human rights’ and ‘the myth of the individual
self ’ – must be substituted by what two of the
post-development field’s key voices have called
‘grassroots postmodernism’,
Arturo Escobar’s book Encountering Develop-
ment(1995) is the most developed account of
thinking about the development industry in grand
poststructural terms, offering a vision of sub-
altern and indigenous social movements as
vehicles for other ways of doing politics (non-
party, non-mass, autopoietic and self-organizing)
and doing ‘post-development’ (decentralized,
community-based, participatory, indigenous and
autonomous). Interestingly, this post-development
movement met up with and cross-fertilized with
a largely western academic development com-
munity energized by what was dubbed the
‘impasse in development’ debate of the 1980s
and 1990s (Booth, 1994; Schurman, 1993). In
effect this was a debate within the walls of
Marxist development theory between its ‘neo’
and ‘structural’ schools over the extent to which
Third World socialism suffered from many of the
trappings of industrial capitalism (and many
others unique to it!), and a theory captured by
economic essentialism, class reductionism and
teleological thinking.
One can argue whether this characterization of
Marxist development theory is plausible or
indeed an adequate account of Marxism itself in
its panoply of guises (Watts, 1989). But the
impasse debate spawned important new inter-
sections between postcolonial and post-Marxist
thinking, providing a fertile ground on which
development could be refigured by a careful
reading of Ranajit Guha or Gyatri Spivak or
Edward Said (see Gupta, 1998). There is little
theoretical coherence in the ‘impasse work’ –
actor network approaches, a focus on identity
politics and the cultural construction of class, a
shift to ‘responsible politics’ (Booth, 1994) – but
Corbridge is nonetheless right to emphasize that
it, like the post-development work, reinforced
the need to see ‘the ways in which the West
represents its non-western others’ and forces us
to ask ‘What is development? Who says that is
what it is? Who aims to direct it and for whom?’
(1993: 95).
Diversity became the new watchword (Booth,
1994: Chapter 1; see also Gibson-Graham and
Ruccio, 2001), but it carried its own burdens (who
wants a few more neofascist development move-
ments in the name of letting a thousand flowers
bloom?). At the same time the postcolonialists’
proper emphasis on writing history differently –
signaling, as Stuart Hall says, the ‘proliferation
of histories and temporalities, the intrusion of
difference and specificity into generalizingEurocentric post-Enlightenment grand narratives’
(1996: 248) – in turn often mistook the word for
the world, and populist incantation for ‘new
politics’, and opted for a heavy dose of wishful
thinking (‘in the heartlands of the West,’ said
David Slater, ‘modernity is in question [a]nd the
fixed horizons for development and progress [are
melting away]’ (1993: 106)!
Is this new deconstruction and reimagining of
development a distinctively original vision?
What sort of vantage point does it provide for a
post-development imaginary? To employ Arturo
Escobar’s own language in representing 1950s
development economics, what sort of ‘world as a
picture’ is contained within the scopic regime of
alternatives to development? On the one hand
there is a certain sense of 1960s déjà vu
(Lehmann, 1997). A number of accounts of globali-
zed political economy in this work – in spite of
its aversion to metanarratives and totalizing
history – rest clumsily on a blunt, undifferenti-
ated account of world capitalism, in which insti-
tutions like the World Bank have untrammeled
hegemonic power, and the Third World appears
as a monolithic, caricatured and often essential-
ized realm of at worst normalized subjects and at
best hybridized, subaltern emancipatory poten-
tial. Has Ernest Gellner’s (1979) Big Ditch
simply been replaced by the Big Panopticon (see
Watts and McCarthy, 1995; Watts, 2000)? There
is in any case an unfortunate hyperbole in some
of this work. Rist for example argues that:
Development (as a program for collective happiness) no
longer exists except as a virtual reality, as synthetic
image in the full-length film of globalization. It is like a
dead star whose light can still be seen, even though it
went out for ever long ago. (1997: 230)As an account of the presence of development
practices in some contemporary global world,
this strikes me as implausible, unhelpful and
rather ignorant.
To say there is much hazy utopianism and
populist sentimentalizing here is something of an
understatement but, as David Lehmann (1997)
has noted, the critics reserve their most virulent
prose for the development establishment – the
development business – itself. Much of this work
rightly takes on the professions of development,
proposing ethnographies of those development
institutions which in the name of building free-
doms (from hunger, from oppression, from arbi-
trary rule) create forms of classification,
exclusion, individuation, normalization and dis-
cipline: in short, the conversion of ‘a dream into
a nightmare’.^4 Globalization – the dialectic of
indigenization and cosmopolitanism – now pro-
jects Foucault’s idea of the birth of the clinic440 BEYOND THE WEST3029-ch23.qxd 03-10-02 4:55 PM Page 440