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Article Excerpt
Introduction
Mobility is the great story of capitalist modernity. What this story tells is the epic movements of trade, peoples, cultures, and capital across the globe, movements that are greatly intensified in the contemporary "postmodern conditions". Accompanying these movements is mobility of another kind: a fluid and progressive sensibility eager to strike against established relations and cultural norm, one that impels a person "to move, to change, and to invent" (Asad 1993, p. 11). These innovative qualities are something of the modern subject. The key to the modern subject is empathy--or as I shall prefer to call it, cosmopolitanism--which takes a person beyond her primary identifications and view social situations from another cultural and communal perspective (Asad 1993, p. 11). The two kinds of mobility--one social and material, one subjective and personal--are closely intertwined if not causally related. One feeds on the other to produce that transformative work for which capitalism is renown. For the authors of The Communist Manifesto, the massive "cosmopolitan character in production and consumption in every country" (Marx and Engels 1959, p. 17) is invariably tied in with cultural and intellectual processes:
In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal and inter-dependent of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become a common property. National onesidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible ... (Marx and Engels 1959, p. 18)
What Marx and Engels wrote resonates with the tempting vision of radicals and liberal-democrats alike: the sweeping law-like changes, and the spread of secular and rationalistic ethos, brought about by capitalism and economic growth in general. The vision is at once dramatic and teleological. In the literature on Southeast Asia, we find also the tendency to write about the inevitability of transnational capitalist forces in transforming local societies and politics in the recent decades. Turning to my specific concern, in analysis of the rise of the middle classes, terms such as capital, class, trade, and the market take on qualities of an "universal thinghood", harnessing and riding on local constraints, and to which national aspirations must pitch themselves in response. In truth, as I shall show among the Malay middle classes in Malaysia, the movement from "cosmopolitan production to cosmopolitan culture", to rephrase Marx and Engels, is a twisted and convoluted process. Capitalist transformation is neither straightforwardly about benefits of market economy and its redistributive effects, nor is it always linked to the rise of the cosmopolitan middle class, who are all ready to pry open the prison-house of tradition and political authoritarianism. In avoiding the pitfalls of teleology, we need more than the rejection of these wishful theoretical views. In undoing the unilineal history of "the economic", we need what Benjamin counsels: a tracking back to, and seizing hold of, "a moment of danger" in the past that (still) beholds the people in their struggle in the world (Benjamin 1968, p. 255). In South American peasant communities as in contemporary Malaysia, capitalist development simply has to deal with those "originary conformism"--to rephrase Benjamin (ibid.)--which threatens to take the process to different and unpredictable directions (Taussig 1980). For any society, to wrestle with this "conformism", and only the harvesting of the rich fruits of "economic rewards", constitutes a critical moment in the engagement with capitalist modernity in a specific context.
