Securing through the failure to secure? The ambiguity of resilience at the bombsite

Introduction

A key component within resilience policies is the domestication of security failure, such that security no longer aims solely at prevention but can also incorporate those events which exceed preventative bounds. Resilience discourses resignify uncertainty and unpredictability as catalysts for attaining security and for the improvement of anticipatory techniques: security failure becomes part of the story about security learning and improvements in capability. Failure and insecurity thus become productive, where they once eluded security and stood in opposition to it. Such a discursive leap accounts for some of the success of the resilience discourse – it is totalizing through its incorporation and mediation of insecurity, redeploying the unpreventable event within a conceptual loop which lauds better future security. In this article, I explore questions of failure mediation and redeployment. If resilience policies suggest that failure and insecurity can be mediated and redeployed in the cause of success, what becomes of visceral sites of security failure such as the terrorist bombsite? Can such sites of insecurity be tamed by the tools of resilience?

The article focuses on a site where security agencies failed to prevent the bombing of a packed nightclub in Bali, in order to explore ambiguity of failure in the resilience era. It considers the efforts of politicians and activists to perform the site as resilient, and the spatial and temporal excess which eludes this performance. But these performances are not resilience policies as such; rather, they are practices which employ discursive repertoires of resilience. The choice of case study, then, has both advantages and weaknesses. It is not an exploration of dedicated resilience policies or practices. Indonesia is more often the subject of resilience practices performed by aid agencies and international organizations, rather than a resilience actor. Similarly, at the time of the Bali bombing (2002), Australia had yet to collate and codify its resilience policies. Neither the state actor, nor the activists I discuss in this article, explicitly made reference to resilience by name in their attempts to mediate the bombsite.

However, the site of the Bali bombing is particularly interesting with regards to making visible the practices which attempt to domesticate and mediate security failure and insecurity, making them productive (a key node within the resilience discourse, I will argue). Politicians, activists, and academic literatures have all made implicit claims upon the resilience of the site. In the academic literature on emergency management, for example, attention has been paid to the Bali bombing with regards to improving the resilience of tourism industries and local economies to crisis events (Gurtner, 2004; Henderson, 2003; Pforr and Hosie, 2008). Additionally, multiple attempts to claim the bombsite for the architectural mediation of security failure have occurred over the decade since the bombing, and this article focuses on the activities of the Bali Peace Park Association (who wish to obtain the land to build a commemorative peace park and museum to the bombing) and the statements of Australian and Indonesian politicians who attempt to discursively mediate security failure to render the site resolved, productive, and useful. Such deployment of security failure as productive is an implicit utilization, I will argue, of the resilience discourse.

The site of the Bali bombing is particularly suited to exposing the practices which attempt to perform destroyed space as resilient. The idiosyncratic nature of the land ownership of the Sari Club bombsite and a related political veto on nightclub reconstruction means that it has not been redeveloped or sold. It stands bare, nearly 12 years after the event which killed 202 people. This visceral emptiness, as gazed upon by the international tourists who now flock back to the island, has provoked plentiful activity from activists and politicians. Throughout this article, I will explore that activity while arguing that it reveals several temporal and spatial ambiguities of resilience. First, disaster recovery is centralized within resilience policy discourses, yet resilience has a profound disregard for practices of bombsite recovery. Resilient recovery is instead projected into the future as an anticipatory consideration, rather than applied to sites which exist. Resilience anticipates the future bombsite which will require recovery, but offers no steps for the performance of bombsite mediation. This temporal ambiguity, I will argue, is situated within a feedback loop. Resilience policies are absent at sites of destruction – instead, they engender practices which work forwards and backwards but are never present. As well as anticipating the mediation of future events, resilience policies utilize and redeploy past examples of security failure to promise a more secure future – securing through the failure to secure via a feedback loop. The present bombsite, however, is left unaddressed. Why?

The main contribution of this article is an explanatory response to that ambiguity. I will show that by forcing resilience to address the present-day bombsite, it becomes clear that resilience is a chimera. Resilience reworks failure retrospectively, fixing memory by invoking national characteristics of heroism in the face of trauma; it also reworks security failure in anticipatory terms as productive of future successes in disaster recovery, but it is entirely absent in the present. It cannot and does not speak of the existing bombsite, because the evidence of failure is too visceral there. The temporal ambiguity, then, is compounded within a spatial ambiguity. Resilience policies speak in abstracted ways of infrastructural space and the restoration of circulations rather than addressing the destroyed site, just as they deal in temporal abstractions while avoiding the present. Through exploration of these ambiguities, I will show that the undeveloped site of the Sari Club stands in excess of all efforts to recast security failure in productive terms. At this point, resilience as a chimera becomes apparent. The security discourse which supposedly allows insecurity and failure into its remit actually functions to resignify that failure as if it never existed in the first place. Resilience attempts to erase security failure through its retrospective, anticipatory, and ‘despatialized’ operations, rather than actually addressing disaster recovery. It is thus a chimera.

Conceptualizing resilience, situating the bombsite

There exists a significant critical literature which has produced multiple conceptualizations of resilience, which I will briefly address here to situate my reading of resilience as related to the incorporation, mediation, and making-productive of security failure. Within the critical reaction to resilience, multiple commentators have pointed to its explicit neoliberal governmentality within the overall agenda (Joseph, 2013) and the practices deployed within programs such as community resilience (Bulley, 2013; Rogers, 2013). In these readings resilience policies are tools which function to ‘conduct the conduct’ of populations, whilst deploying the spectre of future insecurities. In a related critical trajectory, other scholars have used biopolitics to read resilience as a collection of policies and practices aimed at the maintenance of circulatory functions within, and outside, the polity (Dillon and Reid, 2009; Lentzos and Rose, 2009; Lundborg and Vaughan-Williams, 2011). These scholars read the turn from critical infrastructure protection to resilience in various ways, highlighting the discursive shift from actuarial risk analysis to a condition of uncertainty and the resulting deployment of ecological and vital metaphors for the insulation of systems from shocks (see also Walker and Cooper, 2011). In brief, these arguments focus on the deployment of vital heuristics within security – ‘life’ is understood as pertaining to innate properties of ‘adaptability’, which could be extended to infrastructure so that shocks may be overcome and systems may return to normality.

