The act of reading aloud: Animating the neoliberal speaking subject in post-Suharto Indonesia

Abstract

The global spreading of neoliberalism requires discursive technologies capable of producing forms of subjectivity congruent with the extension of market rationality to all dimensions of social life. Since the millennium, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-driven implementation of governance reform in Indonesia has entailed the dissemination of electoral mission statements – a discursive genre aimed at consolidating a new morality of accountability, transparency and proactive entrepreneurialism. Drawing on audiovisual data recorded in a peripheral region of Indonesia, this article examines the circulation of this transnational genre and reveals how its uptake has not been fully successful. The analysis shows how, through a series of verbal and non-verbal cues, candidates would signal their disalignment from the genre’s metapragmatic structure. By performing their statements through the affectless prosody of written texts read aloud, candidates evaded the moral and discursive expectations of transparent accountability and neoliberal entrepreneurialism and reasserted the ethos of impersonal acquiescence underlying the local modes of political self-presentation.