* Goenawan Mohamad’s speech at the opening of Räume und Schatten—Zeitgenössische Kunst aus Südost Asien, (‘Spaces and Shadows—Contemporary Arts from Southeast Asia’), in Berlin, September 30, 2005.

I

Let me begin with shadows. Among the notes I received in the preparation of this festival I found associating ‘shadows’ with ‘terror’—something evil, foul, violent, and/or repressive. Coming from a Southeast Asian country, I would like to contest such a signification even if I understand why it prevails: living in a world of contrasts, often flagrant ones, you cannot always appreciate the metaphorical ‘shadow’ as a play of possibilities, implying the inherent incompleteness of light and darkness.

This festival, organized in Berlin, in a time when people are preoccupied with the issue of what ‘Europe’ is and what it is not, can itself serve as a reminder of such contrasts, while unwittingly repressing other possible meanings of ‘shadow’. On one side the host city, the capital of a reunited Germany, is a member of the proud geography that enjoys being, as it were, at the Hegelian end of history; on the other side, the focus of the festival is a cluster of countries (even when they are represented by their ‘politics of fun,’ perhaps with a certain irony in the verbal use of ‘politics’ and ‘fun’), distinct for being sites of anguish, beset by violence and lack of freedom.

Anguish, however, can often be more eloquent. It is for that reason I would like to cite a case in which the word ‘shadow’ strikes a totally negative tone, and then to propose a different approach. What I have in mind is the words of a man simply called ‘Blue’, the fugitive in Orhan Pamuk’s novel, Snow, a work that echoes the current painful disparity between what is ‘Europe’ and what is not.

Blue is one of the most attractive characters in the novel: handsome, passionate, angry. Living in hiding in Kars, a poor Turkish city in the border with Armenia, protected by his lover and a group of admiring ‘Islamist’ students, his bitterness is that of an injured soul. Here is one of his virulent but poignant utterances: “I couldn’t care less about your European masters. Where they’re concerned, all I want to do is step out of their shadow. But the truth is, we all live under a shadow.”

A shadow, for him, is an oppressive entity, a darkly extension of something solid, immense, and awesome that shrouds something else and thereby preventing it from a desired degree of visibility. His anger or discontent indicates this lack, and his metaphor betrays a readiness to transmute the politics of recognition into the logics of sight. Or, to put it differently, language is perceived like a stage-light that beams ubiquitously to present, or produce, an identifiable self. Blue’s regret is that somebody else squarely bars the light from reaching him and his kind. The shadow engulfs them.

Examined more carefully, however, a shadow is just a quasi-presence; it is like a specter, one of its synonyms. It has no life of its own, no independence, no weight, no solidity; it ‘signals’ the existence of an object without which it would not be. Thus it makes a beautifully improbable story (Hans Christian Andersen’s, who else?) in which a scientist, working in a country in the blazing sun, finds his own shadow gradually take over the role of his exhausted and discarded self.

As I see it, Blue’s complain of living ‘under a shadow’ fails to address the basic question: Why should visibility be equal to self-respect or independence? Does it not underline the fact that the logic of light is also that of power?

The logic of light, which is parallel to the logic of sight, puts everything under my gaze, brings it into the ambit of clarity and knowledge. Knowledge is an attempt to get rid of surprises. It aims for familiarity by letting things emerge in a form in which I can recognize them. “Light is that through which something is other than myself,” says Emannuel Levinas, “but already as if it came from me.” Thus this ‘something’ that was other is no longer truly other.

Obviously, by wanting to come into the light, Orhan Pamuk’s Blue does not foresee that as an illuminated object, he will be captured by a pre-existing set of significations. He should remember Franz Fanon’s story. In his book, Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon describes his experience in being recognized by a white child in the streets of Paris: ‘Look, a Negro.’ At this moment, he encounters a meaning that he does not make for himself. The meaning is always ‘already there, pre-existing, waiting’ for him, inscribed in the color of his skin, his ‘appearance saps, invalidates all his actions.’ He is, as it were, reduced to a complete object, without the ‘ontological resistance’ to the colonizing gaze. He has no access to his own common humanity; he is fixed or identified by that gaze.

In short, the frustration is not because as a non-European one constantly has to ‘live under a shadow,’ as Blue complains; on the contrary, it is because one has to deal with the logic of light of the powerful.

