WRITING INDONESIAN HISTORY: POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND PERCEPTION Adrian Vickers University of Sydney In the study of Indonesian history the main debates have been about the factual value of indigenous sources, about their validity as historical accounts. ‘The recent work of at least one eminent historian shows that the end-point of these debtes can be an uncritical acceptance of indigenous chronicles as ‘history’, as distinct from myth and legend. [1] Another direction taken from these debates has been the move towards a concern with ‘perceptions of the past’, the title of a collection of essays now considered by most historians to exemplify the major trends in the study of Southeast Asian history.[2] The intentions of the historians of ‘perceptions of the past' are clear, namely to be able to know history 'from the inside’, to avoid the production of histories centred on European views, and to come to terms with indigenous experiences. Neverless, this position has been adopted without detailed reflection on what actually constitutes 'perception', and how outsiders may come to terms with other peoples' perceptions. Because philosophical reflection on problems of perception forms part of the background of poststructuralist theory, this theory can provide critical tools of great value for historians of Southeast Asia. ‘The problematic status of the term ‘perception’ can be gauged from the reaction of one historian to an essay by anthony Day which sought to analyse a poetic account of the exile of a Javanese king. The analysis was based on poststructuralist/semiotic theories. The reaction was clearly one which saw such theories as of only secondary value: The essay is skilfully argued but, as with other literary analyses, one is at times impressed by the subtle complexities and at other times dismayed at the intricately woven web of suppositions. While such textual analysis may add to our knowledge of Southeast Asian society, its novelty and methodology of literary analysis may leave one wary of accepting the conclusions as historically valid. Can these methods independently provide reliable perceptions of the past, or are they better used to 'test' hypotheses already acquired from non-literary sources? How can one judge whether the conclusions are indeed those of the author or society from which a work originated and not those of the fertile mind of the literary critic. [3] The terms of this criticism link perception with ideas of ‘validity’ and ‘reliability’. The evidence of such validity is taken to be an avoidan.e of speculation in favour of being true to the ideas of the author or society from which a text came. This leaves the question of how perceptions are reliably conveyed, if textual analysis is not acceptable as a primary means of access to them. Is there any means of gaining the kind of direct access to what is subjective for others? In making this criticism a suspicion of the field of the ‘literary’ isopposed to an advocacy of seeking perceptions through 'non-literary', by implication 'historical' sources. An examination of the philosophical background to poststructuralism shows that problems of knowing things in their own terms and conveying subjective perceptions does not simply involve recognition of the reliability of types of sources. It involves coming to terms with the means by which perceptions are conveyed through signification. This means attention should be given to the role of representation, the way things are shown to exist, in perception. This category of representation, which I will show to be linked to writing, breaks down distinctions between ‘literary’ and ‘historical’ sources. | Phenomenology and Perception structuralism is that it involves close reflection on the basic terms and concepts of Western thought, an absolute necessity if we are not to impose Western ideas on other societies. In the background to post- structuralism, the main line of philosophical enquiry concerned with defining perception has been Phenomenology, which is defined as the intention 'to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself". [4] This enquiry is concerned with perception as the way things (phenomena) are apprehended, or the way individuals, as subjects, construct things as objects of awareness. This is the key issue referred to earlier of being able to come to terms with conclusions from a other authors or societies, to see things as others see them. In the philosophy of Kant perception is an aspect of knowledge involving cognition: Now things in space and time are given only in so far as they are perceptions (that is, representations accompanied by sensation). Perception is empirical consciousness, that is, a consciousness in which sensation is to be found. Appearances, as objects of perception, are not pure, merely formal, perceptions... (5) Here it is clear that we cannot know things directly, nor can we experience 'things in space and time' in the same way as, for example, a seventeenth century Malay or Balinese would have. But by dealing with representations, that is, the way things are apprehended, described, or designated so that they are 're-presented', we still have access to the perceptions of that seventeenth century Malay or Balinese. Martin Heidegger makes the nature of such representation clearer by presenting it as the way things are discussed: Perception is consummated when one addresses oneself to something as something and discusses it as such. This amounts to interpretation in the broadest sense; and on the basis of such interpretation, perception becomes an act of making determinate. [6] 16What Heidegger is saying is that the way things are discussed, the way they exist as objects of discourse, is the result of perception in the Process of determining things. This discourse is never only objective description, since the object cannot be described in itself, but as it is known to another. Discourse is what ‘lets something be seen’. [7] This means that we do not have to experience things as my hypothetical Malay or Balinese would have in order to know things as they do. Instead, his or her discourses, as ways of showing (representing) things, can be analysed as the study of perceptions. Testing the ‘validity’ of perceptions in terms of factuality is complicated by the fact that, in terms of perception, ‘reality’ is not a fixed body of things. Heidegger comments that truth, in relation to discourse, is relative, for it is something 'discovered', while falsity is deception, ‘in the sense of covering up', because'...the sheer sensory perception of something, is ‘true’ in the Greek sense’. [8] Merleau-Ponty says something similar when he points out that, ‘reality is not a crucial appearance underlying the rest, it is the framework of relations with which all appearances tally.'