Ilan Kapoor. Confronting Desire: Psychoanalysis and International Development. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. xvi + 307 pp. $26.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-5017-5175-2; $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5017-5172-1.
Reviewed by Douglas Leonard (USAF Academy)
Published on H-Africa (December, 2020)
Commissioned by David D. Hurlbut (Center for Global Christianity and Mission, Boston University School of Theology)
Enjoyment, Colonialism, and Capitalism
The graduate student experience in history offers any number of twists and turns but perhaps the most jarring is the confrontation with social theory. Following the disciplinary introspection across the Euro-American humanities and social sciences in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, all academics learned to make at least some motion toward the explanatory structure (or anti-structure) offered by these theories. Perhaps most powerful and most pervasive among these thinkers stands Michel Foucault, whose work on the interrelationship of power and knowledge continues to resonate today. My own graduate experience included a heavy dose of wrestling with Foucauldian concepts that seemed to eliminate human agency at the expense of embodied, discursive forces. Our class discussions ultimately concluded that perhaps Sigmund Freud or other psychoanalytical theorists offered the best counter to Foucault. In that vein, Ilan Kapoor, a prominent political scientist and development theorist at York University in Toronto, has taken on the position of Foucault astride development studies and concluded that the emphasis on knowledge/power and governmentality as totalizing forces brings limitations rectified only by the addition of Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, mediated through more recent applications by Slavoj Zizek. The result, Confronting Desire, offers a compelling perspective on the persistence and longevity of the development concept in the postcolonial (and neocolonial) world. Historians of colonial and postcolonial Africa, Central and South America, and South or Southeast Asia will find much room for further investigation into the lived reality of this world of “enjoyment” and “desire” for the proponents and subjects of this policy approach.
Kapoor engages heavily throughout the work with developmental theorists from both anthropology and political science. He spars in particular with Marxist thinkers, finding that their materialist understanding has value but lacks engagement with the “libidinal economy” that provides an avenue for “development’s unconscious desires” to come forth while seemingly “irrational” activities overcome “rational” political and economic interests (pp. xii, xi). Indeed, Antonio Gramsci’s insidious “hegemony” seems to inhabit this work of the unconscious, driving the behavior of transnational institutions, but Kapoor gives the concept of empire and its forces of persuasion and coercion little space.[1] Instead, his consideration of the influence of Marxist and neo-Marxist theory generally remains narrowly focused, at least on the surface, to the concept of development. Consequently, he offers only a single reference to the widely influential work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose neo-Marxist concepts of “empire” and “multitude” have shed light on the dark corners of globalization and given voice to some anarchist disaffection with neoliberal and neocolonial systems of (bio-)power.[2] The work thus leaves unanswered the larger implications for students of imperial construction and maintenance, whether European or otherwise, as it remains focused on the nation-state as the primary mode of political organization. Nonetheless, it opens a new conversation on the implications of unconscious influences on international decision-making at the individual and organizational levels.
Understanding development as a “linguistic/discursive/institutional/socioeconomic construction,” Kapoor focuses on the unconscious “enjoyment” of people engaged in the systems of global capitalism as the driver of the continued resonance of such obviously detrimental structures and policies (pp. xiv, 8). A full understanding of this phenomenon for Kapoor requires engagement not only with the power of Foucauldian discursive structures but also with the identification and description of the unconscious capitalist-induced trauma and response that sustains developmental policies. Kapoor organizes his description of this intersection of the conscious and unconscious with two thematic introductory chapters followed by twelve individual essays that work through terms common in Lacanian psychoanalysis. These chapters revolve around antagonism, drive, envy, fetishism, gaze, gender/sex, perversion/hysteria, queerness, racism, and symptom. The chapters on antagonism, envy, gaze, gender/sex, and racism offer the most potent areas for historical exploration and deserve more investigation here.
