Deconstructing Human Development

From the Washington Consensus to the 2030 Agenda

Juan Telleria

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000300154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

This book provides a critical deconstruction of the human development framework promoted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) since 1990. Taking the Human Development Reports of the UNDP as its starting point for reflection, this book investigates the construction of this framework as well as its political function since the end of the Cold War. The book argues that the UNDP's discourse on development relies on essentialist philosophical, cultural, and political assumptions dating back to the 19th century and concludes that these assumptions – also present in the MDGs and SDGs – impede a full grasp of the complex and multi-layered global problems of the current world. Whilst development critiques traditionally relied on liberal, Marxist or Foucauldian theoretical frameworks and focused on epistemological or political economy issues, this book draws on the post-foundational and post-structuralist work of Ernesto Laclau and Jacques Derrida and proposes an ontological and relational reading of development discourses that both complements and further develops the insights of previous critiques. This book is key reading for advanced students and researchers of Critical Development Studies, Political Science, the UN, and Sustainable Development.

1(The absence of) development

Democracy and human development (…) are both more a journey than a destination – a promise rather than a list.

(Human Development Report 2002)

In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (2000), Ernesto Laclau explains that the intellectual history of the 20th century began with three ‘illusions of immediacy’ – analytic philosophy, phenomenology and structuralism – which assumed it was possible to immediately access the ‘things themselves’ (Laclau, 2000: 74). According to this essentialist perspective, the subject (the knower) can have non-mediated access to the object (the known), which is the starting point for the production of true, objective and veritable knowledge. Laclau traces the evolution of these three philosophical traditions and concludes that ‘at some stage, in all three, the illusion of immediacy disintegrates and gives way to one or other form of thought in which discursive mediation becomes primary and constitutive’ (Laclau, 2000: 74, emphasis added). As explained in the Introduction, Heidegger’s existential phenomenology moved the ontological focus from the object to the situated nature of the subject (the Dasein) and its existence in a context of historically meaningful practices. In parallel, the post-analytical work of the late Wittgenstein and post-structuralist inquiries by Derrida and Foucault, among others, showed that language was not a direct and transparent representation of reality – where words simply name things and their essence – but a constructed structure of signification that mediates between the subject and the object. These critical ontological and linguistic insights eroded the conviction of ‘the existence of a presence or reality that is simply given to consciousness’ and shifted the attention of Western philosophy and social sciences to ‘the constructed, mediated and ultimately contingent character of all objectivity’ (Howarth, 2015: 3).

Since this linguistic turn during the second half of the 20th century, and the consolidation of ‘discourse’ as a central category in philosophy and social sciences in the 1970s, there has been considerable debate about this category and, accordingly, about the nature and status of discourse analysis. In this book, I follow the comprehensive understanding of discourse proposed by post-structuralist thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Ernesto Laclau, who maintain that discourse is a constructed relational and contingent symbolic system that mediates between individuals and reality. Accordingly, discourse analysis involves examining the historical and political construction and functioning of such a symbolic order.

Four key concepts deserve special attention in this approach to discourse analysis: relationality, mediation, contingency and practice. In order to explain the importance of these concepts, this chapter reviews the work of Derrida and Laclau. First, I describe Ferdinand de Saussure’s understanding of language as a basis for explaining Derrida’s approach to discourse and deconstruction. Then, I introduce Laclau’s perspective on the political nature of discourse and the discursive constitution of political identities. Finally, I present the discursive structure of the global reports of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which I deconstruct in Chapters 2 to 5.

Saussure: language, mediation and relationality

To explain Derrida’s conceptualization of language and discourse, I start with a two-step introduction to Saussure’s work. First, let us recall one of those moments when a word is repeated so many times that it seems meaningless. The word – ‘book’ for example – becomes a mere sound (a signifier) with no necessary relationship to the object it refers to (the signified). Books could be called ‘blups’ or ‘merks’ (different signifiers) as long as every speaker accepts that they refer to the same signified concept. One of Saussure’s most important structuralist linguistic findings was that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary; this idea strongly influenced Derrida’s work (Howarth, 2013: 25).

