Tag Archives: Development

Toying with French Enlightenmentists

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Health and disease are powerful tropes in the construction of hierarchies in global geopolitics. Health stands in as a marker of civilization, sanitation as a sign of modernity just as disease denotes barbarism and uncleanliness is an indicator backwardness (Eamon 1998; Goudsblom 1986; Rothschild BM 2005). While the mobilization of these frames of health and disease elide the deeper social, political, and economic disparities, or the outcomes of uneven development (D. Harvey 2006; Smith 2008), historically, they have undergirded, sometimes as pretext, sometimes as defense, U.S. interventions across Latin America, the Caribbean, the island nations of the Pacific and beyond (Amador 2008; Anderson 2006; Barbour 1899; Briggs 2002; McBride 2002; McCoy and Scarano 2009; Moran 2007; Robinson 1905).

Deeply tied to these notions of modern and uncivilized are Enlightenment era theories of progress that emerged, particularly, from the writings of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727-1781) and Auguste Comte (1798-1857).[1] According to both Turgot and Comte, at root of development and progress are man’s conquest or control of nature through human faculties, power of will, and natural law. Anticipating Comte’s three stages law, Turgot suggested that scientific (cultural) progress unfolds in three phases: religious, speculative, and scientific. Progress, as he defines it, is an inevitable consequence of the power of the human mind to learn from its own history[2] – to find the trajectory of causation through an understanding of history. Unlike the cyclical progressions and declines of nature, the progression of human kind is on a continual trajectory toward perfection.

All things perish, in this narrative of the natural, and all things spring up again; and in these successive acts of generation through which plants and animals reproduce themselves, time does no more than restore continually the counterpart of what it has caused to disappear. The succession of mankind, on the other hand, affords from age to age an ever-changing spectacle. Reason, the passions, and liberty ceaselessly give rise to new events: all the ages are bound up with one another by a succession of causes and effects which link the present state of the world with all those that have preceded it (2010, 41).

This unfolding can be nurtured and, Turgot suggests, the role of economic relations acts as a form of motivation for this development (Livingstone and Withers 1999).  In his later works, this relationship is more clearly outlined and progress becomes more intimately tied to laws of social (economic) stages transforming into fourstages of human development that reflect human interaction with nature: age of hunters, shepherds, agriculture, and commerce (Groenewegen 1983; Heffernan 1994; Turgot 2010). These four stages do not (did not) unfold evenly across the globe, as evidenced (again and again) for Turgot in the “savages of America” (Turgot 2010, 66, 89, 147). And while he did not believe in the environmental or geographical determinism that was popular at that time, for him, progress would triumph through human ingenuity and anyone may be brought out of savagery and into enlightenment (Heffernan 1994). In this, Turgot argues not only for the perfectibility of human kind, but the universal perfectibility of all human kind – a continual march toward utopian scientific message of an “enlightened world with a uniform culture and civilization” (Heffernan 1994, 337).

Comte, too, imagined a utopic world of equality and freedom. For him, history follows three stages of development: theological (ruled by kings and priests, guided by religious thought and feelings), metaphysical (ruled by lawyers and churchmen, and governed by law through the emergence of critical thought), and positive (ruled by industrial administrators and guided by laws of nature discovered through science) (Lee 1983). His theory of progress is intimately tied with order – reconciling order and progress – as older forms of order were dependent upon staidness, rendering it stationary (Cowen 2003). His progressivist theory sought to find natural laws of science with which to understand variations of human progress across the globe (Comte 1875; Dean 1994).

The evidence of the stages of progression, Comte insists, is both in the history, itself – seconding spontaneous change – and in the cognitive stages of individual human beings. This is not to say that development is a predetermined path along a perfect tempo of time to a particular goal, but rather that the present is a result of the past (Vernon 1978). In fact, he accedes that human kind can encourage or delay development consciously. The key, Comte believed, is that in finding these laws of society, there could, then, be a system through which to manage progression – most uniquely imagined as the management of social welfare by the state, which inevitably concedes from political domination to self government and by technical and scientific administration (Marcuse 2004, 1:127; Ray 2010).

