Sustainable Development

Sust. Dev. 13, 228238 (2005)

Published online 16 August 2005 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/sd.284

Neither Sustainable nor Development:

Reconsidering Sustainability
in Development
Timothy W. Luke*
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA

ABSTRACT
This paper questions the rhetorical workings of sustainable development as an ide-
ological construct in contemporary global society. It suggests that this term actually
is increasingly used as a label to place over modes of existence that are neither sus-
tainable nor developmental. Yet, the rhetoric is also now a material culture of being
that is created, carried and continued in the everyday practices of design, exchange
and production. Copyright 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Received 14 January 2005; revised 27 February 2005; accepted 4 March 2005

Keywords: sustainability; development; political rhetoric; ideology; material culture

Introduction

HAT IS SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT? SINCE THE TIME OF THIS CATCH-PHRASES POPULARIZATION

W by the Brundtland Commission, it has become increasingly clear that the sustainable devel-
opment project is neither sustainable nor developmental. Hence, one must reconsider
much more critically both sustainability and development as goals for guiding the creation
of a truly environmentally sound political economy. Sustainability for ecological debates is now being
used, and perhaps abused, in webs of questions and answers to refocus national economic prosperity as
well as reposition present-day cultural identity in a corporate material culture of more efficient, but still
unsustainable, consumption. The focus in this preliminary discussion falls on the US, where the growing
use, and abuse, of these terms in both mass media and social science since the 1980s provides many
instructive examples of how the use of simple concepts alone can reshape both political discourse and
material culture.
The intellectual emptiness of sustainable development has clung to it from the moment of its official
articulation by the World Commission of Environment and Development. The WCED (1987, p. 43)
declares that sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without com-
promising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Whose needs in the present, and
whether or not they are needs or desires, and how development is understood to prevail where and for

* Correspondence to: Timothy W. Luke, Ph.D., Department of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 531 Major
Williams Hall, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0130, USA. E-mail: twluke@vt.edu

Copyright 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment
Neither Sustainable nor Development: Reconsidering Sustainability in Development 229

whom, of course, are questions that are left hanging, if not entirely begged. That void, in turn, allows
all of these bigger issues to float from the ill defined present into the misunderstood future, whose only
claimants upon benefits from such policies would be new generations reproducing the same compro-
mising conditions. By the opening of the 1992 Rio Conference on the environment, it was obvious that,
as MacNaghten and Urry (1998, p. 215) assert, these barely workable notions of sustainability [had] been
broadly accepted by governments, NGOs and business, and despite all of the problems with the concept
itself.
This study examines this strange acceptance in order to re-evaluate the relative emptiness of the
concept as well as how this empty notion circulates in sustainable development discourse and practice.
Second, it reviews the impulse of governmentality that is at work in sustainable development thinking,
even though this formation is neither sustainable nor developmental. Third, this analysis wonders how
fully sustainable development is embedded in corporate growth planning and market-building. Finally,
this evaluation concludes that sustainable development fails on its own terms, because it is deeply
embedded in the logics of normalization found in corporate commodity circulation, technological dif-
fusion and global governance organization. All of these forces support transmitting the neo-liberal pro-
vision of good and services, which works behind and beside sustainable development as an idea, to those
who can be developed to sustainably produce and consume these same normalizing good and services
in practice.

