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HERITAGE AND THE PARADOX OF CULTURE*
Bambang Sugiharto
Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung, Indonesia
Abstract
We are accustomed to see culture relative to identity. This has
been the strategy of modernity which leads us to see globalization as
a crisis. This paper proposes to demonstrate that it is more promising
to see a culture as a process of transformation through a creative
dialogue with its Other.
Today, global interactions have compelled us to rethink the role of
our local cultures, along with the significance of its heritage, in our present
life. As never before, culture is now situated in a tug of war between
centripetal and centrifugal forces. The centripetal would treat culture as a
sanctuary or panacea for the troubled identity, whereas the centrifugal
would take culture as a strategy for the transformation of self in new contexts
and wider possibilities. While the former oftentimes shows not so much a
realistic solution to the problem as a disguised helplessness in facing the
global power, the latter seems to promise a more realistic response. How
we are to see the problem of cultural heritage will depend on how we
conceive culture and tradition today.
Culture
Given the inevitability of cultural interaction today and the fact that
so many elements of our culture do change substantively, it would be
more relevant to see culture as a process, instead of a system or a formal
pattern. Culture is an historic process of plural influences and exchanges.
It is a provisional imaginative picture of the junctions of various streams.
What is primary is the flow, not the picture. Culture is a dynamic living
flow. And as such it has its own internal principle of change. Culture consists
Prajñâ Vihâra, Volume 6, Number 2, July-Decmber 2005, 54-60 54
© 2000 by Assumption University Press
of loosely connected elements that can be ordered and reordered in
accordance with changing circumstances, such as when beliefs and values
become incompatible with each other, politics is in tension between
opposing visions and factions, new meaning subverts the old, and so on
and so forth. Hence culture has its own indeterminacies, internal strains,
conflicts and improvisations. It is a process of requests and counter-
requests, of changing one’s responses, and of innovating new expressions.
It is also a struggle of power over meaning-giving to important aspects of
life, such as problems of gender, private property, human rights, etc. Culture
is a creative reordering and renewing capacity, processes of transmission
and transformation, based on the existing condition and the possible.1
Although a culture can be envisaged somehow as a certain whole, it is an
internally fissured whole, a whole containing internal differences, including
its own alternatives (“Otherness”) and conceiving internal contestations.
The connection between culture and social community is not
necessarily one to one. Culture may transgress geopolitical boundaries. In
terms of culture, some countries may be overlapping. In history the
conflation of culture and social unit was oftentimes political: it served to
legitimize the construction of a nation-state. And these days, especially
when the survival of a certain community is under the threat of global
political power, the need to overemphasize cultural uniqueness arises more
strongly. In this respect, when according to Samuel Huntington what is
political is basically cultural or civilizational, it would be better to see it the
other way round that, what is cultural is basically political.2 In such context
culture plays the role only as a temporary common focus for political
engagement, a common reference binding various participants to struggle
together for a common cause, not necessarily with common understanding
of it. Further, culture does not always serve as the principle of social
order, since social order can be buttressed by technique of surveillance,
systematic use of terror, effective economic system, educational institution
or media of communication.3
Tradition
Bambang Sugiharto 55
If culture is a creative reordering and renewing capacity, then, the
capacity does not come out of the blue. It owes a great deal of its energy
and intelligence from the collective past experience, namely, from the so
called tradition. Tradition is a peculiar rationality, that is, a systematic effort
to make the Lebenswelt - the flows of events or the multiformity of
experience - intelligible. It is the inner struggle of human effort to give
meaning to life experience in particular time and space, which eventually
forms particular pattern of inner logic and inner feelings about life.
Tradition is an essential part of our spiritual biography, the collective
unconsciousness that has shaped our inner perception, the tacit knowledge
that has secretly helped us go through the changes. It serves as the inner-
setting, the hidden spiritual alphabet of our dealing with the deep mystery
and the paradox of life : the perpetual motion and change.
There is no culture without tradition. Even modernity has its own
tradition. The problem, however, is that modernity is characterized by the
primacy of the Subject over tradition: personal reflection controls tradition.
