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This article was downloaded by: [University of Utah] On: 03 December 2014, At: 19:23 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Click for updates Third World Quarterly Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctwq20 Fantasy machine: philanthrocapitalism as an ideological formation Japhy Wilson a a Department of Politics, University of Manchester Published online: 02 Oct 2014. To cite this article: Japhy Wilson (2014) Fantasy machine: philanthrocapitalism as an ideological formation, Third World Quarterly, 35:7, 1144-1161, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2014.926102 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2014.926102 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &

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Page 1: Fantasy machine: philanthrocapitalism as an ideological formation

This article was downloaded by: [University of Utah]On: 03 December 2014, At: 19:23Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Click for updates

Third World QuarterlyPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctwq20

Fantasy machine: philanthrocapitalismas an ideological formationJaphy Wilsona

a Department of Politics, University of ManchesterPublished online: 02 Oct 2014.

To cite this article: Japhy Wilson (2014) Fantasy machine: philanthrocapitalism as an ideologicalformation, Third World Quarterly, 35:7, 1144-1161, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2014.926102

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2014.926102

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &

Page 2: Fantasy machine: philanthrocapitalism as an ideological formation

Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Fantasy machine:philanthrocapitalism as an ideologicalformationJaphy Wilson*Department of Politics, University of Manchester

Philanthrocapitalism is promoted as a form of development funding thatinfuses philanthropy with the dynamism and innovation of capitalistenterprise. Millennium Promise is a philanthrocapitalist organisation basedin New York, which finances the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) across10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. At the level of its discursive articula-tion Millennium Promise appears as a Foucauldian ‘anti-politics machine’:a mechanism of transnational governmentality devoted to the biopoliticalproduction of entrepreneurial subjects organised in self-discipliningcommunities. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and field research con-ducted in Uganda, I argue that philanthrocapitalism is better understood asan ideological formation, which mobilises a disavowed enjoyment ofglobal inequality. In the case of Millennium Promise this enjoyment isstructured by specific social fantasies: cause-related marketing campaignsinvite Western consumers to enjoy their imagined distance from ‘African’suffering; the MVP functions as a narcissistic mirror, which offers areflection of capitalist society cleansed of its class antagonism; and,through the staging of messianic rituals, the MVP mobilises a sharedenjoyment of pseudo-colonial relations of domination. I conclude thatphilanthrocapitalism is not an anti-politics machine but a fantasy machine,which demonstrates the limitations of Foucauldian critique, and forces usto confront our own relations to enjoyment.

Keywords: philanthrocapitalism; ideology; fantasy; jouissance;Millennium Villages Project; Slavoj Žižek

IntroductionWhere one doesn’t (want to) know, in the blanks of one’s symbolic universe, oneenjoys.1

Slavoj Žižek

Philanthrocapitalism is promoted by global elites as a radical new form ofdevelopment funding, which infuses philanthropy with the dynamism and

*Email: [email protected]

© 2014 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com

Third World Quarterly, 2014Vol. 35, No. 7, 1144–1161, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2014.926102

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innovation of capitalist enterprise. It invests in strategies that mobilise marketforces, organised through efficient management structures, and directed towards tar-geted, time-bound and quantifiable interventions. This paper develops a critique ofphilanthrocapitalism through the case of Millennium Promise. Founded in 2005 bythe development economist Jeffrey Sachs and the billionaire Wall Street venturecapitalist Ray Chambers, Millennium Promise is a philanthrocapitalist organisationdedicated to ‘ending extreme poverty in our lifetime’.2 It incorporates over 200partners, including many of the world’s largest multinational corporations and mostprominent philanthropic foundations, as well as multilateral institutions such as theUnited Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Earth Institute at ColumbiaUniversity, of which Sachs is Director.3 Millennium Promise is the organisationresponsible for the financing and implementation of the Millennium Villages Project(MVP), a development programme operating in 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.Launched in 2006, the MVP is a ‘proof of concept’ for the development strategy setout in Sachs’s best-selling anti-poverty manifesto The End of Poverty. The MVP iscurrently putting Sachs’s ideas to work in 14 clusters of villages, with a combinedpopulation of over 500,000 people. Through an integrated set of interventionsdesigned to raise the human capital of the villagers and transform them from‘sub-subsistence farmers’ into ‘small scale entrepreneurs’, the MVP aims to achieve theMillennium Development Goals within these villages by their deadline in 2015.4

At the level of its discursive articulation, Millennium Promise would seem toprovide a quintessential example of the kind of multi-scalar technocratic assem-blage that has been extensively critiqued by the Foucault-inspired literature ondevelopment.5 This literature sees development as the meticulous manipulationof social reality, in which abject populations are subjected to a calculative ratio-nality that seeks to maximise their productive potential through targeted welfareschemes, transforming them into entrepreneurial subjects and self-help commu-nities under the guidance of an implacable expert knowledge. In his pioneeringwork in this field James Ferguson has theorised development as an ‘anti-politicsmachine’, which reduces the political to the technical, misrepresenting the realityof ‘developing’ countries, transforming these countries on the basis of its mis-representations, and failing to achieve its stated aims, while unintentionallyadvancing the bureaucratic power of the state.6 Ferguson’s case of the Thaba-Tseka Development Project in Lesotho is remarkably similar to the MVP, and theMVP would seem destined to reproduce its shortcomings, by imposing an equallycrude economic blueprint on an even more heterogeneous social terrain. Further-more, the hybrid institutional structure of Millennium Promise, combining phi-lanthropists, corporations, academia and multilateral organisations, would appearto typify the contemporary iteration of the anti-politics machine that Fergusonhas identified as ‘transnational governmentality’, in which development isremoved from state control and implemented by a diffuse network of non- andquasi-governmental agencies isolated from political accountability.7

These are all elements of philanthrocapitalism identified by the critical litera-ture on the topic, which draws attention to the multiple democratic deficitsimplicit in the administration of ‘development’ by unaccountable foundations,whose preference is for top-down, technocratic, market-oriented forms of inter-vention.8 Millennium Promise therefore invites a critique of philanthrocapitalismas an anti-politics machine. Indeed, I initially approached the MVP from this per-

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spective, interpreting it as a technocratic strategy for the production of marketsociety.9 Yet, as my research progressed, it became increasingly apparent thatthis framework was unable to account for what was actually taking place. Thephilanthrocapitalist initiatives and celebrity spectacles that were being organisedaround the MVP could not be explained by a theoretical lens that reduced devel-opment to the dispassionate machinations of transnational governmentality. Andmy field research in Uganda did not reveal the MVP as a technocratic machinebeing undermined by its own misrepresentation of social reality. Instead, Iencountered a project that seemed less concerned with producing a functioningmarket society than with presenting a façade of success on the internationalstage. My research has therefore led me to an understanding of philanthrocapi-talism, not as a totalising mechanism of social engineering, but as an ideologicalformation devoted to producing and sustaining a specific social fantasy.

