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Don't compromise your desire for development! A Lacanian/Deleuzian

rethinking of the anti-politics machine
Pieter De vries a
a
Department of Rural Development Sociology, Wageningen University, Wageningen, KN, The Netherlands
Online Publication Date: 01 February 2007
To cite this Article De vries, Pieter(2007)'Don't compromise your desire for development! A Lacanian/Deleuzian rethinking of the anti-
politics machine',Third World Quarterly,28:1,25 — 43
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Third World Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp 25 – 43, 2007
Don’t Compromise Your

Desire for Development!
A Lacanian/Deleuzian rethinking
of the anti-politics machine
Downloaded By: [Consorci de Biblioteques Universitaries de Catalunya] At: 12:17 9 October 2008
PIETER DE VRIES
ABSTRACT It is my aim in this article to engage with development and its

promises at a time when many people are distancing themselves from the appalling
reality of the development industry and the disastrous effects of its interventions.
Rather than rejecting the notion of development, I contend that ‘engaging with
development’ remains important in relating to Third World people’s dreams and
desires. In other words, people’s desires for development must be taken seriously
and its promises should not be forsaken. I elaborate on the political and ethical
implications of the rejection of this notion of development and argue that, through
the abandonment of the notion, the very ‘object’ of development is lost. In other
words, the disavowal of development signifies the betrayal of its promise. To
elaborate this position, I propose a Lacanian/Deleuzian perspective on develop-
ment as a ‘desiring machine’—which produces endless desires—so as to explore
the radical, constitutive disjunction between the ‘virtual’ world of the development
machine and the ‘actual’ workings of development interventions.
It must be a strange experience for students of development, well versed in

the latest discussions about ‘post’- or ‘alternative’ development, to be
confronted with the thoughts of Andean villagers in the Peruvian highlands.
There, when engaging people in discussions about the meanings and costs of
development, the position of Andean villagers is quite clear: what is needed is
big and small infrastructure, highways and feeder roads, irrigation systems,
dams, schools, town-halls, etc—or, in local parlance, ‘las obritas [the small
works] they [the state and NGOs] should bring to us’. In fact, when asking the
villagers how they would define development, their answer is surprisingly
straightforward: ‘an extensionist who comes to our field and tells us the kind
of fertilisers we should apply in order to increase our yields’.
We should not discard these ideas as the naive thoughts of people unaware
of the risks development interventions entail. Neither should we see them as a
Pieter de Vries is in the Department of Rural Development Sociology, Wageningen University, Hollandseweg
1, 6706 KN Wageningen, The Netherlands. Email: Pieter.deVries@wur.nl.
ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/07/010025–19 Ó 2007 Third World Quarterly

DOI: 10.1080/01436590601081765 25
PIETER DE VRIES
lack of knowledge of the possible dangers and environmental hazards of

infrastructural works and agricultural innovations. These people are quite
conscious of the momentous consequences, and dangers, of development
projects and programmes for their everyday lives. What they mean to say,
however, is that they hold politicians and the state accountable for their
unfulfilled promises: for the roads that were never built, the schools that
never arrived, the jobs that never opened up; in other words, for the material
and economic progress that was promised but only arrives in their dreams.
Obviously, development entails not only material (infra)structures but also a
moral relationship with distant authorities. As one of them put it, ‘‘we have
learnt to desire such obras, and we do hold them accountable for not
providing them’’.
In this article I look for ways to engage with development and its promises
at a time when critiquing the development industry seems to have become an
industry in itself. I go along with the critics of development concerning the
disappointing and often even disastrous effects of many development
interventions. I also coincide with the view that the solution is not to be
found in terms of ‘better knowledge’ or forms of ‘enlightened’ manage-
rialism. However, I stand back from present-day tendencies to embrace the
idea of the ‘end of development’, ‘post-development’, or ‘alternatives for
development’.
The article addresses this unfailing belief in development, given the
notorious inability of governmental and non-governmental institutions to
keep their promises. I also discuss what it means to position ourselves in
relation to this promise of development in a world characterised by ever more
inequality, poverty and exclusion. Many people who are in utter dismay
about the results of decades of development intervention have opted for no(t)
(longer) playing the fake game of the development industry. They have
decided not to let themselves be co-opted by the fantasies continuously
created. Some have chosen the path of ‘alternatives for development’.
Although I sympathise with these positions, I argue that we should relate to
Third World people’s dreams and desires and not withdraw from the promise
of development. In other words, people’s desires for development must be
taken seriously and development’s promises should not be abandoned.
However, as I will show, taking the promise of development seriously is a
radical position, which carries major ethical implications.
The aim of this article is twofold. First, an analysis is presented of the
relationship between the virtual world of dreams and expectations about
development and the crude reality of actual development—or rather of its
absence. In order to understand this paradox I argue that it is necessary to
analyse the ways in which development operates as a desiring machine
around a virtual ‘gap’. To elaborate this position, I propose a Lacanian/
Deleuzian elaboration of Ferguson’s notion of the development apparatus
as a desiring machine, thus distancing myself from Foucauldian approaches
focusing on governmentality. Second, from this theoretical perspective I
expose the political and ethical implications of the rejection of the notion of
development and argue that the abandonment of the notion signifies the
26
DON’T COMPROMISE YOUR DESIRE FOR DEVELOPMENT
betrayal of its promise. In other words, that the object of development is not
its actualisation but that of sustaining the capacity to desire a different kind
of society that is not yet defined. But before exposing this Lacanian/
Deleuzian analysis, I start with a discussion of the major theoretical
approaches to development and their view of this relationship between the
desire for development and its depressing reality.
Development intervention and theories about its failure

In the literature we find manifold explanations for the shortcomings of

development and the disjuncture between goals and expectations, and real
outcomes. Those who follow a modernisation perspective take a benevolent
position towards the project of development, arguing that, for all its
shortcomings and disappointing results, academics and practitioners should
keep united in their search for better strategies of intervention. In this view
there is simply no alternative for alleviating the fate of the poor. The very
existence of a body of international agencies working on the promotion of
new forms of expertise is viewed as a heroic (if quixotic) modernist endeavour,
or as the expression of the culture of modernity as manifested in the belief in
planning and its symbolic paraphernalia.1 In this view it is important to
acknowledge that there is no alternative to development, that development in
spite of its failures is the only game in town. Here we see a predilection for the
identification of constantly new approaches, as manifested in the popularity of
notions such as social capital, civil society development, participation, good
governance, etc. This is the position of institutions such as the World Bank,
which are ready to engage in thoroughgoing forms of self-criticism and to
reinvent themselves by embracing new approaches and methodologies so as to
salvage the idea of development.
Radical political economists, on the other hand, see donor-funded
development projects as vehicles for the penetration of capitalist relations
of production through the imposition of structures that enhance market
dependence via commoditisation processes.2 They argue that the rationales
put forward by liberal academics for development interventions—in the sense
of programmes aiming at the opening up of local economies to larger
markets—are nothing but ideological justifications for the process whereby
non-capitalist modes of production are subordinated to global economic
forces, thus making their autonomous reproduction unfeasible. Commodi-
tisation leads to the destruction of traditional livelihoods, and their
subsumption to the logic of capital for the sake of global forms of capitalist
accumulation. Planned development without thoroughgoing forms of socio-
economic transformation cannot but operate as a handmaiden to facilitate
such processes of capitalist penetration. According to this view, development
interventions are not good or bad in themselves but must be analysed in
terms of their role in wider processes of social change, the question being
what kinds of interests they stand for. Are they those of transnational
corporations, national capitalists, an emerging rural bourgeoisie, or those of
popular social classes, such as the peasantry, urban working classes, the
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PIETER DE VRIES
landless, etc? Development in this way is an arena of political negotiation

between different social classes, leading to different types of political
economy.
Since the late 1980s modernisation theory and radical political economy
have been joined by several other perspectives, which have in common a
critical stance towards development. The post-structuralist perspective of
‘post-development’ criticises development by demonstrating its dependence
on patriarchal, positivist and ethnocentric principles which derive from the
modernist project of the Enlightenment.3 Modernity, according to post-
structuralist thinkers, is predicated on the idea that objects and subjects of

knowledge are constituted through the will to power as materialised through
practices of classification and representation (mappings of territory,
classifications of nature, of sexuality, etc). Putting it in a somewhat charged
way, in this view development is seen as a constellation of power-knowledge.
This constellation is geared at controlling Third World populations through
forms of governmentality in which what is at stake is nothing less than the
disciplining of bodies through the imposition of epistemic structures that
condition the ways in which ‘the Other’ (in this case Third World people)
relate to their own bodies and to nature. Many of these authors have
developed their analysis following a Foucauldian perspective.
Finally, the reflexive modernisation perspective rejects what it labels as the
utopianism/vanguardism of past notions of progress and development.4
Reflexive modernisation is a social theory that purports to engage in wider
social debates about the future of society while breaking with notions of
development as an emancipatory collective project aimed at making an end
to poverty and injustice at a planetary level. The argument here is that, in an
era of post-scarcity, social struggles revolve around the acknowledgement of
all sorts of risks brought about by modernity. What modern citizens
therefore have in common is not a collective, transformative social project
but an awareness of shared vulnerability to low-probability, high con-
sequences types of risk. Reflexivity, then, is about the perceptions, fears and
expectations that the consequences of modernity produce in individuals. The
questions posed in theories of reflexive modernisation can be posed as: how
does reflexivity look like in societies that have never made a transition from a
first to a second modernisation, that exhibit a ‘lack’ rather than an excess of
development? How does it look in societies that experience both all the
disadvantages of development (environmental degradation, all sorts of risks,
ranging from the emergence of new types of wars to AIDS, to droughts, etc),
without enjoying their erstwhile advantages (material well-being, health
services, stable bureaucracies, the existence of a public sphere, etc)? From
having been a promise, modernity becomes a risky challenge and accordingly
a matter of risk management. This is basically a European social-democratic
perspective purporting to design a ‘third way’ between dogmatic socialism
and savage neoliberalism, which is gaining currency among policy makers
within the Third World.5 Later I explain the role that a reflexive
modernisation stance can play in the reinvention of development as a radical
programme for dealing with the irrationalities of the South.
28
Though poles apart, from my point of view, all these approaches suffer
from a serious shortcoming. They all focus on the actuality of development,
on the effects of development interventions on people’s lives. My argument,
however, is that the actuality of development is supplemented by a virtual
dimension, as manifested in the desire for, and imagination of, development.
Of course, current debates have produced diverse and interesting positions,
some taking extreme anti-development positions, others weighing the merits
and disadvantages of ‘development alternatives’ or alternatives for develop-
ment’. The literature on this debate is huge and this is not the place to review
it, but it suffices to point out that it all revolves around the question of the
extent to which development is a foreign and ethnocentric construct. Labels
such as ‘alternative’, ‘endogenous’, ‘bottom-up’, ‘grassroots’ or ‘autono-
mous’ development are but different ways of answering this question. There
is also a vast body of work on indigenous and local knowledge that sets out
to propose ‘bottom-up’ or ‘grassroots’ development alternatives. Much
recent work on ‘globalisation from below’ is reminiscent of these discussions.
However, they rarely touch upon the work of imagination involved in the
thinking on development, and if they do they centre on individual aspirations
or expectations, not on collective dreams and desires as manifestations of a
collective unconscious. As I argue later, this is not merely a theoretical
question, as it raises important ethical issues.
A case in point is the debate among post-structural critiques of
development, especially concerning the right of development thinkers to
legislate on the relevance of development to poor people’s lives. Many
authors have pointed out that it is poor people themselves who want
development and that arguing against it amounts to assuming that they are
under the spell of ‘false consciousness’. Much of the debate has thus come to
revolve around semantic questions about the diverse meanings of develop-
ment for various actors. Of course, post-structuralists may answer that the
task of the critical thinker is that of deconstructing the discourse of
development and of developing new languages for thinking about ‘alternative
modernities’.6 Such a reconstructive agenda involves redeeming subaltern
people’s notions and practices of community solidarity and hope. Although it
strongly concur with these views, the argument I develop here is that the
desires for, and imaginations of , development stand for an ‘impossible’,
utopian world. My point is that the utopian promise of development involves
a negative dialectics that goes further than imagining (a) different world(s)—
or for that matter alternative modernities—in the precise sense that it points
to the possibility of a radical break with the present. I argue in the concluding
section of the article that such utopian, ‘impossible’, desire for development
has important ethical implications, as it harbours the promise of such a
radical break.
Thus my point is that development has a virtual or fantastic side, as
manifested in particular ways of desiring that are part of the collective
unconscious. Thus the above-mentioned perspectives do not acknowledge the
fact that development generates the kinds of desires that it necessitates to
perpetuate itself, that it is a self-propelling apparatus that produces its own
29
PIETER DE VRIES
motivational drives, that the development industry is parasitic on the beliefs

and dreams of the subjects it creates. In other words, development lies at the
same plane of immanence as the subjects it produces.7
As argued, the idea of development relies on the production of desires,
which it cannot fulfil. In other words—following a Lacanian perspective—
there is a certain ‘excess’ in the concept of development that is central to its
functioning. Development thus points to a utopian element that is always
already out of place. Since it is constitutively impossible, it functions as its
own critique. The question to be answered therefore is why people in the
Third World persist in desiring development in spite of all its failures. My

