Culture promotes emancipation

Culture promotes emancipation

Following is the last 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): In a sense, it is probably not very different
from what Clifford Geertz calls "moral double-bookkeeping".
Today, a great number of people, while eagerly embracing their
new high-tech gadgetry, try to revive once-forgotten symbols,
rituals, and structures. They take great pains to construct, and
invent, "an uncorrupted source", or "the pure origin", or some
kind of primeval paradise. They happily put forward the premise
that social groups have essential identities, and that your
"culture" is your destiny. This is probably the reason for the
upsurge of Islam, Hindu, and Christian "fundamentalism". This is
also probably the explanation of the use of Confucianism both to
boast of East Asian economic achievements and to discourage
democratic change.

What is curious is that this revival of tradition goes hand in
hand with the drive for more modernization. Let's take Singapore
as an example. In many respects, Singapore is the contemporary
paragon of a modernizing Asia. It has one of the most proficient
bureaucracies in the world and efficient judicial institutions.
It has an excellent environment for international trade and
investment -- a perfect milieu to generate consistently strong
economic performance. It is essentially a secularized system
created to serve a well-defined goal. Seeing Singapore from this
perspective, one may wonder whether this is a place of a Weberian
modern future, where people live as "specialists without spirit,
sensualists without heart". However. this near-perfect modernity
also stores up something different. While employing the same
political formulas Western countries use, Singaporean government
leaders keep banging on about the virtues of "Asian values",
particularly of the Confucian variety.

Primarily they do it in resistance of the American and
European ideals of human liberty which are often propagated by
the media and promoted through political diplomacy. No doubt,
there is an element of resentment in this new insistence on
traditional values. The Singaporean ruling elite, like many
others from other parts of Asia and Africa, are understandably
uneasy, even angry, to find themselves living in a world
constructed, maintained and judged by others. Hence the show of
independence. But there is also another rationale behind the
current "neo-traditionalism". Living for many years in an
environment signified by both a "disenchantment of the world" and
an unabashed pragmatism, the Singaporean view of tradition is
more in the nature of strategic action than of a nostalgic
exercise. The return to tradition has been a way to legitimize
control, and through such control it is deemed feasible to fend
off the "side-effect" of modernization. This is a strategy to be
exempted from what Daniel Bell calls "the cultural contradiction
of capitalism".

Permit me for a while to dwell on Bell's theory. The
development of capitalism is driven by military needs, technical
innovation, capital accumulation, marketing and managerial
productivity, and so forth. Its prerequisites are efficiency,
well-organized processes of production, and a rational acceptance
of thrift and temporary deprivation. However, following
successful economic growth, and the birth of a consumer society,
a new hedonism spreads, in the form of "counterculture"
lifestyles, modeled on aesthetic modernity. The danger is that
this new hedonism, stimulated by mass consumption, will
eventually undermine the motivational conditions for a continuing
growth of capitalism. But there is a problem. Unhealthy as that
hedonism may be, it helps the consumer goods industry to
flourish.

To unravel this dilemma, you have to balance the increasing
desire for immediate gratification and "the revolution of the
rising entitlement" with a good management of human drives and
needs. In other words, to maintain the vigor of a modern society,
and economic and administrative rationality, you have to regain
the kind of consensus tradition to furnish a consensus for common
self-restraint.

The issue is, of course, freedom. This may explain why the
ruling elites of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and China, (and
South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand before the recent
democratizations), have a paradoxical view on society and
culture. In their pursuit for social and economic modernity, they
are wary of the impetus of cultural modernity. The advance of
modernization, as generally described by sociologists, gives
birth to an autonomous process of intellectual and aesthetic
productions. In no time, this autonomy sets itself against the
surveillance of the existing authority -- any kind of authority.
It finds it increasingly difficult to accept the willingness to
be purposeful and obedient as dictated by religious precepts. It
becomes more and more obvious that it cannot just go along
comfortably with the strictly guided consensual rubric of
tradition and the ruling political directives.

These are all unwelcome symptoms in the eyes of East Asian
ruling elites. They want to have the kind of discipline on which
an efficient economy, a rational state administration, and, of
course, their own power to rule, functionally depend. They find
it hard to tolerate anarchistic attitudes, subjectivist life-
styles focused on self-experience and self-realization, and other
things typical of the new sensibilities of aesthetic modernity.
Small wonder they prefer cultural creations without a strong
modernist temper, and a political structure that gives them good
control over intellectual and artistic expression. In other
words, they insist on having control over the social organization
of meaning.

Yet the disintegration of the traditional world as well the
old global order have generated a cultural creativity that is
based upon a certain degree of recognition of the undefinable
self. In an age marked by the ubiquity of money and
commodification as well as by the emergence of the "self-directed
person", the state cannot replace the old cosmological order.
Totalitarians can fantasize about a society capable of
synchronizing a great number of individuals and all their little
projects, but today this fantasy has mostly dissolved into thin
air.

The disintegration prevails everywhere. To reintegrate
science, morality and art into everyday life in a holistic
universe is an impossibility, since there is no holistic universe
in the first place. The autonomy and "use" of science and art
increasingly come to oppose each other. It has become more and
more difficult to create a mediated relationship between science
and art or between art and morality.

Perhaps, this is all part and parcel of the emancipatory
nature of modernization -- something many modernizing elites like
to ignore.

The issue is freedom, as I have said before. Admittedly, there
has always been a lingering doubt whether human liberty is what
is at stake in the dilemma of the modernizing process in a non-
European society. The problem is that in many non-European
societies, the individuation process is a precarious thing. It is
not always maintained by the institutionalization of separate
personhood. A self is a fragile phenomenon, a process in itself,
a potential victim of either the powerful gaze of Authority or of
any collective project. The question is whether it is desirable
to protect and develop its potential. I believe it is, if we
share the ideal of human emancipation in our time.

The locus of this affirmation of the self is in the process of
production of intellectual and artistic resources. In its present
form, it has a "liberal temper" that is receptive to new and old
ideas, critical in its outlook and encouraging of dissent. It is
commonly perceived as the world of a minority, or a "cultural
elite", whom many ideologists, development planners and donors
like to denigrate. Yet if art has its moment of revolt,
unpredictability, and even anarchy, and intellectuals start
calling loudly for free expression, it is a healthy sign that
they still insist on calling for non-repressive kinds of order
and reason. Order and reason, implied in the quest for modernity
itself, tend to trample the indefinable self, by putting it into
concepts and categories. As Theodore Adorno would put it, it is
always important to see what eludes a concept, so we may not
"drown the screams of its victims".

Window:

In an age marked by the ubiquity of money and commodification
as well as by the emergence of the "self-directed person", the
state cannot replace the old cosmological order.