Second, although a person may not know the meaning of liburu, if they are told it means ‘book’ in Basque, they will understand. Why? Because now they can link this signifier to those with known meanings – such as book, paper, words, letter, ink, cover, text, translation, and Basque. They will conclude that liburu is an object with a cover, white sheets, black ink letters, and words forming a text, which in English is translated as ‘book’. This is another of Saussure’s important insights: he described language as ‘a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others’ (Saussure, 1974: 114). This is the first of the four key concepts highlighted above: language is a relational web of meanings that is generally accepted by its speakers. For that reason, making a signifier meaningful involves properly relating it to other signifiers. The entry in a dictionary for a given word does not give us the thing it refers to: the entry for ‘book’ does not put the idea of a book directly in my mind. It instead links the word ‘book’ to other words in a way that constructs an idea of what a book is. For example, while most people may not know what the word ‘peplomer’ means, adding the description that it is the spike in the capsule of a virus that binds it to the host helps them understand; they do not need to see a peplomer to know what it means. The web of meanings of known words – spike, virus, capsule, bind, host – thus defines the meaning of the new term. To understand what peplomer means, I simply need to locate it within an existing web of meaningful terms. In this sense, a term’s signifying ability does not directly derive from the object or idea it refers to, but from its relationship with other meaningful terms.

Does this mean that we do not need to have contact with reality (with a real book or a real peplomer, in this case) to determine the meaning of a signifier? Does Saussure mean that we live in a kind of semiotic cloud with no contact with reality? No. His understanding of language is not a nihilist idealism that is detached from material reality and common sense (Howarth, 2013: 93). He instead maintains that our contact with reality is necessarily mediated by a web of meaningful terms called discourse – the second key concept. Every object, and every action we perceive and understand, is meaningful to us only if we articulate it in an existing symbolic system. The fact that discourse mediates between individuals and reality does not imply that I can properly relate to reality on the basis of any discourse. Discourses are not random inventions that are detached from reality: real objects and actions (books, peplomers, etc.) exist, and their existence directly influences the meaning of these terms and their articulation in the symbolic system. An individual would not be able to understand what a peplomer is – and how viruses bind to the host, why we get ill, how vaccines work and so on – by linking it to concepts such as cake, fiord, poetry or car engine. A discourse is only effective (properly mediates) inasmuch as it constructs a web of meanings that offers a coherent explanation of (and enables a satisfactory relationship with) reality.

Derrida: contingency and différance

So far, Saussure and Derrida’s approaches to language generally concur. However, an important aspect turned Saussure’s structuralism into Derrida’s post-structuralism. I use the example of the evolution of telephone technology to illustrate this shift. The signifier ‘phone’ could refer to either a landline device with a cable and rotary dial or a smartphone with internet access. Users could describe them in different ways, and would likely explain that the smartphone is an evolution of the rotary phone. The conclusion would likely be ‘they are the same and different at the same time!’

Derrida’s understanding of meaning plays with this notion of being the same and different at the same time (Derrida, 1981: 33; Glendinning, 2011: 62). Saussure’s focus was on language as a product, whereas Derrida understands it as a process of production (Howarth, 2013: 39–40). Derrida explains that the relational character of a discourse is not only synchronic; it is also diachronic. The meaning of ‘phone’ not only depends on the meaning of many other terms (synchronic), but also on its previous meanings and on the possibility of having different ones in the future (diachronic). For Derrida, every term in a discourse is always open to otherness (Staten, 1984: 18). Paradoxically, the possibility that a term becomes something that it is not, is part of its inherent nature (Staten, 1984: 17). This is because a web of meanings is constantly being rearticulated. Once a new term is inserted into the existing web, the web itself and its elements change. That is to say, the articulation of a new concept forces a re-articulation of the whole web of meanings. Thus, a term’s meaning is contingent on the changing meanings of the other terms in the discursive structure. This is the third key concept: meaning belongs to the contingent realm of becoming, where fixity is the exception.

