Deconstruction as disempowerment: new orientalisms of Java

Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 23 no.3, 1991, pp. 51-71.

In reflecting on the impact of recent theories on the study of Java my comments are stimulated by issues which arise when foregrounding interpretation of traditional mystical culture. Though the works I will deal with are only loosely linked to either deconstruction or mysticism they do highlight issues arising from the intersection between them in the Javanese context. Each work offers a reading of contemporary culture which implicitly or explicitly assesses the place of "traditions" within it. In at once critiquing and applying deconstruction, only sometimes to works which use it, my focus is on posing a question rather than on resolving it or providing a balanced survey of scholarly work. I will not do justice to the works mentioned because my questioning is at the periphery of their purposes, in the spirit of deconstruction itself.
The central issue here is one of cultural imperialism: do the philosophical and epistemological commitments, methodological practices and political predispositions of Western scholars, even those of the new wave and on the left, in effect make their works constitute yet another instrument of subordination?
The most notable work of deconstruction in Asian studies has been Edward Said's book Orientalism. Mention of it has become synonomous with acknowledgement that Western scholarship on Asia is embedded in power relations, systems of knowledge being party to imperialism. Said showed clearly how Western scholarship has been part of the colonial enterprise, how the "knowledge" Europeans have of the "Orient" serves to enshrine unequal power relations. It even becomes apparent that Western scholarship can shape what some Asians know of themselves. He drew attention, as Steadman and others had much earlier, to how notions of "East and West" lead to misguided stereotyping paired with "intuitive and rational" and "passive and dynamic". Said rested his case on extremes, mainly on Victorian scholarship and almost exclusively on studies of the Islamic world, but his thesis stands and is relevant here. Since the seventies explorations in this vein have been a major industry within the human sciences. I am raising again, now in relation to Said's own style of theorising, the point he raised about earlier practices.
Western students of Southeast Asia began moving toward a decolonised scholarship long before Said's work. During the thirties Van Leur signalled the move away from colonial historiography, written as though "from the deck of a ship", calling for a rewriting of Indonesian history from an indigenous and local social perspective. His effort was revived by Smail in his seminal essay "On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia". Smail carefully distinguished questions of moral judgement, perspective, relative importance and focus. He illustrated how local social perspective could be employed to enrich understanding of the plurality of actors and visions which make up the Southeast Asian component within world history. In a variety of ways the following generation showed that the range of indigenous historical scholarship has been shaped by extremely varied cultural lenses. In fact ever since Hall's classic defined the field, students of the region have taken the challenge of reframing history from the local perspective seriously. Of course it is easier to recognise the problem than remedy it.
A new generation has begun to apply analytical tools borrowed from the revolutions in the humanities to scholarship on Java. The leading catchwords of current fashion in cultural theory have been semiotics, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and deconstruction. The terms are often used interchangeably, but these movements can be distinguished. Semiotics arose from linguistics and language philosophies, approaching cultures as systems of signs and often leading to the conclusion that "meaning" resides only in the relations between sign systems. For example we can note that Geertz's interpretive anthropological version of semiotics, one especially relevant to studies of Indonesia, is linked to the philosophers Mead and Ryle and the position that "...all consciousness is intersubjective, mediated by public communicative forms".
Structuralist theories are most associated with the French anthropologist Levi-Strauss and usually appear to focus on unified theory, on quest for universal ordering principles. "Poststructuralism" sometimes refers to works using structuralist principles as a given; at other times more specifically to those who reject emphasis on the systematic formal oppositions emphasised in structuralism. If "modern" refers to industrial societies and schools of thought associated with it, including the positivist social sciences and ideas of progress, then "postmodernism" is both after it and a critique of it. The term originated as a designation for styles of architecture and art, but is now applied also to philosophies, arising since Nietzsche, both linked to and critically concerned with the social conditions of advanced industrial society. So in Foucault's exploration of the history of Western systems of knowledge their relation to the emergence of the industrial state is exposed; in feminism, the boundaries of "politics" are exploded.
Deconstruction is used both literally and loosely, for the taking apart and contextualising of structures and practices common within all social analysis, and, more technically, for the analytical practices associated with Said, mentioned already, and Derrida, who I will return to in concluding. The language of this style of discourse is demanding and often frustrating. Words are used in special ways without the straightforward definitions older styles of discourse demand. This is integral to the new theorising and tied to a resistance to the very notions of "definition" and "meaning" maintained in older theories. The new theories insist, in the way they present themselves and about cultural discourses generally, that every discourse, every communicative structure, rewrites rules and makes sense within itself, even if always also only through relations with other "texts". Sequences of definition would be a contradictory entry to these styles of thought because meanings are seen only as "made" on the run, always remade in their uses rather than fixed in dictionaries.
This theorising denies separation of subject and object and is especially relevant here because a question of relativism underlies any discourse across cultural or religious boundaries. Deconstruction has also penetrated into ethnography, where cultural relativism has been a longstanding concern. Long before the current vogue Marvin Harris's survey of anthropological theory distinguished between adherents to "emic and etic" schools within the discipline. That dispute, between those centrally committed to unveiling internalised cultural meanings and others more concerned with discerning universal laws of culture and society, also clearly dealt with whether translation from the codes of one culture to the language of another, in the end of a universal, is possible.
Relativism arises inevitably in anthropology because it has been centrally engaged with translation between European and non-European systems. Derrida noted this in an essay on Levi Strauss, pointing out that anthropology could only arise in a "decentred" culture. As in the way that studies of Southeast Asian history foreshadow postmodernist concerns, so in anthropology and religious studies some of the major issues are long known. The central issue I am pursuing is related to much wider concerns, arising persistently in the interface between social science and religion, only being put with greater precision through postmodernism.
In the religious studies context relativism has related to the issue of "insiders", who by belonging to a religion find "sense" in it, and "outsiders", who in observing it see "nonsense". Derrida has problematised the opposition of "inside and outside" at length. Now in semiotic senses of religion, each religion is seen as defining itself as a hermeneutic circle--we understand them as making sense only when we participate, but never when standing outside looking in. Deconstruction could lead to the conclusion that all systems of thought are in this sense religious--engagement with social science and deconstruction, as with any cult, makes sense only when they are adopted. At the same time debates over the possibility of dealing with the mystical through social theory are timeless. New cultural theories resemble the theory of relativity and the bootstrap hypothesis in the physical sciences. Like relativity they draw attention to the intrusive consequences of every instrument of knowledge; as the bootstrap notion suggests, they exist on their own authority.
These movements generally push, as the movement within Southeast Asian studies had already, toward recognition of multivalenced local perspectives, away from the elite, high culture or centrist perspective which dominated traditional scholarly conceptualisation. Some writers are especially influenced by Foucault, others are directly influenced by deconstruction as practiced by Said and Derrida, even more generally relate to "theorising" of "texts" and "discourses". In the new scholarship there is refreshing intimacy with the subject and artful presentation. Rich new territory is opening up and old vistas are being reframed by excellent contributions. Recognising the plurality of actors and perspectives in every context we now reject generalised characterisations of culture and are more sensitive to the resonances of politics, understood as a play of dominance in all fields extending into gender relations. As prominent representatives of an older style of scholarship John Legge and Merle Ricklefs have both noted the extent of this movement and expressed their reservations about it.
The new wave brings powerful insights and styles of analysis I readily identify with. Thus in this context I am raising a critical point about precisely the school of scholarship I find the most to learn from. But my ambivalence is deep--especially in relation to the dominant epistemology. The new approaches are tied more tightly than older fashions to mentalist epistemologies, to conviction that "thought" is the only possible locus of "knowledge". Every scholarly work, like any particular view, produces systematic distortions in perception and thus misrepresents--this is one of the generally accepted insights of the new theories. While being religious is not a prerequisite for scholarly interpretation of religious phenomenon, we must always note the systematic effect, on representations, of disjunctions between the ontological positions embedded in specific subjects and interpretations.
In general sensitivity to alternative and competing epistemologies is a primary contribution of the new approaches. This aspect of the new theorising has been clarified in exemplary fashion by Becker and his colleagues in their works on Southeast Asia. Nevertheless the overwhelming presence of religious conviction within Indonesia is in stark contrast to the dominant philosophies of new wave scholarship and this gap deserves more attention. Older studies claimed to be essentially agnostic in holding that issues of belief could be suspended, bracketed apart from scholarship. Current fashion may be diverse but in this respect it is usually atheistic, admitting the intervention scholarship represents and at the same time affirming that there is no ultimate substance to religion.
This means that a methodological atheism ensures that, regardless of the private positions academics hold as individuals, only the voiding of spirituality can come through if works are to be viewed as "scholarly". Professions of atheism are read as indications of neutrality; statements of anything resembling religious conviction are interpreted as jeopardising scholarship--even by those who do not believe objectivity exists. If local practices emphasise a spiritual dimension, it is written out of the picture. References to "spiritual" are reread as "political" and local perspectives on local purposes are thus consistently redirected by scholarly representations. Limitations appear to be increasingly severe and the implications are significant. The philosophical positions of interpreters ensure a blind spot in vision and encourage an angle of focus running against the grain of their subject.
