Culture and artistic processes

Culture and artistic processes

The following is the first of a two-part transcript of a talk
recently given by the Indonesian journalist, poet and
intellectual, Goenawan Mohamad, at the Helvetas General Assembly
Meeting in Basel, Switzerland.

JAKARTA (JP): "Culture" is one of the most abused words in
our contemporary lexicon. It has even become a nice cover for
racial bias.

I remember years ago when there was an uproar in the U.S.
following the purchase of the Rockefeller Center by a Japanese
company. A columnist, explaining the American reaction to the
"Japanese invasion", wrote that it was the "culture difference"
that triggered the storm. Doubtless, he forgot to mention that as
far as foreign investment and corporate behavior were concerned,
there was hardly a big cultural discordance between the Japanese
and the British business executives (who, incidentally, took a
bigger part in the American economy than the Japanese, without
generating a similar protest). But of course, it is politically
more correct to avoid referring to "race" in the argument.
Euphemism helps. It has the quality of a friendly mask.

There is also another use of the word "culture" that I find
both amusing and sad, and that is to gloss over a morally dubious
conduct. The other day I read in Asiaweek, an international
magazine based in Hong Kong, a story dealing with the pervasive
practice of nepotism in Indonesia. One of the businessmen
interviewed tried to justify the abuse of political power by
saying that "it is in the culture" that Indonesian officials, the
President included, give their children privileged treatment when
they are in business. In other words, according to this argument,
culture dictates one's actions, and it is too bad if the outcome
does not fit a common standard of values (if there is one). It
seems that even impropriety has its own defense.

"Culture" is also something you can put the blame on when
you are frustrated with the social inertia or slow economic
growth in developing countries. I think it begins with the sim
plified interpretation of Weber's attempt to analyze divergent
modes of rationalization of culture and to trace out the
significance of such divergencies for socio-economic development.
His most famous work, connecting Puritanism to modern capitalism,
has been the source of much misunderstanding; it makes people
believe that the rationalization of religious ethics he
identifies are the only significant influences that separate
economic development in the West from that of the "Eastern
civilizations".

To be sure, when you juxtapose the historical records of many
European societies and those of China, India or Indonesia, you
will see a set differences, and there is always an inclination to
interpret these differences as "absences". Naturally, in reading
Asian history you will find that China, India or Indonesia do not
have Calvinist Protestants, or a "bourgeois" society living in
politically autonomous cities, or the inherited tradition of
Roman law, or the practice of double-entry book-keeping.
Therefore, the modernizing elite of many Asian and (probably also
African) countries like to fill up these absences with
substitutes they can imagine. They put "cultural change" on their
agenda for their societies -- sometimes in a violent manner. In
China, under Mao Zhedong, they launched a "Cultural Revolution",
during which thousands of people were killed or punished. In
other countries, a less revolutionary method takes the shape of
many educational reforms -- following the formula drafted by
those in power, and not necessarily to promote what is
emancipatory in terms of transforming existing societies into the
mold of modernity.

In most cases, these misuses of the word "culture" are due
to the old presumption that you can safely say what "a culture"
is -- especially when you are vulnerable to the temptation of the
exotic. It starts with being aware that there is a different way
of doing a similar thing. Afterward, the difference is attributed
to a group of people marked out by certain specifics, either of
geographic, historical or biological nature. The final step is to
transmute the difference into essence, race, or paradigm.

In real life, a clearly demarcated culture, perceived as a
coherently structured entity, is an impossibility. Currently, in
Southeast Asia, people talk about "Asian cultural values" in
politics. The concept is obviously preposterous, since Asia is
such a diverse place; not everyone in the region eats with chop
sticks, believes in karma, or has work-ethics indescribable to a
Swiss Calvinist. It is equally difficult to apply a single-
culture concept to a seemingly homogeneous group of people like
those living on Bali or in Japan. Under the rug of similarity,
there is always an internal struggle between different local
expressions to achieve a certain degree of social predominance.
Some are repressed or assimilated. In a less liberal atmosphere,
they are even presented as being mere parasites living outside
"the center" and getting their vital resources from what "the
center" offers.

Yet even the notion of "the center" is problematic. Cultural
expressions take place in the contested space of social exist
ence. The winner calls the shots, and makes its own symbols,
codes and structure the only legitimate origin of meaning. The
loser immediately becomes the unwelcome "Other". A center is
established, sometimes by force. Soon, the cultural environment
is deprived from, in T.S. Eliot's words, the "other echoes (that)
inhabit the garden".

For this reason, I would rather use a different approach to
"culture". My talk will try to focus on culture as a process of
production of intellectual and artistic resources.

The key-word is "process". Of course, old-school
ethnographers (also ideologists and political leaders) tend to
ignore it. They prefer to talk more about established rituals,
social formation and structures. They are oblivious to the fact
that the description of these rituals, social formations and
structures are the likely results of an "experience-distant
concept", (as contrasted to "experience-near concept", using a
psychoanalyst's jargon), that say very little about what is
classified and conceptualized. What the ethnographers,
ideologists and the rest of us have are only parts of cultural
texts, interpreted and reinterpreted by experts and laymen alike.

The trouble is that in reading various cultural texts one
often harbors a consistent bias against the notion of "change".
The urge to constitute "a culture", to define a common identity,
is the most prevalent mistake in our contemporary society. It
freezes the actual motivity that brings change and is fraught
with moments of unpredictability during society's creative inter
play. It converts the process into a label of otherness. In doing
so, it moves against the notion of "text" itself, since it denies
the property of a cultural expression to be mixed or blended with
other cultural expressions. No doubt, the labeling serves a
purpose. It makes a well-organized cultural catalog. But it can
generate a kind of identity-fetishism.

Unfortunately, the world is ripe for such fetishisms.

One of the saddest remarks about the end of the 20th century
is attributed to the historian Eric Hobsbawm: "What holds
humanity together today is the denial of what the human race has
in common". I believe that the denial comes from identity-
fetishism.

It starts with a self-awareness of being different from one
group of people and being similar to another group. This generates a
need to have a common symbol of belonging and develops into a
more structured form of self-understanding, as well as a way to
deal with the world outside. In its more assertive expression, it
is both a statement of presence and of defiance. The result is
today's politics of identity, through which people from different
genders, races and other badges of belonging come forward and
negotiate to have their voices heard and their dignity respected
-- sometimes in a violent way.

To be sure, this is all a natural response to long years of
discrimination or exclusion. There is also another way to explain
the hardening of boundaries between different groups of people.
The world today comprises of an expanding market economy generat
ing an increase in capital. And of course, many things progress
unevenly. The ensuing fragmentation of large and small
communities causes a centrifugal upturn. A sense of loss and
uncertainty comes right after it. The crisis of both Marxism and
the liberal ideal everywhere helps to fan the embers. A great
number of people attempt to secure an identity and a role in the
cosmos immune to erosion.

It is no wonder that one of the impacts of "progress" in
Asia, Africa and Latin America, in which a sector of society lays
claim to modernity, is a visible, often noisy, return to
"tradition". It is a dialectical vortex of centripetal and cen
trifugal forces. At a time when technology and the allure of
modernity (using "the foreign West" as a model) is seemingly
undermining the distinctions between cultures, a local drive or
power comes to the scene to assert itself and make a statement of
its uniqueness, carrying the banner of "nationality", "ethnicity"
or "religiosity". Hence the identity-fetishism.