Kapoor finds that sociopolitical oppression breeds antagonistic structures, employing the contemporary European problems of immigration and the growth of Eurocentric discourses as his primary examples. Following Zizek, he finds these opposing structures operating primarily as an unconscious but shared experience, therefore yielding the possibility of a “universalist politics” with a shared language (p. 60). For Kapoor, that conversation can come only after all acknowledge the pervasive presence of European capital structures and the accompanying racist hypocrisy, thereby leaving space to remove the “roots” of conflict (p. 67). The employment of contemporary examples certainly offers depth to the discussion, but the question remains of the real universality of the argument. Historians would be well served to look for such oppositional structures in the past, paying particular attention to any solutions generated to antagonistic conflict. The universalization of experience threatens to remove the particularity of place, space, and individual understanding generated, for example, by the subaltern studies group along with LGBTQ+ and racial theorists. Understanding the actual operation of this antagonism in specific and historically contingent situations will be important in determining the real impact of this unconscious understanding of capitalist-induced conflict.
Marxist historians in particular have seen this conflict in terms of socioeconomic classes generated by access to capital and control of labor and the ultimate means of production. Kapoor decenters and attacks this approach in his discussion of envy, finding that people of all “classes” desire the enjoyment (also known as jouissance in Lacanian terms) that they observe in others. Economic and social competition thus cause people to try to destroy the enjoyment of others, in the process gaining enjoyment for themselves, widening income and access gaps, generating patterns of conspicuous consumption, and generating corruption. The great challenge for historians will come in looking for evidence of this depiction of socioeconomic interaction. If competition is not purely over resources but also drives a sort of zero-sum social capital acquisition, scholars will have to think about surveillance, both state-based and private, in a different manner. Opposing the Foucault and Jeremy Bentham emphasis on the panoptic regard as a means of control, Kapoor’s insight will force a deeper consideration of this phenomenon as a means to derive pleasure from the destruction of another’s happiness, very much in line with postcolonial understandings of the destructive force of othering.
Along these same lines, Kapoor turns the Foucauldian panoptic gaze on its head by portraying it as a means of generating pleasure and enjoyment through the projection of the self in the other rather than as a technology of domination. Developmental efforts in this case generate power relations through the desire of the outside “other” to find their way to the center while simultaneously seeking the validation of the gaze of those already there. Perhaps most important in this pleasure gaze is the opportunity for resistance through the alteration or denial of the returning gaze from the “other” back to the more powerful center, reducing pleasure and frustrating the center by destabilizing the relationship. While Foucauldian discursive power dynamics, generated by the European Enlightenment, appear eternal, unchanging, and inescapable, Kapoor offers the potential for understanding both the creation and the potential for change of these power dynamics through comprehension of their libidinal, pleasure-associated links. Historians therefore have an opportunity to observe the changes in this libidinal exchange of glances over time through interactions of art, literature, and science at a minimum, a potent source of causation that offers much-needed nuance to the often one-sided Saidian view of Orientalist processes of reproduction.
Beyond his struggles with Foucault, Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and other poststructural and postcolonial theorists, Kapoor also takes on feminist theory. In his view, first voiced by intersectional theorists, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, too much feminist theory tends to divide rather than unite, at least in part due to different racial, sexual, or economic experiences and backgrounds.[3] In examining the work of postcolonial feminists, such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Kapoor argues that these theories generate groups of particular and narrow interests, limiting their impact and threat to capitalist structures. Similarly, the performative theories of Judith Butler remain inscribed in larger capitalist discourses, reproducing those norms as they criticize. Instead, Kapoor proposes a return to an understanding of biological sex, rather than socially inscribed gender, as a fundamental human division that allows for a direct confrontation with the structuring forces of capitalism and its “common patterns of social exclusion and antagonism” (p. 188). Such a disavowal of decades of feminist theory is likely to meet resistance but fits with Kapoor’s larger drive for universality as the key to unlocking the power of capitalism. Historians would be well served to consider the oppositional forces of sex versus the socially inscribed meanings of gender in analyses of particular times, places, and peoples to see whether such a universality is possible or desirable. This is not to suggest that gender has no value as a tool to understand sociohistorical processes but that pairing with biological sex may bring greater nuance to studies of the structures of social and political interaction.