answer to this question is that the desire for development fills the gap
between the promises and their meagre actual realisations, thus giving body
to a desiring machine that also operates in between the generation and
banalisation of hope.
In order to illustrate this dialectic of the generation and banalisation of
desire, we can take the examples of participation in development and the
Millennium Development Goals. The former concept has a long pedigree (eg
notions of popular participation in the 1960s and 1970s), but in the 1980s it
was re-deployed by authors such as Robert Chambers, as a way of bringing
development closer to the people after disenchantment with comprehensive
forms of planning.8 Topics concerning local knowledge, empowerment and
ownership were central in this ‘rediscovery’ of participation. Development
projects were deemed to be ‘owned’ by the beneficiaries rather than imposed
from outside, their knowledge about natural resources and their own
livelihoods had to be taken advantage of for purposes of design and
implementation and, rather than strengthening bureaucracies, interventions
were to empower local people’s organisational capacities. Today, however,
participatory development is being heavily criticised for having spurred a
veritable industry of participatory methodologies aimed at achieving a visible
kind of outcome capable of convincing donors that their money will be spent
in accordance with the capacities and needs of the beneficiaries in what have
become shameful rituals of legitimation.9 Such rituals of legitimation are not
only very time-costly but also generate expectations and demands that are
branded as unrealistic or even politically subversive. In other words, the
promise of participatory development and empowerment has been banalised
into simplistic technologies for the management of change. Yet imagine what
would happen if participation by the target group were really taken seriously
and were no longer constrained by the conditions set by the development
agency. What if the poor could really have control over the donor resources
and decide on its use? We could imagine that not compromising on the desire
of participation would lead to a different kind of development project, one
that would change the very meanings of development in unexpected ways,
creating new notions and practices of empowerment, local knowledge and
ownership. However, we can also surmise that such a ‘naive’ approach would
not be acceptable to the donors and the ‘new professionals’, for it would lead
to the corruption of their notions of development as encapsulated in
capacity-building guidelines and principles of financial transparency.
30
The other example is that of the Millennium Development Goals, which

purport to resolve the basic material needs of Third World populations
through massive investment in social infrastructure and services following a
sectoral approach (ie water, health, education, etc). Such a call for a
concerted global effort to achieve a rather minimalist set of aims can be
anything but disputable. However, the very fact that such a call has to be
made after five decades of development proclamations is scandalous.
Governing the South

Conventional views in the media and in policy documents see development
intervention as oriented towards purportedly postcolonial societies whose
nation-states have followed different trajectories from Western industrialised
countries and which suffer from endemic wars and humanitarian disasters.
Societies, in short, that are the ‘other’ of modernity. Mark Duffield deftly
shows how present representations of the Third World as spaces of excess and
abjection interrelate with a new political economy in the South and that,
rather than examples of failure, they should be seen as creative responses to
neoliberal structural adjustment policies.10 His line of reasoning is as follows.
According to much contemporary thinking, Third World societies with ‘failed
states’ have fallen into a perverse cycle of poverty, war and social regression,
thus becoming marginal or borderland regions that reflect the failure of
modernity in much of the South. But, says Duffield, such representations of
failure and images of regression provide the justification and legitimacy for
new kinds of intervention, a new will to govern the unstable areas of the global
margins. Likewise, mainstream thinking about ‘failed states’ makes a neat
distinction between metropolitan areas and the borderlands, the latter
exhibiting traits such as barbarity, excess and irrationality in contrast to the
civility, restraint and rationality of the former. These representations, Duffield
emphasises, are imaginary, or ideological in the sense that they operate as
legitimisations of this new will to govern. For, ‘the borderlands are . . . ima-
gined spaces of breakdown, excess and want that exist in and through a
reforming urge to govern, that is to reorder the relationship between people
and things, including ourselves to achieve desired outcomes’.11
Mark Duffield has developed an interesting line of thinking in which he
conjoins a Foucauldian perspective on the development machine with a
realist account of ‘reflexive modernisation’ in the South. He shows explicitly
how the reinvention and radicalisation of development goes together with all
sorts of images of the Third World as a phantasmic obscene space,
representing everything that the West is not. Development thus is re-
imagined as a form of global risk management aimed at finding the solution
to the ungovernability of the South. This is a good example of how the
desires for development of Third World people are banalised through the
construction of fantastic images of the ‘other’.
Development within this reformed policy discourse has been able to
transform itself and overcome criticisms directed to its ‘lack’ of success,
leading to a radicalisation of the concept. It should be clear, however, that
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this new form of governance directed to the reconstruction of entire societies

in the South is in essence an extremely authoritarian kind of project, as
manifested in large-scale interventions to build ‘social capital’ and create civil
societies. Here we see the actualisation of the promise of development in the
guise of neocolonial programmes of civilisation and containment of
‘barbaric’ Southern populations.
Development thus becomes part of a wider apparatus of rule aimed at
managing risks and governing distant and unruly populations. The
development apparatus has become part of an illiberal system of global
governance and securitisation intended to stop the spread of irrationality of

the South. In the process it constitutes networks of complicity between
international aid agencies, warlords, NGOs, military interests, drug and
weapon mafias, etc. Yet, while the discourse of development continuously
changes and its field of governmentality has expanded, Third World peoples’
desire for development persists. Thus the gulf between the promise of
development and its actualisation has never in history been so large.
In the remainder of this article I aim to turn the tables against such
spectacular views of the Third World as objects of governmentality and focus
on the role that the dreams and expectations of development play in keeping
alive the promise of development. This, I argue, necessitates that we
conceptualise the development apparatus as a desiring machine and not only
as an apparatus of governmentality.
A Lacanian approach to the ‘lack’ of development

My argument is that we have to scrutinise the disjuncture between the desire
for development and its banalisation in practice. In order to do this Lacanian
psychoanalytical theory is very useful.12 In Lacanian terms it could be stated
that the desire for development fills in a certain lack in its actualisation; it
always points towards something else, for ‘desire is always the desire of the
‘‘Other’’’ (for our purposes the development machine).13 Desire then is the
faculty to produce dreams and utopias that are both evoked and betrayed by
actual development projects. In Lacanian terms desire is triggered by ‘small
objects of the other’ (in Lacanese, petits objets a) which operate as ‘sublime’
objects of desire (sublime, in the psychoanalytic sense that they sublimate, or
give body to the faculty of desire). Examples of these small objects are the
works or obritas Andean people refer to when talking about the promises
of development: the bridge, the road, the irrigation canal, the school
building, etc.
The argument, then, is that development as a desiring machine operates
through the generation, spurring and triggering of desires, and by
subsequently doing away with them. It is this double movement of the
generation and banalisation of hope that constitutes the dialectics of desire.14
The critical point to be made is that the mundane world of actual
development intervention cannot subsist without its virtual supplement: the
fantastic images and promises that are evoked by a diversity of small objects
that operate as causes of desire.
32
It is important to point out that this line of analysis entails a particular

conceptualisation of power and the subject. Here power functions through
the simultaneous generation and banalisation of the desire for development
rather than through Foucauldian processes of governmentality and the
disciplining of subjects15. Contrary to Foucault, this Lacanian approach does
not dispense with the notion of the subject as a contingent outcome of power-
knowledge processes. The subject in Lacanian theory is the name for a void,
or lack, that gives body to the actual social order, and which stands for
society’s contradictions. The subject therefore has no place in the positive
(actual) order of society, yet paradoxically it is essential for its functioning. It

bears witness to, and masks, the impossible and antagonistic nature of
society. The subject of development is therefore an answer to the recurrent
question ‘what is it not to be developed?’ and the hallmark of subjectivity is
precisely this ‘void’ of ‘non-being’. In other words, the fantasies of
development give rise to a subject that identifies herself in terms of that
which she is not. Accordingly, this ‘lack in the subject’ transmutes itself into a
‘subject of lack’. The subject of development is a de-centred subject, in the
precise sense that she is subject to endless desires that originate outside her (ie
those fantastic small objects promised by the development machine). And it
is this radical decentredness as a ‘subject of a lack’ that produces a desiring
subject who keeps searching for what is in development more than itself; in
other words for the ‘promise of development’.
In the next section I explore these ideas further by paying special attention
to the work of Ferguson and Escobar, as I agree with their views, but at the
same time expand my theoretical approach in a very different direction.
The development machine and its instrumental effects

James Ferguson has paradoxically played a major role in the debunking and
the recuperation of the idea of development, first through his introduction of
Foucauldian notions of discourse and discipline to the analysis of the
development apparatus, then by criticising post-development thinkers for
downplaying the significance of the promises of modernity for the subjects of
development.16
Continuing failure of rural development projects brought Ferguson to a
discursive – governmental analysis of development at the beginning of the
1990s. In his now classical study on the anti-politics machine, Ferguson sets
out to analyse the workings of what he coins the development apparatus—
the set of institutions, agencies and ideologies that structure development
thinking and practice—as a machine-like kind of entity that reproduces itself
by virtue of the unintended, unplanned, yet systematic side-effects it brings
about. He takes as a case study one large rural development project in
Lesotho funded by the World Bank and the Canadian International
Development Agency (CIDA) that sadly but quite unsurprisingly ends up in
the dustbin of failed projects in Africa. The reality of project failure,
Ferguson argues, does not lead to a critical re-evaluation of the principles
and conceptualisations that underpin the identification, planning and
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PIETER DE VRIES
implementation of rural development activities. On the contrary, in a

perverse way the same cures are prescribed for the same diagnosis and new,
more ambitious projects, with more sophisticated planning techniques are
initiated.17 As Ferguson puts it, ‘again and again development projects . . . are
launched, and again and again they fail; but no matter how many times this
happens there always seems to be someone ready to try again with yet
another project’.18
Ferguson’s argument is that development interventions hardly bring about
any social and economic transformation in the lives of people in the Third
World. In most cases production structures are not transformed, technolo-

gies are not transferred and, after the whirlwind of development propaganda
and the massive presence of experts and bureaucrats, local people in the end
just continue to live their lives as if nothing important has happened.
It is his argument that development interventions are anything but
inconsequential or innocent, since there is a clear pattern in the outcomes of
these interventions: there are unintended consequences that occur in a
systematic way, behind the backs of the actors involved. In other words,
there is a hidden intentionality in programmes and projects that cannot be
explained by, or reduced to, the intentions, desires or calculations of the
actors involved. In putting this argument forward Ferguson is not denying
that good intentions exist or that interests play no role in development
projects and programmes, but these should not be taken as the explanatory
variables in trying to understand how institutions reproduce themselves.
Another consequence which Ferguson analyses is the way in which
development interventions transform the essentially political nature of
development into a sanitised object of (expert) knowledge complemented by
an arsenal of toolkits—as in the case of ‘participatory appraisals’. The
apparatus of development thus produces a reified world of (discursive) practices
dissociated from the actual struggles and aspirations of the subjects involved,
yet exhibiting an intelligibility of its own. It is Ferguson’s crucial insight that
this coexistence between these two different realms—the actual life-ways,
dreams and aspirations of local populations and the virtual realm of
development rhetoric, routines and procedures—is something to be analysed
on its own terms, not something to be reduced to some external logic of capital,
or to the institutionalisation of some liberal desire to construct a humane world.
It is not that the development apparatus has no impacts or effects on the
‘real world’ of the subjects of development (ie on people’s life-ways). On the
contrary, as Ferguson shows, the effects are highly disappointing, if
sometimes not outright disastrous. The point, however, is that these effects
‘don’t matter’ for the functioning of the development industry. Rather than
deterring the expansion of the apparatus, failure operates as the motor for its
reproduction. At the same time failure produces instrumental effects, such as
depoliticisation and bureaucratic penetration, that are crucial to the
preservation of certain forms of governmentality and domination. It is this
coincidence of instrumental effects and the reinvention of ‘new technologies’
of intervention that makes the development apparatus so effective as an
instrument of domination.
34
Ferguson arrives at this view of the development apparatus through a deft

use of post-structuralist ideas deriving from Foucault and Deleuze. From
Foucault he takes the notion of governmentality as power that operates
through the manufacturing and deployment of technologies of control so as to
convert development into an object of power-knowledge. From Deleuze he
takes the idea of the desiring machine.19 However, he does not elaborate much
on this notion and therefore his analysis remains largely a Foucauldian one.
Escobar brilliantly applied Foucault’s ideas to development when arguing
that development has been rendered possible through the ‘invention of
poverty’.20 Escobar shows how the representation of the ‘other’ as poor,

