Disciplinary Power, Transnational Labour, and the Politics of Representation in Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt

Y-Dang Troeung

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Stephanie Black’s important documentary Life and Debt contains a segment that focuses on a free trade zone established in Kingston, Jamaica in the 1980s. Black provides a compelling visual and narrative account of the processes of globalization leading up to the creation of this free zone and of the exploitive working conditions endured by the local Jamaicans within its military-style guarded walls. The Kingston free zone is represented as a site of transnational labour that exists outside the territorial and economic boundaries of Jamaica. Black shows how, inside this extra-territorial space, the bodies of the Jamaican workers become tools for capital accumulation by transnational corporations and how this exploitation is effected through the maintenance of a disciplined and subjected workforce. In these respects, Black’s representation of the Kingston free zone serves as a compelling example of the continuing operations of disciplinary power in current conditions of global capitalism.

However, in approaching an analysis of the Kingston free zone scene from this critical perspective, I am interested not only in what is signified about the power configurations of global capitalism but also in the kinds of stereotypes and tropes that are mobilized in Black’s representation of the group of Asian transnational labourers introduced into the Kingston free zone to displace the Jamaican workers. The issue that I wish to take up here has to do with the extent to which the film participates in an economy of representation that intentionally or unintentionally exports what has come to be an essential trope of global labour: the existence of a dispersed Asian labour community (and of a Asian female worker more specifically) that possesses certain “innate” characteristics suitable to labour in sites of transnational production. Building on Laura Kang’s analysis of the representations of Asian women as transnational labour, this paper will argue that Black’s representation of the Asian female transnational worker relies on two representational patterns that are frequently employed in various descriptive and critical accounts of labour exploitation in globalization. These tendencies, as identified by Kang, include a spatial-temporal distancing and a visual fixing of the Asian woman at transnational sites of labour, both of which contribute to the discursive production and circulation of the Asian woman as natural labour power for global capitalism (165-166). This paper will explore the extent to which these representational limits in Life and Debt affect the film’s overall critique of existing regimes of transnational capital, and will thus use the film to illustrate some of the challenges facing cultural criticism today.

Historical Background

It is useful to situate Black’s representation of the Kingston free zone within a broader historical context related to the creation of “export-oriented industrialization” (EOI) programs beginning in the 1960s. Swasti Mitter, in her book Common Fate, Common Bond: Women in the Global Economy, explains how the EOI model, encouraged by international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, was conceived of as a way to reduce the national debt of non-European countries—labeled as “Third World”—by having these countries sell their labour power and by having transnational companies from “First World” countries provide the necessary capital (7-8). A common arrangement under the EOI model would involve the provision of loans from the IMF or the World Bank to developing nations. These loans, sometimes referred to today as “tied-aid”—would be contingent upon conditions such as the “elimination of import tariffs that [would] protect domestic industry but hamper multinationals, tax breaks for foreign investors and the creation of free trade zones . . . control of wages, abolition of price controls and any subsidies for food and other necessities” (Fuentes and Ehrenreich 37-38). This international industrial restructuring had the effect of allowing transnational corporations (TNCs) to dictate to a large extent the work conditions of workers within a particular nation-state—exploitive conditions that were often enforced rather than contested by local military institutions (Mitter 9). This configuration was apparent in “export processing zones” or “free trade zones,” strategically chosen areas where a transnational corporation would relocate production in order to evade local economic controls and to employ a low-paid workforce.

As Mitter observes, “in free trade zones—the enclaves reserved for the export-led production of the subsidiaries and subcontractors of transnational corporations—nearly 80 per cent of the workers are women” (14). Mitter argues, however, that this disproportionate gender representation must be understood not in terms of any kind of biological suitability on the part of women, but in terms of an active recruitment strategy on the part of corporate management to compose its workforce of individuals already socially and economically marginalized, and who are thus more easily lured into accepting exploitative work conditions (13). The most common of these conditions include poor-pay, job insecurity, and the prohibition of assembly.

These material consequences of economic globalization policies are explored in Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt through the example of Jamaica, a country that has emerged from a history of colonialism to enter into what is shown to be in many ways a comparably dark period of globalization. While it is important to note that Jamaica entered into its first IMF agreement in 1977, and that it presently owes $4.5 Billion to the IMF and to other international lending agencies, a comprehensive summary of Black’s portrayal of the devastating impact of free trade, international lending, and structural adjustment policies on the everyday lives of Jamaicans is outside the scope of this paper. Rather, I wish to address more specifically Black’s treatment of the damaging effects of free zones on the people of Jamaica.

In the segment focused on the Kingston free zone, the viewer is introduced to the workers who sew five days a week to earn $1200 Jamaican dollars, which is equivalent to $30 U.S. per week. The heavily-secured free zone, for which the Jamaican government is still paying back loans, consists of garment factories owned by American corporations who “are not liable to local controls” (Life and Debt). These corporations are able to evade import tariffs on garment materials, which arrive by the shipload from the U.S., are assembled by the free zone workers, and are then put back on ships, “never in effect having touched the shores of Jamaica” (Life and Debt). Such impediments on local economic flows contradict the official rationale that the free zones provide an economic and social benefit to the nation-state of Jamaica. The inequities of free zones are also apparent in work conditions imposed on the Jamaican workers, who are forbidden from unionizing, and are frequently fired without cause. When the workers at the Kingston free zone eventually organize a work stoppage to protest their exploitive situation, a group of Asian labourers are brought into the free zone to finish the required work before the factory is closed down and relocated to another area.[1] In depicting the social and economic crisis incited by the shifting presence of transnational capital in Jamaica, Life and Debt attempts to capture a sense of the lived effects of globalization in general, and of free trade zones in particular, on the people who these social-historical formations purportedly benefit.

Disciplinary Power and Sites of Transnational Labour

Michel Foucault’s ideas about the operations of modern disciplinary power—and about the disciplinary ordering of space in particular—are useful to understanding Black’s representation of the Kingston free zone in Life and Debt. The first image of this free zone is an image of enclosure. The viewer sees a large number of Jamaican workers walking through the barred-metal gates of the zone structure, which is surrounded by concrete and barbed wire walls that extend beyond the perspective of the camera. An overhead shot of the free zone depicts a vast walled-in compound, complete with its own internal streets and composed of identical-looking factory buildings. As Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish, “discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself” (141). He goes on to argue that the “principle of enclosure” functions through “elementary location or partitioning. Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual” (143). Foucault’s understanding of the disciplinary ordering of space to enhance visibility and supervision is apparent not only in the architectural design of the free zone compound as a whole, but also in the interior spatial organization of each individual factory. The viewer sees the open interior of the factory as the camera pans across seemingly endless rows of women seated at garment workstations. Presumably, this arrangement is intended to maximize productivity by keeping workers within close enough proximity to invite self-monitoring but not close enough to invite communication.

Foucault’s concept of partitioning is illustrated by the anecdotal account given by one of the Jamaican workers. She describes her work conditions as the following: “You can’t talk to nobody. You can’t eat. You can’t get up to go to the bathroom. They’re watching you . . . It’s like you’re working under slavery” (Life and Debt). Like the “analytical space” of the enclosure, the factory space of the free zone factory corresponds “not only to the need to supervise, to break dangerous communications, but also to create a useful space” (Foucault 144). In the example of the Kingston free zone, we see that space is ordered to maximize the utility of disciplined bodies, which themselves become places for capital accumulation. To an extent, Black’s depiction here of a contemporary labour situation in which the intense regulation of physical bodies is more primary than the molding or disciplining of subjectivities suggests a return to an almost feudal system of wage-slavery. Thus, a strict application of Foucault’s concept of disciplinary society to an analysis of the situation Black represents would almost appear to be a mischaracterization. What Black conveys in this scene is the way in which subjectivities have been stripped down to bare labour within the space of free zones. In any case, Black’s overall representation of the Kingston free zone in Life and Debt lends itself to a Foucauldian explication of disciplinary power as operating through the ordering of space.

Other critics, however, have argued that such modes of representing the space of free zones can create a sense of spatial-temporal distancing that further estranges the workers within these zones. Laura Kang, for instance, discusses this representational tendency specifically in relation to the critical discourse surrounding the condition of Asian women within transnational factories. She argues that even in the discursive forms that seek to “uncover” or “report on” the hidden realities of this situation, “often these women workers are not only relegated to a distinct locale in a faraway place, but this geographical distance is mutually reinforced by figuring them as living in a belated moment of both global capitalist progress” (176). One example that she uses is the representation of transnational sites of labour that transcend territorial, social, and economic boundaries (177). While Kang acknowledges that many free trade zones and export-processing zones “have borne little correspondence to actual delineations of geographical contiguity or international borders,” the emphasis in critical discourse on representing these zones as extra-territorial spaces “has the effect of producing an estrangement” that detracts from the local and global corporate alliances responsible for the very real exploitation in these zones (178).

In Life and Debt, the impression of geographical remoteness is effected through the visual and narrative representation of the Kingston free zone as socially, spatially, and economically demarcated from the rest of Jamaica. The restricted accessibility of the Kingston free zone is illustrated by the security procedures that the workers are subjected to. We see that, once they pass through the metal gates of the compound, the workers must then proceed single file through another set of gates where they undergo a security check. The gateways in the Kingston free zone are guarded by “zone police” who verify the “special passes” of each person passing through the gates. The signs hanging on the concrete walls of the compound also work to symbolically demarcate the space of the free zone. One sign specifies that “all persons entering and leaving the Kingston free zone are subject to be searched”; another sign states that “no children under 17 are allowed on the free zone compound”; and finally one sign specifies that “no food or any other goods should be taken in the Kingston free zone for sale” (Life and Debt). These signs highlight the social fragmentation wrought by the free zone through the tight control of bodies and of the goods moving in and out of the zone.

The free zone’s spatial demarcation is conveyed not only through powerful overhead shots of the walled-in compound but also through the commentary preceding these images. One Jamaican worker describes the free zone as an “area . . . like a state within a country” (Life and Debt). Later in the scene, the viewer sees even more expansive overhead shots that depict the free zone’s geographical positioning on the coast of Jamaica. The following commentary is overlaid with the images of ships leaving and arriving at these coastal ports: “The free zone operates within the theoretical thing that is not even part of Jamaica. It is a separate entity. So the goods come in in a container and go through guarded gates. After it leaves the free zone it goes back onto the ship never in effect having touched the shores of Jamaica” (Life and Debt). As a “separate entity,” the free zone is exempt from the usual economic “laws or the systems that normally govern a country’s operations” (Life and Debt). While such visual and discursive accounts paint a picture of the political-economic autonomy of the Kingston free zone from the rest of Jamaica, they also imbue the free zone with an aura of alien remoteness that casts the exploitation of workers within these zones as removed from the motivated and material agents of power responsible for this exploitation. This mode of representation does more to circulate the image of the free zone as a broad symbol of globalization than it does to address or probe the question of what can be done to contest those corporate powers who are accountable.