Both these critical trajectories highlight, explicitly and implicitly, that the turn towards resilience involves securing through the prospect of insecurability. Unstoppable and unpredictable events are the discursive context through which, paradoxically, security is now performed. This article aims to contribute to such critical exposure of resilience as a method of ‘governing through insecurity’ (Lentzos and Rose, 2009). In particular, the article speaks to literatures on the turn towards imagination, pre-mediation, and the performance of event-preparedness scenarios in security practice (Amoore and de Goede, 2008; Anderson and Adey, 2012; Aradau and van Munster, 2011; de Goede, 2008) and the biopolitical literature on resilience which highlights the phenomena of governing through the event of disaster/insecurity. These literatures have both highlighted that security technologies are now governing through the spectre of the event, through insecurity itself. However, in doing so, they have focused on the anticipatory means by which insecurity is made a tool of biopolitical governance. They have addressed resilience as resilience addresses the world – as anticipation. In this article I will step outside the anticipatory remit of resilience policies and discourses to problematize resilience. I switch the temporality by which ‘securing through the failure to secure’ occurs, from pre-mediation and anticipation to an exploration of the variegated temporalities which occur as actors attempt to mediate the disruption of the bombsite.

It is interesting to do this because resilience policies centralize disaster recovery, yet project its remit of activity towards the anticipated future and the abstracted spatiality of infrastructural circulation. The bombsite thus becomes a relevant site for exploration through counterfactual juxtaposition. What happens to the bombsite, given the centralization of anticipated yet unpreventable events within policy? Do recovery practices at the bombsite implicitly deploy resilience thinking, and can they mediate the visceral failure-to-secure which is found at destroyed space? Or do event sites reveal resilience to be a chimera which cannot act upon security failures in the present tense? To make the presence of the bombsite applicable to the resilience discourse, I focus here on the attempts of politicians and activists to perform the site as resilient. My understanding of resilience, in this context, stems from the reconceptualization of security failure within the policy discourse.

The incorporation and remaking of ‘security failure’ is a central motif within the resilience discourse – connected to the redefinition of security in resilience policies. Despite its centralization of insecurity and the inability of governments to prevent disruptive events, the resilience era redeploys insecurity to postulate a new type of ‘preventative’ security: one that doesn’t stop the event from happening, but which involves the systematic mediation of effects and the organic recovery of infrastructural capacity. Events aren’t stopped, but their consequences are. Security is now the mediation of failure. This internalization and redeployment of ‘failure’ and insecurity are situated within the post-Cold War ‘era of uncertainty’, as defined by the UK’s National Security Strategy of 2010 (Cabinet Office, 2010: 3). The US Department of Homeland Security has provided a similar reading of the contemporary era in their 2007 National Security Strategy, whereby insecurity is now a fundamental condition which necessitates that we live with risk rather than resisting it. As such, the resilience era signals the demise of the era of ‘security as prevention’, and the rise of ‘security through inevitable insecurity’. For example:

Despite our best efforts, achieving a complete state of […] protection is not possible in the face of the numerous and varied catastrophic possibilities that could challenge the security of America today. Recognizing that […] we cannot envision or prepare for every potential threat, we must understand and accept a certain level of risk as a permanent condition. (Department of Homeland Security, 2007: 25)

Similarly, in the years following the Bali bombing, Australia (a major player in responses to the bombing) has codified its critical infrastructure protection around the concept of resilience as providing security despite (and through) insecurity. Identifying a climate of ‘increasing complexity’, the Australian government has invoked the necessity of less linear, more adaptive and organic responses to the unforeseeable events which will inevitably shock infrastructural systems (Australian Government, 2010). Failure-to-prevent is thus crucial and yet also ambiguous within resilience. Rather than imagining a supposedly unattainable goal of security – characterized as the absence of disruptive events – the resilience discourse advocates the acceptance of insecurity as a fundamental condition. This acceptance can, it is imagined, lead towards successful mediation of systemic disruption by focusing attention on critical infrastructures and systems rather than on events and/or enemies. Insecurity becomes the explicit condition of security, as security is performed through the unpreventable event.

Yet, to make this happen, bombsites have to be forgotten, mediated, and remade as something else. While failure is crucial to resilience discourse and disaster recovery is centralized, the existing bombsite is left unaddressed by resilience policies, and the practices which resignify destroyed space are silenced and not called ‘resilient’. This silence situates the exploration of destroyed space in this article. Resilience is not applied to the bombsite which exists – rather it is used to think about and anticipate the future disruptive event. Emergency recovery documentation does not address disaster sites except to make future contingency plans for the preparation and restoration of networked systems of transportation, communication, business, and infrastructure (Australian Government, 2010; Cabinet Office, 2013: 81–87). As such, the temporality of bombsites in resilience thinking is always pushed towards the anticipation of the future. Feedback loops then ensure that problematic responses to previous events provide learning, deploying the past to serve the idealization of the future without addressing the present. While taken from the UK context, the multi-agency debrief report compiled by the London Resilience Forum after the 2005 bombings is an archetypal indication of how failures are resignified as opportunities for future successes in this regard (London Regional Resilience Forum, 2006). Entitled Looking Back, Moving Forward: Lessons Identified and Progress since the Terrorist Events of 7 July 2005 (a title which itself highlights the feedback loop whereby resilience appropriates events and failures for the governance of the future), the report highlights problems with radio communication between emergency service providers and supports the installation of TETRA-based systems on the tube network (London Regional Resilience Forum, 2006). The future will thus be more resilient. Two points follow from this: failure is conceived as productive within resilience, and resilience policy is fundamentally anticipatory (via anticipation and also feedback loops which connect failures to the promise of future success, bypassing the consequences of present-day failure). As such, despite the centralization of disaster recovery in resilience policy, there are no discussions of practices that can be enacted upon disaster space to normalize it, or to help it ‘bounce back’.

