Democratic Technologies of Speech: From WWII America to Postcolonial Delhi

Abstract

This article traces putatively democratic speech and interactional techniques from their development during WWII to their translation into postindependence Delhi community development projects led by Ford Foundation consultants. Moving beyond a focus on high‐level development discourse, this article describes the techniques of speech through which development was brought to ground and the ways of speaking that community development promoted in its target populations. The deployment of these techniques in Delhi shows how the promotion of democracy aggressively attacked existing forms of sociality within the city. [speech genres, democracy, technology, development, India]

Too Much Democracy in All the Wrong Places

“…On the other hand, the demand for subjects to form a new kind of collective is at least as old as the demand to modernize and represents an alternative tradition of development and modernization that is only sometimes dependent on a concept of participation (Immerwahr 2015). In Matthew Hull's analysis of community development projects in Delhi in the 1950s, for instance, he demonstrates the transfer of Kurt Lewin's experimental findings and methods in the attempt to create "planned change" and to produce newly democratic subjects-a process at work in similar ways in the cases described by Miller and Rose at the Tavistock institute in Britain in the postwar period and by Fred Turner in the case of multimedia art and culture projects (Hull 2010;Rose and Miller 2008;Turner 2013). Subjects of development, indigenous peoples, the poor, and rural farmers are object of and conduit for participation-and it is perhaps from their perspective that the weird grammar of participation becomes most evident.…”

Introduction: towards an ethnography of meeting

“…The subsequent global spread of these standardized forms has been linked to colonialism and more recently to the actions of postcolonial governments and non‐governmental organizations. This includes the prominence since the Second World War of meeting forms connected to the significant importation of models of ‘good governance’ and democratic speech technologies (see Hull ; Morton ). These historical factors are significant, as contributors variously demonstrate, but do not in any straightforward sense exhaust the complexity of meanings, actions, and relations now animated by this pervasive social form.…”

MetroDogs: the heart in the machine

“…‘Decide for yourselves’ ( reshaite sami ), ring the lyrics of the most popular showtune of the most beloved of late Soviet films ( Ironija Sud'by ), ‘to have or not to have [a dog, а friend, a wife, etc.]’. How to accord humans – not to mention dogs – will remains an unsolved puzzle in Moscow as in many cities (see Hull ); ‘will’ hovers as an elusive object of desire, threatened by those very systems that require intentional planning.…”