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Abstract
Philanthrocapitalism is promoted as a form of development funding that infuses philanthropy with the dynamism and innovation of capitalist enterprise. Millennium Promise is a philanthrocapitalist organisation based in New York, which finances the Millennium Villages Project (mvp) across 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. At the level of its discursive articulation Millennium Promise appears as a Foucauldian ‘anti-politics machine’: a mechanism of transnational governmentality devoted to the biopolitical production of entrepreneurial subjects organised in self-disciplining communities. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and field research conducted in Uganda, I argue that philanthrocapitalism is better understood as an ideological formation, which mobilises a disavowed enjoyment of global inequality. In the case of Millennium Promise this enjoyment is structured by specific social fantasies: cause-related marketing campaigns invite Western consumers to enjoy their imagined distance from ‘African’ suffering; the mvp functions as a narcissistic mirror, which offers a reflection of capitalist society cleansed of its class antagonism; and, through the staging of messianic rituals, the mvp mobilises a shared enjoyment of pseudo-colonial relations of domination. I conclude that philanthrocapitalism is not an anti-politics machine but a fantasy machine, which demonstrates the limitations of Foucauldian critique, and forces us to confront our own relations to enjoyment.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Rob Fletcher, Ilan Kapoor, Ioanna Tantanasi and two anonymous referees for comments on an earlier draft. Versions of this paper were presented in research seminars at City University, London in October 2013 and the University of Manchester in November 2013, and at the International Studies Association annual conference in Toronto in March 2014. I would like to thank those who raised questions on these occasions. Any errors are of course my own. I am grateful to the Hallsworth Research Fellowship for giving me the opportunity to undertake this work.
Notes
1. Slavoj Žižek For They Know Not, 2.
2. Millennium Promise, “Ruhiira, Uganda.”
3. Millennium Promise’s list of partners includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, George Soros’s Economic Development Fund, Bono’s edun project, Madonna’s Raising Malawi foundation, and the corporate foundations of Ericsson, Facebook, General Electric, GlaxoSmithKline, Goldman Sachs, kpmg, Merck, Monsanto, Motorola, mtv, Nestle, Nike, Novartis, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Proctor & Gamble, Sony, Time Warner, Tommy Hilfiger and Unilever. Other partners include the World Bank, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (agra), the undp, the World Food Programme and several other UN agencies. mvp, “Our Partners”; and mvp, “Full List of Partners.”
4. See Wilson, Jeffrey Sachs, chap. 4.
5. See, for example, Dean, “Rethinking neoliberalism”; Illcan and Phillips, “Developmentalities”; Lemke, “The Birth of Bio-Politics”; and Li, The Will to Improve.
6. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine.
7. See Ferguson, Global Shadows, chap. 4.
8. See, for example, Bosworth, “The Cultural Contradictions”; Desai and Karas, “The California Consensus”; Edwards, “Gates, Google, and the Ending of Global Poverty”; Jenkins, “Who’s Afraid of Philanthrocapitalism?”; Ramdas, “Philanthrocapitalism”; and Rogers, “Why Philanthro-policymaking Matters.” This literature raises many important issues, but limits its critique to the realm of discourse, without taking into account the distinctive mobilisation of enjoyment that characterises philanthrocapitalism as an ideological formation.
9. Wilson, “Model Villages.”
10. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 45.
11. See Braunstein, “Desire and Jouissance”; Declercq, “Lacan’s Concept”; and Wilson, “The Jouissance of Philanthrocapitalism.”
12. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 63, 90.
13. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 246.
14. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 24; and Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 283.
15. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 125.
16. Pieter De Vries, “Don’t Compromise your Desire for Development!”, has also drawn on psychoanalytic theory to demonstrate the limitations of Foucauldian critiques of development, and also focuses particular attention on the concept of the ‘anti-politics machine’. De Vries, however, is concerned with desire, as opposed to jouissance, and the argument he is making is very different from my own. Thanks to Rob Fletcher for bringing De Vries’s paper to my attention.
17. Millennium Villages Project, “Ruhiira, Uganda.” Sachs, End of Poverty, 368.
18. Bishop, “Philanthrocapitalism.”
19. Shamir, “The Age of Responsibilization,” 1.
20. Ibid., 9.
21. Kay, Žižek, 146.
22. Žižek, For They Know Not, 239.
23. As Malcolm Bull has observed, ‘There is a strange pleasure to be had from discovering that the top 0.5 per cent of the world population owns 35.6 per cent global wealth, while the bottom 68.4 per cent controls a mere 4.2 per cent; or that the richest thousand or so billionaires are worth more than one and a half billion of the world’s poorest people; or that the wealth of the world’s three richest people is equal to the combined gdp of the 48 poorest countries. It’s like being able to look up at the world’s highest mountain and then straight down to the deepest trench of the ocean…the chasm is there for all who dare to look.’ Bull, “Help Yourself,” 15.
24. Table for Two International, Annual Report, 1.
25. See, for example, ibid., 3.
26. Table for Two, “New Footage.”
27. This description refers to the way in which the bowl of beans and posho is represented by Table for Two, and is not a judgement on the food itself, which is widely enjoyed by people across East Africa, where it is structured by very different fantasies.
28. Table for Two, Annual Report, 27. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 63, makes a similar observation regarding ‘the well-known scene from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil in which the food on a plate is split into its symbolic frame (a colour photo of the course above the plate) and the formless slime of jouissance that we actually eat’.
29. Alexander, “Humble Hilfiger”; and Marati, “Behind the Label.”
30. pr Newswire, “Tommy Hilfiger.” Hilfiger now shares this title with the founder of Diesel, Renzo Rosso, and the Senegalese musician and philanthropist, Youssou N’Dour.
