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| Mantra of the 'super corridor' |
| Azly Rahman | Feb 11, 08 1:38pm |
| Now we are aiming to be a major player in the Information Age industry. For this we will welcome with open arms foreign investments. Those who have experience doing business in Malaysia know that we are ever willing to listen and to act to meet the multifarious needs of foreign investors. And so the Multimedia Super Corridor is created to become a giant test-bed for the soft and hard products of the cyber age.- Dr Mahathir Mohamad, speech to MSC investors, 1998 Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers. - Karl Marx, circa 1880s In Sanskrit, the word "mantra" (mentera in Malay) means formula. Mantra is correlated to the idea of a grand strategy or a belief system in the form of political ideology that permeates the consciousness of the leader and the led or the author and the authored. Inscribed onto the consciousness of the people, via print, broadcast, and electronic media is the mantra of economic success rapidized by information technologies. The formula for success many developing nations, such as Malaysia, is undertaking is one characterized by the dependency on Informational Communications Technologies (ICT) particularly on the technology of the Internet/broadband to fuel the engine of capitalist development, relegating the state as a haven for cheap pool of labor in the microchips industry. The mantra of success is one driven by the belief in the formula of "cybernetics." I will discuss how the "cybernetic chant", one orchestrated and broadcast by the government, permeates through the social environment. Let us first look at the geneology of "cybernetics" I shall relate the idea and genealogy of cybernetics to the idea of what is currently known as "Information Age" or its varying and more fanciful terms such as "The Age of Cybernetics," or "The Networked Economy," or "The Digital Age." I will then relate the idea of this "formula" of cybernetics to the notion of "inscription" of the ideology onto the landscape of human consciousness since the beginning of the second half of the twenty-first century. On Cybernetics The idea of "Information Society" or "The Network Society" stems out of the revolution in computing and has transformed our psychological, ideological, and material landscape of humanity. Social relations of production are altered and transformed as a result of new patterns of division of labor in what many a Chaos theorist would call patterns that arise out of randomness and chaos. There are different levels of meaning of cultural change as it is impacted historically by "technologies of the body," such as the Internet. In the case of cybernetics as technologies of the mind, this seems to be a "natural progression of late stage of capital formation" and in fact, as the Critical Theorist Herbert Marcuse and many a Frankfurt School analysts would call an age wherein technologies are at its final stage of development which will actually liberate humanity out of mundanity as a consequence of automation. Hence cybernetics, as a foundation of artificial intelligence and a philosophy close to the Cartesian philosophy of the mind and appealing to the "philosophy of human liberation via technological feats," is at the present, the highest stage in the development of techno-capitalism. This proposition is reminiscent of Vladimir Lenin's conclusion on the analysis of capitalism made almost a century ago. Writings on social structures and political theory have primarily centered on the relationship between Capital, Humanity, and Nature. Many sociologists have written on how capitalism appropriates natural resources through the creation of labor and surplus value, which will then establish classes The debates that rage between the proponents of free market enterprise and command or controlled economies revolve around the issue of human nature, and who gets to control the production and dissemination and the monopoly of capital. At times, on a different plane there is also the reflection on the need for capital to be interpreted not only as physical or material, but also as cultural, and metaphysical. The central issue of these writings and debate and reflections is of equality and equity; an issue that continues to plague humanity in this age of rapidized technological developments, as echoed by many a contemporary social theorist. In the age of cybernetics, French social philosopher Rousseau's notion of the discourse on the inequality amongst men can be used to explain the evolution of contemporary social problematique such as digital divide, architecture of power, and the erosion of the Self into fragmented and miniscule selves. Other themes also include the furtherance of protectionist democracy via the use of tools of cybernetics, the control over the coding, encoding, and decoding of information by those who monopolize information, and a range of other tools of imperialism and domination and hegemony deployed and employed to the fullest advantage of those who owns the means of social reproduction. And those who own the means to control these processes can also own the means to engineer cultural reconfigurations The nature of thought formation and consciousness production in the world of broadcast media can be exemplified in the media capitalism of Rupert Murdoch whose empire span Britain and the United States made possible by the modern oligopolic system of capital accumulation The scientific paradigm of cybernetics, by virtue of its origin in the mathematical and exact sciences, out of