This tendency in Black’s film to produce an estranging effect with respect to the Jamaican workers is also true with respect to the representation of the Asian transnational labourers who are brought into the free zone to displace the Jamaicans. While the documentary’s paralleling of the situation of Jamaican labourers and Asian labourers within the Kingston free zone effects a critique of globalization by suggesting the international scope of labour exploitation in present circumstances, this documentary construction also further illustrates the problem of spatial-temporal distancing within the film’s representational framework.

Referring to the Asian transnational labourers, one Jamaican worker describes: “these workers are brought in hundreds. And they live in what we consider to be a “camp situation”. They’re all housed in one place” (Life and Debt). Not only are the Asian workers brought to a place that is unmoored from the nation-state of Jamaica but they are relegated to a demarcated area within the free zone itself. The “camp situation” in which the Asian workers live functions as a kind of ethnic enclave that separates them from the local Jamaican workers. What is occluded in the documentary is a depiction or a discussion of the physical “camp situation” itself. Instead, the viewer primarily catches glimpses of female Asian workers in brief camera flashes showing them crowded into transport vehicles. The only explanation given for this representational impenetrability is one provided by a voice over from a Jamaican news broadcast: “We were not allowed into one of the main factories. But our camera caught a glimpse of the interior” (Life and Debt). Even more than the Jamaican workers, then, the Asian transnational workers are imbued with a sense of remoteness or mysterious other-worldliness that “privileges the mobile, disembodied agency of capitalist accumulation” (Kang 176). This tendency to “sight” the female Asian transnational labourer but to simultaneously refuse to go beyond a surface-level representation of her situation in global capitalism is a point I will return to shortly.

Disciplinary Power and Sighting Transnational Labourers

In addition to his theorizations about the disciplinary ordering of space, Foucault’s explication of the discursive construction of “docile bodies” is relevant to the understanding of the condition of workers within transnational sites of labour. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes how “discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)” (138). A “docile body,” according to Foucault is one that “may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (136). Many feminist theorists have taken up Foucault’s concept of docile bodies to explain the operations of modern patriarchal power in terms of the disciplinary regimes of femininity that work to inscribe an inferior status on the surface of women’s bodies.[2] The inscription of a specific biological status on the bodies of women employed in transnational factories is particularly evident in the corporate discourse that delineates various groups of women as naturally suited to the types of labour within these environments. In this context, disciplinary discourses work to justify the wage exploitation of the workers within the space of the free zone on the basis of a natural suitability on the part of the workers.

A clear example of this kind of justification is apparent in the wage exploitation of the Jamaican female labour force in Life and Debt. A Jamaican woman employed at the free zone encapsulates this exploitation in the following account: “a lot of pressure; they pressure you a lot; they tell you you have to go fast fast fast . . . We have to work five days a week to get 1200 Jamaican dollars, which [is] valued 30 US dollars” (Life and Debt). In addition to being economically exploited and physically over-worked, the Jamaican workers are forbidden from unionizing. The requirement of the Jamaican workers to perform repetitive and demanding physical labour under military style conditions, to accept unfair wages, and to be forbidden from assembling are strategically planned measures of control implemented on the part of management to maintain a docile and subjected workforce.

These overt disciplinary measures are conjoined with the discourses of global capitalism that work to discipline the subjectivities of the Jamaican workers. One of the male commentators explains why the free zones were initially established in Jamaica: “The free zones came into Jamaica in the 1980s. The US government decided on a Caribbean-based initiative with the idea of creating a lot of employment at the lower level bases” (Life and Debt; my emphasis). Implicit in this rationale is the attribution of inferior biological characteristics on the bodies of the Jamaica labourers. “Lower level” of course implies the level of un-skilled or semi-skilled labour—designations which are attached to the region and the Jamaican workers as a priori characteristics rather than as historically specific effects of global capitalism. The “low-level” Jamaican workforce, which is shown to be overwhelming female in proportion, becomes a naturalized attribute of the region rather than one that is discursively prescribed. This gender and racial encoding of bodies as means of justifying labour exploitation becomes even more apparent in Life and Debt when we see that not only are transnational corporations prepared to “move the production to areas that are cheaper for them” but they are also prepared to bring in “cheaper” workforces to production areas.

Before returning to a specific discussion of the film, I would like to situate Black’s representation of the Asian transnational workforce in Life and Debt in relation to other texts that have dealt with this topic. In her study of Malay women workers in transnational factories, Aihwa Ong identifies the often-paired traits of “nimble fingers” and “slow wit” that are assigned to Asian women workers in transnational factories. Ong quotes a Malaysian investment brochure to illustrate the management literature that is typical of this discourse: “Her hands are small and she works fast with extreme care. Who, therefore could be better qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a bench assembly production line than the oriental girl?” (qtd. in Ong 152). The infantilizing label of “oriental girl” implies passivity and docility, as if these traits were naturally inherent to the Asian female worker. Laura Kang notes that to the extent that such descriptions about the youth of Asian women workers are accurate, they seldom convey the fact that “the heavy concentration of young female workers is the effect of a consciously pursued recruitment, hiring, and promotion strategy on the part of the firms” (192). In addition to the emphasis on youth, the justificatory logic at work in the Malaysian investment brochure is based on ascribing the biological traits of dexterity and super-human levels of patience to the female Asian assembly-line worker. Semi-skilled labour somehow becomes something that the Asian women worker is naturally suited for, when in effect these are “feminine” traits that Malay peasant women are required to adopt in order to gain employment (Ong 152). These examples illustrate the way in which the bodies of Asian female workers are encoded with the inherent characteristics of passivity, docility, dexterity, and infinite patience to perform assembly-line labour.

To an extent, the appearance of Asian workers in Life and Debt mobilizes this stereotypical trope of the Asian female labourer. I have already discussed the representational problematics pertaining to the spatial and temporal distancing of the Asian transnational workers in the Kingston free zone. This emphasis on remoteness is combined with an equally problematic tendency to represent the female Asian transnational worker as a natural embodiment of labour power for global capitalism. In this respect, Black’s representation bears some similarity to the representational patterns employed in many texts that aim to expose and criticize the deployment of Asian women as transnational labour. Laura Kang makes this claim:

The unexamined identification of “Asian women” with its assured aura of both racial commonality and continental distinction could work to reinforce . . . naturalizing figurations. While these laboring subjects are granted a degree of socioeconomic agency, they are figured as enabling corporate exploitation by “accepting” or being “willing” to work under such terms and conditions. The inferior conditions under which their bodies and labour power are mobilized are rendered as inevitable even for those who would vociferously decry their exploitation.” (191)

Without denying the importance of exposing global inequities, Kang is concerned with unexamined assumptions about Asian women workers that get circulated in “the most well-intentioned representations” (165). She argues that in these texts there is often a visual or textual “fixation” on the Asian female working body that eclipses “a larger scene of transnational coordination” (164). Rather than interrogating the historical and material specificities of this figure, those texts that are avowedly the most critical of the exploitation of transnational workers in global capitalism often fail to go beyond a certain level of iconic fixity in their representation of the female Asian transnational worker.

It is through this kind of visual fixation that, I would argue, the Asian female working body is figured in Life and Debt. The first image that we see of the group of Asian transnational labourers brought into the Kingston free zone—rumored to be 800 in number—is a close-up of a young Asian women in the window a transport vehicle. She appears to be a teenager of no more than seventeen years of age. Her small hands are held beneath her chin, and she stares right at the camera with an almost expressionless gaze. The camera follows her moving image in the transport vehicle. She remains an anonymous figure in the documentary. If, as Laura Kang argues, the representation of a faceless Asian women bent over a tiny Ricoh watch part has become “one of the emblematic images of the global assembly line,” (164) then I would suggest that the representation of a young Asian girl being shuttled to an undisclosed work site has arguably become an emblematic image of transnational labour under global capitalism. While this image of the Asian girl in the window may be visually compelling, it conveys little about this subject’s historical materiality. From where exactly, and under what circumstances was she, and the other 800 Asian labourers, displaced? What kinds of conditions were these labourers forced to endure once inside the free zone? What network of global alliances were responsible for bringing them there? These important questions are elided in Black’s documentary composition of the Kingston free zone sequence. Admittedly, there are narrative limits to the film, and Life and Debt is clearly a film in the main about Jamaica and about the lived effects of globalization on Jamaicans; thus, a full account of the story of the Asian transnational labourers in Jamaica cannot realistically be expected from the film. This being said, however, I question how well the film treads that crucial line between including narrative emplotments that buttress the overall politics of the film and mobilizing stereotypical images and tropes that undermine its political objectives in the end.

One aspect of the film that suggests the latter of these two possibilities is the film’s uncritical portrayal of “racial commonality and continental distinction” among the Asian transnational workers (Kang 191). In Life and Debt, one female Jamaican worker comments, “they [the Asian workers in the free zone] don’t object to nothing because they are getting paid in US.” While such statements belie the Jamaican women’s internalization of the gender and racial stereotypes about Asian workers—stereotypes about obedience and willingness that have long been dessiminated by global capitalists as a way to attract foreign investment—I wonder whether Black’s representational patterns serve to dismantle or to reinscribe such essentialist stereotypes. Near the end of the free zone sequence, a male commentator who is presumably involved in the economic initiatives of the local government, states: “Obviously we’re trying to provide employment for Jamaicans, not Asians. They claim that they couldn’t get the people in Jamaica with the skill level they needed for that job” (Life and Debt; my emphasis). The film’s naming of the 800 transported labourers simply as “Asians” is highly problematic in that it ascribes one homogenous label to a population of over 3 billion people.

Furthermore, while this troubling claim that the Asian workers are more naturally suited to semi-skilled labour than the Jamaicans is clearly a motivated figuration disseminated by management, the discursive problematic in Life and Debt resides in the fact that this stereotypical claim is not clearly dispelled. What is shown instead is an image of a group of smiling Asian women in the back of a transport vehicle. The depiction of their smiling, giggling demeanor is reminiscent of the characterization of the “Oriental girl” in the Malaysian investment brochure. Also, the context of this shot suggests that the Asian workers are now being transported out of the free zone after its closure. The implication is that these workers are now happily moving off to the next transnational production site to be exploited all over again. The depiction of the smiles on the women’s faces mobilizes the stereotype of the Asian transnational worker as bearers of an innate indifference to hardship, particularly when it comes to matters of transnational relocation to work. Black’s representational pattern is symptomatic of the tendency in other discursive texts to uncritically circulate the image of the Asian worker, and the Asian woman worker in particular, as a naturalized embodiment of transnational labour.

