Okay, so that last post began to go south before I could really pin down what I meant. I will try to pick that thread back up and tie it back into my more general comments about the book and how I see it tying into what Sylvester is trying to say about these different fields.
Basically, I was initially concerned with Escobar's lack of discussion about how these discourses were distributed. But I was, admittedly, thinking of them more in terms of ideologies which were pervasive not only at the level of the institutions, but also at the level of interpellating subjects into the development discourse, of calling them into place as "docile bodies" or what have you. My problem was that he was failing to consider the materiality of this distribution process and the very real way that the technological means of communication in many developing areas of the world were directly connected to propaganda goals of the American "military-industrial complex" (to use a cliche). Though much work has been done since, Herbert Schiller's analysis of Mass Communications and American Empire clearly shows that television and radio broadcasts were often illegally beamed into foreign territories with the express purpose of creating a climate in that country that was friendly to American business and foreign policy goals.
In other words, I was being a bit of a pedant and asking why this more materialist angle wasn't explored. But as I thought about it, I realized that the real problem I had wasn't just in the absence of explanation of distribution, but with the same thing that cultural studies critics have skewered Schiler for: there isn't any evidence or discussion of the ways that people understood themselves in these narratives or discourses.
Escobar is using a very rich definition of discourse and his use of the institutional ethnography to elaborate on how the idea of development was produced and poverty made visible. He focuses not only on the words but on the way those words inspired actions and, in this case, plans. He is quite brilliant in exposing the logic behind the programs that were recommended and the elegant escape hatches (123) so that failure is never the fault of the plan or planners but of the executors or the subjects (or objects, if were being critical). This seems to be standard way that developmental debacles have been denied for years--and continue to be: "not working, eh? well here's your problem the markets still aren't open enough and you have this subsidy..." But the way that he was talking about the production of the developmental subject, the way that he used the idea of the medical gaze and the development gaze, it made it seem like these were being used as in Foucault and it was difficult for me to see how the peasants of the community thousands of miles from where these words were spoken, some of whom might not completely understand and certainly wouldn't be forced to internalize the gaze in the way that he seems to indicate. This is an important caveat to the way that Foucault understood the gaze and I harp on it because I find it important for transferring his ideas to an international context.
I understand these discussions of Foucault about discourse to be situated fairly historically and, more importantly, within the context of the state. He is looking at the way that power works in a modern state apparatus which has to deal with 1) the absence of absolutist notions of legitimacy and sovereignty; 2) the ascendence of new forms of rationality that ultimately help to legitimize a new form of state power; and 3) the presence of newly discovered urban populations qua society. He looks at the people who were trying to figure out the best way to organize mass society and the new forms of power/knowledge that were being created to manage disease, crime, etc. within these contexts. The idea of the gaze or of the panopticon is not only about the act of looking or even the discourse that structures that looking: it is based on the premise that the subjects themselves internalize that gaze and, therefore, also the discourse so that they begin to think of themselves in the ways that must negotiate with that discourse.
Though he doesn't use Foucault, Fanon has a similar understanding in Black Skin, White Masks (based more on Lacan) which might be more applicable to this situation, which is that Fanon felt that the racism of the colonizer more or less destroyed the self image of the colonised even as it made him wish for the power of the colonizer. The key here that there was a direct interaction between the colonizer and colonized.
The problem with transferring Foucault's ideas of discourse and, especially, the gaze to the discussion of international development is that this direct interaction between the colonized and colonizer is lost and the bureacracy becomes quite separate from the space of development. So when Escobar says that, "there is no materiality that is not mediated by discourse, as there is no discourse that is unrelated to materialities" (130) it raises a lot of questions for me. He goes on, "from this perspective, the making of food and labor and the making of narratives about them must be seen in the same light." Perhaps what Escobar really does is cast a slew of questions on my understanding of Foucault, but it seems that the international context makes these leaps untenable. I would agree that no materiality is unmediated by discourse. However, in chapter two, and especially in the concluding sections, he focuses on the hybrid or even trenchently traditional way in which people on the ground were interpreting the practices they were being asked to partake in. In other words, there are a variety of discourses for mediating that reality and without that direct connection between colonizer and colonized, the subject and the state apparatus, it is unlikely that the gaze will be internalized in the way that it was intended. In thinking of this I am reminded of a quote that Escobar provides from documents on the PAN planning process in Columbia:
Traditional politicians, however, were weary of PAN and its technical outlook was sometimes seen as bearing the mask of an imported technocratic perspective. No regional leader praised PAN any longer than was strictly needed to insure budget approval. (147)
So the discursive understanding of the situation or its solutions didn't even extend all the way through the local development apparatus. This is largely because the cultural differences are too great--something Escobar keeps pointing out. But at the same time, he discusses the discursive regime in the same way that Foucault does, wherein there is a smooth, uniform power of the discourse which, from within the discourse, allows points of resistance. Maybe Foucault himself makes too general a statement about the dispersion of discourse in relation to the materiality he's discussing, but Escobar surely does. Thus to say that food and labor are the same as narratives about them (or should be seen as a similar production) overlooks the real consumer of this discourse is the development communty and the people they deal with directly in the countries. Certainly the discourse will get carried into the communities via the institutions in some form, but even at the level of the institution, they will be mutated by hybrid understandings. In other words, the discourse and the gaze are functioning differently here at the level of the subject population simply because they are insufficiently reified to work in the same way that they do in Foucault.