What this means is that, as regards the subject of the middle classes and the "new rich" in Southeast Asia, we can no longer singularly focus on their "progressive potential" in either demanding liberalization or in articulating a more universalist, cosmopolitan ideology (Robison and Goodman 1996). Instead, analysis must involve the writing and identifying of the original, near primordial position at the core of middle-class subjectivity. It is primordial because such a position often draws on some foundational sentiments largely culturally and historically constructed, and as such tends to resist undoing by the "great transformation" (Polanyi 1975). Indeed, for the Malay middle classes, the engagement with capitalist modernity is a complex mixture of rejection, accommodation, and revivalism. At the same time, to reaffirm Malay self-conception and its sources is to locate the Malay subject in the tortuous ethnic relations. This, of course, is what gives such an enterprise its discursive energy and contemporary relevance, for the major ideas of the Malay fate--and of Malay nationalism itself--have always depended on the relative position of the non-Malay Other. For both colonialism and Malay nationalists, the construction of the Malays as the "first people" invariably entails the Othering of the "immigrant communities"--mainly Chinese--as the "cause" of Malay deprivation and more implicitly, as a model of cultural emulation. This Othering shapes the contour of the Malay identity and the highly ethnicized national politics. Most fundamentally, if the process has provided the state with the crucial ideology for the complex pro-Malay policy regime, it also tied the Malay subject fatefully to the Other. What is involved, I suggest, is something that resembles the infantalization of the Malay subject. All excavations of the depth of Malay nationalism lead to that. But empirically, as I shall show, the preoccupation of the Malay middle class choreographs a "structure of feeling" that attempts to struggle with--if never rejects--this primordial sign of Malay subjecthood. From this vantage, in so far as such a struggle is an attempt to come to terms with a nascent and contingent cosmopolitanism, it invariably harks back to that original understanding by colonialism and the fathers of Malay nationalism. As the cosmopolitan sensibility urges the moving forward to a broader national affiliation across ethnic division, it also endlessly return to this understanding of Malay marginalization and cultural and economic deprivation. What marks the structure of feeling of the Malay middle classes is precisely this struggle against the ideology which has brought them social improvement and political dominance. In this sense, as we look with hindsight, the positive discriminatory pro-Malay policies indeed carries a Faustian cost of moral compromise and "thwarted subjecthood" which now confronts their beneficiaries. It is in the negotiation with this historical burden that we witness the emergence of a new existential destiny of the Malay subject.
Malay Cultural Identity: A Rehabilitative Project
The pillars of Malay self-identification are officially recognized as bahasa, raja dan agama or language, the royalty, and religion (Islam) (Shamsul 1999, p. 18). Actively promoted by the state, they form the basis of national culture and the powerful ideology for ketuanan Melayu (Malay Ascendancy). In the often-volatile ethnic politics of Malaysia, the subject of Malay identity must necessarily take on something far beyond what the community would like to achieve for itself. Such identity formation must work out a definite relationship with other communities who as citizens also make their own legitimate claim to rights and resources within the nation. This of course has been the fundamental contradiction of the Malaysian political order: one of reconciling the hegemony of a single ethnic group with the wider demands of the national project. For all its historically compelling arguments, Malay Ascendancy cannot but nullify--and make travesty of--the central ideal of modern nation-state based on equal distribution of civic rights and obligations among the citizens. "For the Malay Race, and for the Nation", as the UMNO slogan is wont to proclaim, is a tight rope much more difficult to negotiate than what the party elite would like us to believe.
Analytically, it is useful to remember that ethnic identification is never just a matter of personal existential preferences or communal self-construction; it is in fact contingent upon complex interactions between ethnic groups who are brought together, for example, by immigration, urban industrial employment or colonial administration, as anthropologists have long argued (Mitchell 1956; Kapferer 1972). What this means is that Malay identity, for all its self-possessing qualities, is formed reactively, in response to and in interaction with other ethnic communities. At the same time, notable about Malay nationalism and identity formation is its powerful rehabilitative element. In a word, the affirmative energy of Malay self-identification is underlined, as a matter of principle, by an understanding of real and imaginary disadvantages and the urgent need to overcome them--vis-a-vis the other communities. Perhaps like any nationalist project, Malay communalism too must seek out what it perceives to be the sources of its deprivation as a point of collective struggle (Smith 1996). Historically, this perception can be traced to several factors.
Shamsul in a recent article outlines the origins in European colonial discourse which charted the uneven geography of "Malayness" (Shamsul 2001). He shows that though the key "pillars of Malayness"--kingship, Islam, custom, and language--had emerged out of the geopolitics of the Straits of Malacca, these were also crucially affirmed by colonial writers and administrators like Stamford Raffles and William Marsden who "fostered special feelings of friendship" for the Malays (Shamsul 2001, p. 75). To an extent, colonial texts helped to bring the term "Malay" increasingly to common social use. Raffles, for instance, rendered the title of the major Malay text Peraturan Segala Raja-Raja into, more simply,...
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