Granted the film’s limitations in this respect, Black’s representation of the Asian transnational labourers fits in with the overall narrative of Life and Debt, which shows a relentless process of “accumulation through dispossession”[3] at every scale of Jamaican society: independent businesses, farmers, labourers. In examining the mechanisms of this process and in mapping Jamaica’s place within the broader circuits of power in global capitalism, Black depicts the Asian transnational workers as a part of this general process that will stop at nothing to further the ends of capital accumulation. In the Kingston free zone sequence, Black shows how labour power has become commodified to the point that even $30 a week in wages for the Jamaicans is too much for the system to accommodate. It has to bring in workers that it can exploit even more. The appearance of the Asian workers in this portrait of the contemporary labour situation highlights another aspect of Harvey’s notion of the process of accumulation through dispossession, which involves the “displacement of peasant populations and the formation of a landless proletariat” (145). The film shows how the Asian transnational workers have become a constitutive component of the global mass of “landless proletariat[s]”—workers whose mobility sadly places them at the bottom of the global system of transnational labour, and thus most vulnerable to its exploitive effects. Thus, while there are some significant limits in Life and Debt with respect to the representational strategies that I have already discussed, the film’s depiction of an indifferent exchange of labouring bodies in the Kingston free zone at the hands of an inhumane system of exploitation reinforces the film’s overall critique of globalization.

Conclusion

Unlike any other periodizing concept, the concept of globalization has dominated critical discussions in both academic and public discourse. In critical theory, the trend in analyzing the complex transformations that have taken place under globalization has tended to emphasize an emergent cultural dominant characterized by “new” forms of capitalism that have replaced the disciplinary orderings of the past.[4] Without denying the importance of such analytical approaches, this paper has attempted to trouble the notion that capitalist discipline has given way entirely to newer, more diffused forms of capitalist domination by examining textual and visual representations of sites of transnational labour and of transnational labourers. In particular, the analysis of the Kingston free zone sequence in Life and Debt highlights the continuing collusion of capitalism and disciplinary power under globalization.

Stephanie Black’s critically acclaimed documentary can be read not only as a discursive text that compellingly examines the lived effects of globalization and free trade zones on the citizens of Jamaica, but also as one that is itself partially disciplined by the discourses of global capitalism. I have argued that in its representational composition of the female Asian transnational worker, Life and Debt may inadvertently re-inscribe, rather than contest, certain ideological notions about the role of this figure in the economy of transnational labour. To a certain degree, then, Black’s documentary participates in a wider discursive field of sympathetic texts that, as Laura Kang identifies, implicitly privilege the logic of “transnational capital over and against the ‘natural’ Asian female working [body]” (187). Despite its representational limits, however, the film’s inclusion of the Asian transnational workers in the construction of the Kingston free zone sequence reinforces the film’s overall critique of existing regimes of transnational capital by showing how labouring bodies become exchanged and exploited within these regimes. The broader question that Life and Debt raises is the question of how to engage in cultural criticism that grapples with the discourse of neo-liberalism without affirming the inevitability of its goals. As critics and producers of public discourse, we must be attendant not only to the multiple forms of class and gender exploitation taking place in globalization, but also to the modes visualization, description, and critique that we use to convey present circumstances.

Notes
[1] It is telling that such displacements of Asian peoples under global capitalism bear an uncanny parallelism to the forced migrations of Asian indentured labourers to the Caribbean during the colonial period. See Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), 184-87, for a discussion of the history of Chinese indentured labour in Jamaica.
[2] See Sandra Bartky, "Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power," in Feminism and Foucault: Paths of Resistance. Ed. Lee Quinby and Irene Diamond. (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988), pp. 61-86.
[3] See David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford UP, 2005) for a full account of his notion of “accumulation by dispossession.”
[4] See Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscripts on the Society of Control” October 59 (1992): 3-7; Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2006); James Paul Gee, Glynda Hull, and Colin Lankshear, The New Work Order: Behind the Language of New Capitalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).

Works Cited
Bartky, Sandra Lee. "Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” Feminism and Foucault: Paths of Resistance. Ed. Lee Quinby and Irene Diamond. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988.
Boltanski, Luc and Ève Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Gregory Elliot.New York: Verson, 2006.
Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October 59 (1992): 3-7.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans A. Sheridan. Oxford, England: Vintage, 1979.
Fuentes, Annette, and Barbara Ehrenreich. Women in the Global Factory. INC Pamphlet # 2. Boston: South End Press, 1983.
Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
Gee, James Paul, Glynda Hull, and Colin Lankshear. The New Work Order: Behind the Language of New Capitalism. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996.
Kang, Laura. Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women. Duke UP, 2002.
Life and Debt. Dir. Stephanie Black. Narr. Jamaica Kincaid. Tuff Gong, 2001.
Look Lai, Walton. Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.
Mitter, Swasti. Common Fate, Common Bond: Women in the Global Economy. London: Pluto Press, 1986.
Ong, Aihwa. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

‘Lovers and Political Movements’, A Review of Jeff Sparrow, Communism: A Love Story

Deborah Jordan

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Jeff Sparrow, Communism: A Love Story (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007).

Jeff Sparrow’s Communism: A Love Story is an engaging intervention into historical and literary global debates about love and activism, and is a new development in Australian biography. Written with an enviable talent for dramatic narrative, Sparrow will find a new generation of readers for the life story of this rebel and his commitment to an international/transnational/global movement: communism. Guido Carlo Luigi Baracchi (1887-1975) has been waiting in the wings, especially since the late 1960s with the advent of New Left criticism, and we now have him centre stage, his life and loves, political thinking and praxis. Communism: A Love Story raises questions about the relationships between lovers and political movements; shared intellectual passions and radical sexual politics; about being centre stage and off in the margins; and the function of the Soviet Union and its transformation of communism into ideologies in the service of power. Sparrow portrays Baracchi as a leading Marxist theorist of the Australian left in the period after the Great War, and this large claim makes this new biography particularly significant.

Born in 1887 in Melbourne to a renowned astronomer and meteorologist father, Baracchi was one of the generation that grew up in the radical tide of Australia’s white democracy. As adolescents they saw the new century and Australia’s federation; some of them took up the challenge of Bernard O’Dowd, the prophet and militant poet, to partake of the dawning of the new age. In student circles, literary circles, free religious circles, and Marxist grouplets a number of young men and women including Lesbia Harford and Esmond Keogh, Percy Earsman, Percy Laidler, Christian Jollie Smith and Katharine Prichard challenged, explored and resisted the previous generation’s Victorianism, its religious rituals and its Puritanism. What matter that Baracchi stepped out of the schoolboy networks of the elite private grammar school in which he was educated, did not sit for his exams at the University of Melbourne or was arrested and served a prison sentence, when Australia could be ‘an augury of a new democracy’ or the ‘Delos of a coming sun-God’s race’.[1] Baracchi’s education, like Esmonde Higgins’ and Vance Palmer’s, continued in London through close contact with Fabian and guild socialist ideas, and the London School of Economics. The heady days before the implosion of the Great War are explored by Sparrow to frame Baracchi’s intellectual development. When does Baracchi have his moment of intellectual revelation about the vision of Marxism? Tens of thousands of Australians have done so, Sparrow finds. In Baracchi’s case, it was partly through his relationship with women.

Baracchi was both an extraordinary lover, and a cosmopolitan theorist. The book opens with his arrest on the Yarra Bank for campaigning against First World War recruiting. Baracchi was extremely active in the anti conscription campaign and his opposition to the war was based on a class analysis The disruption, the disjunction of the Great War in this generation’s lives, was a forcing time for their political positioning and this is explored in depth in the chapter ‘You don’t want to be disloyal do you?’ As a founding member of the Communist Party in in 1920, Baracchi co-edited the Proletarian. In 1922 he left for Europe with Neura, his second wife, edited an English version of the Communist Party paper in ‘Weimar’ (Chapter Six), and by 1924 was a member of the party of . Back in Melbourne, after advocating the dissolution of the Communist Party there, he was expelled. After a visit to Asia with Neura, Baracchi went on to lecture through the auspices of the Victorian Labor College and co-edit the Communist and the Communist Review. Sparrow unfolds the course of Baracchi’s life as he again works for the communist press in the 1930s with Betty Roland in ‘Russia’ (Chapter Eight), attempts to return to the fold of the Communist Party and does so in , but is finally out of the Party again over its support for World War Two. The rich texture of the social history of the period provides the frame through concrete example, iconic images and thick description.

In assessing recent trends in literary studies in universities, David Carter finds a move towards ‘post theory’: not anti theory but an added focus on context, function and audience.[2] Communism: A Love Story can be located within the advent of creative non-fiction, and interest in narrative and life writing. With exemplary skill, Sparrow’s text shifts scenes, draws on a huge range of historical sources – from intimate letters and interviews to plays and government archives and, through all that, as the novelist Amanda Lohrey suggests on the cover, has all the passion and drama of a novel. There are moments of close focus on a particular dramatic incident in Baracchi’s life followed up by questions and exposition. The general reader is given handles in the form of well known iconic figures from world history. Emily Davison, the British suffragette who was killed by the royal horse, for instance, becomes an exemplar for suggesting the passion and commitment of some of the New Women who appear in the text.

This kind of reading, this kind of recuperation, has some similarities to the challenge which feminist historians and literary critics have been working with for some time, with a clear focus on subject, agency and action, working with the wounded. Biographies of some significant left intellectual women have appeared – Jean Devanny, Marie Pitt, Lesbia Harford and, soon, Edna Ryan and Aileen Palmer. The examination of their work and lives is both detailed and critiqued. The biography of Charmian Clift by Nadia Wheatley reached a high point in presenting a fascinating and illuminating story with dramatic plot underpinning the structure of the study. Fewer Australian male activists on the left have had their life stories told – the New Left of the late 1960s sliced up the old men for their theoretical failures and left them dissected for their colleagues. Stuart Macintyre’s history The Reds: the Communist Party of Australia from Origins to Illegality exposed many of the pet vanities in the search for ideological purity. With the demise of the Soviet Union, has Western ‘progressivism’ – that linked the social demands of Western countries, and especially those of the labour movement, with support for the Soviet Union and the Communist parties, – collapsed as Alain Touraine[3] argues?

It was rare for the historical biographer in to write with the need to create an audience, with the need to capture the passion and sacrifice of their subject, but Sparrow has done this. With skilled exposition and exegesis, he considerably extends our understanding not only of Baracchi himself and the issues facing communists, but of many of the key women in the early days of the Communist Party, both in and overseas. Take the case of Lesbia Harford, poet and committed activist, and her relationship with Baracchi, all told with skill and verve which makes us want to ponder further on these remarkable men and women. Sparrow draws the threads together from a careful reading of Lesbia’s poems, working out the exact timing of their writing to cross-correlate so as to contextualize them in a biographical frame which certainly elucidates their meaning. The shipboard affair with Katharine Prichard, the significant Australian novelist, is apparently based in original research and new material. His reading of the sexual politics of these lovers and equals, these activists and intellectuals, is full bodied and nuanced, encompassing emotion and desire. And yet, it is partly the story told from the male gaze. Sparrow is rather conventional in many of his authorial intrusions, given the revolutionary sexually liberated future for which they hoped. Wasn’t Lesbia, for instance, a sexual radical (as her poetry indicates she aspired to be); hence it is hardly fair to cast her in the stereotyped roles of femininity. Why would she feel ‘betrayed’ when Baracchi, her current lover, marries another? Surely she would hardly see the new wife as her ‘rival’? Presumably she shared Baracchi’s critique of marriage and understood its links with property, capitalism and the family, for they had all read Galsworthy and Marx, presumably Engels. And while they may not always have managed to sustain these kinds of open relationships and lifestyles, surely Baracchi and his lovers are best seen in these terms, not as flawed conventional men and women.