Escobar, does not, I don't think, intend to show these different ways of functioning, but in doing so, it only further solidifies his main point which is that development officials are interested in making the power they weild seem disinterested. Here, I return to his discussion of political economy. He has just finished looking at a political economic analysis by De Janvry wherein it is argued that thereis a "functional dualism" in the economy so that the cheap labor needed to work on the capitalist farms is fed by the cheap food produced at no profit by the "backward" or traditional sector. De Janvry calls this a Disarticulated accumulation. Escobar feels that analyses such as these "are too quick to impute purely economic functions to development projects" and argues that:
The requirements that political economists discovered [in the description of disarticulated accumulation] rest upon the ability of the development apparatus to create discourses that allow institutions to distribute individuals and populations in ways consistent with capitalist relations. The logic of capital, whatever it is, cannot explain fully why a given group of rural people were made the targets of the interventions we are discussing. Such a logic could equally have dictated another fate for the same group. (130-131)
This is where I see Escobar connecting with the other readings I've done so far. For this is almost the same critique I had of Frank's economism: that by attributing everything to some economic logic, you can only explain so much. On the other hand, Escobar himself, who remains rather calm for most of the book, seems to get rather excited near the end when he begins discussing "sustained development" and the "progressive capitalization of production conditions," in particular, the move from talking about nature to talking about "environment" as a resource to be exploited and asking peasant populations to begin patenting their commons. Though he goes on to more post-structural desctiptions from Donna Haraway and Deluze that attempt to make more discursive sense of this process, the fact of the matter is that he sees this as an economic logic. And, for all his discussion of discourse, there is little other explanation for why these discourses are doing what they are doing except for this logic. To look back at the quote from the Columbian Bureaucrat, it would also seem that the respect given to the discourse was, for the most part, informed by that logic as well (i.e. they played along to get the money.)
It would seem, to tie it in to Arrighi as well, that the new turn towards the commodification of nature (in ways Polanyi could only have dreamed) in the form of intellectual property rights is not only a new form of enclosing the commons, but is another part of the financial expansion which America is leading. These patents are seen as investments, even pitched as such to the indigenous population. And, like Polanyi's description of the false commodity, (quoted in Escobar 200) these are not commodities that have gone through the production process with the intent of selling them.
What I am getting at here is that I think Escobar does valuable work in using Foucault to illustrate the way knowledge functions in service of power. He also helps answer the question of how well meaning people who end up fucking people over are still able to sleep at night. And it also reminds me of the importance of understanding the way that institutional knowledges contribute to these systems of domination and accumulation--above and beyond simplistic ideologies.
As for Sylvester, I had a very hard time focusing on the post-colonial section because I used to know so much more about it and now it just makes my head hurt. Nevertheless, I came away from both her and Escobar with a clear connection to Sen. What all of them seem to be saying is that there is a great deal of value in subalterns being able to have a role--if not the role--in deciding their fate. Though Escobar and Sylvester insist that what is at stake is the ability for subalterns to represent themselves, to control the production of the discourses about them, it seems to me that the real freedom is not only being able to change the representation or interpretation of the world, but to change their actual material circumstances. This seems to be what most of the protests were against anyway; not global capital or the discursive regime of development but being forced to grow stuff they didn't want to eat so they could try to market it and sell it and buy the things they did want to eat. Whether you call that development, bigotry, neo-colonial discourse, the key is that changing the discourse alone won't necessarily create the desired change in the way that discourse is articulated into a power relationship that could have the opposite effect. This is, of course, the greatest danger in Sen's elegant attempt to re-envision development. Once "freedom" becomes agreed upon as the end of development, its role in the means is incedental: the struggle will be over who has the power to define and determine what Freedom is.
No comments:
Post a Comment