[RUN Literature Review] 2. Unauthored consequences and the Anti-Politics Machine

Hi STEEMIT,

Today, we’re going to continue on and wrap up our discussion on Ferguson’s book, The Anti-Politics Machine.

Development has been used synonymously with a lot of positive-sounding words. But really, what is it? Some view that development is akin to modernization and capitalist development. Others view it as an improvement in quality or the standard of living. Viewing the two as being one in the same is what liberals view, while the neo-Marxist view is that oftentimes, capitalist development in Africa ends up being the very cause of poverty.

What we should not forget is that there is no easy way of drawing the picture of development. Paul Willis, in his book Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs describes how the 18th century liberals view public schools as instruments for an enlightened, egalitarian society to eradicate wealth polarization, while Marxists critique that schools are established by the capitalist state to reproduce labor power for an industrial order whose jobs are organized hierarchically.

()
(Reference: https://capitadiscovery.co.uk/brighton-ac/items/1362147)

Similarly, Foucault’s “genealogy” of the prison from 1979 whos that prisons ought to serve as correctional institutions that try to rehabilitate prisoners, yet as is often the case, they become nearly impossible to return to normality, while the structure merely produces and intensifies the strata of “delinquents”.

What is clear is that there is a complex relationship between the intentionality of planning and the strategic intelligibility of outcomes. Or else, the unauthored consequences that drive much of the effects of our efforts may last uninterpreted--possibly dangerous.

The story continues...