Towards a genealogy of "good living" Contributions from Materialist Discourse Analysis

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

Aalborg

Workshop; New perspectives on Discourse and Governamentality; 2013

University of Aalborg

This paper articulates the Materialist Discourse Analysis, the Governamentality Studies approach and a Foucauldian archaeological/genealogical research perspective to address a specific problem: 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" 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 among "Good Living" proposals resonate, as a discursive memory domain, debates about ´another development´ that emerged between 1968-1975 and were blocked in the 1980s by the discourse of "sustainable development". The exhuming of these memory domains will allow us to dismantle the perspective according to the (one and only) ?development discourse" would have existed until current (and entirely new) alternatives of post-development emerged. Thus, this chapter makes a contribution to a central issue for the intelligibility of contemporary governmentality, which is the problematic relationship between nature and development.