However, by taking resilience to the bombsite, where it is conspicuously absent as a policy discourse of recovery, it becomes possible to expose the ambiguities of resilience. Practices become apparent which implicitly domesticate ‘failures to secure’ through memorialization, discursive resignification, and the incorporation of failure within a linear discourse of security improvement. Failure is recast so that it can be reimagined as productive. Existing policy and academic literatures on resilience mainly focus on its anticipatory deployment without interrogating such retrospective and feedback-loop features. But, explored through the bombsite, these implicit deployments of resilience (securing through the event of insecurity) can be exposed. These practices deploy both anticipatory and retrospective temporalities to reassert a linear temporality around trauma (Edkins, 2003) and yet, at the bombsite itself, the Sari Club stands in excess of all efforts to resignify security failure as something productive. There is a lacuna within the performance of resilience. Resilience, I will argue, is revealed to be a chimera – acting to dissolve failure rather than incorporating it. I will develop this argument by first looking at the temporal ambiguity of resilience in disaster recovery, then the spatial ambiguity (whereby bombsites stand in excess of attempts to resignify failure) and then by exploring the everyday touristic acts of resignification directed at the Sari Club site.

Securing through the failure to secure: Resilience as temporally ambiguous

Given the centrality of Bali within Australian imaginations of its national place in Asia (Philpott, 2005: 234; interviews with Anne Aly and Made Wijaya) and the high number of Australian tourists killed in the 2002 bombing, Australian actors have loomed large in responses to the destruction of the Sari Club and Paddy’s Bar. Australian politicians and journalists initially responded to the Bali bombing through strategies of ‘othering’ and the ‘militarization’ of security policy associated with the war on terror frame (Hutchison, 2010; McDonald, 2005). But, in tandem with the codification of the Australian resilience policy in recent years (COAG, 2009; Australian Government, 2010), it is evident that efforts are now being made to resignify the bombing as productive of security success (or as an event which can be productively deployed within invocations of Australian national heroism). While these efforts are not dedicated resilience policies as such, they implicitly deploy the resilience approach towards making insecurity productive and thus become relevant to questions of ambiguity, temporality, and spatiality in security practice.

Practices of ‘securing through the failure to secure’ directed at the Sari Club site have been both retrospective and anticipatory in nature: retrospective practices have included efforts to architecturally redevelop the site, and the public discourse which recharacterizes the traumatic event as revealing the gritty, yet compassionate, Australian spirit (Abbott, 2012; Gillard, 2012). Anticipatory practices, on the other hand, have utilized failure-feedback loops which recast the bombing event as productive in terms of future preparation for disruption. In both temporalities, failures to prevent an event are resignified in positive terms. This recharacterization of failure and insecurity indicates the implicit salience of the resilience discourse, whereby insecurity and disastrous events are turned into productive positives – offering a window into the strange world of resilience whereby a slaughter of tourists becomes resignified as productive.

To begin with what might be called retrospective resilience, where failures-to-prevent are used to govern through the resignification of events and their insertion within a historical trajectory, the application of the ANZAC legacy to the Bali bombings during the tenth anniversary period is crucial. Both (the then) Prime Minister Julia Gillard and opposition leader Tony Abbot spoke frequently of the resilient Australian spirit revealed by the bombings, situating this character trait within the trajectory of the Gallipoli legend of the ANZAC solider (a key component within official depictions of Australian national identity) (Gillard, 2012; see also McDonald, 2010). Despite the historical and contextual distance between trench warfare and a nightclub bomb, the (then) Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbot, published an editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald on the tenth anniversary of the Bali bombings which explicitly projected the ANZAC legacy onto the bodies of burnt tourists. His use of Gallipoli and Kokoda Track imagery (where Aussie soldiers [diggers] endured terrible conditions during World War II) retroactively imagines the Australian nation as tough, fair, and resilient through experiences of trauma:

For many Australians, the abiding image of the 2002 Bali bombing will be Hanabeth Luke helping Tom Singer to escape from the Sari Club. Like the equally emblematic photographs of Simpson at Gallipoli and the fuzzy wuzzy angel leading a blinded digger down the Kokoda Track, it perfectly captured the way we instinctively turn to each other for help and support in the most stressful circumstances. Often, the worst of times can bring out the best in people […] Australians could have railed against the country that harboured their killers. Instead, we worked with Indonesia to find them and Indonesia worked with us to bring them to justice. (Abbott, 2012)

Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Gillard used her speech at the tenth anniversary ceremony of the Bali bombing to incorporate the nightclub disaster into a linear narrative about Australian resilience, grit, and fairness – listing examples of Gallipoli, Kokoda, the Bali bombing, and the Australian victims of the London bombing (2005) to weave a retrospective story about trauma, heroism, resilient character, and national identity. These tropes were repeated ad infinitum across regional anniversary events in Australia and the Australian media. Political figures and the media attempted to recast the Bali tragedy in terms of success. Failures to prevent a nightclub bombing have been utilized to retroactively consolidate Australian national character, in association with other key signifiers like the ANZAC experience and the Kokoda Track legacy. Insecurity has become productive.

