The Developer's Self: a non-deterministic Foucauldian frame

Abstract

Recent development studies literature has begun to consider the developer's self. This welcome enlargement of the field deserves to be deepened and extended by moving beyond opposition to post-development critics, and by articulating an explicit theoretical frame for examining developers' selves. By exploring Foucault's suggestion that modern approaches to knowledge and selfhood may be entwined through developmentalism, this paper proposes a flexible and non-deterministic cultural–historical framework for considering developers' selves. Foucault's analyses of relations of power and subjectivity provide strategies for examining developers' selves, but this does not suggest that such selves can be read off the proposed framework. Examining developers' selves is necessarily a reflective ethical task, and one which requires engaging the external relations that constitute the self. Foucault provides valuable resources for this task, but there is also a need to extend upon and complement a Foucauldian approach. Pursuing our new-found interest in developers' selves by working through and beyond Foucault promises to open new professional futures and possibilities for development practice.

Notes

Thanks to Rebecca Duffy and colleagues at The University of Queensland for comments on an earlier version of this paper.

1 I Kapoor, ‘Hyper-self-reflexive development? Spivak on representing the Third World “Other”’, Third World Quarterly, 25 (4), 2004, pp 627–647; Kapoor, ‘Participatory development, complicity and desire’, Third World Quarterly, 26 (8), 2005, pp 1203–1220; and Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development, New York: Routledge, 2008.

2 G Wilson, ‘Beyond the technocrat? The professional expert in development practice’, Development and Change, 37 (3), 2006, pp 501–523. See also J Graaff, ‘The seductions of determinism in development theory: Foucault's functionalism’, Third World Quarterly, 27 (8), 2006, pp 1387–1400.

3 P Tamas, ‘Spoken moments of a pernicious discourse?’, Third World Quarterly, 28 (5), 2007, pp 901–916.

4 K McKinnon, ‘An orthodoxy of “the local”: post-colonialism, participation and professionalism in Northern Thailand’, Geographical Journal, 172 (1), 2006, pp 22–34; and K McKinnon, ‘Post-development, professionalism and the political’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97 (4), 2007, pp 772–785.

5 M Girgis, ‘The capacity-building paradox: using friendship to build capacity in the South’, Development in Practice, 17 (3), 2007, pp 353–366.

6 J Gilbert, ‘“Self-knowledge is the prerequisite of humanity”: personal development and self-awareness for aid workers’, Development in Practice, 15 (1), 2005, pp 64–69.

7 I refer to those professionals directly involved in development practice as well as those of us broadly involved in development efforts and concerns. Furthermore, I refer to selves in a broad sense—to fluid and mobile assemblages with social and political, social and cultural dimensions—rather than to a fixed, narrow or psychological self.

8 J Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p 5.

9 See A Valls, ‘Self-development and the liberal state: the cases of John Stuart Mill and Wilhelm Von Humboldt’, Review of Politics, 61 (2), 1999, pp 251–274.

10 See, for example, S Lazar, ‘Education for credit-development as citizenship project in Bolivia’, Critique of Anthropology, 24 (3), 2004, pp 301–309; and M Brigg, ‘Empowering NGOs: the microcredit movement through Foucault's notion of Dispositif’, Alternatives, 26 (3), 2001, pp 233–258.

11 See T Jakimow, ‘Answering the critics: the potential and limitations of the knowledge agenda as a practical response to post-development critiques’, Progress in Development Studies, 8 (4), 2008, pp 311–323.

12 Tamas, ‘Spoken moments of a pernicious discourse?’, p 912.

13 See Wilson, ‘Beyond the technocrat?’; Tamas, ‘Spoken moments of a pernicious discourse?’; and Graaff, ‘The seductions of determinism in development theory’.

14 Tamas, ‘Spoken moments of a pernicious dscourse?’.

15 See Graaff, ‘The seductions of determinism in development theory’, p 1398. Some measure of the simplification at play here can be gained by noting that Graaff's article is subtitled ‘Foucault's functionalism’ yet does not cite a single source by Foucault.

16 M Foucault, ‘What is enlightenment?’, in P Rabinow (ed), The Foucault Reader, London: Penguin, 1984, p 41.

17 Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage, 1970; and R Nisbet, Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development, New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

18 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

19 Ibid, p 209.

20 Ibid; and Foucault, The Order of Things.

21 HL Dreyfus & P Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982, p xii.

22 M Foucault, ‘The subject and power’, in Dreyfus & Rabinow, Michel Foucault, p 208; and Foucault, ‘The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom’, in J Bernauer & D Rasmussen (eds), The Final Foucault, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987, pp 1–2.

23 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p 210.

24 Nisbet, Social Change and History. See also Nisbet, The Making of Modern Society, New York: New York University Press, 1986, ch 1.

25 Nisbet, Social Change and History, p 7.

26 Ibid, pp 3–4.

27 G Lakoff & M Johnson, Metaphors we Live By, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

28 For further discussion of the development metaphor as applied to social change, see Nisbet, Social Change and History, pp 170–188. See also Nisbet, The Making of Modern Society, pp 42–53. For comparison, see G Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, London: Zed Books, 1997, ch 2.

