Simryn Gill, from the series Dalam [2001]

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE BRAND KEVIN CHUA About halfway through V. S. Naipaul's account of his travels through Malaysia, we arrive at the following citation, fresh off the pages of the New Straits Times. The date is November 6, 1979. Three Charges of Destroying Hindu Idols in Temerloh Temerloh, Mon. - An ex-religious teacher and a student pleaded not guilty in the magistrate's court here today to charges of having destroyed Hindu idols in the Temerloh district, last year...1 Naipaul felt that this destruction, too, was part of the Islamic movement among the educated young. It was a more elemental kind of Islam, he felt, that embarrassed his native guide Shafi. We are then taken to another trial of several guards in Klang who were being charged for the "culpable homicide not amounting to murder" of five idol-smashers at a Kerling temple a year before in 1978. The trial made headlines; it was closely followed; people were nervous. But the event itself seemed private, as unimportant as Shafi had said it was: a Malay magistrate, two Malay policemen, a young, good-looking Indian boy in the witness stand, an Indian woman interpreter in a yellow sari sitting beside the boy giving evidence, an Indian lawyer with sideburns asking questions.2 One notices the brevity of his description, and the curious good looks of the Indian boy: as though these details had some stake in the story, details that resonated jarringly, uncomfortably, with the history of communal violence in Malaysia in the 1960s and 1970s - a history stained with blood.3 The iconoclasts in the courtroom seemed to him "lost and foolish... bewildered by the new world, their bewilderment simplified into a dream of thirty smashed idols and an eternity in heaven, had died." Dreams into bathos. Naipaul's narrative then nonchalantly slips out of the trial, as though he was more interested in the West Malaysian landscape outside: Far from that coast, a new-cut road led up through the forested hills to the Genting Highlands. The clouds came down over the hills... But at the end of that road, after the tall white trunks of forest trees, after the forest gloom, the creepers, the large, heart-shaped leaves, the ferns and wild palms and wild bananas; after that, there was no settlement, no town, only a vast amusement area, a concrete playground in the mist: a toy lake, toy walks, toy trains, a hotel and a casino. The pleasures of money in Malaysia were simple. Money magnified the limitations of places like Malaysia, small, uneducated, and coming late to everything. Money - from oil, rubber, tin, palm oil - changed old ways. But money only turned people into buyers of imported goods, fixed the country in a dependent relationship with the developed world, kept all men colonials. It was possible to understand the withdrawal of someone like Shafi; the rage of the idol-smashers; and the wish, among other Malays, to pretend that they were Arabs, living as purely as in the days of the Prophet.4 As a writer, Naipaul's reception has been difficult, to say the least. He has been accused of being a "witness for the Western prosecution [of the Third World]", a displaced Trinidadian eager to impress The White Man. Yet, like any good writing, his was born out of an incommensurability of time and place; condensed passages trace contradictions of capitalism and modernity that are not so easily dismissed - because the aesthetic exceeds linguistic taming, even the language of virulent accusation. As though part of the logic of global capitalism was that it rescripted colonial roles for intellectual politics - on this side those who, in the name of a realist politics, have rejected the white man and his colonialism, on that side those who have failed to transcend the aesthetic in favour of the political - while capitalism itself in the 1980s and 1990s was beginning to shift into a higher gear, caring only for how the racially other could be incorporated into the market.5 Perhaps the best way a writing could survive was to find a form that lingered, which plumbed the serried edges of negativity, the imbrication of contact with the Other. To risk reception as an outcast, to err on the side of betrayal - to pass through myths of master and native yet again. What makes Naipaul's account of a trial of religious iconoclasts compelling is that it is embedded in a wider reflection of the changes taking place in Malaysian society in the early 1980s. A strange mountain casino putting into privacy the ethno-religious conflict below; as though one temple was caught rising out of the mist as another sunk into shadow. Naipaul seems almost to be describing contradictions arising out of the landscape itself: capitalism transfiguring Nature, only to return her in gifts of simulacra and mock pastoral. I open with this anecdote as it leads us into the question of iconoclasm, by which I refer to any kind of symbolic destruction of an idol or icon. 