Similarly, Kapoor examines the polarizing power of race in sustaining capitalist structures. Echoing Frantz Fanon, he finds that racism exists psychologically but is never spoken of in public. This “fetishistic disavowal” allows for whiteness to assume a seemingly neutral and referential position while allowing those coded as white to pursue pleasure-inducing racist activities that transgress stated norms (p. 236). At an international level, “Western” or “white” states feel a sense of “glee” when the “Third World” states find themselves unable to achieve stated Western norms of industrial and capitalist development (pp. 249-50). Most provocatively, Kapoor proposes that traditional approaches to remove racist inclinations, such as “tolerance,” “color blindness,” and “anti-racist education” simply do not work as they fail to confront the historical conditions creating race or the pleasure that drives its continued prevalence (pp. 254-55). The power of race in colonial and postcolonial histories has been widely explored, but the mechanism of its perpetuation has never been entirely clear. Kapoor’s psychoanalytical emphasis opens the possibility of including methodology from the history of emotions to trace sources of and changes to racialized discourses and structures of power.[4]
Kapoor’s efforts both to reinforce and to supplant Foucauldian understandings of power dynamics are thus provocative and important. His depiction of a seemingly unitary and self-sustaining power of international capitalism, though, universalizes interactions at the expense of a more detailed and specific comprehension of individual moments, places, and spaces. As Gregory Mann has demonstrated in his recent study of the West African Sahel, From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Nongovernmentality (2015), “nongovernmentality” is the product of a number of disparate forces, some of them international and not all of them motivated by the maintenance of a capitalist order. While Kapoor engaged with postcolonial theorists in a number of different areas of the book, he never really acknowledged the vital contributions of Dipesh Chakrabarty, in particular his Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000). The mere idea of a European-driven industrial-capitalist modernity must be decentered in non-European terms to understand its true impact and outcome. Just as Kapoor critiqued the feminist employment of terms derived from the capitalist order in a reproduction of those repressive structures, so too must theorists and historians alike deconstruct the historically constituted meanings of places, objects, and ideas in a non-European frame, dismantling the discursive power of the capitalist order while adding an affective understanding as proposed by Kapoor. Universality should begin not with a reappropriation of European norms of modernity but rather from the perspective of the other side of the gaze.
Ultimately, Kapoor’s book is a powerful contribution to the discussion on postcolonial and neocolonial structures of power. His findings on envy as a motivation for continued practices of oppression and classism are important and require further historical study. The book, organized and produced effectively by Cornell University Press with both notes and a bibliography at the end of each chapter, serves as more of a collection of essays than it does as a single argument based in specific circumstances. While loose and perhaps frustrating in its ambiguity and repetition in parts, Kapoor’s work opens up new connections and possibilities for historical research in these fraught circumstances. Both scholars and graduate students would be well served to examine his conclusions and investigate their applicability with more historical specificity.
Notes
[1]. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), particularly “State and Civil Society.”
[2]. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri formulated these concepts into a trilogy of theory, with mixed results: Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2000); Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2005); and Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) with a more recent follow-up in Assembly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
[3]. For her first introduction of the term (since employed more widely), see “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, no. 1, Article 8 (1989): 139-67.
[4]. For an introduction to the methodology, see Nicole Eustace, Eugenia Lean, Julie Livingston, Jan Plamper, William M. Reddy, and Barbara H. Rosenwein, “AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions,” The American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): 1486–531.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-africa.
Citation:
Douglas Leonard. Review of Kapoor, Ilan, Confronting Desire: Psychoanalysis and International Development.
H-Africa, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55880
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |