Development as Dialogue

7/28/2019 Development as Dialogue

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Honours Thesis in International Development Studies

submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirementsfor the degree of Bachelor of Arts Honours

Postdevelopment and the Crisis of Development Theory:Towards a Gadamerian Alternative

by

Jordan Stark

under supervision of

Supervisor: Dr. Nissim MannathukkarenInstructor: Dr. John Cameron

at

Dalhousie UniversityHalifax, Nova Scotia

April, 2010!


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The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that

we are still not thinking.MARTIN HEIDEGGER

In the context of academia, the field of development occupies an interesting and unique

space. Unlike most other disciplines, development - by its very definition - signifies

some sort of progressive movement forward, a type of betterment or advancement. With

this active content comes great opportunity as well as great risk. On the one hand,

opportunity lies in the potential to connect theory and praxis so as to employ clear and

careful thought to service the struggles of the exploited and the oppressed. On the other

hand, there is a sense in which the field of development presents certain risks and

dangers in a way the disciplines of biology or microphysics do not. Indeed over the past

fifty years, we have seen the notion of development be used as an instrument of control

that privileged certain voices while marginalizing and excluding others. When we set out

to answer the question What is Development? or propose some schema to guide future

praxis, we cannot help but be informed by the tacit assumptions and unarticulated

presuppositions that mediate our experience of the world. Thus behind our answers to

these questions of Development there will always remain a hidden set of understandings

that bear the stamp of our age and our geography. What guarantee is there that the Good

we define will match up in a relevant way with the concerns of those we hope to

emancipate? It is in this way that development studies stumbles easily into the dangers of

ethnocentrism.

These are concerns well known to undergraduate students of development. In

every class we seem to be affronted by the evils of Western imperialism and the

disastrous consequences of Development. When discussing other cultures we are


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continually reminded of their difference and warned of the dangers of imposing our

Western (read: materialistic, rational, individualistic) perspectives onto the life-worlds of

the South (read: poor, spiritual, collectivist). To speak of universals such as Progress,

Truth or a linear trajectory of Development is strictly forbidden. To question these self-

evident axioms is considered heresy against the unspoken but tacitly accepted scripture of

postmodernism. It is in this way that the necessary modesty of development studies

seems always to slide unquestioned into a space ofculturalrelativism. The result of all

this is a discipline that is directionless and fragmented, populated by a group of students

who are equally confused. This paper is an attempt to bring a much-needed clarity to

these murky waters of our collective consciousness and render visible those spaces of our

psyche where we prefer not to linger.

The situation I have outlined above is the surface reflection of a much deeper

transformation that has impacted the social sciences more broadly. In recent decades,

poststructuralist approaches have emerged in numerous fields of social inquiry such as

anthropology, history, geography, gender studies and political science. Together these

approaches can be characterized as a radical skepticism toward such metanarratives as

modernity, progress, truth, and Enlightenment-style rationality. By directing attention

towards the contingency and arbitrariness of dominant modes of understanding,

poststructuralist frameworks reveal the ruptures, shifts and instabilities that underlie our

institutions, discourses and practices. In the context of development studies, these

fashionable lines of thought manifest in the school ofpostdevelopment. For theorists of

this school, development is understood not as fixed or essential, but rather as a

historically produced discourse that functions to legitimize particular forms of knowledge


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while discrediting and excluding others. Postdevelopment theorists contend that these

discursive mechanisms constitute a form of power which functions to reinforce and

extend systems of Western hegemony. As a result, these critics affirm that we must

jettison the very notion of development and look towards a politics that is local and

context specific.

The postdevelopment school marked a critical departure from early forms of

critique. Whereas before one could argue about the strategies employed to achieve

development, the larger organizing logic of development itself could not be questioned.

In this way, postdevelopment theorists shed a necessary light on the ethnocentrism

inherent in development discourses that understood development to mean greater

production achieved through the wider and more vigorous application of modern

scientific and technical knowledge (Harry Truman cited in Escobar, 1995: 3). Despite

these strengths, the theories of postdevelopment are problematic on several levels: By

conceptualizing development as a monolithic hegemony postdevelopment theorists

move uncritically to posit an evil West against a noble non-West. Rather than challenging

the ethnocentric dichotomies (i.e. North and South, traditional and modern, developed

and underdeveloped, East and West, global and local) of previous development

discourses, postdevelopment merely reproduces and inverts them. Situations of poverty

and powerlessness are seen as arising solely from Western intervention, and thus the local

and traditional are constructed as the pinnacle towards which we must strive. The result is

an approach that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of global problems and a set of

solutions that are as ridiculous as they are frightening.


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This paper seeks to uncover the deeper philosophic tensions from which these

contradictions arise. I argue that the limitations of postdevelopment can be understood as

originating in a Foucauldian conception of power. Following Foucault, postdevelopment

theorists commit to a Nietzschean relativism that understands any claim to truth as an

attempt to extend a system of control and domination. Thus any claim to development

is coded as Western domination. It is at this point that we are affronted by the

fundamental challenge of development theory: How are we to avoid the ethnocentrism

inherent in dominant universalist approaches, without surrendering to the debilitating

relativism that accompanies postdevelopment? Here I claim that the work of Hans-Georg

Gadamer proves exceedingly useful. By positioning his notion of the fusion of

horizons at the core of development theory and praxis, it is possible to resolve these

tensions and restore coherence to a field that has become increasingly fractured and

irrelevant.

Keep in mind that this is a work of philosophy. This paper does not intend to set

out a concrete plan of action or to answer to the question: What is to be done? The aim is

not to provide answers but to ask different questions. It is to show that our approaches to

the problem of development theory are actually apart of that problem. Thus it is an

attempt to reorient the discourse in such a way so to make visible the deeper and more

fundamental issues that we must grapple with.

After outlining the central features of poststructuralism, Chapter 1 locates the

thought of Michel Foucault in relation to the major proponents of the postdevelopment

school. Here I focus on the ways in which Foucauldian modes of analysis are expressed

through the work of postdevelopment theory. After establishing this conceptual


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foundation, Chapter 2 uses Frederic Jamesons notion of postmodernism as a

schizophrenic condition to describe the fragmented and incoherent state of

development studies. In addition, the chapter aims to draw links between the limitations

of Foucaults conceptualization of power and the problematic contradictions that

emerge in the context of postdevelopment. Finally the last chapter attempts to resolve

these contradictions by hypothesizing about what a Gadamerian approach to development

might look like.


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I. POSTSTRUCTURALISM, POSTDEVELOPMENT AND

MICHEL FOUCAULT

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It

is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds offamiliar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that

we accept rest.We must free ourselves from the sacralization of the

social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so

essential in human life and relationships as thought.MICHEL FOUCAULT

The human word is the power that orders our chaos.

NORTHROP FRYE

To develop an adequate understanding of postdevelopment and its major proponents, it

will be necessary to situate these lines of thought in relation to the larger intellectual

context from which they emerge. As previously stated, poststructuralism acts as the

philosophic foundation from which postdevelopment theorists derive their strategies and

modes of analysis. Therefore, in moving towards a comprehension of postdevelopment, it

is instructive to consider both the development and defining characteristics of

poststructuralism.

Poststructuralism identifies a style of French thought that developed in the 1960s.

It was a philosophic movement that arose out of and in relation to the intellectual currents

ofstructuralism. Broadly, structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that seeks

to understand social phenomena through an analysis of underlying structures that are

eternal, fixed and universal. It originated in the field of linguistics through the work of

Ferdinand de Saussure. The critical insight for Saussure was that language ought to be

understood as a system of signs in which meaning is produced through the internal

relationships of these signs. Importantly, meaning is not produced through representation,


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but rather emerges from the internal relationships of signs (Saussure, 1959). As different

theorists recognized the wider applicability of these insights, Saussures approach spread

to various disciplines in the form of structuralism.1 In the field of anthropology, Claude

Lvi-Strauss articulated a structuralist approach to the study of culture. In this

framework, the meaning of particular cultural practices is not the result of cultural agents

but rather originates in the cultural structures that precede the agent (Lvi-Strauss, 1974).