the Copernican Revolution, of Newtonian physics and of Principia Mathematica, onwards to its march of Classical Physics, and next, Quantum Physics and Informational and Decisional Sciences and so on - is a science which has appropriated the "Natural-ness" of the art of being human. Being a paradigm subjected to the development of propositions, verification by the testing of hypotheses, falsification by the rejecting and accepting of the null, and replicating these processes and so on and so forth, cybernetics creates a "space" between what is Natural and what is Artificial. In-between these spaces, Technology as the motivator of civilizations to progress and to dominate, to extent the limits of what otherwise is impossible (for example the navigational technology of Christopher Columbus which made it possible to open up European colonization of the Native Indians of Amerigo Vespucci's America) is also psychologically, a way to create the Technocratic and Authoritarian self. In between these spaces of Nature versus the Artificial lie Media as technology of the mediated self. Technology, as it is developed not by the hands of the "Author" has thence become a powerful tool of the surreal - of inequality amongst men. Popular culture presents technology as a colonizer of humanity, as exemplified by the theme of the movie, The Matrix. Cybernetics as a paradigm of thinking about the technology of action and feedback and the loops they produce is an interesting synthesis of three theoretical orientations: logical positivism, critical theory, and phenomenology The paradox is that on the one hand, it is derived from the Classical and Quantum Physics, on the one hand, it is a good foundational philosophy of technologism which combines many fields to form a unified theory of living things (like Critical Theory's attempt to universalize and integrate the disciplines, albeit in a dialectical fashion), and on the other hand, Cybernetics too is phenomenological. Precisely because we can derive three clusters of theories out of the paradigms above makes Cybernetics appealing and hegemonizing. The Internet as a manifestation of the ideology of cybernetics is a good example of how it is both a technology of advanced logical-positivism, and at the same time, one that is employed to make the concept of democracy more "accessible" when one goes into the study of free speech on the Internet. Cybernetics and the idea of Cyberjaya What is the link between the mantra of Cybernetics and the creation of Malaysia's Cyberjaya? I propose the existence of a possible link between Cybernetics and Cyberjaya; on how the idea of cybernetics, as Systems Theory (employed to explain the nature of how living systems operate in a loop-feedback fashion) suggested undergoes transcultural evolution. The idea is now interpreted and transmutated by the government of Malaysia to mean the base and superstructure of hypermodern digital cities such as Cyberjaya, a city that embodies a new spirit of national development. Hence, the term evolved from the description of the physics of living things to the politics of domination and control in what I argue, is commonly known in the world of militarism, as the science of Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence (C³I). In each phenomena of social transformations, lies the history of dominant idea and of power, technology, and ideology. In the case of Malaysia's corridor, the idea is alien and alienating to the masses. It is a transplantation of a mantra not understood by the local elites who benefit from the real estate projects associated to "cybernetics". |
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12 comments:
dear dr azly rahman,
your piece on the mantra of super corridor is too pretentious, as it is abound with unnecessary high theory explanations, which clouds the gist of your short essay.
as a result, you failed to demonstrate how the manipulation works via cyberjaya.
the theme central in most, if not all, your essays relates to manipulation through cybernetics.
you also try to inject to the maximum explanations from critical theory.
how many of your readers understand the high theory of the frankfurt school or even heard of it.
the assumption is that there is manipulation through cybernetics.
there is very little analysis of the culture and the mind-set of the dominant ethnic group in malaysia.
the malays are not just passive raw materials waiting to be moulded and remoulded by cybernetics.
it would be interesting to analyse how the the culture of the malays influence and shape the type of propaganda that are disseminated through cyberjaya.
the writer of the rukun tetangga song you mentioned in the ketuanan mlayu essay, i would disagree with you, failed to understand what he was writing.
you say that the writer does not even understand the people's history of malaysia or its social-political economy.
i would argue that the writer understands it differently from you did.
the song writer understands the
social-historical-economic scenario from the viewpoint of the dominant ethnic group in the country.
whereas you try to understand it from the perspective of high theory.
seen from this perspective, i would argue that many of the propaganda programmes of the government are formulated with feedback from the grass roots.
the dialecical interaction between the grass roots and the government produces the propaganda of the day.
if you understand marx properly, (someone whom you like to name drop in your essays regularly) you will see how the social-economic background of the song writer influences his composition.
