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Abstract
This article carries out a psychoanalytic critique of Post-Development, arguing that the latter’s inattention to the unconscious underpinnings of power not only leaves it unable to explain why development discourse persists, but also deprives it of a radical politics, resulting in a surrender to global capitalism. Drawing on the work of Escobar, Ferguson and Esteva, the article valorises Post-Development’s important insights on the production of development discourse and its attendant power mechanisms. But using a Lacanian lens, it also probes Post-Development’s failure to address how power is mediated at the level of the subject: in maintaining that (capitalist) development is produced discursively in a cold, impersonal way (like an ‘anti-politics machine’), Post-Development ignores the fact that such power is only able to take hold, expand and, crucially, persist through unconscious libidinal attachments (e.g. desires, enjoyment). This failure leaves Post-Development with few resources – beyond localised resistance (Escobar, Esteva) or the call for a universal basic income (Ferguson) – to address the structural challenges of global capitalism. Psychoanalytically speaking, such a (Left) position appears to manifest a secret desire that nothing too much must change: Post-Development may well criticise the disciplinary mechanisms of neoliberal development, but ultimately it engages in an unconscious acceptance of capitalism.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers, and to Maria Eriksson Baaz and the editor of this special issue, Aram Ziai, for their valuable comments. I also wish to thank Arturo Escobar for his warmth and intellectual generosity. I am forever grateful to Kent Murnaghan for his support and perspicacious insights.
Notes
1. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, 20, italics added.
2. Towards the end of The Anti-Politics Machine, 275–276, Ferguson makes fleeting reference to Deleuze and ‘desire’, even mentioning the ‘unacknowledged’ and ‘non-discursive’ structures embedded in development discourse. But he refrains from elaborating these ideas or their psychoanalytic implications. In other words, by evading the psychoanalytic route, he appears to implicitly accept the Foucauldian notion of desire as discursively produced, as opposed to seeing desire as an unconscious, non-discursive remainder à la Lacan.
3. de Vries, “Don’t Compromise.”
4. Escobar, Territories of Difference, 175.
5. I will use the terms ‘global capitalism’ and ‘liberal democratic capitalism’ interchangeably as, in my view, both global capitalism and liberal democracy go together: liberal democracy is the political arrangement for (global) capitalism.
6. It should be noted that, while both Escobar and Ferguson have mostly stuck to their Foucauldianism, their more recent work does diverge, with Escobar embracing a more utopic decoloniality perspective (e.g. Mignolo and Escobar, Globalisation and the Decolonial Option) and Ferguson a more realist welfarism.
7. Ziai, “The Ambivalence of Post‐Development”; Brigg, “Post-Development, Foucault.” For example, while Foucault advocates a historically contingent and sensitive notion of discourse, Esteva tends to view development discourse as monolithic, seeing power exercised, not biopolitically as Foucault would have it, but by a single ‘Western’ force. Esteva, “Development,” 6, 17; Brigg, “Post-Development, Foucault,” 424–425.
8. Esteva’s “Regenerating People’s Space” (1987) is perhaps his most Foucauldian, using the term ‘development discourse’ and citing Foucault (137, 146). His later works make more fleeting references to Foucault, although still identifying with ‘post-modern’ ideas more generally (as witnessed, for example, by the title of his 1998 co-authored book, Grassroots Post-Modernism).
9. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 49.
10. Escobar, “Discourse and Power in Development,” 384; Escobar, Encountering Development, 9, 11. Escobar’s statement closely follows Said’s famous definition of Orientalism as ‘the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period’. Said, Orientalism, 3.
11. Esteva, “Regenerating People’s Space,” 146; Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, 8.
12. Escobar, Encountering Development, 215; Esteva, “Development,” 6, 8; Ziai, “Post-Development,” 846.
13. Esteva, “Regenerating People’s Space,” 146; Esteva, Babones, and Babcicky, The Future of Development, 105; Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 81.
14. Foucault, “Governmentality.”
15. Escobar, “Discourse and Power in Development,” 387–388; Escobar, Encountering Development, 17, 21ff., 216; Escobar, “Beyond the Search”; Escobar, Territories, 69ff. See also Esteva, Babones, and Babcicky, The Future of Development, 115.
16. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, 70.
17. Esteva, “Development,” 6, 16.
18. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, xvi, xv, 275.
19. Escobar, Encountering Development, 6.
20. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 156, italics added.
21. Lacan, Ecrits, 287. See also Homer, Jacques Lacan, 71–72; Kapoor, “Psychoanalysis and Development: Contributions,” 1122.
