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.