31. See the images on the Promise Collection website, http://uk.tommy.com/hilfiger/millennium-promise,en_GB,pg.html, accessed October 18, 2013.
32. Tommy Hilfiger, I Promise, 5.
33. Yelena Noah, quoted in Foreman, “Tommy Hilfiger.”
34. Comments by Gintar and Styleclouds, included in Feragni, “Tommy Hilfiger.”
35. See the Promise Collection website.
36. Ibid.
37. See Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, 82–87.
38. Konecky and Palm, Millennium Villages Handbook.
39. Li, The Will To Improve. Indeed, Illcan and Phillips have identified the mvp as a key example of ‘developmentality’, in which ‘populations, referred to as “millennium villages”, are made responsible for choosing the most powerful, practical technologies that will dissociate themselves from their impoverishment’, thus ‘linking together individual responsibility and calculation…which in turn creates the responsible and calculating individual’. Illcan and Phillips, “Developmentalities,” 858.
40. See Wilson, Jeffrey Sachs, chap. 5.
41. Many of the accusations of corruption, nepotism, and lack of oversight were set out in a dossier compiled by a group of ex-administrators of the mvp in Ruhiira and sent to the headquarters of Millennium Promise in New York in August 2013. I was provided with a copy of the dossier, which is entitled “Ruhiira Millennium Villages Project at the Brink of Collapse.” Details of the dossier are included in Wilson, Jeffrey Sachs.
42. See Lane, “The Stain,” 196.
43. See Bailly, Lacan, 28–40.
44. This same function is performed by microcredit programmes, business training schemes, social entrepreneurship awards and other initiatives favoured by philanthrocapitalism. See Bishop and Green, Philanthrocapitalism, 127, 132, 181; and Edwards, “Gates, Google, and the Ending of Global Poverty,” 38–39.
45. Millennium Villages Project, The Ruhiira Millennium Village Roundup.
46. Household interview #29, Ruhiira, Uganda, February 16, 2013.
47. Marx, Capital, 873–940.
48. Marx, A Contribution, 59.
49. See Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism, 171–288; and Wilson, “The Shock of the Real,” 310–311.
50. Žižek, For they Know Not, 211.
51. Ross et al., “Workers Die.” The fire occurred in 2010. An investigation found that the deaths were the result of hazardous electric wiring, lack of safety equipment and the fact that the factory gates were locked. When challenged at the event in February 2012, Hilfiger assured abc News that Philips-Van Hausen, Tommy Hilfiger’s parent company, no longer operated in Bangladesh. Shipping records, however, showed that Tommy Hilfiger products continued to ship from two factories in Bangladesh in which deadly incidents had been recorded previously.
52. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 200. Emphasis added.
53. Ibid., 200 (emphasis added). For a useful discussion of gaze, and the relation between the ideal-ego and the ego-ideal, see Žižek, The Sublime Object, 105–107.
54. Jeffrey Sachs, in the “Health” video on the Promise Collection website.
55. See Agamben, Homo Sacer.
56. Giorgio Agamben, quoted in Comaroff, “Beyond Bare Life,” 208.
57. Sachs, “The Millennium Villages Project,” 12.
58. Hirsch, “What’s Life Like?”
59. See, for example, the “Postcards from Ruhiira” on the Tommy Hilfiger Corporate Foundation website, http://108.166.76.198/2013/01/, accessed October 18, 2013.
60. See the Promise Collection website under “Technology and Innovation.” I did not see or hear of any other biogas systems in Ruhiira, yet it is displayed on the Promise Collection website as if it were standard issue for every farmer in the ‘village’.
61. For a detailed account of the Ruhiira village tour, see Wilson, Jeffrey Sachs, chap. 5.
62. A video documenting Sachs’s tour of Ruhiira in 2010 can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbTffV-cEBI, accessed October 18, 2013.
63. Handa-Williams, “wfp Director Hails the ‘Revolution of Hope’.”
64. Interview with mvp health worker, Ruhiira, February 12, 2013.
65. Comaroff, “Beyond Bare Life,” 206.
66. Churches partnering Millennium Promise include the Presbyterian Church of Basking Ridge, St. John the Evangelist Church and St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. Millennium Villages Project, “Full List of Partners.”
67. Bishop and Green, Philanthrocapitalism, 40.
68. Household interview #33, Ruhiira, February 17, 2013.
69. Ibid.
70. Interview with Millennium Band member, Ruhiira, March 10, 2013.
71. Household Interview #33, Ruhiira February 17, 2013.
72. Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
73. Žižek, “Da Capo,” 250.
74. Žižek The Plague of Fantasies, 5.
75. ‘The externality of the symbolic machine is...not simply external: it is at the same time the place where the fate of our internal, most “sincere” and “intimate” beliefs is in advance staged and decided. When we subject ourselves to the machine of a religious ritual, we already believe without knowing it; our belief is already materialized in the external ritual.’ Žižek, The Sublime Object, 43.
76. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 123.
77. Interview with Millennium Band member, Ruhiira, March 10, 2013.
78. Interview with school teacher in Ruhiira, March 10, 2013.
79. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 59. In this respect the ideological operation of the mvp also resembles Žižek’s account of actually-existing communist regimes, in which ‘the semblance according to which people supported the party and enthusiastically constructed Socialism was not a simple subjective semblance (nobody really believed in it) but, rather, a kind of “objective semblance” a semblance materialized in the actual social functioning of the regime, in the way the ruling ideology was materialized in ideological rituals and apparatuses’. Ibid, 157.
80. Ibid., 21.
81. Bishop and Green, Philanthrocapitalism, 11.
82. Ibid., 20.
83. Žižek For They Know Not, 100.
84. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, xv–xvi.
85. Declercq, “Lacan’s Concept,” 247.
86. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 59.
87. Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, 95–95.
88. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative.
