The Desire of the State: Ritualization and Repetition in Indonesian Politics

Abstract

University of WashingtonAbstract The Desire of the State: Ritualization and Repetition in Indonesian Politics Imam Subkhan Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Celia Lowe Department of Anthropology This dissertation investigates a central paradox of Indonesian democratic life: despite widespread cynicism toward the Indonesian House of Representatives (DPR) and persistent perceptions of corruption, parliamentary politics continues to generate legitimacy, reproduce sovereignty, and draw citizens back into participation. Rather than treating the DPR as a merely representative institution, the study approaches it as a key site where the state’s desire for freedom, unity, and progress is articulated, circulated, and materialized through ritualized practices. The dissertation poses three interrelated questions. First, how and why does the Indonesian state repeatedly produce political forms driven by freedom, unity, and progress through the DPR, while simultaneously generating exclusion, repression, and fear? Second, how do parliamentary rituals and procedures, particularly the State of the Nation Address (SONA) and the state budget process, assemble and channel collective desire in ways that sustain sovereignty even when belief is weak or openly cynical? Third, when political, fiscal, and legitimacy crises deterritorialize these arrangements, through what legal, ritual, and fiscal techniques does the state reterritorialize political meaning and material practice? Methodologically, the study combines “studying up, down and sideways” ethnography with archival research. Fieldwork included 3 participant observation in parliamentary arenas, especially Standing Committee and Budget Board deliberations; interviews with legislators, aides, secretariat staff, ministry officials, and civil society actors; and archival ethnography based on parliamentary minutes, SONA manuscripts, and historical budget documents. Analytically, the SONA and the state budget are treated as focal practices through which symbolic performance and material allocation converge. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of assemblage, productive desire, and the Urstaat as a virtual diagram of the state, and integrating theories of ritualization, the dissertation argues that the DPR operates as the state’s desire-machine. Through ritualization and repetition, especially in the SONA and budgeting processes, the DPR assembles, channels, and recodes collective desire into administrable forms that sustain sovereignty amid cynicism. Moments of crisis periodically deterritorialize these formations, yet the state reasserts itself through the reterritorialization of meaning via law, protocol, and fiscal technique, rendering contradictions livable without resolving them. Across historical periods, the study traces how Sukarno’s mass SONAs territorialized revolutionary unity, how the New Order reassembled ritual into administrative control and technocratic budgeting, how Reformasi deterritorialized state legitimacy through crisis and democratization, and how post-Suharto budgeting and the revival of Pancasila simultaneously expanded parliamentary authority while enabling new forms of capture, coalition control, and ideological discipline. The central finding is that the Indonesian state endures not primarily through persuasion or repression alone, but through ritualization and repetition that continually recode desire, making political contradictions livable, governable, and periodically reversible, without ever fully resolving them.