Confronting Desire

Psychoanalysis and International Development

Ilan Kapoor

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501751745
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

By applying psychoanalytic perspectives to key themes, concepts, and practices underlying the development enterprise, Confronting Desire offers a new way of analyzing the problems, challenges, and potentialities of international development. Ilan Kapoor makes a compelling case for examining development's unconscious desires and in the process inaugurates a new field of study: psychoanalytic development studies.

Drawing from the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, as well as from psychoanalytic postcolonial and feminist scholarship, Kapoor analyzes how development's unconscious desires "speak out, " most often in excessive and unpredictable ways that contradict the outwardly rational declarations of its practitioners. He investigates development's many irrationalities—from obsessions about growth and poverty to the perverse seductions of racism and over-consumption. By deploying key psychoanalytic concepts—enjoyment, fantasy, antagonism, fetishism, envy, drive, perversion, and hysteria— Confronting Desire critically analyzes important issues in development—growth, poverty, inequality, participation, consumption, corruption, gender, "race, " LGBTQ politics, universality, and revolution.

Confronting Desire offers prescriptions for applying psychoanalysis to development theory and practice and demonstrates how psychoanalysis can provide fertile ground for radical politics and the transformation of international development.

PART ONE

Introduction and Context

CHAPTER 1

Psychoanalysis and International Development

Introduction

When the indigenous leader confronts the development economist, accusing him of promoting a project that would mean the loss of livelihoods, the economist vehemently denies it, asserting:

• first, that the project will be beneficial for the community;
• second, that the project may be damaging but only because of community resistance to it; and
• third, that the project may well be damaging for the local community, but it will be good for broader national development!

This quip is meant to be humorous, but like all jokes it has a ring of truth to it, describing quite accurately how, for example, many recent megadevelopment projects—the Three Gorges and Narmada hydroelectric dams, the Trans-Anatolian Gas Pipeline, the Guinea Simandou mining project, and so on—have been justified in the face of local resistance (see De Wet 2006; Sovacool and Cooper 2013). The humor of the joke lies in what can be called the “kettle defense,” the one evoked in Freud’s famous joke in The Interpretation of Dreams (1955, 143–144; see also Žižek 2004, 1): “the defence put forward by the man who was charged by one of his neighbours with having given him back a borrowed kettle in a damaged condition. The defendant asserted first, that he had given it back undamaged; secondly, that the kettle had a hole in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly, that he had never borrowed a kettle from his neighbour at all.” Taken individually, the denials are a plausible justification, yet strung together, they are contradictory, confirming precisely what they are trying to deny: that the defendant returned a broken kettle, or in our case that the development project will indeed be damaging to the local indigenous community. What psychoanalysis helps reveal here, even (or perhaps especially) through a joke, is the disavowed desire of development, its attempts at camouflaging and justifying its institutional power.

Yet international development—by which I mean the socioeconomic and discursive/institutional practices that structure relationships between the West and the Third World¹—has tended to ignore psychoanalysis. In Development Studies, for example, there has been relative silence on the topic.² Partly, such neglect is attributable to the belief by social science disciplines (and Western modernity more generally) in the rational and empirical, taking seriously only that which is logical, measurable, and quantifiable, while disparaging the emotional, qualitative, unpredictable, or indeed humorous.

But partly I would venture to say that development’s relative silence on psychoanalysis is itself psychoanalytically telling: it betrays a suspicion of human/social passions, which threaten to destabilize and alienate the subject, divide social identity, and thus endanger development’s projects, intentions, aspirations. Yet, such resistance is revealing precisely of development’s unconscious, of its inability or unwillingness to confront the antagonisms of its desires. The theory and practice of development, in this sense, are replete with unconscious social passions, which, as we shall see below, exactly because they remain unacknowledged can result in “irrational” behaviors. Thus, the function of psychoanalysis is to better understand the role of the unconscious, to help us identify and come to terms with our attachments and disavowed passions.

Accordingly, this chapter examines the contributions of psychoanalysis to international development, illustrating ways in which thinking and practice in this field are psychoanalytically structured. Drawing mainly on the work of Lacan and Žižek, I will emphasize three key points: (1) psychoanalysis can help uncover the unconscious of development—its gaps, dislocations, blind spots—thereby elucidating the latter’s contradictory and seemingly “irrational” practices; (2) the important psychoanalytic notion of jouissance (enjoyment) can help explain why development discourse endures, that is, why it has such sustained appeal, and why we continue to invest in it despite its many problems; and (3) psychoanalysis can serve as an important tool for ideology critique, helping to expose the socioeconomic contradictions and antagonisms that development persistently disavows (e.g., inequality, domination, sweatshop labor). But while partial to Lacan/Žižek, I will also reflect on the limits of psychoanalysis—the extent to which it is gendered and, given its Western origins, universalizable.