Developing and Circulating Ideas

Those who cling resolutely to a purely instrumental understanding of language in which words always
have definite meanings, clear uses and neutral loadings are often not disappointed with the use of sus-
tainability and development together. This investigation, however, follows Bourdieu, who asserts when
dealing with the social world, the ordinary use of ordinary language makes metaphysicians of us (1990,
p. 54). Deploying terms such as sustainable development is all about using words in quite sophisticated,
artful and confused ways whose power and knowledge effects can become so profound and pervasive
precisely because of their metaphysical import. Language is action, and rhetorical meaning in such envi-
ronmental discourse can be quite powerful and political.
In this respect, Bourdieu is also correct: the social world is the locus of struggles over words which
owe their seriousness and sometimes their violence to the fact that words to a great extent make
things, and that changing words, and, more generally, representations (for example, pictorial represen-
tation, such as Manet), is already a way of changing things. Politics is, essentially, a matter of words
(1990, p. 54). This observation is true inasmuch as individuals and groups tussle over words and deeds
to gain greater symbolic power. So the mere act of naming things, and thereby bringing them into being
out of nothingness, is, as Bourdieu argues, the most typical demonstration of such power-in-action
(1990, p. 55) for rhetorical terms.
The triumph of todays given established industrial forms of production and consumption reveals
itself even in the assessments of allegedly critical environmental thinkers. Torgerson, for example,
argues that public debates about the environment have essentially evolved into primarily a discourse of
sustainability (1995, p. 10). Likewise, MacNaghten and Urry see business, government and the NGO
sector all accepting the WCEDs vision of sustainability, as members of this generation embrace it as
meeting needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs and of inte-
grating environment and development (1998, p. 215).
Sustainable development captures, then, many of the multiple possibilities caught up in the politics
of actualizing their more complete universalization. All who seek greater sustainability can articulate

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230 T. W. Luke

polysemic performative discourses with such terms, which illustrate what it is like to attain sustain-
able development, and then they become self-renewing as an economy. At the same time, experts will
opine about these phenomena and laypersons will repeat their opinions, confirming the new doxa of
these discourses (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 3963). These discussions essentially start to extrude elements of
sustainability from the debates exploring what this phenomenon could be. By presuming to suggest
what sustainability should be, its exponents cause developmental events and processes to come into
effect which test what they should and should not be. The hesitant and multiversal qualities of such
transformations, at the same time, become more definitive and universal, because these concepts anchor
the mythic invention of their referents as a concrete material culture. That is, as Bourdieu maintains,
the habitus fulfills a function which another philosophy consigns to a transcendental conscience: it is
a socialized body, a structured body, a body which has incorporated the immanent structures of a world
or of a particular sector of that world a field and which structures the perception of that world as
well as action in that world (1998, p. 81).
The imperatives of necessity, desirability and universality implied by sustainability are imparted to
institutions as well as other ideas through this general habitus. This acculturating device retranslates
the intrinsic and relational characteristics of a position in the world with its many styles of living into
a unitary set of choices of persons, goods, practices (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 81). Once the effects of sus-
tainability begin to shape the fields of action and decision, they are integrated into the shared habitus.
There, inside doxological systems of classification, division and valorization, such terms help make dis-
tinctions between what is good and what is bad, between what is right and what is wrong, between what
is distinguished and what is vulgar (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 8), as the constructs of the world carried by
words push and pull everyone toward world constructions in their material culture that match sustain-
ability rhetoric.

Governmentality and Sustainable Development

As sustainable development concepts are constructed discursively by contemporary technoscience and

civic discourse, the art of government continues to find the principles of its rationality tied to the
specific reality of the state (Foucault, 1991, p. 97), where the rhetorical programs of globalization,
sustainability and development are shaped to serve the systemic requirements of politics. Government
comes into its own when it has sustainability or the welfare of populations, the improvement of their
condition, the increase of their wealth, security, longevity, health and so on as its object. Moreover,
such sustainability goals can give rational firms and governments all of the planets life to reformat as
endangered populations, needing various corporate commodities and state ministrations to transform
their lives into objects of managerial control as part and parcel of a range of absolute new tactics and
techniques (Foucault, 1991, p. 100). Coping with sustainability simply crystallizes another consolida-
tion of instrumental rationalitys three movements: government, population, political economy, which
constitute . . . a solid series, one which even today has assuredly not been dissolved (Foucault, 1991,
p. 102) in the buzz of political conflicts.
Finding the worlds communities and individuals focused on the sustainable protection of develop-
ment in a register of safety or security can then turn into a key theme of new political operations, eco-
nomic interventions and ideological campaigns to raise public standards of collective morality, personal
responsibility and collective vigor. The politics being defined in such rhetoric, therefore, operates as a
whole series of different tactics that combined in varying proportions the objective of disciplining the
body and that of regulating populations (Foucault, 1980, p. 140). With these dispositions, rhetoric can,
in turn, ensure popular belief broadly in the established order as well as coordinating effectively the