There are dangers and strengths in Sparrow’s immersion in past sources. When the focus is on the key actor, as in biography as a genre, all others fall by the wayside. Take for instance the case of Vance and Nettie Palmer, who appear in the text as friends and colleagues and on whom there is an extended literature suggesting their adherence to different cosmopolitan socialist ideas, yet who are too often castigated as repressed nationalists. Why on earth would Vance Palmer like the wonderful transnational and free thinking Baracchi, asks Sparrow, reverting to and perpetuating the bushy myth of Palmer’s philosophical positioning. Yet, Sparrow does often reach through the closures in cultural nationalisms by his close use of primary sources, never too far from the truth as represented by the subjects themselves. Baracchi surely went out of his way to cultivate the Palmers because of their shared experience both locally and globally, their common long term engagement with socialist theory and practice even as it took them in different directions. Socialism is ‘one of the few things I’ve been hot about’, Nettie told Vance in 1909 in their early exploratory letters of friendship.[4]

The main thrust of Communism: A Love Story is a sensitive and engaging rendition of Baracchi’s relationship with communism both inside and outside the Communist Party in key locations. The account of the growth and changes in the Communist Party and communism in its various tendencies is humanized, refracted through the lens of the warm and generous personality of Baracchi and the key women in his life. What we know about fellow travellers, popular fronts and Trotskyites comes alive as they are embodied in key individuals in their kitchens, workplaces and bedrooms. As we become aware of the strength of Baracchi’s commitment; some of his story resonates with those present day environmentalists who step out of the corridors of their careers to live on platforms high in trees to save them from logging long after the media have gone.

One of the main themes in the book is Sparrow’s comparison and contrast of Baracchi’s two grand passions: for various women and, as Sparrow implies, his more important love of a political and intellectual belief structure, communism. Communism was and is, of course, notoriously weak on the equal participation of women, before (and after) initial revolutionary phases, and is flawed in its focus on the paid, as distinct from the unpaid worker. Perhaps this opposition between love of women and love of political action is merely a way to hasten the story and integrate the two supposedly disparate aspects of Baracchi’s life, yet it is conceptually slight and needs more interrogation. Recent interest by sociologists on forms of identity and action associated with social movements extending the work of the Italian sociologist Francesco Alberoni on nascent and institutional stages has much of interest to add here. Similarly, Sparrow’s claims about communism and its key place in Australian radical traditions offering the only alternative to capitalism, may merely be paraphrasing Baracchi to strengthen the interpretation, but allows Sparrow to write out the revolution going on in Australia in the interwar period for the rights of women, and the persisting influence of the new social movements from the late 1960s. He begins to meet an urgent need ‘to make political action meaningful once more’ but stalls when reverting to conventional divides between the identity of men and women.

‘What is to be done with your relish for versing?’ Nettie Palmer, who was Australia’s finest nonacademic critic in the interwar period in , once queried Baracchi. ‘I like to see everything you write in this way,’ she continued, ‘yet it’s incomplete without its background. I can sort of see them all in a big book – rambling, whimsical verse accompanied by its exploratory and explanatory prose. To be published – I fear – posthumously.’[5] Baracchi’s response, when he reminisced with Nettie’s daughter, was how ‘she had seen, however, by no means everything.’[6] With our heightened interest in Baracchi after reading his story, we might have been able to demand, in the 1970s, to see more of Baracchi’s theoretical writings and versifying – in a companion volume to Communism: A Love Story, and we might have got it. Now, given the state of Australian left publishing, at best we can trust Sparrow will post a bibliography of Baracchi’s writings on the web. Communism: A Love Story is a remarkable achievement in illuminating the past passions for real socialism, especially given the past is so often aligned with Tradition.

Dr Deborah Jordan is working with Carole Ferrier and Maryanne Dever at the University of Queensland on the correspondence between Vance and Nettie Palmer. She has published widely on the Palmers especially in Nettie Palmer: Search for an Aesthetic.

---

[1] Bernard O’Dowd, ‘Australia’ in W. Murdoch, (intro.) The Poems of Bernard O’Dowd, (Melbourne: Lothian, 1941), p. 35.
[2] Ramona Koval (Presenter), ‘The Death of Australian Literature: The Bookshow’, ABC Radio National, 15/06/2007.
[3] Alain Touraine, Can We Live Together? Equality and Difference, trans. David Macey, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 288.
[4] Nettie Higgins to Vance Palmer, March 1909, Ms 1174/1/152, National Library of .
[5] Nettie Palmer to Guido Baracchi, n.d. Guido Baracchi Papers, Ms 5241, Box 1, National Library of .
[6] Guido Baracchi to Helen Palmer, 10.1.1965 Helen Palmer Papers Ms 6083, Box 1, National Library of

Buku Terbaru Goenawan Mohamad

Buku terbaru Goenawan Mohamad telah terbit dalam dua bahasa Indonesia dan Inggris.

TUHAN DAN HAL-HAL YANG TAK SELESAI
Penerbit: KataKita, Jakarta, September 2007
Tebal 162 halaman
Harga Rp 50.000.

Versi Inggris:
ON GOD AND OTHER UNFINISHED THINGS
Terjemahan Laksmi Pamuntjak
Tebal 162 halaman
Harga Rp 75.000.

Buku Goenawan Mohamad terbaru ini berupa 99 esei liris pendek yang berangkat dari aforisme, mengikuti jejak Percikan Permenungan karya Roestam Effendi di tahun 1930-an. Angka "99", dengan berasosiasi kepada 99 nama Tuhan menurut tradisi Islam, juga mengesankan ketidak -selesaian.

Isinya pada umumnya merupakan eksplorasi saat-saat religious,
pengalaman puitis, juga renungan tentang Tuhan, iman, kematian dan kekuasaan.

Dalam mengembangkan pemikirannya, Goenawan Mohamad mengolah dan mengritik percikan filsafat Eropa (Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Marion, dan Badiou, misalnya), dan filsafat Islam, khususnya, Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali serta Ibn Rusdh.

Ia juga memakai bahan-bahan dari sastra Jawa klasik. Salah satu
eseinya menunjukkan persamaan Serat Cabolek (khususnya tentang pertemuan Bima dengan Dewa Ruci) dengan meditasi Cartesian tentang subyek.

Kutipan dari buku Goenawan Mohamad, "Tuhan dan Hal-hal yang Tak Selesai"

**

Demak: Pada suatu hari yang mungkin tak sebenarnya terjadi di abad ke-16, dengan sabar sembilan orang wali mendirikan mesjid pertama di kota pantai utara Jawa ini. Beratus-ratus tahun kemudian cerita terus beredar, bahwa salah seorang dari mereka, Sunan Kalijaga, menyusun tiang mesjid di Demak itu dari tatal: serpihan kayu yang tersisa dan lapisan yang lepas ketika papan
dirampat ketam.

Saya bayangkan dengan takjub: sebuah mesjid yang ditopang oleh yang terbuang, yang remeh dan yang tak bisa disusun rata -- bukan sebuah rumah Tuhan yang berdiri karena pokok yang lurus dan kukuh, dengan lembing dan tahta..

**

Dari riwayat yang rusak, manusia membayangkan satu titik di depan yang sempurna. Titik itu seringkali jelas ditegaskan, tapi sebenarnya ia adalah, untuk memakai kata-kata Laclau, sebuah "penanda yang kosong".

Kekosongan ini bukan berarti sesuatu yang sepenuhnya negatif. Justru penanda itu begitu menggetarkan dan menggerakkan kita, dan lahirlah damba. Dengan damba itu kita membuat sejarah untuk mengisi penanda yang kosong itu dengan sesuatu yang bisa yang ditandai secara memadai.

Tak mudah dijelaskan dari mana datang ajektif dalam penanda kosong yang melahirkan dan menggerakkan damba itu -- katakanlah nilai "adil" dalam kata-kata "masyarakat yang berkeadilan". Mungkin sebab itu orang berbicara tentang wahyu.

Cerita tentang wahyu adalah cerita saat manusia jadi makhluk yang
terbatas: ia mengalami persentuhan dengan Yang Tak Terbatas. Ketika wahyu datang pertama kali, demikianlah kisah Nabi Muhammad yang kita dengar sejak kanak-kanak, ia terguncang, ketakutan, dan menutup diri dalam selimut. Kefanaan dipaparkan dalam hubungan dengan yang abadi.

**

Iman lebih kaya ketimbang kemurnian. Iman adalah bianglala yang
semarak. Yang menghendakinya sebagai sehelai pembalut putih yang steril lupa bahwa manusia bukan cetakan tunggal mumi Adam di atas bumi. Bahkan tak ada mumi, juga dalam kotak kaca, yang tanpa sejarah, tanpa ketelanjuran kebudayaan.

Yang kekal selamanya saling membelah dengan bumi yang guyah.

**

Yang menyangka ada jalan pintas dalam iman akan menemukan jalan buntu dalam sejarah. Tiap masa selalu ada orang yang mengembara dan membuka kembali pintu ke gurun pasir tempat Musa -- yang tak diperkenankan melihat wajah Tuhan -- mencoba menebak kehendak-Nya terus menerus. Di sana tanda-tanda tetap
merupakan tanda-tanda, bukan kebenaran itu sendiri. Di sana banyak hal belum selesai.

Gurun pasir tak sepenuhnya dialahkan, dan cadar selalu kembali
seperti kabut.

Manusia bisa tersesat, tapi sejarah menunjukkan bahwa iman tak pernah jera justru ketika Tuhan tak jadi bagian benda-benda yang terang.

**

Tiap doa mengandung ketegangan. Doa selalu bergerak antara ekspresi yang berlimpah dan sikap diam, antara hasrat ingin mengerti dan rasa takjub yang juga takzim. Di depan Ilahi, Yang Maha Tak-Tersamai, lidah tak bisa bertingkah.

Bila ada agama yang memusuhi syair, itu karena ia lupa bahwa puisi
juga sejenis doa. "Di pintu-Mu aku mengetuk/aku tak bisa berpaling", tulis Chairil Anwar, antara lega dan putus-asa. Puisi, bahkan dalam pernyataannya yang tersuram, adalah rasa hampa tapi juga sikap bersyukur yang tak diakui.

