Though an introductory outline of a book solicits a disciplined presentation of a framework, location of the book in the larger discursive ambit, and justifications of the objectives of the book, this introductory chapter seeks to take liberty while doing most of the expected. It plays with polemic, an ancient intellectual art, in support of the framework of the book. It is essential to do so since the matter at hand is sporty, issues under discussion entail theatrics, and details of the ideas appear dramatic . The contextualization of the book solicits more than a clinical recounting of the predecessors, a neat-systematic deliberation on the moot points. A creative usage of such an art of polemic is thereby reflective of the contents and discontents, what we shall deem adequately dramatic , integral to the idea of development. As the book aims at bringing about a realization that both, verbal and visual, heard and seen, are prominent sites of experiences of developmentalist constructions, seeing and showing entails a denial of the repressed sound and sight in the larger terrain of developmentalism . Likewise, hearing and saying could not be absolved of the potential repression, if not total erasure, of fine nuances and countercurrents of the phenomenon. The complexity of the formulation gets simpler as this introductory outline advances toward the key motifs underlying the book. To keep the curiosity on, this can be said that the book unfolds a drama named development in which unseen is as crucial as seen, unheard is as significant as heard, unsaid is as pivotal as said. Critical evaluations, unmasking, and debunking are great sources of enchantment about the idea of development. So are uncritical submissions of agency and will to the politico-cultural constructs, the artifacts of development. We make a modest attempt in the following to make sense of the dramatics of development, which we invariably refer to as developmentalism .
This introductory note solicits a musical-lyrical commencement for a quick glance at the popular cultural engagement with the apprehensions of development prevalent across the hemispheres. A popular contemporary musician and singer from Malta, and a fascinating teacher of music, Julia Zahraās song titled Just an Illusion speaks volumes about imagination , aspirations and everything that belongs to a vocabulary of innocence, so to say.
She reveals the aspirations and imaginations of innocence, through this wonderful song which captures the essence of the disenchantment and disillusion of a person, who wants to be famous. This goes as āIāve been told about living like a star; Hotel Rich, champagne and caviar; But no one ever showed me the reverse; And that really hurts, babe, it really hurtsā¦ā.
The song makes sense if one puts it in a larger scheme of imagining. It was concluded long ago that it is humane to dream , or one could mischievously play with the Cartesian formulation, while reading Freudian thesis on dreaming, and propose in a drawing-room banter over steaming cup of coffee or cheesy glass of wine, I dream, therefore I am. This improvization on the Cartesian Cogito, which emphasized the verb āthinking,ā is not entirely whimsical. Many classical anthropologists persuaded us to believe: the collective dreams , therefore, it is. The dreams of collective, mythology of a community, religion in a society are indeed a well-established area of enquiry. And hence, a foray in the thick mythological corpus ensued, from (archaic) James Frazer to (banal) Rolland Barthes. We navigate from mythology of collective with pivotal archetypes to mythologies at the intersection of market, industry, and society. We traversed from a Durkheimās totem in primitive society to new Left scholarsā fetish in the post-industrial societies in human socio-cultural history. They all entailed dreaming, though with changing springboards, from collective to individual, from manufacturers to consumers, and so on. The windmill of dreaming, individually and collectively, is eternally working toward perpetual mythologizing of past as well as present. This was aptly summed up by a few folklorists and anthropologists of folklore too. They brought to our attention, the national necessity to folklorize-mythicize everything from reinvented tradition to renegotiated modernity . It was owing to the national folklorization that the postcolonial societies derived legitimacy for the nation-building endeavors. 1 And the perpetuity of folklorization engulfs even the dot-com age. Internet is as efficient an arena to accomplish foklorization as was conventional community in real time, life, and space, even to our dismay. 2 This amounts to, among various other things, a cultural politics redefining our aspirations , imaginations , politics, and development that constitute the mainstay of this book.
Therefore, returning to Julia Zahraās verse, there is an allusion to the complexity behind dreaming. The lyric emphasizes the other side, dark one, of being a star. An artist is treated as merely a product rather than as a being. Stardom, thus, is merely an illusion. The singer persuades people not to get hypnotized with the illusion of stardom and run after it blindly. This was also a message strongly delivered in a critically acclaimed film, a psychological drama, Requiem for a Dream (Aronofsky 2000), based on a novel by the same title. The protagonistās travail from ordinary to extraordinary, aspiration and endeavor, wrecks the possibility of redemption. The dark side that Julia Zahra alluded to becomes a pervasive determinant. And we can go further back in time to find more in support of the macabre affects of the dreaming, imagining, and aspiring that led humans to various intended as well as unintended destinations. A Faustian drama or a Dr. Frankestienās ambitious experiments is within this scheme. The corpus of popular literature, cinema, music, and poetry comes to aid in problematizing something that was deemed humane. The vocabulary of innocence thus stands for critical scrutiny. And in that spirit, it seems that everyone gets awed with the glaze of the individual ambition and collective dreams of development. Seldom does anybody see the darkness behind it, or if we do, we tend to stay blissfully ignorant, akin to the proverbial Nero who played on the lute while the city of Rome was ablaze.
If we look around ourselves carefully, we would come to know that our ideas and imagination of the world, knowledge, and values are shaped by an on-going and dominant discourse of development. The trope of developmentalist imagination is fraught with artifices, activities, creating a collective inclination to the notion of development. Dear to various stakeholders of this discourse, from leadership, manufacturers, consumers, and electorate, it has by now turned out to be a well-tested axiom that we live in a ādevelopmentalā society. Or, even more appropriate is a suggestion: we live in the age of developmentalism , with a mind-set inclined to a nearly sacred notion of development. The developmental society is akin to the society of spectacles, wherein, following Guy Debord (2014: 2), āThe spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.ā And Debord goes on saying what spectacles are: āNot the lived thing but representation, not technological creations, they are worldview. And in between, spectaclesā being representation rather than real, and being a worldview rather than merely techno-mediated creation, there is a gulf of meaning that the aphorismic-polemic-hermeneutics of Debord creates. In this deep pool of insights, one gets to see not only a critical polemic, but most importantly an anxious reasoning with the cultural-political adversity in the wake of progress. The anxiety, to recast in the scheme of this book, is that the illusion of development overpowers development; spectacles become relations; dreams turn pathological; aspirations become dreadful. And yet, to add to the complexity, no one dares to say anything against it, since every heart throbs with the desire to develop. Indeed, there is a vocabulary of innocence, truly innocuous, that comes to the service of the society of spectacles.
This stream of sense constitutes the spine of the book in which a situationist seeking, such as Debordās, unravel situations that have devoured āordinarinessā for the benefit of āextra-ordinary,ā 3 where āsmall is no longer beautifulā; the society of spectacles subverts the sweet-humane aspiration of an off-beat economist such as E. F. Schumacher 4 who had delivered a persuasive dream for many of the victims of large assembly line productions with a phrase, small is beautiful. In the regime of various ranks and files of spectacles, ranging from grand narratives of nations to the micro-narratives of communities and individuals, gods are primarily those who can appear towering enough and hence rulers of human conscience. In this regime, small is not beautiful, banal is.
The polemical stance that emerges in this wake, solicits more creative response rather than a cynical rejection or skeptical debunking of development. That we leave for better-equipped scholars of development studies or anthropologists of development who have performed this wonderful task of critically evaluating developmental schemes, its interface with market, state, and people inter alia. For us, the more important part is to make sense of the mediums and messages that are pivotal in the sustenance of the mind-set inclined to the idea of development. This informs us, as we unravel the issues of developmental society, in the situationist framework of...