In the realm of literary criticism, scholars stopped looking for the meaning of a text

intended by its author and instead directed attention towards deeper structures that

produced meaning, such as its relationship to other texts.

2

Similarly, in the domain of

political theory, Louis Pierre Althusser developed theories of structural Marxism in

which the meaning of political action derives from underlying structures (namely the

structures of capital) rather than political agents.

Together these strands of thought represent a structuralist attempt to arrive at

stable knowledge through the reduction of the world to a set of representable objects

whose underlying relationships can be scientifically studied (Agrawal, 1996: 470).

Poststructuralists fundamentally reject this premise and radicalize the structuralist project

by affirming that linguistic structures far from fixed and eternal are dynamic, fluid

and marked by contingency. If the aim of the structuralist was to describe the structures

that underpin reality, the aim of the poststructuralist is to historicize them. To elucidate

the contingency and genesis of dominant representations, poststructuralists examine the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 Although his work originated the philosophic movement of structuralism, Saussure himself never

explicitly used the term structure. Instead he discusses elements and the ways in which elements relate

together to produce meaning.2This is evident in the work of Roland Barthes. In his famous essay, The Death of the Author, Barthescriticizes methods of reading and literary critiques that rely on an authors supposed intentions and

biographical context (Barthes, 1978).


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discursive mechanisms through which certain forms of understanding and being are made

legitimate while others are excluded and even made impossible. As Michel Foucault

observed in January of 1976:

what has emerged in the course of the last ten or fifteen years is a sense

of the increasing vulnerability to criticism of things, institutions, practices,

discourses. A certain fragility has been discovered in the very bedrock of

existence- even, and perhaps above all, in those aspects of it that are mostfamiliar, most solid and most intimately related to our bodies and to our

everyday behaviour (Foucault, 1980: 80).

Through their radical historicization of discourses, practices and institutions,

poststructuralists destabilize linear narratives of progress and restore to our latent

consciousness the rifts, flaws and instabilities that underlie dominant modes of

understanding. In revealing these historical ruptures and discontinuities, poststructuralists

bring into question such metanarratives as modernity, progress, truth and instrumental

rationality (Agrawal, 1996: 470).3

The Intellectual Tools of Michel Foucault

Among the various poststructuralist theorists, the work of Michel Foucault has been the

most influential for scholars of development. Here it is useful to highlight two theoretical

innovations of Foucaults thought that have continually manifest in the work of

postdevelopment thinkers: namely (a) Foucaults genealogy and (b) his conception of

power asproductive and decentralized. This section briefly considers these two modes of

analysis and the ways in which they are employed in the context of postdevelopment.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!3 In moving towards a conceptualization of history defined by discontinuity, poststructuralists were

influenced by transformations in the history of science, particularly the work of Thomas Kuhn. In his work,

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn revealed that science undergoes abrupt

transformations or paradigm shifts in which new approaches to understanding become legitimate and

accepted as truth. These findings fundamentally undermine dominant narratives that understand scientific

progress to be smooth, linear and continuous.


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For Foucault, genealogy refers to an historical investigation that attempts to

elucidate the genesis of an idea, concept or theory, as well as its related practices and

institutions. In his works, Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals,

Nietzsche develops this method to illuminate the socio-political content that is somehow

hidden in the notions of good and evil. Importantly Nietzsches aim is not to reveal

the metaphysical essence of these concepts, but rather to demonstrate that there is a

concrete history that informs and produces them. In other words, ideas, concepts and

theories that we have come to regard as fixed and essential are actually the result of a

particular history. By revealing this history, Nietzsche unmasks the ideological function

of these concepts as well as the metaphysical fiction designed to obscure it.

In his essay, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault outlines the significance

of the genealogical method to his historical studies. For Foucault, the purpose of a

genealogy is to make visible the accidents, ruptures and contingencies that give rise to

particular concepts, epochs, practices and institutions. As Foucault writes:

Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not mapthe destiny of a people. On the contrary, to follow the complex course of

descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to

identify the accidents, the minute deviations or conversely, the complete

reversals the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations thatgave birth to those things which continue to exist and have value for us; it

is to discover that truth or being lies not at the root of what we know and

what we are but the exteriority of accidents. (Foucault, 2003: 355)

Importantly Foucault rejects the Hegelian conception of history as a necessary unfolding

of events and instead emphasizes its discontinuities. For Foucault, to conceive of history

as a necessary process of unfolding would mean that the historian could somehow step


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outside of history and claim a privileged standpoint.4 These types of totalizing,

metaphysical narratives obscure the historians place in history and presuppose some

access to the perspective of God - a viewpoint existing outside space and time (Foucault,

2003: 352). As Foucault notes:

if the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens

to history, he finds that there is something altogether different behindthings: not a timeless and essential secret but the secret that they have no

essence, or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from

alien forms. [] What is found at the historical beginning of things is not

the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. Itis disparity. (Foucault, 2003: 353)

To sum up, Foucault rejects metaphysical narratives of necessity and continuity

by demonstrating that the way things are could have been differently. In revealing this

contingency, it becomes possible to radically criticize those discourses, institutions and

practices that appear most familiar and natural. In the context of development, this

genealogical framework and distrust of metanarratives is translated into an effort to

historicize development discourse and thus make visible the power-relations that it

functions to conceal and extend. In this sense, the intellectual tools adopted from

Nietzsche and Foucault enable postdevelopment scholars to bracket the familiarity of

development and stand detached from it, removing its appearance as fixed or essential

and opening a space for radical critique.

By approaching dominant representations as historically constructed, it becomes

possible to examine the ways in which power functions through language, discourses and

institutions. For Foucault conventional understandings of power failed to properly

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!4 Here Foucault recognizes that the historian - along with her language, concepts and attitudes are the

product of history and fundamentally limited. This was the critical insight made by Immanuel Kant (1781)

in his, Critique of Pure Reason: our position as finite beings experiencing the world prevents us from

knowing the infinite, the unconditioned, God. To know this infinite reality would be to deny our limited

experience and somehow step outside of time and space.


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recognize the ways in which power isproductive and decentralized. Power is not merely

something that is negative and repressive, weighing down on the subject from a political

location above the social sphere. Rather power is a productive force which traverses the

entire social body, reaching into the subject and influencing the very ways in which

reality is constructed. As Foucault states, If power were never anything but repressive, if

it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it?

What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact it traverses and

produces things, it induces pleasures, forms knowledge, produces discourse (Foucault,

1984: 61).