Rekonsiliasi Fakta dengan Fiksi

oleh : Savitri Scherer

Kompas, Senin, 20 Agustus 2007

rubrik : Pustakaloka; resensi
judul buku : Kalatidha
Penulis buku : Seno Gumira Ajidarma

 

Meminjam judul puisi Ranggawarsita dari abad ke-19, yakni Kalatidha, Seno, penulis abad ke-21, merangkum cerita yang berkisar tentang peristiwa kekerasan di Indonesia pada sekitar tahun 1965.

Dituturkan melalui pandangan bocah laki-laki berusia tujuh tahun yang mempunyai kebolehan masuk-keluar dunia bayangan yang berkabut.

Kebolehannya mengikuti usianya yang menjadi dewasa, hingga dunia tersebut terkadang bercahaya gemilang, ataupun merupakan samudra dari titik-titik kristal yang berkilauan.

Bocah pengamat pasif, dari suatu kejadian ketika rumah tetangga diserang penduduk setempat dan dibakar. Bocah itu sempat melihat satu dari gadis kembar penghuni rumah lolos dari pengepungan, sedangkan kembarannya tewas.

"Aku tidak mengerti, tetapi kuketahui betapa nasib keduanya sangat berbeda. Yang satu menjelma bayangan yang kadang tampak dan terkadang hilang, yang lain masih berkeliaran di muka bumi dengan diri yang kadang hilang kadang kembali" (hlm 46). Suatu kekayaan imajinasi penulis yang berpotensi untuk dikembangkan ke sana kemari.

Korban dari sistem

Seno memakai kesempatan ini untuk menyinggung berbagai segi spiritual dari dunia istimewa yang diakrabi bocah tadi dengan meramu unsur-unsur budaya spiritual Jawa yang memasuki dunia nyata, dan berbagai dunia kehidupan yang dijatahkan kepada si gadis yang lolos, tetapi terguncang jiwanya.

Ditambah selingan dari dunia Johnny Malin Kundang, pasien di rumah sakit jiwa tempat mereka berdua dirawat dan ditambah lagi dunia yang penuh perkibulan dari pengusaha serong (bocah ketika dewasa?).

Penyiksaan yang sempat di terima gadis, korban politik waktu itu, dan penyiksaan dalam cara merawat-menatar, baik di rumah sakit maupun di kantor polisi dan di penjara untuk semua narapidana, digambarkan untuk menunjukkan situasi yang sejajar bagi semua warga yang telah kehilangan hak untuk hadir dalam peradaban manusia.

Peradaban yang aturan dan kodenya dibuat oleh setiap penguasa zamannya, Neraka dunia ini, penjara dan rumah sakit jiwa sudah dijabarkan ahli filsafat Perancis Foucault (M Foucalt, Naissance de la clinique, Paris, PUF, 1963 dan Surveiller et punir, Paris, Gallimard, 1975) Dalam Kalatidha, gadis simbol yang mewakili korban dari suatu sistem, tanpa rasa dan pikiran. Pengarangnya kemudian mengembangkan tubuh si gadis menjadi sosok yang dititisi arwah kembarannya dan membuat gadis tadi menjadi jawara wanita yang mengacu pada garapan Seno yang terdahulu, Perempuan Preman di Melawai (Dunia Sukab, 2001, hlm 145-155).

Jawara dalam Kalatidha, setelah diisi arwah kembarannya, menghancurkan semua deretan sosok yang pernah menyiksanya, kecuali Johnny yang sempat berambisi untuk menjadi pemain sepak bola. Dia hanya menendang-nendang si gadis, tanpa memperkosanya.

Dalam adegan lain, yang sempat dialami bocah, ia dan kakeknya mengalami suatu peristiwa spiritual yang canggih digambarkan Seno dalam bab 12 berjudul: Perburuan (hlm 93-97).

Bagian ini dirancang seolah menjadi pembuka jalan atas suatu pertanyaan si pengarang: apakah pembalasan selalu lebih kejam? yang dirangkumnya di bab 13. Misteri ini dijawabnya sendiri dengan merangkum bab 19: Sang Mata di Tepi Pantai (hlm 163-171). Jawara preman Melawai itu menyelamatkan dua bocah yang sedang bermain di laut (hlm 171). Hanya saja samudra tadi dengan kekuasaannya selalu mencoba menelan bocah-bocah lain yang bermain di situ yang tidak menggubris pengalaman dua bocah yang sempat terselamatkan.

Seno mencoba mengutarakan harapan bahwa ada kemungkinan gadis yang dititisi kembarannya berubah menjadi jawara penyelamat. Walaupun si pengarang ataupun pembacanya tahu bila pergantian peranan dari jawara preman (pembalas dendam) menjadi jawara Sri Asih (sosok garapan RA Kosasih) tidak otomatis menyelamatkan seluruh bocah di dunia dari bahaya.

 

Berpikir positif

Seno sebagai pengarang, yang telah merancang-rancang dunia bayangannya yang kejam, berdarah-darah di mana hutan bambu digusur menjadi pasar toserba raksasa, tetap membawa suatu harapan positif terhadap semua kemungkinan yang terburuk dari peradaban.

Ia percaya ada warga dunia yang peduli dan berkapasitas memperbaiki nilai kemanusiaan kita semua. Pandangan positif ini dibutuhkan bagi pembaca untuk memperbaiki lingkungannya. Bahwa manusia berkapasitas mempunyai welas asih, suatu unsur terpenting dalam sejarah peradaban dunia.

Seno mengakhiri ceritanya begini, "Miliaran sosok kristal yang mengalir membentuk suatu arus menyilaukan ke balik sebuah lembah yang penuh dengan cahaya di baliknya." (hlm 226). Ada cahaya di balik cahaya. Pilihan Seno untuk berpihak pada cahaya didukung oleh fakta, tanpa matahari seluruh ekosistem jagat kita akan bubar.

Sebagai pengarang yang menggarap suatu insiden dalam sejarah Indonesia yang kontroversial, di mana dia terlalu muda ketika peristiwa 1965 terjadi (dilahirkan 1958), usahanya membawa nilai khusus bagi pembaca Indonesia untuk memikirkan prioritas apa saja yang harus didahulukan dalam memajukan kesejahteraan kehidupan bersama di tengah dunia yang selalu rancu. Keganasan di Rwanda, atau di Kamboja di bawah Pol Pot, di Irak dan Palestina tidak perlu terjadi. Semua terletak pada itikad manusianya sendiri.

Punya rasa sendiri

Rahasia hidup memang membawa pesona khusus. Hal ini digarap Seno dengan dua cara. Pertama, secara faktual dengan memasukkan berbagai dokumen arsip dari periode yang dia bayangkan, yaitu guntingan-guntingan surat kabar. Ini untuk mengingatkan publik pemikiran apa-apa saja sebetulnya dilontarkan di periode itu yang memicu kejadian.

Cara kedua adalah membandingkan kejadian yang sempat mewujud di sekitar tokoh fiksi karangannya itu dengan, misalnya, isi kepala pasien Johnny Malin Kundang. Semakin gombal bayangan dunia Johnny, yang menyangkut peranannya sendiri dalam suatu insiden, semakin rancu pula ramuan di kepalanya antara si pelaku, si pengamat, atau korban yang dipaksakan bertanggung jawab.

Yang masih bisa diandalkan sebagai "fakta" di dalam kepala Johnny hanya sisa-sisa ingatannya yang berbentuk "rasa" dari sederetan makanan, seperti tempe mendoan atau botok teri (hlm 86-90). Gamblangnya, peristiwa yang sudah lewat itu masing-masing mempunyai rasanya sendiri. Tidak semua hambar dan tidak selalu harus sesuai dengan kenyataan perasaan sensasi pada waktu kejadian. Rasa pada waktu kejadian dan rasa dari ingatan mengenai kejadian itu tidak mungkin sama.

Melalui sisipan Johnny ini, Seno seolah ingin membawa pembacanya menerima segala kontradiksi kehidupan sebagai urusan yang tidak akan selesai diuraikan. Fakta atau kebenaran tidak dapat diramu melulu melalui ingatan, apakah itu ingatan seorang gila, seorang korban perkosaan, ataupun seorang pengarang.

Setiap zaman edan dalam setiap era sejarah menghasilkan segepok orang-orang gilanya sendiri yang dengan logika masing-masing, meluruskan versi sejarah kehadiran mereka. Sebaliknya, pelurusan tersebut bukanlah suatu proses acak yang diramu hanya bedasarkan makian yang menyebut berbagai macam makanan Jawa; walau sudah seluruh makanan diucapkan.

Dengan Kalatidha, Seno menawarkan gaya penulisan untuk mengungkapkan bagaimana menyelaraskan sebagian dari bunyi-bunyi sumbang ke dalam rangkuman dunia tanpa melupakan betapa hidup ini sesungguhnya kocak, acak dan edan.

Keputusan itu yang diambil Johnny, "Aku bukan pembunuh. Aku hanya membebaskan jiwa yang terikat kepada tubuh dan otak yang mengharukan, yang diperas seperti apa pun untuk berpikir tidak akan pernah mampu mengenal dunia dalam arti yang sebenar-benarnya. Gulai Otak. Bedakah rasanya otak pintar dan otak bodoh jika di goreng dalam bungkus telor?" (hlm 90).

(Savitri Scherer, Jurnalis Bermukim di Paris)

Responsibility and War Guilt: A Culture-Setting Intelligentsia

Noam Chomsky interviewed by  Gabriel Matthew Schivone                  ZNet Update Fri, 17 Aug 2007

 

The Responsibility of Intellectuals

GMS: Addressing a community of mostly students during a public forum at the steps of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1969, you expressed: "This particular community is a very relevant one to consider at a place like MIT because, of course, you're all free to enter this community-in fact, you're invited and encouraged to enter it. The community of technical intelligentsia, and weapons designers, and counterinsurgency experts, and pragmatic planners of an American empire is one that you have a great deal of inducement to become associated with. The inducements, in fact, are very real; their rewards in power, and affluence, and prestige and authority are quite significant." Let's start off talking about the significance of these inducements, on both a university and societal level. How crucial is it, in your view, that students particularly consider and understand this, as you describe, highly technocratic social order of the academic community and its function in society, that is, comparably to the more directly associated professional scholarship considering it?

CHOMSKY: How important it is, to an individual, depends on what that individual's goals in life are. If the goals are to enrich yourself, gain privilege, do technically interesting work-in brief, if the goals are self-satisfaction-then these questions are of no particular relevance. If you care about the consequences of your actions, what's happening in the world, what the future will be like for your grandchildren and so on, then they're very crucial. So, it's a question of what choices people make.

GMS: What makes students a natural audience to speak to? And do you think it's worth 'speaking truth' to the professional scholarship as well or differently? Are there any short- or long-term possibilities here? 

I'm always uneasy about the concept of "speaking truth," as if we somehow know the truth and only have to enlighten others who have not risen to our elevated level. The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles. 

