ABSTRACT
Our goal in this chapter is to (de)-familiarize1 the given/received conception of development; and also to tease out the intimate connection between development and dislocation and defendwhy any discussion of dislocation independent of development is constitutive of a modernist project of reconstructing ‘third world’ societies. The act of de-familiarizing involves intervention at two levels which remain connected in our analysis. In the first, rather than taking the relation between development and dis-
location as given or imputing any normative connotation to development, we evaluate the process through which development appears as a concept; how that concept remaps horizontal differences and existing hierarchies-discriminations in the social on to a complex ‘temporality-verticality’ – where existing temporalities are reduced to a ‘step ladder verticality of space’ and existing verticalities are reduced to ‘historical and evolutionist temporality’. Development thus embodies a peculiar conception of time-space (not reducible to ecological time or cosmological space) that conjoins history with economy: history is made economistic and economic is made historicist. Conceptualizing and then splitting co-existing and coeval spaces/differences into chronological time and non-linear experiences of time into top-down spatialities, the complex ‘temporality-verticality’ informs a unique ‘logic’ that in turn implies ‘normalised models of stages of development’ with ‘homogenizing and regulatory features’ (Burman 2008: 262); the effects of dislocation are also resolved and dealt with through the logic of ‘temporality-verticality’, which, not surprisingly,
encapsulates the faith in and anticipation of salvation named, in secular language, ‘progress’; needless to say, progress appears through a teleological scheme in this set up. Normativity and normativization exercises are neither externally produced nor a fanciful projection of theorists. Rather, they appear and function through the very evolution of the concept and logic of development (in and through the complex temporality-verticality); they emerge in the process of development, in turn giving further shape and twist to the latter’s movement (that is, its appearance, mutation, shift and march – forward and backward). No matter how curvy its path, no matter how many are the breaks and turns, the theological system of thought (notwithstanding its secular connotation) founded on temporality-verticality abandoned neither the ‘logic’ of development nor the faith in salvation/progress. Indeed, as we shall evaluate, the history of development is a tale of innovations within such a system of thought.2 And, it is not that the system of thought determined the practice of development; rather, the system of thought reflected a way of contemplation and practice that came to be known as development; it is constitutive of development. The concept temporality-verticality and its relevance will be unpacked further as we go along. Second, we show how development is tied to a certain image and repre-
sentation of the ‘third world’; third world, as it comes into the foreground, relegates the world of the third into the background; third world is the rationale that does not abandon difference-discrimination, but rather resituates them in a temporal-vertical plane; third world is the rationale that marks the momentous shift of discursive terrain from the relation of horizontality between the world of the third and the camp of global capital into a temporal-vertical plane; third world as pre-capitalist – as lower in step ladder verticality is what enables the precipitation-sedimentation of the normativity of development. All these features dovetail in an interconnected way into the category ‘third world’. We show how an image and representation of lack qua thirdworld facilitates the growth and expansion of the modern industrializing capitalist economy, a rationalization that in turn is taken as the deus ex machina of dislocation. This analysis then makes clear the ‘reformist-managerial’ approach’s stake in trying to keep and address dislocation as distinct from and independent of development. This is the representative politics of development – keep development separate from dislocation; don’t let one doubt that development must not be questioned for producing dislocation; don’t let one get the idea that there can be development without dislocation; don’t let one think of any possibility of development other than ‘capitalist development arrived at through dislocation’. Our discussion on the relation between development and dislocation ties
together three components. We start with a worldview in which difference exists in a relation of horizontality; hierarchies-verticalities are also there, but have not been reduced to a historicist evolutionist temporality. Specifically, the de-centred and heterogeneous everyday of economic life is represented in this book in terms of a class-focused Marxian theory. Yet, the basic structure of the economy underlying the development discourse is founded on a
dualistic frame – a frame that divides the economic into two homogeneous wholes – and out of which one is fundamental/central and the other a lacking replica of the fundamental/central. How is it possible for the conception of an economy to be transformed from its otherwise de-centred, disaggregated and heterogeneous setting into a dualistic setting given by, on one side, capitalism/ modernity and, on the other side, pre-capitalism/third world? How does such difference get shifted to a complex of temporality-verticality in the conceptualization of the economy? To explore this series of questions, in which lies the mystery and also the force of the ‘logic’ of development, we present a short review of the class-focused Marxian framework and its conception of the economy. Here, we only posit the groundwork of such an economy as that is sufficient for us to locate the moment of transmutation of an otherwise decentred economy into the normative logic of the stages of development. Critique of the received debates on dislocation and alternative theories of dislocation and resettlement right demands further elaboration of the Marxian theory that is to be taken up in Chapter 4. Next, we precisely locate the logic of development and, in that context,
posit the idea of ‘progress’ as telescoped in this logic of development. We shall demonstrate that the ideas of both logic and progress in development discourse arise from an overdetermination of two centrisms – capitalocentrism (the centrism of capital in the viewing and assessment of the economy) and orientalism (the centrism of the modern industrial West in the viewing and assessment of the rest of the world, especially the Orient and the Southern social). This capitalocentric-orientalist perspective and its associated development discourse produce a conception of the Southern economy as fundamentally fixed into the domain of ‘third world’ and of its conceivable transition towards capitalism. Finally, we need to spell out clearly the connection of development logic
with the poverty management exercise as, in the ‘reformist-managerial’ approach, dislocation is seen in its intimate relation with poverty. That is, the process of dislocation is positioned as a moment of poverty creation, and compensation/resettlement as a solution to dislocation is conceived as integral to the process of poverty alleviation. Thus, the relation of development logic with dislocation is subsumed under the overall connection of the development logic with the poverty management exercise. Having explicated the logic of development and its connection with the poverty management exercise, we defend our claim of the specified connection between the logic of development and dislocation in the ‘reformist-managerial’ discourse. That in turn will constitute our point of reference and departure for the rest of the book.