My key objective here is to identify the specific perceptual warp which results from this particular blind spot, to identify constraints on what, if anything, of the inner life is allowed to come through in new academic representations of Java. I have dealt elsewhere with ways in which Javanese people employ traditional analytical tools to mythology, drama and the interpretation of power relations. Here my objective is to identify implicit limitations in what appear to be the most liberated modes of Western theorising about culture. I am thus not centrally arguing for a theory--despite the theoretical implications to my statements--but aiming to expose implicit limits within current practices so as to invite deeper exploration.
Specifically, a systemic blindness to "rasa" generates a distinct warp in recent scholarly representations of Javanese culture. That term highlights the aspect within Javanese culture which most clearly brings out the gap I am concerned with. The term originates from Sanskrit and is connected both in India and in Java to highly developed local theories of philosophy and aesthetics. At the simplest level the term "rasa" means "feeling" as experienced through taste, touch and emotion. At a deeper philosophical level it refers to intutitive feelings, the sixth sense, organ or "tool" which registers awareness of feelings--indeed of all inner life. Rasa is a key term in everyday speech in both Indonesian and Javanese languages and permutations of it lie at the root of many traditional conceptualisations. As Javanese understand the term all people, including those who do not think in terms of it consciously, have and employ rasa, it is not understood as knowable only to an esoteric elite.
In Java reference to rasa is at base simply statement that we have feelings as well as thoughts, hearts as well as heads. Everyone will know that they do, only some will choose to prioritise sensitivity in that area. To speak of rasa as a domain of knowledge is not to refer to something either unknowable or available only to a select few. We can note human ability to run a mile under four minutes while admitting that only some athletes cultivate it. The exclusion I am concerned with in Javanese studies is analogous to conclusion that no one can run that fast because the person making the evaluation cannot. It ought to be evident that we can speak about capabilities, whether of athletes or mystics, without having to experience or replicate them. Intellect can acknowledge that it is the condition of the body, not the mind which is crucial to speed; in traditional Javanese terms it is the heart, not the head, which gives access to spiritual knowledge. There is neither contradiction nor mystery in speaking about matters which cannot be conveyed through words--it requires nothing other than admission of possible limits to the reach of intellectual knowledge.
At an explicit political level there is a chorus of emphasis, consistent with Said's style of deconstruction, on the ways in which Javanese "tradition", including our understandings of the place of mysticism within it, is a construction of Dutch philology. The connection between traditional elites, Dutch language education and both the composition and orientation of the leading nationalists has long been noted. The national elite has been deeply shaped by colonialism and does owe many of its ideas about local history to Dutch scholarship. Now however, indigenous mystical interpretations of mythology are being dismissed as fabrications of the Theosophical Society and the pervasive references to tradition within contemporary political philosophy are read almost exclusively as cynical manipulative ploys by dominating powers. The prevalence of such reading is connected to an incapacity, dictated by the dominant conventions, predispositions and epistemology of scholarship, to attend to the intuitive knowledge and inner orientations which form the ground on which traditional religious culture is localised, appropriated to personal purposes as a positive vehicle.
Social scientists are implicated, as postmodernism emphasises. Even in sophisticated and self conscious new ways there is continuing assertion of power, a hegemonic functioning which may even become most profound when the practices at issue are committed to exposing that quality in themselves. Concentration on one half of the dialectic, on the conditioning forces which shape human subjectivity, effectively represents Javanese actors as creating parodic imitation--either of Western filtered constructions of their own past or of modern practices. Present practices, if conceived as relating to "tradition", are discounted by precisely those who are most committed to foregrounding everyday praxis.
Thus significant communities of contemporary actors, spread across the spectrum of social and political life, are rendered speechless by a systematic unwillingness of contemporary theories to engage them. Through the examples of scholarship which follow it will become clear that "traditionalists" are often presented, when mediated by the very theories which stress engagement and committed to liberation, as ciphers. They are disempowered and made to appear only as victims because, according to the increasingly dominant rules of postmodern discourses, the dimensions within which they chart their struggles cannot be on the map of the "knowable" world.
Postmodern theorising has directly sensitised us to the fact that academic systems, as systems of theorising, are rooted in a wider social context intimately tied to imperialistic power relations. In the ways in which we admit issues into our discourses we are still far from open to the contributions to knowledge implicit in the sometimes highly developed theorising of non-Western cultures. Systematic and often highly analytical theorising is still categorised as "belief" insofar as root presuppositions depart from those implicit in our own thinking. The scholarly conventions which arose from European cultures thus still maintain limiting laws of discourse. Other cultures encode other systems of often also empirically rooted knowledge. If as human beings, not just as scholars, we are not open to knowing, even in ways that are new, then we retain commitment to what can be aptly characterised as an implicit cultural imperialism.
Scholarly practices remain situated within a web of cultural relations of unequal power, they carry powerful residues of earlier overtly imperialistic relations. Unconscious imperialism may be implicit in every reproduction and extension of any form of knowledge but academic models contain professed commitment to increasing openness in this regard. We frequently contradict ourselves in practice. Individuals are politically implicated not only through ideological positions or external activism, in relation to social systems of power, but internally. Our commitments are reflected in expressions which shape all our social transactions, including those present in field research process.

tradition and mysticism in Javanese context

The terms "tradition" and "modernity" have been deconstructed, so that the implied opposition between static or homeostatic "tradition" and dynamic "modernity" no longer applies in scholarly work. "Culture" is in all contexts changing and in contention, never universally given in undifferentiated fashion over time or between distinct classes and social groups. Related usage of the term "development" (pembangunan), closely linked to ideas of tradition and modernity in the Indonesian context, has also been subjected to a highly informed and useful deconstruction by Ariel Heryanto. There have been extended debates about the role of traditional culture in Indonesia and in scholarly interpretation of it. Tony Day has recently offered probing reflections on the issue in relation to interpretations of Indonesian history, challenging assumptions about a supposedly "traditional" nineteenth century Java.
But just as "culture" no longer means "high civilisation" in academic discourses, there is no reason in this context to correlate "tradition" with "stasis". Tradition can be understood simply as a reference to culture as communicated through time. In Java references to tradition are clearly a way of speaking about predispositions and practices growing out of local patterns from the past but not only defined by them. Twentieth century Javanese theorists, "traditionalist" innovators including notable figures such as Ki Hajar Dewantoro, have not generally thought of themselves as advocating a static "tradition". Generally their self conscious aim has been to draw on local cultural roots to formulate contemporary culture. What is relevant here, before we focus on the most recent scholarship, is how mysticism is situated within and how interpretations of Javanese "tradition" relate to the cultural politics of contemporary Java.
Mystical forms of spiritual life are contentious not only within scholarly conventions but also to any orthodoxy because mysticism relates to the undefinable, to precisely what cannot be identified with a "form" (not even with a "mode of discourse"). As classically understood mysticism is precisely what is knowable only to and through an internal voyage of "experience" and related to conviction that the ultimate truths of spiritual life, which all religions relate to, are not captured in forms as such, though ultimately they move through them. There are two primary senses of the term, both relevant here. In the first instance it refers to the "inside" of all religious life; in the second to practices and beliefs centrally focussed on activating direct individual consciousness of that "inside". In Java, following Islamic terminology, the term "batin" refers to the inner and "lahir" refers to the outer aspects of religious life. Thus "kebatinan" refers to the science or path of the inner life, the practices concentrating on activating spirituality, whether within or independently of the vehicle of traditional religious rituals, teachings and practices. Essentially mysticism is the depth dimension within religion.
In the context of the Indianised kingdoms and Islamic sultanates of Java, religious thinking consistently took mystical form, active mystical practices played a visible role through all levels of society, art and etiquette implied spiritual values. Even those who did not see themselves as especially religious accepted that ultimately access to "Truth" came only through mystical gnosis. This does not mean that a large percentage of Javanese have ever been mystics--it is only to say that within the dominant forms of religious practice the mystical dimension of it was given a focal place until recently. Javanese senses of what it meant to be religious, whether in the court cities or in remote villages, always used to stress the mystical, the presence of a vertical dimension of spiritual depth. Even if debating the extent of this emphasis we would note that scholarly interpretations have made it seem significant.
Persistence of mysticism has usually been attributed to Indian influences which interacted profoundly with indigenous animism. Often mysticism used to appear in commentaries on Java as a counterpoint to Islam, implying wrongly that it is not also an integral part of it. Counterpointing arose in part because students realised that profession of Islam coexisted with earlier spiritual traditions. Thus stereotypes of Islam, themselves problematic in the end, were transparently inapplicable in the Javanese context. European images of Islam had been conditioned by post-Reformation senses of religion which imply emphasis on doctrine and a core of rituals. Now it is understood that Sufism, through the tarekat movements, has been a vehicle for popular practices in traditional Islam containing, apart from extravagances, sophisticated and refined mystical philosophy. Thus it is known that mysticism has been a part of Islam, not necessarily in opposition to it.