i have read only the abstract and the chapters' headings of your dissertation, as you need to purchase the entire thesis from columbia.
there doesn't seem to be much analysis on the social-historical environment of the day that created cyberjaya.
you stress endlessly on manipulation throughout your works.
the same theme recurs, albeit in different ways and forms, in all your essays.
if manipulation is so pervasive, then what would be your paradigm of change.
if human cosciousness is so reified (to use a western marxist term which you are only too familiar), then what possibility is there for change.
the only way for change to happen is for an intellectual elite, a modern prince, who knows what is best for the masses, to appear on the scene.
this paves the way for authoritarianism and bureaucracy, which the frankfurt school is so much against.
this paradigm of change is also against marx's philosophy, as expounded in the third thesis on feuerbach, which he attacks the philosophy of enlightenment.
in cambodia, such paradigm of change was translated into pol potism, resulting in mass genocide.
Dear "david",
I think you constructed a good critique of the article. I certainly learned a lot from the points you raised. You did quite a close reading of the piece. The brief opinion piece, as you pointed out cannot explain everything about "manipulation". Not even my full scale dissertation "Thesis on Cyberjaya" can explain the complexity of totalitarianism in the context of Malaya.
Your concluding statement on "pol pot-ism" is a careless and leisured , touch and go recap to your summary of you critique, though. You need to explain how you arrive at such a conclusion. It is too simplistic, missing the discussions of major evolution of thoughts in between.
Continue this dialogue, David. I consider your serious thinker. It is not a pretentious piece, I assure you. There are levels of understanding of Critical Theory you need to explore before arriving at the idea of the non-pretentiousness of the piece.
David said "there doesn't seem to be much analysis on the social-historical environment of the day that created cyberjaya".
Whatever thought may have gone into their formation, I think the creation of MSC and Cyberjaya were doomed from the very beginning.
As the saying goes "if you keep repeating a lie over and over, you will eventually come to believe the lie to be true".
The plain truth is, if we aim to be a major player in the Information Age industry, we must first have at least some amount of quality in our human capital to function effectively in the field.
The plain truth is our human capital is somewhat mediocer at the very best. To operate at the cutting edge of Information Industry you need a strong pool of capable workers who are quick on the take when it comes to training, updation of skills and overall higher quality in critical thinking.
Working in the information industry is not like other industries where we one can JUST SAY, "we have great doctors, fantastic engineers, brilliant professors". There is no basis of correct comparison in such fields.
Whereas in the IT and Information Age Industry, one's boasts will be put to the test within half-an-hour.
The standard scenario is "There is the computer. This, here is the hypothetical problem. You have 20 minutes to solve it. Start NOW!".
Alamak! this is too much for our UM, UKM and USM graduates to handle.
The above I believe is the reality. If that is the case, how could one expect the whole concept to take root and gain support from UMNO leaders. The first question from our great leaders would be 'MANA ORANG KITA ?'.
And if they are told that our 'ORANG' can not cut it in this field. That will be the end of the whole project. And I believe that is what has happened with our MSC / Cyberjaya project.
dear dr azly,
i had to delete my post a few times to make some changes in the write-up.
hope you don't mind.
In regards to Cambodia, I was merely trying to argue that there is a tendency for elite-led revolutions to become authoritarian and
bureaucratic regimes.
In Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre stresses that revolutionary
movements, due to the problem of material scarcity, have the tendency to lose their democratic character, becoming authoritarian and oppressive in nature.
The Russian and Chinese revolutions are some examples.
The Cambodian experience is another.
Sartre, however, maintains that the group-in-fusion, comprising
subjects who are united by common interests and a common project, is
the proper revolutionary organisation, and not the Leninist party.
(i)
The problem started with Lukacs who talked about reification, a concept drawn not only from Marx, but also from Weber.
When the proletariat revolution failed to break out in Western Europe, Lukacs and Gramsci-the founders of Western Marxism-argued that the
revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat had been fragmentised.
Terms such as 'reification' and 'hegemony' were introduced to explain the effects of twentieth-century capitalism on the class-consciousness of the proletariat.
To bring about a proletariat revolution, so they argued, a Leninist type of revolutionary party must be formed to guide the proletarian
back to true revolutionary class consciousness.
