Deciphering Development: The Productive Power of Myths

Roland Barthes’ seminal work on political and sociocultural myths offers a unique way of dealing with the power that lies in terminologies and ascriptions of meanings. His understanding of myths allows us to deci­pher the apparently true stories that have been created around the idea of development.

However, myths can become subject to struggles over meaning, as the creation and shape of developmental myths is no longer a privilege of the West. Developmental myths are subject to reinterpretation and contesta­tion. Rising powers in the Global South not only act as new donors but also confront the discursive hegemony of developmental terminologies, by reinterpreting them or by creating their own development myths. Thus, myths can also carry emancipatory and empowering functions.

Third, myths are harmonising., insofar as ‘mythology harmonizes with the world, not as it is, but as it wants to create itself’ (Barthes 1972, 130). Myths thereby contain a utopian tendency, as they carry an idea of a near and better future, without contradictions and tensions but rather a more harmonious and moderate image. This harmonising notion also refers to the subjects that are addressed through the myth. In fact, myths achieve part of their power through consensus-building.

Thus, despite strong political notions within myths, their universalis­ing quality also expresses forms of ‘' depoliticized speech’ (Barthes 1972, 130). During the process of mythologisation, topics become unquestion­able as their historical and political background blurs, while the myth itself becomes an ‘emptied form’. This depoliticisation is functional insofar as it gives the myth a powerful meaning. As Cynthia Weber (2010, 7) puts it: ‘power works through myths by appearing to take the political out of the ideological.’ Two other effects closely connected to the depoliticising function need to be mentioned: silencing and naturalising tendencies of myths, which unfold as myths cover the historicity of a certain subject. Thereby, myths become ahistorical, supratemporal truths. For the case of development, James Ferguson’s ethnographic reconstruction of develop­ment aid in Lesotho as an ‘anti-politics machine’ gives evidence of how a mythological concept as development is able to wipe out any political or economic notions of rural development and replace them by depoliticised administrative and bureaucratic procedures (Ferguson 1990).

Deciphering and re-politicising myths is an interpretive and linguis­tic practice. Although we appreciate Barthes’ seminal distinction between ‘the signifier’ and ‘the signified’, which become both interwoven in the form of the myth as a semiologic system, we will not pause at this point. While Barthes’ semiologic system still follows a clearly defined structure, we prefer a looser coupling that denies the objectivities Barthes’ structur­alist view is still prone to, and would rather look at the difference (Derrida 1972; cf.

Following Bell’s elaborations on political myths and on the growing interest in mythology due to increasingly complex and rationally organ­ised societies, we would also claim for the field of international devel­opment cooperation that there is a tendency to rewrite political myths in order to ‘flatten the complexity, the nuance, the performative contra­dictions of human history’ (Bell 2003, 75). Thereby, myths can play an important and constitutive role for storytelling and can thereby illuminate the political field (Sala 2010, 4), especially due to their ambivalent shape and structure, being partly connected to realpolitik and partly subject to political phantasies and narratives. This ambivalent quality is an important characteristic which allows myths to travel in time and change shape if necessary.

The myth functions Barthes has identified can give further evidence of how myths shape and transcend political actions. For a myth to be suc­cessful, various functions need to be exerted, and the myth must be able to adapt to changing political conditions (Campbell 2002; Sala 2010). For the field of development cooperation, this implies that we are interested in how the myth of development cooperation has changed and travelled.