Performative resilience: How the arts and culture support austerity in post-crisis capitalism

Resilience is a key theme in contemporary post-crisis capitalism, prominent across government policy, popular discourses, business and management thinking and academia. This article is about the deployment of the concept of resilience in cultural policy and practice under conditions of austerity. It is based on an extensive engagement with literature, an analysis of cultural policy discourse, and qualitative data drawn from 23 indepth interviews with freelance cultural practitioners. The findings contribute to the literature on the politics of resilience in policy and society (Allen et al., 2014, Diprose 2014, Burman 2018, Gill & Orgad 2018, Harrison 2012) and the effects of austerity on culture (Felton et al. 2010, Pasquinelli & Sjöholm 2015, Pratt 2015). We adapt Robin James’s (2015) concept of resilience to show how arts leaders and practitioners generate performative narratives that seek to publicly represent their capacity to adapt to austerity, and we explore the different versions of resilience thinking that these narratives mobilise. We argue that resilience in cultural policy and practice unwittingly produces a discursive surplus which becomes reinvested in institutions, providing subsequent justification for the processes of post-crisis austerity itself.