These positive mechanisms of power are perhaps most evident in Foucaults

genealogy of the prison (Foucault, 1979). The prison was created as a correctional

institution to imprint on the inmates the qualities of good citizenship: to make criminals

into honest, hard working, law abiding individuals, who could return to a normal place

in society (Ferguson, 1994: 19). It is this notion of rehabilitation that led to the

establishments of prisons throughout the world and remains today the foundational notion

that justifies their maintenance and occasional reform. But it is obvious upon inspection,

according to Foucault, that prisons do not in fact reform criminals; that, on the contrary,

they make nearly impossible that return to normality that they have always claimed to

produce, and that, instead of eliminating criminality, they seem to rather produce and

intensify it within a well-defined strata of delinquents (Ferguson, 1994: 19). It is

through this positive mechanism that the prison succeeds in maintaining a particular

system of social control. As Foucault states:


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If this is the case, the prison, apparently failing, does not miss its target,

on the contrary it reaches it, in so far as it gives rise to one particular formof illegality in the midst of others, which it is able to isolate, to place in

full light and to organize as a relatively enclosed, but penetrable milieu

For the observation that prison fails to eliminate crime, one should perhaps

substitute the hypothesis that prison has succeeded extremely well in producingdelinquency, a specific type, a politically or economically less dangerous and on

occasion, usable- form of illegality; in producing delinquents, in an apparently

marginal, but in fact centrally supervised milieu; in producing the delinquent as a

pathologized subjectSo successful as the prison been that, after a century and ahalf of failures, the prison still exists, producing the same results, and there is

the greatest reluctance to dispense with it. (Foucault, 1979: 276 7)

It is precisely these positive mechanisms of power that postdevelopment

theorists attempt to elucidate and examine. In this sense, postdevelopment writers are less

concerned with the stated objectives that underwrite development ideology so much as

their actual social effects. As James Ferguson notes:

For the question is not how closely do these ideas approximate the truth,but what effects do these ideas (which may or may not happen to be true)

bring about? How are they connected with and implicated in larger social

processes? This is why I speak, following Foucault, of a conceptualapparatus- in order to suggest what we are concerned with is not an

abstract set of philosophical or scientific propositions, but an elaborate

contraption that does something. (Ferguson, 1994: xv)

In adopting a Foucauldian conceptualization of power, Ferguson and other

postdevelopment theorists move beyond conventional critiques and toward an

examination of the ways in which power functions through the development apparatus

to actually produce things (identities, discourses, practices, institutions, worldviews).

Whereas conventional critiques would underscore the failures of a particular strategy of

development and its inability to meet its stated objectives, postdevelopment reveals that

even in it failures the project of development succeeds in bringing about particular

effects with remarkable regularity, and those effects might constitute its actual

objectives (Agrawal, 1996: 471). Thus, in the context of development, the deployment


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of a more nuanced understanding of power reveals that hidden beneath official narratives

of development there remains a second, more insidious set of ideological motives and

functions.

Here it is useful to think of Michel Foucault as a skilled intellectual artisan,

fashioning tools of analysis to be wielded by scholars writing from and for the margins.

This section has outlined two of these tools. Namely (a) the genealogical method

inherited from Nietzsche and (b) a conceptualization of power as productive and

decentralized. Together these styles of thought enable the postdevelopment theorist to ask

new questions and reconfigure the boundaries within which criticisms are theorized.

These patterns will be explored further through a discussion of the major works of

postdevelopment.

Postdevelopment and the Critique of Development Discourse

As discussed above, postdevelopment thought represents a fundamental break from

previous challenges to development. Earlier analyses focused on the kinds of

development that needed to be pursued but accepted the desirability of development as

the driving aim. Even those theorists that sought to undermine dominant capitalist

strategies did so under the umbrella of alternative modes of development (participatory

development, socialist development, another development). As Escobar observed: [O]ne

could criticize a given approach and propose modifications or improvements accordingly,

but the fact of development itself, and the need for it, could not be doubted (Escobar,

1995: 5). Like the concept of civilization in the nineteenth century or the concept of

God in the twelfth century, development had become a fixture in the dominant social

imaginary making it impossible to conceive of reality in other terms (Ferguson, 1994:


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xiii). Employing the analytic tools of poststructuralism, the work of Ferguson and

Escobar mark an elemental break from this dominant worldview or Weltanschauung.

In his book, The Anti-Politics Machine, Ferguson (1994) understands

development as an interpretive grid through which impoverished regions of the world

are known to us (Ferguson, 1994: xiii). Importantly, development does not reflect

reality but rather shapes the ways in which reality is imagined and acted upon. As

Ferguson states:

Within this interpretive grid, a host of everyday observations are rendered

intelligible and meaningful. Poor countries are by definition less

developed, and the poverty and powerlessness of the people who live insuch countries are only the external signs of this underlying condition.The images of the ragged poor of Asia thus become legible as markers of

a stage of development, while the bloated bellies of African children are

the signs of social as well as nutritional deficiency. Within this

problematic, it appears self-evident that debtor Third World nation-stateand starving peasants share a common problem, that both lack a single

thing: development. (Ferguson, 1994: xiii)

Through this theoretical lens, we see development not as innate or natural, but rather

contingent and historically produced. With this understanding, it is then possible to

stand detached from it [Development discourse], bracketing its familiarity, in order to

analyze the theoretical and practical context with which it has been associated (Foucault,

1986: 3). For Ferguson, this means considering the social effects produced by

development discourse in the context of rural Lesotho. In his investigation of the Thaba-

Tseka Development Project, Ferguson highlights the ways in which development

discourse functioned to reinforce and expand bureaucratic state power, destabilize rural

social relations and depoliticize questions of poverty (Ferguson, 1994: 251-277).

Importantly, Ferguson illustrates the productive capacity of development discourse:

failed development projects fuel the need for new strategies, greater technical expertise


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and increased state presence. Paradoxically failed development produces more

development.

In his book, Encountering Development, Arturo Escobar (1995) seeks to expand

on the arguments of Ferguson and demonstrate the ways in which development has

come to organize the social reality of Asia, Africa and Latin America. For Escobar,

development discourse constructs the Third World as a place of powerlessness,

passivity, poverty, and ignorance, usually dark and lacking in historical agency as if

waiting for the (white) Western hand to help subjects along (Escobar, 1995: 8). 5 In its

construction of the Third World as an object of knowledge, Escobar understands

development to be analogous to colonial discourse:

The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a

population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order tojustify conquest and to establish systems of administration and

instructionI am referring to a form of governmentality that in marking

out a subject nation, appropriates, directs and dominates its variousspheres of activity. (Cited in Escobar, 1995: 9)

Similarly development discourse has created an extremely efficient apparatus for

producing knowledge about, and the exercise of power over, the Third World (Escobar,

1995: 9). Once the Third World is constructed as a place of lack and deficiency, the

alleviation of these conditions demands intervention by government and aid agencies and

thus the development industry becomes necessary and natural. By revealing the

interrelations of knowledge and control, Escobar affirms the inseparable link between

development and systems of Western hegemony.

The Development Dictionary, edited by Wolfgang Sachs (1992), similarly

employs a poststructuralist framework to deconstruct central concepts of the development

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


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discourse such as planning, population, environment, production, equality, participation,

market, poverty and so on. The aim of the book is to demonstrate the contingency of

these concepts by locating their origin in European civilization and revealing the

particular historical events that led to their transformation. Through this critical

genealogy, the authors underline the arbitrary nature of these concepts and their

destructive capacity when deployed in the context of the Third World. Furthermore the

authors highlight the ways in which non-Western knowledge systems have been excluded

from development discourse and argue that these systems should be revisited.

The Problems of Postdevelopment

Through a discussion of the central themes and works of post-development, the

undeniable strengths of the framework clearly emerge. By continually directing attention

toward the contingency of dominant modes of thought, post-development makes visible

the rifts and instabilities upon which development discourse has been constructed. Far

from neutral and apolitical, Western claims of universalism are seen to justify and

perpetuate Western dominance of the world system. In revealing the contingent nature of

development and its potentially hegemonic implications, post-development opens a

necessary space of critical awareness from which marginalization and exclusion become

visible and thus contestable. While acknowledging these key strengths, many

development theorists have sought to illuminate the ways in which the postdevelopment

school is problematic (Agrawal, 1996; Kiely, 1999; Storey, 2000; Everett, 1997).

Ultimately these theorists underline two inter-related limitations of the post-development

school, namely its methodological inconsistencies and its political impotence. The

following section provides a brief overview of these criticisms.


