Some theorical points of depature

The first issue to be raised, perhaps, is that the present study is an anthropological one. Unlike
many anthropological works on development, this one takes as its primary object not the people
to be developed, but the apparatus that is to do the developing. This is not principally a book
about the Basotho people, or even about Lesotho; it is principally a book about the operation of
the international development apparatus in a particular setting.

To take on the task of looking at the development apparatus anthropologically is to insist on a

particular sort of approach to the material. As an anthropologist, one cannot assume, for instance,
as many political, economists do, that a structure simply and rationally represents or
expresses a set of objective interests; one knows that structures are multi-layered, polyvalent,
and often contradictory, and that economic functions and objective interests are always located
within other, encompassing structures that may be invisible even to those who inhabit them. The
interests may be clear, and the intentions as well; but the anthropologist cannot take planning
at its word.

Instead of ascribing events and institutions to the projects of various actors, an anthropological
approach must demote the plans and intentions of even the most powerful interests to the status
of an interesting problem, one level among many others, for the anthropologist knows well how
easily structures can take on lives of their own that soon enough overtake intentional practices.
Whatever interests may be at work, and whatever they may think they are doing, they can only
operate through a complex set of social and cultural structures so deeply embedded and so ill-
perceived that the outcome may be only a baroque and unrecognizable transformation of the
original intention. The approach adopted here treats such an outcome as neither an inexplicable
mistake, not the trace of a yet undiscovered intention, but as a riddle, a problem to be solved, an
anthropological puzzle.

It is at this point that the issue of discourse becomes important. For writers such as Heyer at al
(1981) and Galli (1981), official discourse on development either expresses true intentions or,
more often, provides and ideological screen for other, concealed intentions: mere rhetoric. The
bulk of development discourse, with all its professions of concern for the rural poor and so on, is
for these writers simply a misrepresentation of what the development apparatus is really up
to. The World Bank may talk a lot about helping poor farmers, for instance, but in fact their funds
continue to be targeted at the large, highly capitalized farmers, at the expense of the poor. The
much publicized new strategy, then, is largely rhetoric, serving only a mystifying function
(Williams 1981).

In the anthropological approach adopted below, the discourse of the development

establishment is considered much more important than this. It may be that much of this discourse
is untrue, but that is no excuse for dismissing it. As Foucault has shown, discourse is apractice, it os
structured, and it has real effects which are much more profound than simply mystification. The
thoughts and actions of development bureaucrats are powerfully shaped by the world of
acceptable statements and utterances within which they live; and what they do and do not do is a
product not only of the interests of various nations, classes, or international agencies, but also,
and at the same time, of a working out of this complex structure of knowledge. Instead of
ignoring the orderly field of statements produced by the development apparatus on the grounds
that the statements are ideological, the studybelow takes this field as its point of departure for an
exploration of the way in which development initiatives are produced and put into practice.

It should be clear from the above that the approach to be taken to the problem of the
development industry in Lesotho will be, in keeping with the anthropological approach,
decentered that is, it will locate the intelligibility of a series of events and transformations not
in the intentions guiding the actions of one or more animating subjects, but in the systematic
nature of the social reality which results from those actions. Seeing a development projects as
the simple projection of the interest of a subject (the world bank, Canada, Capital, Imperialism)
ignores the non- and counter-intentionality of structural production, and is in this way profoundly
non-anthropological. As in the case of Willis treatment of the schooling apparatus (1981), one
must entertain the possibility that the development apparatus in Leshoto may do what it does,
not at the bidding of some knowing and powerful subject who is making it all happen, but behind
the backs of or against the wills of even the most powerful actors. But this is not to say that such
institutions do not represent an exercise of power; only that power is not to be embodied in the
person of a powerful subject. A development project may very well serve power, but in a
different way than any of the powerful actors imagined; it may only wind up. In the end,
turning out to serve power.

