On Knowledge, the Nation, and Universals
Kasian
Tejapira
Let me begin with a poem. I composed it in hiding
at the house of one of my aunts right after the
May
this wrath
turn into strength
as mighty as a raging storm.
We
shall rise up
and fight to the death
sacrificing our lives.
Millions
upon millions of people
wrathfully and thunderously clamor,
the sky and oceans reverberating,
dictatorship trembling.
The
Devil rules over this evil age,
selling out the nation, robbing the people,
collaborating with foreign invaders
to set up military bases all over the land.
They
gag our mouths, shut our eyes and ears,
taking away our rights and freedom.
Guns in hands, together they occupy and plunder our land.
When
the people peacefully protest,
they shun us and pretend not to understand.
Our words are spoken in vain
and met with only contempt.
Their
mouthpiece slanders us,
distorts the news and makes wild allegations.
Their henchmen, armed to the teeth,
bludgeon and slaughter us.
Our
friends were battered unconscious,
then hanged from a tree.
Their benumbed bodies were piled up,
drenched with gasoline and burned alive.
A
carnival of carnivores,
with their bestiality let loose
to feed upon people’s flesh and blood,
devils in human disguise.
The
land was soaked in blood,
fiery, bloody reddened everywhere.
And the ground was strewn
with the bodies of our fallen heroes.
Let
us wipe away the blood and tears.
A costly lesson has just been learned,
for which we paid with our blood, tears and lives,
one we’ll never ever forget.
A
peaceful, legal struggle could not but bring us futile deaths.
We can’t reason with brutes.
When they can kill people just like that,
it’s no use talking to them.
Let’s
lay down our pens,
save our breath,
and retrain our hands
to take up guns instead.
An
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,
and a life for a life we’ll gladly exchange.
We’ll hold fast to the revolutionary line
till we exterminate all evils.
Let’s
proclaim truth with bullets!
The people will support our fight.
With our great number, unity and determination,
the world will be turned upside down.
Our
cherished people’s war
will surely triumph.
In the end,
and all of us, free at last.
May
the souls of our fallen heroes and friends
rest happy and assured
that the day of victory will soon come
and vengeance be visited upon the devils.
October 1976
What was so troubling about that massacre was not
only the degree of violence used, but also the fact that a lot of ordinary Thai
folks took part actively and bloodthirstily in lynching the students. Our
fellow Thai countrymen must have really hated our guts to have killed us in
that bestial manner.
That incident formed the background of the
knowledge, method, and aspirations of the so-called “Octobrist” generation of
Thai intellectuals and scholars, to which I belong. Hence the two basic facts
about us are: the Thai (official) nation
tried to kill us but we survived; and then
we tried to make a revolution but it failed. In a way, our subsequent
common intellectual trajectory has been a traumatic, persistent attempt, in our
own separate ways, to find an appropriate and adequate intellectual answer and
political response to those two problematics – why the Thai nation hated us so
and why the revolution failed.
Given the collapse of the revolution in the early
1980s and with nothing better to do, scores of
us went to the West for higher education, including me and a few ex-comrades
who went to Cornell. Of course there we met Khroo Ben or Professor Benedict
Anderson. It was Ben who started me thinking about the Nation as a cultural
political project, a transitive reality, a state power-constituted construct
that creates, delineates, and reproduces its own others. In the case of
It was also Ben who made me see for the first time
my invisible “pigtail” and become aware of my Chinese ethnicity as a cultural
political problem. Grasping Thainess and Chineseness as two sides of the same
ethno-ideological coin, my academic-cum-cultural political ambition was to
undermine the deadly cultural infrastructure of the Thai official nation which
had made possible and justifiable such state terrorism against the people as
the
But how did one go about doing so academically? The
provisional answer I improvised was to analytically and critically trace the
genealogy (or the tradition of invention and reception) of a key signifier in
modern Thai cultural politics, namely Thainess, all the while trying to
destabilize, denaturalize or, if one prefers, deconstruct it in the most
outrageously irreverent and iconoclastic, most sacrilegiously hilarious and
profane manner possible, by making use of basic semiotic concepts and insights.
With the sacred and deadly contents of Thainess emptied out and its lid thrown
wide open, a semiotic space for contestation was thereby created in which
alternative “un-Thai” meanings and referents could come freely into full play
as “Thai,” including my favorite radical, popular candidates, in a dynamic and
open-ended reimagination and reconstruction of a new Thai nation.
That’s how I have been trying to settle my account,
intellectually, with the Thai/Chinese, or indigenous, or local, side of my
cultural political formation. The other side is the single universalism of
Western thought, which I dealt with through a retrospective engagement with my
first political love, the one to which I lost my teenage ideological virginity,
so to speak – Marxism-communism.