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For many critics, post-development theory suffers from methodological

inconsistencies arising from its singular and homogenous understanding of

development. Throughout postdevelopment literature, development is portrayed in

terms of a monolithic hegemony (Cited in Kiely, 1999: 18). As Kiely observes,

irrespective of time and place, development constitutes the exercise of Western power

over non-Western people (Kiely, 1999: 18). Two problematic implications arise from

this unitary and undifferentiated framework: Firstly it obscures the ways in which

development and its effects are diverse, heterogeneous and contested. Secondly, the

framework leads into unproductive binary oppositions in which the South and the local

are constructed as noble while the North and the Global are portrayed as evil. This

criticism is perhaps best articulated in the work of Margaret Everett. In her article, The

Ghost in the Machine, Everett illuminates the complex processes of negotiation,

resistance and accommodation underlying programs of sustainable development and

other development strategies in Bogota, Columbia. By underlining the ways in which

development is manipulated and rewritten at the local level, Everett shows that

development is neither so monolithic nor as hegemonic as post-development theorists

may suggest. By obscuring these complexities, post-development imposes conceptual

binaries and thus fundamentally misinterprets the complex mechanisms that underlie

development discourse.

After establishing these methodological concerns, it is necessary to understand

how these criticisms function alongside claims that postdevelopment is politically

impotent. As many scholars have acknowledged, by treating development as unitary

and undifferentiated, there is a sense in which anything connected to development


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becomes tainted- functioning only to reconstitute systems of Western domination. Thus

postdevelopments deconstructive approach offers little space for positive political

engagement (Kiely, 1999; Pieterse, 1998; Storey, 2000; Little and Painter, 1995). These

critics underscore the reflexive implications of many poststructuralist accounts. By

descending into a state of relativism, there can be no stable ground from which to move

beyond critique toward productive avenues of change. Thus postdevelopment scholars

suggest that systems of knowledge/ power ought to be resisted yet provide no standpoint

from which such resistance could be launched.

This paper contributes to this body of literature by illuminating the deeper

philosophic tensions from which these limitations arise. The following section argues that

by adopting a Foucauldian notion of power and committing itself to a Nietzschean

relativism, postdevelopment undermines the anchor from which radical development

theory derives its purpose and meaning. The result is a field that is increasingly

fragmented and impotent, unable to develop a coherent challenge to the dominant

frameworks of neoliberalism.


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II. THE SCHIZOPHRENIA OF POSTDEVELOPMENT

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new

cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms

appear. ANTONIO GRAMSCI, Prison Notebooks

In his essay, Postmodernism and Consumer Society, Fredric Jameson invokes the

Lacanian notion of the schizophrenic to describe the postmodern cultural formations

characteristic of Late Capitalism. For Lacan, schizophrenia is understood as a language

disorder in which there is a break in the chain of signification and thus the subject is

unable to enter into the realm of speech and language (Homer, 1998: 105). To understand

this breakdown in signification, it is helpful to revisit concepts of structuralism. As

previously stated, structuralism is the insight that language is a system of interrelated

elements. Meaning is produced through the internal relationships of these various

elements, namely a signifier (the sound of a word, the script of a text), a signified (the

meaning of that sound or material text) and the referent (the real object to which the

sign refers) (Jameson, 1983: 119).6 However the development of structuralism and

emergence of poststructuralism has led to a deep skepticism of the referent. As Jameson

observes, There has been a tendency to feel that reference is a kind of myth, that one can

no longer talk about the real in that external or objective way. So we are left with the

sign itself and its two components (Jameson, 1983: 119).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!6 Importantly this view is distinct from a representational framework in which words are conceived as

naming things in a one-to-one correspondence between a signifier and a signified. When one considers

the feeling of reading a sentence, we see that the representational view appears inadequate. As Jameson

notes, Taking a structural view, one comes quite rightly to feel that sentences dont work that way: we

dont translate the individual signifiers or words that makeup a sentence into their signifieds on a one-to-

one basis. Rather, we read the whole sentence, and it is form the interrelationship of its words or signifers

that a more global meaning now called a meaning effect- is derived (Jameson, 1989: 119).


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It this disintegration of the referent that leads to the break in the chain of

signification (Homer, 1998: 105). For Lacan our experience of time is an effect of

language. As Jameson describes, It is because language has a past and a future, because

the sentence moves in time, that we can have what seems to us a concrete and lived

experience of time (Jameson, 1983: 119). Since temporality itself is embedded in

language, a breakdown in signification leads to what Jameson terms a schizophrenic

experience,

an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers

which fail to link up into a coherent sequence. The schizophrenic thus

does not know personal identity in our sense, since our feeling of identitydepends on our sense of the persistence of the I and the me overtime.[Furthermore] the schizophrenic [] is not only no one in the

sense of having no personal identity; he or she also does nothing, since to

have a project means to be able to commit oneself to a certain continuity

of time. (Jameson, 1983: 119-120)

For Jameson, this schizophrenic condition exists as a profound state of fragmentation

and rupture, which functions to undermine any efforts to understand or change the course

of history (Johnson, 2009: 21).

7

Jameson claims these postmodern transformations

represent a cultural logic of late capitalism that is part of a shift towards a new set of

socio-economic and political arrangements. Thus by rendering the subject fractured,

isolated, incoherent and immobilized, postmodernism is seen as extending and

reinforcing the dominant logic of consumer capitalism.

In this chapter I argue that Jamesons account of postmodernism as a

schizophrenic condition provides a useful analogy for conceptualizing the current state

of development studies. Just as postmodernism has led to the disintegration of the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!7 It is this condition that produces what Adorno hauntingly termed the subjectless subject, a being

lacking the reflective coherence and continuity which makes possible genuine experience, and reacting in

a purely passive and disconnected way to every new stimulus and social demand (Cited in Dews, 1987:

227).


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referent and reproduction of consumer capitalism, postdevelopment frameworks have

subverted and dissolved the anchor from which development derives its purpose and

coherence. By fundamentally undermining narratives of salvation, Progress, Truth and

Development, postdevelopment has pushed development theory towards a state of

increasing fragmentation and rupture. It is these tensions that effectively disarm radical

development theorists and contribute to the perpetuation of dominant neoliberal

frameworks. As Johnson describes:

Development has become increasingly fragmented in terms of the

theories, concepts and methodologies it uses to understand and explain

complex and contextually specific processes of economic developmentand social change. Outside of neo-classical economics (and related fieldsof rational choice), the notion that social sciences can or should aim to

develop general and predictive theories about development has become

mired in a philosophical and political orientation that questions the ability

of scholars to make universal or comparative statements about the nature

of history, cultural diversity and progress. The result is a field that has

become extremely good at documenting the nuance and complexity of

local development processes, but rather less good at connecting theseground realities to wider, historical trends and forces. [emphasis added]

(Johnson, 2009: 15)

Thus development scholars find themselves isolated, fragmented and disconnected,

lacking the intellectual tools necessary to develop foundational theories from which

larger networks of resistance and reform could be constructed against the reigning

orthodoxy of neoliberalism. As Corbridge notes: These are strange times in development

studies. There are few takers now for a socialist alternative to capitalism, and the Right,

suitably encouraged by the impasse in radical development thinking, has pushed ahead

with its declaration of a Washington Consensus (Corbridge, 1998: 138). It is in this

inability to offer coherent alternatives to dominant frameworks that postdevelopment has

led to a type of schizophrenic condition in which development is rendered


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foundationless and impotent, essentially becoming a field without a theory (Johnson,

2009: xi). To get to the root of this increasing fragmentation, this chapter discusses the

theoretical limitations of postdevelopment frameworks and their relation to the deeper

philosophic rifts that underpin modern European social thought.

The Legacy of Michel Foucault: Power, Freedom and Truth

In order to illuminate the deficiencies of postdevelopment, it will be necessary to

interrogate the theoretical foundations from which they arise. Thus it is useful to return to

the work of Michel Foucault and consider the ways in which the structure of his thought

manifests in the arguments of postdevelopment theorists. More specifically, my aim will

be to draw out some of the major limitations of Foucaults conceptualization of power

in order to better understand the theoretical contradictions that underlie the

postdevelopment school.