For Foucauldians, of course, ideology is an obsolete concept, based on anaïve division between appearance and reality, and a humanist reification of theCartesian subject. But the critique of ideology has advanced significantly inrecent years. Slavoj Žižek, in particular, has developed an influential reconceptu-alisation of ideology based on Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Žižek ideology isnot an illusory appearance that conceals an external reality from an otherwiseautonomous subject. Instead, it is a web of fantasies that structures ‘reality’ itselfin relation to an unsymbolisable and traumatic Real.10 Drawing on the work ofthe psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Žižek argues that one of the primary functionsof fantasy is to structure our relationship to ‘jouissance’. Though commonlytranslated as ‘enjoyment’, jouissance is a far more ambiguous phenomenon,which is associated less with pleasure and desire than with the raw energy ofthe libidinal drives. Through our entry into the symbolic order in earlychildhood, we abandon our previously unmediated relationship to the Real ofjouissance, which nonetheless continues to intrude upon our symbolic universewith an alien material persistence. It is only through specific fantasies thatjouissance can be framed to provide enjoyment to the subject, and thisenjoyment is as much to do with pain, disgust and horrified fascination as withour commonsense understanding of enjoyment-as-pleasure.11

Žižek argues that all social orders are underpinned by ideological fantasiesthat mobilise and regulate our relationship to jouissance.12 What makes con-sumer capitalism unique in this regard is that it seeks not to repress jouissancethrough scarcity and prohibition, but to guarantee the expanded reproduction ofcapital through a regime of ‘commanded enjoyment’.13 It is within this context,I argue, that philanthrocapitalism should be understood, as an ideological forma-tion that structures our enjoyment in specific ways. Philanthrocapitalism is dis-cursively framed in the economic language of poverty alleviation and the ethicallanguage of saving lives. But it also mobilises fantasies in which ‘we’ – thepopulations of ‘Western’ consumer societies – are invited to enjoy the obscenespectacle of global inequality. This is never made explicit at the level of itsdiscursive articulation – fantasy is only operative to the extent that it remainsunconscious, and the enjoyment that it elicits remains disavowed.14 The critiqueof ideology must therefore ‘aim at extracting the kernel of enjoyment, atarticulating the way in which – beyond the field of meaning but at the same

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time internal to it – an ideology implies, manipulates, produces a pre-ideologicalenjoyment structured in fantasy’.15

In this paper I develop a Žižekian critique of philanthrocapitalism as an ideo-logical formation, through the case of Millennium Promise and the MVP. Thefirst section explores the ways in which philanthrocapitalist initiatives infuseconsumers with the jouissance of salvation, by staging the gap between suffer-ing Africans and the imagined glamour and opulence of the West. The secondsection interprets the MVP as a narcissistic mirror, which offers an ideal-ego rep-resentation of a capitalist society stripped of its constitutive antagonism andreflected in the imagined gaze of the African Other. The third section focuses onthe distance between the lived experience of the ‘beneficiaries’ of the MVP andthe celebrations of the Project that are performed in the Millennium Villages fordonors and visiting dignitaries. These messianic spectacles create an illusorysense of harmony, which is paradoxically underpinned by a disavowedenjoyment of pseudo-colonial relations of domination and submission. I con-clude that philanthrocapitalism is less an anti-politics machine than a fantasymachine, thereby demonstrating the limitations of Foucauldian critique.16

The joy of inequalityThe Millennium Promise webpage for the MVP in Uganda leads with JeffreySachs’s conclusion to The End of Poverty: ‘Let the future say of our generationthat we sent forth mighty currents of hope, and that we worked together to healthe world’.17 Such sentiments are typical of philanthrocapitalism, which satu-rates its discourse with moralising condemnations of poverty and messianicprophecies of salvation. Its very name suggests a form of capitalism infusedwith morality, in which the philanthropic activities of the capitalist are no longerseparate from the process of accumulation, but have transformed the logic ofcapital itself. In the words of Matthew Bishop, the business editor of The Econ-omist, who coined the phrase in 2006: ‘Philanthrocapitalism is about combiningthe head and the heart… [It is] about doing well by doing good… Capitalism isdead: long live philanthrocapitalism!’18

From a Foucauldian perspective ‘the moralization of markets further sustains,rather than undermining, neoliberal governmentalities’.19 Just as governmentalitytransforms individuals from welfare beneficiaries into ‘responsible’ agents, so‘responsibilization also incorporates market enterprises…the effect being that ofexpecting market entities to assume socio-moral obligations’.20 This assessmentoverlooks the fact that the neologism works both ways. At the same time that itpromises the moralization of capitalism, philanthrocapitalism penetratesphilanthropy with the jouissance of capital itself, as ‘the invisible, obsceneunderside of today’s institutions’.21 Žižek argues that ‘enjoyment is the“surplus” that comes from our knowledge that our pleasure involves the thrill ofentering a forbidden domain’.22 In the case of philanthrocapitalism this‘forbidden domain’ is the disavowed enjoyment of inequality itself.23

This is evident in philanthrocapitalist initiatives associated with MillenniumPromise, in which the enjoyment of Western consumer culture is dependentupon its imagined distance from the poverty and suffering of ‘Africa’. One suchinitiative is Table for Two International, which contributes to the MVP in Uganda,

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Ethiopia, Tanzania and Rwanda. Table for Two has received an award for socialentrepreneurship from the World Economic Forum, and its executive directorhas been named as one of the Forbes ‘Heroes of Philanthropy’.24 Customers atparticipating restaurants in Japan, the USA and Europe are invited to purchasehealthy low calorie meals, and to donate the calories they have saved to provideschool meals for children in ‘Africa’. The ‘two’ at the table are the wealthy,obese Westerner and the poor, malnourished African child – a relationship thatis graphically represented in the organisation’s promotional material. The sloganis ‘At Table for Two, you’ll never eat alone’.25

