Don't compromise your desire for development! A Lacanian/Deleuzian rethinking of the anti-politics machine

Abstract

It is my aim in this article to engage with development and its promises at a time when many people are distancing themselves from the appalling reality of the development industry and the disastrous effects of its interventions. Rather than rejecting the notion of development, I contend that ‘engaging with development’ remains important in relating to Third World people's dreams and desires. In other words, people's desires for development must be taken seriously and its promises should not be forsaken. I elaborate on the political and ethical implications of the rejection of this notion of development and argue that, through the abandonment of the notion, the very ‘object’ of development is lost. In other words, the disavowal of development signifies the betrayal of its promise. To elaborate this position, I propose a Lacanian/Deleuzian perspective on development as a ‘desiring machine’—which produces endless desires—so as to explore the radical, constitutive disjunction between the ‘virtual’ world of the development machine and the ‘actual’ workings of development interventions.

Notes

I would like to thank Monique Nuijten, Glenn Banks and anonymous referee for their perceptive comments on my article.

1 Robertson argues for development as a quixotic enterprise and Hoben for a culturalist analysis. Alexander Robertson, People and the State: An Anthropology of Development, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984; and Allan Hoben, ‘Paradigms and politics: the cultural construction of environmental policy in Ethiopia’, World Development, 23 (6), 1995, pp 1007 – 1021.

2 See Henry Bernstein, ‘African peasantries: a theoretical framework’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 6 (4), 1999, pp 421 – 443; Bernstein, ‘“The peasantry” in global capitalism: who, where, and why?’, in Leo Panitch & Colin Leys (eds), Working Classes, Global Realities: The Socialist Register, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001, pp 21 – 51; Rosemary Galli, Colombia: Rural Development as Social and Economic Control, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1981; and Alain de Janvry, Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

3 Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995; and Wolfgang Sachs (ed), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, London: Zed Books, 1992.

4 Beck Ulrich, The Re-invention of Politics: Rethinking Politics in the Global Social Order, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994; and Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.

5 For a critique of the ‘third way’ approach in Brazil, see J Petras & H Veltmeyer, ‘Whither Lula's Brazil? Neoliberalism and ‘Third Way’ ideology’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 31 (1), 2004, pp 1 – 44. For recent works on modernisation in the Third World, see Arthur PJ Mol, ‘Environment and modernity in transitional China: frontiers of ecological modernization’, Development and Change, 37 (1), 2006, pp 29 – 56; and David A Sonnenfeld & Arthur PJ Mol, ‘Environmental reform in Asia: comparisons, challenges, next steps’, Journal of Environment and Development, 15 (2), 2006, pp 112 – 137.

6 In fact, in his latest works Escobar talks about the need to think about ‘alternatives to modernity’ in addition to ‘alternative modernities’. However, he does not elaborate on this conceptual shift. See Arturo Escobar ‘Beyond the Third World: imperial globality, global coloniality and anti-globalisation social movements’, Third World Quarterly, 25 (1), 2004, pp 207 – 230.

7 For the concept of ‘plane immanence’, see Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp 70 – 79.

8 Robert Chambers, ‘The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal’, World Development, 22 (7), 1994, pp 953 – 969.

9 For a critique of the tyranny of participation, see Bill Cooke & Uma Kothari (eds), Participation: The New Tyranny?, London: Zed Books, 2001. For an attempt to transcend the tyranny, see Samuel Hickes & Giles Mohan (eds), Participation—From Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring New Approaches to Participation in Development, London: Zed Books, 2005.

10 Mike Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merger of Development and Security, London: Zed Books, 2001; and Duffield, ‘Social reconstruction and the radicalization of development: aid as a relation of global liberal governance’, Development and Change, 33 (5), 2002, pp 1049 – 1071.

11 Duffield, ‘Social reconstruction and the radicalization of development’, p 1053.

12 Lacan's own work is notorious for its difficulty. When talking about Lacanian theory I refer especially to the work of what has been called the Slovenian Lacanian school, comprising among others authors such as Slavoj Žižek, Zupančič, Renate Salecl and Mladen Dollar. In contradistinction to therapeutic psychoanalytic Lacanian approaches, this school has set out to reinstate the Marxist critical tradition through a sustained engagement with Hegelian philosophy, deconstruction and political theory. Slavoj Žižek in particular has become influential through his didactic use of popular culture. Presently he defines himself as a dialectical materialist.

13 Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, London: Verso, 2001.

14 On the concept of hope generation, see Monique Nuijten, Power, Community and the State: The Political Anthropology of Organization in Mexico, London: Pluto Press, 2003.

15 See also Pieter de Vries, ‘Vanishing mediators: enjoyment as a political factor in Mexico’, American Ethnologist, 29 (4), 2002, pp 901 – 927.

16 James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994; and Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.

17 Denis Rondinelli, Development Projects as Policy Experiments: An Adaptive Approach to Development Administration, London: Routledge, 1993.

18 Ibid.

19 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze's notion of the desiring machine can be seen as a critical engagement with the works of Freud and Marx, harnessed by the use of Nietzschean concepts. Desire, as a form of will to power, is seen as a distinctly social and political process, and is therefore external to the consciousness of individuals. The machine is any point at which desire leaves or enters a structure (a body, a mode of production, etc). Capitalism operates as such a kind of desiring machine, one which works through decoding and deterritorialisation, but nomadic movements of subaltern populations and warfare can also be seen as desiring machines. My understanding of the desiring machine has been developed in analogy to Deleuze and Guattari's ideas. A good introduction to Deleuze's work is John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2000. For a brilliant application of Deleuze and Guattari's ideas to political theory, see Hardt & Negri, Empire.

20 Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development.

21 Kate Gardner & David Lewis, ‘Dominant paradigms overturned or “business as usual”? Development discourse and the White Paper on International Development’, Critique of Anthropology, 20 (1), 2000, pp 15 – 29.

22 David Mosse, ‘Is good policy unimplementable? Reflections on the ethnography of aid policy and practice’, Development and Change, 35 (4), 2004, p 641.

23 In my view Ferguson's notion of hegemony is a sophisticated one, as he explicitly detaches the notion of discourse from that of the conscious intentions of individuals, while linking discourse to the Foucauldian notion of governmentality, ie the social and discursive technologies by which certain issues can be problematised and rendered visible, and certain courses of action legitimised and made accountable.

24 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political, London: Routledge, 2005.

25 See Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

26 Malcolm Bull, ‘Smooth politics’, in Paul Passavant & Jodi Dean (eds), Empire's New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri, New York: Routledge, 2004.

27 For the concept of ‘smooth space’, see Hardt & Negri, Empire, pp 327 – 333.

28 See Albert Hirschmann, A Bias for Hope: Essays on Development and Latin America, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961. Rather than holding to the crude materialist notion that development (in terms of material infrastructure, organisational forms, etc) would create the ideational framework that would lead to a self-propelling process, Hirschmann argued that there was a certain mythical/utopian element in the idea of development itself. In other words, the practice of development needs a ‘virtual’ supplement that is provided in the desires generated by the idea of development. Later, in his book The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977, Hirschmann argued that economic thinking had moved from the idea of passions as the motives for action to that of interests. But is the vocabulary of interests not a way to construct an economic actor who is continuously busy reflecting on his/her passions and desires in rational ways? Is this not a typical example of reflective determination in which desires are recognised and assumed as such through discourses of rationality?

29 Paradoxically planning remains as central as ever, if only because projects have to be ‘projectised’ in order to make them amenable to evaluation and monitoring. Thus we see that apparently technical demands for financial accountability are not discordant with the virtual side of development as a desiring machine.

30 Stacey Leigh Pigg, ‘Inventing social categories through place: social representations and development in Nepal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34, 1992, pp 504 – 530.

31 Slavoj Žižek & Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004.

32 For a further elaboration of this material, see Pieter de Vries & Monique Nuijten, ‘Some reflections on the (mis)use of the concept of culture in Andean studies’, in T Salman & A Zoomers (eds), Imaging the Andes: Shifting Margins of a Marginal World, Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2003; and Monique Nuijten & David Lorenzo, ‘Dueños de todo y la nada: restitution of Indian territories in the central Andes of Peru’, paper presented at the AAA, Washington, DC, November 2005. For a critical engagement with Escobar's work from an Andean perspective, see Anthony Bebbington, ‘Reencountering development, livelihood transitions and place transformation in the Andes’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90 (3), 2000, pp 495 – 520. For a fascinating discussion of the rejection of ngos' intercultural education programmes by Andean villagers, see Maria Elena Garcia, Making Indigenous Citizens: Identity, Development and Multicultural Activism in Peru, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.

33 Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993, pp 95 – 99; Zupančič, Ethics of the Real; and Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans Peter Hallward, London: Verso, 2002.

34 See also Badiou, Ethics.

35 Žižek & Daly, Conversations with Žižek, p 160.

36 Ibid, p 167.