Whereas in the pre-modern condition it is tradition that controls personal
reflection. Modernity is an ongoing process of transvaluation of any cultural
traditions, and of its own. But the Subject or self is never a disengaged
agent. In Heideggerian terms, the self finds itself and is able to define itself
only in terms of a life shared with others, as being-together.4 And, following
Merleau-Ponty, the most part of its perception is basically pre-conscious
and pre-personal, materialized by a bodily ego which is also pre-
conscious.5 It is precisely this archaic unity between the self and the world
that manifests itself in the so called tradition. But it manifests itself not so
much in its overt systems and artifacts as in the covert desires, emotion,
imagination, evaluation and behavior behind them. As such, tradition is the
natural field for all our modern thoughts and explicit perceptions.
However, when tradition is put vis-à-vis modernity, and
“traditional” means “pre-modern”, then, we can see traditional culture,
with its peculiar characters, as a significant antidote to contemporary
modern life. In general, the traditional antiques set up for us the context of
our history. Heritage is some sort of transubstantiation of our past. But
when they are exhibited in museums they becomes art objects and, like
all masterpieces, are made idols, to be appreciated in contemplation,
with disinterestedness and distance. And idols soon are transformed into
ideas in discourse. Unlike modern art objects, however, traditional artifacts
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originally do not belong to the realm of spectacle, in the sense that they are
meant neither to be appreciated through watching, nor for contemplation
of the sublime. They, instead, belong to the realm of event. It is not the
object in itself, but rather, the event or the collective happening that counts.
In such context, beauty, usefulness, pleasure, reflection and psycho-
physical effects are all fused.6 Therein the significance of an object lies in
its physical presence, which presents the unpresentable, the absent, the
godhead. The power does not lie in its conceptual meaning or virtuosity,
but rather, in its emanation of being, in the collective spiritual-cognitive
resonance it incites. It does not mean, it simply is. And to appreciate
In the modern world the value of objects can be framed in two main
categories: instrumentality and contemplation. Instrumental perspective
prevailing in modernity has created peculiar fabricated environment filled
with mass-produced things, the world of “the They” (das Man). The
modern perspective of contemplation, on the other hand, has created
esoteric art with its high formalism trying to articulate the sublime. The
former is characterized by its usefulness and transparency, the latter by its
virtuosity and opacity. Traditional artifacts can be viewed as an antidote to
the insipidity of functional modern industrial environment as well as to the
anomic and idiosyncratic world of art. In traditional art maximum utility
is continually violated in favor of imagination and sheer caprice, whereas
beauty and contemplation are subordinated to usefulness and supernatural
power. The energy of its creation is derived from the desire to take delight
in every thing we see and touch, a celebration of divinity working in and
through banality. It is a fiesta of the object which transforms everyday
utensils into a sign of communal participation. This explains the predominant
penchant for decoration, while in modernity decoration is almost a crime.
The imprint on the object is not personal signature, but rather, a faded
scar commemorating the original brotherhood of man, the fact that the
object is made by and for human collectivity, where soul searches for
other soul and body for other body, in a mutually shared physical life.7
By suppressing local traditions and heritage modernity has
impoverished the world, has become an agent of cultural entropy. And as
a utopia it has created uniformity without unity, has failed to eradicate
rivalry and hatred between peoples and states. Great civilization is always
Bambang Sugiharto 57
a rich synthesis of various cultures, an ongoing growth through the
elaboration of otherness.
Global Cultural Interaction and Authenticity
Global modernization has enhanced cultural interactions which, in
turn, have also elicited the instability of culture. In the interaction self-
interrogation and mutual self-criticism take place, in which the participating
cultures are put into question. In this way, cultures would weave and
reweave their conceptual networks continually. Through a process of
translation, appropriation, resistance, subversion and compromise,
thoughts, emotions, symbols and self–awareness are time and again
decomposed and recomposed. It is a process of continuous translation of
the Other into our own horizon, biography and collective consciousness,
and the reverse, our own into the Other’s. Thereby we are exposed to the
possibility of interpreting anew our own cultural tradition as well as our
personal narratives, hence a new possibility to give sense to life.8
Indeed the logic of negation or the logic of the “new” inherent in
modernism would always compel cultural traditions to reformulate and
translate their worldviews in terms of new frameworks of meaning, new
demands and new opportunities. But the outcome of such process is not
necessarily alienating, since in this way the long hidden potentiality and the
unknown significance of a culture may also be rendered manifest to their
most abundant flowering. Neither is it to be perceived simply as leading to
the re-integration of the core values of the respective cultures, as once
envisaged by Samuel Huntington. It is, instead, a process of Deleuzian
deterritorialization of meanings and values, a subtle and unpredictable
process of ramification, which in turn might even change the very core
value of the culture itself.9
Cultural interaction is a process of self-enlargement. Vis-à-vis the
other, or the Thou, we realize ourselves, we realize the imaginative variations
of the ego, the playful metamorphosis of the ego.10 It is a process of
recognizing the complexity, ambiguity and subtlety of each other’s “world”.