However, while Comte envisioned a utopian society, one in which all people would come to be progressive (though, unlike Turgot, never perfect) and equal, without racial or geographical discrimination, his laws of development were most deeply flawed in that they were based upon European, and particularly French, social, political, and economic progress. In attempting to define a universal theory of human progress, both Comte and Turgot inadvertently legitimized imperial and colonial rule through the enforced homogenizing frame that they and other enlightenmentists developed (Bonnett 2000; Marcuse and Neumann 2004; Patel and McMichael 2004).

While philosophers like Turgot and Comte struggled to define what a universalist future might look like, there was imbedded in this conception of progress, an invitation to totalitarianism (Marcuse and Neumann 2004). Mastery over nature and society meant a rulership through science (and by extension, scientists) and technological administration. If classical liberal democracy can be said to have succeeded in Europe as the dominant social and political organization of society, vestiges of Comteian development theories lingered to varying degrees across the populations governed through this new-found liberalism. This “administrative ordering of nature and society” James C Scott tells us, “undergird[s] the concept of citizenship and the provision of social welfare” (1998, 4). Modern liberal citizenship,[3] for the attendant celebration of its emergence in the 18th century, was only truly conferred in the tiniest of increments – increments laden with social, racial, economic, and political particularities that worked furiously to, on the one hand limit who may be a citizen, and on the other, craft who may yet become a citizen (or in the case of the colonized, may never be, but require close social ordering) – dependent upon social engineering.

Everywhere, from the emergence of public health within European states to the administratively articulated domination of non-European populations through colonization, was heavily informed by this new form of social engineering, employed as a necessity for the development of backwards people and for the legitimation of a new form of biopolitics through, among other things, public health and subsequently tropical medicine. At root is the formation of the appropriately participating individual – a participation which requires at the very least a healthful body with which to produce and contribute. And it is through health, that the administration of the body politic reaches down into the level of the individual bodies of the administered group – that the political subjectivity of individuals is written through the reading of the health of persons.

[1] Many authors tie Turgot and Comte together as part of a series of French enlightenment philosophers who founded a history of science and philosophy that includes Marquis de Condorcet, Voltaire, Saint-Simone, and Fourier. I have limited myself to the two as Turgot is noted as a strong influence on Adam Smith’s doctrines of liberal economics and Comte is closely tied to the founding of sociology – a term he coined – as a science of human sociality whose legacy on linear human progression continued to be felt through Durkheim, Marx, and Rostow. These two philosophers’ impact on (though greatly reconfigured into much more complex and elaborate positivist projects) on theories of development can not be under-stated.

[2] Interestingly, this pattern closely mirrors Turgot’s as his early work, On the Historical Progress of the Human Mind (1750), was written while a theological student at the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, while Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth (1766) was written during his tenure as Comptroller of Finances of France.

[3] As opposed to older and non-European Enlightenment / Renaissance forms of citizenship – for example Toltec toltecáyotl (For a discussion of AmerIndian forms of citizenship, among others, see: W. Mignolo 1995; W. D. Mignolo 2006).

Experiments, or how the US learned to Develop

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I’ve come to this project with a sense that the Occupation in haiti was really an experiment, a kind of testing ground for what would be the future of Big D Development, as we know it. Today, while reading through JAG files, i found this lovely statement that was an Exhibit (1) in the court record:

The Military Representative of the United States in Haiti in 1917 made the following statement in a Memorandum entitled “Relations Between Treaty Officials of the Haitian Government”:

“The United States is carrying on in Haiti a great experiement, the success of which is a matter of national importance to the United States and, as far as the Naval Service is concerned, of service pride. It is, of course, a further matter of doing the greatest possible work for Haiti. Nothing avoidable should be allowed to stand in teh way of complete success. The thing that will make for success in a higher degree than anything else is complete harmony and team work between all Americans who are in any way connected with the experiment. On the other hand, no worse thing could happen than to have the Haitians get the idea that there is any lack of complete harmony among Americans who are officially there.”

I guess it doesn’t matter how the Haitians actually feel about any of the Occupation, in general… thanks, Haiti, for being a US petri dish…

On that note, thank goodness for the declassification of JAG files. I found, tucked in as evidence for the trial, daily log reports for July 1915 – September 1920, along with correspondence, etc. These were not actually in with the other logs and reports. I don’t know if they were never declassified or if they were simply lost, but, after two 30 minute sessions of going through the Research Guides, one-by-one, i have yet to find the original documents. Lesson learned? Don’t give up on missing documents, something might be tucked in somewhere else.

