Subjects to freedom: The entanglements of desire in Upland Indonesia

Abstract

This article draws on fieldwork in upland Indonesia to explore how discursive genres mediate political and affective transformations. Since the millennium, IMF-driven governance reforms have disseminated novel ideals of transparent accountability, representative democracy, and individual entrepreneurialism, which at once presuppose and generate a market-oriented subject endowed with the freedom to express desires and choose among multiple options. Transnational discursive genres play a key role in these transformations by foregrounding a consumerist notion of desire as a site of emancipatory imagining. These discursive technologies are, however, only partially successful. By describing their partial uptake I discuss the predicaments posed by the ethnographic scrutiny of reformist rationalities emerging in post-authoritarian contexts. Indeed, while the emancipatory promise of democratic reforms irradiating from transnational lending agencies undermines entrenched social hierarchies, the emphasis on individual aspirations may also conceal new forms of subjection to capitalist valorization, whereby individuals are turned into bundles of measurable desires.