As discussed earlier, Foucaults historical analyses consist largely in charting the

origins and evolution of modern concepts, discourses and institutions. By historicizing

these fixtures of our modern consciousness, Foucault disrupts dominant narratives of

linear progress and reveals the Enlightenment project far from leading us toward truth

and emancipation has produced modern systems of power that are more all-penetrating

and more insidious than previous forms (Taylor, 1984: 152). One would think that

implicit in these historical analyses would be notions of freedom and truth. It would

seem that by unmasking modern systems of control and domination Foucault moves us

beyond deception and illusion towards liberation. What is odd and perhaps problematic is

the fact that Foucault repudiates both these concepts opting for a Nietzschean relativism


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that denies the notion of truth has any meaning outside a given order of power. As

Charles Taylor notes:

Foucaults analyses seem to bring evils to light; and yet he wants to

distance himself from the suggestion that would seem inescapably tofollow, that the negation or overcoming of these evils promotes a

good[For Foucault] the idea of a liberating truth is a profound illusion.

There is no truth that can be espoused, defended, or rescued against

systems of power. On the contrary, each such system defines its ownvariant of truth. And there is no escape from power into freedom, for such

systems of power are coextensive with human society. We can only step

from one to another. (Taylor, 1984: 153)

In his essay, Foucault on Freedom and Truth, Taylor criticizes this position and

provides a useful framework for understanding the major limitations of Foucaults

conceptualization of power. For Taylor, discussions of power simply do not make sense

without the foundational concepts of freedom and truth (Taylor, 1984: 172). Taylors

argument for this claim proceeds as follows: The very nature of a notion like power or

domination necessitates a victim (Taylor, 1984: 172). In Taylors words, something

must be imposed on someone if there is to be domination (Taylor, 1984: 172).

Something is only an imposition on someone against a background of desires, interests

and purposes (Taylor, 1984: 172-173). In other words, it is only an imposition if the

subject is prevented from fulfilling (or perhaps even formulating) a set of desires/

purposes/ aspirations/ interests (Taylor, 1984: 173). Because power is linked to

imposition in this way, it cannot be separated from the notion of some relative lifting of

this restraint, from an unimpeded fulfillment of these desires/ purposes (Taylor, 1984:

173). It is this lifting of restraint that is captured in the notion of freedom. Thus, power

does not make sense without at least the idea of liberation (Taylor, 1984: 173).

Furthermore power not only requires a notion of liberty but also a notion of truth.


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For Foucault, modern systems of control are effective because of their capacity to reach

into our consciousness and make us complicit in our own subjugation it gets us to

agree and concur in the name of truth or liberation or our own nature (Taylor, 1984:

174). It is in this sense that modern systems function through illusions, disguises, masks

and falsehood. Thus truth becomes an essential notion. As Taylor states, Mask,

falsehood makes no sense without a corresponding notion of truth. The truth here is

subversive of power: It is on the side of the lifting of impositions, of what we have just

called liberation (Taylor, 1984: 174). By tracing these deeper contours of Foucaults

thought, Taylor properly demonstrate that Foucaults concept of power only make sense

when paired with the foundational notions of freedom and truth.8

Foucaults refusal of these foundational concepts emerges from his commitment

to a Nietzschean relativism. For Foucault, there is no order to human life or a human

nature from which one could anchor judgments or evaluations between ways of life

(Taylor, 1984: 175). In this view, truth does not exist outside a given order of power. In

his essay, Truth and Power, Foucault outlines this view:

Each society has its rgime of truth, its general politics of truth: that is,

the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the

mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and falsestatements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and

procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those

who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault, 1980: 131)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!8 Various theorists echo Taylors concerns. For instance, Peter Dews notes that for power to have any

meaning there must be some principle, force or entity which power crushes or subdues, and whose

release from this repression is considered desirable. A purely positive account of power would no longer be

an account of power at all, but simply the constitutive operation of social systems (Dews, 1987: 162).

Similarly Jrgen Habermas argues that Foucault lacks a foundational normative basis from which the

nature of power could be properly assessed (Habermas, 1987). Lacking this normative basis means that we

have no grounds for resisting oppression, or for determining which forms or movements are genuinely

emancipatory and which are not (Parfitt, 2002: 51-52).


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Through this lens, truth is understood to be subordinate to power and any claim to truth is

merely an attempt to establish another order of power. As Taylor notes: [The] regime-

relativity of truth means that we cannot raise the banner of truth against our own regime.

There can be no such thing as a truth independent of it, unless it is that of another regime.

So that liberation in the name of truth could only be the substitution of another system

of power for this one (Taylor, 1984: 175). Here it is necessary to emphasize that there

can be no gain in truth or freedom from one regime to another, since each will be

redefined in the new order.9 Thus forms of life become completely discontinuous and

incomparable.

Foucaults commitment to this Nietzschean framework has two fundamental

implications, namely (a) a retreat into a politics of local resistances and (b) a vilification

of modernity. Foucault rejects any foundational basis from which a larger, global

resistance could be constructed. Therefore he is profoundly skeptical of totalizing

theories that make claims to truth and prescribe paths toward liberation. This leads him

to conceive of resistance in a way that is strictly local and context specific (Taylor, 1984:

176). The second major implication is related to what Foucaults historical analyses leave

out, namely the possibility that a change in form of life may result in a move toward

greater freedom and truth. Since Foucault understands changes in forms of life to be

completely discontinuous and incomparable, this type of evaluative judgment becomes

impossible. Consider, for instance, Foucaults conceptualization of the rise of modernity

and the disciplinary systems that develop in armies, schools, factories and hospitals in the

eighteenth century (Taylor, 1984: 157). Here he wishes to adopt a position of neutrality

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!9 This idea is best understood against the Hegelian view, which understands history as the teleological

unfolding of events toward the ultimate realization of Freedom.


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where the classical and the modern are treated as two incommensurable orders of power.

Thus the rise of modernity and new disciplinary systems are understood exclusively as the

reflection of a new order of control and domination (Taylor, 1984: 156). While this

stance allows Foucault to reveal previously neglected aspects of modernity, its more

positive elements are denied altogether. As Taylor notes:

Foucault has missed the ambivalence of these new disciplines. The point

is that they have not served only to feed a system of control. They also

have taken the form of genuine self-discipline that have made possible

new kinds of collective action characterized by more egalitarian forms ofparticipation The point is that collective disciplines can function in both

ways as structures of domination and as bases for equal collective

action. [emphasis added] (Taylor, 1984: 164)

Foucaults major success lies in his ability to disrupt linear narratives of progress and

reveal the ways in which the modern project has extended systems of control and

domination. While one must recognize these losses, one must also acknowledge

modernitys fundamental gains. Foucaults commitment to a Nietzschean relativism

blocks his capacity to identify these more positive elements and thus contributes to an

analysis that is overtly one-sided. In adopting Foucauldian notions of truth and power,

postdevelopment theorists reproduce these theoretical tensions as well as the relativist

foundations from which they emerge.

