Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos

Notes

179 Notes Chapter One 1. This dance of mutual domestication is what Michael Pollan has, referring to quite a different context, playfully called the “botany of desire” (2002). 2. This approach was formulated by Scott in a number of monographs (1985, 1990 and 1998), a special issue of Journal of Peasant Studies 13, 2 (1986), in an edited collection (Scott and Kerkvliet 1986) and in a series of publications (1976, 1977a, 1977b, 1977c, 1977d, 1977e, 1979). For a more recent overview, see the special issue of American Anthropologist, 107, 3 (2005). This literature on rural politics in Southeast Asia has continued to inspire contemporary writers, such as Ong (1987, 1991), Mcelwee (2007) and Kerkvliet (1986, 1995). 3. But it is not quite fair to caricature contemporary economics by the terms laid out in an introductory textbook. The most influential economists today, such as Stieglitz, offer much more complex accounts which include the vagaries of politics, partial knowledge and power. The idea of rational action has come under particular critique from behavioural economics and neuro-economics. Opinions are so diverse in contemporary economics that a recent publication by The Economist concluded rather forlornly that economics can only really be defined as “what economists do, the best of them anyway” (The Economist 2011). 4. In the foreword to the second volume of his history of sexuality, he makes a more general comment about the ascendancy of desire in the theories and counter-theories of his day: At the time the notion of desire, or of the desiring subject, constituted if not a theory, then at least a generally accepted theoretical theme. This very acceptance was odd: it was this same theme, in fact, or variations thereof, that was found not only at the very center of the traditional theory, but also in the conceptions that sought to detach themselves from it. It was this theme, too, that appeared to have been inherited, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from a long Christian tradition. While the experience of sexuality, as a singular historical figure, is perhaps quite distinct from the Christian experience of the ‘flesh,’ both appear nonetheless to be dominated by the principle of ‘desiring man.’ (Vol 2: 5). 5. See for example Pfanner and Ingersoll 1962; Moerman 1966; Spiro 1966; Terweil 1976; Keyes 1983; Kirsch 1982; Little 1990; Rajavaramuni 1990; Sizemore and Swearer 1990. 180 Notes to pp. 15–20 6. The original passage is quite engaging and worth quoting in full: “Every society is at once rational and irrational. They are necessarily rational in their mechanisms, their gears and wheels, their systems of connection, and even by virtue of the place they assign to the irrational. All this presupposes, however, codes or axioms which do not result by chance, but which do not have an intrinsic rationality either. It’s just like theology: everything about it is quite rational if you accept sin, the immaculate conception, and the incarnation. Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational—not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift. Everything about capitalism is rational, except capital or capitalism. A stock-market is a perfectly rational mechanism, you can understand it, learn how it works; capitalists know how to use it; and yet what a delirium, it’s nuts. This is what we mean when we say that the rational is always the rationality of an irrational … it is demented and it works. So then what is rational in a society? Once interests have been defined within the confines of a society, the rational is the way in which people pursue those interests and attempt to realise them. But underneath that, you find desires, investments of desire that are not to be confused with investments of interest, and on which interests depend for their determination and very distribution: an enormous flow, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious flows that constitute the delirium of this society. In reality, history is the history of desire. Today’s capitalist or technocrat does not desire in the same way a slave trader or a bureaucrat from the old Chinese empire would have. When people in a society desire repression, for others and for themselves; when there are people who like to harass others, and who have the opportunity to do so, the ‘right’ to do so, this exhibits the problem of a deep connection between libidinal...