But is there really latent revolutionary consciousness that has to be manipulated and neutralised because of the threat it poses to the political status quo?
Even if such revolutionary consciousness did exists, as Eduard Bernstein argued, the improved conditions of capitalism of the early twentieth century had made revolutionary struggle an outmoded form of social change.
Gramsci realised the problem of an elitist party and tried to come up
with a more democratic version of a Communist party, emphasising on the role of factory councils, the importance of working class culture, and the role of organic intellectuals.
(ii)
"Revolutionary Consciousness' and 'Revolutionary Practice' were notions postulated by Marx to give his philosophy a scientific basis.
(The 'German Ideology', for example, was an attack against the other Left Hegelians such as Max Stirner who wants to impose their ideals on the world)
Marx was so caught up with wanting to change the world that he did not spend time studying the class-consciousness of the proletariat.
Until the arrival of Marx, the 18th century philosophers explain social change as stemming from the efforts of enlightened individuals, who somehow could escape from determination by the surrounding conditions.
This would mean that only enlightened individuals know what is best and can provide the guidance for social changes.
The 18th century philosophers adopted such an explanation because they adhere to the view that human beings and society are products of
conditions.
It was against such an elitist conception of social change that Marx wrote the 3rd Theses on Feuerbach.
'The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and
upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of
circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung]
can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary
practice'.
In the German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto, Marx talked about the inherent contradictions in the capitalist society, the conflict
between the productive forces and relations of production, which
engender the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat.
In the German Ideology, Marx wrote: 'Communism is not merely a state to be brought about or an ideal to which reality should conform; what we call Communism is an actual movement which is sweeping away the present state of things'.
Historical materialism and class-consciousness are key tenets
introduced by Marx to precisely ensure that his socialism has that
scientific basis that would distinguish it from other Utopian socialist beliefs.
If the proletariat were able to achieve revolutionary consciousness and become agents of social change, then the role of the party in the
revolutionary cause would be minimal.
An elitist conception of the party goes against the very basic grain of Marx's philosophy of praxis.
Subsequently Marx wrote very little on the relationship between the Communinist party and the proletariat and the strategies of revoltuion.
This topic was to be developed later by twentieth century such as
Plakhanov, Lenin, Kautsky, Luxembourg, Lukacs, and Gramsci.
(iii)
The model of an elite-led revolution, I would argue, is no longer suitable or even desirable in the new millennium.
With the arrival of IT, there are new centres of resistance to hegemony or strategies of rule from the above-be it in the form of cultural imperialism or other modes of domination.
This is where the methodological tools of social history pioneered by EP Thompson and new theories of power relationships popularised by Foucault become useful.
(iv)
If you talk of cultural imperialism and manipulation from above, then it will be important to look closely at the 'raw materials'--the needs, interests, and culture of the people--that are being manipulated.
Hegemony must not be understood from the viewpoint of those
implementing the strategies of rule by consent.
It must also be seen from the perspective of the masses that are the target of manipulation.
Hegemony is always in the process of becoming, as it is always being
influenced and moulded by the needs and interests of the grass roots.
The grass roots are not passive beings.
They are 'live' people with particular needs and interests.
Thus in order for strategies of rule by consent to be successful, they have to accommodate those needs and interests of the grass roots.
Are the puppet masters manipulating the show or are they being manipulated to manipulate the show in a certain way.
If the strategies of rule are influenced by the grass roots, doesn't it imply that the grass roots is essentially right wing in nature. That would be the implication.
In Malaysia, Umno's policies can only be understood from the perspective of its members who constitutes the majority in the country.
You have to take the local culture of the dominant ethnic group and its relationship with the other ethnic groups into consideration.
The works of Pierre Bourdieu on habitus and field would also come into relevancy for such a study.
And how the Umno members interact with the others greatly influence the process of creating a viable and suitable form of hegemony.
I think it would do you good if you were to come back to Malaysia and spend say three months to six months in a kampung such as Permatang Berangan or Bumbung Lima in North Seberang Prai.
I think after spending that time there you may want to revise your
theories on cultural imperialism and hegemony.
If you 'bracket out' (to use a Husserlian termilogy) the scheming from 'above', you will see the stark naked interests, needs, and aspirations of the grass roots.
