Development as Trasformation

But what is development? There are as many answers as there have been times the question had been asked. Joseph Stiglitz proposes a comprehensible answer that forms a conceptual quintet. “Development,” according to Stiglitz (2002:252) “is about transforming societies, improving the lives of the poor, enabling everyone to have a chance at success and access to health care and education.” It is not about helping enrich the handful elite of a country. Neither is it about “creating a handful of pointless protected industries that only benefit the country’s elite” (Stiglitz 2002:252). Eyal Press (2002) observes that development for Stiglitz is “not just the accumulation of capital—it is about a transformation of society, a change in ways of thinking.” In short, to transform a society, the poor must have a chance at success which can happen only if they have the means to stay healthy and receive appropriate education. But only with a leap of the imagination can a way of thinking change such that Stiglitz’s conceptual quintet would find traction. At this juncture, it would seem that the novelist Sionil Jose anticipated Stiglitz the Nobel prize-winning economist. It is in this conjunction where perhaps development and imagination can come into fertile and productive intercourse.

It is without doubt economics has a hand in the outcome of the social and political fortunes of humanity. Any discourse on development and poverty cannot avoid intruding into economic territory. But economics operates with terse mathematical models which by necessity simplify the reality modeled. In short, economic models cannot fully represent mathematically life as lived by real people. Nor can a formula or equation predict with certainty the outcome of human actions whether performed out of hope or despair. There is richness in the social text—the complex web of traditions, customs, norms, history, beliefs, and relationships—whose essence cannot be gathered as symbols of a calculus. “Simplification,” Mankiw (2002:11) contends “is a necessary part of building a useful model.” Yet models, according to Mankiw (2002:11) “assume away features…that are crucial to the issue at hand.” This assuming away of crucial features, he claims “lead to incorrect conclusions.” But this fact remains: whether for ill or good, economic conclusions, prognoses, or forecasts derived from, or reached through the manipulation of abstract models always affect the lives of flesh-and-blood people decisively.


A certain sense of disappointment stains the reputation of the present concept of development and progress that has been described as linear and infinite. It would seem this smudge was dabbed by the soiled brush of this abstract concept’s unfulfilled promise, the promise of material abundance and limitless progress. Then there is also the looming specter of the absent correlation between democracy and economic development. The promise of the utilitarian view of society remains unfulfilled because individual maximizations did not result in a sustainable process of democratization. The liberal view holds that the task of programming the government in the interest of the society at large results from the democratic process. In this view, government is portrayed as public administration apparatus, and society is conceived as a network of interacting private individuals structured by market forces. It also presumes that in the democratic process, compromises between competing interests are formed in the spirit of fairness and equality.

But economic development is “a very delicate topic,” says Mary Douglas (2004:109). “It is as difficult to talk about the causes of poverty without putting blame on the poor.”

Amartya Sen (1999:35) points to “a distinction between two general attitudes to the process of development” discernible in both “professional economic analysis and in public discussions and debates.” Sen (1999:35) describes the first view in which development is seen as a “fierce” process that “demands calculated neglect of various concerns that are seen as ‘soft-headed’.” These soft-headed concerns include "social safety nets that protect the very poor, providing social services for the population at large, departing from rugged institutional guidelines in response to identified hardship, and favoring…political and civil rights
and the 'luxury' of democracy" (Sen 1999:35).

This austere attitude places these soft-headed concerns in storage to be brought out for airing “when the development process has borne enough fruit” because “what is needed here and now is ‘toughness and discipline’” (Sen 1999:35). In contrast to this hard-as-nails attitude is “an alternative outlook that sees development as essentially a ‘friendly’ process…exemplified by…mutually beneficial exchanges…or by the working of social safety nets, or political liberties, or of social development—or some combination or other of these supporting activities” (Sen 1999:35-6). In harmony with Stiglitz’s understanding of development aimed toward uplifting those who live in poverty, Sen espouses the idea of “development as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy” because the expansion of freedom is no less than “the primary end and the principal means of development” (Sen 1999:36).

Thus, development “is the process of expanding human freedoms, and the assessment of development has to be informed by this consideration.” It can be surmised that Sen’s concept of development as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy rose over the notion of development as a fierce process on the wings of creative imagination.

El Obeid, Sudan

Explanation and Understanding: Text in Positivism and Critical Hermeneutics

Without any pretense of being exhaustive, one could synthesize the main features of the positivistic tradition as follows: science is the highest form of knowledge; there is one scientific method common to all the sciences; and metaphysical claims are pseudo-scientific. The common denominator of all the different schools within the positivist tradition is the search for an “a priori universal” scientific method as well as the identification of fundamental structures (and the relations among them) applicable to all domains of the natural world including human behavior. Levi-Strauss describes it as the “quest for the invariant, or for the invariant elements among superficial differences” (1978: 8).

Such an approach has been adopted also in the study of language and text. To study language from this perspective, analysts must describe a linguistic system, which consists of structures not content. For structuralism, the crucial point is that the object of analysis is not the corpus of utterances identified as “parole,” but the underlying system (“langue”) – that is, a set of formal elements defined in relation to each other and which can be variously combined to form a sentence (Saussure 1983).

The language-speech (langue-parole) distinction is fundamental in order to give linguistics a homogeneous object that is both a-temporal and composed of “units devoid of proper meaning” (Ricoeur 1981: 153). In this light, language and text become systemic objects that can be investigated scientifically under the assumption that in any state of the system there are no absolute terms but only relations of mutual dependence. In other words, structuralism treats the collection of signs as closed and autonomous system of internal dependencies (Ricoeur 1981: 8).

Two major implications of the positivistic approach are the treatment of the text as a “worldless and authorless object” – that is, to be explained in terms of its internal relations (Ricoeur 1981: 152). Each unit of the text-system is defined only in terms of its difference from all of the others.
Consequently, structural analysis divests the role of the plot in the narrative and subordinates it to the underlying logical structures. Plot is relegated to the surface level of manifestation as opposed to the level of “deep grammar,” that consists of structures and their transformations (Ricoeur 1981: 280).


The duality between explanation and understanding, outlined in Dilthey’s work (1976), constitutes an alternative wherein one term is mutually exclusive to the other: “either you ‘explain’ in the manner of the natural scientist, or you ‘interpret’ in the manner of the historian” (Ricoeur 1981: 150). After Dilthey the decisive step was the questioning of the fundamental postulate that saw the differences between the “hard” sciences and the “human” sciences as an epistemological matter. In other words, the legitimization of the human sciences was dependent on the development of an appropriate methodology of their own. Such presupposition implies that hermeneutics is merely a subsection of the theory of knowledge and that “the debate between explanation and understanding can be contained within the limits of the…methodological dispute” (Ricoeur 1981: 53).

Both Heidegger and Gadamer, the fathers of the critical hermeneutics approach, put into question such an assumption – that is, the presupposition that hermeneutics is construed as epistemology. This movement beyond the epistemological enterprise uncovers the ontological conditions of hermeneutics. Ricoeur defines it as “a movement from regional to general hermeneutics” as well as a “radicalization of hermeneutics” where the question to be asked is “what is the mode of that being who exists only in understanding?” (Ricoeur 1981: 54). From now on, the properly epistemological concerns of hermeneutics – that is, its efforts to achieve scientific status – are subordinated to ontological preoccupation, “whereby understanding ceases to appear as a simple mode of knowing in order to become a way of relating to beings and to being” (Ricoeur 1981:44).

This ontological turn informs the approach to the written text as a fixed discourse. Ricoeur (1981) worked out a systematic theory of interpretation based on a distinctive notion of the text. A text, according to Ricoeur is an instance of written discourse. Thus, it involves four forms of distanciation which differentiate it from the conditions of speech. First, in spoken discourse there is an interplay between the event of saying (the utterance) and the meaning of what is said: it is the meaning which is inscribed in the text. Second, whereas in spoken discourse there is an overlap between the intention of the speaking subject and the meaning of what is said, in the case of written discourse these two dimensions of meaning drift apart: the meaning of the text does not coincide with what the author meant. The written text becomes an independent entity from its author. Third, whereas spoken discourse is addressed to a specific recipient, written discourse is addressed to an unknown audience and potentially to anyone who can read. Fourth, whereas the shared circumstances of the speech situation provide some degree of referential specificity for spoken discourse, in the case of written discourse these circumstances no longer exist. To think of language as a structure or a tool limits the interpreter’s creativity and confines it to a designated set of actions outside its being and apart from its own history.