As for possibilities, they are limited only by will and choice. 

Students are at a stage of their lives where these choices are most urgent and compelling, and when they also enjoy unusual, if not unique, freedom and opportunity to explore the choices available, to evaluate them, and to pursue them.

GMS: In your view, what is it about the privileges within university education and academic scholarship which, as you assert in some of the things you've written, correlate with them a greater responsibility for catastrophic atrocities such as the Vietnam War or those in the Middle East in which the United States is now involved?

Well, there are really some moral truisms. One of them is that opportunity confers responsibility. If you have very limited opportunities, then you have limited responsibility for what you do. If you have substantial opportunity you have greater responsibility for what you do. I mean, that's kind of elementary, I don't know how it can be discussed.

And the people who we call 'intellectuals' are just those who happen to have substantial opportunity. They have privilege, they have resources, they have training. In our society, they have a high degree of freedom-not a hundred percent, but quite a lot-and that gives them a range of choices that they can pursue with a fair degree of freedom, and that hence simply confers responsibility for the predictable consequences of the choices they make.

 

The Rise of a Technical Intelligentsia

GMS: I think at this point it may do well for us to go over a bit the beginnings and evolution of the ideological currents which now prevail throughout modern social intellectual life in the U.S. Essentially, from where may we trace the development of this strong coterie of technical experts in the schools, and elsewhere, sometimes having been referred to as a 'bought' or 'secular priesthood'?

Well, it really goes back to the latter-part of the nineteenth century, when there was substantial discussion-not just in the United States but in Europe, too-of what was then sometimes called 'a new class' of scientific intellectuals. In that period of time there was a level of knowledge and technical expertise accumulating that allowed a kind of managerial class of educated, trained people to have a greater share in decision-making and planning. It was thought that they were a new class displacing the aristocracy, the owners, political leaders and so on, and they could have a larger role-and of course they liked that idea.

Out of this group developed an ideology of technocratic planning. In industry it was called 'scientific management'. It developed in intellectual life with a concept of what was called a 'responsible class' of technocratic, serious intellectuals who could solve the world's problems rationally, and would have to be protected from the 'vulgar masses' who might interfere with them. And it goes right up until the present.

Just how realistic this is, is another question, but for the class of technical intellectuals, it's a very attractive conception that, 'We are the rational, intelligent people, and management and decision-making should be in our hands.'

Actually, as I've pointed out in some of the things I've written, it's very close to Bolshevism. And, in fact, if you put side-by-side, say, statements by people like Robert McNamara and V.I. Lenin, it's strikingly similar. In both cases there's a conception of a vanguard of rational planners who know the direction that society ought to go and can make efficient decisions, and have to be allowed to do so without interference from, what one of them, Walter Lippmann, called the 'meddlesome and ignorant outsiders' , namely, the population, who just get in the way.

It's not an entirely new conception: it's just a new category of people. Two hundred years ago you didn't have an easily identifiable class of technical intellectuals, just generally educated people. But as scientific and technical progress increased there were people who felt they can appropriate it and become the proper managers of the society, in every domain. That, as I said, goes from scientific management in industry, to social and political control.

There are periods in history, for example, during the Kennedy years, when these ideas really flourished. There were, as they called themselves, 'the best and the brightest.' The 'smart guys' who could run everything if only they were allowed to; who could do things scientifically without people getting in their way.

It's a pretty constant strain, and understandable. And it underlies the fear and dislike of democracy that runs through elite culture always, and very dramatically right now. It often correlates closely with posturing about love of democracy. As any reader of Orwell would expect, these two things tend to correlate. The more you hate democracy, the more you talk about how wonderful it is and how much you're dedicated to it. It's one of the clearer expressions of the visceral fear and dislike of democracy, and of allowing, again, going back to Lippmann, the 'ignorant and meddlesome outsiders' to get in our way. They have to be distracted and marginalized somehow while we can take care of the serious questions.

Now, that's the basic strain. And you find it all the time, but increasingly in the modern period when, at least, claims to expertise become somewhat more plausible. Whether they're authentic or not is, again, a different question. But, the claims to expertise are very striking.  So, economists tell you, 'We know how to run the economy'; the political scientists tell you, 'We know how to run the world, and you keep out of it because you don't have special knowledge and training.'

When you look at it, the claims tend to erode pretty quickly. It's not quantum physics; there is, at least, a pretense, and sometimes, some justification for the claims.  But what matters for human life is, typically, well within the reach of the concerned person who is willing to undertake some effort.

GMS: Given the, albeit, self-proclaimed notion that this new class is entitled to decision-making, how close are they to actual policy, then?

My feeling is that they're nowhere near as powerful as they think they are. So, when, say, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the technocratic elite which is taking over the running of society-or when McNamara wrote about it, or others-there's a lot of illusion there. Meaning, they can gain positions of authority and decision-making when they act in the interests of those who really own and run the society. You can have people that are just as competent, or more competent, and who have conceptions of social and economic order that run counter to, say, corporate power, and they're not going to be in the planning sectors. So, to get into those planning sectors you first of all have to conform to the interests of the real concentrations of power.

And, again, there are a lot of illusions about this-in the media, too. Tom Wicker is a famous example, one of the 'left commentators' of the New York Times. He would get very angry when critics would tell him he's conforming to power interests and that he's keeping within the doctrinal framework of the media, which goes back to their corporate structure and so on. And he would answer, very angrily-and correctly-that nobody tells him what to say. He writes anything he wants,-which is absolutely true. But if he wasn't writing the things he did he wouldn't have a column in the New York Times.

That's the kind of thing that is very hard to perceive. People do not want-or often are not able-to perceive that they are conforming to external authority. They feel themselves to be very free-and indeed they are-as long as they conform. But power lies elsewhere. That's as old as history in the modern period. It's often very explicit.

Adam Smith, for example, discussing England, quite interestingly pointed out that the merchants and manufacturers-the economic forces of his day-are the 'principal architects of policy', and they make sure that their own interests are 'most peculiarly attended to', no matter how grievous the effect on others, including the people in England. And that's a good principle of statecraft, and social and economic planning, which runs pretty much to the present. When you get people with management and decision-making skills, they can enter into that system and they can make the actual decisions-within a framework that's set within the real concentrations of power. And now it's not the merchants and manufacturers of Adam Smith's day, it's the multinational corporations, financial institutions, and so on. But, stray too far beyond their concerns and you won't be the decision-maker.

It's not a mechanical phenomenon, but it's overwhelmingly true that the people who make it to decision-making positions (that is, what they think of as decision-making positions) are those who conform to the basic framework of the people who fundamentally own and run the society. That's why you have a certain choice of technocratic managers and not some other choice of people equally or better capable of carrying out policies but have different ideas.

GMS: What about degrees of responsibility and shared burdens of guilt on an individual level? What can we learn about how one views oneself often in positions of power or authority?

You almost never find anyone, whether it's in a weapons plant, or planning agency, or in corporate management, or almost anywhere, who says, 'I'm really a bad guy, and I just want to do things that benefit myself and my friends.'  Almost invariably you get noble rhetoric like: 'We're working for the benefit of the people.' The corporate executive who is slaving for the benefit of the workers and community; the friendly banker who just wants to help everybody start their business; the political leader who's trying to bring freedom and justice to the world-and they probably all believe it. I'm not suggesting that they're lying. There's an array of routine justifications for whatever you're doing. And it's easy to believe them. It's very hard to look into the mirror and say, 'Yeah, that guy looking at me is a vicious criminal.' It's much easier to say, 'That guy looking at me is really very benign, self-sacrificing, and he has to do these things because it's for the benefit of everyone.'

Or you get respected moralists like Reinhold Niebuhr, who was once called 'the theologian of the establishment'. And the reason is because he presented a framework which, essentially, justified just about anything they wanted to do. His thesis is dressed up in long words and so on (it's what you do if you're an intellectual). But what it came down to is that, 'Even if you try to do good, evil's going to come out of it; that's the paradox of grace'. -And that's wonderful for war criminals. 'We try to do good but evil necessarily comes out of it.' And it's influential. So, I don't think that people in decision-making positions are lying when they describe themselves as benevolent. -Or people working on more advanced nuclear weapons. Ask them what they're doing, they'll say: 'We're trying to preserve the peace of the world.' People who are devising military strategies that are massacring people, they'll say, 'Well, that's the cost you have to pay for freedom and justice', and so on.

But, we don't take those sentiments seriously when we hear them from enemies, say, from Stalinist commissars. They'll give you the same answers. But, we don't take that seriously because they can know what they're doing if they choose to. If they choose not to, that's their choice. If they choose to believe self-satisfying propaganda, that's their choice. But it doesn't change the moral responsibility. We understand that perfectly well with regard to others. It's very hard to apply the same reasoning to ourselves.

In fact, one of the-maybe the most-elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, If something's right for me, it's right for you; if it's wrong for you, it's wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at has that at its core somehow. But that principle is overwhelmingly disregarded all the time. If you want to run through examples we can easily do it. Take, say, George W. Bush, since he happens to be president. If you apply the standards that we applied to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, he'd be hanged. Is it an even conceivable possibility? It's not even discussable. Because we don't apply to ourselves the principles we apply to others.

There's a lot of talk about 'terror' and how awful it is. Whose terror? Our terror against them? I mean, is that considered reprehensible? No, it's considered highly moral; it's considered self-defense, and so on. Now, their terror against us, that's awful, and terrible, and so on.

But, to try to rise to the level of becoming a minimal moral agent, and just enter in the domain of moral discourse is very difficult. Because that means accepting the principle of universality. And you can experiment for yourself and see how often that's accepted, either in personal or political life. Very rarely.

 

Looking at Nuremberg and the Culture of Torture

GMS: What about criminal responsibility and intellectuals? Nuremberg is an interesting precedent.

The Nuremberg case is a very interesting precedent. First of all, the Nuremberg trials-of all the tribunals that have taken place, from then until today-it is, I think, the most serious by far. But, nevertheless, it was very seriously flawed. And it was recognized to be. When Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor, wrote about it, he recognized that it was flawed, and it was so for a number of fundamental reasons. For one thing, the Nazi war criminals were being tried for crimes that had not yet been declared to be crimes. So, it was ex post facto. 'We're now declaring these things you did to be crimes.' That is already questionable.

Secondly, the choice of what was considered a crime was based on a very explicit criterion, namely, denial of the principle of universality. In other words, something was called a crime at Nuremberg if they did it and we didn't do it.

So, for example, the bombing of urban concentrations was not considered a crime.  The bombings of Tokyo, Dresden, and so on-those aren't crimes. Why? Because we did them. So, therefore, it's not a crime. In fact, Nazi war criminals who were charged were able to escape prosecution when they could show that the Americans and the British did the same thing they did. Admiral Doenitz, a submarine commander who was involved in all kinds of war crimes, called in the defense a high official in the British admiralty and, I think, Admiral Nimitz from the United States, who testified that, 'Yeah, that's the kind of thing we did.' And, therefore, they weren't sentenced for these crimes. Doenitz was absolved. And that's the way it ran through. Now, that's a very serious flaw. Nevertheless, of all the tribunals, that's the most serious one.