An example is the word ‘atom’. The definition of this term – its articulation in a meaningful web – changed when the electron was discovered. Ancient Greeks defined atom by linking it to matter, division and limit; modern scientists relate it to energy, protons, orbit and speed. That is to say, the insertion of the term electron changed the meaning of the term atom, and, consequently, the whole web of meanings. In this sense, Derrida would say that when Democritus wrote ‘atom’ about 24 centuries ago, the term was open to mean something else; indeed, that is the contingent nature of the meaning of any term. When I read Democritus’ work now, the word atom brings an image to my mind (the signified) that is different to the one Democritus had in mind. The same applies to the example of the phone discussed above: the meaning of the signifier ‘phone’ not only refers to other signifiers synchronically – call, numbers, internet, and so on. It also refers to the same signifier in the past (which is no longer) and in the future (the possibility of having a different meaning, which is not yet). The word ‘phone’ (or any other word) is constantly open to recontextualization and rearticulation. That is the sense of radical contingency: the meaning of each term depends on the meaning of other terms, which are in turn based on their relations with other terms in the structure. That is why discourse is unavoidably marked by instability and constant rearticulation.

In this way, Derrida advanced Saussure’s insights and proposed a new way to understand language, meaning and discourses, confronted with the traditional essentialist and nominalist perspective previous to Saussure (Howarth, 2000: 31). The latter assumes that objects have an essence, that reality has an inherent and stable order, and that language can reproduce it in our mind. Within the essentialist logic, words precisely reproduce real objects: they simply relate names to things, concepts, actions, and so on. Accordingly, they assume that the structure of language parallels the structure of reality (Derrida, 1982: 183; Staten, 1984: 7), and that, in an ideal, optimal epistemological encounter with reality, we would be able to precisely reproduce it in our mind. According to the essentialist perspective, language would enable direct, objective and fully transparent contact with reality. On the contrary, Derrida explains that language is an interface that systematically mediates between individuals and reality. Accordingly, our understanding of reality systematically reproduces the structure of language – which might, or might not, be the same as the structure of reality. Since language is a complex and contingent relational structure that is systematically opened to otherness – to change, to rearticulation, to recontextualization – our understanding of reality will inevitably be contingent on and open to constant rearticulation. This does not mean that language is an arbitrary structure and that, accordingly, Derrida is arguing that any proposition is as valid as any other. His understanding of language does not summon the arrival of discursive anarchy. If that were the case, communication and coexistence would be impossible, and after reading a paragraph you would have thrown this book into the bin (if you have got this far, it means you did not). Derrida is instead making the case that any attempt to produce a single, fixed, stable and transparent representation of reality is necessarily condemned to fail.

Critically analysing the structure of language and meaning takes us from an epistemological realm characterized by a single, fixed approach to an essential reality (e.g., positivism) to one that features the coexistence of diverse (not infinite) and contingent (not arbitrary) approaches to reality. Derrida coined the term différance to explain the contingent, complex and relational nature of language and our understanding of reality. It mixes the French words for difference (différence in French) and deferred (différée in French). Différance as ‘difference’ stresses the synchronic relational character of language: the meaning of every term is constantly open to other terms because its current meaning is constituted by its relationship to them. Différance as ‘to defer’ stresses the diachronic nature of language: the meaning of every term (atom, phone) is constantly open to something that is no longer (Democritus’ atom, an old phone) and to something that is not yet (future rearticulations) (Howarth, 2013: 53).

The search for stability: binary oppositions and the transcendental signified

If, according to Derrida, our understanding of the world is necessarily contingent and unstable, how did traditional essentialist approaches to reality explain the world? How did they avoid contingency and instability? In general, Derrida’s philosophical work exposes how the Western epistemological essentialist tradition – which aimed to find a way to purely, transparently and truthfully represent reality – is inexorably affected by the contingent and unstable nature of language, and, accordingly, the logic of différance. According to Derrida, the essentialist approach sought stability in two complementary ways: by constructing binary oppositions that are assumed to represent reality, and by relying on a transcendental signified that stabilizes, sustains and governs the structure of meanings. I now explain these important concepts.

Derrida critically analyses key Western philosophical and scientific works and exposes the key importance of specific binary oppositions within them...