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

Introduction: protocols of speech as political technologies

The crumbling of long-established regimes entails major institutional and economic shifts. A less noticeable, but equally potent aspect of these structural transformations concerns the emergence of new genres of discourse, which are in turn connected to new styles of moral conduct and self-presentation. In this article, I develop a critical discussion of neoliberalism’s political and moral rationality through the analysis of new forms of political speechmaking that have emerged in contemporary Indonesia. One of the main tasks for scholars interested in the interface between forms of verbal interaction and social macrostructures consists in the analysis and description of how people navigate the demands of moral and discursive transformation posed by radical alterations of the political and economic status quo. This article aims to contribute to this larger endeavor by exploring how the recent neoliberal restructuring of Indonesia’s institutional organization has impacted people’s communicative practices in the relatively remote and primarily rural Toraja highlands.

Our late-capitalist present is marked by the growing hegemony of ‘management speak’ (Holborow, 2015: 1). A considerable body of literature offers a critical analysis of how the spreading of financial language and corporate jargon to many areas of our lives may function as a way to mold both individual subjectivities and public common sense according to neoliberal ideologies (see, for example, Block et al., 2013; Chiapello and Fairclough, 2002; Fairclough, 2010; Holborow, 2015; Kelly-Holmes and Mautner, 2010; Massey, 2013). Less work, however, has been done to explore the actual uptake of this ‘marketization of language’ at the micro-level of situated interaction events. My aim in this article is to blend the critical insight of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with the ethnographic approach typical of linguistic anthropology ¹ to explore the penetration of neoliberal language of managerial good governance, transparent accountability and proactive entrepreneurialism in a community of the global South, which had long remained peripheral to the economic and political centers of capitalist production and consumption.

Since the early 2000s, the Toraja highlands of Sulawesi – a geographically remote and economically stagnant region of eastern Indonesia – have been saturated with a new political lexicon. Words such as visi (vision), misi (mission), aspirasi, transparansi, komitment, akuntabilitas and other borrowings from English (often through Dutch affixation ² ) have gradually colonized the local public discourse. ³ The spreading of this new political lexicon is strictly connected to the restructuring of Indonesia’s institutions – a process in large part driven by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and commonly referred to as Era Reformasi (I: ‘Reform Era’). The meltdown of the Asian financial markets in 1997 unleashed a phase of social and political turmoil, leading to the collapse of over three decades of authoritarian regime and to the demise of President Suharto, arguably ‘the last of the great Cold-War capitalist dictators’ (Hadiz and Robison, 2004: iii).

An important, yet largely overlooked, aspect of this institutional shift has been the proliferation of new discursive protocols (i.e. genres of speech and textual artifacts), such as electoral mission statements, training workshops, customer satisfaction surveys, checklists, flowcharts and workflow diagrams. Pivoting on new metrics of desires, emerging standards of accountability ⁴ and a novel emphasis on personal intentions, these discursive technologies play a crucial role in the consolidation of neoliberal rationality, engendering new forms of political speechmaking and a new moral-political ethos.

Political actors had to become acquainted not only with the new lexicon, but also, and perhaps more importantly, with larger units of discourse and thus learn how to master new ways of speaking. In this article, I explore the complex uptake of a new pattern of language use, which I call electoral mission statement. My analysis begins with (and stretches beyond) the political vocabulary to encompass the meaningfulness of discursive components that lie beyond the referential (e.g. prosodic and paralinguistic elements, voice quality, body posture, multimodal performance). I argue that to further our understanding of the global spreading of neoliberalism, we need to look at how its proliferation is enabled by the working of small cogs, that is, acts of speech. Put differently, neoliberal structural changes require specific protocols of speech and behavior that need to be enacted at the micro-level of interaction. Such enactments, however, like any performance, are always subject to potential breakdowns and failures. To anticipate my conclusions, I argue that through the act of reading aloud their electoral statements, Toraja candidates at once comply with and subvert the neoliberal morality underwriting the new genre.