What emerges in the interaction is the truth that tells about both. And the
truth becomes perceptible only through letting oneself “be told” by the
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other, being exposed to that otherness. This is an infinite relation. For the
condition of the dialogue keeps changing, motivated by different interests,
questions and prejudices.11
We are all the potentialities that we have. What we call “human
nature” is something we interpret and construct through relationship, by
way of metaphors, figures, discourses, organizations and various forms of
self-externalization. Identity is in fact a transitory product of ongoing critical
dialogical exchange with others. History, tradition and heritage of the past
are all the data and interpretation that have constituted our way of living,
that we have made use of, and that we are exposed to as an alternative
among many others. History, tradition and heritage are not always objective
representations of the past, but rather, possible interpretations of it, which
are to be re-interpreted so as to transform us, to keep us on the move and
to enable us to evolve to higher level.12 More than simply a matter of
transmission, tradition is a process of transformation.
In global cultural interaction what we can expect is the disclosure
of possibilities for being and acting that emerge in and by means of playful
encounters with the others. It is self-enrichment and greater self-realization
as a result of the play of meaning. Authenticity, then, is to be conceived as
“being in the truth”. We are in the truth when we are true to ourselves,
when in the process of self-transformation we are able to incorporate our
specific tradition and personal histories, that is, when our narratives are
such as to contain a significant amount of ongoing coherence ; when in
our rewriting and retelling we are able to preserve and take up the
significance of the past with greater subtlety and complexity of narrative.
We are authentic also when we are able to overcome the distortions –
systematic or otherwise- that constantly menace conversation; when we
can maintain the openness of the conversation and keep it going. For it
seems that what we most truly are, in our deepest inner self, is a
conversation.
ENDNOTES
* The paper was written for AACP International Conference on “Asian
Heritage in a Global Society”, 18-20 August 2004, Bangkok, Thailand.
1 Cfr. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977) p 8.
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2 Huntington basically sees political problems of the global world today
as merely problems of identity rooted in the differences of civilizations. See Samuel
P.Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, remaking the world order (New York:
Touchstone, 1997) pp 20-21.
3 Cfr. J.G. Merquior, The Veil and the Mask: Essays on culture and ideology
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,1979) pp 63-65.
4 see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans John Macquarrie et al.
(New York: Harper and Row, 1962) pp 61-62.
5 cfr. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin
Smith ( New York: The Humanities Press, 1962) pp viii-xi.
6 cfr. Leon Rosenstein, “The Aesthetic of the Antique” in Philip Alperson
(ed) The Philosophy of the Visual Arts, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
pp 404-405.
7 Octavio Paz writes beautifully on craftwork, comparing it with modern
objects. This part is inspired very much by the article. See Octavio Paz, “Use and
Contemplation”, ibid. pp 402-408.
8 Cfr. Gadamer, Truth and Method, (London: Sheed and Ward,1975) pp 345-6.
9 In Deleuzian perspective meaning and values as inscription of desire
and produced by various “desiring machine” are deterritorialized along with the
Capitalist formation. The deterritorialization happens in such an unprecedented
way that the previous social inscriptions is no longer needed. See Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert
Hurley et al (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
10 Cfr. Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology”, in
J.B.Thompson (ed), Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1981) p. 94.
11 see Gadamer, “Forward to the second German edition of truth and method”,
in I.K.Baynes et al (ed), After Philosophy (Massachusets: MIT Press, 1991) p 347.
12 Michel Foucault proposes an interesting notion that by way of re-
interpreting our history, self can also re-create her/himself. This “Aesthetics of
Existence” is in line with Nietzschean notion of self as a “work of art”. See H.Dreyfus
et al, Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982).
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