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Neither Sustainable nor Development: Reconsidering Sustainability in Development 231

actions and thoughts of the ruling/owning/controlling elites by finding the right relations of doxic sub-
mission which attaches us to the established order with all the ties of the unconscious (Bourdieu, 1990,
p. 55) to the economy by developing new technologies, dominating more markets and exploiting every
national economic asset. On the other hand, the phenomenon of failed states, ranging from basket
cases such as Rwanda, Somalia or Angola to crippled entities such as the Ukraine, Afghanistan or Kaza-
khstan, is often attributed to the severe environmental frictions associated with rapid economic growth
(Kaplan, 1996). Consequently, a genuine world politics, whose key issues range from global stability to
sustainable development to a moral community, is receiving greater consideration in the name of cre-
ating jobs, maintaining growth or advancing technological development in the politics of the post-Cold
War era. Through the images of rhetoric, a new order of things emerges out of sustainability theories
as they inter-operate among the normalizing discussions of firms, states and the media. This project of
command, control and communication is a vast undertaking, but these terms start circulating in the
networks of public discourses, foreign policy and neo-liberal capitalism.
A political, economic and technical incitement to talk about sustainability is a notion that reimag-
ines economy and society against some notion of environment, nature or ecology. It first surfaced in
the 1970s, but this notion became far more pronounced in the 1980s and 1990s. Few of its effects took
the form of a more general theory, because sustainability practices mostly steered instead toward analy-
sis, stocktaking and classification in more quantitative forms of planetary accountancy. The project
of sustainability in the US, whether one speaks of sustainable development, growth or use in relation
to Earths ecologies, embodies another set of assumptions about the worlds life processes as the
American state talks about a rational harmonization of its political economy with global ecology as a
form of green geo-politics.
Taking sustainability into account creates discourses about the world whose goals derive not only
from civic morality, but also from industrial rationality in shared material culture. Indeed, as all nations
allegedly face the limits of growth or see the population bomb ticking away, environments became
something that one could judge morally. They are transformed into world-defining processes that the
state must administer. Sustainability, then, has evolved into a public potential; it called for management
procedures; it had to be taken charge of by analytical discourses, as Washington recognized that its
environmentalized manifestations are a police matter not the repression of disorder, but an ordered
maximization of collective and individual forces (Foucault, 1980, pp. 2425).
What hitherto were regarded as purely economic concerns now become environmentalized national
security issues of wise resource use and sovereign property rights. Government manipulation of trade
policy, state support of major corporations or public aid for retraining labor all become vital instruments
for the continuation of the ancient rivalry of the nations by new industrial means (Luttwak, 1993, p.
82). The relative success or failure of national economies in head-to-head global competitions are taken
by geo-economics as the definitive register of any one nation-states waxing or waning international
power as well as its rising or falling industrial competitiveness, technological vitality and economic
prowess. In this context, the doxa have many believe that public considerations of globalization, sus-
tainability or development cannot be ignored, or even be granted only meaningless symbolic responses,
in the quest to mobilize as many political resources as possible.
Sustainable development accepts the prevailing form of mass market consumerism as it currently
exists, defines its rationalizing managerial benefits as the public ends that all advanced economies ought
to seek, and then affirms the need for hard discipline in elaborate programs of productivism, only now
couched within rhetorics of highly politicized developmentalist competition, as the means for sustain-
ing mass market consumer lifestyles in nations such as the United States. Creating economic growth,
and producing more of it than other equally aggressive developed and developing countries, became the
sine qua non of national security in the 1990s. As Richard Darman, President Bushs (No. 41) chief of