indigent and thus in need of aid is part of the constitution of a network of power
relations that both reproduces images of otherness as pathology and of the
‘other’ as a subject to be reconstructed through the knowledge of development.
Accordingly, disciplinary power is harnessed by techniques of classification and
categorisation (eg the use of indicators and economic modelling techniques), or
bio-power, which provide the rationalities of government (or governmentality)
through which the conditions that impede development can be identified and
analysed. In other words, governmentality is about the problematisation of the
social as a realm that lends itself to the application of new technologies of
government aiming to instil the idea of development as both the problem and
solution of the predicament of postcolonial subjects.
In this view ‘problematisation’ through the production of rationalities of
government (governmentality) is the process by which both regimes of
legitimisation are constructed and the social becomes the object of the gaze
of the development apparatus. At the same time the aims and objectives of
development operate as pretexts for the workings of governmentality. In this
way the social is constructed as a space for intervention through which
development subjects are fashioned as the targets of the technologies of
development. The political programme of post-structuralists like Escobar,
therefore, is that of fracturing that gaze so as to render possible the
dissemination of knowledges outside the unified, powerful view of the
‘development’ industry.
Although I agree to a large extent with Escobar’s analysis, I differ with
respect to the role of the desire for development. This also leads us to
question whether his emphasis on the dissemination of other knowledges is a
political programme that corresponds with the desires and dreams of the
subjects of development. Let’s go back to the example of Andean villagers,
who, rather than ‘development alternatives’ or ‘alternatives for development’
would opt for the ‘real’ thing since, as they themselves put it, they have learnt
to desire development. Is Escobar’s post-structuralist programme not again a
disavowal of the promises of development, and of the utopian fantasies it
generates? Is there not a danger that such a programme ends up colluding in
the banalisation of such promises? As argued, this ‘reality’ of development, is
evoked by those small objects (what Andeans call obritas). In my view the
challenge for a leftist critique of development is that of engaging with this
constitutive lack in development, hence assuming the radical position of
taking its promise seriously.
35
PIETER DE VRIES
Of course, post-structuralist critiques of development would argue that

individuals and communities can imagine themselves in other ways and
devise strategies for combating or undermining the hegemony of develop-
ment. Such strategies are usually presented or formulated in terms of
alternative modernities. But one could argue that this is just another way of
disavowing the very fact that the subject constituted by development is a split
entity, a void concealed through the ongoing promises of modernity. In other
words, Foucauldian post-structuralist theory fails to interrogate the very lack
in development itself, its inability to engage with the dreams and fantasies it
triggers.
Before elaborating on my Lacanian approach to the ‘desiring machine’, let
us reflect on how Ferguson’s and Escobar’s arguments have been misread.
For instance, Gardner and Lewis criticise Ferguson and Escobar for the
over-determined character of the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality
and discourse which, in their view, leads to a tautological way of thinking. In
their view the development world is much more diverse than assumed by
these authors. As they put it, development ‘involves multiple and ever
changing realities and narratives’ and ‘to construct it as bounded and
internally homogeneous is theoretically contradictory’.21 But, in my view,
this is a travesty of Ferguson’s and Escobar’s arguments, as their notion of a
development apparatus does not deny the fact of multiplicity or hetero-
geneity. The issue rather is why this multiplicity of desires, expectations,
technological packages, planning instruments and methodologies leads to the
pervasiveness of failure as a social fact, and how failure is again used as an
entry point for new rounds of development thinking and practice.
Similarly Mosse criticises Foucauldian perspectives on development for ‘not
doing justice to the complexity of policy-making and its relationship to project
practice or to the creativity and skill involved in negotiating development’.22
And in criticising Ferguson’s and Escobar’s supposed teleological function-
alism and their unwillingness to take into account the predicaments of policy
makers, Mosse contends that, rather than analysing how events and practices
are generated, it is more urgent to gain an understanding of how control over
the interpretation of events is exercised, for ‘authoritative interpretations have
to be made and sustained socially’. Is this not a way of denying the fact that
development interventions reinforce old and produce new kinds of political
contradictions, that indeed this disavowal of political antagonism may be the
defining feature of development discourse?23 As Chantal Mouffe argues, an
‘anti-political vision which refuses to acknowledge the antagonistic dimension
constitutive of ‘‘the political’’ . . . reveals a complete lack of understanding of
what is at stake in democratic politics and of the dynamics of constitution of
political identities and, as we will see, it contributes to exacerbating the
antagonistic potential existing in society’.24
Towards a Lacanian approach to the development machine

Although I agree with much of Ferguson’s and Escobar’s approach, I differ
over their emphasis on governmentality and instead give more weight to the
36
ideological and imaginary effects of the ‘anti-politics machine’. Focusing

more on desire than on discourse leads to a different view of the workings of
the development apparatus, one which centres on the disjuncture between the
virtual side of development and the actuality of practice and the dialectical
role of desire in bridging this disjuncture.
Following Deleuze the development apparatus can be visualised as a social
body constituted by the assembling of heterogeneous desires. Such an
assembled and assembling body of desires is a ‘body without organs’;25 it
does not presuppose the existence of functional differentiation within an
organism, in which several organs are hierarchically positioned vis-à-vis each

other to the benefit of the whole. We can then visualise the development
apparatus as a body without organs, for Deleuze and Guattari deny any
notion of society that emphasises its centralisation, cohesion or complexity.26
It is important to point out that this description of the development
apparatus as a desiring machine is very much opposed to the ways in which we
commonly think about institutions, and to the way the development institutions
present themselves. Rather than being a rational, legal – bureaucratic and
hierarchical order, the development apparatus functions as a crazy, expansive
machine, driven by its capacity to incorporate, refigure and reinvent all sorts of
desires for development. It cannot be emphasised enough that the logic of this
machine is not that of organic functional differentiation but that it operates
through the construction of a smooth institutional space in which buzzwords,
forms of expertise and methodologies can be replicated over and over.27
Ferguson discerns two kinds of instrumental effects of development
interventions: de-politicisation and bureaucratic – institutional penetration. I
would like to add a third instrumental effect: the generation and banalisation
of the desire for development. Already in the 1970s Albert Hirschmann had
pointed out that the very desire for development was in itself the driving force
in the unfolding of the process. Putting it in Lacanian/Deleuzian terms, the
virtual world of development generates forms of excess enjoyment (passions,
dreams and imaginations) that retroactively produce the rationalisations and
justifications that the planning process itself lacks.28
This idea of the ‘lack’ resonates very well with the eternal lamentations
about the ‘impossibility of planning’, the fact that the planning process is
always limited, that the blueprint always falls short of ‘reality’, and that
something else, outside of it, has to be added in order to supplement it (eg
participatory planning, etc).29 What is crucial is that the desiring machine
functions through the constitution of this lack (of knowledge, social capital,
resources, etc), which as a void gives body to all sorts of fads, theories and
rationalisations. The desire for development, thus, persists through failure,
that is by sliding from one object to the other and thus masking its
constitutive impossibility. Accordingly, the metonymic desire for develop-
ment both masks its impossibility and reveals a utopian dream.
I argue that the promise of development is constitutive of a subject who
stands for this impossible, utopian side. It should be noted that this position
differs widely from Foucauldian notions of the subject as constituted by the
interplay between power and resistance.
37
PIETER DE VRIES
According to a Lacanian approach, the subject, rather than a subject of

governmentality—ie the subject of the truth effects of power-knowledge—is a
desiring subject. The desiring development subject is a response to the lack in
the development apparatus. It is the failure to satisfy the desire for
development and the impossibility of bringing about the promises of
development that produce a subject that always already eludes the grasp of
power. Development intervention always already misses its target and keeps
on creating new ‘lacks’, in this way inspiring new desires. Is this not a nice
example of Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’, of how a bureaucratic rationality
works through the irrationality of hope, in which an object of knowledge