What Psychoanalysis Can Contribute to International Development

Freud is often considered to have discovered a new “continent”—the unconscious—that domain of repressed desires that disrupts and distorts our conscious lives yet remains inaccessible to us. His pioneering psychoanalytic insights see childhood development and family relationships as key to the formation of selfhood and the unconscious. According to him, the infant’s separation from the maternal body is traumatic (resulting in painful loss and repression, which inaugurates the unconscious), as is the child’s relationship to its father (resulting in rejection and the rise of the “Oedipus complex,” crucial to the construction of sexual and gender identity). But in making these claims, Freud tends toward biological essentialism, famously attributing gender difference, for example, to the presence or absence of the penis, or affirming an innate human sexual drive or libido.³

Lacan takes up Freud’s insights but reinterprets them linguistically. That is, he averts biological essentialism by constructing trauma around, not biological drives or anatomy, but symbolic processes.⁴ Thus, the “Phallus” is not a bodily member but a symbol of fraudulent authority; the “castration complex” traumatizes, not because “we” don’t have a penis, but because we experience a fundamental lack (the cutting off of one’s enjoyment, rooted in our emergence from nature into culture); and sexual difference is based, not on physiological characteristics, but on the gap in structures of representation (see chapter 8).

Lacan draws on structural linguistics to argue that our horizons of meaning are thoroughly linguistic, so that we can make sense of the world only through language. The fundamental issue for him is that language is nothing but a string of signifiers, with each signifier deriving meaning purely relative to other signifiers (Lacan 1977, 105). The color blue, for instance, makes sense only in relation to the series red, green, black, white, yellow, brown, and so on; thus, the “blue” of the sky inheres not in some intrinsic “blueness” but in the linguistic relationship of blue to the other colors in the series.

Two important implications follow. The first is that there are no master signifiers or ultimate reference points: since each signifier depends on others, our signifying systems are incomplete and unstable, never able to express any definitive meaning or justification and never able to fully capture the thing being described. Master signifiers (e.g., freedom, democracy, God, beauty), and for that matter meanings, are fixed only by such factors as social convention, habit, acts of authority, and/or leaps of faith.

The second implication is that, once we (as human animals) enter language, we are thoroughly denaturalized. That is, we are unable to relate to the world directly any more, since it is always mediated by and through language. Psychoanalytically speaking, this means that we are cut off (i.e., symbolically castrated) from our “instincts.” Our biological “needs,” in the sense of pure and unmediated instincts, are accessible only through language, thus becoming what Lacan calls “desires” (2017, 203).⁵ The problem is that, while an instinctual need such as thirst can be satisfied, desire never can be, because it is mediated by a signifying system that is always imprecise and lacking. There is, therefore, a gap between desire and need, as a result of which we often desire what we don’t need. So, for example, the global North doesn’t need to engage in overconsumption, but many of us who live there desire to nonetheless; or we don’t need to eat fatty or sweet foods, but we often desire them (Eisenstein and McGowan 2012, 12). The related, more general, point here is that because we are linguistic beings and the symbolic order is lacking, so are we lacking, always divided and alienated (from the world, from our own biological instincts).

Lacan articulates many of the above ideas by positing three interrelated registers, which make possible our interpsychic life: the Imaginary (the order of seductive images and meanings, which often provide the illusion of wholeness and clarity); the Symbolic (the order of language, the result of historical, intersubjective, and collective practice);⁶ and the Real (the order of traumas, antagonisms, and contradictions that undermine reality but also constitute its conditions of possibility) (see Homer 2004, 10; Lacan 2016, 11–12; Žižek and Daly 2004, 65).⁷ For Lacan, we are positioned, and create ourselves, in all three registers, with the Symbolic and Imaginary helping to make the fabrics of our reality (however incompletely), and the Real tearing them apart.

One last point before we tease out the implications of all of this for development: to say that we are linguistic beings does not mean that we create the material world. Lacan is not positing an idealist ontology here. Rather, the view is that our signifying systems frame reality, laying down the structures and parameters for our understanding of it (in this sense, the Lacanian standpoint is quite consistent with discourse theory). In fact, Joan Copjec (1994, 7–8) claims that Lacan is a materialist:

[Suggesting that] something cannot be claimed to exist unless it can first be stated, articulated in language—is no mere tautology; it is a materialist argument parallel to the rule of science which states that no object can be legitimately posited unless one can also specify the technical means of locating it. The existence of a thing materially depends on its being articulated in language, for only in this case can it be said to have an objective—that is to say, a verifiable—existence, one that can be debated by others.

In other words, materiality cannot be apprehended without immateriality (the Symbolic), and each is meaningless without the other, a claim that aligns well with modern physics (e.g., quantum mechanics, wave theory) (see Žižek 2013, 905ff.).

Žižek pushes this “dialectical materialism” further to argue that human consciousness emerges from material reality itself, or more precisely as a result of the gap (the Real) or lack in reality. No wonder that our own subjectivity mirrors this same lack; a lack, as we shall see below, that we are constantly trying to avoid and disavow even as we try to apprehend reality. Listen to Žižek on this point:

We cannot pass directly from nature to culture. Something goes terribly wrong in nature: nature produces an unnatural monstrosity and I claim that it is in order to cope with, to domesticate, this monstrosity that we symbolize. ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part One: Introduction and Context
• Part Two: Keywords/Essays
• Index