More recently we can apply Gilsenan's understanding to reframe the place of Islam in the archipelago, by doing so coming to recognise it not only as a set of formalised institutions and practices but also as a mode of discourse about the inner life. "Islam" can then be understood as a discourse which has penetrated deeply into Javanese spiritual life, letting us see that many nominal or statistical Muslims have a deeper allegiance to the religion, through the ways in which inner lives and images of the ultimately "real" are shaped, than even they may be aware. Drewes had in effect applied this perspective some time ago, arguing that Islamic modes of discourse had a profound grip on Javanese spiritual life, more than those who emphasise the persistence of animistic and Indic thought, or a supposed opposition between mystical and Islamic, have believed. Now the question of whether it is the Mahabharata or the Koran which most shapes Javanese inner life can be separated from debates about the status of mysticism.
Current work breaks down the common earlier equation of "mystical" with Indic and "literal" with Islamic, allowing us to see the issue of mysticism as distinct from that of religious beliefs. Different religious images operate on one plane, the issue of the degree to which they are mystical is one of depth, of an additional dimension. On this point, that is in reassessing the nature of the interplay between Islamic and pre-Islamic spirituality in Java, contemporary readings of "discourses" have opened up a rich new interpretation. In this respect new theories have had great value, taking us into a deeper understanding of interactions between different Javanese religious modes. There is still pervasive adherence to religious views in Java, even amongst those who are not activists in specific religious communities and not only in one part of the political spectrum.
Religion is an intensely political issue in Suharto's New Order Indonesia, its significance alone indicating the seriousness of continuing commitments. Though committed to "freedom of religion", according to its own understanding of that phrase, the state sees itself as having the responsibility to guide the population within the religious sphere. In this respect its interpretation of its role, and hence of the connection between religion and politics, is closer to Islamic than Western models. At the same time it has continued to invoke, in many of the same ways Sukarno did, cultural and spiritual commitments it identifies with Indonesian and especially Javanese tradition. In the Pancasila, the five principles which define Indonesian statehood, and in the way it is promoted, as a complex everyone should realise more fully, there is a powerful resonance with "tradition", so there is a complex conjunction between political preoccupation and cultural interpretation. Western readings of tradition in Indonesia connect directly with politics, independently of the trend in social theory toward politicised interpretations of culture.
Disputes over the legal status of mysticism in Indonesia have been a distinct subplot within debates about the place of tradition, as mystical spirituality has been a key component in Javanese traditional culture. These debates are distinct from but closely related to the continuing Islamisation of Java, as new calls for orthodoxy and modernity renew questioning about the nature of spiritual life. Positions have been articulated in the media, through government policies, in disputes between religious communities and mystical movements and they extend into scholarly interpretations of the issues. Mysticism was at issue in debates between secularists and Muslims when situating religion within the constitution. Mysticism has been problematic from the standpoint of both the government and orthodox Islam, which frowns on many forms of it, so umbrella organisations were formed to represent mystical movements nationally.
At the same time "religion" in general is increasingly defined by and hence implicitly reduced to material forms--to phenomenal structures of ritual and belief, to social and ideological structures. Clearly discourses about the status of mysticism involve not only politics as normally understood, but also a struggle between differing epistemologies and ontologies--they are an arena in which the nature of what it means to be human is at issue. Strong forces are working to produce an Indonesian version of the reduction of the human to "one-dimensionality". The point is double edged, applying both to trends in the country and to interpretations by scholars who articulate our knowledge of it. The same issue is embedded in both discourses and the connection is not incidental.
Even being Indonesian does not guarantee that local lenses are activated in scholarly work. Claims to presentation of indigenous perspectives may be crosscut by commitment to Western methodologies. In focus and framing Indonesian scholars do sometimes present views non-natives are unable or unlikely to adopt, but theorising of mysticism is not often sufficiently problematised. The consequence is a reductive reading which allows mysticism into discourse only as idea, never as interiorised praxis. It is important on this point to distinguish the issue of indigenous history from postures in relation to mysticism. I am not meaning to suggest that to be "indigenous" historiography must "be" religious or mystical. However the fact that those qualities are pervasive in local socio-cultural contexts means that representations of those contexts must attend to the perpectives of actors who are. Far from opening up internal, local and indigenous perspectives, in these respects Indonesian scholars often exemplify the limitations of established Western theorising.
Hadiwiyono, a Protestant minister who taught at a Yogya Theological college, worked on texts, following the model of Dutch philology. His analysis aimed to show that contemporary mystical sects adhere to an essentially Hindu concept of self. Working with manuscripts, beginning with those of Sufis of the seventeenth century and continuing to booklets of contemporary teachers, he does in this respect give voice to what local people think. Apart from a distinct Christian bias, the primary limitation of his study is that he speaks of mysticism as though it is a version of philosophy and without sensitivity to the interplay of ideas and practices. In this respect his study illustrates a general problem in representations of mysticism. Insofar as scholarly work, especially philological and historical study, prioritises "texts", written traces of praxis, representation of human activity is mediated heavily by words, presenting only a fragment of practice. The consequence of approaching mysticism exclusively through literary texts is that ideas, rather than practices or consciousness, become the "subject". Often only the systems of thought are "seen" and usually as though in isolation.
Sartono Kartodirdjo has been centrally concerned with presenting local perspectives and in his major early work he does provide great insight into religious upheaval in late nineteenth century Java. However, the religious dimension is treated, as in his general book, as a social phenomenon essentially explained through social and economic variables. In his recent collaborative work on the priyayi he has moved farther from the constraints of Western conceptualisation. His early works demonstrate mastery of foreign traditions--his sources are in Dutch archives and interpretations rely on American social science of the 1950s. In the positive he opens local perspectives, fracturing the centrism of historical writing; in the negative and implicitly he specifies the limits of what can come into view through modern social science. Though providing a wonderful insight into the way wider process appears from the village, these works are blatantly reductionist. If in Hadiwiyono's case "the mystical" is presented exclusively through thought systems, in Sartono's it is reduced to socio-economic factors, seen almost exclusively as a reflex of other dimensions.
In Koentjaraningrat's encyclopedic study of Javanese Culture there is a sociological rather than ideological or political basis for analysing Javanese religious life. Following the logic of his earlier critiques of Geertz he distinguishes, all within Javanese Islam, between Javanism (kejawen ) and orthodoxy. He argues that orthodox (santri) and heterodox (kejawen /abangan) Muslims exist within both major classes, of village oriented peasants (wong cilik)" and urban directed courts (priyayi and bangsawan"). With remarkable modesty he claims as fieldwork only short periods of research in south Central Java. His choice of framework and the wealth and coherence of detail can be attributed to his native status, but he does not capitalise on that, instead relying on mainly foreign written sources, demonstrating unparallelled mastery of them. However this reliance conditions perspective and relates to a view of mysticism as a cultural artifact rather than as lived experience--the practical dimension of it comes into view more readily through ethnographic studies.
Debate about the domestication, especially the Islamisation, of knowledge have been active. In global terms Islamic intellectuals, as suggested by Edward Said's Palestinian origins as well, have played a leading role in questioning the epistemological basis of Western social
sciences. Some Southeast Asian scholars have contributed to the debate but most Indonesian academics accept the formulation of knowledge in Western social sciences as a given. Though the issue of "Indonesianising" knowledge was more popular several years ago it is still recognised as an issue and a few pursue it actively at present.
In the immediate post-revolutionary context liberal modernisers and radical revolutionaries alike could see "tradition" as a residual force, inevitably giving way to an emergent "modern" society. We see in McVey's discussion of the debates about wayang, the traditional shadow play, within the communist party that even at this level the issues were not straightforward. As the attempted transposition of Western Parliamentary Democratic governmental models gave way in the late l950s to Guided Democracy new interpretations of the role of tradition also developed. Scholarly works on "neo-traditionalism" emerged, pointing out that new forms of social and political interaction were building on deeply engrained patterns which often dictated the logic of interactions. Thus Benda spoke of the river of history returning to earlier deepset channels; Geertz showed how political styles and affiliations corresponded with longstanding cultural patterns, still imprinting on contemporary social groups; and Anderson demonstrated the continuing coherence of Javanese notions of power, showing their influence on the present.
These efforts to register the persistence of indigenous patterns were related to, though distinct from, emphasis on local perspectives in history. They relate to the arguments about autonomy through the fact that they drew attention to the significance of indigenous uses of culture. Cultural interpretations allowed recognition that Indonesian practices were not always appropriately read exclusively against the Western model they ostensibly followed. Thus through a recent application of this logic we notice that elections also enact ritual structures of long enshrined political process and are not only an Indonesian adaptation of parliamentary models. With connection to traditional practices in mind we are no longer so likely to judge process by Western notions, such as usually condition Western media views. The significance of these arguments is that they are related to an emphasis on variant localised purposes, to allowance that independence could involve creative adaptation and experimentation rather than mechanical imitation of a fixed model.