Drawing on a corpus of audiovisual data recorded in Toraja between 2002 and 2003, ⁵ I describe how candidates strove to master the new genre and acquaint themselves with the exogenous rhetoric of ‘vision’, ‘mission’ and ‘commitment’, and I highlight how this process resulted in a complex mixture of cultural adjustment and resistance. On the one hand, Toraja candidates adapted their styles of self-presentation to the neoliberal ethos of individual voluntarism, political personalism and moral accountability. Indeed, in compliance with the genre’s metapragmatic design – a term by which I mean how a genre is supposed to be used and for what purpose – Toraja candidates embraced the commissive ⁶ proclamation of their political intentions and goals. On the other hand, while paying lip service to the paradigm of entrepreneurial accountability, they would perform their statements in a way that allowed them to disclaim any real political, illocutionary and performative responsibility. In other words, candidates would turn the presentation of their mission statements into a perfunctory, hesitant and recalcitrant performance. Contrary to the highly intentional and agentive speaking subject presupposed by electoral mission statements, they would re-contextualize the delivery of their vision and mission ⁷ as ‘a process of textual reanimation’ (Bauman, 1996: 314) of a bureaucratic transcript.

If as Rofel (2007) suggests we should not ‘assume the coherence of neoliberalism’ and ‘take it for granted’, the study of situated interaction may help examine the local configuration taken by exogenous neoliberal styles of linguistic and moral conduct and thus achieve more sophisticated and ethnographically grounded critical accounts of neoliberalism’s modus operandi (p. 19). My analysis of local performances of electoral mission statements is aimed at offering a contribution to the study of the intersection between macro-social forces and micro-cultural worlds of human interaction – which constitutes the research agenda of a large body of interdisciplinary scholarship crisscrossing linguistic and semiotic anthropology, interactional pragmatics, ethnographic linguistics and CDA (see, among the others, Agha, 2005; Block et al., 2013; Cameron, 2000; Cavanaugh, 2016; Duchêne and Heller, 2012; Fairclough, 1989; Holborow, 2015; Kroskrity, 2000; McElhinny, 2015; Van Dijk, 2008).

My endeavor is driven by a set of intertwined concerns. First, I suggest that neoliberalism is not only a politico-economic doctrine (Harvey, 2005) or a moral project of individual reformation (Rose, 1990), but also – and, perhaps, more intriguingly – a way of speaking and a set of discursive protocols. Second, I argue that in order to make sense of our contemporary moment and of the theoretical debates surrounding it, we need to systematically scrutinize how specific discursive protocols become enacted within daily linguistic routines. ⁸ Third, I propose that there is great analytic promise in the microscopic study of how structural transformations (of the neoliberal kind, in this case) unfold through aspects of human interaction that transcend the referential function of language and are not based on the explicit semantic meaning of words. This, as we will see, entails looking at how paralinguistic features such as voice quality and intonation contours produce pragmatic meanings and encode metapragmatic indications on how to interpret such meanings. ⁹ Before developing these points, an ethnographic and historical account is in order.

The changing political economies of language in the Toraja highlands

The Toraja, like most people in Indonesia, are bilingual. The great majority of the population – roughly 500,000 people, living in two neighboring regencies in the mountainous interior of the island of Sulawesi – can speak both the local (basa toraya) and the national language: Bahasa Indonesia (literally ‘the language of Indonesia’). Indonesian, generally acquired through formal school education, is associated with the official domain of the state and used as a code of interethnic communication, while Toraja is widely conceived as an in-group code. Proficiency in Toraja (and particularly in its high ritual/oratorical register) represents a quintessential ingredient of the local identity. Toraja high register is endowed with a characteristic formal structure (parallelism), is rich in metaphors, is socially prestigious, and relies on oral transmission, also due to the lack of an indigenous script. Competence in this high register – variously called ‘the words of the ancestors’, ‘the high language’ or ‘the ritual specialist’s (T: to minaa) language’ – is still considered an essential ingredient of any religious or political gathering.

Meant to be delivered in standard bureaucratic Indonesian, electoral mission statements posed a challenge to this local political economy of language, as is evident from the explicit metapragmatic statement (uttered in Toraja) with which a candidate (whom I call Mr Karappa) introduced a self-aware switch from Toraja to Indonesian. ¹⁰ Beginning his speech with the Toraja high register, which is conventionally used in traditional kombongan (T: political gatherings), Mr Karappa immediately announced that he would deliver his mission statement in Indonesian, as a gesture of respect for the electoral committee (Indonesian words are italicized):