But the use and recasting of security failure is not only retrospective; it is also used within feedback loops which recast the event as antecedent to future security success. This is a clear overlap with the resilience policy discourse. During the same anniversary service, the failure to secure the Legian Strip from terrorist attack was repeatedly reframed by politicians as productive of successes regarding the sharing of forensic and investigative expertise between Australia and Indonesia – ready for the Asian tsunami several years later. Prime Minister Gillard of Australia and the Indonesian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dr Marty Natalegawa, both emphasized these practical successes when addressing the families of victims and survivors of the bombing at the 2012 anniversary service (despite the emotional disconnect created by discussing forensic advances in front of grieving families). Here the orientalizing relationship of place (through which Australia’s place in the Asian region is imagined through practices of tourism; see Philpott, 2005: 234; interviews with Anne Aly and Made Wijaya) was reconstituted through the mentoring offered by a beneficent Australia to a supposedly grateful Indonesia. The Australian imaginary was remade through reimagining the bombing as antecedent to success, securing through what was once a failure to secure.

In my interview with Fiona Hoggart of the Australian Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), she highlighted this international cooperation which has resulted from the bombings and was happy to agree with me that the Bali bombings had presented the chance for Australia and Indonesia to repair their post-East Timor relations. Indeed, she was emphatic about the Bali bombing as presenting an opportunity for success, demonstrating that security can be furthered through the failure to secure – in the style of the resilience discourse:

Fiona asked that much of our conversation be treated as ‘off the record’ and was very thorough in removing any statement which might be misconstrued from the transcript, but regarding this issue she clearly emphasized the ‘on-record’ importance of advances in cooperation post-bombing and their convergence with the official narrative of the Australian government. It can thus be treated as indicative of the official line on such matters.

So, how should we situate these anticipatory and retrospective remakings of failure and insecurity by political figures? Such reworkings of the bombing speak to an interesting reversal of Paul Virilio’s conception of the integral accident – where each technological advance simultaneously invents its own accident (2007: 5–10). In this reworking of disastrous events, each failure to secure is manipulated and resignified to produce its own successes – an implicit utilization of a central tenet within the resilience discourse where insecurity becomes the means to attain security. The failure is retrospectively recast as a positive through the revelation of Australian national grit (via the first responders and Abbott’s identification of tolerance in Australian treatment of Indonesia) and the deployment of ANZAC narrative, and simultaneously incorporated into the anticipatory and preparatory technologies which take future events (like the Asian tsunami, to use Fiona’s example) as their objects. Failure is recast through a feedback loop and, apparently, will contribute to future security.

Such feedback loops of failure reveal ambiguities in the anticipatory policy discourse of resilience. Resilience is used to signify pre-emptive preparatory action against imagined future threats, despite use of the prefix ‘re-’. ‘Re-’ usually signifies a return to a previous state, but security discourses of resilience commonly project this ‘return’ into the future. As I have shown through discussion of resilience policies, resilience is not concerned with practices which aid the ‘bouncing back’ of the bombsite despite its centralization of disaster recovery. Resilience in security policy does not deploy the ‘engineering’ discourse of elasticity in resilient materials, such that they might ‘bounce back’ to their previous shape (Bruijne et al., 2010); rather it mediates failures in security by reworking them as antecedents in a story about adaptive capacity and success. The discussion of shared forensic expertise after the bombing, and the positive impact upon the troubled post-Timor relations between the states, fits this mould of the feedback loop which connects past and future while evading the present.

However, if we consider the retrospective invocation of resilience by politicians and journalists (such as the national character revealed through traumatic events like bombings or trench warfare), then we must note its differing temporality. Such responses reframe violent events as evidences of the natural resilience of the nation’s people, and in doing this they act upon the past. This is not claim-making which deploys the past to make claims about the future via a feedback loop. Instead, retrospective attributions of resilient national spirit function to return the ‘past’ to a palatable state where performances of nationhood are no longer disrupted by the memory of televised bodies and stricken survivors. They domesticate and re-‘quilt’, to invoke Žižek’s conception of the ideological labour undertaken to secure meaning in the face of shifting signifiers (1991: 16–21), the traumatic event into a discourse of national endurance and tenacity. In this resilience practice, it is the past which is reworked as success – not the future. It is resignified to speak of national endurance, identity and wholeness.

Given the political deployment of the bombing within efforts to resignify both past and future insecurity as resolved and productive, we can consider several ambiguities of resilience. If we accept that the effort to recast failure is symptomatic of, or implicit within, the resilience frame, then resilience works forwards and backwards in political discourse about the event – while remaining silent about the mediation of already-existing disaster in the present tense. There is a lacuna here which requires explanation. ‘Securing through the failure to secure’ is temporally ambiguous. Its implicit deployment of resilience involves obscuring the emergence of past failure (recasting it in terms of ANZAC legacy and narrating first-responder bravery within terms of national character) and also obscuring the imagined future danger by suggesting that technologies of prevention are better prepared through failure. This reveals something fundamentally ambiguous about resilience. It is not ‘there’ – and, through its workings, neither is ‘failure’. The discourse which supposedly admits failure and insecurity into the remit of security spends its time revoking this admission. Resilience is supposedly organized around the admission of failure/insecurity into the remit of security (securing through insecurity), but there is no present-tense application of resilience to the bombsite, and retrospective and anticipatory measures focus on remaking the failure event so that it never existed as failure in the first place. Claims to prevention are thus made redundant. Resilience as failure negation actually has nothing to do with preventing or mediating the consequences of events; instead, it exorcises the spectre of insecurity through retrospective and anticipatory means of resignification. Resilience functions as a chimera.