Postdevelopment and the Dangers of Thinking Local

My aim thus far has been to illuminate the theoretical tensions that arise from Foucaults

commitment to Nietzschean relativism and underline the limitations of his notion of

power. The problems that plague postdevelopment can be understood as mirroring these

deeper tensions. Just as Foucault rejects any claim to truth as an attempt to establish a

new order of power, postdevelopment theorists understand any claim to development as


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an effort to extend and reinforce systems of Western hegemony. This profound

skepticism of universalizing narratives manifests in a rejection of both Marxist and liberal

models, and a retreat into a local relativism. In discussing the declining ideological

appeal of Marxism, Henry Bernstein laments:

Many formerly Marxist academics, whose formation was in the 1960s and

1970s, have abandoned Marxism; there is much less Marxism available totodays university students as part of their general education in the social

sciences. The connections between Marxist intellectual work and the

programmes and practices of progressive political formations, both parties

and regimes, have eroded with the demise or decline of the latterTo theextent that one or another variant of Marxism exemplified a (fashionably)

radical stance in the social sciences only a few decades back, this has

largely been displaced by the various currents of post-structuralism,postmodernism and the like (loosely defined), the radical ambitions ofwhich rest on their subversions of the claims of existing forms of

knowledge to objectivity and of any political aspirations to a project of

universal emancipation. (Bernstein, 2005: 126-127)

In line with these trends, many postdevelopment theorists have argued against the

universalism of human rights. In an essay entitled, From Global Thinking to Local

Thinking, Esteva and Prakash affirm that claims to universal human rights are actually

claims to power that function to reproduce systems of Western dominance (Esteva and

Prakash, 1997: 282). To replace these universalizing schemes, they recommend a politics

of local resistance (employing the slogan think local, act local), an active struggle to

oppose all abuse of power, both pre-modern and modern, in all forms (Esteva and

Prakash, 1997: 284). Thus the Nietzschean relativism evident in Foucault is reproduced

in the work of postdevelopment theorists, leading to a rejection of universal projects of

emancipation and a withdrawal into a series of disconnected local resistances. Terry

Eagleton accurately sums up the current situation when he states: In pulling the rug out

from under the certainties of its political opponents, this postmodern culture has often


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enough pulled it out from under itself too, leaving itself with no more reason why we

should resist fascism than the feebly pragmatic idea that fascism is not the way we do

things in Sussex or Sacramento (Eagleton, 1997: 24).

The postdevelopment shift towards a politics of the local is problematic on many

levels. The core of these tensions lies in its tendency to reproduce the conceptual binaries

that it seeks to contest, such as North and South, developed and underdeveloped,

traditional and modern, global and local, core and periphery. It is this pattern of thought,

which is characteristic of our modern discourse, that Jacques Derrida has termed

logocentrism. In her essay, Modernist Discourse and the Crisis of Development

Theory, Kate Manzo offers a useful explication of this concept:

[Logocentrism] describes a disposition to impose hierarchy when

encountering familiar and uncritically accepted dichotomies betweenWest and East, North and South, modern and traditional, core and

periphery, rational and emotional, male and female, and so on. The first

term in such oppositions is conceived as a higher reality, belonging to therealm of logos, or pure and invariable presence in need of no explanation.

The other term is then defined solely in relation to the first, the sovereign

subject, as an inferior or derivative form. It simply stands to reason, wemight say, that the East should become more like the West, the South likethe North, the traditional like the modern. What distinguishes

logocentrism for Derrida is a nostalgia for origins; for a foundational

source of truth and meaning that is pure, innocent, natural and normal;

and for a standpoint and standard supposedly independent ofinterpretation and political practice. (Manzo, 1991: 8)

Here it is necessary to emphasize, as Derrida has shown, that even the most radically

anti-ethnocentric discourse easily slips into the form, the logic, the implicit postulations

of what it seeks to contest (Manzo, 1991: 8). To illustrate this point, Derrida considers

the work of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Though Levi-Strauss rightfully

denounces the supposed distinctions between historical societies and societies without

history (known as the nature/culture dichotomy), he nevertheless constructs Native


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peoples as a model of original and natural goodness, of pure innocence interrupted only

by the forced entry of the West (Manzo, 1991: 8). Thus Levi-Strauss ethnography

exemplifies an ethic of nostalgia for origins in which he seeks a standpoint that is pure,

innocent, natural and normal. Here logocentrism was not avoided; the culture/nature

dichotomy was merely inverted (Manzo, 1991: 8).

Theories of postdevelopment fall into a similar conceptual trap. Despite its efforts

to challenge the simplistic binaries of modernization theory, postdevelopment moves

uncritically to posit a noble Non-West against an evil West. As Corbridge notes: Post-

development makes its case for change with reference to unhelpful and essential accounts

of the West and the RestThe West is coded as inauthentic, urban, consumerist,

monstrous, utilitarian and more, and its men and women are pitied as lonely, anxious,

greedy and shallow. In contrast the social majority of the Non-West are depicted as

authentic, rural, productive, content, in tune with Nature and so on (Corbridge, 1998:

144). Through this lens, development is understood in terms of a monolithic hegemony

whereby an evil North poisons a pure South (Peet, 1997: 77). Mirroring the structure of

Levi-Strauss ethnography, postdevelopment fails to challenge the underlying logic of

modernization theory and merely inverts the dichotomies of North and South, traditional

and modern, global and local.

It is these conceptual dualisms that shape the discourses in which problems are

formulated and solutions are imagined. Since the South is constructed as a space of purity

and innocence, problems of the South are understood as arising exclusively from Western

intervention. This is evident in the work of Vandana Shiva. As Kiely notes:


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Shiva and others are notoriously silent on questions of female foeticide

and infanticide, domestic violence and gender wage differentials. GivenShivas focus on South Asia, her silence on the question of why womens

lives are on average shorter than mens, in contrast to the rest of the

world, is particularly disturbing. She does recognize that women are

oppressed, but blames this on development strategies such as the GreenRevolution. (Kiely, 1999: 39)

Since the ills of the South are explained entirely as foreign impositions, postdevelopment

theorists are led to reject any solution that appears tainted by the evils of Western

Civilization and promote answers that are perceived (falsely) as emanating from a pure,

local essence. Having stepped outside the diseased circles of Modernity, Science,

Reason, Technology, Westernization, Consumption, the Nation-State, Globalisation and

Development, the peoples of the social majority can then make and rule their own lives at

the grassroots. The key to a good life would seem to reside in simplicity, frugality,

meeting the basic needs from local soils, and shitting together in the commons

(Corbridge, 1998: 142). This approach functions to both obfuscate repressive structures

operative at the local level and close off possibilities for meaningful inter-cultural

dialogue.

These problems emerge from an inadequate understanding of culture. In the

literature of postdevelopment, we are confronted with a world of unbridgeable

otherness in which cultures are static, primordial and isolated. Contrary to this image,

cultures do not exist in neat compartments interacting like billiard balls on the global

stage. Cultural identities are dynamic and fluid with blurred edges, continually being

shaped and reshaped by a multiplicity of forces.10 As Rigg correctly argues:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!10 Salman Rushdie speaks to this point when he provocatively asks: Do cultures actually exist as separate,

pure defensible entities? Is not mlange, adulteration, impurity, pick n mix at the heart of the idea of the

modern, and hasnt it been that way for almost all this shook-up century? Doesnt the idea of pure cultures,


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The construction of the past to fit an image of our own imagination is notrestricted to colonial historians and latter-day developmentalists. It is as

much a feature of the post-developmentalists and their agenda. So, when

scholars ask for interpretations of development, history and culture to be

rooted in, and based on local/ indigenous visions and experiences, it is fairto ask which local? (Rigg, 1997: 34 -36)

By adopting an approach that seeks to preserve an imagined local essence,

postdevelopment narrows the lens through which solutions can be envisaged. For

example, Apffel Marglin has argued that the British introduction of a smallpox

vaccination to India was an act of cultural imperialism because it led to the abolition of

the cult of Sittala Devi, the goddess whom one prayed in order to avert smallpox

(Marglin, 1991). Increases in life expectancy were deemed unimportant because these

concerns were grounded in the (allegedly) Western binary of life and death (Marglin,

1991: 8; Kiely, 1999: 42). Here we see how a position anchored in a supposed respect for

cultural difference slides problematically into an indifference to suffering at the local

level fostered by an uncritical rejection of any solution perceived as Western. 11 This is

similarly reflected in the unwillingness of postdevelopment scholars to recognize the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!in urgent need of being kept free from alien contamination, lead us inexorably towards apartheid, towards

ethnic cleansing, towards the gas chamber? (Rushdie, 1999: 21)11 These positions are doubly problematic as they function to reproduce the Eurocentric tendency to view

science and reason as purely Western constructions. In her essay, Is Modern Science a Western,