508. Eh tabe’ lako kita sola nasang

 Eh apologize to you all

509. Ko tama’ basa solatamo,

 Well, now I (lit. we) will speak our (inclusive) language

510. Dako’pa ke visi dan misi

 Later when [I will be delivering my] vision and mission

511. Kumane umbasa Indonesiai

 Then I will speak Indonesian

512. Saba’ tang kuporai tu pengkarangan tu panitia

 Because I would disrespect the work of the [electoral] committee

513. Ke laku basa tominaa ri lan visi misi dako’

 If I were to deliver [my] vision and mission using the code of the ritual specialists (lit. the language of the to minaa)

After this metapragmatic explanation, Mr Karappa gave proof of his oratorical competence by performing a deferential opening in the high register of Toraja. As he proceeded to deliver his electoral statement in Indonesian, Karappa began to read aloud from a written document, enunciating his mission as a list of bullet points, which resembled more a laundry list than a political bid:

536. Bidang Pemerintahan

 Governance

537. Menciptakan pemerintahan yang bersih dan berwibawa

 Create a clean and respectable form of government

538. Menciptakan pelayanan terhadap semua lapisan masyarakat secara adil tanpa pandang bulu

 Service each social layer in a just and equal manner

539. Menjalankan pemerintahan secara transparan dan bertanggung jawab

 Run the government in a transparent and accountable way

540. Keamanan dan Ketertiban

 Security and Order

[. . .]

Toraja language is an important site of ideological production. Not only does it play a crucial role within the local ethnic imagination, but it also partakes in the reproduction of culturally specific notions of knowledge, affect and morality. A strong ideology of predestination and ‘unintentionalism’ informs the local notions of linguistic competence and apprenticeship. The process of learning the Toraja high register, historically based exclusively on oral transmission, widely downplays agentive and intentional attitudes (Donzelli, 2007). In Toraja, as Keane (1997) observed for the neighboring island of Sumba (Anakalang), ritual experts ‘say they never actively learn their skills. Rather, it is knowledge that comes to them’ (p. 154).

In the political arena, this ethos of unintentionality emerges through specific forms for the linguistic and behavioral expression of agency. As I observed during my fieldwork in a Toraja village, local models of political leadership, speechmaking and self-presentation prescribed a firm denial of the desire to be elected. Rather than actively campaigning for their election, candidates were generally expected to display a disinterested composure. Even during rallies, they would stay silent, relying on the linguistic labor of supporters in charge of speaking on their behalf. The electoral appeals delivered by the candidates’ spokespersons were in turn marked by the avoidance of exhortatory modes of discourse and by a distinctive mitigation of agency and volition.

The excerpts below (recorded in the summer of 2002) provide insight into the more traditional patterns of Toraja aesthetics of persuasion and political leadership. The fragments are drawn from traditional-style rallies organized by a candidate’s (named Papa Jeni) supporting team to persuade the audience ‘to offer moral support’ (i.e. vote for him). The speeches were delivered almost exclusively in Toraja, with a few Indonesian interpolations (marked in italics). After performing an elaborate honorific apology in Toraja, which I cut for the sake of brevity, the orator proceeds to state the purpose of the gathering through markedly indirect constructions:

50. Dadi yatu lakupokada indete tae’ mora na dipembunian

 So what I will say here is no longer a secret (lit. no longer kept secret)

51. Kumua apa disaean tantu ditandai nasanmo

 What we came here for is already known by all

52. Menjelang te

 We are approaching it

52a. Laditingayo lako tanggala’ tallu

 It will be faced on the day of the 3^rd (the day the elections were scheduled for)

53. Tae’ mo kilaumbuni

 We will not conceal

54. Kumua yake tanggala’ tallu

 That as for the elections (lit. the 3^rd)

55. Tae’ tu apa lakipogau’ ke tae’na dukunganmi.

 There is nothing we could do if there won’t be your support

As the orator formulates his electoral appeal, he constructs the request for support through a complete avoidance of imperative forms, deploying instead elliptical constructions, desiderative circumlocutions ( ‘if there is luck’, line 79a), agentless passives ( ‘what is looked for’, line 79) and non-volitional clauses ( ‘he can end up being elected’, line 80):

79. Na inde’to iatu apa tu didaka’

 And here what is looked for

79a. Na densia mani upa’

 [It is] just [that] there is luck

80. Iatu kakangku Papa Jeni bisa terpilih

 And as for my older brother Papa Jeni, he can end up being elected

The avoidance of directive and agentive constructions is a very recurrent feature of the more traditional electoral speeches in my corpus. ¹¹ Below we can see how, on another occasion, a different member of the candidate’s supporting team addresses the audience using a combination of desiderative constructions and non-volitional clauses:

85. Dadi yanna dako’to ke densia upa’

 So later if a little luck will be with us

86. Tae’mila untiroi-tiroi tu Pong Jeni

 You will not be reckless toward Pong Jeni

87. Ko mangkamo te kupokada ke napoeloi Puang

 Well, I already said it, if God wants it

88. Papa Jeni terpilih

 Papa Jeni [will] be elected

This fatalistic attitude contrasted sharply with the new rhetoric of vision, mission and commitment characterizing the IMF-driven implementation of governance reform in post-Suharto Indonesia. For example, the electoral mission statements, which had become a mandatory requirement for anyone willing to run for office, presupposed a speaking subject endowed with clear consciousness of her goals and with the agentive capacity of stretching her control on the unfolding of future events, as is typical of the ‘regimes of personalism’ of American political discourse (see Dunmire, 2005; Hill, 2000). Drawn from corporate discourse (Swales and Rogers, 1995), electoral mission statements clearly resonated with entrepreneurial models of the neoliberal self (Gershon, 2011; Rose, 1990; Urciuoli, 2008) and with transnational ideologies of transparent good governance.

In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, these new protocols of speech were seen as instrumental for restoring socioeconomic stability and implementing ‘good governance’. Indeed, according to the analysts of the IMF and the World Bank, ‘poor governance’ and ‘lack of transparency’ had been the main causes of the Asian crisis (IMF, 1998). Transparent good governance has been a ‘nodal point’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 105–112) in the discursive operationalization of the IMF-driven reforms of the last two decades. In spite of (and thanks to) its alleged neutrality, ‘good governance’ has been often deployed to ‘naturalize the global neoliberal project’ (Jessop, 2002: 467), working as a powerful banner for a vast array of politico-economic interventions aimed at realizing a technocratic fix for situations of economic crisis and social conflict. ¹² Put differently, in order to get a loan, countries have been often required to implement what IMF indicated as ‘measures to improve governance or redress corruption’ (IMF, 2005).

Besieged by political turmoil and by an economic crisis of dramatic proportions (ICG Indonesia, 1999; World Bank, 1998), the Indonesian government was forced to deliver unprecedented power to the IMF and implement a series of distinctively neoliberal measures, ranging from administrative decentralization to economic liberalization (market deregulation, fiscal austerity, privatization of public services and state-owned enterprises). Central to this new political climate was a rampant rhetoric of transparency and civil society’s empowerment (the key ingredients of ‘good governance’). The new emphasis on popular participation and personal commitment deeply informed the implementation of regional autonomy in Toraja, where, in the early 2000s, a fervid political activity accompanied the redrawing of administrative boundaries and the holding of popular elections to select new village chiefs and thus ensure the renewal of the administrative establishment, which was seen as too colluded with the discredited political caste. Within the new political arena, candidates were summoned to convey their political agenda and passionately express their willingness to be chosen, while villagers were expected to perform acts of free and informed choice. This market-inspired model stood at odds with the Toraja political ethos. Political candidates were now expected to abandon their detached attitude and play a proactive role, making explicit their objectives and values. They had to highlight their full and deliberate involvement in the race and their desire to be elected. This new morality of commitment and personal intention also entailed mastering new discursive genres, such as electoral mission statements, which projected a regime of anticipatory accountability and charged the candidates with the task of rendering themselves pre-emptively ‘auditable’ (Cavanaugh, 2016; Shore and Wright, 2000: 58).

According to regional regulation issued in 2001, those willing to run for local elections had to present their vision and mission to an assembly made of village representatives. How did Toraja political actors react to the new moral and discursive demands? In order to answer this question, we need to examine situated performances of their speeches. I focus specifically on the early phase of the spreading of electoral mission statements. During the inceptive moments that precede the elaboration of extensive and systematic metapragmatic reflections, people negotiate their commitment to new genres and their alignment with the underlying moral paradigm. They do so not so much through explicit commentaries and overt moral assessments, but rather through more subtle and tacit forms of stancetaking practices ¹³ (Englebretson, 2007; Jaffe, 2009) and intertextual operations (Briggs and Bauman, 1992; Silverstein and Urban, 1996). A few concrete examples will help make my point clear.