At this point, the theoretical approach of the present work links up with another important body
of literature, closely associated with the work of Foucault. Using a decentered conception of
power, a number of recent studies have shown how the outcomes of planned social interventions
can end up coming together into powerful constellations of control that were never intended and
in some cases never even recognized, but are all the more effective for being subjectless. This
theorical innovation makes possible a different way of connecting outcomes with power, one that
avoids giving a central place to any actor or entity conceived as a powerful subject.

Perhaps the best example of this kind of analysis is Foucaults genealogy of the prison. The
prison, Foucault shows, was created as a correctional institution. It was intended to imprint on
the inmates the qualities of good citizenship: to make criminals into honest, hardworking, law
abiding individuals, who could return to a normal place in society. This idea of rehabilitation
was behind the establishment of modern prisons throughout the world, and it continues to be
offered as the chief justification for maintaining them and, from time to time, reforming them. But
it is obvious upon inspection, according to Foucault, that prisons do not in fact reform criminals;
that, on the contrary, they make nearly impossible that return to normality that they have
always claimed to produce, and that, instead of eliminating criminality, they seem rather to
produce and intensify it within a well-defined strata of delinquents. While such a result must be
conceived as a failure from the point of view of the planners intentions, the result has quite a
different character when apprehended as part of a different strategy. For the constitution of a
class of delinquents, Foucault argues, turned out to be very useful in taming popular illegalities
and transforming the political fact of illegality into the quasi-medical one of pathological
delinquency. By differentiating illegalities, and by turning one uniquely well-supervised and
controlled class of violators against the others, the prison did end up serving as part of a system of
social control, but in a very different way than its planners had envisioned. If this is the case,
Foucault writes: the prison, apparently failing, does not miss its target; on the contrary, it
reaches it, in so far as it gives rise to one particular form of illegality in the midst of others which it
is able to isolate, to place in full light and to organize as a relatively enclosed, but penetrable,
milieu

For the observation that prison fails to eliminate crime, one should perhaps substitute the
hypothesis that prison has succeeded extremely well in producing delinquency, a specific type, a
politically or economically less dangerous - and on occasion, usable form of illegality; in
producing delinquents, in an apparently marginal, but in fact centrally supervised milieu; in
producing the delinquent as a pathologized subject So successful has the prison been that, after
a century and a half of failures, the prison still exists, producing the same results, and there is
the greatest reluctance to dispense with it.

The point to be taken from the above argument is only that planned interventions may produce
unintended outcomes that end up, all the same, incorporated into anonymous constellations of
control author- less strategies, in Foucaults sense that turn out in the and to have a kind of
political intelligibility, This is only another way of approaching the problem noted by Wills in his
discussion of the school cited above: the most important political effects of a planned intervention
may occur unconsciously, behind the backs or against the wills of the planners who may seem
to be running the show.

This will turn out to be one of the key problems raised by the operation of the development
apparatus in Leshoto, and the approach that is adopted owes much to the literature so briefly
discussed above.

The complex relation between the intentionality of planning and the strategic intelligibility of
outcomes is perhaps the single most important theme winding through the pages that follow. As
this theme appears and reappears in the chapters below, one cardinal principle will be illustrated
again and again: intentional plans are always important, but never inquite the way the planners
imagined. In the pages that follow, I will try to show how, in the case of a development project in
Leshoto, intentional plans interacted with unacknowledged structures and chance events to
produce unintended outcomes which turn out to be intelligible not only as the unforeseen effects
of an intended intervention, but also as the unlikely instruments of an unplotted strategy.
Specifically, the remaining chapters will show how outcomes that at first appears as mere side
effects of an unsuccessful attempt to engineer an economic transformation become legible in
another perspective as unintended yet instrumental elements in a resultant constellation that has
the effects of expanding the exercise of a particular sort of state power while simultaneously
exerting a powerful depoliticizing effect. It is this unauthored resultant constellation that I call the
antipolics machine, for reasons that I hope will in the end become clear. The remaining chapters
aim to explore how such an unlikely machine works, and to understand better what it does