These various characteristics of the text provide the basis upon which Ricoeur elaborates his theory of interpretation. He argues that the process of interpretation can be facilitated and enriched by the use of explanatory methods of analysis. Since the text is a structured totality of meaning which has been distanced from its conditions of production, it can be analyzed fruitfully and legitimately by means of structuralist methods. But this type of analysis can never be an end in itself. It can only be a step along the path of interpretation – that is, a partial contribution to the broader hermeneutical task of unfolding the “world” of the text and the significance it has for its readers. While Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation is formulated with regard to texts, he argues that it can be extended to non-textual phenomena like action (1981, 1986). Ricoeur’s argument is that action involves the four forms of distanciation characteristic of written discourse; and hence, for the purposes of analysis, action can be treated as a text. One advantage of this approach is that it enables Ricoeur to propose a novel solution to the problem of the relation between explanation and interpretation in the social sciences. Just as interpretation of texts can be facilitated by the structuralist analysis of their contents, so too the understanding of action can be enriched by an explanatory account. Hence explanation and understanding are not necessarily in opposition. Rather, the explanation of action can be treated as an integral part of a process of understanding.

Jinja, Uganda

Conakry, Guinea

Thoughts on Dasein, Technology, Culture and Development

Both Heidegger (1972) and Ricoeur (1992) understand the self, or Dasein, as essentially embodied. The self is both made possible and constituted by its material and cultural situation which presents it with a dynamic weltanschauung. But, on the other hand, Dasein is always capable of initiative, of inaugurating something novel.

Dasein is authentic when it ceases to take the world for granted as some objective entity “present-at-hand,” recognizing it, instead, as an open horizon of possibilities “ready-to-hand.” Being is indeed revealed authentically through the temporal horizon of Dasein (Heidegger 1972) in a creative process of becoming.

Acting in as well as understanding the world, becomes therefore a way of being – that is, Dasein is transformed every time it engages in the world.

If one accepts this ontological orientation, that is housed in language, one is to deem the world of work as a premier locus where such an expressive and transformative event can occur both personally and communally.

Accordingly, one can hold that technology (elementary or sophisticated as it may be) and other techniques of production are no longer mere means. They become a way of revealing. With Heidegger (1977: 12-13), one could argue that every “bringing-forth,” that is, the use of technology in the workplace, is indeed a way of revealing as it is the possibility of all productive activities.


Most of the early attempts to capture social phenomena and, through an accurate description, to reach some form of knowledge about the subjects in question as well as the relations among them don’t seem to be thorough if one is to seek for a more dynamic and open-to-the-future understanding of the human condition.

In the light of the ontological turn (Heidegger 1972), culture becomes a mode of being, something so intimate and inherent to human nature that cannot be detached, not even for analytical purposes, from the lived historical essence of being. According to Heidegger (1972), humans’ essence lies in existence. Human existence thus becomes an activity of endless transcendence. Such act is similar to the distanciation between the reader and the text, personal, social or written as the case may be. Being situated, thrown in an historical context and simultaneously having the ability to transcend, imagine and initiate new possibilities are specific features of human being, of Dasein in Heideggerian lingo.

This human faculty, which calls for the exercise of critique, does not take place in a vacuum.

In this light, a radically new working concept of culture emerges: culture becomes Dasein’s lived experience played in a to-and-from movement between throwness and imagination. Accordingly, the understanding of the nature of development changes.

On the one hand, Escobar’s (1985) work traces back and documents every bit of history of development and points out how a certain decision might have had a socio or political consequence up to present. On the other hand, he does not offer any feasible way to escape the historical entrapment, other than by, externally, counterattacking the established status quo. The throwness, in this case, has taken over.

Moreover, such a process ought to be readily available to each and every participant because one is “always already” (Gadamer 1988) part of a historical community. This very historicity becomes the basis for emancipation through narrative identity, that is a kind of identity to which a human being has access via the mediation of the narrative function.

Dakar and Ziguinchor, Senegal