Senior Research Seminar with Professor Aurora Donzelli (University of Bologna)

Language, pragmatic standardization, and the affective political economy of late capitalism in an “out-of-the-way place”

Professor Aurora Donzelli (University of Bologna)

 

The goal of this talk is to reflect on the role of discursive genres in producing political and affective transformations. Since the millennium, Indonesia has witnessed the dissemination of a range of transnational discursive genres: from mission statements to customer satisfaction surveys, from training workshops and motivational cheers to flowcharts and workflow diagrams. Drawing on longitudinal fieldwork in upland Indonesia, my ethnographic account is twofold. First, I highlight how the standardization of discursive practices is key in establishing the ideals of accountability, transparency, and proactive entrepreneurialism endorsed both by transnational lending agencies (IMF and World Bank) and NGO grassroots organizations. Second, I provide some examples of the failed or partial uptake of this novel discursive and affective ethos. In so doing, I address an ethnographic and political predicament: While the emphasis on individual choices and aspirations is replacing entrenched forms of sociality centered on hierarchical reciprocity and political censorship, the emancipatory promise of democratic reforms irradiating from transnational lending agencies and metropolitan centers conceals new forms of subjection to capitalist valorization whereby individuals are turned into bundles of measurable desires endowed with the individual freedom of choosing among multiple options and citizens are increasingly interpellated as customers.

 

Aurora Donzelli is a linguistic anthropologist and associate professor at the University of Bologna. Her research deals with the nexus between language, morality, and politics in different geographic contexts. Aside from her long-term commitment to Indonesia, she has worked on the postcolonial Lusophonic imagination in Portugal and East Timor and has analyzed contemporary US political discourse and the semiotics of place branding in Italy. Currently, she is studying the Italian “neorural revival” as a linguistic and cultural response to the standardization of agricultural labor and human interaction ensuing from the post-WWII rural exodus. She received research grants from the NSF, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology.