By Azly Rahman
Happy Mother’s
Day and Happy May Day! May the labors of love reign supreme.
I recall an
old Malaysian radio advertisement: “May Day … May Day… I’m itching all over!” I
suppose this is the predicament we all are in when we speak of the “mother of
all issues”: culture!
Mothers give birth to babies. Babies do not know
what racism means until they learn from adults. And then they become defined
through institutionalized racism produced by the Ideological State Apparatus.
The child, is the father of Man, said a sage.
Where are we at on Mother's Day and May Day?
Are we more race-conscious now than
ever before? Are we really in the postmodern era in which politics of identity
is taking its linguistic and semiotic turn – in which the ugliness and the
beauty of race and ethnicity is surfacing and rearing their heads? Do we need a
better understanding of the word “culture”?
Cultural wars
By the
growing number of race-related news-stories, letters to the editors, column
writings, and opinions published by Malaysiakini, we seem to be arguing more
intensely on the issue of race and social dominance.
We argue on which
language is more superior, whose civilization originated first, to who this and
that land belong to, or if God actually has a chosen people. We even go on a
crusade and jihad based on the superiority of this and that culture and
civilization. We then hear of suicide bombings in the name of this and that
culture.
We let ourselves be shaped by theories of race and ethnicity.
These theories were developed by those who think that human beings are material
beings primarily and that race and ethnicity are constructs that must be made
real. These theories might have originated from racists themselves.
We
design systems of social dominance. We build our politics, schools, cultural
institutions, organizations, youth movements, and all kinds of imaginary prisons
based on notions of racial superiority. We design economic policies around these
notions. We distribute justice based on them. We define citizenship based on
these notions. We create imagined communities out of them. We then get trapped
by the attempt to redefine what race, ethnicity, and culture means.
We
include or exclude human beings using languages that gatekeep. We protect our
economic interest using sophisticated language of institutionalized racism. The
result: we see a manifestation of poverty based on the identification of
race.
We then tried to correct the imbalances using the culture of
Classical/Rostowian/Friedmanian economics and developmental/pluralistic
politics. We used statistics to measure people and to argue of this and that
distribution of the economic pie. We developed the culture of communalism based
on the numbers we crunch.
As decades go by, we then see race and class
emerging. We did not realize that the seeds of destruction were planted in the
very house we inhabit based on the notions of race, ethnicity, and culture we
understand – our understanding based on old colonial theories. We charted our
future ruins. When the incorruptible becomes corrupt, we saw how some of us
design oppositional politics based on these constructs. In the end, we are still
trapped.
This is a double jeopardy in our conceptualization of humanity,
as we embrace and offer ourselves the deadly kiss of the Machiavellian notion of
race, ethnicity, and culture.
At the root of these shackles of social
dominance, I think lies in how we imagine ourselves as cultural beings. This is
the cultural problematique that goes beyond merely the clever notion of the
“clash of civilizations”, as many a Huntington scholar might have us
believe.
Is tculture the culprit?
We continue to debate about
culture and religion in our public schools. We might be debating on faulty
premises. We might have to look at the issue of culture, race, and ethnicity
from a radically different perspective. Let us see what this may mean based on
the propositions I will be making which fundamentally begin like this: culture
is in the imagination and is not real.
There is no such a concept as
'original culture'. Cultures are systems of construction of realities that is
influenced by the historical-materialistic march of technology and capital, that
then develops conditions of existence and formulate human consciousness. Culture
is fluid and amorphous and is a construct rather than a constant. Culture is not
static. Cultural construction can be conveniently used and abused to lend
legitimacy to power and its concentrated self.
It is more than just the
tools we use and play but also the house that we inhabit. Its definition is
problematic; the numbers of definitions are many. The word Malay, Chinese,
Indian, American, Indonesian --- all these are cultural constructs that are
useful in some ways but useless in others.
Unfortunately it is the
uselessness of culture that is often most attractive and get translated into
sophisticated racist policies. As racist policies become further
institutionalized and as economic interests that go with these need to be
protected even more, racial tensions and consequently violence erupts. As these
further mounts, we have war and ethnic cleansing -- in the name of cultural
superiority.
We are endowed by the Creator these variations in skin color
and appearances to have use solve problems of humanity; to understand what needs
and wants are, and to discern what is Good and what is Evil.
Cultures can
enable human thinking and it can also disable it. It can be shaped, structured,
and symbolized based on the influence of class structure of the
people/peoples.