In this staging of the relations of global inequality, the familiar criticism ofcharity as ‘crumbs from the rich man’s table’ is not challenged as a misrepresen-tation, but is explicitly performed as an ethical act. The meal is presented as a‘win-win’ situation, combining the improvement of ‘our’ health with the salva-tion of the African child. Yet beneath the ethical register Table for Two mobilis-es a disavowed enjoyment of the distance between the two meals in terms ofquality and price. In contrast to the tasty and expensive meal on ‘our side of thetable’, we are informed that the African’s meal has cost us just 25 US cents,and consists of beans and ‘posho’, which we are told is ‘made by boiling maizeflour in water. It is most commonly cooked to a dough-like consistency…Here,it is served as porridge.’26 The promotional material is filled with images ofAfrican children in needy and grateful Oliver Twist poses, and even includes amock-up of the ‘table for two’ itself. On one side of the table is a beautifullypresented plate of ‘Braised Chicken Couscous’ with a colourful medley of exo-tic fruit and vegetables. On the other is a loathsome bowl of beans and posho,lumped together in an excremental mass with a fork thrust crudely into it.27 It isas if the relation between fantasy and jouissance through which we organise ourenjoyment has broken down – the Westerner’s delightful meal appears as purefantasy, while the Real of jouissance is revealed in all its repulsive materialityin the bowl of the unfortunate African child.28 Yet it is precisely through thisorganisation of relations of global inequality that Table for Two achieves its suc-cess, and the privileged Westerner is able to ‘really’ enjoy their meal.

A further example is provided by Tommy Hilfiger’s Promise Collection. TheTommy Hilfiger Corporate Foundation donated $2 million to the MVP in 2009 –a figure that should be viewed in the context of the market valuation of thecompany at over $4.6 billion.29 Hilfiger sits on the board of Millennium Prom-ise, and was named its first Global Leader in 2010.30 In 2012 his companylaunched the Promise Collection – an ‘Africa’-themed range of Hilfiger clothing,all proceeds from which would go to the MVP in Ruhiira, Uganda. The campaignwas led by the Hollywood actress Katie Holmes, and framed around her visit toRuhiira. On the Hilfiger website, and in fashion magazines and blogs includingVogue, Marie Claire, Daily Makeover, and Blonde Salad, Western consumerswere invited to enjoy a spectacle of deprivation and salvation, suffused withHolmes’s white Western glamour, in contrast to the abjection of the blackUgandan hordes surrounding her.31 Meanwhile, the press pack informed us that‘To generate awareness for Millennium Promise…Tommy Hilfiger will wrapoutdoor furniture in a signature African-inspired print…during city-widetakeovers, including underground station dominations’.32 Lavish launch parties

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were thrown in major cities across Europe and the USA. In the words of onesocialite at the launch event in Paris:

It’s amazing. I mean it’s always nice to have a cocktail and to drink champagne,but it’s important to remember what this is for…It’s not just a charity to give, it’sa charity to create sustainable development in Africa, and Tommy Hilfiger, whichis this huge, huge company, is giving 100 per cent of the proceeds from thecollection…It’s quite beautiful.”33

Other fashionistas shared her enthusiasm. A Blonde Salad blog-post on thePromise Collection was flooded with admiring comments: ‘So happy to hearthat some people, who could just enjoy their beautiful life, are spending time onsuch important causes’; ‘Through all the glitter and glamour we experience inour world – especially in the world of fashion – I think it’s important not to for-get the less fortunate’.34 In these statements the enjoyment of the ‘champagne’,the ‘huge, huge company’, the ‘beautiful life’, and ‘the glamour and glitter’ isemphasised, while the stated purpose of the Promise Collection, concerning‘Africa’, ‘important causes’ and ‘the less fortunate’, appears as a mere after-thought. But it is precisely the disavowed gap that this afterthought establishesbetween ‘our world’ and the abyss of ‘Africa’ that constitutes the fantasy spacein which the Promise Collection and its associated festivities are experienced asenjoyment.

Like Table for Two, the Promise Collection does not just stage a spectacle ofinequality, but invites us to actively participate in it through our purchase of itsproducts. Its promotional material is themed around a colonial African adven-ture. All the models of the collection’s ‘traditional African prints’ are white, andproducts are set against a background filled with colonial-era maps, journals andsuitcases, while the website invites us to ‘explore Ruhiira with Katie Holmes’.35

Within this fantasy space the consumer is offered the chance to enjoy the roleof colonial administrator – determining what is best for the African villagersunder his or her charge. When selecting their products from the Promise Collec-tion, the consumer’s choice is guided not only by their relative aesthetic value,but also by the area of Ruhiira’s ‘development’ that they consider most impor-tant: the ‘Congo Swimshort’ for ‘improving food’, the ‘Rwanda Polo’ for‘improving business’, the ‘Paarl Bikini’ for ‘improving environment’, and soon.36 The enjoyment of the product is therefore entwined with the performanceof an imagined identity, in which the consumer is able to actively participate inpseudo-colonial relations of domination. Needless to say, the website for thePromise Collection also encourages consumers to purchase products fromTommy Hilfiger’s for-profit range. Despite sales closing within two months, thewebsite remained active for a further 18 months, suffusing the brand with acomplacent jouissance of salvation. Yet this is only one of the forms of enjoy-ment that permeate philanthrocapitalism, as the following sections explain.

The paradise lost of the bourgeoisieThe blueprint for the Millennium Villages Project is set out in a 147-page‘handbook’ drawn up by a team of natural and social scientists at the EarthInstitute in New York, which serves as the training manual for the local

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administrators of the MVP across 14 sites in 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.Like the Thaba-Tseka Development Project critiqued by Ferguson in The Anti-Politics Machine, the handbook begins from a misleading representation of ruralsub-Saharan Africa as a pre-capitalist space of subsistence farmers devoid ofinternal power relations and excluded from markets.37 With an investment of$120 dollars per villager per year, the MVP aims to transform this reality, and tomeet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. This is to beachieved by the biopolitical improvement of the population, through free schoolmeals, clean water sources and improved medical services; the liberation ofentrepreneurial energies through the transition from subsistence farming to cashcrop agribusiness; and the guarantee of ownership and sustainability through anintensive process of participatory planning and community-led development.38