Recently there has been increasing weight to the view of political-economists. They generally put emphasis on universal forces, seeing local cultures as contributing only minor stylistic variations. Sometimes they virtually conflate exploration of culture, especially attribution of any explanatory significance to it, with emphasis on classical texts, elite high culture and conservative consensual politics. Political-economic approaches to Indonesia, most notably those of Robison, are influential and share with recent literary theories a Gramscian emphasis on culture as an instrument of domination. However there is no conjunction of emphasis on culture and conservative politics in most recent cultural theory. Postmodernist and deconstructionist rereading of culture is heavily conditioned by the insights of radical political-economy. Even those who focus on culture often do so with an eye to political-economic issues, the category "culture" appearing subordinate to issues of power and economy.
In this review my focus is on scholars who foreground culture, but it should be clear that I am taking issue not with focus on culture, but with those who read it too much in political-economic terms. More specifically I I am concerned with what is now meant by "religion" and, bearing in mind that representations of it also influence the context they refer to, with how the "inner life" is represented in recent works. Shifts in the ways Western theorising of culture accommodates, or fails to accommodate, religion, especially the depth dimension within it, are clearly significant. Despite growing sophistication in cultural theory there is increasing reductionism, albeit of a new form, in understandings of "religion". Translations of the works of Geertz and other Western scholars are used as texts in Indonesian universities and leading indigenous academics usually frame their works in Western terms so it is obvious that the politics of interpretation and context resonate deeply.

'rasa blindness' in new Javanese studies

In moving from general considerations to comments on representations, even if by omission (sometimes especially instructive), of the mystical dimension in recent works on Javanese society I am not arguing a mechanical connection between postmodernist theory and the works at issue. The questions I am asking, on the one hand of postmodernism and on the other of works on Java, are related but separable. With one hand I am deconstructing studies of Java; with the other I question both deconstruction and interpretations which are only sometimes related to it. Deconstruction, as a distinct movement, and the new Javanese studies are independently symptomatic of wider currents, each illustrating sharply, but in different ways and only in a few cases at once, a wider problem. I remain nevertheless also especially interested in, but claim only to hint at, the point where they coincide--that is in the specific constraints evident in postmodernist representations of mysticism. "Deconstruction" is a style of discourse and practice, not a theory that can be clearly pinned down--by its elusive nature it actualises the openness of meaning propounded and thus eludes critique.
Several of the authors I refer to are selfconsciously engaged with postmodernism or deconstruction, most engage with literary and cultural theory to some extent, others are more closely alligned with political-economy. There are many fine works in the same vein which I am not treating here, notably Jennifer Lindsay's thesis on the performing arts and Robert Hefner's book Hindu Javanese. Obviously my selection is guided by the issue I have chosen, and I make no claim to presenting a fair sample, whatever that could be. Just as I suggest that these works neglect what they do not touch; I unquestionably neglect positive qualities of the newest scholarship--both apart from and within the works I comment on. In any case, and without exception, the works I refer to add depth of empirical insight and theoretical sophistication to the study of Java and I am keen to engage with them because I appreciate that. Because I question the unsaid as much as the said, I am making what may thus be only marginal commentary and not pretending to be comprehensive or balanced. In every case an element of deconstructive practice is employed, though in some cases only as it is in older styles of social science.
In debates among historians about how to conceptualise early Indian influences, "external forms" were counterpointed to "indigenous uses". In the earliest historical studies it had been tempting to depreciate local populations, in effect even if not always intentionally, seeing early states as part of "greater India" and all inspiration as imported. This was related to a general and often explicit disempowering and devaluation of local peoples, a perpective framed by colonial structures which encouraged it. Everyone now disavows this aspect of colonialism in principal, though as I am suggesting not necessarily in practice. Recently Wolters has coined the term "localisation" to replace Quaritch Wales' earlier term "local genius" in reference to what anthropology terms "acculturation". Wolters uses "localisation", not incidentally employing insights from literary theory, to emphasise that imported elements are adapted by indigenous systems to locally defined purposes. Through these conceptual strategies the volition and creative power of local actors reappeared, even when dressed in borrowed costume. This gain may now be at risk in recent studies, not because it is denied but because its significance is forgotten.
In a neat thesis by Laurie Sears on the history of the Javanese wayang, or shadow theatre, her analysis uncovers a hidden voice within the drama. Sears' work is essentially structuralist rather than postmodern, but is relevant here in several respects. As is generally known, the narrative core within wayang centres on the Indian epics, principally the Mahabharata. Nevertheless there is usually emphasis on the likelihood of Javanese origins. Rassers, for instance, speculated that the shadow drama was structured around invocation of ancestral spirits, built out of presumably indigenous rites of initiation centering on the Polynesian styled men's house. He refers to Hazeu's arguments that in technical terminology and even in elements of narrative form the wayang is indigenous. Others, including Krom and Ras, have argued for Indian origins. Whatever the actual historical origins of the shadow drama, Sears has given a convincing argument that the authoritative voice encoded within it is that of the Indian treatise on drama, the Natyasastra. Thus the form of rasa theory which establishes the aesthetic constraints within which the drama works are fundamentally Indian. This is an important point and adds depth to our understanding of Javanese adoption of Indian culture.
As an afficionado of the wayang, relating to it as part of what it means to be Javanese, I felt something missing. The wayang is profoundly and distinctively Javanese. Javanese consistently refer to it, it occupies a key position within the web of traditional culture, ramifying profoundly through other fields. This recognition led me to question the constraints operating on Sears' thesis, considering what it does not ask. The thesis tells us of a structure underlying the wayang, it does not ask what might be especially Javanese about it. This is not wrong (why must it?) but does remind us that conclusions are, as critical theory tells us, dictated by the direction of the question. Sears' thesis directs attention to the ways in which culture is constructed. Structuralism predisposes us to look at the ways in which human beings are made by identifiable systems. Rethinking the thesis in the light of effort to attribute proper weight to local actors, I realised that my problem was related to a difference of objective. Sears' concern lay in uncovering formal rules; mine lay with what people used the drama for, with how it served their purposes. The issue is not one of accuracy, but of differing motives and methods which then give the issue of origins different complexions.
Another example also relates to wayang. In Ward Keeler's beautifully crafted book on the dalang (puppeteer) and wayang in their village context, Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves, he deals with its meanings in relation to Javanese "selfhood". The book is a wide ranging and probing general ethnography, not narrowly an analysis of the dalang's role in the more traditional terms which apply in van Groenendael's recent work. Though building on the brilliant works of Geertz and Anderson, as a generation of Javanese studies has, and clearly sensitive to recent theorising, Keeler's writing ignores key lessons of ethnoscience and postmodernism. He sidesteps and then actively depreciates significant indigenous interpretive frameworks and appears unselfconscious about the power of his mediating role as interpreter--his presentation of his own self within his exploration of Javanese selfhood. He adopts the magisterial voice characteristic of Geertz's classic, one deemed permissible in ethnography in the 1950s and 1960s but dubious now. Geertz referred to informants by pseudonym often; Keeler more often renders them anonomous, speaking for "the Javanese" in a way even Koentjaraningrat, in the study mentioned above, never does. The authority we engage with is Keeler's, requiring our faith in his experience of village culture near Klaten. This writing-out of informants, a habit of anthropology now under question, is in itself a disempowering, a denial of voice to those represented.
There is a more invidious disempowering within Keeler's work. Early in his study he establishes quite reasonably that he aims to focus on the social practices contingent on the wayang so as to avoid either "imposing alien judgements" or being limited by "indigenous exegitical 'traditions'". As both objective and strategy this is entirely reasonable, but it provides no grounds for ignoring the interplay of indigenous theories and actions within local spiritual practices. In dealing with Javanese interpretations of the wayang he discounts indigenous esoteric theories far too easily.
Keeler dismisses local interpretation of the wayang off-handedly, with the comment that "these seem to fit certain theosophical prejudices of both Javanese and Western analysts (or apologists)...". As he does he has a note to the works of prominent Javanese authors on the subject, Mangkunegara VII and Seno Sastroamidjojo. But does not take the time in his text to explain that their theories explicate "meaning" through exploration of notions of correspondences between microcosm (jagad cilik) and macrocosm (jagad gede), a framework central to traditional Javanese and Indic cosmology. That theoretical framework connects the representation of figures in the drama to the senses, desires, psychic organs, and other components within human psychology, making performance a reference to individual spiritual process. This theory is not the private domain of a few recent interpreters, much less of those influenced by the Theosophical Society as Keeler suggests. It is a pervasive framework of thought within traditional Javanese cosmology and has been explicitly articulated as such not only in India but also through a rich tradition of Javanese literature.