This will translate into "high", "low", "mass",
"popular", and "sub-culture". With all these subdefinitions of culture comes the
status symbols of the object of display, affection, work, leisure, etc, that
shape and that are shaped by the economic condition.
Hence, a goblet used
in a sultan' s palace might be worth a thousand goblets used by the sultan's
hamba sahayas. Or a Rolls Royce used by a royal family signifies a symbol of
"high culture" as opposed to a "[Proton] Rusa,” a symbol of "popular culture"
used by a family in a remote kampong.
There is a new dimension of culture
emerging. There are classes of culture and culture of classes. Classes of
culture are post-industrial tribes that are victims of producers whereas culture
of classes are the internal logic of cultures that have been eroded by the
forces of globalization and late capitalism.
Classes of
culture
Cultures have eroded, been deconstructed, synthesized, and been
redefined as capitalism continue to march in its own cultural logic. As
capitalism becomes a culture unto itself and appropriates, robs, and raped
Nature, human beings become workers and slaves to the system of cultural
production.
Workers become human machines under the system of
indoctrination of bureaucratization, and next, Taylorism and next Fordism, and
now Total Quality Management. Those who design these gentle systems of modern
servitude can exploit the worker better; in a sublime, scientific, and
systematic way.
Workers are asked to adopt the culture of work of the
Japanese and to look East; not realizing that the Japanese continue to further
their East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in a post-modern way.
Our government
tells the world that we have excellent workers that can be exported globally.
These workers, like Mercedes Benz, Jaguars, Bentleys, and Audis, are good brands
that can be exported. We take pride in producing good workers at a cheaper rate.
The Malaysian people are now embalmed as machines that have culture; not
cultural beings that can control the machines.
We are however, afraid to
tell the world that we need good citizens that can think critically and to
become agents of cultural change; workers that understand who owns the means of
production and the process of mental servitude. We are afraid the “brand name
workers” might become “brand name thinkers” and create “brand name social
changes” in a nation of “other people’s” blue chip industries.
Culture of
dominance and hegemony evolved into a new name called ideology, carrying with it
the definitions of race and ethnicity.
We create classes of people in the
technological sector; those digerati we house in Cyberjaya and who we continue
to socially reproduce through an education system that is increasingly training
human beings into machines.
This is the new culture we are cultivating;
one that is “heteroglosially” global and technological; one whose members are
increasingly hypermodernised, hypertextualized, and hyperactive consumer of
wants more than needs.
We have evolved into cyber-Malays, cyber-Indians,
cyber-Chinese, cyber-Kadazans, cyber-Muruts, and cyber-Senois and cyber-Jakuns’
true to the cultural mold of cybernetic capitalism.
This is the new
phenomenon in global cultural construction – the emergence of, no longer
linguistic or cultural stocks of people, but personality types shaped by the
advancement of economic conditions.
Culture or Human
Nature?
If cultures are imaginary concepts we carry as our own personal
realities, what then is human nature?
Man is a universal being that exist
in its particularity. Man is one and many all at once. The purpose of the
existence of Man is to de-evolve into Nature and to free itself from the shackle
called “culture”. The “cultured Man” has stolen Nature and has forgotten its own
Nature.
Man is a being constructed out of DNA which is color-blind,
culturally insignificant, and racially blind.
Man’s evolution is
determined by the economic condition first and foremost and by the systems of
belief that condition him/her ideologically. The rise of private property and
the emergence of the concept of family is the precursor of the rise of the
system of monopoly of resources. As human knowledge advances in the hands and in
the imagination of those who owns the means of production, Man creates theories
of racial superiority that are attractive and useful to the cause of colonialism
and next, imperialism.
Better technologies and better systems of
educating for colonial dependency create more sophisticated means to define
people racially and ethnically. Nationalism, or the sense of “nationhood” became
a phenomena to rally people of the same color, the same geographical origin, the
same language into fighting for the cause of a the same imagined community that
could then be turned into the nineteenth-century concept of
nation-state.
Nation-states pose problems to cultural differences
within.
What has emerged is a global class of owners, producers,
managers, technocrats, laborers, consumers, and pariahs and hamba sahayas of the
Information Age – speaking Geek.
We need to embrace the new global
definition of culture if we are to step outside of the circle of fire we have
build using the language of race, ethnicity, and culture.
Or -- we might
have built a wrong house fifty years ago!
On a more positive
note:
Happy Mother’s Day. Let us raise our children in Peace, Love, and
Tolerance. Into transcultural citizens, preferably. We must go back to Mother
Nature.