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232 T. W. Luke

OMB declared after Earth Day in 1990, Americans did not fight and win the wars of the twentieth
century to make the world safe for green vegetables (cited by Sale, 1993, p. 77). Nonetheless, debates
about the sustainability of these American lifestyles have even led the Clinton and Bush (No. 43) admin-
istrations to embrace sustainability terms as policy rhetoric.
In the final analysis, ecological sustainability boils down to a new form of economic rationality to
remake world politics. In a search for the lowest-cost method of reducing the greatest amount of pol-
lution (Makower, 1993, p. 57) in the industrial turnover of global production processes, sustainable
development became, almost magically, an economic, and not merely an environmental, calculation.
The initiatives taken by businesses to prevent pollution, reduce waste and maximize energy efficiencies
are to be supported as world-remaking programs. However, in taking these steps, world businesses reaf-
firm most existing premises of technology utilization, managerial centralization and profit generation
now driving advanced corporate capitalism.
These rhetorics might not only preserve bits of Nature, mollify some green consumers or pay homage
to the Earth. They also enhance corporate profits, national productivity and state power. The e-factor
here is not simply ecology it is also efficiency, excellence, education, empowerment, enforcement and
economics embedded in the acts and artifacts of material culture. As long as implementing ecological
changes in business means implementing an alternative array of instrumentally rational policies, such
as finding lower-cost methods of energy use, supply management, labor utilization, corporate commu-
nication, product generation or pollution abatement, sustainability has tremendous world remaking
potential.
One cannot dismiss discursive terms, such as sustainable development, as nothing but rhetoric. Their
doxic effects quickly insinuate themselves into both official policy and critical analysis through the work
of activist academics, NGO leaders, corporate officers and government executives. In this respect, the
doxosophies of neo-liberal markets and green capitalism often merge in a utopian vision that, as
Bourdieu claims, now

generates a potent belief, free trade faith, not only among those who live from it materially such
as financiers, big businessmen, etc., but also those who derive from it their justifications for exist-
ing, such as the senior civil servants and politicians who deify the power of markets in the name of
economic efficiency, who demand the lifting of the administrative or political barriers that could
hinder the owners of capital in their purely individual pursuit of maximum individual profit insti-
tuted as a model of rationality, who want independent central banks, who preach the subordination
of the national states to the demands of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the
suppression of all regulations on all markets, starting with the labor market, the forbidding of deficits
and inflation, generalized privatization of public services, and the reduction of public and welfare
spending (1998, pp. 100101).

The complementarities spun up from these beliefs are continuously displayed in the spectacles of global
media as they cover the common efforts of all those high representatives of the state who abase the
dignity of their position by bowing before the bosses of multinationals, Daewoo or Toyota, or compet-
ing to charm Bill Gates with their smiles and gestures of complicity (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 102). Looked
at alone, sustainable development can ring hollow. When one, however, hears such ready-made phrases
all day, as Bourdieu worries, they become elements in a doxosophy, or a whole philosophy and a whole
worldview which engender fatalism and submission (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 57). These capabilities turn
sustainability into a key strategic asset for anyone who is intent upon prevailing in such struggles.
Sustainable development rhetoric shows, once again, how the most decisive revolutions today are
being made both globally and locally, as Beck maintains, under the cloak of normality (1992, p. 186) by

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Neither Sustainable nor Development: Reconsidering Sustainability in Development 233

technics and economics. Therefore, in contemporary discussions, as Beck suggests, the alternative
society is no longer expected to come from parliamentary debates on new laws, but rather from the
application of microelectronics, genetic technology and information media (1992, p. 223). Moreover,
once envisioned, it must be sustained.