Ironically in his conclusion, framed by the works of Geertz and Ricoeur, Keeler first repeats that he has taken issue with established theories, those he has mentioned only to exclude, then presents as his conclusion, that: only when we treat the wayang "...as an experience of great evocative power rather than as some elaborate heuristic device, do we escape the intellectualist prejudices and expectations we bring to the study of texts."--as though this is his own elaboration of Western theories. He appears to be unaware, as he makes this statement, of the perfect match between what he is saying and the import of the Indic Javanese rasa theory, the same body of knowledge he earlier chose to side-step so quickly. He is entirely correct and presents his point lucidly, but in the process indigenous theory is both dismissed and then appropriated without acknowledgement.
Keeler has seen this point explained and there was every reason for him to note that his argument is a key element of Javanese theorising. Keeler's point is linked directly to rasa theory, Tantrism and the idea of correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm--as explicated within the wayang itself. The connection to the rasa theory contained within the Natyasastra, the text Sears refers us to, is not incidental. Keeler probably absorbed Javanese theorising while remaining unaware of the debt but the claims to lineage implied remain revealing. He did not look to Javanese theories as a source of insight into the dynamics of the drama, implicitly seeing only Western theories as casting light in this regard. He read Javanese theory as mechanical exegisis, giving it far less voice than Geertz had, and thus arrives at a very useful conclusion by displacing the Javanese he claims to represent. This tells us more about the rules of scholarship than it does of wayang--in observing a simultaneous discounting of indigenous theory and self conscious claim to lineages of Western teachers we can ask which interpretive process is most bound by sacred lineages of transmission.
A second observation appears more peripheral to Keeler's objectives, but is equally revealing. The term "batin", refering to the space within which "inner" realities are apprehended, naturally appears often in Keeler's exploration, but the term "rasa" does not feature. This is indicative of a critical limit in what Keeler will admit into discourse. Rasa , though derived from Sanskrit, is central to kebatinan concept and practices. Even the permutations of the word "rasa" in everyday Javanese speech are sufficient evidence of its status to suggest that it cannot be ignored. Neither the significance of rasa nor self consciousness about its relation to spirituality and wayang can be identified exclusively with urban elites. Rich sensitivity to word play is a characteristic of village oral culture and the word "rasa" resonates incredibly. In the Javanist view it is precisely with rasa that we enter the inner aspects of personal experience, the formation of Javanese selfhood, which is supposed to be Keeler's focus. The absence of this concept thus signals a crucial boundary in Keeler's considerations.
The discounting of indigenous theories and disempowering of Javanese voices can be directly related to an unwillingness to engage with the experiential and inner dimension which, his own analysis admits, is given central importance by his informants. Neither in this nor in my general point do I require what cannot be done. Engaging with rasa, as a concept within Javanese society, does not require being a mystic or an impossible translation. It requires only a readiness to acknowledge commentaries about functions or consciousness we may not activate or be able to evaluate in ourselves. It is quite possible, as the corpus of rasa theories demonstrate by existing, to build analysis in reference to the existence of planes which are not intrinsically communicable through thought or texts. Both Geertz and Mulder, neither of them remotely "mystical" in personal orientation, were perfectly capable of registering the place of rasa in Javanese thought. Keeler's exclusion of rasa, goes hand in hand with a process of appropriation, he claims as his own a weak version of what is actually the Javanese theory he has devalued. Both points seriously mar what is in many other respects a fine work.
Nancy Florida, like Pemberton, Day, and Anderson who she draws on, opens new depths in analysis of the resonances of tradition in Java. In a delightful essay on the non uses of traditional literature in Surakarta she refers to the disdain the nineteenth century philologist Cohen Stuart expressed for his language assistant's linguistic ability. The obvious irony is that Javanese now view Ronggowarsito, the assistant in question, as the last great traditional court poet. Florida shows that Javanese respect but fail to read their own literature, that the Dutch contribution to the formation of Javanese tradition as now construed was great and that even elements of the mysticism within it are constructions of dominant political and social forces. Her work counterpoints official versions of tradition to its observable substance, showing a multiple voiced countercultural substance in both past and present, one absent in sanctioned and oversimplified readings of a glorified high culture.
She appears to miss a critical double irony in the analogy between her own position and Cohen Stuart's. Like some colonial scholars, she has been acknowledged as more expert than the Javanese themselves and her comments about contemporary Javanist orthodoxy mirror Cohen Stuart's about Ronggowarsito. In saying that contemporary Javanese fail to "read" their literature she adheres implicitly to a notion of reading, promoted since the Reformation, which discounts the hierloom (pusaka) significance of texts. This is especially ironic because she is in other repects extremely sensitive to this aspect of the texts. However here her comment relates to a Javanese ignorance of the literal substance of the texts, her sense of "reading" being implicity Protestant, relating to "meaning" through what words literally designate. She notes connections, through the vigour of their critical qualities, to pop culture, a culture which incidentally remains religious. Some unmentioned others, of those in Solo who have "not read" Ronggowarsito but who position themselves in his lineage, nevertheless live out practices very closely related to his concerns about an age which has lost its moorings. Failure to refer to them means that even this version of philological scholarship also privileges texts above social practices by the way it selects what to present.
Both Ulbricht and Mangkunegara VII, to mention but two prominent mystical interpreters of the wayang, had been influenced by the Theosophical Society. Florida makes this point with the same implication it has in Keeler's book. If we reflect on the nature of the connection, and on what framing it the way they do implies, there are still other points to make. The Theosophical Society was profoundly significant in late colonial society, it became perhaps the only context where members of the Indonesian and Dutch elites met on equal ground as participants, sometimes transcending the unequal status implied by the colonial situation. It was also, not incidentally, an especially natural meeting place for those within each community most interested in learning from the other one. Coincidentally, Indonesian participants were also socially and politically situated to control the print media and institutions which shaped nationalism and underpin the contemporary state. The lingering influence of the Theosophical Society is amazing, running through contemporary Buddhist and Hindu movements in Java and underlying the practices of a whole generation who themselves went on to found movements which often claim to be indigenous.
Does this "deconstruction" mean that the esoteric mystical interpretations of the wayang are a "product" of the Theosophical Society? This is what the weight of Keeler's and Florida's comments imply. On the wider question of whether the mystical (kebatinan ) movements are derivative, the argument has never been pushed quite so far by Western interpreters, who essentially accept the kebatinan claim to being "indigenous". For different reasons Indonesian Muslims sometimes employ an argument resembling that of deconstruction. They see kebatinan as essentially a corrupt derivative of Islam and point to the Dutch as a source of the strength of mysticism, even if not of mysticism as such (it has a place in orthodox Islamic thought). The connection between the Javanese courts and the evolving priyayi bureacratic elites and the Dutch was not incidental, the Dutch did shore up precisely the elite which tended to preserve Indic mystical notions at the expense of orthodox Islamic ones.
But we cannot read convergence, between wayang and kebatinan on the one hand and the Theosophical Society on the other, strictly as conditioning. Behind Theosophy we do find Western esotericism, an apparently marginal current of the late Victorian era, diverse influences coming through founders and leaders including Olcott, Blavatsky, Besant and Leadbeater. Besant was a very prominent feminist and advocate for independence, closely linked to leading nationalists, in the Indian subcontinent. Though clearly European in origin the leading Theosophists drew from a deep well of Indian thought, however filtered, in their articulation of the movement. So when Javanists drew on Theosophy they did so not only for the instrumental reasons implied by a social analysis of their relations with the Dutch elite, who indeed brought Theosophy into prominence in their context, but also because it came from the same roots as the wayang and Indian influences generally. By the same I mean not only a common historical source in India but also common appeal to a similar internal experience accessible to all.
There is a powerful parallelism between esoteric Theosophy, with its elaborate sense of interchanges between adepts and spirit masters on subtle planes, and established Javanese spirit beliefs, beliefs which were already an amalgam of indigenous and Indic concepts and practices. In each of those contexts human beings relate to complex spirit realms and there is a similar underlying perception of reality. Thus the Javanese had strong reasons, within the terms of their own already mystical and Indic culture, to "see" the esoteric significance of the wayang. Choosing to explain those inclinations as a recent invention is a thin artifice when history, convergence, creative adaptation and local purposes are so evident. Once again I would argue that this choice of emphasis in interpretation tells us more about the scholars making it than of the subject.
Related arguments suggest in general terms that the Javanese sense of their own tradition is a creation of Dutch scholarship. Traditional forces and perceptions are now generally discounted in explaining contemporary process and present formulations of "tradition" are interpreted mainly as constructions convenient for essentially utilitarian political reasons. This point can be made unobjectionably and the political uses of ideology deserve the exposure recent scholarship has been offering. There is no doubt that contemporary interpretations of the past are profoundly mediated by present political purposes and lenses. I am questioning only the exclusivity of focus and weight of explanatory emphasis in these works, as Clifford Geertz also did in relation to a similar style in his response to critics. My concern is that in the process of exposing mediating historical forces, social interests and political purposes we are both neglecting and depreciating another dimension, of culturally and religiously shared inner meanings.