As already mentioned, the MVP therefore seems purpose-built for a Foucauldiancritique of development as a governmental machine of meticulous socialengineering, based on calculability, biopolitical optimisation, the production ofentrepreneurial subjects and the mobilisation of self-help communities, and drivenforward by the Western expert’s ‘will to improve’.39 Yet, while the governmentali-ty approach maps perfectly onto the discursive articulation of the MVP, it is notreflected in the implementation of the Project on the ground. In 2013 I conducted35 household interviews in the Ruhiira Millennium Village, and interviewedimplementers and administrators employed by the Project. My research findings(which I have presented in detail elsewhere40) suggest that the MVP is not a scien-tific machine of meticulous social engineering. Instead, it is being implementedwith a notable absence of ‘scientific rigour’, and an apparent lack of concern forthe production of entrepreneurial subjects or the promotion of communityparticipation. The groups organised for the distribution of agricultural inputs aredominated by local elites; only a handful of model farmers have been selected toattend business-training programmes; and the ‘extremely poor’, whom the Projectwas designed to lift out of poverty, are being excluded from the majority of itsbenefits. Implementers and ex-administrators have made allegations of corruptionwithin the local administration, and Millennium Promise has been accused of lackof oversight and a failure to prevent nepotism and embezzlement.41

In this section and the next I argue that the MVP is less concerned with suc-cessful implementation than with the projection of an image of success on theinternational stage. In the case of the MVP – and I would argue of philanthrocapi-talism in general – the Foucauldian gaze of expert power–knowledge is there-fore less significant than the Lacanian gaze, in which the ideal-ego of thephilanthrocapitalist is reflected for his/her own narcissistic enjoyment.42 Thisimagined gaze is related to what Lacan called the mirror-stage of childhooddevelopment, in which personal identity is first established. It is through seeingits reflection in a mirror, or in the gaze of an Other, that a child first formulatesan understanding of itself as a unified and distinct subject, and this initial expe-rience of self-identity is replete with narcissistic jouissance.43 Similarly, indevelopment projects like the MVP, philanthrocapitalism reflects an idealised rep-resentation of capitalist society back onto itself, which contributes to the forma-tion of its own narcissistic self-image as simultaneously profit-oriented anddedicated to the greater good.44 This is evident in a promotional brochure forRuhiira on the MVP website, which presents a selection of success stories in the

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style of a local parish magazine. The brochure represents Ruhiira as a flourish-ing community of budding entrepreneurs. It is filled with stories of ‘thrivingmicro-businesses’, ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ and ‘self-driven empowerment’, com-bined with ‘a change in the community’ and ‘a sense of cooperation and teamspirit’. A member of a newly established banana marketing cooperative isquoted as saying, ‘Before MVP, there was no business spirit...But now, people inall groups are motivated to work harder and as a result have built permanenthouses, bought more land, set up new businesses’.45

In contrast to this narrative of the collective transformation of subsistencefarmers into commercial businesspeople, development is actually occurring inRuhiira through the intensification of antagonistic class relations. This wasexplained to me in matter-of-fact terms by a prominent local landowner, whowas also a businessman and an influential local politician, and who was workingclosely with the MVP:

Now, there are some people who will benefit [from the MVP] according to theirstatus. I’m saying this because you will find that someone will receive fertilizer,but he has nowhere to put it. And then you’ll find someone else who has a lot ofspace and a lot of land benefitting more than the poor…But those who do nothave any land are beyond help. How can you help them? What can you do forthose who have nothing at all? But they still benefit…from working for other peo-ple and getting paid…A poor person who lives around rich people…If he is paid3000 [Ugandan shillings – US$1.20 – a day], that is something…But some peoplecannot even look after themselves.46

In practice the MVP is therefore engaged in the process of primitive accumulationthat Marx identified as the historical origin of capitalism, in which impoverishedpeasants are forced into wage labour for an emergent class of capitalist farm-ers.47 The distance between the MVP’s narrative and the reality on the groundsuggests that it cannot be understood in terms of the totalising biopolitical pro-duction of society depicted in its planning documents. Instead, it should beinterpreted as the staging of a social fantasy, in which community spirit andentrepreneurial zeal coexist in a commercial society devoid of class antagonism.This is Adam Smith’s fantasy of the origins of capitalism, which Marx describedas ‘the paradise lost of the bourgeoisie, where people did not confront oneanother as capitalists, wage-labourers, land owners, tenant farmers, usurers, andso on, but simply as persons who produced commodities and exchangedthem’.48 According to Smith, capitalism emerged not through the coercive sepa-ration of the peasantry from the land, but through the frugal activities of individ-ual farmers, who accumulated capital, reinvested in increased production anddiversified into other sectors, leading to the emergence of a harmonious com-mercial society of small-scale entrepreneurs.49 As Žižek has pointed out, thisnarrative recalls the Lacanian fantasy of origins, as ‘the voyage into the past, inwhich the capitalist is present as a gaze at its own conception’.50 This fantasyprovides an image of wholeness and unity that fills out the antagonistic ruptureat the heart of capitalist social relations. The ideological utility of such fantasiesis evident in the case of the Promise Collection, which was launched in April2012. Two months earlier, ABC News had confronted Tommy Hilfiger at NewYork Fashion Week over a fire in a garment factory in Bangladesh that produced

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his company’s products. Twenty-nine workers had died after finding the exitslocked by the factory owners.51 The Promise Collection replaced this stark classviolence with the fantasy of harmonious capitalist development staged in Ruhiira.

The successful staging of this fantasy remains dependent on the gaze of anOther. Commenting on the West’s fascination with the democratic revolutions inEastern Europe that marked the end of communism, Žižek argues that EasternEurope functioned at that moment as the ego-ideal of the West – the imaginedpoint from which the West could see itself as its ideal-ego: ‘The real object offascination for the West is thus the gaze, namely the supposedly naïve gaze bymeans of which Eastern Europe stares back at the West, fascinated by itsdemocracy’.52 In the same way the philanthrocapitalist can only enjoy his ideal-ego to the extent that this identity is reflected in the imagined eagerness of theAfrican Other to emulate his entrepreneurial and community-spirited activities.This gaze stares out of the promotional brochure for Ruhiira discussed above,which is filled with images of aspiring local entrepreneurs smiling enthusiasti-cally at the camera. In his discussion of the end of communism, Žižek claimsthat from the imagined perspective of the East, the West was ‘able to perceivein Western society its own agalma, the treasure that causes democratic enthusi-asm and that the West has long lost the taste of’.53 The admiring gaze of theMillennium Villager performs an analogous ideological function: in the midst ofan unprecedented crisis of Western capitalism, it allows the philanthrocapitalist– and the purchasers of Table for Two meals and Promise Collection clothing –to enjoy their imagined identity as an object of desire, even if they have ‘longlost the taste of’ that desire themselves.