Sustainable Development as Commodification Campaign

Rhetorics of governmentality do not fall fully formed from the sky. They must instead be made ready
by their designers and/or managers for some sort of business by enrolling owners, users and advocates
in new social movements to promote their utility, tout their necessity and herald their inevitability with
complex campaigns of persuasive transformation (Adas, 1989). Sustainable development is perfect for
this mission. Living in societies organized around global information networks and commodity markets
requires a broad facility from everyone for coping with many different language games, using various
skill sets, adapting to several new technocultures and all while being green (Agger, 1989). In many
ways, sustainable development is a social movement for greater commodification, working both from
above and below.
The satisfaction of human needs today mostly transpires in the world market where large and small
corporate entities oversee cycles of production and consumption for the goods and services required to
supply global demands (Nye, 1996; Altvater, 1993; Reich, 1991). Firms concentrate energy, information
and material in market exchange: this network is the origin of neither sustainable nor developmental
material culture. Moreover, their operational networks, in-house technologies and company strategies
constitute the everyday environments needed for organizing, institutionalizing and enjoying the eco-
nomic performances of many different agents and structures (Tabb, 2001) around the goals of sustain-
ing the ability to maintain unsustainable modes of existence. These social forces do all of this with such
authority that they can configure agents and structures in many other places around the world in support
of their particular corporate, national and technical environments by collecting information, moving
people, using energy and processing materials as it suits them. As a result, the public agenda is rarely
shaped to serve the interests of the public per se. Rather, it serves a much smaller subset of highly salient
interests espoused by the owners of big companies and/or expert managers of powerful technologies
(Virilio, 1997). Sustainable development is one of their key credos.
Corporations are, in some fundamental sense, complex machines for both touting sustainability and
developmentalism (Luke, 1996; Ihde, 1990; Greenfeld, 2001; Goldstone, 2001). Furthermore, produc-
ers and consumers in almost all the worlds markets must, in part, accept their goals, find their resources
and generate their outcomes amidst the machinic operations of major corporations that embed them-
selves in particular built environments to produce their goods and services. Inasmuch as any economy
today represents concretions of corporate acts and company artifacts shaped by particular enterprises in
specific settings, globalizing societies are made out of cultural practices and material things mobilized
to advance profit-seeking corporate strategies (Robertson, 1992; Luke, 1989). Commodification is a
campaign, and it constantly needs new campaigners and campaign goals. If being green, or at least
greener, sells, then this rhetoric also can be rolled out as a developmental strategy.
Such patterns are neither fully formed nor completely dominant everywhere in the world. Where they
are established, however, people develop networks for communicating, debating and mediating their
collective and individual interests as part and parcel of sustaining the corporate entities and civic struc-
tures that simultaneously perpetuate their civil society (Habermas, 1989). Personal identities, individ-
ual interests and technical imperatives become tied up with reproducing the corporate form sustainably
as well as producing the civic substance of the everyday civilized life such developmentalist

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234 T. W. Luke

projects make possible (Mittelmann, 2000; Robertson, 1992; Harvey, 1989). No understanding of
global society should ignore these machinic dimensions in the workings of corporate economic, politi-
cal and social practices as they run beneath the enjoyments of all civilized social agents (Virilio, 1995;
Ohmae, 1990; Harvey, 1989). Still, these conditions could be changed, and, at the same time, made
more democratic.
Such market-based technologies of production and the self-identity co-generate new linkages between
objective systemic productivity and subjective idiosyncratic consumption for producers and consumers
in the social regimens of sustainable development. The end users of corporate commodities are redes-
ignated through their purchase of commodities to play the role of capital asset, causing the ultimate
realization of the private individual as a productive force. The system of needs must wring liberty and
pleasure from him as so many functional elements of the reproduction of the system of production and
the relations of power that sanction it (Baudrillard, 1981, p. 85). In other words, corporate plans for
social transformation gain life, liberty and property through the buying decisions of individuals rather
than the other way around. For transnational businesses, living with a development agenda makes them
ready to sustain the ability for development, which can be understood as their commodified approach
to liberating personal wants or individual needs, as they are allegedly believed by marketing and man-
agement experts to be felt by everyone anywhere. Moreover, these strategies allow firms to set about
making more and more commodities hitherto inaccessible in many markets available to all who desire
them. This mind-set sustains development, but it hardly constitutes sustainable development.
Liberating these needs, however, always will be met by global capital and its experts with new mobi-
lizations of local need fulfillments as commodities. Green consumer goods can be supplied once these
new subjects are recognized as having the sustainable demand functions expected from good con-
sumers. Subjectivity is redefined as material needs, and global subjects are those who can be defined
by their demand for the transnational goods and services designed to supply and thereby satisfy them
(Baudrillard, 1996). Disciplinary objectivities, in turn, shape disciplined subjectivity. As Baudrillard
observes,

The consumption of individuals mediates the productivity of corporate capital; it becomes a produc-
tive force required by the functioning of the system itself, by its process of reproduction and sur-
vival. In other words, there are these kinds of needs because the system of corporate production
needs them. And the needs invested by the individual consumer today are just as essential to the
order of production as the capital invested by the capitalist entrepreneur and the labor power invested
in the wage laborer. It is all capital (1981, p. 82).