In the next section I will argue that this chimera of functionality explains why resilience policies are never applied to the bombsite itself by exploring the spatial ambiguity of resilience through the Sari Club site. The temporal ambiguity of the resilience chimera is situated within this spatial ambiguity because, when confronted with the present-day bombsite, all efforts to mediate failure collapse. The excess of the bombsite cannot be captured or domesticated – highlighting that resilience operates through retrospective and anticipatory means but is fundamentally absent in the present. It does not address the present temporality or spatiality of the failure-to-prevent for a reason: its claims would collapse. It cannot assimilate failure when confronted; instead, it relies upon inserting that failure into retrospective and anticipatory trajectories from an abstracted distance. Resilience, then, is not a strategy for prevention or coping but, instead, for sweeping under the carpet. The excess of the unreconstructed site dismantles its claims.

The excess of the Sari Club site and the spatial ambiguity of resilience

What happens to the bombsite? The temporal ambiguity of resilience (discussed above) is compounded in a spatial ambiguity whereby bombsites are silenced in favour of policy discussion of abstracted circulations. For instance, despite the centrality of disaster recovery to resilience discourses, the Council of Australian Governments’ ‘Strategy for Disaster Resilience’ does not focus on recovering the sites of disaster (primarily bushfires in this document) but rather on building disaster awareness between business leaders and communities such that future disruption to functionality might be minimized. The focus is on the adaptive continuity of economic circulations, with particular emphasis on educating households to take out sufficient home insurance, with the aim of the strategy being that: ‘Following a disaster, a satisfactory range of functioning is restored quickly. People understand the mechanisms and processes through which recovery assistance may be made available’ (COAG, 2009: 6). Similar spatial abstractions to the level of circulation can be found across international resilience policies, with the UK policy on disaster response and recovery emphasizing the restoration of systems of transportation, business, and communication – rather than addressing the sites of events (Cabinet Office, 2013: 81–87). Similarly, the academic literature which has considered the Bali bombing relative to resilience has not focused on the bombsite itself but rather the restoration, or otherwise, of tourist circulations. The bombing is discussed relative to the ‘making resilient’ of tourism industries and the national economies which depend upon them (Gurtner, 2004; Henderson, 2003; Pforr and Hosie, 2008).

I will focus here, in counterfactual style, on the practices which have instead explicitly addressed the place of the Bali bombing in order to resignify the security failure – and the excess of the site which resists them. By exposing the place-specific efforts to remake failure as success, the spatial ambiguity of resilience can be explored – resilience policies ignore the practices which occur to enable the ‘normalization’ and bouncing back of destroyed space. They are spatially abstracted to the level of circulations and infrastructure. I will argue that this silence regarding the event-site points to resilience discourse and policies as a chimera – they cannot encompass the visceral destruction upon such sites within their supposed mediation of security failure. Bombsites are too visceral for resilience to resignify failure, thus resilience abstracts to the levels of anticipatory and retrospective temporality, and abstracted spatiality. Resilience, then, does not incorporate or act upon insecurity to alleviate the consequences of events, as it suggests – rather, it functions to obscure and resignify security failure such that it never existed.

Before I make this argument, however, the existing theorizations of place and/as security must be outlined. My interviews with the Bali Peace Park Association revealed an intensely place-specific focus within their campaign to appropriately mark and redevelop the site of the 2002 bombings, and looking at place-specific phenomena requires an understanding of place. Place has historically been conceptually sidelined in geography, in favour of the concept of space (Cresswell, 2004: 19). Yet, interestingly for our discussion of bombsite recovery, Yi-Fu Tuan’s classic reinvigoration of the study of place begins with the statement that ‘place is security’ (Tuan, 1977: 3). Contrasting the qualities of ‘place’ with ‘space’, he argues that the constitution and performance of ‘place’ is central to human experience. Undifferentiated space becomes place when it is endowed with value and meaning. Place is safety, security, and the constitution of an inside against an outside. This classic study has been critiqued from many angles (Harvey, 1996; Massey, 1991; Rose, 1993), but the more recent Heideggerian treatment which builds upon Tuan’s analysis is useful for the exploration of bombsite recovery. In Jeff Malpas’s book-length treatment of place, for example, place is integral to the possibility of human experience. No-one is ever outside place, and place is thus constitutive of subjectivity (Malpas, 1999). Importantly, for our discussion of place as security, the longing for stable places of dwelling reflects (he argues) a counterpoint to inevitable ontological insecurity.

Places help us to attain ontological security through presumed stability and the contrast with external identities and spaces (see also Campbell, 1992). Place is security. But because of this significance, symbolic places are targeted for attack and destruction (see also Coward, 2009). Sites are not randomly selected for attack. It was no accident that the Bali bombing targeted two of the most decadent and debauched clubs for Western backpackers on the tourist-dominated Legian Strip. Efforts to redevelop bombsites subsequently reveal efforts constituted around the ‘recovery’ of destroyed places – not the circulations so prized within resilience policies. As such, my exploration of the Sari Club site contrasts the infrastructural spatiality of resilience policies in disaster recovery with the practices which occur at the bombsite, highlighting a spatial ambiguity in resilience policies such that they do not (and cannot) address the event site.

