Resilience Governmentality: Toward a Genealogy of Systemic Risk Regulation

• In Event: Scenarios Beyond Imagination: What Is Imaginable? and What Is Not?

Abstract

The systemic risk regulation regime created under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 is one of the primary targets of the Trump administration's agenda to dismantle the administrative state. This paper argues that this new regime is particularly vulnerable to such an attack because it rests on a hybrid form of governmental expertise the paper calls "resilience governmentality." Allowing policymakers to reach all the way into financial mammoths like Citibank and make executive decisions on their daily daily operations, resilience governmentality deploys a puzzling form of intervention that is too intrusive to be neoliberal, and yet too cautious and restricted to be “interventionist.” Tracing the genealogy of this intervention form that predict and prevent "unimaginable financial catastrophes," the paper shows that resilience governmentality was invented by a group of system analysts at the New Deal resource planning agencies to explain the Great Depression. These experts assembled a network of expertise to detect the systemically important points of vulnerability in the structure of the economy. Combining systemic analysis techniques (input-output interindustry tables) with non-monetary intervention instruments (stockpiles) under a problematization of the economy as a complex of vital and yet vulnerable economic systems, they sought to enhance the resilience of these systems by reducing the vulnerability of their systemically important points (the price of key commodity flows). Tracing the development of resilience governmentality, following the demise of the New Deal, at the Cold War defense mobilization preparedness agencies that sought to enahce the resilience of the industrial system to a nuclear attack, the paper shows that this expertise network was remapped onto a financial ontology on the onset of the Latin American debt crisis to manage systemic risks in the financial system. The paper traces the genealogy of systemic techniques as they are repurposed to address substantively different problems within an underlying form that is common to the problem of system resilience and systemic risks such fragilities pose.

Author

• Onur Ozgode, Northwestern University