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Report Conclusion

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Melody Bohol Plaza
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CONCLUSION

The crucial threshold and transformation that took place in the early post–
World War II period discussed in this chapter were the result not of a radical
epistemological or political breakthrough but of the reorganization of a
number of factors that allowed the Third World to display a new visibility
and to irrupt into a new realm of language.

This new space was carved out of the vast and dense surface of the Third
World, placing it in a field of power. Underdevelopment became the subject
of political technologies that sought to erase it from the face of the Earth but
that ended up, instead, multiplying it to infinity.

Development fostered a way of conceiving of social life as a technical


problem, as a matter of rational decision and management to be entrusted
to that group of people

The development professionals whose specialized knowledge allegedly


qualified them for the task. Instead of seeing change as a process rooted in
the interpretation of each society’s history and cultural tradition—as a
number of intellectuals in various parts of the Third World had attempted to
do in the 1920s and 1930s (Gandhi being the best known of them)—these
professionals sought to devise mechanisms and procedures to make
societies fit a pre-existing model that embodied the structures and functions
of modernity.

Like sorcerers’ apprentices, the development professionals awakened


once again the dream of reason that, in their hands, as in earlier instances,
produced a troubling reality.

At times, development grew to be so important for Third World countries that


it became acceptable for their rulers to subject their populations to an
infinite variety of interventions, to more encompassing forms of power and
systems of control; so important that First and Third World elites accepted
the price of massive impoverishment, of selling Third World resources to the
most convenient bidder, of degrading their physical and human ecologies, of
killing and torturing, of condemning their indigenous populations to near
extinction; so important that many in the Third World began to think of
themselves as inferior, underdeveloped, and ignorant and to doubt the value
of their own culture, deciding instead to pledge allegiance to the banners of
reason and progress; so important, finally, that the achievement of
development clouded the awareness of the impossibility of fulfilling the
promises that development seemed to be making.

After four decades of this discourse, most forms of understanding and


representing the Third World are still dictated by the same basic tenets. The
forms of power that have appeared act not so much by repression but by
normalization; not by ignorance but by controlled knowledge; not by
humanitarian concern but by the bureaucratization of social action.

As the conditions that gave rise to development became more pressing, it


could only increase its hold, refine its methods, and extend its reach even
further. That the materiality of these conditions is not conjured up by an
“objective” body of knowledge but is charted out by the rational discourses
of economists, politicians, and development experts of all types should
already be clear.

What has been achieved is a specific configuration of factors and forces in


which the new language of development finds support. As a discourse,
development is thus a very real historical formation, albeit articulated
around an artificial construct (underdevelopment) and upon a certain
materiality (the conditions baptized as underdevelopment), which must be
conceptualized in different ways if the power of the development discourse is
to be challenged or displaced.

To be sure, there is a situation of economic exploitation that must be


recognized and dealt with. Power is too cynical at the level of exploitation
and should be resisted on its own terms.

There is also a certain materiality of life conditions that is extremely


preoccupying and that requires great effort and attention. But those seeking
to understand the Third World through development have long lost sight of
this materiality by building upon it a reality that like a castle in the air has
haunted us for decades.

Understanding the history of the investment of the Third World by Western


forms of knowledge and power is a way to shift the ground somewhat so that
we can start to look at that materiality with different eyes and in different
categories.

The coherence of effects that the development discourse achieved is the


key to its success as a hegemonic form of representation: the construction of
the poor and underdeveloped as universal, pre-constituted subjects, based
on the privilege of the presenters; the exercise of power over the Third World
made possible by this discursive homogenization (which entails the erasure
of the complexity and diversity of Third World peoples, so that a squatter in
Mexico City, a Nepalese peasant, and a Tuareg nomad become equivalent to
each other as poor and underdeveloped);

and the colonization and domination of the natural and human ecologies and
economies of the Third World.

Development assumes a teleology to the extent that it proposes that the


“natives” will sooner or later be reformed; at the same time, however, it
reproduces endlessly the separation between reformers and those to be
reformed by keeping alive the premise of the Third World as different and
inferior, as having a limited humanity in relation to the accomplished
European.

Development relies on this perpetual recognition and disavowal of


difference, a feature identified by Bhabha (1990) as inherent to
discrimination. The signifiers of “poverty”, “illiteracy,” “hunger,” and so forth
have already achieved a fixity as signifies of “underdevelopment” which
seems impossible to sunder.

Perhaps no other factor has contributed to cementing the association of


“poverty” with “underdevelopment” as the discourse of economists.

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