The sustained ability to develop ecologically comes into play here. One sees many sites where the elec-
tive affinities of corporate expertise and authority draw technologies of the self (consumer decisions to
exercise purchasing power) together with technologies of production (producer choices to organize
adding value) in the worlds industrial ecologies (Foucault, 1988). Ideologies of competitive corporate
growth realized through the exploitation of labor are inscribed in each commodity, even though these
objects are delivered to consumers as true developmental tokens of their collective sustainable libera-
tion. Moreover, corporate ideologies of individual empowerment are reaffirmed with each act of per-
sonal artifact appropriation as signs of once more backward markets attaining greater economic and
social development (Tomlinson, 1999).
Sustaining the ability to develop further the prevailing modes of development is regarded as the best
one can get amidst the worlds neoliberal programs for capitalist growth. Campbell, for example, sug-
gests that in the battle of big public ideas, sustainability has won: the task of the coming years is simply
to work out the details, and to narrow the gap between theory and practice (1996, p. 312). Such rea-

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Neither Sustainable nor Development: Reconsidering Sustainability in Development 235

soning only underscores how one-dimensional advanced capitalism has become, and then remained
since the 1960s. When Torgerson asserts that public debates about environmental issues have shifted
into a register that is primarily a discourse of sustainability (1995, p. 10), he too struggles to recast
unfreedom as freedom.
A generation ago, Marcuse saw how nature itself was becoming a key relay in the circuits of control.
Nature does not end, as McKibben (1989) would have it, but it is assigned new ends, namely, to anchor
the technical apparatus of production and destruction which sustains and improves the life of individ-
uals while subordinating them to the masters of the apparatus (Marcuse, 1964, p. 168). When sus-
tainability is the dominant ideological guise of the capitalist mode of production, experts can claim their
task is simply to work out the details or narrow the gap between theory and practice in attaining, and
then sustaining, the ability to develop commodity productions and consumption as smart growth, wise
use, or natural capitalism. These ideas implicitly bring the instrumentalities for this has ever-more-
effective domination of man by man through the domination of nature . . . Today, domination perpetu-
ates and extends itself not only through technology but also as technology, (and the latter provides the
great legitimation of the expanding political power) which absorbs all spheres of culture (1964, p. 158).
Under the pleasing green packaging of sustainable development, Marcuse reminds everyone how
extensively advanced industrial society is a political universe, the latest stage in the realization of a
special historical project namely, the experience, transformation and organization of nature as the mere
stuff of domination (1964, p. xlviii). To accede to the victory of sustainable development as a big public
idea behind this shared material culture, one essentially surrenders to the realization of a very specific
political program: sustainable domination, unwise abuse, unnatural exchange as a rhetorical ruse that
supposedly meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of subsequent
generations to dominate humans in a similar manner by also dominating natures sustainability.
Yet, the consumer is never a docile or inattentive target. He/she is an active, volatile capacitor for
every unsustainably developed circuit of corporate globalisms power effects (Falk, 1999; Tabb, 1999;
French, 2000; McNeill, 2000), who must be captured and convinced of this commodification cam-
paigns merits. As company growth targets circulate through nets of normalization, goods and services
in the marketplace constitute both individuality and collectivity around the prevailing norms of con-
sumption. Expertise and ownership constitute a program of command and control, and they commu-
nicate themselves through the ever-shifting normalization routines of the commodity. When a rhetoric
of sustainable development takes root, consumers want to believe that buying the right stuff gets them
reconnected to the planet, so one must recognize how individual subjects often struggle to reposition
by their possessions in the manifold agendas of a green transnational globalism. As Foucault notes,
individuals are vehicles of power, not its points of articulation (1980, p. 98). Commodities work as
effective relays of corporate management only inasmuch as their generic capacities for market-mediated
individualism become materially articulated in their specific effects upon one, some, many subjects as
well as collectivized as the universal affects within one, some, many objects. The range of globalitys
subjectivities, even those of allegedly sustainably developmental modes of existence, is formed, in part,
at the cash and commodity nexus with the objects produced, in part, by globalization (Luke, 2001).