The site of the Bali bombing is particularly relevant to discussions of place and the spatial abstraction of resilience policies because it stands half-finished in the eyes of its would-be-Australian-curators – the Bali Peace Park Association. Its place within the Kuta landscape is missing, still disrupted. The Jalan Legian Strip, where the Sari Club once stood, is the centre of Bali’s night-time economy. It is replete with the bars, restaurants, magic mushroom stalls, money-changers, and nightclubs which cater to the tourist trade. Yet, in the midst of all the crowded chaos stands a dirty yard fenced by corrugated iron sheeting. The lot is the site of the Sari Club. In the years since the bombing, a veto enforced by Bali’s Governor I Made Mangu Pastika has prevented commercially-interested parties from remaking the spot as a tourist-consumable. Thus it remains bare. Simultaneously, however, the private ownership of the site prevents a collective of activists called the Bali Peace Park Association from planting a remembrance garden and building a museum. As such, the site of the Sari Club is not currently acceding to anyone’s demands for the remaking of place (and the securing and normalization of the visuality of the Kuta landscape) – either as nightclub or commemorative garden.

Importantly, the ugliness and unresolvedness of the (now concrete) lot frustrates the efforts of Australian politicians to successfully renarrate the bombings away from Prime Minister John Howard’s war on terror frame (McDonald, 2005) towards a framing whereby they represent a pivotal moment within an implicit story about resilience. It is difficult to tell a success story about the bombings as productive of security and to weave them into a story of historical Australian heroism when the bombsite stands unresolved. The site is disruptive to the reframing of ‘failures to secure’ as productive – it stands in excess of resilience because it is spatially and temporally present, in opposition to the temporal and spatial abstraction of resilience policy.

The previous section explored the attempts of politicians to recast the failure-to-prevent the Bali bombing as a ‘success’ (implicitly deploying the resilience discourse on failure). But the undeveloped site of the bombing frustrates efforts to renarrate the bombings within this frame. It is important to explore the disruption posed by the site. It is uncooperative to the remaking of place and failure, and as such it was avoided by the official ten-year anniversary ceremony for the bombings. This ceremony, attended by the author, occurred over 10 km away in a disused quarry in Jimbaran to avoid the Sari Club site. The visual disruption of the site accounts for the idiosyncratic decision to hold the anniversary service in a quarry, and to bus the families and dignitaries from Kuta to Jimbaran. The discourse of resilient recovery, performed in politicians’ narratives of the ANZAC legacy and the usefulness of the bombing in preparing Australian-Indonesian cooperation for the Asian tsunami, would have seemed laughable if performed upon a bare site still imbued with unconcealed destruction. When I asked Australian official Stephen Candotti (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) about the decision to hold the anniversary service in the quarry, he invoked security concerns for the high-level delegates (interview with Stephen Candotti, 2012). To an extent this may be true – the quarry did allow for the positioning of snipers (pointed out by members of the audience before the ceremony began) and for the stationing of Indonesian army units on site. However, (then) Prime Minister Gillard attended the site the following day – rubbishing the explanation that the anniversary ceremony couldn’t be held there given security concerns for officials in the Legian Strip area.

Instead, it was the horror and failure of the site which remained excessive and prevented the anniversary ceremony from taking place in Kuta. The site is comprehensively problematized in peace park activist discourse (and newspaper articles) as a disrespectful and shameful use of sacred ground (interviews with Dallas Jackson Finn; Sharon Nash and Nick Way). Sometimes, local labourers park their motorcycles on the bare site and take tea from makeshift stalls there, given the dense overcrowding of Kuta, and the car park theme looms large in commentary about the site. Similarly, (the then) Prime Minister Gillard also visited the site on the morning after the anniversary service and confessed afterwards to having been ‘distressed’ by its current state (interview with Nick Way, 2012). Yet it is interesting that the site is experienced by Australian visitors as unresolved, because a large memorial to the victims of the bombing has been constructed on land adjacent to the site. The bombing has been memorialized – so why does activism continue? Why is the site still experienced as excessive to normalization efforts? Why is it spatially excessive of attempts to resignify failure as productive and what does this reveal about the spatial ambiguity of resilience?

The head of the Bali Peace Park Association, Nick Way, explained to me that the placing of the official memorial next-door to the Sari Club site fails to adequately cope with the resonance of the ‘actual’ site. This was a very interesting framing of the catastrophic event as ending at the external walls of the club – one which was shared by many Australian activists. The Chairman of the Peace Park group explained that even though the size of the truck bomb meant that people died in a wide radius, including upon the intersection where the present memorial stands, the Sari Club site remains exceptional and unresolved:

The difficulty with the memorial, as it is, is that it is not directly related to any of the places where people died. That’s a bit of an insult to some of the people, I suppose. Unfortunately many people died or were injured in the street there, where it is. It is a good compromise but it is also – it is not complete because the Sari Club is the epicentre of the destruction […] And so the present memorial is, I think, it’s slightly lacking in the fact that it does not actually cover one of these areas. (interview with Nick Way)

In his reading, the event has been curtailed to the space of the Sari Club – not the street, and (by omission) not the site of the first bomb at Paddy’s Bar which drove people to flee towards the Sari Club. Interestingly, other discourse has also spatially curtailed the event to the remnants of destroyed space at the Sari Club site (and not any further, despite the enormity of the truck bomb). On the night of the tenth anniversary, a man in Australian club football uniform was photographed urinating ‘on’ the site. The Australian media and blogosphere reacted with horror, demanding the man be named. Interestingly, the Kingsley football club responded through a statement by President Keith Pearce – who defended the man by arguing that he was clearly standing with his feet up against the external boundary of the Sari Club site, meaning that the urine was landing outside the event site and upon what was once an alleyway (Pearce cited in Feely, 2012). Therefore, the urination is not scandalous as it falls upon a space beyond the external boundary of the club. Yet, if the blast radius from the truck bomb was so large, an alleyway at the side of the club would also have been the site of violent deaths. Despite this, the Australian public discourse draws the lines of the event at the external walls of the nightclub – the only space to remain undeveloped after the bombing. This is more than coincidence.

