Reworking development today: what Drain Theory and Decoloniality lack
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article builds on the burgeoning field of Psychoanalytic Development Studies to argue for the need to dwell on the realm of unconscious desire to explain people’s obstinate attraction to capitalist modernity today, despite critique. It focuses on two significant contemporary critical standpoints in development: Neomarxist ‘Drain Theory’, which exposes new mechanisms of imperialism resulting from the unevenness of globalized production; and Decoloniality, which illuminates continuing patterns of Western coloniality, advocating instead for a delinking from them through a pluriversal localist politics. The article claims that, in spite of their valuable critiques, both standpoints lack insight into unconscious desire, the former selling short the fetishism endemic to capitalism, the latter fetishizing questions of authenticity that end up reproducing, rather than withdrawing from, capitalist modernity. The article concludes by outlining psychoanalytic options for a transformatory politics.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.083 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.029 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".