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Paper short abstract

This presentation offers a multimodal response to the ongoing debate between critical studies of and technocratic drives underpinning development. It offers a kind of critique that attends to the moments when the binaries enabling both sides of the camp to crystallise yet crumble at the same time.

Paper long abstract

This presentation explores how to engage with development in multimodal terms as a modest form of critique. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Eastern Indonesia, this paper aims to speak to the perennial debate between critical approaches to and technocratic views of development, by highlighting the limits and the possibilities that arise from both sides of normative assessment. In doing so, it begins by reframing what multimodal engagements mean and take, by ethnographically accounting for people's encounters with development in both crude and aesthetic, abstract and concrete as well as established and experimental forms. Recognising such multimodal insights points towards the need of holding development in both affirmative yet negative manners, hence ambiguously. The stakes involved, this paper argues, are then two-fold. One one hand, despite their oftentimes utopian stance, technocratic proponents continue to be confronted not only with the hypes and hopes of development, but also its despair-laden and violent tendencies. On the other, those who have been negating development have to grapple with not only the dystopian qualities in their appraisal, but also the possibilities of empowerment however slight and provisional these might be. Such ontological ambiguities, this paper further suggests, allow us to pay closer attention to the ethical and moral implications that arise whereby the binaries that enable both critical (and technocratic) pursuits towards development, are reified and blurred at the same time.