The importance of this point stems from the experience of disruption – which perforates the existing attempt to bound the event and remake failure spatially and temporally through the adjacent memorial. The site remains an ‘excessive failure’, beyond the means of the techniques applied to retrospectively secure it, precisely because it is still undeveloped. To further build this argument, we need to look across the street from the site. The inverse of the excess which lingers around the Sari Club site is Paddy’s Bar. Paddy’s Bar, where the first bomb exploded, has been re-made to fit the Kuta landscape. It is now a Quicksilver shop with a bar overhead. People shop, drink, and party there, but this goes completely unremarked in political discourse. Even more tellingly, the Paddy’s Bar site was roped off during the anniversary visit of Prime Minister Gillard – it was physically separated from the area of ‘the event’, left as a section in which crowds gathered to watch the arrival of dignitaries. The redevelopment of Paddy’s Bar as a surfing shop and bar could be an even larger political issue than the gaping space of the Sari Club, but it was not acknowledged in official visits or media discourse. Why does no excess linger there? Asana Viebeke Lengkong, the original beneficiary of USAID funding to research the redevelopment of the bombsites and a peace park activist, remarked to me that Paddy’s attracted less attention because ‘it was a suicide vest explosion, so some people got shrapnel. But the Sari Club was the impact, what happened in the Sari Club is two tonnes of bomb, and it’s an impact, it’s one thousand degree heat, so it’s a total barbeque’ (interview with Asana Viebeke Lengkong). As such, the impression is given by activists and journalists that the Sari Club site was different due to the increased body count and visceral carnage. But the magnitude of dead bodies piled on one square metre rather than another does not necessarily determine the political significance of that space.

The location of the excess seems to be fixed at the Sari Club, but no-one notices what became of Paddy’s. ² The reason for this paradox in attributions of profane redevelopment stems, ironically, from the peace park activists’ success in obtaining a veto for commercial building on the Sari Club site and in preventing the emergence of another nightclub on the site. And it speaks to resilience as a chimera which cannot account for present-day sites of failure. While the construction veto is viewed as a success because the site now possesses the potential to become a peace park, the site has remained as a dusty space where motorcycles are parked. As such, it has not been resignified as evidence of resilient spirit and international cosmopolitan identity (Lisle, 2013), nor concealed within the surrounding tourist landscape. The space remains disruptive because the remaking of failure occurs through the incorporation of the event into retrospective and anticipatory trajectories – events are domesticated by marking them as ‘passed’ and simultaneously as productive of future successes in security. Yet the site resists these efforts at resignification of failure and insecurity because it is still there, in the present. It sits within the temporal and spatial vacuum of the resilience feedback loop, undermining the efforts undertaken to exorcise the site (the existing memorial, the application of the ANZAC legacy) and the anticipatory delineation of the bombing as productive of later success in Australian-Indonesian relations and disaster cooperation.

Contrastingly, the space of Paddy’s Bar goes unremarked because it has been remade. It looks like any other surf-shop/bar combo on the Legian Strip. Paradoxically, this has resolved the event and does not produce activism. It is the frustration of reconstruction which causes activism and claims of profanity, not the end result of a peace park or bar/club. Failures and horrors are hidden, to the tourist gaze at least, no matter what is constructed upon them. The Sari Club site disrupts the remaking of orientalized tourism and the national imaginaries which rely upon it because it is still there. It is unsecured, excessive, and liable to highlight failure in the security strategies which attempt to deploy failure to their own ends. Resilience, then, is both absent in the present tense in disaster recovery as well as spatially absent. Failure cannot be made productive while the bombsite remains – thus resilience is a chimera. It is not actually active within disaster recovery or the utilization of failure for future security learning. It is not securing through failure but is instead absent until its resignification work can be undertaken once the event is spatially and temporally concealed. It cannot take place upon visceral sites of destruction because it operates to temporally and spatially abstract from security failure, erasing that which it discursively claims to act upon.

Remaking the present: Everyday acts within the void of resilience

But some things do happen in the present tense at the bombsite in Bali. In this lacuna of resilience, everyday acts of mediation and signification are performed by tourists. Acts of terrorism may disrupt discourses of security and relationships of place, but acts of tourism contribute to the reconstitution of place and the national imaginaries implicit within them. Primary among these is the tourist photograph of the existing memorial – now a noted tourist landmark on the island. I will explore this here to highlight the functionality of redeveloping destroyed space relative to the resignification of failure. The way the Bali memorial is functional through the tourist gaze and photograph is indicative of the intended purpose of the planned peace park on the Sari Club site. While resilience agendas overdetermine the past and the future in their re-establishment of linearity and security, the functionality of memorialization and redevelopment is a counterbalanced ‘presencing’. Redevelopments of destroyed space are to be gazed upon, photographed, and resignified, such that the retrospective and anticipatory devices of resilience might be supported. Redevelopment and memorialization are the presencing techniques which complement the anticipatory and retrospective actions of resilience, concealing its spatial and temporal ambiguities.

Debbie Lisle has provided an argument which can help us to reconsider the ubiquitous tourist photograph of the memorial as an everyday attempt to reproduce place and to remake failure-to-prevent in terms of rearticulated cosmopolitan tourism. She has commented that the tourist fascination with the 9/11 viewing platform indicates that this event destroyed the reality principle. The live broadcast of the events functioned to disorient audiences, who struggled to determine if what they were watching was real or not (Lisle, 2004; Der Derian, 2002). These audiences then visited the viewing platform in their droves to reassert and consume the reality of the event, and ground zero slotted into a ‘normalised circuit of tourist consumption’ (Lisle, 2004: 9). Utilizing the work of Debord, Baudrillard and Bauman, Lisle argues that the traumatic event reaches beyond the regimes of signification which produce the world of images for us. It offers a glimpse of the real – which tourists are eager to touch in their desire to gaze upon distinctions to their banal everyday lives (the very function of the tourist gaze) (Lisle, 2004; Urry, 1990).

