Beyond the Biopolitics of Capability and Choice in Human Development: Being, Decision, and World

Abstract

International development is one of the primary biopolitical problematics of the 21st century. Yet, biopolitical critiques of ‘human development’ tend to leave the framework’s ontological underpinnings largely unexplored. This article seeks to remedy this gap by problematising the notions of ‘capability’ and ‘choice’ in human development through an engagement with Martin Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of modernity. The article argues that underlying human development is an ontology that enframes human beings as a contingent, orderable, and calculable reserve of capabilities. The enframing of choice in turn conceals the limitedness of the conditions within which choice can happen. As opposed to such liberal choice, the article puts forward an ontological notion of ‘decision’, which entails understanding the world as an openness that resists any final determination of being. A politics that draws its involvement in the world from the openness of being entails the ability to question critically even benevolent and supposedly emancipatory projects when they lack recognition of their own ontological commitments and of the limitations that those commitments impose on people’s lives. A re-politicisation of human development thus requires exposing the paradigm’s ontological limits, but it also demands practical political engagement in the factical situations that beings inhabit.

Politics of Being–Related: on Onto–Topologies and “Coming Events”

“…The concealment is thus filled with the potentiality for a transitional moment. The discussion of 'transitional moments' can be, of course, found from Heidegger's earlier notion of the blink of an eye (Augenblick) (see Alt 2015). In his mid-career works, Heidegger (1999, p. 285) also talks about the "abyssal ground" (Ab-grund) of open be-ing (Seyn).…”

Recognising hope: US global development discourse and the promise of despair

“…12 In Ghana, Obama hence apologised for a world that ‘sees only tragedy and the need for charity’ (2009a). Although acknowledged to be born from ‘genuine compassion towards those in need’ (2015a), Obama defines charity as a relation wrought in power, continuously reproductive of the hierarchies of underdevelopment: ‘the old model in which we are a donor and they are simply a recipient’ (Obama, 2013). For Obama, the moral self-positioning associated with the notion of gift-giving is labelled as a patronising condemnation that ‘might make us feel good’ (White House, 2010a) in the present but will ultimately fail to deliver sustainable development in the future, as concluded in the 2010 Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development.…”

“…Indeed, the theoretical establishment of the human development paradigm during the 1990s was similarly formed through a promise ‘to consider individuals as active agents of change instead of passive recipients of benefit’ (Alt, 2015: 77) – a ‘fundamental point’ (Alt, 2015: 77) of Amartya Sen’s framework that, as noted by Suvi Alt, was constantly reiterated. Also similar to the logic presented by Obama, vocal proponents of human development advocated for the abandonment of the ‘aspirational goal’ (Duffield, 2005: 152) of modernism – ‘that the underdeveloped world would, after passing through various stages, come to resemble the developed’ (Duffield, 2005) – as well as of the reference to the figure of bare life (Reid, 2010: 392) and of the emotional economy of pity (Chouliaraki, 2010) associated with it.…”

“…Presented as a progressive alternative to such paternalism, the paradigm of human development has instead been claimed to govern life through a particular notion of empathic freedom, continuously branding its practices as respectful of local traditions and desires (Abrahamsen, 2004; Murray Li, 2007: 246). Underlined by this paradigm is the importance of partnerships, local ownership and participation (Abrahamsen, 2004; Cooke, 2003; Crawford, 2003; Hansson, 2015; Murray Li, 2007), as well as the empowerment of individual potentiality – or capability, as is this literature’s favoured concept: the individual’s capacity for choice (Alt, 2015; Shani, 2012), freedom (Chandler, 2013), self-reliance (Duffield, 2007) and resilience (Evans and Reid, 2014) – all of them keywords in the development discourse of the Obama administration. As noted by Bill Cooke, this form of governance finds its historical roots in the practice of indirect rule applied by colonial administration (Cooke, 2003; see also Duffield, 2005; Murray Li, 2007: 267).…”

The measure of all things? The Anthropocene as a global biopolitics of carbon

“…This carbonic subjectivism, in which ‘Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such’ (Heidegger, 1977b: 128), is both extended and concretized through our modern sciences that work by challenging-forth and setting-upon Nature, bringing it into being as bounded, measurable, orderable objects. These are always projected by, and then related back to, a human subject (on ‘enframing’, see Alt, 2015; Hamilton, 2016). It is no longer what is visually apprehended as being in our presence that is cognized or comprehended.…”