In an excellent article John Bowen has deconstructed the political uses of the term "gotong royong", meaning roughly "cooperative mutual assistance". The term has been prominent since Sukarno's rhetorical uses of it within the neo-traditionalist ideology of Guided Democracy. It is established as a key in the attempt to mobilise village labour by invoking an idealised view of cooperation and self-sufficiency in village society. Its use is tied to suggestion that in present society Indonesia's modernising process is rooted in and oriented toward recreation of the idealised egalitarian village imagined as "traditional". He demonstrates that this ostensible meaning is subverted, effective meaning, even in earlier states, always being closer to "corvee labour". He suggests that even in earlier contexts this idea was an instrument justifying state interventions at the village level, the idea of collective cooperation being a way of mobilising labour for state purposes.
Following a similar vein Dove argues that the mythology of wet rice (sawah) cultivation in Java has been consistently used to justify mobilising peasant labour for rulers. The "mythology of rice" is not only a reference to the pervasive myths and rituals in village society relating to Dewi Sri, the rice goddess, but also to the priority given to rice in diet and ideology. He shows that, whether in Javanese state ideologies or in academic interpretation of stateformation, there has been a misreading of the relationship between wet rice cultivation and the state. Emphasis in both contexts has usually been placed, as in the much mentioned Wittfogel thesis, on the extraordinary productivity of sawah and the necessity, underlying that productivity, for state coordination of extended irrigation systems. This conjunction has been seen as underlying the rise of states. It is also connected to the continuing extension of sawah cultivation, through transmigration especially, into what had been largely swidden (ladang) regions. Dove draws on important recent works, including his own, to show that swidden systems are more labour efficient for producers, the primary advantage of sawah being for states, which can extract surplus production more readily from it.
In assessing the recent"asas tunggal" policies of Suharto, Newman argues that they have been introduced by American trained managers inspired mainly by interest in social control. "Asas tunggal" means roughly "single foundation". The legislation enforces not only adherence to the Pancasila, but also explicit adoption of it in the constitutions of all political and social organisations. The legislation emphatically put a seal on the New Order's insistance, one present since its origins, that fundamental philosophical issues of the nature of the state could not be at issue between different social or political factions. On the surface the point of the legislation is to definitively establish the uniquely Indonesian nature of the modern nation. It affirms, not only in the constitution but through all levels of society, a common basis for "being Indonesian", one distinct from that underpinning many other modernising nations. Newman's argument, following those of Robison, is that this policy reflects not true belief, not a different culturally based perception of politics, but straightforward manipulation to suppress dissent and consolidate the power of the state.
In relation to the ostensibly mystical and millenarian dimensions of the Sawito affair of 1976 Bourchier argues that the mystical flavour of the event was essentially a smokescreen. Sawito's letter of protest, signed by leading religious figures, was interpreted by both the Indonesian and foreign press, as implying that he claimed the wahyu, the divine mandate which according to tradition is supposed to legitimise the ruler. Even apart from whether Sawito's challenge was based on such ideas, the implication has generally been that the extent of government, press and public reaction to the affair was a reflection of the strength of belief in the traditional mystical idea of power. Bourchier's detailed analysis has shown that distinct and identifiable interest groups were behind and promoting the affair, both in its inception and in ensuring that the trial became the massive public event it did. Because he has found that there were "real" political issues at stake, he implies that the ostensibly mystical dimensions of the event are essentially irrelevant to understanding it, as though these are alternatives.
In a probing essay on the uses of gamelan music in contemporary society John Pemberton presents us with an informed suggestion that its significance relates not to the ostensible aesthetic appreciation, but essentially to the "creation" of passive and controlled people. Traditional gamelan music is a key element in performance within Javanese rituals, not only in the weddings which were the focus of his research but in varied contexts. Pemberton's article draws attention to some of the ways in which the gamelan has been constructed by court interests as a vehicle for assertion of the primacy of elite culture. The regulation of interactions by the introduction of chairs to ceremonial life and the maintenance of intense deference patterns can be directly linked to modern reproductions of "feudal" status systems. The thrust of his argument is that people do not "listen" to gamelan, that its presence is a form of musak. What is meant by "listening" is problematic and the "passivity" Pemberton touches on raises deeper issues.
The passivity referred to is indeed related to the condition petitioners at Javanese courts cultivated through meditation, reflecting their deference, an attitude thus directly tied to "feudal" status hierarchies. It is also internally related to the passivity of ego, relating to activity of the eye and mental life, but counterpointed by an activitation of intuitive feeling (rasa), relating to reception through the ear in the body. When Pemberton says "passive" he refers to the passivity of part of the person; he fails to note the spiritual within the same moment not only because his idea of that guides him wrongly, but because that aspect did not register. In Javanist theory gamelan registers in rasa and it is through that that it is "spiritual music". Musicians did speak of the spiritual aspect of their music, as Pemberton notes, like non-musicians but without being precious. Their everyday attitude apparently seemed at variance with Pemberton's notion of what "spirituality" could mean, his implication being that spirituality is connected with the lofty and ethereal. He and other observers hold these notions apart because of their own sense of what is "spiritual", one not always present in the context.
The same disjuncture is readily apparent in James Siegel's important recent book on Solo in the New Order. It is worth considering his contribution carefully. Siegel's work is on the frontier of the new Javanese studies, he is a leading figure and guided more deeply than Keeler by recent theories. He makes self conscious use of Derrida's form of deconstruction, but thankfully in a fine style, without embedding his narrative in loaded metadiscourses. If Keeler's interpretive approach is paralleled by van Groenendael's study of the dalang; Siegel's deconstruction of Surakarta is shadowed by Guinness's study of a Yogyakarta neighborhood. All are useful contributions and I counterpoint them only because the contrasts instruct us about the impact of new theorising. The works by van Groenendael and Guinness present as traditional descriptive ethnography. Even lay readers will readily relate to them as description and explanation--their works are "modern" and thus, though notable in themselves, not at issue here. Both Keeler and Siegel probe more deeply into cultural meanings, drawing on recent literary theories and finding their greatest strengths in the depth of insight into the nuances of language. It is precisely their strengths that carry them toward the problems of spirituality I am raising.
Though Siegel's subtitle, "Language and Hierarchy in an Indonesian City", is clearly apt, his title, "Solo in the New Order", raises questions. The book does not deal with some of the issues readers might expect from it. For example, Siegel does not address the place of Solo within New Order political culture at any length. As a court centre, along with Yogya, and thus key site identified with "tradition" it is of special note for ethnic Javanese, especially for Javanists, even more so for Suharto, who clearly prioritises it. This aspect of Solo's role is alluded to, but not developed or probed. Neither natives of nor researchers in the city will find that this coverage presents the city in the ways they usually know it, not in what most would consider its typical or modal range of faces. Nor does the book deal, in overview historical or social terms, with changes over the past two decades or with the social groups or activities which reflexively come to mind in a stock-taking reflection on this city of half a million people. The four parts, each of three chapters, deal in sequence with: firstly, the Javanese language as "translation", enshrined hierarchies and an incident of neighborhood politics; secondly, "oddity" expressed in theatre, the street and the classroom; thirdly, money in relation to households, pop culture and the Chinese; and fourthly, the "failure of translation" in "odors" of death, New Order jokes and communication with foreigners. Coverage of significant issues is greater than is obvious from those topics, but as they suggest entry is always at a tangent to the obvious. Local politics is represented through one instance subjected to extended probing, not via overview. Islam appears only vaguely, through indirect relation to burial and local conflict, never being spotlighted, though it is a major presence in his neighborhood and the city. Mystical Javanism appears mainly as backdrop for what seems "aneh" (meaning "odd" and used essentially when a phenomenon seemed so to Siegel) around the edges of the everyday, though also briefly in relation to Anderson's essay on power. The local Chinese, whose shops and homes surround the margins of Siegel's neighborhood, appear only as contributors to funds for the nightwatch and as intruders, strangely being conflated with spirits, upsetting local hierarchies.
Everything is approached from the side, never head on or in overview. As a representation of "Solo in the New Order" there must be questions, though as "Kemlayan streetscapes" there would be none. The latter refers to Siegel's neighborhood and is encompassed in the former, but grammatically the title has a larger referant than the book. Because Siegel's approach is through a series of interlocked essays, excursions into aspects of Solo which became prominent through his experience of it the result is naturally shaped both by the neighborhood he lived in and by personal predelictions. However every representation is necessarily selective and thus these avenues of approach can be accepted as productive, as they also clearly are, of specific insights into the subject. The environments which he touches, perspectives presented and flavours evoked are nevertheless recognisable, relevant and productive of insight.
There are grounds to question the way insights are reached. The most obvious indication of need for caution occurs when Siegel introduces the notion of "sore". He uses the term as a reference to the state of relaxation he observed as neighbors stood outside their houses in that time of day (the late afternoon) characterising it as a kind of "drifting". His observation is interesting and touches a state readily recognisable to students of Java, or for that matter of the archipelago. Siegel launches his comment with an anecdote about his first entry into the neighborhood, when he stepped down off his bicycle in some confusion and then left. He places considerable emphasis on the way two women responded, as though "...one has seen such things before", on the erroneous premise that the event would have been unusual. As it happens, if there is any neighborhood in Solo where the event would have been natural, Kemlayan is it--one resident has had a business renting bicycles to European travellers since the early 1970's. The false assumption does not negate his observation, but does put us on guard about the way he builds his ideas. In other places as well the weight of emphasis on the "oddness" of foreigners in Solo appears partly as projection of his own feeling of oddness in the context.
