Towards a genealogy of ?Good Living?. Contributions from Materialist Discourse Analysis

AGUILAR PAULA; FIUZA PILAR; GLOZMAN MARA; GRONDONA ANA; HAIDAR VICTORIA; PRYLUKA PABLO

Workshop; New Perspectives on Discourse and Governmentality; 2013

This paper articulates French Materialist Discourse Analysis, the Governamentality Studies approach and a Foucauldian archaeological/genealogical perspective in an empirical quest that addresses a central issue regarding contemporary governmentality: the ways in which the relationship between nature, people, humankind, environment and development has been historically delimited. The theoretical-methodological device thus constructed allowed us to destabilize the "development discourse" that underlies a number of current critical studies (Escobar 2007). As result of the analysis we can argue that since the mid-twentieth century, "development", as a key element in the government of third world populations, has been predicated in several ways, some of which resonate in the contemporary discussion about the "Good living" rooted in Latin America. In particular, we can show how debates about 'another development' that emerged between 1968 and 1975 ?and was then blocked in the 1980s by the discourse of "sustainable development"- resonate as a domain of memory among "Good Living" proposals. In an epistemological level, this chapter focuses on the theoretical and methodological criteria for corpus construction. Based on the distinction between discourse production and discursive formation, we discuss both relativistic approaches that undermine the objective conditions that allow the construction of certain series of documents, and the approaches that assume that the delimitation of such series must be stabilized ex-ante. From our perspective, research in the archive leads to the discovery, identification and description of links among discourses which don?t necessarily respond to the same production conditions (or historical conjunctures) but show other kind of regularities, related to the process of discourse formation. The construction of these series of documents, far from being arbitrary, is based on regularities shown by diverse ?tracks" in the textual materiality. For example, in this chapter, the forms of problematizing "development" - "nature" - "population" - "consumption" - "human." Also, we identify regularities- i.e. relationships of repetition/transformation- among forms of the ?developmental discourse?. This work makes a point regarding the pertinence of rearticulating governmentality studies with genealogical/archeological analysis, in order to avoid the risk of presuming discursive homogeneity, as the notion of ?rationality? may entail.