Philanthrocapitalism is the opium of the peopleMillennium Promise narrates Ruhiira as a rags-to-riches fairytale, in which pov-erty and disease are being rapidly overcome. In the words of Jeffrey Sachs onthe Promise Collection website: ‘When we started there was almost nothing. Somuch death. So much disease. So much suffering. And yet with this great sci-ence…we’re seeing a community come back to life.’54 This narrative is inaccu-rate, both in its depiction of Ruhiira’s past abjection, and in its representation ofthe achievements of the MVP. All the householders I spoke to had benefited insome way from the Project. But for the poorer and more marginalised families,these benefits were limited to free school meals, some basic medicines, and freeseeds and fertiliser (which they had received less frequently and in smallerquantities than those with better connections and more land). Rather than cata-lysing their transformation into ‘small-scale entrepreneurs’, as the MVP claimswould happen, these limited benefits were being incorporated into their everydaysurvival strategies, and were recognised as providing only modest and temporaryimprovements to their lives.

Georgio Agamben has conceptualised the administration of survival in suchsituations as an inverted form of biopolitics, in which humanity is not renderedproductive but reduced to ‘bare life’.55 From a Foucauldian perspective Ruhiiracould therefore be interpreted as a humanitarian iteration of ‘the camp’ – themodern site of bare life, which Agamben understands as ‘the hidden matrixagainst which normal, healthy political subjects come to be defined’.56 On

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certain occasions the MVP even frames itself in these terms. During a lecture inWashington, DC in 2006, for example, Jeffrey Sachs told his audience, ‘Thepoorest of the poor are saying “We buy into your system. You can keep yourwealth. We don’t call for a revolution. We just want a little help to stayalive.’”57

Yet, while Ruhiira may be a camp for the administration of the bare life ofthe poor, it is simultaneously a holiday camp for Sachs and his privileged asso-ciates, in which they are invited to enjoy a colonial fantasy of paternalistic dom-ination. In contrast to the insalubrious conditions of Millennium Villages suchas Bonsaaso in Ghana, which has been overrun by wildcat gold miners,58

Ruhiira offers a picturesque poverty of neat mud huts and lush green valleys.Perhaps this is why, of all the Millennium Villages, Ruhiira has been thefavoured destination for the MVP to send Western donors, celebrities, politi-cians, journalists, academics and tourists. From a comparison of their blogs, arti-cles and reports, it becomes clear that everyone who visits Ruhiira gets avariation of the same guided tour – the Project Office, a water project, the ICT

centre, a health clinic, the grain warehouse, a primary school and a women’sbanana leaf jewellery cooperative.59 Despite the fact that the population ofRuhiira numbers over 50,000, everyone seems to visit the same farmer, a certainPaul Mugisha. In contrast to the impoverished farmers I visited, the MVP hasprovided Mugisha with two cows, five goats, a variety of grafted fruit trees anda state-of-the-art biogas cooking system.60 And despite the Project being spreadover 140 square kilometres, all these sites are within a kilometre or two of eachother, connected by a short stretch of graded road, which runs along a highridge, offering bucolic views of the surrounding countryside. If the visitor is ofsufficient status, their tour will end with a ceremony in which village womensing and dance in a display of gratitude to Millennium Promise and the MVP.61

The grandest village tours and the greatest celebrations are reserved for JeffreySachs himself, who visited Ruhiira in 2007, 2010 and 2011.62 The finale of his2010 visit is depicted in a blog-post on the MVP website:

For the people of Ruhiira, the visit…was a celebration of the fact that today, theirstory is different. Today, the community was living proof to the world that despiteall the scepticism, great stories and dreams can be made a reality as a result ofeffective synergy between well-targeted aid and community empowerment. ‘Wehaven’t done it, you have’, proclaimed Sachs, to tumultuous applause and ulula-tion from the crowd of hundreds; babies and grandmothers who had walked fromfar and wide to catch a glimpse of their hero…Pledging support to the communityuntil 2015, [Sachs] promised that when that day comes, Ruhiira will be ‘a shiningexample to the entire world’.63

The guided tour of Ruhiira provides a highly misleading impression of the suc-cess of the MVP. In the words of one health worker: ‘When we get visitors fromdonor countries – now that is when you see Ruhiira shining! But let them comeanother time…It is all about pleasing the visitors. Then [the visitors] go back,and they revert to their normal situation.’64 Viewed from this perspective, thejubilant festivities described above take on the appearance of a Brechtian farce,in which the privileged and the destitute revel in their collective dehumanisation.Jean Comaroff has conceptualised such humanitarian spectacles in terms of ‘the

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politics of salvation’.65 There is clearly a religious dimension to the MVP. Thevery name ‘Millennium Promise’ is laden with religious overtones, and severalevangelical churches are partners of the organisation.66 But the staging of thisspectacle is infused with a complex and obscure jouissance, which remains tobe deciphered. For Sachs and his wealthy associates the source of enjoyment isunambiguously located in the performance of the messianic role of the saviour.As Matthew Bishop has argued, philanthrocapitalism is ‘about making adifference with your life, which is vaguely religious and gives you a buzz’.67

But the villagers also enjoy these performances, and this is more difficult toexplain. After all, why would you celebrate a development project that youknew was failing you?

I was struck by this question during an interview with a poor mother of twoin her early twenties, who lived in a single-room hut on a steep slope aboutthree kilometres from the Project Office in Ruhiira. The woman was one of thesingers who entertained Sachs and other visiting dignitaries. She told me of vari-ous ways that the MVP was failing to fulfil its promises to her. It had stoppedproviding her with free seeds and fertiliser three years previously, and she hadreturned to her prior farming methods. Cows, goats, and latrines had been givento influential local people, but not to her. She had not received any businesstraining. She had been excluded from the MVP’s fuel-efficient cook-stove schemebecause they were selling the stoves at a price she could not afford (20,000 shil-lings – $8). The MVP had also started charging for the clean water it provided(200 shillings – 8 US cents – for a jerry can). She could not afford this either,and was using a polluted water source instead.68

Based on this account, I assumed that her only reason for participating in the‘Millennium Band’ would be in the hope of receiving payment for her perfor-mance, and that her songs of thanks would have been insincere. The band musthave been cynically established by the MVP administrators as part of their care-fully orchestrated tour experience, I thought. But things were not so straightfor-ward. In interviews with this woman and two of her fellow band members, Iwas told that they had created the ‘Millennium Band’ themselves, to thank‘white guests like Sachs’ for their generosity.69 They wrote their own songs inthe local language Runyankole, with lyrics like ‘Jeffrey Sachs/You have done alot/God should bless you’.70 Sometimes they received a little money as a tip,but sometimes they did not, and this was not the objective of their perfor-mances. Despite having told me of all the ways the MVP had failed her, thewoman smiled when talking about ‘Sachsy’, and told me that ‘We sing abouthow they have brought us development, how they have given us clean water…It’s true that they have given us everything. That is what we sing about.’71