[9] This conclusion comes | from the partiality of cognition. Merleau-Ponty uses the example of a cube. Although a cube is known to have six sides, all those sides cannot be seen at once (the cube cannot be perceived as it exists for itself); the cube can only be partially seen. This means it can only be ‘known’ as the agreement of different perceptions. [10] Following this line of thought, it is not possible ever to reproduce the 'reality' of a past and distant culture in absolute terms. It is possible, however, to look at the sensory side of perception through examining the aesthetic and cognitive norms of, to continue the example, seventeenth century Bali. From this starting point, seventeenth century Balinese reality may then be examined from the discourses of that time and place, which are known to us in the form of texts. Enquiry into perceptions of the past is then part of a wider enguiry into the nature of representation and apprehension, and the search for the validifiable ‘truth’ of the past consists of looking at different texts in relation to each other for what they say about the norms and expectations of different individuals. To try and present the reality of the past as a crude composite of European and indigenous accounts is not the best course of action, for where these different xepresentations can be shown to disagree, the only form of arbitration is to privilege one representation over another.[11] The result of this amongst historians can be a return to Eurocentric history which upholds the European accounts as more ‘true’ than the indigenous. Literature and History In a more subtle way, the ideal of an absolute truth is maintained in the discipline of history by differentiating between ‘literary' and ‘non-literary' sources (the latter being designated as ‘historical’ or ‘factual'). This is what is implied in the criticism of Day's ‘literary’ methodology. Such a differentiation is related to the privileging of European accounts, for it privileges those indigenous accounts which seem most like European-style history, and looks at theseaccounts in terms of facts which can be abstracted from them, rather than as forms of representation. In Indonesian literatures there is no category equivalent to our ‘history* which covers a genre of writing. For example, in Malay literature those texts which have hitherto been treated as ‘historical’ can be shown to belong to the same genres as 'non-historical' texts. ‘These genres include the syair (tnarrative poems'), sejarah (dynastic genealogies or chronicles) and hikayat ("narratives'), and in them there is no distinguishing between ‘fact and ‘fiction'.[12] A recent analysis of Malay narratives has shown that instead of these terms of ‘factuality', the major difference operating in these representations is between those texts which give greater prominence to moral values and those which are designed to be emotionally ‘soothing’. [13] A similar set of relationships between genre and function exists in Balinese literature, where different genres such as kekawin (epic poems in Indian-derived metres using the Old Javanese language), babad (dynastic genealogies) and geguritan (poems in Javanese-Balinese metres) all include texts which we would call "historical (respective examples being the Nagarakertagama, Babad Buleleng and Rusak Buleleng). In Bali there is no concept of literary 'fiction', since texts which are not considered 'true' are ‘lies' which are too trivial to become acts of signification.[14] Instead, the different genres of Balinese literature present different discourses about social action, moral being and the nature of desire and emotion. [15] ‘The implications of this are that so-called ‘historical’ texts should not be separated out from other types of text in a manner which imposes inappropriate Western values. Western history makes Malay, Javanese and Balinese texts into 'historical' works for its own disciplinary needs. It explicitly requires a division between the ‘literary! and the 'non-literary' which renders the former supplementary to the latter, as a test of its own validity. This is what it means 'to "test" hypotheses already acquired from non-literary sources’. This exclusion of the ‘literary can be seen as an avoidance by historians of the need to question their sources and examine them in other ways than merely looking at them as sources of 'facts'. If ‘literary’ sources are shown to be writing conveying perceptions, then ‘historical’ sources, to be examined as perceptions, need also to be looked at as ways of seeing and signifying. In Western historiography this has already begun with the work of scholars who examine Western histories in terms of the rhetorical and narrative representations they use. [16] Weiting and Discourse Poststructuralism not only helps to break down the categories of Western thought through complicated procedures such as the unravelling "deconstruction' of Jacques Derrida[17], but also provides alternative ways of thinking about categories and terminology which form a bridge between Western thought and other ways of seeing. One of these alternatives is Derrida's use of the term ‘writing’ to denote the process of representation as a form of inscription by which phenomena are marked for significance. Derrida argues that this writing is what makes history possible. [18] 18Similarly, Michel Foucault's work has been aimed at examining discourse in relation to social institutions. He has looked at how, in the West, we have defined things like madness and sexuality within limited sets of terms which imply the exclusion of other ways of talking about these things. In his later work he showed how such discursive Processes are linked to the exercise of power in society and to the nature of social institutions such as asylums, prisons and psychiatry. [19] Both of these courses, amongst