But Lisle is also very clear in her assertion that the tourists of the (Lacanian) real do not find what they are looking for. Instead, visitors to ground zero were disappointed that the real was not as television had made it appear; the real was inaccessible. The spectacle of 9/11 which disrupted the everyday regimes of simulation was not something that could be visited. The authenticity which seduced the tourists was obscured, unapparent, missing. The foiled desire to consume the catastrophe and to touch the real is the subject of Lisle’s article – in the way that the undeveloped space of the Sari Club foils (and stimulates) efforts to resignify security failure here. However, Lisle’s argument can be extended by suggesting that the consumption of the catastrophic event and its memorialization are akin to security practices. The gaze, even if it is disappointed in its quest to touch the real, is part of a practice which functions to integrate the event into the realm of signification – removing the traumatic excess. Like the official discourses which named 9/11 and retrospectively inserted it into security discourses (Croft and Moore, 2010; Zehfuss, 2003), the consumption and resignification of disasters resecures them within the realm of the symbolic and the visual. We consume disaster in the same way that we consume touristic paradise on Bali – we are presented with images within the tourist or security gaze (Urry, 1990; Rojek and Urry, 1997), we visit those sites, we photograph them and we contribute to their reproduction in the symbolic economy. We secure them as signifiers. And in this process we slowly drain them of the ability to disrupt the wider symbolic economies in which they sit.

The tourist photograph of the memorial could be interpreted as a form of failure-mediation which occurs in the present day (with the concurrent understanding that the unrebuilt place of the Sari Club remains in excess). ³ Importantly for my argument, the enabling of such resignification is the aim of the campaign to construct a peace park on the Kuta bombsite. It would be gazed upon, photographed, and visited. Horror and trauma could be resignified through spatialized integration within a linear temporality (this happened here once, but it is not ongoing), remedying the temporal ambiguity of resilience by performing a present tense of recovery, while simultaneously remedying the spatial void of resilience. Recovery is here, now. The remaking of sites reconstructs a sense of place and continuity by reinserting them into linear trajectories through memorialization and the architectural promise of future hope. Failure can then be remade around them, once they are reconstructed and no longer exist in excess.

The purpose of the large stone and marble memorial (constructed adjacent to the Sari Club site, but not upon its grounds) thus becomes clear. It provides a photo opportunity to mark the ‘place’ where ‘it’ happened – creating a new scopic post-event environment and restoring the experience of undisrupted visuality and restored linear temporality. Indeed, it is regularly remarked by complaining visitors to Kuta that the memorial has become another destination on the Australian and international tourist trail – treated as another photographic opportunity. Yet the vacant lot adjacent to the monument destabilizes it with a continued lack of resignification. The unphotographable site lingers next door to the memorial, in excess of the architecture of the tourist economy, revealing the politics of security and resilience which have otherwise incorporated the event into the tourist trail. Despite being centralized within a political narrative of the gritty Australian character and the resilient relationship between Australia and Indonesia, the brutality of the unmade site continues to refuse all resignifications of failure. It shrugs off attempts to assert retrospective and/or anticipatory resilience because it still exists. And resilience, as I have shown through discussion of its temporal and spatial abstraction and ambiguities, cannot cope with failure in the present tense.

Conclusion

By ‘taking’ resilience to the bombsite, this article has exposed its spatial and temporal ambiguities. Juxtaposing resilience with the present day bombsite has rendered the attempt to ‘secure through the failure to secure’ ambiguous in both content and temporality. The discourse which supposedly admits failure and insecurity into the remit of security unwrites this acceptance through its very practice. The remit of the resilience discourse is mediation of failure and insecurity through resignification, so that they never really existed in the first place. Resilience, then, is circular. It has nothing to do with preventing future events or dealing with current ones; instead, it exorcises failures and insecurity through retrospective and anticipatory means. This is why resilience policies are never applied to the bombsite, despite their centralization within disaster recovery policies. Forcing resilience to look at devastated place stifles the resignification of failure as productive or as evidence of success. Destroyed place is just too vivid and excessive for such disingenuous discursive manipulation. Only once sites are reconstructed (as a Quicksilver, a tourist bar or a peace park) can failure then be successfully resignified as productive through retrospective and anticipatory means. Resilience is absent in the present tense despite policy renderings which centralize its importance within disaster recovery.

To conclude the argument of this article, it is important to remember that security and resilience are not only performed anticipatorily. If critical research continues to focus only on anticipatory technologies, accepting the resilience temporality as it is performed in policy, then we risk buying into the rhetoric of prevention even as we critique it. Security practices, such as resilience, also work retrospectively to mediate the disruption of events and the incursion of insecurity – in this case, resignifying a terrorist event as evidence of national heroism and grit. Furthermore, by pursuing a counterfactual research strategy and forcing resilience out of its normal bounds to look at a bombsite, we can reveal that resilience actually has nothing to do with prevention. The incorporation of inevitable disruption and insecurity into security thinking is the central tenet of the resilience shift, and yet resilience dedicates itself to the reworking of failure as if it never existed in the first place. Resilience then is a chimera, a conceptual loop. By forcing resilience to look at that which it shies away from, the existing bombsite, we pursue a critique of its technocratic, abstracted ambition to conceal failure rather than to pursue a security worth attaining.