I am really impressed with Arturo Escobar's Encountering Development . Though I am only about half-way through the book, it is already clear that this is an important book. I am not sure how many later works have looked at his argument or how well it has stood the test of time, but it has all the gravitas of a classic, even if it isn't old enough to be one. Personally, I think he is as important to the field of cultural studies as to development studies and I know that he isn't on the radar in my field. He should be. For this book does something that many recent uses of Foucault and discourse analysis have failed to do--if ever they tried: it says something important. And it does this by applying Foucault in a most rigourous way to a recent set of discourses--not to show what we already know, i.e. that they are racist and patriarchal and ethnocentric--but to show the way that they construct an object (or as he says it "a set of objects") in such a way as to make them meaningful and then shows how the institutionalization of this discourse at a particular time, in a particular way, reifies certain assumptions which lead not only to a misunderstanding of reality, but to an utter failure in the purpose for which they were given their authority (and more importantly, to much unnecessary death and hardship.) Though this is all very abstract in how I am describing it, it is this abstraction that I am getting at, namely, that by using Foucault in this way--and with little reference to "the master" himself, he is showing the value of social theory and the importance that cultural studies approaches can have in not only describing a conjuncture, but in recommending a new course.
This is refreshing because often the way that theory is used is instrumental and highly literal. Though there is a value to this in certain moments--and a similar process is certainly informing and/or underpinning Escobar's analysis--it often is so far removed from even a notion of reality that it becomes a sort of intellectual onanism that only the most fetishistic of fans would want to watch. Escobar, instead, shows that one doesn't have to show off every few pages with random citations from Foucault--or better yet, that it is much more important to his analysis to be familiar with something other than post-structuralist cultural criticism. Instead of showing his intricate knowledge of an important theorist, he models the theory by looking at the object and, it seems, begins to make a theory of his own in the process: but neither of these is the goal. As Stuart Hall recommended, his theory is something he uses on the way to something more important.
The thing more important has implications for cultural studies but since it has already been ten years since this work was published and I have no sense of CS shifting its focus in this direction, I will assume the bulk of its practitioners haven't grasped it. The real implications are, in some ways, an update of another scholar who seems to be overlooked in cultural studies, much to its detriment. Polanyi's argument in The Great Transformation is ultimately about culture, in the broadest sense and about the embeddedness of social institutions such as the market within a culture. He bases this on a critique of classical economists and their misunderstanding of the relationships of their own historical circumstances, misunderstandings that were then placed into a universalist discourse about the way that markets functioned. This discourse guided political economy into the marginal revolution which eventually led to the market outstripping the cultures and societies in which it was operating, prompting these societies to demand, in what Polanyi calls a double movement, protection from the market. This demand for protection leads societies to accept otherwise unconscionable levels of political repression--what he terms "fascism" in order to assure them some material security and cultural autonomy. It is all a very contradictory process, but that is precisely Polanyi's point: the marginalists and neo-clasicalists may be right about the economic logic they are promoting, but the key is that, for this free-market to work in the perfect way they predict, it will violently destroy the cultures it is let loose on.
Escobar has a similar argument about both the cultural logic that led to the implementation of the developmentalist regime of truth and about its failure to understand that there is more to life and, consequently, to development, than economics. And, more importantly, Escobar doesn't see this as an issue for the bleeding hearts to whine over--though it may be--but rather a more rigorous perspective. As he puts it:
"The suggestion that we take into account people's own models is not only a politically correct position. On the contrary, it constitutes a sound philosopical and political alternative. Philosophically, it follows that mandate of interpretive social science that we take subjects as agents of self understanding whose practice is shaped by their self-understanding." (100-101)
I should note that in this is one place where, I can see that Pierre Bourdieu would be useful in thinking through this "logic of practice" (as he would have been for most of Escobar's study.) This also leads to another interesting aspect of the study that opens up one of the central questions that I have about the his interpretation.
In each section, he provides some ethnographic anecdotes which illustrate the hybrid ways that local populations have appropriated these development models. These examples of transculturation are meant to show that these development models were something that locals were aware of, i.e. it wasn't just an academic discussion in the core, AND that locals had some agency in incorporating them into their own worldviews. This is, first of all, the way that Cultural Studies could be most helpful in bridging these cultural divides, in creating a true dialogue and, god forbid, making it possible for development economists to imagine it possible to learn something from local populations (realizing, of course, that this category of "development economists" is as much a generalization as "local populations" and that some of my readers may even know people from both camps that are perfectly reasonable and a delight to be around). But I digress...what I see in this analysis is a space of possibilty for creating a dialogue, but I also see a potential where the tools of cultural studies or anthropology could be cynically employed in the power of these institutions. That is by simply creating more complex understandings of indigenous communities so that these developmental models could be more easily marketed, there is no change in the power dynamic, just a bit more wining and dining before the date rape begins. (sorry. it's a bit late.)
But it also occurs to me that this is something that communication scholars have already been doing for years and it was precisely in the realm of development studies that they began to think about the "diffusion of innovations." They tried to come up with a complex understanding of how societies who were encouraged to adopt certain practices actually came to adopt them. Everett Rogers has one of the more well known set of works in this paradigm. The upshot of these studies is that, basically, you have to understand the culture that you are trying to change before you can change it. On the surface, this seems to at least incorporate some of the spirit of what Escobar is recommending and, if we were to be presented with this model, it would be difficult to point out to most people enmeshed in the discourse that this was really just a continuation of the core-periphery relationship. Because, at its heart, it doesn't challenge the fundamental assumption of development economics as Escobar has described it, namely that, though it may be more culturally nuanced, it still assumes that one culture, one model is superior, it is an "innovation" and the goal is to manipulate its diffusion to the users of the less superior model. It is a marketing ploy that is based on a discursive inequality in power/knowledge (though I suppose that few marketing ploys aren't.
Nevertheless, I feel that Escobar implicitly endorses (at least in the first three chaptes) a simple awareness of the "other" as a subject (rather than an object) within the discursive formation. (I should come back here and fill in some quotes but I am trying to push throught this before I sleep) This seems to be a fine first step, and a welcome one at this point, but it doesn't really solve the problems he is talking about. Perhaps it is late, perhaps I have too much materialism in my head, but it seems to me that this is where his analysis needs to move a few steps back from his own assumptions about discourse and ask some more other questions. One important one for me would be where these discourses are distributed. Although it is clear that they have some origination in the conference proceedings and reports that he analyzes and he provides some proof that there is a negotiated reading given by the local population, there is no sense of how this message was distributed, how technocrats in Washington and Bogota were able to begin to convince these local populations that this was even remotely in their best interest. There is a certain assumption on the part of Escobar that the words spoken by development economists were heard round the world. This is, of course, the consequence of considering a discursive formation outside of the mediums through which it is transmitted...Institutions, yes, but how was the ideology of development secured. This isn't just a mundane question--though I will admit it may be completely tangential to Escobar's study. I'll return to this, but I will point out that the dominance of US communication corporations in the third world, and their goal of promoting US ideologies and interests is well documented by people like Herbert Schiller. I would also like to remind myself that propaganda is alive and well. (again, mostly incedental--that's what blogs are for, right?)
Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News
"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers. To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications. Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production."
Published: March 13, 2005
New York Times
"It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.
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