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’.

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