'Iconoclasm' in this broad sense returned with horrifying clarity with the events of September 11, 2001, as two symbols of American global capitalism were reduced to piles of rubble - an irruption that left us in awe, as though we were standing on the brink of the apocalypse. I'd like to put this in conjunction [despite its admitted clunkiness] with the iconoclastic destruction of various store signs and window displays during the mass protests against the World Trade Organization [WTO] in Seattle in November-December 1999, symbolic attacks on consumer brands like Nike and McDonalds. Though both these events do seem to have different causes and motivations - the former a result of 'Islamic' terrorism, or 'blowback' against US foreign policy incursions abroad, the latter a grassroots resistance to neo-liberal globalisation - a closer look ties them both to American globalisation, which has in the current context taken a more extreme form of imperialism. As destructions of capitalist icons, both were in some ways attempts to break through the [Debordian] spectacle to get a glimpse of the Real - however difficult or impossible that attempt might be. Even the aftermath of the recent invasion of Iraq has seen less visible brands like Halliburton and Bechtel negotiating behind the scenes for multi-million dollar governmental contracts to rebuild the now-razed country - companies that may at some level be driving the political decision-making behind the war. [War as the continuation of economics by other means.] In Asia, as well, the bombing of the Sari club in Bali in October 2002 was part of the march of globalisation in the 1990s, an all-too-grim parody of Hardt and Negri's notion of the global 'multitude' which resists Empire.6 It is difficult to tell at such points 'friend' from 'enemy' - one man's terrorist is another's revolutionary. It is also difficult to tell what productive work iconoclasm does. Though the Bali attack dampened tourism in its immediate aftermath, news reports were quick to point out that the island's economy might bounce back in the long term.7 Investment in the Southeast Asian region as a whole, while threatened, might continue, even increase for some countries.8 All are in fact looking towards China, the global market of the near future, which spells portents for the creation of an Asian 'second front' in the new war-driven economy. This essay is an attempt to step back from that immediate politics to try and understand iconoclasm's gesture - the battle between image proponents and image naysayers - and ask what it means for representation. For representation as such is already threaded through with a desire for negation; modern art, after all, has disfiguration as one of its core tactics.9 If the Protestant Reformation opened us onto a vista of secular capitalism, I want instead to consider the religiosity in capitalism10: how it exists as a mode of belief, how its symbols and image-streams hold us in thrall.11 No doubt symbolic politics has been with us since the fall of the Bastille in 1789 [if not earlier], yet global capitalism shifted into a higher gear after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Capitalism has since invaded everyday 'life'; we are at a point in history when mediation doesn't seem to exist at all, and yet at the same time envelops us completely12 - reification at this highest stage works by naturalising desire. The 'reality' of the price-tag and the bottom dollar asks that we strike down false icons. What Naomi Klein's No Logo brought to light was that the emergence of 'megabrands' like Nike and Starbucks in the 1990s was intrinsically tied to changes that were taking place in the global economy from the 1970s onward - the relocation of production away from the core to sweatshops and export-processing zones in the periphery to manufacture these branded goods, all relying on a disproportionate amount of low-wage labour.13 While many areas in the South languished in despair, the North triumphed in an orgy of gilded consumerism.14 Klein's achievement was in connecting the domestic to the international, the public politics of street demonstrations in the advanced capitalist countries to the hidden machinery of the global factory. Yet we would be wrong to emphasise the street politics of No Logo - the politics of publicity targeted against closed-door institutions like the WTO - over and above the book's historical analysis. While these oppositional struggles have been laudatory and necessary, so is an effort to understand iconoclasm's deeper logics. For it is easy to forget that global capitalism has an image dimension because it is precisely so visible. These days it is hard to tell if the destructive act actually occurs in order to enable that which comes after [e.g. war followed by the corporate rebuilding of Iraq, or the restructuring of the US economy along stronger neo-liberal lines; behind every failed AOL-Time Warner, a stronger Viacom]. There lurks moreover a constant possibility that all dissent might be incorporated back into the system: dissent now commodified. One wants to ask whether these iconoclasms are expressions of real transformation