For that reason, I’d rather see the realm of shadows as that of a play of possibilities. Precisely in their being a quasi-presence, having no life of their own, no independence, no weight, no solidity, shadows allude to fluidity. They bring to mind, as I mentioned earlier, the inherent incompleteness of light and darkness. I believe that the significance of the various Southeast Asian forms of puppet theaters lies in the fact that they underline shadows as a necessary part of human narratives. It is also a productive, rich, and lively part. In the Indonesian language, the theater is called wayang, which has the same root as bayang (shadow).

Particularly in the Balinese tradition, it is the shadow of the puppets that creates the enchantment of the play. In other words, the theatre negates any totalizing impulse coming either from the realm of light or that of darkness. It recognizes the fact that shadows only signify a lack of visibility, but not a lack of self-respect and independence.

In fact, shadows can serve as a metaphor of resistance. My theory is that in its long history of repression and rebellion, Southeast Asians have developed habits of resistance against the logic of sight by using certain languages, symbols, and signals; in various forms of verbal and non-verbal texts, the weak, or the subordinates, adopt discourses that are excluded under a pervasive domination. James Scott, in his Domination and the Arts of Resistance calls these expressions (‘gesture, speech, practices’) a ‘hidden transcript.’ The word ‘hidden’ may not be accurate, since they are not totally indiscernible. I prefer ‘shadow’ as its metaphor. Shadow makes the imperative of visibility a delusion of grandeur or, better still, of control.

II

Now let me speak a little bit about this imperative of visibility and its relation to space, which is a story of Southeast Asian modernity. For this purpose, I will borrow liberally from Henri Lefebvre’s magisterial work, The Production of Space. Despite its rather Eurocentric scope, the book leads me to a more insightful perspective of the issue of space—as well as shadows.

Lefebvre relates ‘visibility’ with ‘readability’ (or ‘intelligibility’). Originally, he says, space was produced before being read; nor was it produced in order to be read or grasped, but rather in order to be lived by people. Yet there are cases in which space is produced in order to be read. Lefebvre’s caveat is that one has to be aware of things ‘the impression of intelligibility’ conceals. He urges us to keep in mind what ‘the visible/readable’ is, and its ‘traps.’

To discuss the issue of ‘visibility’ a little bit further, let me introduce you to my two concepts of space, obviously inspired by Lefebvre, although I am more susceptible to the habit of dichotomy than he is.

There is a time when space appears as something conceptualized. This ‘representation’ presents space as it appears to builders of houses and fields, architects, urban planners, bureaucrats of regional administration, national economy technocrats, and social engineers. I will name that space the ‘L space,’ with ‘L’ for ‘linear’ (in my Indonesian version, this ‘L’ also stands for ‘lurus’ or ‘straight’, and ‘lekas’ or ‘quick’).

The role of this ‘L space’ in every society is immense, and it is primarily this space that shapes modernity. It is easily translated into design, letters and numbers. It is as clear as black on white. It is easily controlled and easily used to control. But it is not everything.

Another space occurs when social space is produced in history: space that is directly occupied by man and his body—out of which customs, legends, and various symbolic acts are born. It is this space that is called upon in recollection, hope, and anxiety, and as such it is not easily transcribed into characters and blueprints. I label this ‘representational’ space ‘R,’ with ‘R’ for ‘recalcitrant’ (in the Indonesian, ‘R’ can also stands for ‘rumit,’ or ‘complex’, and ‘redup’ or ‘blurry’’, ‘shadowy’).

The history of Southeast Asia is one of frequent engagement, crisscross, and negotiation between the ‘L’ space and the ‘R’ space and the people who interact with the two, either simultaneously or by turns. The ‘L’ space pushes us to draw a straight, single line. Here conformity and uniformity play a significant part. On the other hand, the ‘R’ space keeps bobbing out of the ‘L’ space’s complete enclosure. It is not always clear, it is an annoyance, and it is persistently at variance.

In the ‘L’ space, man manages differences as it manages a large theme park: a chain of mainlands and islands, an amalgam of dialects and languages, and goodness knows how many customary laws and faiths are represented as a regular series of units, like stages with the same backdrop. But this kind of management, for all its spirit of ‘multiculturalism,’ ignores the ‘R’ space. Supervisors of the ‘L’ space tend to standardize (and hence immobilize) the differences between various incompatible, even conflicting, currents that are obscure and volatile, and generally evade any classification.

