Against Resilience: The (Anti-)Ethics of Participation in an Unjust and Unequal Public Sphere

Abstract

If we define public spheres as social spaces in families, media, governance and policy making, workplaces, colleges, schools, places of worship and leisure where people can participate in sociopolitical debate and action, it is important to understand how imbalanced architectures of power ensure that the affective and physical costs of participation are higher for some than for others. While critiques of Habermas have engaged these power imbalances and their effects on the putative notions of the public sphere, public spheres and counter-publics, the notion of public and individual resilience continues to be invoked in a celebratory mode for communities and environments that survive and thrive despite political repression. Drawing on interviews and focus groups about disinformation and hate in legacy and social media, and on scholarship about resilience from health and ecology, my paper historicises and critiques the notion of resilience as currently deployed in communications and social theory. Based on this analysis, I argue that the concept of resilience now serves mainly to elude or defang valid and varied critiques of communicative inequality, discrimination and violence in the devastatingly flawed contemporary public sphere, while also feeding into double-edged celebrations of recognition as empowerment and neoliberal becoming.