rather than unconscious acting-outs or surface transgressions, pin-pricks rather than deep cuts. We often hear the charge that iconoclasm is more reactive than creative, surfacial rather than deep, mere griping instead of criticism. "In technocratic and colourless times, brands bring warmth, familiarity and trust", says Peter Brabeck, boss of Nestlé. "They also have a cultish quality that creates a sense of belonging. In an irreligious world, brands provide us with beliefsŠ They define who we are and signal our affiliations."15 We need to ask whether iconoclasm leaves its mark on the landscape, whether it actually refigures our place in the world. The issue is not how iconoclasm finds its antithesis in something more real, but that both are bound by a common structure in relation to something outside: nature. Such a question fits into the larger problem of how we re-imagine the body politic after September 11 - 're-imagining' meaning finding our selves already mirrored in the broken shards on the ground. We pick up the pieces, realising that the iconoclastic gesture, as much as it announces the end of a politics or religion, often ends up installing something else in its place - and at a higher level. Leading with a discussion of the work of two Düsseldorf school photographers, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, I will then focus on a single work of art, Simryn Gill's Dalam [2001]. The series of two hundred and fifty eight photographs, packed tightly into three rows of eighty-six, was shown at the Galerie Petronas in October 2001, within the recently built Petronas Twin Towers building in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.16 Each photograph was of a household interior, randomly 'sampled' as it were from houses across the Malaysian peninsula. None of their owners were present in these photos: each work was sparse and minimal, describing in line and color the material contents of the living room. If at first glance the work might seem iconoclastic - the maternal womb of each photographed interior set against the immense phallic towers above - I will argue that the strength of the work lies deeper, and provides us with alternate ways to think about iconoclasm, as it exceeds into everyday life. I want to understand a key moment in the work, the decision to size the photos at 23.5 by 23.5 cm square. The artist had taken some pains over the decision: 23 cm was too small; 24 cm too large. Arriving at 23.5 cm seemed to close the work for the artist - hence releasing it into the world. That size/scale decision mediated the bodily viewer into the photograph[s], situating the tenuous boundary between the work's aesthetic and conceptual [ready-made] modes of perceptual understanding.17 We move between the experience of one image and an installation of images, the space between the photographs becoming as important as the photographs themselves. What might that moment, that turning between sight and body, man and nature, mean both aesthetically and ethically, as a way of relating to the world - would it be a world without false idols? Prada I [1996] by Andreas Gursky is a large-scale photograph measuring 134 by 226 cm, of a long, sleek display cabinet full of high-end designer shoes, each one different, captivating in their combined allure. Like one of his images of stadium crowds - crowds too large to be a mass, yet possessing a curious organisational intelligence of their own - the picture seems to be capturing a similar effect of mass-beyond-measurement with material objects, here with the glitziest of commodities. We feel suspended, even disoriented, yet lulled into the image. In both sorts of photographs, the removal of distortion produced by the lens and their enlarged scale estranges our vision: we are faced with an uncanny flatness - the flatness of a dream. In Prada I, devoid of any transitional foreground between us and the display case, we seem to be cut off from any grounded vantage point. Nor are we viewing a horizon - the image is framed tightly and centrally around the display case, as though pushing against the conventions [the expectations] of perspectival vision as such. And when the larger frame of the entire image is repeated in the two smaller rectangles within - the shoes hovering within two long lightboxes - we realise that a strange kind of 'nesting' is taking place, a rhythm of Chinese boxes. Our attention switches between a reverential awe at the picture's whole and a desire to approach each shoe individually, to linger on its infinitesimal details. We go back and forth between material object and image-screen. Yet that in-between viewing position remains awkward and is fundamentally unstable: an impossible moment when the pull from the infinite particularity of detail turns into an encompassing cosmological largeness; a moment that can perhaps only be unified by some force beyond the human. At the heart of Gursky's material photographic practice lies a core that might best be called mystical. Isn't Gursky giving us the religion of the brand, via a spectacular image? We