22. Copjec, Read My Desire, 19. Note that Lacanian psychoanalysis focuses not on some essentialised and separate ‘individual’ mind or psyche (and is in fact very critical of behavioural psychology on this score) but on a transindividualised ‘subject’ (of language), which it sees as split, that is, a subject of lack, always troubled and divided by a gap, an excess (i.e. the unconscious). Kapoor, “Psychoanalysis and Development: Contributions,” 1123.
23. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 15ff., 129–130. In his later work, Foucault is quite critical of psychoanalysis, seeing it (along with medicine generally) as a normalising technology in the service of our disciplinary societies.
24. Copjec, Read My Desire, 14. See also Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 81; Vighi and Feldner, Žižek, 18–23.
25. Harstock, “Foucault on Power,” 168–170; Sawicki, “Feminism and the Power of Discourse”; Fraser, Unruly Practices, 31.
26. Lacan calls the Real ‘extimate’ (extimité), that is, intimately external or internally transcendent. Lacan, The Seminar, Book VII, 71. Žižek illustrates the idea this way: ‘What all epochs share is not some trans-epochal constant feature; it is, rather, that they are all answers to the same deadlock [the Real]. I think this is the only consistent position’ (Žižek and Daly, Conversations With Žižek, 76).
27. Kiely, “The Last Refuge,” 30.
28. Escobar, Encountering Development, 215, 226.
29. Esteva, “Development,” 6; Ziai, “The Ambivalence of Post‐Development,” 1048.
30. Kiely, “The Last Refuge”; Storey, “Post-Development Theory,” 42; Ziai, “Post-Development,” 839.
31. Rigg, Southeast Asia, 36.
32. Kiely, “The Last Refuge”, 44.
33. Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism, 25.
34. CSPI, “Soda Companies.”
35. Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 79.
36. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 18, 32–33.
37. Lacan, The Seminar, Book XI, 273.
38. Kapoor, “Psychoanalysis and Development: An Introduction,” 1118–1119.
39. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, 19–21, 254–255.
40. Ibid., 19, 21.
41. Kapoor, Celebrity Humanitarianism, 34; Kapoor, “Psychoanalysis and Development: Contributions,” 1130–1132; Wilson, “The Joy of Inequality.” Note that associating jouissance with sadomasochism is wholly within the Lacanian tradition; the term denotes excessive, irrational pleasure, after all. Lacan, The Seminar, Book XI, 185.
42. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, 269. Note, as the rest of this paragraph/section underlines, that I am not trying to replace Ferguson’s argument, but enrich and complicate it with a psychoanalytic argument. As I shall claim later (see Universal basic income), the fact that there is a not-to-be-missed passionate enjoyment in bureaucratic politics further undermines Ferguson’s recent attempt at ‘repurposing’ neoliberal governmentality: it is improbable that bureaucrats passionately invested in the system (and their own bureaucratic power/privilege) would be easily amenable to change, and Ferguson fails to specify otherwise.
43. Institutional expansion can be explained more precisely by what Lacanians call ‘drive’, which is to be distinguished from desire: while both desire and drive arise as a result an impossible striving for fullness, desire is a futile attempt to fill the void with particular objects that never satisfy, while drive is a constant circulation around objects, deriving satisfaction (jouissance) from the futility of searching. Drive thus feeds off always frustrated desire. Hence my suggestion that institutional growth happens through the enjoyment of power (i.e. drive). Kapoor, “What ‘Drives’ Capitalist Development?”
44. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 142, 99.
45. Escobar, Encountering Development, 11, 215, 218.
46. Escobar, “Discourse and Power in Development,” 377; see also Escobar and Alvarez, The Making of Social Movements; Alavarez, Dagnino, and Escobar, Cultures of Politics.
47. Esteva, “The Zapatistas and People’s Power,” 165; see also Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism, 161.
48. Esteva, “The Zapatistas and People’s Power,” 163, 155ff.; Esteva, “The Meaning,” 126. See also Esteva, Babones, and Babcicky, The Future of Development, 124ff.; Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism, 152ff., 172ff.
49. Esteva, “The Zapatistas and People’s Power,” 173.
50. Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism, 31, 34.
51. Kirsch, Mining Capitalism; della Porta, Social Movements; McMichael, Development and Social Change, 213ff.; Aronowitz, Left Turn, especially 1ff., 109 ff.
52. Escobar and Alvarez, The Making of Social Movements, 325–326; see also Escobar, Encountering Development, 226.
53. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 355; della Porta, Social Movements.
54. Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 179.