Conclusion: Neither Sustainable Nor Developmental

Sustainable development, therefore, shows how ordinary commodities are simultaneously carriers of
discourse, circuits of normalization and conduits of discipline, which corporations use to possess their
proprietors with the properties of systems as personal property. Sustainably developed commercial arti-
facts in the world society of corporate commodification should be regarded as the communicative media

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236 T. W. Luke

conducting the forces of a society of normalization (Foucault, 1980, p. 107) in which adding value to the
artifacts of commerce and/or purchasing power over consumer goods become the sine qua non of being
a good consumer with normal tastes and attitudes. Nonetheless, normality is never univocal or monodi-
rectional; it is multivocal and polydirectional, as any strategic analysis of sustainable development as
global purchasing power soon reveals (Bourdieu, 1984). In almost all respects, the main organizing prin-
ciple of sustainable development is economic growth: creating it, managing it, distributing its costs and
benefits on a national scale in particular territorialized states. All, it is claimed, want more material goods
and social services; so global elites compete to control the markets that allow them to implement various
policies to serve these ends (Hardt and Negri, 2000).
After over two centuries of rapid, but radically inequitable, economic growth, some of the technical
and organizational challenges of struggling against material necessity have been met by propounding
the material cultures of advanced industrial society: given any set of a operational conditions, many
industries can produce and distribute virtually any range of b products. However, the expert leaderships
of advanced economies are often unmindful of the tough questions about continuing the solutions for
that distributional problem: who rightly should decide what a or which b? Why produce b with a? What
do the production and consumption of b mean? How might the costs of a conditions be measured? Who
guarantees the givens and operational conditions? And for whose benefit is a produced and at what
cost? Such questions about choosing ends and applying means arise from popular doubts about the
overall rationality of the conduct provided by advanced corporate capitalism. The old logics of miscon-
strued economic efficiency and mis-stated distributional equity have not provided any completely satis-
factory criteria for sustainable lifestyles. Nonetheless, the existing lines of consensus are policed with
new substantive ends: sustainable development becomes a new overarching goal whose supporters cam-
paign to advance through greater commodification as these developmental ideas come to be regarded
as more universally true or trustworthy.
The real political agenda of sustainable development is obscured for clear reasons that serve impor-
tant ideological and political purposes:

techno-economic action remains shielded from the demands of democratic legitimation by its own
constitution. At the same time, however, it loses its non-political character. It is neither politics nor
non-politics, but a third entity: economically guided action in pursuit of interests (Beck, 1992, p. 222).

While most consumers want to defend their place at the table, there are many centers of private, eco-
nomically guided action in the economy and society actively pursuing their own national, corporate and
personal monetary interests in reproducing this unsustainably non-developmental material culture.
Their actions, however, unfold in highly self-serving terms to sustain their ability to push forward what
they regard as development. These dynamics, ironically and simultaneously, also shield the essentially
unsustainable network of developmental technics behind each nation and in every market from com-
plete democratic legitimation, and thereby lock their producers and consumers into routines for running
along on the treadmills set up to serve the demands of the performativity games behind globalization.

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Biography
Timothy W. Luke is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic
Institute and State University in Blacksburg, VA. He also is the Program Chair for Government and
International Affairs in the School of Public and International Affairs, and Director of the Alliance
for Social, Political, Ethical and Social Thought (ASPECT) in the College of Liberal Arts and Human
Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Copyright 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 13, 228238 (2005)