Also, today’s post was brought to you by De La Soul (yes, this is what i’m listening to as i scan documents and run OCR Text Recognition on my scans):

 

Diss intro

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First attempt at the less-than-exciting opening paragraphs of my introduction…comments welcome

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti laying bare the immense infrastructural inadequacies of the tiny island nation. In the weeks and months that followed, international coordination efforts focused on managing the devastation and carrying that management into rebuilding the country. For many international observers, the calamity offered an opportunity to “build back better” – a trope often bandied but seldom elaborated beyond administrative organizing.  The central focus of this dissertation is to ask, “Build back better than what?” More particularly, this dissertation is interested in how some bodies (particularly Haitian bodies) become essentialized and depoliticized through an imaginary of disease and the ways in which these processes are mobilized in the pursuit of political and economic agendas that are couched in humanitarian  and development frames.

Throughout this dissertation, I illustrate that the relatively new mantra of “build back better” is short sighted in multiple ways. It is historically short-sighted in that its understanding of the history of Haiti is encompassed in the near-recent past, and does not take into account the deeply embedded historical legacy of American military and philanthropic interventions that reach back nearly 100 years. It is politically short-sighted in its refusal to engage with the Haitian people as truly political subjects of a sovereign nation. And finally, that it is epidemiologically short sighted in its consideration of how Haitians are engaged in their own health management.

Each of these short comings are dependent upon a failure to recognize the citizenship of Haitians themselves – both specifically in relation to their nation-state and more generally in relation to global political processes. I argue that it is through the lens of health citizenship that we can begin to unravel the imaginative geographies of Haiti that have been transnationally constructed. And while I am not claiming that it is the only lens through which to come to understand these processes, this lens does offer a unique insight across multiple scales and between historical periods in the way that bodies become particularly marked and managed through the guise of health and disease management.

By situating the examination through the lens of health citizenship, I am pointing to the ways in which global processes of intervention enter into and are enacted upon the bodies of Haitians. I am re-centering the body as the site of political enactment, particularly from the top down, not because the lived messiness of everyday existence is not important, but because it is precisely the invisibility of that messiness that informs grand schemes in humanitarianism and development through health.

On grievability for Haiti

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…the shared condition of precariousness leads not to reciprocal recognition, but to a specific exploitation of targeted populations, of lives that are not quite lives, cast as “destructible” and “ungrievable.” Such populations are “lose-able” or can be forfeited, precisely because they are framed as being already lost or forfeited; they are cast as threats to human life as we know it rather than as living populations in need of protection from illegitimate state violence, famine, or pandemics. – Judith Butler Frames of War

Haiti has been a test tube for global governance through health and development since the first US occupation in 1915. Marked as a site of experiment in the construction of a national health system (Dash, 1988; Browden, 1986), with verticalized development programs (McBride, 2002), and now for the post-Washington-Consensus-meets-MDG meta-narrative of development, Haiti has been developed to death, quite literally. While Haiti should stand as the model of What Not to Do, particularly in regard to health, the country is still imaginatively mapped as the playground of the US’s global health industry.

Health is the site of intersection of multiple scales of intervention, negotiation, and power. Judith Butler (2010) argues, the body is a site of encounter of a full range of social and political networks leading to differential precariousness.  The evidence of the earthquake, the political and social upheavals, the cholera outbreak, and the dearth of consistent and appropriate health care and access to food, clean water and sanitation, and housing are all being mapped onto the individual bodies of Haitians. And yet Haiti is still be read as a site of backwardness, corruption, violence, and political ineptitude at global scales.

Health is an obvious point of entry into the discourses of failure – framed as a basic human right (and further undergirded by the UN OCHA Guiding Principles for Internal Displacement), the health system (and the lack of it) represents the failing of global mechanisms for humanitarian relief. Paul Farmer (2003) and others (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois, 2004) have pointed to structural violences as equally demanding of our attentions as the political violences which, for so long, were deemed somehow more “worthy” of attention and analysis. Yet, structural violences meted out through health and development hold every bit of the historical and social processes that are embedded in so-called political violences. It is not enough to narrate the violences so much as it is important to trace them back to the social, political and economic ideologies underpinning the process of state reorganization (or usurpation, as in the case of Haiti).