Those who perceive the world as an ‘L’ space—departmental officials, territorial military officers, real estate executives, and official clerics —will never fully succeed in producing the space they aim for. For the ‘R’ space is alive; it speaks in symbols and signs, echoing memories and traumas, with the residue of history or its social subconscious. In diagrams and scripts, within the ‘L’ space people capture only some aspects of the ‘R’ space. A large part remains unearthed as forms of ‘hidden transcripts’, as shadows.

The vast multitudes living consciously and unconsciously in the ‘R’ space do not always reject the transposition of their lives into the ‘L’ space. At times they may even enjoy it. But more often they object. Eventually, in rebellion or otherwise, ‘users’ of this space are at odds with the ‘producers’ behind the grand design.

In today’s Southeast Asia, the grand design is mainly that of the imposition of ‘visibility’ of the nation-states. As I see it, the birth of the nation-states in Southeast Asia was symbolically marked by the construction of readability: since then we have had definite borders drawn on the map previously produced by former colonial powers.

For practical purposes, the marking has been faithfully reaffirmed by the succeeding powers-that-be that came into being since the revolutionary 20th century. However, at the local level, say at the border between Indonesia and Malaysia in the northern part of Kalimantan, people saw the newly imagined communities—like the preceding colonialized societies—not as a continuity of their time-honoured sense of territory. The marking of the borders was not the outcome of their lived experience.

This, in turn, creates a constant fear of centrifugal breakdown of the existing national entities, as in the case of Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. This also implies not only the need for a constant communication, but also the perpetuation of violence. Lefebvre, a Marxist with a highly incisive mind, is correct in describing how nations are formed: first through intersectional commerce, and second through violence. These two energies unite in producing a ‘national’ space.

Let us remember that there is a hyphen in the words ‘nation-states.’ To me the hyphen indicates a symbiosis that is not always stable between the ‘L space’ and the ‘R space’, or between a constructed structure and existing expanses of land in history. It is nationalism that attempts to provide a discourse for this symbiosis. It is nationalism that forms part of what Lefebvre terms ‘metaphorization,’ when ‘violence is cloaked in rationality and a rationality of unification is used to justify violence.’

There is, however, one important omission on Lefebvre’s part: he mentions only ‘rationality.’ In fact, nationalism as metaphorization reinforces the symbiosis between the ‘L space’ + ‘programmatic + ‘progressive’ elements and the ‘R space’ + ‘affective + ‘conservative’ elements. Benedict Anderson’s musings in Imagined Communities indicate that this ideology was born in the shadow of the religious fervor it replaced, including its irrational aspects: it is nationalism that generated a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, of contingency into meaning, of chance into destiny.

But it is for this very reason a successful discourse of nationalism is a highly uncertain thing. The space that is formed, as I have stated, is also a political space where power, conflict, and rivalry occur. An ‘imagined community’ is never universally imagined. It is always the product of the one that dominates the imagining—that is, the one who holds hegemony that is transient.

What is admirable about nationalism is that in its uncertainty, it emerges to break through destiny—while posturing itself as the voice of destiny. But its uncertainty remains. In fact, since the last decade, there has been an alternative ‘voice of destiny’ in the making: ‘Islamist’ revivalism. Its impact in the region is sporadic and yet visibly increasing, both in its violent and non-violent expressions. At any rate, it believes in the capacity of religion (and not nationalism) to transform fatality into continuity and contingency into meaning.

Even if superficially, it carries the language of conservatism, ‘Islamic revivalism’ is by no means a rejection of modernity. In fact, in line with the spirit of modernity, it tends to de-historicize tradition. To these revivalists, the historical sediment of the local carries a trace of ‘impurity’ and therefore has to be rid of—Indeed, this is one of their leitmotifs to barricade the faithful against the lure of what they call ‘superstition’ brought by pre-Islamic myths of magic and paranormal forces. In their view, the Word of God is a completely readable text—at least to them, if not to others. In other words, they share, to borrow Gadamer’s words, the ‘prejudice of the Enlightenment’: a presumption that truth is in principle obtainable by those endowed with the ability to see the light and command meanings.

Thus, despite its current position as a half-shadowy discourse, it shares the modern preference for ‘L space.’ The ‘Islamist’ faith is linear, straight and impatient. For that reason, I am not sure whether ultimately it will make a sustainable alternative to the prevailing discourse of nationalism and modernity in Southeast Asia. Every form of power, including the one exercised on behalf of Allah, implicitly recognizes resistance. For better or worse, the death of shadows remains distant.