Speaking like neoliberal subjects

It is the fall of 2002 and the unadorned room of the Mengkendek district office is the stage of an important chapter in the intense political activity that has been sweeping the Toraja highlands since the implementation of new legislation on regional autonomy in 2001. After a long introduction dedicated to celebrate the new era demokrasi and illustrate the voting procedures, the head of the district council who is chairing the meeting invites the first balon (I: prospective candidate) to come forward and give his speech in front of an audience made of civil servants (I: pegawai negeri), traditional leaders (T: to parengnge’), religious authorities (I: tokoh agama) and a vast cohort of villagers (T: to tondokan). While the audience’s composition seems aimed at materializing the newly popular concept of ‘civil society’, the actual purpose of this official gathering – a distinctive type of social event that Indonesians call rapat – is electing the candidates who will run to become head (T: kapala lembang) in one of the district’s main villages.

As the head of the district council points out, the candidates should avoid being ‘too political’ (I: terlalu politis). By this, as he further explains, he means they should not engage in the traditional patterns of clientelistic reciprocity, which entails the offering of free meals and drinks (T: ma’pakande sia ma’pairu’) to secure supporters’ votes. ¹⁴ In the new ‘era of transparency’ (I: era transparansi), there is no more room for clientelistic politics: candidates, as the local official further explains in a mixture of Toraja and Indonesian (marked in italics), are now to be selected on the basis of their mission (I: misi), that is:

17. Apa tu lana pogau’ kedadimi dako’ Kepala Lembang,

 What will they do if later they will become village chief

18. Apa tu lana pogau’

 What will they do

19. Sehingga masyarakat Lembang Tangti Rante Kalua’ menjadi sejahtera

 So that the people of the village of Tangti Rante Kalua’ become prosperous

After the long preamble, the first prospective candidate (whom I call Mr Sirappa) steps to the fore to give his speech, holding in his hands a thin file of stapled papers. Like several of the other seven candidates (six men and one woman), he is clad in a neatly ironed khaki uniform, which indicates a civil servant background. Mr Sirappa begins his speech in Indonesian, addressing, in hierarchical order, all the major authorities present at the meeting. After completing the formulaic deferential opening, Mr Sirappa opens up the file he has been holding in his hands and begins to read aloud the content of his mission statement. His arms are unnaturally stretched and the tension in his tongue, neck and shoulders are well apparent. His tremulous voice and a number of disfluencies and self-repairs in his reading performance betray discomfort. His eyes are fixed on the pages as he presents in a flat and monotonous intonation the points comprising his mission:

269. Pertama: Memacu peran serta masyarakat dalam proses pembangunan

 First: Encourage community participation in the development process

270. Kedua: Menyu . . . Mengupayakan pemberdayaan sumber daya alam

 Second: Ster . . . (self-repair) strive to improve natural resources

271. Ketiga: Mendorong tingkatnya perekonomian rakyat

 Third: Enhance the level of people’s economy

272. Keempat: Mengoptimalkan potensi rakyat pertanian

 Fourth: Optimize the potential of the agricultural people

273. Kelima: Meningkatkan pelayanan kesehatan

 Fifth: Improve health service

273a. Dengan usaha pembedahan dan pengobatan pem . . . prefentif

 With surgical facilities and per . . . (self-repair) preventive treatments

274. Keenam: Mengoptimalkan kebersihan

 Sixth: Optimize the cleanliness

274a. Lingkungan per . . . pemukiman penduduk

 Of the environment of the inhabited ser . . . (self-repair) settlements

The excerpt presents a number of noteworthy features, which are common to all the mission statements in my corpus. The absence of linguistic forms deictically anchoring the text to its situational context (i.e. personal pronouns, demonstratives, deictic adverbs) is paralleled by an extreme referential density in the guise of long strings of lexical items and infinitive verbal forms, ¹⁵ uttered in a list-like fashion. These linguistic features inform also the following speech, performed by Ms Ranteballa (a pseudonym). Like the previous speaker, Ms Ranteballa begins speaking off the cuff and then switches to reading aloud. After completing the honorific opening in Indonesian, Ms Ranteballa leaps into the read-aloud portion of her performance. The transition is marked by a five-second pause and by flat and the somewhat unnatural prosody, often associated with the act of reading aloud. ¹⁶ Like the previous speaker’s, Ms Ranteballa’s rigid posture reveals self-consciousness and performance anxiety. Ms Ranteballa delivers her statement in a highly constative fashion:

445. Misi adalah pelaksanaan dari rencana program kerja

 The mission is the implementation of the work plan

446. Lima tahun kedepan

 For the next five years

447. Dalam memimpin lembang Tangti Rantekalua’

 Of governing the village of Tangti Rantekalua’

448. Dalam rangka mencapai misi tersebut

 In order to achieve the above-mentioned mission

449. Selanjutnya dibutuh misi sebagai berikut

 It is therefore necessary to [have] a mission such as the following:

450. Satu: Program jangka pendek

 One: The short-term program

451. Dua: Program jangka panjang

 Two: The long-term program

452. Satu: Program jangka pendek yaitu

 One: The short-term program, namely:

453. A: Segera mengajukan calon perangkat lembang

 Point A: Immediately nominate candidates

454. Dari masing-masing kampung untuk diajukan dan disetujui oleh BPL

 From each village to be submitted and approved by the village council

455. B:

 Point B:

[. . .]

The presentation of Ms Ranteballa’s mission unfolds smoothly, without the hesitations and disfluencies that characterized Sirappa’s performance. Her speech, however, presents the same formal features: the list-like structure, organized in a series of bullet points and sub-points, the lack of performative verbs of saying, the profusion of agentless infinite verbal forms, the affectless tone, the abundance of English borrowings (e.g. mengoptimalkan, transparan, potensi, visi, misi, program). Furthermore, the paucity of exophoric shifters pointing to something outside the text and within the spatio-temporal field of the utterance is contrasted by the recurrent presence of endophoric references, such as ‘mentioned above’ (I: tersebut di atas), at line 448, and ‘as follows’ (sebagai berikut), at line 449. These anaphoric and cataphoric ¹⁷ connectors strengthen the text’s portability and compactness as a bounded unit of discourse, making these statements akin to impersonal bureaucratic transcripts. Likewise, the lack of performative verbs of speech and thought foregrounds the propositional content of the text over its illocutionary force, erasing any metapragmatic indication of the existence of a speaking subject from where the text originates, thus contributing to the highly entextualized character of mission statements.

The term ‘entextualization’ refers to the process whereby speech is extracted from its original pragmatic context and made ‘circulable’ (Park and Bucholtz, 2009: 486). Stripped from any deictic reference to its situatedness in the here and now of performance, entextualized speech is endowed with enhanced portability and a textual (or text-like) quality (Briggs and Bauman, 1992; Kuipers, 1990: 4; Silverstein and Urban, 1996). As Du Bois (1993) once argued in relation to divinatory speech, entextualization is a key device for the production of ‘intentionless meaning’ (p. 48). Put differently, the avoidance of shifters (such as personal pronouns and temporal and spatial deictics), ¹⁸ the affectless voice and the monotonous tone with which candidates would undertake the cross-modal practice of reading aloud allowed them to inhabit a highly citational stance, that is, distance themselves from their own electoral statements. By stripping their ‘utterance[s] of the prosodic signs of a performer’s involvement’ (Irvine, 1996: 155), the candidates would thus present themselves as mere ‘animators’ (Goffman, 1974, 1981) or ‘transmitters’ (Irvine, 1996) of foreign protocols of speech and action. This disaligned stance was also corroborated by the referential fuzziness of much of the statements’ lexicon.

Referential fuzziness, enregistered voices and blurred accountability

Toraja mission statements contain long strings of composite nouns and infinitive verbs. Indonesian is an agglutinative language, which entails the use of numerous affixes and clitics that can be glued to the word stem to produce semantic variation. So, for example, the affixes meN- and -kan can be attached to the word optimal to produce the verb menG-optimal-kan (‘optimize’, see lines 272, 273); the nominalizers pe-/peN- and -an can be combined with the root obat (‘medicine’) to create the word peng-obat-an (‘treatment’, line 273a) and so on. This agglutinative morphology, however, has undergone a process of erosion, with the result that today only formal Indonesian retains the original agglutinative complexity, while colloquial Indonesian is primarily isolating and presents a higher concentration of roots and free morphemes.