Patriarchal Myth, Nanda brings light to these issues and reveals that it was not until the eighteenth century

that many European writers clearly proclaimed the West as rational the Rest as irrational, eras[ing] from

the history of ancient Greece, the supposed cradle of western philosophy, all traces of the eastern

cultures that were pivotal for the formation of Greek thought (Nanda, 1991: 37). Thus when Shiva claims

the domination of South by North, of women by men, of nature by westernized man are rooted in the

domination inherent to the world view createdby western man over the last three centuries, she furtherperpetuates this Eurocentric mythology [emphasis added] (Shiva, 1989: 30). In the context of democracy,

Amartya Sen reveals a similar flaw in many supposedly anti-Eurocentric discourses. In his essay entitled,

Democracy and its Global Roots: Why Democratization is Not the Same as Westernization, Sen reminds us

that: [t]he self-doubt with regard to pushing Western ideas on non-Western societies is combined with

the absence of doubt in viewing democracy as a quintessentially Western idea, an immaculate Western

conception (Sen, 2006: 217). For further discussion of these issues see Appiah, K. A. (2006).

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. London and New York: W.W. Norton & Company as

well as, Appiah, K. A. (1992). The Postcolonial and the Postmodern. In My Father's House (pp. 137-157).

New York: Oxford University Press.


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instances in which development has acted as an empowering force. Though it must be

conceded that most of the time development has brought disastrous consequences, there

have been undeniable successes.12 The postdevelopment framework leaves no room for

these exceptions. As Agrawal concludes: In posing the dualisms of local and global,

indigenous and Western, traditional and scientific, society and state- and locating the

possibility of change only in one of these opposed pairs one is forced to draw lines that

are potentially ridiculous and ultimately indefensible. Development, like progress, or

modernity, may be impossible to give up. Harboring the seeds of its own transformation,

it may be far more suited to co-optation than disavowal (Agrawal, 1996: 476).

Beyond Ethnocentrism and Relativism

The primary aim of this section has been to elucidate the philosophic foundations from

which the major problems of postdevelopment originate. Since Foucauldian notions of

truth and power lie at the core of postdevelopment thought, these concepts were

interrogated with reference to the work of Charles Taylor. It was shown that Foucauldian

notions of power only make sense when paired with the foundational notions of truth

and freedom. In rejecting these notions, Foucault commits himself to a Nietzschean

relativism in which truth is understood to be subordinate to power and any claim to truth

is merely an attempt to establish a new system of domination. From here Foucault is

forced to retreat into a politics of local resistance and adopt a view of modernity that is

absurdly one-sided.

In anchoring analysis in Foucauldian notions of power, postdevelopment

reproduces these deeper philosophic tensions and descends into an unproductive

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!12 For examples of these exceptional successes, see Krishna, A. (1996). Reasons for Hope: Instructive

Experiences in Rural Development. West Hartford: Kumarian Press.


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relativism. Through its rejection of all projects of universal emancipation, the

postdevelopment school is forced to withdrawal into a series of disconnected local

resistances. Here we are confronted by a fragmented world composed of isolated cultural

islands, lacking any foundation from which larger networks of understanding could be

constructed. In this world of unbridgeable otherness, problems are explained with

reference to the monolithic hegemony of Modernity, Science, Reason, Technology,

Westernization and Development. In contrast, the local is celebrated as a primordial

fountain of truth from which answers to our development dilemma will magically flow.

Thus we are left with a situation in which a positive local politics of empowerment

slides fitfully into an amoral politics of indifference, or towards a local politics which

craves no point of contact with forms of political practice which are connected to global

issues and ostensibly universal themes (Corbridge, 1990: 97).

Ultimately these lines of thought lead development studies toward an increasing

state of fragmentation and rupture. By undermining foundational notions such as

Progress, Truth, liberation and Development, postdevelopment dissolves the anchor from

which development theory derives its purpose and meaning, rendering it impotent and

fractured. The result of all this is an inability for radical development theorists to develop

a coherent challenge to the reigning orthodoxy of neoliberalism. In the words of Jan

Nederveen Pieterse:

Postdevelopment is caught in a rhetorical gridlock. Using discourseanalysis as an ideological platform invites political impasse and quietism.

In the end postdevelopment offers no politics besides self-organisingcapacity of the poor, which actually lets the development responsibility of

states and international institutions off the hook. Postdevelopment arrives

at development agnosticism by a different route, but shares the abdication

of development with neoliberalism. (Nederveen Pieterse, 2000: 87)


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Thus the final outcome of the postdevelopment critique is not a revolutionary return to a

local utopia but a schizophrenic condition in which the hegemonic relations of Global

Capitalism are reproduced and extended.

These limitations of postdevelopment cannot be cast aside as insignificant or

peripheral. However it would be equally problematic to dismiss these theories outright

and arrive at the crass conclusion that postdevelopment has nothing to offer. As

Corbridge notes: In a quite fundamental way, the voices of post-modernism/ post-

colonialism force us to ask what should be the first question(s) of development studies:

what is development? Who says this is what it is? Who aims to direct it, and for whom?

(Corbridge, 1994: 95) In posing these questions, postdevelopment theorists awaken us to

the familiar and unchallenged modes of thought upon which the practices and institutions

of development rest. Here postdevelopment theorists have convincingly demonstrated

that many claims to universalism are often no more than white mythologies functioning

to extend and reinforce asymmetrical relations of power. Thus the success of

postdevelopment lies in its ability to move us beyond the ethnocentrism inherent in

technocratic frameworks that see development as an apolitical transfer of knowledge and

resources from the North to the South. The question becomes: How are we to preserve

this critical disposition of postdevelopment and thus avoid the ethnocentrism inherent in

dominant universalist approaches, without surrendering to its debilitating relativism that

disables any possibility for meaningful social change? The following section moves

toward a resolution of these tensions.


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III. THE FUSION OF HORIZONS: A GADAMERIAN

APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT

The great challenge of this century, both for politics and for social

science, is that of understanding the other. CHARLES TAYLOR

In the sky there is no east nor west.

We make these distinctions in the mind, then believe them to be true.THE BUDDHA,Lankavatara Sutra

In the introduction to his book, Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty identifies a

fault line central to modern European social thought (Chakrabarty, 2000: 18). As

Chakrabarty states: [O]ne may explain this division thus. Analytic social science

fundamentally attempts to demystify ideology in order to produce a critique that looks

toward a more just social orderHermeneutic tradition, on the other hand, produces a

loving grasp of detail in search of understanding the diversity of human life-worlds

(Chakrabarty, 2000: 18). Whereas the analytic tradition tends to assimilate local

difference into some abstract universal, the hermeneutic turn leads many theorists into

an incapacitating relativism. Chakrabartys aim is to bring these two patterns of thought

into conversation in an effort to understand the nature of political modernity in the

context of South Asia. In the realm of development theory, we are faced with a similar

conceptual challenge: How are we to accommodate the critical insights of

postdevelopment (i.e. avoid the ethnocentrism inherent in universalist discourses) while

nevertheless escaping the slide into relativism that seems unavoidably to follow? This

chapter attempts to resolve these tensions through an application of Gadamers notion of

the fusion of horizons.


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In his essay, Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View of Conceptual

Schemes, Charles Taylor situates the thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer in relation to the

dominant rifts that underlie contemporary human sciences. In explicating these rifts,

Taylor identifies the central problem we find ourselves grappling with in the context of

development studies. He states:

The days are long gone when Europeans and other Westerners could

consider their experience and culture as the norm toward which the whole

of humanity was headed, so that the other could be understood as an

earlier stage on the same road that they had trodden.But the recovery of the necessary modesty here seems always to

threaten to veer into relativism, or a questioning of the very ideal of truth

in human affairs. The very ideas of objectivity that underpinned Westernsocial science seemed hard to combine with that of fundamentalconceptual differences between cultures; so the real cultural openness

appeared to threaten the very norms of validity on which social science

rested. (Taylor, 2002: 280).