When Chief Justice Jackson, chief counsel for the prosecution, spoke to the tribunal and explained to them the importance of what they were doing, he said, to paraphrase, that: 'We are handing these defendants a poisoned chalice, and if we ever sip from it we must be subject to the same punishments, otherwise this whole trial is a farce.' Well, you can look at the history from then on, and we've sipped from the poisoned chalice many times, but it's never been considered a crime. So, that means we are saying that trial was a farce.

Interestingly, in Jackson's opening statement he claimed that the defense did not wish to incriminate the whole German populace from whence the defendants came, for the crimes they committed, but only the "planners and designers" of those crimes, "the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness.of this terrible war."

That's correct. And that's another principle which we flatly reject. So, at Nuremberg, we weren't trying the people who threw Jews into crematoria; we were trying the leaders. When we ever have a trial for crimes it's of some low-level person-like a torturer from Abu Ghraib-not the people who were setting up the framework from which they operate. And we certainly don't try political leaders for the crime of aggression. That's out of the question. The invasion of Iraq was about as clear-cut a case of aggression than you can imagine. In fact, by the Nuremberg principles, if you read them carefully, the U.S. war against Nicaragua was a crime of aggression for which Ronald Reagan should have been tried. But, it's inconceivable; you can't even mention it in the West. And the reason is our radical denial of the most elementary moral truisms. We just flatly reject them. We don't even think we reject them, and that's even worse than rejecting them outright.

I mean, if we were able to say to ourselves, 'Look, we are totally immoral, we don't accept elementary moral principles,' that would be a kind of respectable position in a certain way. But, when we sink to the level where we cannot even perceive that we're violating elementary moral principles and international law, that's pretty bad. But that's the nature of the intellectual culture-not just in the United States-but in powerful societies everywhere.

GMS: You mentioned Doenitz escaping culpability for his crimes. Two who didn't escape punishment and were among the most severely punished at Nuremberg were Julius Streicher, an editor of a major newspaper, and-also an interesting example-Dr. Wolfram Sievers of the Ahnenerbe Society's Institute of Military Scientific Research, whose own crimes were traced back to the University of Strasbourg. Not the typical people prosecuted for international war crimes, it seems, given their civilian professions.

Yeah; and there's a justification for that, namely, those defendants could understand what they were doing. They could understand the consequences of the work that they were carrying out. But, of course, if we were to accept this awful principle of universality, that would have a pretty long reach-to journalists, university researchers, and so on.

GMS: Let me quote for you the mission statement of the Army Research Office. This "premier extramural" research agency of the Army is grounded upon "developing and exploiting innovative advances to insure the Nation's technological superiority."  It executes this mission "through conduct of an aggressive basic science research program on behalf of the Army so that cutting-edge scientific discoveries and the general store of scientific knowledge will be optimally used to develop and improve weapons systems that establish land-force dominance."

This is a pentagon office, and they're doing their job. In our system, the military is under civilian control. Civilians assign a certain task to the military: their job is to obey, and carry the role out, otherwise you quit. That's what it means to have a military under civilian control. So, you can't really blame them for their mission statement. They're doing what they're told to do by the civilian authorities. The civilian authorities are the culpable ones. If we don't like those policies (and I don't, and you don't), then we go back to those civilians who designed the framework and gave the orders.

You can, as the Nuremberg precedents indicated, be charged with obeying illegal orders, but that's often a stretch. If a person is in a position of military command, they are sworn, in fact, to obey civilian orders, even if they don't like them. If you say they're really just criminal orders, then, yes, they can reject them, and get into trouble and so on. But this is just carrying out the function that they're ordered to carry out. So, we go straight back to the civilian authority and then to the general intellectual culture, which regards this as proper and legitimate. And now we're back to universities, newspapers, the centers of the doctrinal system.

GMS: It's just the forthright honesty of the mission statement which is also very striking, I think.

Well, it's like going to an armory and finding out they're making better guns. That's what they're supposed to do. Their orders are, 'Make this gun work better.', and so they're doing it. And, if they're honest, they'll say, 'Yeah, that's what we're doing; that's what the civilian authorities told us to do.'

At some point, people have to ask, 'Do I want to make a better gun?' That's where the Nuremberg issues arise. But, you really can't blame people very severely for carrying out the orders that they're told to carry out when there's nothing in the culture that tells them there's anything wrong with it. I mean, you have to be kind of like a moral hero to perceive it, to break out of the cultural framework and say, 'Look, what I'm doing is wrong.' Like somebody who deserts from the army because they think the war is wrong. That's not the place to assign guilt, I think. Just as at Nuremberg. As I said, they didn't try the SS guards who threw people into crematoria, at Nuremberg. They might have been tried elsewhere, but not at Nuremberg.

GMS: But, in this case, the results of the ARO's mission statement in harvesting scholarly work for better weapons design, it's professors, scholars, researchers, scientific designers, etc., who have these choices to focus serious intellectual effort and to be so used for such ends, and who aren't acting necessarily from direct orders but are acting more out of freewill.

It's freewill, but don't forget that there's a general intellectual culture that raises no objection to this.

Let's take the Iraq war. There's libraries of material arguing about the war, debating it, asking 'What should we do?', this and that, and the other thing. Now, try to find a sentence somewhere that says that 'carrying out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, which differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows' (paraphrasing from Nuremberg). Try to find that somewhere. -I mean, you can find it. I've written about it, and you can find a couple other dozen people who have written about it in the world. But is it part of the intellectual culture? Can you find it in a newspaper, or in a journal; in Congress; any public discourse; anything that's part of the general exchange of knowledge and ideas? I mean, do students study it in school? Do they have courses where they teach students that 'to carry out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows'?

So, for example, if sectarian warfare is a horrible atrocity, as it is, who's responsible? By the principles of Nuremberg, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice-they're responsible for sectarian warfare because they carried out the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows. Try and find somebody who points that out. You can't. Because our dominant intellectual culture accepts as legitimate our crushing anybody we like.

And take Iran. Both political parties-and practically the whole press-accept it as legitimate and, in fact, honorable, that 'all options are on the table', presumably including nuclear weapons, to quote Hilary Clinton and everyone else. 'All options are on the table' means we threaten war. Well, there's something called the U.N. Charter, which outlaws 'the threat or use of force' in international affairs. Does anybody care? Actually, I saw one op-ed somewhere by Ray Takeyh, an Iran specialist close to the government, who pointed out that threats are serious violations of international law. But that's so rare that when you find it it's like finding a diamond in a pile of hay or something. It's not part of the culture. We're allowed to threaten anyone we want-and to attack anyone we want. And, when a person grows up and acts in a culture like that, they're culpable in a sense, but the culpability is much broader.

I was just reading a couple days ago a review of a new book by Steven Miles, a medical doctor and bioethicist, who ran through 35,000 pages of documents he got from the Freedom of Information Act on the torture in Abu Ghraib. And the question that concerned him is, 'What were the doctors doing during all of this?' All through those torture sessions there were doctors, nurses, behavioral scientists and others who were organizing them. What were they doing when this torture was going on? Well, you go through the detailed record and it turns out that they were designing and improving it. Just like Nazi doctors.

Robert Jay Lifton did a big study on Nazi doctors. He points out in connection with the Nazi doctors that, in a way, it's not those individual doctors who had the final guilt, it was a culture and a society which accepted torture and criminal activities as legitimate. The same is true with the tortures at Abu Ghraib. I mean, just to focus on them as if they're somehow terrible people is just a serious mistake. They're coming out of a culture that regards this as legitimate. Maybe there are some excesses you don't really do but torture in interrogation is considered legitimate.

There's a big debate now on, 'Who's an enemy combatant?'; a big technical debate. Suppose we invade another country and we capture somebody who's defending the country against our invasion: what do you mean to call them an 'enemy combatant'? If some country invaded the United States and let's say you were captured throwing a rock at one of the soldiers, would it be legitimate to send you to the equivalent of Guantanamo, and then have a debate about whether you're a 'lawful' or 'unlawful' combatant? The whole discussion is kind of, like, off in outer space somewhere. But, in a culture which accepts that we own and rule the world, it's reasonable. But, also, we should go back to the roots of the intellectual or moral culture, not just to the individuals directly involved.

GMS: As you mentioned before, whether students are taught serious moral principles: At my school, the University of Arizona, there are courses in bioethics-required ones, in fact, to hard scientific undergraduates (I took one, out of interest)- which mostly just discuss scenarios in terms of 'slippery slopes' and hypothetical questions within certain bounds, and still none at all in the social sciences or humanities. Do you think there should be? Would that be beneficial?

If they were honest, yes. If they're honest they'd be talking about what we're talking about, and doing case studies. There's no point pontificating about high minded principles. That's easy. Nazi doctors could do that, too. 

Let's take a look at the cases and ask how the principles apply-to Vietnam; to El Salvador; to Iraq; to Palestine-just run through the cases and see how the principles apply to our own actions. That's what is of prime importance, and what is least discussed.

GMS: As a note to end on, there seems to be some very serious aberrations and defects in our society and our level of culture. How, in your view, might they be corrected and a new level of culture be established, say, one in which torture isn't accepted? (After all, slavery and child labor were each accepted for a long period of time and now are not.)

Your examples give the answer to the question, the only answer that has ever been known.  Slavery and child labor didn't become unacceptable by magic. It took hard, dedicated, courageous work by lots of people. The same is true of torture, which was once completely routine. 

If I remember correctly, the renowned Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie wrote somewhere that prisons began to proliferate in Norway in the early 19th century. They weren't much needed before, when the punishment for robbery could be driving a stake through the hand of the accused. Now it's perhaps the most civilized country on earth. 

There has been a gradual codification of constraints against torture, and they have had some effect, though only limited, even before the Bush regression to savagery. Alfred McCoy's work reviews that ugly history. Still, there is improvement, and there can be more if enough people are willing to undertake the efforts that led to large-scale rejection of slavery and child labor-still far from complete.

Berhenti Berpikir Cara Televisi

Yonky Karman

Ini zaman melek televisi dengan perannya yang dominan dalam kehidupan masyarakat, dari kota hingga desa. Di pedalaman lebih mudah menemukan layar kaca daripada seperangkat komputer.
Penduduk desa menyiasati keterpencilannya dengan antena parabola. Pada era informasi, besar kontribusi televisi yang mengajar pemirsa banyak hal, kecuali mematikannya. Kaum yang membela netralitas televisi berkilah, benda itu hanya medium komunikasi. Baik buruk pemanfaatannya bergantung pada konsumen. Namun, aforisme Marshall McLuhan masih benar. Medium membawa pesan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964). Lebih dari message, medium juga massage. Bentuk komunikasi itu menentukan isi komunikasi. Televisi bukan produk teknologi bebas nilai.