The words used in the mission statements combine morphological complexity (indexical of Indonesian’s formal register) and referential fuzziness (typical of ideological discourse): ‘run the government in a transparent and accountable way’ (line 539), ‘optimize the cleanliness of the residential environment’ (lines 274, 274a), ‘service each social layer in a just and equal manner’ (line 538) and so on. Drawing on Williams’s (1976) notion of keyword, and on Silverstein’s (1976) concept of shifter, Urciuoli (2003) shows how ideological discourse often operates through a kind of desemanticization, which turns certain terms into ‘strategically deployable shifters’ (SDSs), that is, semantically thin and ‘referentially fuzzy’ (p. 398) lexical items that ‘tend to cluster’ and signal the speaker’s ideological stance (p. 214). In a similar way, a great deal of the lexical items appearing in Toraja mission statement point toward pre-existing texts and voices, allowing the speaker to indirectly express a form of ideological alignment with larger discursive formations. Thus, the uttering of lexical items such as visi (line 509, 513), misi (lines 510, 513), potensi (line 272), meng-optimal-kan (lines 272, 274) and transparan (line 539) embeds the speaker within a laminated interdiscursive order of interlacing texts and voices – resonating at once with the IMF rhetoric of ‘transparency’, ‘accountability’ and ‘good governance’, the post-Suharto celebration of a new ‘era of democracy’ and ‘popular aspirations’, as well as the older bureaucratic register of the state apparatus. These terms became key devices of ‘enregisterment’ (Agha, 2005), producing the semiotic and social association between speech forms (i.e. ‘registers’ and ‘social voices’) and stereotypical social practices and ‘social types’ (p. 38).

Interestingly, however, the uttering of these terms did not entail a full intellectual or moral uptake on behalf of the speaker. During the early 2000s, Toraja candidates had yet to develop an articulate understanding of the semantic and ideological meaning underlying these new terms. For example, during a number of transcription sessions I conducted with those who had actually delivered the statements, my interlocutors would often ask me to explain the actual meaning of some of these foreign sounding terms. On other occasions, while reading their statements, speakers would often stumble over the terms visi and misi, saying misi in place of visi and the reverse. Although accompanied by self-repairs, these occurrences were conveying a general sense of distance from the genre and from its moral and ideological subtext.

We saw how the physical and corporeal execution of mission statements through the cross-modal practice of reading aloud allowed Toraja candidates to inhabit the role of animators and evade their liability as performers, understood by Bauman (1984) as someone who takes responsibility for the display of competence. As both Goffman (1974: 517ff, 1981: 129) and Hymes (1972: 58–60) point out, the categories of ‘speaker’ and ‘hearer’ are more complex than what is typically considered. ¹⁹ Thus, if we analyze the ways in which talk is produced – what Goffman (1981) calls the ‘production format’ ²⁰ of an utterance – we may see how the category of the speaker could be further broken down into subcategories, such as Author, Animator, Principal and Figure. ²¹ In the production of an utterance, these roles often display a disjunctive relation: the Author may be different from the Animator, the role of Principal and Author could be disjointed and so forth.

Through their physical engagement with the text (keeping it straight in front of themselves, foregrounding the very act of holding it in their hands and gazing exclusively at the text), and through the monotonous prosody with which they enunciated the items in the list, Toraja candidates construed the delivery of their visions and missions as a sort of ‘semiquote’ (Hanks, 1996: 161). Reminiscent of ritual and divinatory forms of speech and authorship, this metapragmatic stance highlights the ontological antecedence of the text, while, at the same time, it prevents a clear individuation of the text’s author and of the author’s responsibility for the words being uttered (what Goffman calls the speech’s Principal). This sense of diluted authorship defies the underlying metadiscursive expectation that mission statements constitute a primary outlet for the display of the candidates’ ‘character’ and ‘word’, (Hill, 2000), transforming mission statements into text artifacts animated by a speaking subject turned into a ‘sounding box’ (Goffman, 1981). In this sense, by inscribing their electoral statements into written texts, Toraja political actors would redefine the ‘moral production format’ of the genre itself – by which I mean a genre-specific mode of articulating speakers’ roles that is overlaid with moral assumptions about how its ideal speaking subject should act, as well as speak.

The formal structure of Toraja electoral statements mimicked that of Indonesian bureaucratic transcripts, resonating with the multitude of decrees (I: surat keputusan), regulations (I: peraturan) and legislations (I: undang-undang) disseminated by the state’s administrative machinery. The paucity of exophoric references and the abundance of endophoric connectors (such as ‘mentioned above’ and ‘as follows’), the referentially fuzzy lexicon, the use of affixes and the compound nominal and verbal forms typical of the formal register of Indonesian evoked intertextual relations with the written documents of the Indonesian state apparatus. Due to the historical lack of an indigenous script, the Toraja entertain an ambivalent relation with the highly textualized practices of the Indonesian central state, oscillating between attitudes of ethnolinguistic pride and self-conscious inferiority (see Donzelli, 2007).