The members of the Millennium Band were not ‘docile bodies’ produced bya governmental machine and blindly performing their prescribed functions.72 Onthe contrary, as we have seen, there was no effectively functioning governmentalmachine in Ruhiira. Yet their knowledge of the MVP’s failure did not preventthem from enjoying its success. Once again, it is Lacan, rather than Foucault,who can provide an explanation for this peculiar state of affairs. In his exposi-tion of the Lacanian theory of the subject, Žižek likens human subjectivity tothe digestive system of a plant, whose intestines are ‘outside its body’ (in thesense that it is nourished by absorbing nutrients through its roots). In the same

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way, Žižek argues, our dependence on language in the construction of ourworlds of meaning implies that the roots from which we draw our ‘spiritualfood’ are located outside ourselves, ‘embodied in the decentred symbolicorder’.73 For this reason it is not necessary to ‘subjectively’ believe in an ideol-ogy for it to be operative, as long as this ideology is expressed in the perfor-mance of a ritual. In a church service, for example, the belief in God can beoperative without anyone actually believing in Him: ‘As Pascal put it, if you donot believe, kneel down, act as if you believe, and belief will come by itself’.74

The rituals performed in Ruhiira function ideologically in precisely this way.The visiting dignitaries pretend to believe for the Western consumers of theirphilanthrocapitalist initiatives. The singing and dancing villagers pretend tobelieve for the visiting dignitaries. And in their shared enjoyment of the uplift-ing music and the messianic speeches, the success of the MVP becomes operativeas an objective faith, without anyone subjectively believing in it.75 In otherwords, everyone collectively believes what they individually know to be false.

On a purely symbolic level the rituals performed in Ruhiira present an illu-sory unity, in which donors and recipients confront each other as equal partners,enjoying the shared success of a community-led development project. As Sachssaid to the villagers in the scene described above, ‘We haven’t done it, youhave’. But, beyond the symbolic register, this performance operates ideologicallynot only by celebrating a false equality, but also by mobilising an obsceneenjoyment of the relations of global inequality that it at once stages and dis-avows. In Ruhiira the staging of the relationship between the villagers and thevisiting dignitaries reproduces the sado-masochistic enjoyment of the colonialrelation. On one side, there is the ‘narcissistic self-gratification’ of the colonialadministrator.76 On the other, there is the submissive deference to ‘white guestslike Sachs’, who are presented to the villagers as abstract figures of authority. AMillennium Band member explained that she had been told that Sachs is ‘theone behind everything, the one who does everything’.77 When I asked what heknew about Tommy Hilfiger, a school teacher who had been present at one ofhis visits said ‘I don’t know. I know that he is a Big Man. I know that when heis to come, you see everyone moving up and down, doing what he’s supposedto do.’78 The fantasy space of the Millennium Village is therefore ultimatelysustained by what Žižek describes as the ‘paradoxical jouissance…that theexploited, the servant, receives for serving the Master’.79

ConclusionFrom a Foucauldian perspective, the Millennium Villages Project appears as abiopolitical strategy for the production of entrepreneurial subjects organised inself-disciplining communities, and financed and managed by MillenniumPromise as a diffuse assemblage of transnational governmentality. In this paper Ihave argued that this appearance is only sustained by the evisceration of theReal of jouissance. Philanthrocapitalism is better understood as an ideologicalformation, not in the sense of an illusion concealing a deeper reality, but as thestructuring of reality by a web of social fantasies, which both mobilise anddisavow an obscene enjoyment of global inequality. My field research in Ruhiirasuggests that the principle function of the MVP is not the ending of extreme

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poverty, but the sustaining of this ideological formation. When confronted bysuch fantasy constructs, however, Žižek suggests that our priority should not beto challenge them from the perspective of ‘reality’, but to ask for whom theyare being staged.80 Beyond the enjoyment of the philanthrocapitalists them-selves, I would argue that these fantasies are staged for the broader populationsof Western capitalist societies. Yet, rather than merely seeking to legitimate orconceal relations of global inequality, philanthrocapitalism encourages us toenjoy them in ways that forge a libidinal bond between the super-rich and our-selves. In this paper I have shown how cause-marketing campaigns such asTable for Two and the Promise Collection offer us the opportunity to imagineourselves in the position of the philanthrocapitalist in relation to the abjectAfrican Other. The MVP provides a narcissistic mirror, in which we are invited tojoin the philanthrocapitalist in admiring an imagined reflection of our owncapitalist society as a thriving entrepreneurial community cleansed of its classantagonism. And the stage-managed tours of Ruhiira are rituals in which we areinvited to join the philanthropists and the villagers in a celebration ofpseudo-colonial relations of domination.

In other words, philanthrocapitalism is a class strategy. Indeed, it is unambig-uous in this regard. In a celebratory book entitled Philanthrocapitalism: Howthe Rich Can Save the World and Why We Should Let Them, Matthew Bishopand his co-author interrupt their litany of success stories to issue a serious warn-ing: ‘If the rich do not take on this responsibility [for development], they riskprovoking the public into a political backlash against the economic system thatallowed them to become so wealthy.’81 This danger, they add, ‘is well under-stood by the leading beneficiaries of the winner-takes-all society, [who] worryincreasingly about the political risks of growing inequality and are concludingthat philanthropy may be one of the best ways to manage those risks’.82 Onceagain, Foucauldian analysis is ill-equipped to deal with this dimension of philan-throcapitalism. Like jouissance, class is Real – it is the rupture at the core ofcapitalist society that consumer capitalism seeks to suture with enjoyment, butwhich constantly undermines all attempts at unity or totalisation.83 To the extentthat Foucauldian analysis excludes this dimension, it can be said to be complicitin the reproduction of relations of domination. Indeed, in its fantasies of ameticulous technocratic manipulation of social reality, and its commitment towhat Ferguson describes as a ‘cold-blooded’ analysis that ‘more closely resem-bles vivisection than critique’,84 we can perhaps discern an affinity with thetechnocratic fantasies of capitalist development itself.