Pendangkalan publik

Tayangan televisi komersial pada dasarnya bersifat selingan, tidak menuntut banyak berpikir, memperpendek rentang perhatian. Diskursus publik tentang politik, agama, pendidikan, olahraga, atau bisnis dikemas dalam berbagai bentuk hiburan (entertainment), sebagai bagian bisnis pertunjukan. Penampilan dalam tayangan lebih penting daripada isinya. Medium ikut mendefinisikan realitas.

Untuk memahami kultur suatu masyarakat, lihat medium komunikasinya yang dominan. Tayangan televisi merusak karakter reflektif manusia. Iklan komersial dikemas menarik sampai tak ada hubungan dengan kualitas dan manfaat produk yang diiklankan. Orang dibujuk membeli karena pencitraan. Kesan pertama dibuat menggoda, selanjutnya terserah pemirsa. 

Sebuah produk mencantumkan peringatan serius untuk tidak mengonsumsi karena merusak kesehatan. Namun, iklannya amat indah membawa pesan keindonesiaan yang merekatkan bangsa.

Tayangan rutin yang mengeksploitasi tindakan sadis tidak memupuk iba atas korban, tetapi menumpulkan nurani. Banalisasi kejahatan, kekerasan, kekejaman, dan penderitaan. Pernikahan kehilangan sifat sakralnya. Ketika bencana nasional menjadi breaking news, berlangsung konstruksi sekaligus dekonstruksi rasa haru.

Neil Postman merisaukan kultur di AS pada paruh kedua abad ke-20 dan seterusnya (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1986). Abad pertelevisian telah menggeser abad percetakan (tipografi). Pesona tulisan tergeser pesona tayangan. Bisnis surat kabar di AS terdesak televisi dan mesin pencari berita, opini, dan iklan seperti Google dan Yahoo.

Sebagian masyarakat AS tengah memasuki kultur lisan fase kedua. Fase pertama sebelum orang berkenalan dengan budaya tulisan dan hidup dalam tradisi lisan. Kultur lisan fase kedua bersifat high-tech didukung peralatan elektronik seperti televisi dan komputer (Walter J Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 1982).

Menonton televisi tidak perlu melek huruf.

Akibat pengaruh televisi di AS, terjadi pergeseran kultural. Dari kultur yang berpusat pada kata kepada kultur yang berpusat pada gambar, tanpa kecenderungan berbalik arah dan nyaris tanpa protes. Orang tertidur di depan televisi yang masih hidup, menghibur diri sampai mati. Dibanjiri tayangan yang tak berkait, orang menjadi terbiasa mementingkan hal-hal sepele terkait perasaan dan kenikmatan, menjadi pasif dan akhirnya egoistis.

Pesona televisi dapat melumpuhkan minat baca kita yang notabene masih rendah. Ada korelasi kemajuan bangsa dengan kegemaran membaca. Masih rendahnya minat baca kita terlihat dari 4.800 judul buku yang dicetak per tahun di Indonesia, sementara Malaysia 7.000, Thailand 8.000, Jepang 10.0000, Korea Selatan 43.000, Amerika Serikat 50.000.

Tahun 2003, belanja masyarakat Indonesia untuk rokok Rp 150 triliun per tahun, tetapi belanja surat kabar hanya Rp 4,9 triliun. Berbeda dari di AS, sebagian besar masyarakat Indonesia belum beranjak dari kultur lisan fase pertama. Belum sempat memiliki budaya baca, orang yang terperangkap budaya televisi tanpa disadari memasuki budaya lisan yang lain, sekaligus berada dalam dua fase kultur lisan.

Pada temu koordinasi nasional pelaksanaan gerakan nasional percepatan pemberantasan buta aksara di Jakarta, 11 Juli, Mendiknas Bambang Sudibyo menegaskan, cara paling mudah, murah, dan cepat meningkatkan indeks pembangunan manusia (IPM) adalah dengan pemberantasan buta aksara. Penduduk Indonesia yang buta huruf pada akhir 2009 ditargetkan menjadi 5 persen.

Namun, data di kantung-kantung kemiskinan yang tersebar di 1.236 kecamatan atau 20.633 desa miskin menunjukkan, masyarakat usia 15-44 tahun mengidap tiga kebutaan: buta aksara, buta bahasa Indonesia, dan buta pengetahuan umum/ pendidikan dasar. Mereka belum mengenyam pendidikan dasar atau cuma beberapa tahun di SD lalu putus sekolah.

Tanggung jawab bersama

Penuntasan tiga buta itu mendapat hambatan serius dari pesona elektronik yang membuai dan menjauhkan masyarakat dari barisan huruf. Pemerintah tidak boleh berdiam diri membiarkan industri pertelevisian secara tak langsung melestarikan kemiskinan. Warga miskin yang lemah perlu dilindungi dari dekadensi moral dan psikologis akibat tayangan yang hanya mengikuti selera pasar.

Sejauh ini industri pertelevisian menganut sistem tunggal rating kuantitatif yang tak peduli dengan efek pembodohan tayangan. Yang dilihat hanya peringkat dan jumlah penonton, padahal rating tidak mencerminkan kualitas tayangan. Bisa saja tayangan buruk memiliki rating tinggi (Erica L Panjaitan dan TM Dhani Iqbal, Matinya Rating Televisi, 2006). Efek pembodohan itu bertentangan dengan upaya mencerdaskan bangsa.

Jangan berharap banyak pada industri pertelevisian yang berorientasi bisnis. Untuk membendung efek pembodohan dan meningkatkan efek pencerdasan televisi, Kementerian Komunikasi dan Informatika dapat mengeluarkan rating tandingan yang memperhitungkan dampak sosial tayangan terhadap psikologi penonton.

Gagasan Garin Nugroho bersama Yayasan SET (Sain, Estetika, dan Teknologi) dan Ikatan Jurnalis Televisi Indonesia untuk memelopori rating publik sebagai alternatif perlu didukung. Rating kualitatif itu melibatkan 560 orang dari berbagai latar profesi (dosen/guru, aktivis LSM, jurnalis/redaktur, profesional/pebisnis, pemuka masyarakat) di 14 kota besar.

Sebuah keluarga yang saya kenal "menyelamatkan" keempat anaknya dengan menempatkan televisi di ruang belakang, hanya ditonton seperlunya. Tayangan juga dapat menjadi obyek puasa. Keadaban bangsa tak boleh digadaikan kepada kapitalisme berjubah media.

Yonky Karman Rohaniwan

BOOKS TOOLBOX: 50+ Sites for Book Lovers

http://mashable.com/2007/09/08/books-toolbox/

September 8, 2007 — 03:57 AM PDT — by Daksh Sharma — Share This

Lulu, a book publishing site, is in the news this week. But there are many more sites for book reviews, self-publishing and exchange. Here are more than 50 of our favorites.

Disclosure: Lulu currently has an ad campaign running on Mashable.

Book Reviews

Amazon.com - Search from thousands of books, buy them online and read excellent reviews.

Booksprice.com - Users can search and compare prices of new and old books from all major stores.

Bookswellread.com - Users can share reviews of some of their favorite books with others.

Titlez - Users can perform a comparative analysis of a book or group of books with other books in the market.

Whatshouldireadnext.com - Users enter their favorite book and they are a recommended a new book based on analysis of the reading preferences of other registered users.

Book Communities

aNobii - A great way to create book listings, interact with people and express thoughts.

Booksconnect.com - A site which connects book lovers, writers and resellers. Users can discuss with each other, stay updated about events or network with interesting people.

BookJetty.com - Community site where users can tag their favorite books.

BookRevyoo.com - Users can read and rate books from multiple categories.

BooksWellRead.com - Excellent community for book readers looking for recommendations.

Connectviabooks.com - People can create list of read books and share their opinions with others.

Delicious Library - Browse the stream of books shared by other users.

Douban.net - Users can find interesting books recommended by other members and participate in discussions & reviews about a particular book.

Facebook.com Favoritebooks - Developer application on Facebook allowing users to share their favorite books with other users who can write comments.

Goodreads.com - Users can keep a track of books read by them, find out what their buddies are reading and also get recommendations from others who have read a book.

LibraryThing.com - Enables users to create an online catalog of books.

Project Gutenberg - Excellent platform for collaborative sharing of books.

Reader2.com - Users can find new books and recommend their own books to others.

Shelfari.com - An online shelf for sharing favorite books with friends.

Squirl.info - Nice way to share & organize information about books.

Storycode.com - A site for making book recommendations to other users.

Tagabook.com - A tagging site for book lovers allowing them to tag their favorites.

Vitalsource.com - Users can purchase their text books, download them and keep the mobile books with them all the time.

Zestr.com - Cool way to create a catalog of books online.

Publishing

Bibli - Book publishing & sharing platform for poems, scripts, short stories, novels etc.

Blurb.com - Create and sell books.

deusto.com - Book publishing platform for writers to create digital books.

Glypho.com - Collaborative platform for reading and writing books.

Mixbook.com - Users can create amazing books by mixing stuff like pictures to create books in collaboration with their friends.

Sharedbooks.com - Users can publish their information from multiple sources in the form of a structured printed book.

Book Search & Exchange

Americabookshelf.com - One of the largest book exchange clubs across the US.

BookCrossing.com - A community of users from over 130 countries who exchange books with each other at public places like cafes, parks etc.

Booksfree.com - A large and the most extensive library of books.

Bookhopper.co.uk - Free community for UK residents to share used books with each other.

Bookins.com - Book sharing website enabling members to exchange used books with each other in real time.

BookMooch.com - An interesting concept where users can exchange books with others through points. Users gain points when they give books to others.

Booksalescout.com - Online community of users allowing them to sell books in the US.

Bookswim.com - Book borrowing service with free shipping for registered website users.

Feedbooks.com - Users can search & download free PDF books from the internet.

Google Book Search - One of the best search engines for books allowing users to preview some chapters from the book they'd like to buy.

Lazylibrary.com - Special search engine for readers looking to read short books with less than 200 pages.

Live Search Books - Platform for searching books of interest online.

Manybooks.net - Users can search for free ebooks for their PDA, ebook reader or iPod.

PaperBackSwap.com - Users can share books amongst each other and only pay for the delivery charges.

Pazap.com - A book trade engine for students to buy and sell old books.

Read It Swap It - A free service that allows users to exchange books with others.

Socialbib - Book swapping network between students, the website does the searching for books.

Whatshoulditreadnext.com - Users enter a book of their preference and the search engine recommends books on the basis of reading habits of other users.

Worldcat.org - Extensive catalog of books available for viewing and downloading.

Others

bibliophil.org - Users can monitor their library books with public or private security access.

LeapTag.com - newsreader that picks users reading preferences and understands the books that they like.

Thatscrazyhot.com - A cool bibliography generator for book titles.