Like Keeler, Siegel makes a special contribution through his sensitivity to language usage. Notions of hierarchy are naturally especially exposed through Javanese speech, especially near the courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta where both worked. Javanese speakers everywhere identify the language spoken in the vicinity of the courts as superior. Exploration of language enriches the discourses of villagers as well, and their play resembles that characterising Shakespearean English--people of all statuses exchange playful banter with resonances and theorising about the etymology of words. Extended development of vocabulary relating to emotional and spiritual conditions implies a sensitivity to nuances in that domain impossible in English.
However the most notable feature of Javanese language is its formal division into speech levels. Nine levels have been distinguished, three are commonly referred to and two are fundamental: ngoko and krama. The former is the language of everyday speech among ordinary people, between intimate friends of similar status, or of superiors addressing inferiors; the later is employed in formal situations and by social inferiors addressing superiors. Indonesian now operates in the Javanese context as another speech level, one normally used in formal organisational life or in exchange with non Javanese. In daily usage the lexicons do mix, borrowing across levels indicating a fluidity the formal systems appear to deny. Nevertheless, though similar status differentiation exists in languages such as Japanese, informally even in English, Javanese formalisation of levels is distinctive and especially complex. Javanese speech thus reveals nuances of both meaning and status which are distinctive.
What Siegel calls "sore" can be linked in his discourse to an extended commentary on what he sees as a vacuum or emptiness within Javanese social communication. He comments on the correlation between speaking kromo, the elaborate elite level of Javanese, and saying "...nothing of substance." In probing what he calls the "vacuity" of the standard, formulaic, social exchanges with foreigners or between Javanese he goes on to theorise that in such conversations people find their real pleasure in complicitous sharing of the secret that "...they both know without saying that they are not speaking ngoko"(ngoko is the lower level of Javanese). Occams razor is needed, Siegel is trying too hard and misses the obvious. What Siegel calls "nothing" or "vacuity" in Javanese discourses is related precisely to the transaction in feeling through which people are establishing and cultivating contact. In these everyday transactions the use of words is as a vehicle for establishing contact in feeling and thus there is a substance in exchange even if not in the words, not just a displacement. In his introduction to Javanese language Keeler notes the same presumed emptiness of content in Javanese introductory exchanges with foreigners--every traveller in Java is thoroughly familiar with the pattern they both refer to.
The words in these contexts function not only to purposefully say nothing, as both these authors seem to suggest, but also to establish relationship (even beyond establishing relative status, which is clearly one aspect of them). The frustration most Europeans experience in these contexts is related to their attention being focussed on mentally conveyed meaning, what they imagine as "substance", when the attention of the Javanese may be on a transactional relationship involving rasa. This particular disjuncture in transactions is pervasive, whether in the marketplace or here, in academic misreadings. Siegel notes, following Errington, that the embellishment of words is at its highest level with referance to a hidden presence of royalty as a structured element of discourse. The presence in question is termed "Ingsun", which is not just the "ruler" as they put it, but at once deity or "God". If "God" is not real this can only be imagined as an internalised status deference, but reference in Javanese discourse clearly intends something beyond that. At the "lower level", of exchanges in the street, there is also a conscious cultivation of rasa. In its most refined forms rasa is an avenue for connecting awareness to God; at its lower level it is a vehicle of contact between human beings who are imagined to have feelings as well as minds. The smiles which Siegel reads as complicity in suppressing ngoko relate also (if to ngoko at all) to a positive interplay of rasa.
Siegel and Keeler see a vacuum at the core of Javanese discourse because of incapacity to distinguish "ngalamun" from "sore", leading to a misreading of "nothing". "Ngalamun" means, roughly, "to daydream", at least that is our closest equivalent. In more technical Javanese terms, terms ordinary Javanese are conscious of, it is to let your attention leave your body. As Javanese view it the danger will be that if your attention wanders then your body, being vacant, can be occupied by an intruder--you can be possessed. Javanese, even children, will nudge an adult visitor when they "catch" one with attention wandering, to "call them back". This reflexive act is linked to everyday awareness of their own attention and, through sensitivity and attentiveness, even to where another person's "attention" is.
Siegel speaks of "sore" as though it is "ngalamun"; in fact the reflective and relaxed condition of "sore" is closer to meditative centring. The relaxing of the activity of thought, coming after a rest and bath, involves releasing of the tensions accumulated during daily work. It is precisely being "present", but without "thought", thus naturally appearing "empty" to an observer who measures presence of self by activity of reflective thought. Keeler and Siegel show us by their careful probing just how close astute observation can come to (and at once how far it still remains from being able to recognise) meditative spirituality as an aspect of everyday Javanese practice. Their perceptivity clarifies the boundary which makes them foreign to it and that is a substantial contribution, one never so clear in earlier forms of ethnography.
In Java the spiritual dimension is understood as present within, as a dimension of, the realities Western researchers have been conditioned to bracket apart. Being spiritually active and attuned through rasa, the prime vehicle for entry into the inner life, is in no way at odds with being in the midst of everyday activities, in a joking mood, or for that matter embroiled with politics and economic interests. Neither is it at variance with being oppositional or marginal, as the special political sensitivity attaching to spiritual leaders ought to indicate. To establish, as these new works do, that what we construe as "tradition" is enmeshed in political process and economic interests does not mean that the spiritual element is not there at the same moment--except by its omission in description. To speak of the intricate web which binds gotong royong, Dewi Sri, asas tunggal, Sawito, and gamelan to each other and to systems of power is to speak of the exoteric.
The esoteric side to all of them is not as though in conflict with or an alternative to the exoteric, it is another aspect of them, referance to a different dimension or plane within precisely the same transaction. The mistake has been to read them as in opposition, to imagine, as modern ideologies and theories encourage us to in their continuing reification, that there can be separation between economic, political, social and spiritual. Just as older works privileged classical civilisations and imperial powers, new interpretations give power to material rather than subtle forces, implying a dualism the theories at issue would reject, and to Dutch philology, Theosophy and Western lineages of theory at the expense of indigenous voices. If the economic and political logics we can discern renders notice of the other planes unnecessary, then our representations establish their own priorities, valuing what they highlight and voiding what they deny or fail to note.
The weight of recent argument is that Javanese remain victim of the scholarly version of imperialism Said draws attention to. Motives are seen as essentially political in the way we read that term. However artificial cultural constructs seem to outsiders that it is not all there is worth saying about them. Leaving commentary at that point is precisely equivalent to viewing early Javanese states as creations of Indian princes, failing to note the process of active appropriations by local peoples. Ostensibly emphasising popular culture and multivalenced indigenous actors, recent works often seem disdainful in reference to tradition as a dimension of present practice. With new intimacy, those we come closer to are accepted less for what they profess and aim to be. In one respect this signals gains in theoretical understanding of cultural process, but there is every reason to keep questioning the costs and implications of our endeavour.

a hegemony of postmodernist discourses?

The link between interpretations of tradition and mysticism and the confrontation of poststructural theories with mysticism is multilayered and implicit above. Foucault's sense of politics underpins my sense of the politics of mysticism as a clash of epistemic worlds, a conflict between systems which define the limits of what is real and knowable. If politics is a struggle between discursive formations, a contest between ways of defining issues, then the central issue is what determines the constraints or boundaries of interaction, providing a template for communication and guiding attention to what will or will not enter into discourse. In these terms the most powerful suppression comes neither through logical argument nor ostensible strength but through the capacity to choose what to engage with and what to simply ignore. In this sense "power is knowledge", not the reverse, and the underlying issue is always that of who or what determines the rules of the game.
Foucault situated academia within Western lineages of hegemonic knowledge. Taking his cue, we note that academic approaches, including postmodernist approaches to mysticism, are a component within the Indonesian constellation of events, academics assert specific claims about the limits of knowledge. Western scholars are disproportionately privileged through the freedom they have to voice (time and money for research) and promote (control of publication and education) their views and through the status given to them in the Indonesian context (including the status of indigenous exponents). Their preoccupations thus intrude vigorously, continuing, as earlier naive colonialism did, to dictate local trends. Academic representations, of whatever stripe, inevitably, as postmodernism itself informs us, impinge directly on the cultural politics of the people who are ostensibly subjects.
