Reflexivity and developmental constructs: the case of sustainable futures

ABSTRACT

The quest for sustainability signals a departure from industrialist presuppositions about the human capacity to control nature that had hardly been questioned during the modern era. Environmental politics, indeed, entered the public scene with warnings of environmental crisis that disrupted industrialist assumptions and supported a call for a dramatic change in course. As environmental problems became part of an agenda of sustainable development, however, there came a shift from a disruptive politics towards professionalization and a managerial emphasis. A reflexive approach to sustainability needs to reconsider the relevance of politics while also thematizing problems of history and power. The concept of ‘developmental constructs’, which Harold D. Lasswell offered as part of his proposal for a reflexive project of contextual mapping, is advanced here as relevant to that end. Comparing the early interventions of Rachel Carson and Amory Lovins to Lasswell's conception of developmental constructs, the article maintains that such proposals for sustainable futures highlight the importance of a political connection.

KEYWORDS:

• Reflexivity
• developmental constructs
• sustainability
• Lasswell

Notes

1 Habermas (1972) provides an account of how the ‘reflexive priority of the knowing subject’ (p. 83) in idealism tended to be displaced by a materialist ‘self-reflection of the knowing subject’ (p. 63) oriented to problems of psychopathology and ideology.

2 Whatever the advantages of sharply distinguishing between ‘reflexivity’ and ‘reflection’ (Beck, 2006) or between two ‘orders’ of reflexivity (Voß & Kemp, 2006), these conceptual strategies risk obscuring this historically important connection.

3 Freud is central to Lasswell's critique of psychopathology in politics (1977), and Lasswell explicitly acknowledges Marx's model of historical development as a central influence in his own formulation of the concept of ‘developmental constructs’ (1971, pp. 67–68), also noting elsewhere in a discussion of the ‘Marxian dialectic’ that psychoanalysis could contribute to an understanding of ‘the symbolic aspects of historical development’ (1965a, p. 19). Cf. Torgerson (2007, pp. 17–18, 1985, pp. 242–244).

4 The reframing has tended to take the form of environmental problem redefinition, which—as in the cases of both Carson and Lovins—reverses a key relationship of the prior problem definition, in a manner that is similar to reversals in creative problem solving and carnivalesque logic but that also involves political contention in a dynamic of power and insight (see Torgerson, 2011).