For Taylor these inadequacies emerge in the contemporary human sciences due to a

fundamental flaw in the model upon which these disciplines have been predicated. To

alleviate these conceptual tensions, Taylor proposes a Gadamerian approach that will

carry us beyond the dilemma of ethnocentrism and relativism (Taylor, 2002: 280). This

alternative framework will be outlined below before moving to a discussion of its

applicability to development studies.

Understanding the Other and the Fusion of Horizons

In Truth and Method, Gadamer convincingly demonstrates that to properly understand a

text or event our approach must be formulated not on the model of the scientific grasp

of an object but rather on that of speech partners who comes to an understanding

(Taylor, 2002: 280). Whereas the scientific model is premised on an attempt to gain

intellectual control over an object, the conversation model necessitates an approach to


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the text or other as a dialogue partner who has the capacity to change us as we expand our

horizons to understand it or her. For Taylor this approach is relevant for all human

sciences and must act as the basis from which we understand our knowledge of the other.

To further elucidate this alternative model, Taylor contrasts the two forms of

inquiry: knowing an objectand coming to an understanding with a partner in dialogue.

Whereas the first approach is unilateral, the second is bilateral. For example, when I set

out to know a rock or the solar system, I dont have to deal with its view of me. As

Taylor notes: The unilateral nature of knowing emerges in the fact that my goal is to

attain a full intellectual control over the object, such that it can no longer talk back and

surprise me (Taylor, 2002: 280). This is clearly the case in a discipline like microphysics

where the aim is to finally chart all the particles and forces in an explanatory language

that requires no further revision (Taylor, 2002: 280). In contrast, coming to an

understanding can never produce this finality. Firstly the languages of understanding

developed with one interlocutor will not necessarily prove useful when dealing with

another. Secondly the life-situation of our present interlocutor may change and thus

undermine the understanding at which we had previously arrived. Thus understandings

are party-dependent in that we come to an understanding with a particular interlocutor at

a particular moment in time.

A final distinction that can be drawn between these two modes of thought is

related to the ways in which they conceive of their final ends. While both approaches

may require revision and adjustments, the final aim of the first model will always be to

attain full intellectual control. By contrast, in coming to an understanding the end of the

operation is not control, or else I am engaging in a sham designed to manipulate my


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partner while pretending to negotiate. The end is being able in some way to function

together with the partner, and this means listening as well as talking, hence may require

that I redefine what I am aiming at (Taylor, 2002: 281). To sum up, there are three

components of understandings that are distinct from knowing an object. Namely

understandings are bilateral, party-dependent and involve the revising of goals.

Many scholars have argued against Gadamers conception of knowledge as

understanding because it is thought to veer into a postmodernism relativism defined by

complete incommensurability. To understand why these views misunderstand the

argument, it is instructive to consider another way in which Gadamer breaks with the

ordinary conception of science. The dominant view of science is that it employs a

language that is clear, neutral and explicit. As Taylor notes, this is a false view that has

effectively been dispelled by thinkers such as Kuhn and Bachelard. We now understand

that the practices of natural science have become universal in our world as the result of

certain languages, with their associated practices and norms, have spread and being

adopted by all societies in our time (Taylor, 2002: 283-284). Taylor argues that these

languages became universally diffusible because they were insulated from the language

of human understanding (Taylor, 2002: 283). Thus the great accomplishment of the

seventeenth-century scientific revolution was to develop a language for nature that was

purged of human meanings (Taylor, 2002: 283). This marked a clear break from earlier

scientific languages, which were infused with meaning and purpose.

In stark contrast, the theories and approaches of the social science remain far

more heterogeneous and contested. Thus there appears to be a fundamental incapacity for


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the social sciences to achieve the same universality as the natural sciences. For Taylor,

the difference is related to the fact that

the languages of human science always draw for their intelligibility on

our ordinary understanding of what it is to be a human agent, live insociety, have moral convictions, aspire to happiness, and so forth. No

matter how much our ordinary everyday views on these issues may be

questioned by a theory, we cannot but draw on certain basic features of

our understanding of human life, those that seem so obvious andfundamental as not to need formulation. But it is precisely these that may

make it difficult to understand people of another time or place. (Taylor,

2002: 284)

Here Taylor recognizes the central difficulty inherent in attempting to know or

understand peoples and events existing outside our particular historico-cultural context.

We slip easily into tendencies of ethnocentrism when we innocently speak of people in

other ages holding opinions or subscribing to values without noticing that in our society

there is a generalized understanding that everyone has, or ought to have, a personal

opinion on a certain subject say, politics or religion; or without being aware of how

much the term value carries with it the sense of something chosen (Taylor, 2002: 284).

Whereas the natural sciences allow one to bracket out human meanings and still think

effectively, these meanings are inextricably linked to the ways in which we understand

and interpret human affairs. This background of hidden understandings, beliefs and

meanings is so deep and fundamental to our perception of the world that there is no way

of simply suspending it or operating outside it (Taylor, 2002: 284).

It would seem that a consequence of these limitations would be that we are

perpetually imprisoned by this tacit background of understandings and thus unable to

make contact with or know the other. In Gadamers view, this is not the case. To use

Taylors words, The road to understanding others passes through the patient


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identification of those facets of our implicit understanding that distort the reality of the

other (Taylor, 2002: 285). By allowing our firmly held identities and understandings to

be challenged and put at risk, we become interpellated by what is different in their lives

(Taylor, 2002: 285). This causes two interconnected changes: we will see our

peculiarity for the first time, as a formulated fact about us and not simply a taken-for-

granted feature of the human condition as such and at the same time, we will perceive the

corresponding feature of their life-form undistorted (Taylor, 2002: 285-286). Through

this process of openness we generate a language of understanding that bridges both

knower and known. It is this transformation that Gadamer speaks of as a fusion of

horizons. Here ones horizon the way one comes to understand the human condition

and the world is temporally put at risk and fused with the horizon of the other. Thus

we become aware of a different way of understanding and believing in things and thus

our horizon is extended to take in this possibility. Through this process we move

gradually toward an improved understanding ofthe other as well as ourselves.

Development as Dialogue

The field of development studies is dominated by a conceptual approach that

understands situations of poverty and powerlessness as objects to be scientifically studied

and categorized. Even in its more radical circles, the aim is to develop some type of

intellectual control over the concept of development in the hopes of generating a

formulaic model from which all practice could be grounded. In his essay, The

Irrelevance of Development Studies, Michael Edwards expresses these concerns. He

argues that


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Although some progress has been made in exploring alternative

approaches, inspired particularly by the work of Paulo Freire,development studies are still based largely on traditional banking

concepts of education. These traditional concepts embody a series of

attitudes that contribute to the irrelevance of much of their output to the

problems of the world in which we live. Most importantly, people aretreated as objects to be studied rather than subjects of their own

development; there is therefore a separation between the researcher and

the object of research, and between understanding and action. Research

and education come to be dominated by content rather than form ormethod; they become processes which focus on the transmission of

information, usually of a technical kind, from one person to another.

(Edwards, 1989: 117-118)

Through this analysis Edwards affirms that Development research is full of a spurious

objectivity: this is a natural consequence of divorcing subject from object in the process

of education. Any hint of subjectivity is seized upon immediately as unscientific and

therefore not worthy of inclusion in serious studies of development (Edwards, 1989:

121). Postdevelopment theorists react against these currents and argue that we must

abandon the universalizing project of developmen

Documents

Development as Dialogue