Yet, before accusing Foucauldian scholarship of indulging in a disavowedenjoyment of the technocratic mechanisms that it claims to deconstruct, weshould first question the source of our own enjoyment. After all, jouissance isnot something we can claim to be free of, or hope to escape from. We can onlyseek to confront the nature of our relationship to it, concealed within the fanta-sies that structure our reality.85 The most difficult thing for us as avowedly criti-cal scholars, perhaps, is to admit our own enjoyment of relations of inequality.To what extent, for example, are those of us who call ourselves ‘Marxists’ heldin thrall by the monolithic power of global capital, its vertiginous inequalitiesand the imagined jouissance of those whose wealth we dream of expropriating?It is only by confronting our own relations to enjoyment – as well as exposing

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those organised by the fantasy machine of capitalist ideology – that we can hopeto ‘“traverse the fantasy” which structures our jouissance in a way which keepsus attached to the Master [and] makes us accept…the social relationship ofdomination’.86

In The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou insists that ‘we have to getback to the immediate and reflexive life of all those who live in this world. Ifwe get back to that…we see simple things that we have known for a long time:capitalism is nothing but banditry, and it is irrational in its essence and devastat-ing in its becoming’.87 One evening during my time in Ruhiira I was in a localbar watching football on TV with peasant farmers who had each paid 500 shil-lings (20 US cents) for the right to watch the game. None of them could afforda beer. Most had nothing to drink, although a few bought a cup of tea and apiece of sweetbread. Everyone was shouting and laughing. Then a man in anexpensive shirt stumbled in blind drunk. He was an agricultural middle-man,who bought these peasants’ produce and sold it on elsewhere – precisely thekind of exploitative trader that the MVP claims to have replaced with a harmoni-ous commercial society of small-scale entrepreneurs. He began shouting at them:‘I am very rich! And you are poor! I have a lot of money and you have noth-ing!’ At first they laughed uncomfortably, not wanting to anger a man theydepended on for their survival. But he continued to mock them, and eventuallythey stopped laughing and watched the game in humiliated silence. This sceneis structurally identical to the class relation that is played out in Ruhiira whenpeasants dance and sing for the personal enjoyment of Tommy Hilfiger –although in the latter case the scale of the inequality being staged is immenselymore obscene. Stripped of all fantasies of salvation and shared enjoyment,philanthrocapitalism is a rich man enjoying his domination of the poor. Ratherthan concluding with the kind of hysterical and impotent call to action thatcritical scholars often feel compelled to utter in such circumstances, perhaps weshould ‘tarry with the negative’ as Žižek suggests.88 Perhaps we should forceourselves to remain within the humiliated silence of the peasants watchingfootball in the bar. It is not a comfortable place to be. The enjoyment thatsustains the relation between rich and poor is gone. All that remains is the Realof class antagonism. And a silence charged with the desire for equality.

AcknowledgementsThanks to Rob Fletcher, Ilan Kapoor, Ioanna Tantanasi and two anonymous referees for comments on an ear-lier draft. Versions of this paper were presented in research seminars at City University, London in October2013 and the University of Manchester in November 2013, and at the International Studies Association annualconference in Toronto in March 2014. I would like to thank those who raised questions on these occasions.Any errors are of course my own. I am grateful to the Hallsworth Research Fellowship for giving me theopportunity to undertake this work.

Notes on ContributorJaphy Wilson is Lecturer in International Political Economy at the University ofManchester. He is the author of Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr Shock andMr Aid (2014), and co-editor with Erik Swyngedouw of The Post-Political and itsDiscontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics (2014). Hiswork concerns the politics of development and the critique of ideology.

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Notes1. Slavoj Žižek For They Know Not, 2.2. Millennium Promise, “Ruhiira, Uganda.”3. Millennium Promise’s list of partners includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller

Foundation, George Soros’s Economic Development Fund, Bono’s EDUN project, Madonna’s RaisingMalawi foundation, and the corporate foundations of Ericsson, Facebook, General Electric, Glaxo-SmithKline, Goldman Sachs, KPMG, Merck, Monsanto, Motorola, MTV, Nestle, Nike, Novartis, PepsiCo,Pfizer, Proctor & Gamble, Sony, Time Warner, Tommy Hilfiger and Unilever. Other partners include theWorld Bank, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa(AGRA), the UNDP, the World Food Programme and several other UN agencies. MVP, “Our Partners”; andMVP, “Full List of Partners.”

4. See Wilson, Jeffrey Sachs, chap. 4.5. See, for example, Dean, “Rethinking neoliberalism”; Illcan and Phillips, “Developmentalities”; Lemke,

“The Birth of Bio-Politics”; and Li, The Will to Improve.6. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine.7. See Ferguson, Global Shadows, chap. 4.8. See, for example, Bosworth, “The Cultural Contradictions”; Desai and Karas, “The California Consen-

sus”; Edwards, “Gates, Google, and the Ending of Global Poverty”; Jenkins, “Who’s Afraid of Philan-throcapitalism?”; Ramdas, “Philanthrocapitalism”; and Rogers, “Why Philanthro-policymaking Matters.”This literature raises many important issues, but limits its critique to the realm of discourse, without tak-ing into account the distinctive mobilisation of enjoyment that characterises philanthrocapitalism as anideological formation.

9. Wilson, “Model Villages.”10. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 45.11. See Braunstein, “Desire and Jouissance”; Declercq, “Lacan’s Concept”; and Wilson, “The Jouissance of

Philanthrocapitalism.”12. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 63, 90.13. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 246.14. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 24; and Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 283.15. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 125.16. Pieter De Vries, “Don’t Compromise your Desire for Development!”, has also drawn on psychoanalytic

theory to demonstrate the limitations of Foucauldian critiques of development, and also focuses particularattention on the concept of the ‘anti-politics machine’. De Vries, however, is concerned with desire, asopposed to jouissance, and the argument he is making is very different from my own. Thanks to RobFletcher for bringing De Vries’s paper to my attention.

17. Millennium Villages Project, “Ruhiira, Uganda.” Sachs, End of Poverty, 368.18. Bishop, “Philanthrocapitalism.”19. Shamir, “The Age of Responsibilization,” 1.20. Ibid., 9.21. Kay, Žižek, 146.22. Žižek, For They Know Not, 239.23. As Malcolm Bull has observed, ‘There is a strange pleasure to be had from discovering that the top 0.5

per cent of the world population owns 35.6 per cent global wealth, while the bottom 68.4 per cent con-trols a mere 4.2 per cent; or that the richest thousand or so billionaires are worth more than one and ahalf billion of the world’s poorest people; or that the wealth of the world’s three richest people is equalto the combined GDP of the 48 poorest countries. It’s like being able to look up at the world’s highestmountain and then straight down to the deepest trench of the ocean…the chasm is there for all who dareto look.’ Bull, “Help Yourself,” 15.

