From ‘Top down’ to ‘Bottom up’ New Order’s Vertical Synchronicity and the Vintage Aesthetics of the Margins in Post-Suharto Political Oratory

Following the 1998 demise of President Suharto’s New Order regime, Indonesia has become the stage of a rampant ideology of transnational neoliberal democracy. Epitomized by emphatic appeals to a new lexicon of “transparency”, “vision”, and “mission”, this new ideology emerged as the discursive leitmotiv underlying the structural implementation of a radical program of decentralization endorsed by transnational neoliberal agencies (IMF, World Bank, Asian development Bank). Drawing on audiovisual data recorded in a peripheral region of upland Sulawesi, this paper examines the re-articulation of the interplay between speech forms and forms of political rationality in contemporary Indonesia. While at first sight Post-Suharto public discourse seems pervaded by a hegemonic ideology of transnational neoliberal democracy that leaves little room for local interpretations, a closer look reveals a more complex picture. This paper engages this complexity by offering an account of subversive forms of intertextuality produced through an emerging aesthetics of “the vintage” and “the peripheral”. It discusses how the usage of regional language (Toraja) and the deployment of formulas of anticolonial rhetoric are currently used to convey enhanced oratorical agency and political radicalism. Besides undermining the authority of bureaucratic Indonesian, the deployment of linguistic “pastness” and locality allows an aesthetic re-articulation of Indonesian historical consciousness that challenges two pillars of New Order’s cultural politics of Time and Space: the imagining of time as anchored in an aesthetics of “present-ness” (Pemberton 1994) and the representation of the State as a spatial entity marked by “vertical encompassment” (Gupta and Ferguson 2002). Through framing political discourse as a site for examining the shifts in the politics of locality and temporality currently taking place in Indonesia, this case brings the focus on situated communicative interaction to bear on the study of the zones of cultural friction (Tsing 2005) underlying the global processes of late capitalism.