(development) is constituted through a succession of failures to resolve the
problems it supposedly reflects?
As we all know, applied development theory today consists of an array of
methodologies, of which rapid rural appraisals and stakeholder analysis are
perhaps the most prominent. Taking the latter as an example, is the
proverbial stake that the actors are supposed to carry, and by which they can
mark their interests and demand their right to be heard, not a good example
of a signifier that permits the subject to recognise herself, as an actor
implicated in a complex network of relations? The point is that actors come
to define themselves as interested beings competing and negotiating with
other stakeholders for the sake of development. In other words, what they
share is their common desire for development. We obtain, then, the image of
an individual who becomes a subject by virtue of holding a stake. The subject
of development can decide to hold another stake, s/he even can trade stakes;
in fact, the subject’s subjectivity is predicated on the fact that her/his identity
is defined in terms of her/his status as a holder of a place within a closed
economy of stakes. Thus we encounter a subject who functions solely as the
placeholder of the ever-changing discourse of development by which actors
come to recognise themselves as subjects of the crazy development machine/
structure. It is this distance, or gap, between the stake as a master signifier of
development and the individual holding the stake that produces the subject of
development. As argued, the subject of development is a desiring subject, a
subject that engages with the impossibility of development and the inability
of the development industry to believe in its own promises. The subject,
rather than a being contingent side-effect of the workings of the development
apparatus (the Foucauldian definition of the subject) is a desiring subject
which the apparatus cannot gentrify, something which eludes the grasp of
power-knowledge. I argue later that this conceptualisation of the subject has
important ethical implications.
But let me note that this view accords with the classic Marxist position: the
issue is not that of developing forms of social justice in response to capital’s
drive for profits, etc, but that of surpassing or overcoming the very bourgeois
notion of social justice. The issue is not that of providing development
subjects with new languages for imagining (alternative) modernities, but that
of interrogating how different stakeholders deal with the very void behind the
stakes, ie their reduction to a simple development category by development
discourse.30 The issue, then, is not that of hiding the void by imagining new
38
subject positions (thus a proliferation of development categories and

identities), but that of exposing this void as a constitutive lack in the
development apparatus as much as possible.
Following Slavoj Žižek it can be argued that the subject of development
stands for the truth of our current historical situation. By this he means that
the truth of contemporary forms of capitalist globalisation is the increasing
exclusion and marginalisation of the majority of the world’s population. The
only way to understand the workings of capitalist globalisation is by
identifying with this excluded abject position. As he puts it, ‘the abject
position stands for the lie of the existing universality’ as represented by

universal narratives of progress and human rights. In fact, the abject position
of the subject of development embodies what is false in the existing
universality by not having any positive content.31 In contradistinction to this
spurious universality he posits the concrete universality of the abject position.
In my view this concrete universality stands for the faculty of the subject of
development to desire.
A case in point concerns the villagers in the Andes referred to above.32 In
the 1980s the area was the centre stage of an uprising provoked by the Maoist
guerrilla movement Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). The Peruvian military
reacted in an utterly repressive way, treating villagers as potential subversives
and establishing peasant vigilante groups in order to counter the threat of the
Shining Path. After the end of the conflict all sorts of NGOs and government
organisations flooded the area with programmes aimed at introducing
democratic forms of governance with the help of methodologies of
participatory planning, organisational development and capacity building.
Much emphasis was also placed on the need to develop new forms of
accountable leadership. An underlying assumption in these programmes was
the idea that poverty and lack of modern forms of social organisation had
given the ‘subversives’ the possibility to gain a foothold among traditional
indigenous people. With this line of thought new governance structures and
forms of democratic participation had to fill the void created by the conflict.
There is no doubt that the new discourse of democracy and institution
building provided a precious opportunity to the development apparatus to
expand its field of operations, thereby legitimating new kinds of intervention
that were to function in a therapeutic and precautionary mode. Arguably,
such discourses establish a natural relation between poverty, subversion and
displacement, while representing Andean people as passive victims of such
processes. And indeed many villagers and refugees did adopt such new
identities so as to be eligible for aid.
However, not all Andeans chose to follow this path. Thus in some areas,
rather than subjecting themselves to the imperatives of the development
apparatus, villagers chose to organise themselves within their indigenous
community organisations and thus to reinforce their own structures of
leadership and accountability. At the same time they pressed government
institutions to channel reconstruction money into tangible development
structures (buildings, roads, markets), rather than into intangible activities
such as workshops in participatory planning. The point not to be lost was
39
PIETER DE VRIES
that the villagers refused to compromise on their desire for development.

Rather than letting the promise of development be banalised by neoliberal
discourses of responsible citizenship and the latest fads in development
thinking, they insisted in demanding the ‘real’ thing. They refused to become
trapped in this perverse logic of victimisation and instead pressed claims on
the state to restitute land and build the infrastructure that had been promised
to them, thus persevering in their own fantasies of development.
This example raises important questions for an ethics of development, one
based on people’s aspirations and dreams that foregrounds their capacity to
desire. This is what authors such as Žižek, Zupancic and Badiou call the
Ethics of the Real, an ethics encapsulated by the Lacanian maxim ‘don’t
compromise your desire’.33 If it is true that the development apparatus
sustains its hegemony through the generation and banalisation of hope, then
not compromising your desire means refusing to accept the betrayal of
development by the anti-politics machine. This is an ethics of sustaining the
capacity to desire, of demanding that what the development apparatus
promises but is not capable of delivering. This is an ethics that demands the
realisation of the impossible through its insistence on the ‘real’ thing, an
ethics that believes in the existence of miracles. For, in the eyes of Andean
villagers, there is nothing so excessive and miraculous as development itself.
This I think is a good example of what Žižek calls an Ethics of the Real
which, in opposition to a depoliticised ethics of human rights, does not
assume that there is any guarantee for its existence in an external
‘humanitarian gaze’, or in universal norms of victimisation.34 This entails a
radical politicisation of ethics. An Ethics of the Real is an ethics of taking
risks and making radical decisions, of not compromising a fundamental
desire. For Andeans this means holding to defined images and practices of
community institutions and fair access to land and other natural resources, as
against state programmes of land privatisation and neoliberal governance.
This stance of not compromising on the desire for development runs counter
to the global consensus that establishes that development is about the
production of responsible and calculating individual citizens subject to forms
of governmentality epitomised by depoliticised notions such as ‘cost-sharing’
and financial ‘transparency’. Are such examples of intransigence, then, not
really small miracles, in the sense that they attest to the capacity of
development subjects to insist on their own utopian imaginations of
development, and to act upon such desires?
Conclusion: the Ethics of the Real, or don’t compromise your desire

