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ID:
141216
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| Summary/Abstract |
International development is one of the primary biopolitical problematics of the 21st century. Yet, biopolitical critiques of ‘human development’ tend to leave the framework’s ontological underpinnings largely unexplored. This article seeks to remedy this gap by problematising the notions of ‘capability’ and ‘choice’ in human development through an engagement with Martin Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of modernity. The article argues that underlying human development is an ontology that enframes human beings as a contingent, orderable, and calculable reserve of capabilities. The enframing of choice in turn conceals the limitedness of the conditions within which choice can happen. As opposed to such liberal choice, the article puts forward an ontological notion of ‘decision’, which entails understanding the world as an openness that resists any final determination of being. A politics that draws its involvement in the world from the openness of being entails the ability to question critically even benevolent and supposedly emancipatory projects when they lack recognition of their own ontological commitments and of the limitations that those commitments impose on people’s lives. A re-politicisation of human development thus requires exposing the paradigm’s ontological limits, but it also demands practical political engagement in the factical situations that beings inhabit.
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| 2 |
ID:
151510
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper will examine some of the ways in which development has been influenced by the body of ideas known as techne, or technics. This body of ideas focuses on a central theme that envisages technology broadly defined as developing its own impetus that removes it from the control of human agency and that begins to circumscribe and even control human agency. This can be seen as having various impacts on development, notably a subsumption of any concern for human development to issues concerning process and production of outputs. The paper focuses on the approach of Heidegger as he provides an account that places technology at the centre of human being, whilst helping to distinguish both the negative (enframing) tendencies and the emancipatory (or, as Heidegger might have it, poietic) possibilities of technics. The paper concludes by identifying some of these negative and emancipatory influences in the development context.
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