How the World Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Failure: Big Data, Resilience and Emergent Causality
| Published date | 01 June 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829816636673 |
| Date | 01 June 2016 |
| Author | David Chandler |
| Subject Matter | Conference Articles |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2016, Vol. 44(3) 391 –410
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829816636673
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How the World Learned to
Stop Worrying and Love
Failure: Big Data, Resilience
and Emergent Causality
David Chandler
University of Westminster, UK
Abstract
In modernity, failure was the discourse of critique, today, it is increasingly the discourse of power:
failure has changed its allegiances. Over the last two decades, failure has been enfolded into
discourses of power, facilitating the development of new policy approaches. Foremost among
governing approaches that seek to include and to govern through failure is that of resilience. This
article seeks to reflect upon how the understanding of failure has become transformed in this
process, particularly linking this transformation to the radical appreciation of contingency and of
the limits to instrumental cause-and-effect approaches to rule. Whereas modernity was shaped
by a contestation over failure as an epistemological boundary, under conditions of contingency
and complexity there appears to be a new consensus on failure as an ontological necessity.
This problematic ‘ontological turn’ is illustrated using examples of changing approaches to risks,
especially anthropogenic understandings of environmental threats, formerly seen as ‘natural’.
Keywords
resilience, Big Data, emergent causality, Bruno Latour, Ulrich Beck
Introduction
Key to the politically disputed understanding of ‘failure’ under modernity was the shared
assumption that governing authority rested on causal chains of interconnection: that
governing powers bore responsibility for the outcomes of their policy interventions.
Thus, the attribution of failure was of central concern to both the defenders of power and
Corresponding author:
David Chandler, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster, 32–38
Wells Street, London W1T 3UW, UK.
Email: d.chandler@wmin.ac.uk
636673MIL0010.1177/0305829816636673Millennium: Journal of International StudiesChandler
research-article2016
Conference Article
392 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3)
1. To paraphrase Bruno Latour’s view of modernist forms of critical sociology, ‘Why Has
Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry
30, no. 2 (2004): 225–48.
2. See, for example, William Desmond, ‘The Philosophy of Failure’, The Journal of Speculative
Philosophy 2, no. 4 (1988): 288–305; 293.
3. The process of naturalising or essentialising difference, from ideas of race through to new
institutionalist or neoliberal critiques of universalist assumptions, serves to distance ‘fail-
ure’ from dominant structures of power, see, for example, John Hobson, The Eurocentric
Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012); Frank Furedi, The Silent War: Imperialism and the
Changing Perception of Race (London: Pluto Press, 1998); Douglass North, Understanding
the Process of Economic Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
4. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth: In the International Law of the Jus Publicum
Europaeum (New York: Telos Press, 2003).
5. There is a rich collection of Foucault-inspired work on insurance as a modernist attempt
to compartmentalise, explain away and to exclude failure. As Francois Ewald argued:
‘Insurance, through the category of risk, objectifies every event as an accident’, ‘Insurance
their critics. Could policy failure be directly or indirectly linked to ruling ideas and
actions or were there other independent variables that needed to be taken into account?
Causal chains and causal claims were the essence of modernist contestations and the
stakes of failure were high in terms of political and ideological legitimacy. The key con-
nection that this article seeks to explore is that between the decline of modernist or ‘lin-
ear’ framings of causality and the reintegration of failure into policy-making. Or, to put
this another way, the emptying of the political significance of failure. Failure was a
modernist concept, and as such, the rich and complex love-hate relationship that moder-
nity had with failure seems to have finally ‘run out of steam’.1 In fact, in the conclusion
I will argue that – through the process of reintegrating failure – the concept of failure
itself now lacks any meaningful significance.
Failure no longer appears to demarcate the lines of critique and apologia; fought on
the grounds of failure’s inclusion (the basis of systemic critiques of power) or its exclu-
sion (in defence of dominant regimes of regulation and control). For modernist dis-
courses of power – reliant on instrumental forms of legitimisation and presupposing the
liberal, rational, calculating, self-conscious subject2 – failure was always problematic, a
threat to the status quo: something to be tamed, managed, insured against, excluded, or
made into the exception to the norm (an accident, an act of Nature or ‘Act of God’).
Dominant discourses of failure were those of apologia, denying links between failure and
the operations of power; failure was addressed through exclusion and ‘othering’.3
Thus, on the one hand, failure was excluded: although understood to be unavoidable,
it was to be ‘bracketed’ from the norm (in the terminology of Carl Schmitt)4 and treated
differently, as an ‘exception’ or ‘accident’. Failure was to be governed but through its
exclusion or separation. Risk insurance is a classic modernist form of the bracketing of
failure: ensuring that failure is compartmentalised through a separate mode of calculus
and regulation, dissipating responsibility for the securing of systems of production and
exchange.5 On the other hand, for discourses of modernist critique, failure – from
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