ABSTRACT
The field of development faces a curious impasse – there are critiques, especially of the postdevelopment variety, which try to block the flow of this discourse by talking about alternatives to development, denying its central concern. Conceptualisations of disciplinary power and discourse have been borrowed from Foucault to describe development as a discourse that extends bureaucratic state power by expanding its reach and through disciplining populations. The state continues to be the development actor par excellence despite the competing yet complementary claims of neoliberal globalisation and postdevelopment localisation. Therefore, developing knowledge of the operations of the everyday state remains relevant. Both Gramscian borrowings and the usage of Foucauldian conceptualisations of discourse and disciplinary/bio-power to understand development do not adequately grapple with the state; in the first, the state remains an epiphenomenon, while, in the second, it comes across as a 'residue' of the operations of disciplinary power.