the many techniques arising from post~structuralism and the related movements of structuralism and semiotics, suggest that we do not have to oppose the ‘literary’ and the ‘historical’ in order to come to terms with perceptions of the past in Southeast Asia. By treating both ‘history’ and ‘literature’ as forms of writing, it is possible to show how they obey rules of representation which determine what is said and how it is said. Those studies in the field which have begun to look at history and literature as writing have done this through both examining the language of such writing for the way it presents sets of terms, and by looking at intertextuality, or the relationship between texts. In the essay by Day referred to at the beginning of this paper, intertextuality was explored through an examination of the semantic resonances of words used in a text, and by looking at how that text drew on conventions of wayang theatre. [20] Koster and Maier have recently written a study which adopts a similar approach to Malay texts. They have looked at these texts in terms of the expectations created in their audiences and as parts of the intellectual bonding which made the Malay world culturally specific. (21) Similarly Foucault's notion of discourse can be counterpoised against the tendency in the Derridean style of analysis to follow semantic resonance and intertextuality into complicated intellectual games which have no immediate relation to social experience. Foucault's example of the relationship between discourses of punishment and prisons as institutions, for instance, shows that a study of Balinese or Malay legal terminology could be related to the way kings and priests exercised social control through notions of crime and punishment. [22] These possible uses of poststructuralist theories show that careful attention to the forms of representation (whether linguistic or otherwise) make it possible to avoid ‘conclusions’ which are ‘suppositions' ‘of the fertile mind of the...critic'. Although there are dangers of imposing one's own values in any academic undertaking, such dangers can be minimized through the kind of reflection on terminology advanced in these theories. By looking at the way Javanese, Malays or Balinese show things to be, we can know something of their perceptions. There are two prices to pay for this knowledge. The first is the discarding of boundaries which separate the study of history from the study of literature and the study of society; the second is the need to put aside suspicions of theories which seem too complex, if not too pretentious or fashionable, for scholars to worry about.Notes ‘he author would like to thank Kathy Robinson, Tony Day and Craig Reynolds for comments on drafts of this paper. 1, M.C. Ricklefs, "The Crisis of 1740-1 in Java: The Javanese, Chinese, Madurese and Dutch and the fall of Kartasura', Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI) 139 (1983), 268-290. | 2. anthony Reid and David Marr, eds., Perceptions of the Past in | Southeast Asia, ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series 4, Heinemann, Singapore, 1979. 3. Leonard ¥. Andaya, Review of Lorraine Gesick, ed-, Centres Symbols and Hierarchies: Essays on the Classical States of Southeast Asia, Monograph Series No.26, Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, New Haven, 1983 in ASAA Review 8:2 (November 1984), 118-120. Day's essay in the Gesick volume is 'The drama of Bangun Tapa's exile in Ambon, the poetry of kingship in Surakarta, 1830-58", 125-193. 4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time; (transl. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson) Blackwell, Oxford, 1973; 58. On the relationship between phenomenology, structuralism and poststructuralism, see Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, (transl. L. Scott-Fox and J.M. Harding) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980; Jonathon Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structural ism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1983; and Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structural ism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983. 5. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, transl. by Norman Kemp Smith, Macmillan, London, 1950, 162, 201 & 314. 6. Heidegger (op. cite), 89 7. Tid: 56-7. 8. Ibid. 9. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; (transl. Colin Smith) Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1962, 300. 10. See Descombes (op. cit.), 64ff. 11, See also Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, eds., Rationality and Relativism, Blackwell, Oxford, 1982. 12. For these terms see Sulastin Sutrisno, Hikayat Hang Tuah: Analisa Struktur dan Fungsi, Gajah Mada University Press, Yogyakarta, 1983, 69-87. See also H-M.J. Maier and R.G. Tol, Review of Raja al Haji Ibn Ahmad, The Precious Gift (Tuhfat al-Nafis). An Annotated Translation by Virginia Matheson and Barbara Watson Andaya, Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1982, in BKI 140 (1980), 356-359.G.L. Koster and H.M.J. Maier, ‘A Medicine of Sweetmeats: on the Power of Malay Narrative’, BKI 141 (1985), 411-461. 14. See Mark Hobart, 'Is interpretation incompatible with knowledge: the problem of whether the Javanese Shadow Play has meaning’, Paper given at the 2nd Bielefeld Colloquium on Southeast Asia, Bielefeld University, 1982. 15. Some of these issues are explored in A. Vickers, The Desiring Prince: A Study of the Kidung Malat as Text, PhD thesis, the University of sydney, 1986. 16. The most famous work in this vein being Haydon White's Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe; John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1974. 17. Culler (op. cit.) 18. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology; (transl. G.C. Spivak), John Hopkins Univeristy Press, Baltimore, 1976: see esp. 27. 19. See Dreyfus and Rabinow (op. cit.). Op. cit. op. cit. This article is not entirely free of the terms of the ‘fact' - ‘fiction’ dichotomy because it implies that some texts belong to the realm of 'fantasy', even though they are set in real locations. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; (transl. Alan Sheridan) Vintage, New York, 1979. This relationship has been the subject of unpublished studies by myself and Mark Hobart.