It began in the early 1990s during my doctoral
dissertation research on the formation of modern Thai radical culture by
post-war radical public intellectuals. Given my axiomatic belief as a good
Maoist in the unproblematically universal character of Marxist-communist
theoretical truth and concepts, I was surprised and amazed to find that these
Thai discourse compradors, in their attempt to introduce Marxism-communism to
the Thai public through the translation of key terms from Chinese and English
into Thai – either inventing new Thai coinages or matching them with old Thai
words – had actually transformed not only the outward appearance of these
terms, their look and sound, but also their meanings and usages.
My two favorite examples are the various Thai translations of “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat,” two key Marxist-communist terms denoting the two main classes in a capitalist society. In the case of bourgeoisie, instead of following the rather neutral-sounding and low-key official Thai translation of kradumphi, an Indian-derived Thai word meaning “rich people,” the Thai communist intellectual Atsani Phonlajan (alias Naiphi) retranslated it as phaessaya, a Sanskrit-derived Thai word with the wonderful double meaning of “merchant class” and “prostitute or bitch.”
Proletariat, kammachip in Thai, went a different way. Initially, leftist intellectuals and students (many themselves low-ranking and low-paid government employees) fiercely, if confusedly, debated whether or not both Thai government employees and tricyclists (pedicab drivers) should be counted as members of the proletariat. Of course the proletariat was supposed to consist of property-less wage earners, and the former group, though middle-class by station, were indeed state-employed wage earners who didn’t own any means of production, while the latter, though dirt poor and toiling, nonetheless possessed as private property their own means of production – the battered tricycles.
Subsequently, kammachip came to mean something altogether different from “modern
industrial workers” in actual political usage. The top ranks of the Communist
Party of Thailand (1942 through the mid-1980s), purportedly the vanguard party
of the Thai proletariat, held just a handful of Thai and Laotian industrial
workers. Most were high school-educated, Sino-Thai, petty bourgeois, small and
medium entrepreneurs, shopkeepers and their apprentices, along with a few
university-educated intellectuals. It turned out that the Chinese
apprenticeship ethics of self-discipline, diligence, endurance,
self-abnegation, parsimony, and simple lifestyle were identified as universal
“proletarian characteristics and virtues” and became the prescribed model and
hallmark of CPT cadres and revolutionaries in the years of rural armed
struggle.
My way of making sense of this process of
transformation is to compare it with the start of a snooker game wherein a
player hits a white ball against a triangular formation of other balls so that,
upon impact, the balls scatter, going their own separate ways. It was as if,
once imported (or smuggled) across linguistic boundaries, stripped of their
original script and sound, made to incarnate Thai forms, thrown into a new
semantic field, and shoved into various Thai verse genres, those poor alien
Marxist words ran into a virtual mine-field of immensely complex rhyming,
syllabic, accentual, rhythmic, and tonal rules and regulations that followed a
totally disparate logic. Crashing into these cultural obstacles head-on, they
disintegrated on impact into free-floating radical signifiers, multiple
confusing signifieds, substituted referents, and incongruent practices, each
going their own separate, mind-boggling way.
How did I come to terms with the phantasmagoria of
single universalism? The Enlightenment belief in the universality of reason and
transparency of the word-reality relationship has been proved overly optimistic
by the actual cross-cultural, cross-language flows and motions of words and
discourse. And yet this is no reason to give up the noble dream of universal
reason. One need only understand that it is impossible to transplant intact a
fixed signifier with definite signifieds, unchanging referents, and
prescriptive practices from one culture and language into another because there are no such things in the first place.
Having already disintegrated, any “universal” can come to other peoples only as
a self-educating process in which they have to fight, experience, learn,
improvise, invent, and reinvent that “universal” for themselves. Only through
this actual, historical process can the free-floating signifier, the multiple
signifieds, the substituted referents, and the mimic practices that together
constitute any and every “universal” be reintegrated. Only in this way can their
institutions be built and take root. A generous attempt in good faith to come
up with a single definition of “universals” can never replace that process, for
the only sustainable “universal” is the one that people learn to define and
build for themselves, not the one decreed, then offered to or imposed on them
by well-wishers.
So eventually we’ll end up with many different
“universals.” Some may look like ours, others may not. Some we may envy, others
we may disapprove of, so much so perhaps that we may not want even to call them
“universal.” That’s fine, because our own universals (be they Buddhist,
Islamic, Confucian, Asian, Thai, or Singaporean) are also far from perfection
and contain many features which we hope to change and improve in years to come.
That’s why the differences between our “universals” and others’ are no less
important than our common ground. For differences invite us to compare,
contrast, and learn from one another’s “universal” achievements and
shortcomings. Let’s open up the vista of many “universals” and the opportunity
for open-ended dialogue. In the process, we may change their definition of
universals; they in turn may change ours. Thank God there’s no universal
definition of universals. Let’s hope people can talk and argue about their
universals in a sincere, free, and non-violent way.
Kasian Tejapira is assistant professor of political
science at