities. The art of living dangerously is about safeguarding yourself in a way that keeps you going without smoking: of the job, the savings, the security.
We have moved from security state (Foucault) to adaptability as the instrument of endless crisis – it becomes a continuous art in itself. We are therefore in a new phase – the resilient – where it is is about robustness and adaptation without real change. We have replaced the language of change, political visions and life-affirming activity with a language of adaptable life.
The resilient life is big business. From micro to macro level, it is about locating self-help strategies, taking responsibility for yourself, getting out of crises, building successful relationships, surviving turbulence in relationships and working life, managing losses, adjusting to threats, creating incentives for more efficient work performance. et cetera. Jobs, lives, partners, housing could be fixed in the past, and the floating lifestyle was an exception. Contemporary life, on the other hand, is spun into a complex web of uncertain design and has made it difficult to locate the conditions for a meaningful life. The resilient subject is always in crisis.
Neoliberal pleasure sickness. Statistics are used to convince us of the uncertainty of the future and have replaced long-term visions. The vast majority of political initiatives are thus reactions to a possible crisis which would be worse if not… The liberal society has succeeded in making the use of the survival instinct the necessary strategy to keep life together – to equate biological life with vulnerable life . But one is not really interested in learning from the vulnerable life. The liberal subject is therefore not so much defined by his freedom, but by the ability to handle a permanent uncertainty and vulnerability. This robustness can be translated here as the ability to pursue preferences for enjoyment and reduce pain. But the requirement to constantly pursue enjoyment and dreams often turns into a state of exhaustion and individual collapse. And if you are afflicted with illness or pain it is just to become strong and survivable. To be neoliberal is to be enjoyable.
The docile individual. The neo-liberal view of humanity gradually resembles the language of sport about winners and losers. It is not enough to have experience and be able to deliver quality in the core service – you also have to be able to perform, make yourself visible, be on, exceed yourself. The result is a culture of anxiety with constant fear of exclusion. In his speech at Ground Zero a few years ago, Obama just praised the workability and robustness: Management shows that the subject is exposed, but at the same time that it can come again. The indomitable man who can return after adversity becomes a role model for leadership and for the individual: the Hunter soldier who human resource-Example, the sportsman who overcomes his cancer illness and wins in a big race, the obese who loses weight.
We have moved from the security state (Foucault) to the adaptability.
But the rugged individual is, in fact, the name of it docile an individual who loses the ability to say no and to think for himself. He makes it easy, just adapts, and this is where his selfishness consists. A community of adaptable individuals may have self-confidence, but often low self-esteem. In the wake of my ability to adapt, I learn to behave as best I can. A strategic approach that confuses the ego with the self and devalues one's integrity. Rather, the liberal society's celebration of self-determination, autonomy and freedom is the story of the reactive man who uses his "autonomy" for constant adaptation and short-term enjoyment. The result is what the authors call "a dilution of the self". The despairing appeal of the liberal society that the individual must be strong, original and unique stands in the way of a mature, reflexive processing of the self with a heightened sense of the essentials and the essentials of life. The biological-individual survival metaphor has replaced our ability to investigate and critique the structures that maintain and reproduce oppression, inequality and social irresponsibility. It is not surprising that the youth are told that there is no common dream – that they just have to perform to secure themselves against the rising uncertainty. No belief in viable, social ties – only trust in one's own resources. While education should support an educational commitment to cultural values, to vulnerable, weak and oppressed groups, fragile consumers are produced whose education makes political engagement difficult. The belief in resilience replaces and rejects the belief in a change in political structures. Life is a constant exercise. We value the adaptability itself rather than the substance of our values. The result is a society constructed solely on an economic basis that ignores our spiritual and cultural roots, including the judicial and political. There remains a political sense called "the politics of necessity" for which the future is a threat.
If you ask a child, life has something to do with discovery and creation. If you ask adults, they talk about life as something about survival.
To tell the truth. But how can we live our lives in a way that is not governed by the collective neurosis of neoliberalism: winning, accomplishing, consuming and calculating reason? We must, according to the authors, return to what the Greeks referred to as "the free spirit" – parrhesia (to speak freely) – and to the ideal of speaking the truth. To speak power against and show the way to a life beyond achievement and merit. To face the truth in dialogue with your own past. For the European, the past is not just cultural values and tradition, but also an anthropological basic condition. We can only advance archaeologically to the present by coming to greater clarity about our own history – how the past works in us as a living conversation. Therefore, the truth of the future begins with an understanding of our time, seeing our own blindness, rediscovering the imagination, and daring to tell the truth about moral failure, learning from history's defeat, learning about the importance of cultural treasures to our way of life, to cities, coastlines, countryside (which is destroyed by center buildings, highways and financial gain). Universities and schools must be able to create a living dialogue between the past and the present. Short-term economic benefit is eroding educational institutions and is devastating for a serious conversation about culture and values.
Life art. But it requires that I understand that living is not just an experience that many people believe today – but a task. An exercise in marveling at everything that doesn't look like ourselves; that which manages to challenge us and open ourselves to the world and other people. A life guided by adaptation is a life that pushes life ahead. Learning to understand our mortality is ethical and politically decisive in order to act. The art of life is a struggle against the lazy, well-satisfied and adapted mass within ourselves, the indifferent self who loses the sense of self. The values that belong to everyone, I understand only because I take my own and others' lives seriously, because they stem from the deepest care for others. Only through this care do I become a real individual. This the ancient Greeks knew. The Greek drama was not a performance art in the sense of exhibiting my life, me and my identity, but was intended to awaken citizens to the awareness of the dignified and unworthy life. Through the drama one learns the injustice because the pain is the reality that carries a common element – the unbearable life.
Art and spirit must teach us to see that be seen, into our own time. Justine, the main character of Lars von Triers Melancholia (the picture) is such a viewer. She feels led by her job, family and wedding falseness. She sees the structures and power that sustain the unbearable and inauthentic life. Like many others who have tried to live a life of constant adaptation, she is exhausted. Unlike her neurotic sister Claire, who, while the planet Melancholia is approaching, lives in fear of the downfall of the world, Justine affirms her and our mortality. It is through this gesture (affirmation) that she becomes political and exhibits a post-biopolitical ethic. In the closing scene with her sister, Justine abandons any plan to prepare and adapt to a possible other world. For Justine, there is only this one world. She sits down, waits and marvels.
Poetic connection. Maybe we need to more nihilism, not nihilism as worthless emptiness; that which neoliberal capitalism delivers – but a dissolution of what gives one's life meaning and value until one finally lets go of oneself and changes? Perhaps the transformation will only come about in the face of this impossibility, in that there is a transformative touch with nothing? No longer to be mastered by plans, adjustments, calculations and assurances, and paralyzed by biological survival, but to thrive on exercises of admiration and admiration for art, culture and all that does not resemble ourselves. The authors are leading the way, and their bid for a new art of life is only very tentative, but they have a clear message: With the neoliberal view of humanity, we have lost our sense of self-limitation. "On the other hand, we maintain that were it not for a more original love for the world and the other, a poetic connection that allows us to be connected, subsequent ties, based solely on our uncertainty and threat, would be superfluous." The difficult thing is not to adjust to uncertainty; the difficulty is finding new ways to confirm life and life forms.
Carnera is a literary critic in Ny Tid.
ac.mpp@cbs.dk