You will see things a bit differently: that the grass roots play an active role in determining what these hegemonic constructs should be.
If the grass roots in this country is essentially right wing, conservative, and retrogressive
in nature, then what hope is there for progressive change?
The answer is none, unless the grass roots wants to have progressive change.
But then what is 'progressive' to them may not be to you and me.
(v)
One of my favourite works is Max Weber's 'The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit Of Capitalism', which presents a very persuasive argument on the
role of religious/cultural forces in transforming the social and
economic order.
At the turn of the 20th century, Zhou Shuren, a Chinese studying
medicine in Japan, saw pictures in a newspaper of Chinese prisoners
about to be beheaded by the Japanese.
Surrounding the scene were other Chinese, laughing and mocking at the prisoners.
It was at this moment that Zhou Shuern decided to become a different type of doctor, one who diagnoses the ills of society.
Zhou Shuren adopted the pen name Lu Xun and started to write stories
that criticise the thousand-year-old Confucianist tradition in China.
The most famous story he wrote was 'The Real Story of Ah Q', a
penetrating criticism of that type of mentality that brought Imperial
China to its knees.
The "Malaysia Boleh" spirit is a classic example of the Ah Q mindset.
Features of such mindset: never admit mistakes, never admit defeat, never encourage criticism, promote cover ups, as face saving is more important, and always tell grandeur stories about yourself.
And when you tell lies too often, you will soon believe in the lies
also.
Mao Dun, Lao She, and Bing Xin soon joined Lu Xun, who together exerted
enormous influence on the May 4th movement and the origins of the
Marxist party in China.
Later, Mao called Lu Xun the heart and soul of Chinese literature.
Malaysia needs someone like Lu Xun, a literary critic who dares to speak against and make a break with tradition.
But I doubt such an individual or individuals would who can inspire
positive changes in the mindset and culture of Malaysians would ever come by.
Of course, there would be changes in Malaysian society.
In fact changes are already taking place.
They have been taking place for the past several years, gaining
momentum as time goes by.
But these changes are not the type that liberal, left liberal, and
secular intellectuals would consider as progressive.
But remember what is backwards to the liberal and secular intellectuals
maybe progressive to others.
Dear "david" and "anonymous"
Your comments are excellent I'd like to post them in my column "Republic of Virtue" in Malaysia Today. I think many more readers will benefit from your analyses.
Keep on sharing your ideas. If we can have these kinds of discussions in Malaysian universities, we will be in good shape.
thank dr azly for your generous and kind comments.
if i think of any interesting topic, i will share it with you here.
i left the world of marxism and european intellectual history many years ago.
due to a hectic working life, i don't keep up with the latest literature on marxism and intellectual history anymore.
but i do pick up a few books on the subject every now and then through amazon.com.
the general elections are on and the results on march 8 would be very telling on the kind of impact bloggers--like yourself--have created over the past four years.
Dear Dr Azly Rahman,
You have a lot of good advice and analysis of the problems we have in this beautiful land of ours.
I as a Malaysian, will venture to give my view of the problem as regards to the NEP, 30% equity,bumiputra,university quota etc etc.
I wound like to point out that the more crutches you give out, the least competitive the race will become. Bear in mind the other races are working hard,improving themselves to prepare to survice in the near future globalise world.
I used to argued post May 13 that the malay are way behind, so it is alright to help by social engineering,but the umnoputra start to interpret it as their right. I use to reason it this way:if I have a bright child & a not so bright child, I would try to help the not so bright child until the latter can survive on his own, then I will allow equal competition.I am sure that there are plenty of bright malays here,
like I see in so many bloggers. Unfortunately they shy away from politics.How good it would be if the present new cabinet be replaced by you bloggers.The way UMNO is doing will only weaken the
Malay.I would like to see an equally hard working, bright,intelegent malay race that
can proudly proclaim "I can compete with anyone in this world
without help from anybody". Then Malaysian will not have to talk about race.Better still,Pakatan Rakyat will compete with Barisan National(abolish all other parties like UMNO, MCA,MIC,DAP,PRK,PAS etc)
to see who the rakyat chose to be the government.You would not disagree unless you are less capable,less inteligent,lazy.We
are all children of God/Allah, we should all be brothers & sisters,helping each other rather than fighting each other.
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