55. Lacan, Anxiety, 16ff., 157ff.
56. Kiely, “The Last Refuge”; Nederveen Pieterse, “After Post-Development”; Storey, “Post-Development Theory”; Hart, “Development Critiques in the 1990s,” 655; Ziai, “Post-Development.”
57. Kiely, “The Last Refuge,” 46.
58. Esteva, “The Zapatistas and People’s Power”; Esteva, “The Meaning”; Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism.
59. Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development, 51–53.
60. Escobar, “Discourse and Power in Development,” 381, italics added. See also a series of similar statements on page 393, including: ‘a strategy of resistance must develop’ and ‘the discourse of development must be dismantled’ (italics added); in Escobar, Encountering Development, 98, 110, 209, 222. This is an illustrative, not exhaustive list, as is the case with the examples from Esteva’s work listed in notes 63 and 64 below.
61. Harstock, “Foucault on Power,” 170.
62. Esteva, Babones, and Babcicky, The Future of Development.
63. Esteva, Babones, and Babcicky, The Future of Development, 70; Esteva, “The Meaning and Scope,” 142. Other examples of moral exhortation can be found in Esteva, Babones, and Babcicky, The Future of Development, x, 117; Esteva, “The Zapatistas and People’s Power,” 169; Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism, 42ff.
64. Esteva, “The Zapatistas,” 162; Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism, xiv. Other examples of such generalisations and bravura can be found in Esteva, “The Zapatistas and People’s Power,” 162, 174; Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism, 8, 204; Esteva, “The Meaning and Scope,” 139. Esteva rationalises his ‘broad brush strokes’ by stating that he aims at ‘breaking the prison of academic disciplinary boundaries’ in order to speak to ‘non-specialists’ (Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism, 8). But I am suggesting they are more likely an unconscious cover/compensation for ineffectual arguments and theoretical grounding.
65. Esteva has worked as an advisor to the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) in Chiapas, especially in connection with its negotiations with the Mexican government. So perhaps it is no coincidence that the EZLN’s moralistic politics has rubbed off on him, or indeed that his own moralistic stance has been, at least to a small degree, reproduced in the EZLN.
66. Esteva, “The Zapatistas and People’s Power.”
67. Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 177.
68. North American Free Trade Agreement.
69. Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 178.
70. Ferguson, “The Uses of Neoliberalism,” 173; Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish, 32, xiii.
71. Ferguson, “The Uses of Neoliberalism,” 183.
72. Ibid., 173.
73. Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish, 15, 17.
74. Ibid., 24, 26, 56.
75. Ibid., 19, 36, 38ff., 177; Ferguson, “The Uses of Neoliberalism,” 174.
76. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 236, italics added. It should be noted that, ironically, Ferguson marshals Žižek’s statement that universal basic income is ‘arguably the Left’s only original economic idea of the last few decades’ (Žižek, Living in the End Times, 233) to back up his case (Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish, 193), but he does so disingenuously since Žižek is in fact highly critical of the idea, despite it seeming attractive.
77. Mensah, Neoliberalism and Globalisation in Africa; Bond, Looting Africa.
78. Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish, 198, italics in original.
79. Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish, 200. Ferguson’s book is scattered with sentences that favour what he calls a certain ‘empiricism’ and ‘inductivism’ so that, according to him, his project can start from what people do ‘instead of from some theorist’s idea of what they ought to do’ (Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish, 140; on p. 32 he even approvingly quotes Foucault on the need for ‘a certain empiricism’). Yet by the same token, given his admission of the currently unfavourable record of basic income in southern Africa, his arguments must succumb to these same empiricist predilections.
80. The paternalism Ferguson is worried about may be reduced through basic income programmes, but it would by no means be eliminated. Society would still be divided into ‘basic income’ and (let’s say) ‘productive’ citizens, so that hierarchical distinctions and social stigma and resentment would still remain. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 240–241.
81. Holloway, Change the World.
82. Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes, 349.
83. Per-capita income could be one measure, but as is well-known, this is not an unproblematic indicator, given its tendency to hide sometimes wide inequalities (in income, gender and racialised positioning, etc.) and the environmental costs of development.
84. Japhy Wilson accuses Ferguson’s variant of Post-Development of being ‘complicit in the reproduction of relations of domination’ by excluding the dimension of desire and the Real; Wilson, “Fantasy Machine,” 1156.
85. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 18, 32–33.
86. Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes, 337ff.
87. Jameson, Postmodernism.
88. Hart, “Development Critiques in the 1990s,” 650. Ray Kiely also makes a similar argument in “The Last Refuge,” 48.