24. Table for Two International, Annual Report, 1.25. See, for example, ibid., 3.26. Table for Two, “New Footage.”27. This description refers to the way in which the bowl of beans and posho is represented by Table for

Two, and is not a judgement on the food itself, which is widely enjoyed by people across East Africa,where it is structured by very different fantasies.

28. Table for Two, Annual Report, 27. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 63, makes a similar observationregarding ‘the well-known scene from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil in which the food on a plate is split into itssymbolic frame (a colour photo of the course above the plate) and the formless slime of jouissance thatwe actually eat’.

29. Alexander, “Humble Hilfiger”; and Marati, “Behind the Label.”30. PR Newswire, “Tommy Hilfiger.” Hilfiger now shares this title with the founder of Diesel, Renzo Rosso,

and the Senegalese musician and philanthropist, Youssou N’Dour.31. See the images on the Promise Collection website, http://uk.tommy.com/hilfiger/millennium-promise,

en_GB,pg.html, accessed October 18, 2013.32. Tommy Hilfiger, I Promise, 5.

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33. Yelena Noah, quoted in Foreman, “Tommy Hilfiger.”34. Comments by Gintar and Styleclouds, included in Feragni, “Tommy Hilfiger.”35. See the Promise Collection website.36. Ibid.37. See Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, 82–87.38. Konecky and Palm, Millennium Villages Handbook.39. Li, The Will To Improve. Indeed, Illcan and Phillips have identified the MVP as a key example of ‘devel-

opmentality’, in which ‘populations, referred to as “millennium villages”, are made responsible forchoosing the most powerful, practical technologies that will dissociate themselves from their impoverish-ment’, thus ‘linking together individual responsibility and calculation…which in turn creates the respon-sible and calculating individual’. Illcan and Phillips, “Developmentalities,” 858.

40. See Wilson, Jeffrey Sachs, chap. 5.41. Many of the accusations of corruption, nepotism, and lack of oversight were set out in a dossier com-

piled by a group of ex-administrators of the MVP in Ruhiira and sent to the headquarters of MillenniumPromise in New York in August 2013. I was provided with a copy of the dossier, which is entitled “Ru-hiira Millennium Villages Project at the Brink of Collapse.” Details of the dossier are included in Wil-son, Jeffrey Sachs.

42. See Lane, “The Stain,” 196.43. See Bailly, Lacan, 28–40.44. This same function is performed by microcredit programmes, business training schemes, social entrepre-

neurship awards and other initiatives favoured by philanthrocapitalism. See Bishop and Green, Philan-throcapitalism, 127, 132, 181; and Edwards, “Gates, Google, and the Ending of Global Poverty,” 38–39.

45. Millennium Villages Project, The Ruhiira Millennium Village Roundup.46. Household interview #29, Ruhiira, Uganda, February 16, 2013.47. Marx, Capital, 873–940.48. Marx, A Contribution, 59.49. See Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism, 171–288; and Wilson, “The Shock of the Real,” 310–311.50. Žižek, For they Know Not, 211.51. Ross et al., “Workers Die.” The fire occurred in 2010. An investigation found that the deaths were the

result of hazardous electric wiring, lack of safety equipment and the fact that the factory gates werelocked. When challenged at the event in February 2012, Hilfiger assured ABC News that Philips-VanHausen, Tommy Hilfiger’s parent company, no longer operated in Bangladesh. Shipping records, how-ever, showed that Tommy Hilfiger products continued to ship from two factories in Bangladesh in whichdeadly incidents had been recorded previously.

52. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 200. Emphasis added.53. Ibid., 200 (emphasis added). For a useful discussion of gaze, and the relation between the ideal-ego and

the ego-ideal, see Žižek, The Sublime Object, 105–107.54. Jeffrey Sachs, in the “Health” video on the Promise Collection website.55. See Agamben, Homo Sacer.56. Giorgio Agamben, quoted in Comaroff, “Beyond Bare Life,” 208.57. Sachs, “The Millennium Villages Project,” 12.58. Hirsch, “What’s Life Like?”59. See, for example, the “Postcards from Ruhiira” on the Tommy Hilfiger Corporate Foundation website,

http://108.166.76.198/2013/01/, accessed October 18, 2013.60. See the Promise Collection website under “Technology and Innovation.” I did not see or hear of any

other biogas systems in Ruhiira, yet it is displayed on the Promise Collection website as if it were stan-dard issue for every farmer in the ‘village’.

61. For a detailed account of the Ruhiira village tour, see Wilson, Jeffrey Sachs, chap. 5.62. A video documenting Sachs’s tour of Ruhiira in 2010 can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=AbTffV-cEBI, accessed October 18, 2013.63. Handa-Williams, “WFP Director Hails the ‘Revolution of Hope’.”64. Interview with MVP health worker, Ruhiira, February 12, 2013.65. Comaroff, “Beyond Bare Life,” 206.66. Churches partnering Millennium Promise include the Presbyterian Church of Basking Ridge, St. John

the Evangelist Church and St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. Millennium Villages Project, “Full List of Part-ners.”

67. Bishop and Green, Philanthrocapitalism, 40.68. Household interview #33, Ruhiira, February 17, 2013.69. Ibid.70. Interview with Millennium Band member, Ruhiira, March 10, 2013.71. Household Interview #33, Ruhiira February 17, 2013.72. Foucault, Discipline and Punish.73. Žižek, “Da Capo,” 250.74. Žižek The Plague of Fantasies, 5.

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75. ‘The externality of the symbolic machine is...not simply external: it is at the same time the place wherethe fate of our internal, most “sincere” and “intimate” beliefs is in advance staged and decided. Whenwe subject ourselves to the machine of a religious ritual, we already believe without knowing it; ourbelief is already materialized in the external ritual.’ Žižek, The Sublime Object, 43.

76. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 123.77. Interview with Millennium Band member, Ruhiira, March 10, 2013.78. Interview with school teacher in Ruhiira, March 10, 2013.79. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 59. In this respect the ideological operation of the MVP also resembles

Žižek’s account of actually-existing communist regimes, in which ‘the semblance according to whichpeople supported the party and enthusiastically constructed Socialism was not a simple subjective sem-blance (nobody really believed in it) but, rather, a kind of “objective semblance” a semblance material-ized in the actual social functioning of the regime, in the way the ruling ideology was materialized inideological rituals and apparatuses’. Ibid, 157.

80. Ibid., 21.81. Bishop and Green, Philanthrocapitalism, 11.82. Ibid., 20.83. Žižek For They Know Not, 100.84. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, xv–xvi.85. Declercq, “Lacan’s Concept,” 247.86. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 59.87. Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, 95–95.88. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative.

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