29 Nisbet, Social Change and History, p 70.

30 Ibid, pp 104–114.

31 Here and elsewhere I make use of the term ‘man’ alongside more gender-neutral terms such as human being. To entirely recast the language of the pre-modern and early modern eras in gender-neutral terms would elide important gendered dimensions of the knowledge of the times. I am thus referring to gendered relationships rather than presenting man as a generic term.

32 Nisbet, Social Change and History, p 64.

33 Ibid, p 114.

34 Ibid, p 115.

35 G Deleuze, Foucault, London: Athlone, 1988, pp 125–126.

36 See Foucault, The Order of Things. The episteme requires careful definition and application. For Foucault it is the ‘epistemological space specific to a particular period’ (p xi). An episteme is neither transcendental nor ahistorical. As Foucault states, the ‘episteme is not a form of knowledge … or type of rationality which, crossing the boundaries of the most varied sciences, manifests the sovereign unity of a subject, a spirit, or a period; it is the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyses them at the level of discursive regularities’. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p 191.

37 Foucault, The Order of Things, p 313.

38 Ibid, pp 313–314.

39 Ibid, p 312.

40 Ibid, pp 331–334. See also Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p 12.

41 Foucault, The Order of Things, p 251.

42 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p 12.

43 Foucault, The Order of Things, pp 221–226, 53. See also L Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1977, pp 82–89, 189–204.

44 Foucault, The Order of Things, p 254.

45 Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx, p 167. See also J Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, St Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1975.

46 K Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001, pp 136–140.

47 Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx, pp 104–105.

48 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p 171.

49 Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx, p 106.

50 Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production.

51 Ibid, p 19, emphasis in the original.

52 Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx, p 167.

53 Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, p 19.

54 Foucault, The Order of Things, p 257.

55 Ibid, p 255.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid, p 331.

58 Ibid, pp 331–332.

59 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p 12.

60 AJ Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp 70–71.

61 C Geertz, ‘From the native's point of view: on the nature of anthropological understanding’, in P Rabinow & WM Sullivan (eds), Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979, p 229.

62 C Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp 105–106.

63 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp 209–210.

64 This is not the place for a full-blown discussion of the intricacies of Foucault's thought on power relations and subjectification. (For one detailed corrective of the deterministic view, see KJ Heller, ‘Power, subjectification and resistance in Foucault’, SubStance, 25 (1), 1996, pp 78–110.) However, it is perhaps useful to point out that many of the problems of misinterpretation arise because commentators ascribe an ontological standing to power (capital ‘P’ Power in some accounts) which Foucault himself never countenanced. As Foucault has noted, he almost always uses the term power in a nominal way to refer to relations of power. See Foucault, ‘The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom’, p 11. In the places where he does give it greater ontological standing it is as a ‘moving substrate of force relations’ and thus operating as part of a ‘complex strategic relation’ in which there are always resistances—in which relations of power are always coterminous with resistance. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, London: Penguin, 1981, pp 93–95; and Foucault, ‘Power and strategies’, in C Gordon (ed), Power/Knowledge, New York: Pantheon, 1980, p 142.

65 N Rose, ‘Identity, genealogy, history’, in S Hall & P de Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity, London: Sage, 1996, p 130.

66 For all its prominence, developmentalism (and, more specifically, productivism) does not totalise our humanity. Pockets of human community explicitly resist both productivist calculations and developmentalist schemas, and many dimensions of our individual lives are traversed and patterned by psychological and social forces which speak to a more intricate social patterning and a subtle approach to value. See D Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of our Own Dreams, New York: Palgrave, 2001. At a broader level Polanyi argues that the expansion of productivist forces has always been accompanied—indeed necessitated—by counter-movements to resist its effects. With this argument Polanyi and others acknowledge that humans require—for our survival—the ineffable currents generated between and among people and lodged within our imaginaries and our cultural and social fabrics. See Polanyi, The Great Transformation.

67 See G Deleuze, ‘What is a Dispositif?’, in TJ Armstrong (ed), Michel Foucault: Philosopher, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992, pp 160, 62.

68 Tamas, ‘Spoken moments of a pernicious discourse?’.

69 Foucault, ‘On the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress’, in Dreyfus & Rabinow, Michel Foucault, p 245.

70 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol 2, New York: Penguin, 1992, p 9.

71 Foucault, ‘What is enlightenment?’, p 41.

72 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p 8.

73 Foucault, ‘Friendship as a way of life’, in P Rabinow (ed), Michel Foucault: Ethics, the Essential Works I, London: Penguin, 1997, p 137. See also Foucault, ‘The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom’; and Foucault, ‘Technologies of the self’, in LH Martin, H Guttman & PH Hutton (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts, 1988.

74 Deleuze, ‘What is a Dispositif?’, pp 161–162.

75 See A Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, London: Routledge, 2000, p 88.

76 R Coles, Self/Power/Other: Political Theory and Dialogical Ethics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992, p 85, emphasis in original.

77 See references in the opening paragraph.

78 See references in the opening paragraph.