This article has argued that the development apparatus is both instrumental
in the production of the desire for development and of its banalisation, and
that the disavowal of the promise of development has its price in the return of
the repressed object in the guise of all sorts of spectral apparitions: images of
famished populations in drought areas, of violent youth in the rainforests
taking Rambo as their example, of massacres and mutilated bodies, of
genocide and ethnic cleansing and of ‘irrational’ fundamentalist movements.
40
As Duffield argues, development was rediscovered in an utterly opportunistic

and cynical way as a project of deep social transformation by the
international community as a means of making an end to the irrationalities
of the South.
The Lacanian Ethics of the Real differs greatly from the ethics currently
dominant in development circles, one that invites us to have soliditarity with
the suffering of the victimised ‘other’ on the basis of a presumed universal
human capacity to empathise. This is a logic of victimisation that is
correlative with a passive subject, a subject who is satisfied with the right to
narrate her suffering. This, as Žižek argues, is the position of a spurious

universality, one which presupposes the existence of an outsider (the West,
NGOs, humanitarian organisations, etc) who is entitled to determine who the
victims are. In other words, it presumes the existence of a development
apparatus with the right to ascertain this status of victim.35 Contrary to this
spurious human rights ethics, I have argued for an ethics that takes as its
point of departure the viewpoint of those who refuse to play the game of
victimisation, an ethics that refuses to engage in the banalisation of the
promises of development.
As Žižek puts it, ‘the truly traumatic thing is that miracles—not in the
religious sense but in the sense of free acts—do happen, but it’s very difficult
to come to terms with them’.36 Perhaps we should search for such miracles in
the capacity of those who refuse to subordinate themselves to the gaze of the
development apparatus, who persist in and act upon their desire for
development. Perhaps the Zapatista uprising of 1 January 1994 in Mexico,
occurring on the same day that the North American Free Trade Association
treaty was installed, was just such an example of a miraculous, yet traumatic,
event that came to symbolise the spurious universality of the global
neoliberal project.
Notes
I would like to thank Monique Nuijten, Glenn Banks and anonymous referee for their perceptive
comments on my article.
1 Robertson argues for development as a quixotic enterprise and Hoben for a culturalist analysis.
Alexander Robertson, People and the State: An Anthropology of Development, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1984; and Allan Hoben, ‘Paradigms and politics: the cultural construction of
environmental policy in Ethiopia’, World Development, 23 (6), 1995, pp 1007 – 1021.
2 See Henry Bernstein, ‘African peasantries: a theoretical framework’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 6 (4),
1999, pp 421 – 443; Bernstein, ‘‘‘The peasantry’’ in global capitalism: who, where, and why?’, in Leo
Panitch & Colin Leys (eds), Working Classes, Global Realities: The Socialist Register, New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2001, pp 21 – 51; Rosemary Galli, Colombia: Rural Development as Social and
Economic Control, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1981; and Alain de Janvry,
Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1982.
3 Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995; and Wolfgang Sachs (ed), The Development Dictionary: A Guide
to Knowledge as Power, London: Zed Books, 1992.
4 Beck Ulrich, The Re-invention of Politics: Rethinking Politics in the Global Social Order, Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1994; and Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.
5 For a critique of the ‘third way’ approach in Brazil, see J Petras & H Veltmeyer, ‘Whither Lula’s
Brazil? Neoliberalism and ‘Third Way’ ideology’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 31 (1), 2004, pp 1 – 44.
For recent works on modernisation in the Third World, see Arthur PJ Mol, ‘Environment and
41
PIETER DE VRIES
modernity in transitional China: frontiers of ecological modernization’, Development and Change,

37 (1), 2006, pp 29 – 56; and David A Sonnenfeld & Arthur PJ Mol, ‘Environmental reform in Asia:
comparisons, challenges, next steps’, Journal of Environment and Development, 15 (2), 2006, pp 112 –
137.
6 In fact, in his latest works Escobar talks about the need to think about ‘alternatives to modernity’ in
addition to ‘alternative modernities’. However, he does not elaborate on this conceptual shift. See
Arturo Escobar ‘Beyond the Third World: imperial globality, global coloniality and anti-globalisation
social movements’, Third World Quarterly, 25 (1), 2004, pp 207 – 230.
7 For the concept of ‘plane immanence’, see Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000, pp 70 – 79.
8 Robert Chambers, ‘The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal’, World Development, 22
(7), 1994, pp 953 – 969.
9 For a critique of the tyranny of participation, see Bill Cooke & Uma Kothari (eds), Participation:
The New Tyranny?, London: Zed Books, 2001. For an attempt to transcend the tyranny, see Samuel
Hickes & Giles Mohan (eds), Participation—From Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring New
Approaches to Participation in Development, London: Zed Books, 2005.
10 Mike Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merger of Development and Security,
London: Zed Books, 2001; and Duffield, ‘Social reconstruction and the radicalization of development:
aid as a relation of global liberal governance’, Development and Change, 33 (5), 2002, pp 1049 – 1071.
11 Duffield, ‘Social reconstruction and the radicalization of development’, p 1053.
12 Lacan’s own work is notorious for its difficulty. When talking about Lacanian theory I refer especially
to the work of what has been called the Slovenian Lacanian school, comprising among others authors
such as Slavoj Žižek, Zupancic, Renate Salecl and Mladen Dollar. In contradistinction to therapeutic
psychoanalytic Lacanian approaches, this school has set out to reinstate the Marxist critical tradition
through a sustained engagement with Hegelian philosophy, deconstruction and political theory. Slavoj
Žižek in particular has become influential through his didactic use of popular culture. Presently he
defines himself as a dialectical materialist.
13 Alenka Zupancic, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, London: Verso, 2001.
14 On the concept of hope generation, see Monique Nuijten, Power, Community and the State: The
Political Anthropology of Organization in Mexico, London: Pluto Press, 2003.
15 See also Pieter de Vries, ‘Vanishing mediators: enjoyment as a political factor in Mexico’, American
Ethnologist, 29 (4), 2002, pp 901 – 927.
16 James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in
Lesotho, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994; and Ferguson, Expectations of
Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt, Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1999.
17 Denis Rondinelli, Development Projects as Policy Experiments: An Adaptive Approach to Development
Administration, London: Routledge, 1993.
18 Ibid.
19 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans Brian
Massumi, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze’s notion of the desiring
machine can be seen as a critical engagement with the works of Freud and Marx, harnessed by the use
of Nietzschean concepts. Desire, as a form of will to power, is seen as a distinctly social and political
process, and is therefore external to the consciousness of individuals. The machine is any point at
which desire leaves or enters a structure (a body, a mode of production, etc). Capitalism operates as
such a kind of desiring machine, one which works through decoding and deterritorialisation, but
nomadic movements of subaltern populations and warfare can also be seen as desiring machines. My
understanding of the desiring machine has been developed in analogy to Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas.
A good introduction to Deleuze’s work is John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2000. For a brilliant application of Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas to political theory, see
Hardt & Negri, Empire.
20 Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development.
21 Kate Gardner & David Lewis, ‘Dominant paradigms overturned or ‘‘business as usual’’? Development
discourse and the White Paper on International Development’, Critique of Anthropology, 20 (1), 2000,
pp 15 – 29.
22 David Mosse, ‘Is good policy unimplementable? Reflections on the ethnography of aid policy and
practice’, Development and Change, 35 (4), 2004, p 641.
23 In my view Ferguson’s notion of hegemony is a sophisticated one, as he explicitly detaches the notion
of discourse from that of the conscious intentions of individuals, while linking discourse to the
Foucauldian notion of governmentality, ie the social and discursive technologies by which certain
issues can be problematised and rendered visible, and certain courses of action legitimised and made
accountable.
42
24 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political, London: Routledge, 2005.

