Malaysia: A discourse-impoverished society
The answer to this question is a complex one. Some parts of it will be noted below. But it is clear that national educational planning and cultural policy have not been keen to foster the flourishing of those other specialist forms of knowledge and empowering “discourse”.
Clive Kessler, New Mandala
Malaysia, I suggest, is a “discourse-impoverished” society.
And, what is more, this impoverishment is the source of many of its problems, and even of the national impasse in which it now faces.
“Discourse”
What do I mean here by “discourse”?
Well, you hear the word a lot these days. Everywhere. But especially in Malaysia. Far too much, in fact. It is on everybody’s lips, constantly.
But, almost invariably, it is used loosely, casually, and inaccurately.
People seem to use it pretty much as synonymous with “chatter”, with whatever it is that people might have to say.
Nobody these days, it seems, has a conversation or puts an argument or has a viewpoint to offer. They have “discourse”.
You have a discourse, yours, and I have a discourse, mine, and people everywhere have theirs.
It sounds grand. Well, to some, perhaps. That is the point of invoking and employing the word so promiscuously, in this debased way. But this common usage is no so much grand as grandiose and grandiloquent, pathetically intended for grand effect.
People’s “discourse”, in this loose and vulgar sense, is simply what they have to say, however vague or diffuse, no matter how banal or incoherent, it may be.
But this is not what, like it or not, in the world that a generation ago was reorganised and provided for us by Foucault, the term “discourse” is now properly understood to convey —— and, again like it or not, as a “pre-postmodernist old grump”, I am well known for not greatly liking it at all!
Something far more precise is intended. At least, that is, by those who, rather than simply wanting to seem up-to-date or striving to impress, really know what they are talking about.
People, that is, who care about words and ideas and about precision in using and handling them.
Discourse, properly understood
“Discourse”, ever since Foucault, has come to mean far more than just an utterance or barrage of personally connected utterances.
Far more than that, a discourse is a form of knowledge, often a deeply-seated way of understanding things or of arranging consciousness of them, that is embedded in and also sustained by a certain way of talking about them. Things are, or become, known from the way we talk about them: through the linguistic structure and semantic architecture of publicly organised consciousness and speech.
A discourse, then, is a form of talking about and hence of “knowing” things that is grounded in and responds to a form of power yet which, at the same time, produces and projects, which regenerates as well as simply ratifies and consolidates, that form of power.
A form of discourse, properly understood, both serves a kind of power that already exists yet also conduces towards realising a form of power that is constantly being created, or recreated, and replenished.
Its relationship to power, then, involves a two-way traffic of reciprocal support. Discourse grows from and expresses a form of power yet also, indispensably, creates and animates it.
This is hardly what the overwhelming majority of people who these days, in Malaysia elsewhere, have in mind when they let the irresistible word “discourse” pass their lips. I sometimes think that, especially in Malaysia, the word “discourse” is used so frequently and freely because, when one puts one’s mind to what the word properly denotes, there is so very little of it.
In this sense, contemporary Malaysia is a “discourse-poor” society, a “discourse-impoverished” culture.
An “over-lawyered” society?
One way to begin to explain this situation is to consider the unusual eminence and influence, the very special prestige and standing, that lawyers have established for themselves in Malaysia.
Without doubt —— the idea is a frequently voiced one —— Malaysia an intensely litigious society. A large part of public life consists of the extravagant issuing, and often the retaliatory counter-issuing, of writs, of threats of dire legal action, and an almost incessant recourse to the making “police reports” against other citizens for holding, or upholding, views that the complainants may find not so much criminal as personally uncongenial.
There is a constant buzz and frisson of legalism surrounding, even pervading and deeply penetrating, Malaysian public life.
Why, I often wonder, is this so?
Is it the lawyers’ fault?
It is easy to sound angry and critical about this situation, but blaming the lawyers doesn’t help very much.
It not just the lawyers and their ways who are responsible. This, more generally, is simply “the way it is”, just how things are.
Why?
There can be no doubting that “the law” is a powerful discourse, a powerful way of thinking and working and producing public effects, in Malaysia.
It is that in many other places too, but here the situation is a little different. Different in a way that helps explain the legalistic domination of public and national life.
The law is just one form of knowledge and professional practice, merely one “discourse”.
In many other societies, the kinds of public issues that the law treats and specialises in managing authoritatively are also matters of central and continuing concern to other forms of knowledge, to other forms of serious discourse and their specialist practitioners.
Take, for example, the hardly trivial example here in Malaysia of constitutional questions —— including those involving religious freedom and pluralism. Certainly these are, par excellence, matters of professional concern to lawyers, to their profession as a whole.
But in most countries exponents of many other forms of knowledge, and many other kinds of specialist expertise and practice, also “weigh into” disputes in this and similar areas: political philosophers and theorists, cultural and intellectual historians, social and cultural analysts and commentators, scholars versed in the history of world religions and in the study of comparative religion, and many others.
But in Malaysia?
These important, internationally recognised forms of knowledge and practice —— highly developed, favourably positioned and well-regarded professional communities specialising in these matters and eager to offer informed expert opinions upon them from their own distinctive standpoints —— scarcely exist.
Legal discourse in consequence looms so large, even overwhelming, because it commands the field in a kind of lofty solitude, not merely unchallenged but virtually without any potential rivals or alternatives.
The legal domination of public life, debate and action is in large measure the result of this situation: of the lack of alternative forms of respected professional knowledge and at least potentially influential practice.
The lawyers’ at times controversial, even resented, domination of public life is less the consequence of how they conduct their elite professional work than of the way that others —— meaning government, via official educational and cultural policy —— have structured, and in other ways virtually denuded, the professional terrain upon which they operate.
The legal domination of Malaysian public life is the result, and a perhaps malign symptom, of a “discourse-impoverished” society and public culture.