To inscribe a note on the margin of these projects, precisely the sort of engagement Derrida's practice of deconstruction commends to us, we must examine the specific metaphysical and epistemological constraints which guide these new interventions. The critical constraints are related to Saussure's affirmation that "...there is simply no access to knowledge except by way of language and other, related orders of representation" and also recognisable in Derrida's commitment to the position that "...we simply cannot have a primordial intuition of the other's lived experience". In the general wave of emphasis on "the social construction of reality" it is held that all human knowledge is mediated by thought structures. These views are held widely, dominating new forms of scholarship rather than being restricted to Derridian deconstruction. Derrida's use of the term is especially relevant even when not directly tied to the representations of Java above--he articulates key principles underlying those works. To him deconstruction is a practice not a theory, turning against every orthodoxy as it arises it becomes a form of guerrilla warfare. Indeed engagement with it here, provoked partly because some appear to use it as an orthodoxy, ironically partakes of it--it invites its own subversion persistently.
Derrida argues that meaning is always open, being renegotiated by each discoverer, defined not by a transcendental subject (the existence of which within metaphysics he holds subverts the Western philosophical tradition) but only intertextually, through the ways, within any given context, signs and symbols relate to other surrounding systems. These positions are presented as conclusions of logic but resemble a-priori professions of faith. The "religious" nuance to this comment is meant ironically, because the philosophies at issue are often tied to Nietzsche, who pronounced "God" dead, and Derrida's form of "...deconstruction is the 'hermeneutic' of the death of God".. However, the postmodernist opinion that there is no absolute, no "transcendental subject", and hence no final substance to religion is often held by those committed to it in precisely a "religious" fashion. In this respect we are not so far from religion as either those who think it dead or those who bemoan its loss may think. Insistant openness about meaning, opposition to closure and fixity, is linked not only to profound recognition of the role of interpreters within any process of interpretation but also to a relativism that borders on being absolute.
Mysticism begins precisely where postmodernism ends. The sophisticated Buddhist dialectics of Nagarjuna, moving well beyond dualities and negations, long pre-empted Derrida's deconstruction of structural oppositions. Though it would be relevant, I am not equipped to explore Derrida's engagement with Heidegger, and through him with mystical metaphysics. The conjunction is promising because cultural theory is moving so close to mystical theory--both place extreme emphasis on praxis and on the phenomenal dimensions (language, social and cultural structures) as mediators of human experience and knowledge. However, the mystical dimension, the inner aspect of religious life cultivated through meditation, is universally described by those who claim it as accessible only through consciousness which begins precisely where thought and language end. Divergence leads, as nearly as I can summarise it, to postmodernism centring on a nihilistic "void void" while mystical religiosity, including its technically atheistic Buddhist forms, centres on a "full void".
Realisation of the extent to which symbol systems limit human access to knowledge and a pervasive phenomenological relativism have long been central within the intellectual traditions of mystical religion. Recognising the extent of mediation in the same way, postmodernism points toward an "empty emptiness", seeing meaning as attainable only in terms of sign and symbol systems, as constantly recreated through the systems by which we have access to it. In contrast mystical traditions point toward a "full emptiness" which is accessible through knowledge attainable in our bodies. From the mystical perspective deconstruction appears to speak from, to and of the mental. Implicitly yet affirmatively it denies the possibility of access to knowledge through the body, a mode of knowledge, experience of selfhood and way of being which is thus actively depreciated, most specifically by being excluded from discourse. The final imperialism of deconstruction thus lies not in superimposition of a Western system over Asian systems, but in an imperialism of the mind within the body.
In this respect postmodernism may be symptomatic of rather than liberating from the alienation of modern life. Stressing negations to the exclusion of affirmation makes deconstruction disempowering. If meaning and subjectivity are only comprehensible as constructions of sign systems determined intertextually then agency is missing. Affirmative uses of signs, symbols and structures is ignored by an approach which puts all emphasis on one half of the dialectic, on constructions of subjectivity. Commitment to exposing conditioning forms appears to reveal that nothing but conditioning process exists in the end--if there was ever a snake eating its own tail, then deconstruction must be it. Postmodernists insist that we cannot get beyond the logic of communications systems and that there is no final court of appeal. Postmodernism is itself a speech community extending its rules, working implicitly to govern others to the extent that it gains prominence. By its own revelation the contest is not one of logical ploys with an external neutral arbiter, but one of power, reflecting the social and cultural positioning of actors. Insofar as it implies a subordination of Asian mystical to modern materialistic ontological and epistemological systems it participates in a power struggle between ways of being human, becoming a new form of "orientalism".
Postmodernists have exposed the myth of progress yet ironically often situate themselves, at least by their exclusivity of focus on recent Western theorising, as though superseding earlier knowledge. Emphasis on Freud's work as discovery ignores, as Jung did not, the earlier technicians of inner space; it is like speaking of Columbus as discovering the Americas, writing the Amerindians out of history. Deconstruction itself instructs us that Freud's breakthrough equally marks the moment when the psychic spheres, familiar to shaman and mystics, had been repressed. In the history of Western consciousness the rise of print media, the Protestant Reformation, the suppression of witches, the industrial reorganisation of social life and the narrowing of knowledge to an adventure of thought are all related. What is really new about Freud and his disciples is the context and gestalt: restriction of "knowledge" to the domains of thought and the related suppression, underlined in the witch trials, of the intuitive and thus also of religion, not in its entirety, but as a distinct mode of knowledge. Are we inadvertently agents of a new inquisition if we say that what we do not see cannot be there?
Those who see cultural reality only as text either forget or deny any other substantive positions, implying that what can be real is only the relativity they perceive, not ever even possibly the substance another does. In deconstructing oppositions such as "East and West" or "traditional and modern" the possibility of qualitiative difference is precluded, submerged within a view which puts all reality on one plane. While there is reason to welcome the new self-consciousness within scholarly practices we need to apply the same critical eye we direct at the margins of other socio-cultural systems to ourselves. If we honestly apply to ourselves the same frank critical analysis we believe we exercise in relation to our subject then we would speak openly of how we determine what questions to pursue; of who publishes what, where and through what connections; of our behavior socially in field situations; and other critical aspects of our practice. Though apparently recognising a plurality of knowledge systems, Western scholars in practice spend increasing portions of their energy engaging with each other, doing so through increasingly esoteric language. A mirror, deflecting deconstruction back towards us, shows that at the deepest level the decentring process we engage in needs to extend into realisation of the way our thought process is situated inside ourselves as individuals.
It is not enough to admit in formal discourses that we will modify our mode of operation or theorising through new evidence encountered. We are the instruments of our knowledge as people, not just as intellects. What we are able to know depends on how and who we are, not just on how we think or what intellectual procedures we employ. If learning about others fails to imply knowing ourselves differently then we have simply not learned. Insofar as scholarship implies growth and change we cannot afford, neither in the deepest levels of personal and cultural commitment nor in theories we maintain, to maintain a stance of presumed objectivity. In the end we cannot construe exploration of culture as an enterprise which will not change either ourselves or our theories. They are transformed regardless, simply by moving into new contexts, and we ought to be able to admit it openly.
Admission that within scholarship we are implicated subjectively as well as objectively is not new and does not imply the irrelevance of scholarly enterprise. The essence of scholarship is reflexive critical examination, refinement and extension of the domain and nature of human knowledges. In this era we are increasingly conscious of the cultural roots and implicit limits of our systems of knowledge, even of "scientifically" formed knowledges. Comparative or cross cultural interpretation and theorising involves a process of exchange, not just addition--generalisations cannot be defended unless the local processes they build on are comprehended. Within this exchange all cultures, including scholarly cultures, are implicated and thus implicitly, even when denying so, interwoven within a process of pervasive change and reconstruction.
It is no longer legitimate to maintain, nor would most scholars openly argue, that "objective knowledge" is embodied only in one tradition, not even in that of the supposedly "international class" of academicians. The constitution of knowledges is contextual, what obtains and is knowable is intimately tied to the situations producing it and in which it is used. If committed as people and not just to "scholarship" we cannot rightly maintain a posture of learning "about" others. We must admit as individuals and into formal enterpises that extending the boundaries of cultural knowledge implies learning "from" those we engage with. Every voyage across cultural boundaries substantially alters who we are and the ways in which we know.
The decolonisation of discourses on Java has gone half way. There is no escape from intervention and no doubt that the postmodernism we now cultivate, like the modernist wave before it, extends into every sphere it touches. Like economic systems, philosophical currents grow and move. The newest works are responsible steps in the right direction, in them Javanese appear in full diversity and everyday dress as actors on their own stage. But the rules which govern discourses remain part of a particular configuration of industrial world culture, the postmodern variant, that is also increasing its power to define the nature of being. According to these rules it appears as though learning from rather than about those we study is still heresy and can only be read as advocacy, notions of "critical theory" being reserved for Western lineages. Discontinuity is nowhere more evident than in representations of Javanese senses of their inner being, where local theorising is richly nuanced. The newest works which deal with this cultural realm are probing more deeply than earlier works did, but with increasing fierceness of adherence to a logic which represents, translates and hence helps make the Javanese inner world something quite other than it has been.

New: 24 October, 2021 | Now: 24 October, 2021

Freotopia

This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally hosted at freotopia.org/people/paulstange/deconstruction.html. The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.

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Deconstruction as disempowerment: new orientalisms of Java