Development, rendering technical, and practices of assemblage

Through this research theme I have explored a set of interventions, from the colonial period to the present, devised by experts and authorities who have diagnosed deficiencies in Indonesian society, and set out to rectify them. I pay particular attention to the practices through which experts define a problem and circumscribe its boundaries in such a way that social forces can be managed, and technical solutions applied. Through this process, which I call “rendering technical,” experts exclude from their diagrams the processes that impoverish people, and focus on the conduct of the poor. I find this approach alive and well in the contemporary apparatus of “poverty reduction” that highlights symptoms and correlations (e.g. the poor lack education, they lack assets, they live in isolated locales), rather than exploring the social relations that cause these conditions. Too often, the result is to confirm that poor people are responsible for their own fate, and should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and/or take the initiative to move to areas of high growth and new opportunity. The practices through which these anti-political formations are assembled and defended is another question I have attempted to subject to rigorous, empirical analysis.

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