The delivery of mission statements entailed subtle but meaningful acts of stancetaking, which were mediated by switches of code (from Toraja to Indonesian), register (from oratorical Toraja to formal Indonesian), modality (from speaking to the cross-modal practice of reading aloud) and political ethos (from the traditional practices of reciprocity and personal understatement to the transparent accountability endorsed by transnational financial agencies). The micro-forms of stancetaking adopted by Toraja candidates were revealing of a larger meta-cultural and metapragmatic position vis-à-vis the emerging constellation of protocols of speech and political practices. Similar to the practices of foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, gossip and pilfering that Scott (1985) described as prosaic techniques of the rural class’s struggle, the enumerative structure and the prosodic dullness characterizing the delivery of mission statements gesture toward a form of resistance to both the genre itself and its moral and ideological subtext. Toraja electoral mission statements thus served both to strengthen and to undermine the project of neoliberal governance. On the one hand, by adopting certain lexical and discursive practices, Toraja speakers would signify their recognition of, and alignment with, a new system of political values, authenticating themselves as legitimate political actors in the new Reform Era. On the other hand, the speakers’ actual enactment of the genre was generative of a ‘hidden transcript’ (Scott, 1985) capable of defusing the entrepreneurial subject of the new rhetoric of transparent good governance and the moral subtext that underlies neoliberal protocols of speech.

Conclusion

Since the millennium, Indonesia has experienced a massive process of administrative devolution, the spreading of audit cultures and their administrative apparatus, the reframing of political and socioeconomic issues as technocratic matters and the growing application of rationalities of financial management to other domains of human existence (Hadiz and Robison, 2004; Rodan and Hughes, 2014; Shore and Wright, 2000; Strathern, 2000). Accordingly, central to Indonesia’s new political landscape have been a rampant ideology of managerial good governance and a new morality of personal entrepreneurship, individual empowerment, informed choice and transparent accountability, which – as argued by several scholars (see, for example, Brown, 2003; Gershon, 2011; Rose, 1990) – suffuse neoliberal forms of citizenship. According to the economic discourse of entrepreneurial choice underlying neoliberal forms of moral subjectivity and political rationality, individuals have to become ‘entrepreneurs of themselves, shaping their own lives through the choices they make among the forms of life available to them’ (Rose, 1990: 230).

As a linguistic anthropologist, I am interested in exploring how these larger discursive formations become enacted (or dismissed) through people’s everyday linguistic routines, within specific cultural and social settings. In this article, I grounded my analysis in the discursive practices of the Toraja people of upland Sulawesi. More specifically, I examined the recent spreading, in this relatively remote area, of the new discursive genre of electoral mission statements. My analysis revealed a disjoint between the way mission statements were performed by candidates and the implicit metadiscursive understanding of their production format. Toraja candidates would turn their statements into bureaucratic documents written in the register of governmental Indonesian and read them aloud in a flat tone of voice, displaying a detached affect and stiff composure, in a systematic, though not necessarily deliberate, undermining of the genre’s emphasis on personal intentions. Thus, instead of engaging an inspired, impactful and committed expression of their political values and goals, candidates would deliver their statements through the monotonous and affectless prosody of written texts read aloud, in a paradoxical mixture of extreme ‘textual fidelity’ (Bauman, 1996: 314) and radical metadiscursive subversion. Contrary to the highly personalistic and agentive metapragmatic structure of the genre, the way in which Toraja mission statements were executed resulted in blurring authorship and defusing accountability. Contrary to their commissive aspiration, the list-like arrangement defied the statements’ anticipatory design and situated them in a fixed present of descriptive enumeration. Contrary to the regime of informed choice that they presupposed, the statements’ high degree of replicability (i.e. their all being almost identical) undermined the very possibility of selecting among different options, hinting at the fact that other elements of political and social reasoning may inform constituents’ electoral behavior.

According to several scholars, neoliberalism has become an ‘overarching explanatory trope’, utilized to explain too many and too diverse phenomena (Ganti, 2014: 89; Kipnis, 2007: 383). The study of language in context will provide a finer grained understanding of the role that specific linguistic and semiotic practices have in both reproducing and undermining the forms of neoliberal subjectivity and political rationality that characterize our contemporary moment.