25 See Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
26 Malcolm Bull, ‘Smooth politics’, in Paul Passavant & Jodi Dean (eds), Empire’s New Clothes: Reading
Hardt and Negri, New York: Routledge, 2004.
27 For the concept of ‘smooth space’, see Hardt & Negri, Empire, pp 327 – 333.
28 See Albert Hirschmann, A Bias for Hope: Essays on Development and Latin America, New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1961. Rather than holding to the crude materialist notion that development (in
terms of material infrastructure, organisational forms, etc) would create the ideational framework that
would lead to a self-propelling process, Hirschmann argued that there was a certain mythical/utopian
element in the idea of development itself. In other words, the practice of development needs a ‘virtual’
supplement that is provided in the desires generated by the idea of development. Later, in his book The
Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1977, Hirschmann argued that economic thinking had moved from the idea
of passions as the motives for action to that of interests. But is the vocabulary of interests not a way to
construct an economic actor who is continuously busy reflecting on his/her passions and desires in
rational ways? Is this not a typical example of reflective determination in which desires are recognised
and assumed as such through discourses of rationality?
29 Paradoxically planning remains as central as ever, if only because projects have to be ‘projectised’ in
order to make them amenable to evaluation and monitoring. Thus we see that apparently technical
demands for financial accountability are not discordant with the virtual side of development as a
desiring machine.
30 Stacey Leigh Pigg, ‘Inventing social categories through place: social representations and development
in Nepal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34, 1992, pp 504 – 530.
31 Slavoj Žižek & Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žizˇek, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004.
32 For a further elaboration of this material, see Pieter de Vries & Monique Nuijten, ‘Some reflections on
the (mis)use of the concept of culture in Andean studies’, in T Salman & A Zoomers (eds), Imaging the
Andes: Shifting Margins of a Marginal World, Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2003; and Monique
Nuijten & David Lorenzo, ‘Dueños de todo y la nada: restitution of Indian territories in the central
Andes of Peru’, paper presented at the AAA, Washington, DC, November 2005. For a critical
engagement with Escobar’s work from an Andean perspective, see Anthony Bebbington, ‘Reencoun-
tering development, livelihood transitions and place transformation in the Andes’, Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, 90 (3), 2000, pp 495 – 520. For a fascinating discussion of the
rejection of NGOs’ intercultural education programmes by Andean villagers, see Maria Elena Garcia,
Making Indigenous Citizens: Identity, Development and Multicultural Activism in Peru, Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2005.
33 Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1993, pp 95 – 99; Zupancic, Ethics of the Real; and Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on
the Understanding of Evil, trans Peter Hallward, London: Verso, 2002.
34 See also Badiou, Ethics.
35 Žižek & Daly, Conversations with Žizˇek, p 160.
36 Ibid, p 167.
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Don't compromise your desire for development! A Lacanian/Deleuzian

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Don’t Compromise Your

ABSTRACT It is my aim in this article to engage with development and its

It must be a strange experience for students of development, well versed in

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/07/010025–19 Ó 2007 Third World Quarterly

lack of knowledge of the possible dangers and environmental hazards of

Development intervention and theories about its failure

In the literature we ﬁnd manifold explanations for the shortcomings of

landless, etc? Development in this way is an arena of political negotiation

structuralist thinkers, is predicated on the idea that objects and subjects of

motivational drives, that the development industry is parasitic on the beliefs

Third World persist in desiring development in spite of all its failures. My

The other example is that of the Millennium Development Goals, which

Governing the South

this new form of governance directed to the reconstruction of entire societies

governance and securitisation intended to stop the spread of irrationality of

A Lacanian approach to the ‘lack’ of development

It is important to point out that this line of analysis entails a particular

(actual) order of society, yet paradoxically it is essential for its functioning. It

The development machine and its instrumental eﬀects

implementation of rural development activities. On the contrary, in a

World. In most cases production structures are not transformed, technolo-

Ferguson arrives at this view of the development apparatus through a deft

poverty’.20 Escobar shows how the representation of the ‘other’ as poor,

Of course, post-structuralist critiques of development would argue that

Towards a Lacanian approach to the development machine

ideological and imaginary eﬀects of the ‘anti-politics machine’. Focusing

organism, in which several organs are hierarchically positioned vis-à-vis each

According to a Lacanian approach, the subject, rather than a subject of

works through the irrationality of hope, in which an object of knowledge

subject positions (thus a proliferation of development categories and

position stands for the lie of the existing universality’ as represented by

that the villagers refused to compromise on their desire for development.

Conclusion: the Ethics of the Real, or don’t compromise your desire

As Duﬃeld argues, development was rediscovered in an utterly opportunistic

narrate her suﬀering. This, as Žižek argues, is the position of a spurious

modernity in transitional China: frontiers of ecological modernization’, Development and Change,

24 Chantal Mouﬀe, On the Political, London: Routledge, 2005.

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