are left dumbstruck in front of his photographs with their inhuman scale and often riotous colour. Perhaps he is trying to photograph from the perspective of God. "Both man and his creations are subsumed into a grand order," one critic remarks, "something that in an earlier time [Caspar David Friedrich's, for example] would have been called divineŠ A higher order is adumbrated but not revealed."18 A second photograph by Gursky, Prada II, taken a year later, shows a similar display case, now emptied of its wares.19 The relics have been struck down. Yet what keeps us standing in front of this, enthralled? Partly in the way that Gursky's images [including Prada I] so 'naturally' convince us that they represent reality - a more heightened and vibrant reality, but a reality nonetheless. As though all the work involved in cropping the picture, erasing the seams, removing the foreground - that all this is supplementary to the 'real business' of capturing the view. Still the romantic belief in the power of the snapshot, but from the other side of blank perception, as it were. Yet in Prada II, Gursky seems to be questioning his own practice and picture of the year before, being responsible to that prior 'object' by putting yet another frame around it. The new photograph seems less to be mocking our empty desire for commodities [that we want the brand and the idea of the product rather than the product itself] than literalising the iconoclastic gesture in representation. In other words, literalising the modernist dream of having representation in its pure, material sense, shorn of its baggage of figuration, emptied of desire and meaning; as though the magic act performed by the commodity was, already, photography's own - photography's dream of pure indexicality.20 Thomas Struth's Tien An Men, Beijing [1997]* takes a different path into the problem of mediation. Where Gursky thrills us into the lure of the commodity, Struth inserts us instead into a space in the global tourist continuum - China's Tiananmen Square. Several tourists mill about the foreground space, some taking snapshots, while an icon of Mao behind seems to stare at us from all vantage points. We wonder if it is Mao or photography that possesses this omniscient gaze. If Communism completely mediated our existence before [what Debord called the "concentrated spectacle"], photography today seems to fulfill that same role. Isn't this fiction of the possession of the view, the Kodak moment, where 'belief' most strongly takes place, takes us away from place? There seems a gulf in Struth's image between the foreground figures and the implacable wall of the Forbidden City behind, as though this lack of communication between humans and things were the fate of the now-lost public sphere. Struth's photographs are like holding spaces for the reactivation or reappearance of History; and yet - especially when his camera moves to non- Western locales - we feel as though we're imprisoned as global flaneurs. All we can do is take the obligatory snapshot, make Art - while the heart of global capitalism continues to withdraw from common perception, and we are kept as strangers outside that occulted and forbidden interior. More than any other medium, perhaps, photography had an iconoclasm at its core. Not only did it cast down the idol of painting [so the story goes], it enabled a dissemination of the artwork into the hands of a wider bourgeois public. Art could finally be said to capture truly democratic ends; no longer did we need to fear the elitism of the hallowed artistic masterpiece. Everyone could take pictures with a camera, and that levelling of artistic production - a de-skilling ad absurdum - had since the late nineteenth century enormous consequences for the history of representation around the world.21 It was Walter Benjamin who foresaw the implications of this shift early on, in his seminal essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' [1939].22 The overturning or liquidation of the representational universe founded on aura and the shift to one of mechanical reproduction - best exemplified in the arts of photography and film - were, Benjamin argued, dialectical rather than linear. And if the new practices of representation occasioned new chance and shock effects, those effects were contingent on the human being's phenomenological integration into his environment.23 If reproductive technology penetrated into the heart of everyday experience, producing an 'innervation'24 of the observer's body, it held out a double possibility of enabling true experience to occur, a rupture in the fabric of time, on the one hand, and a darker programming of reality as such, on the other. "To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose 'sense of the universal equality of things' has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics."25 After that moment of muscular fibrillation, in other words, there occurs a naturalising of perceptual reality. Interiority, once opened, has to be closed up again. In trying to close the gap between ourselves and the demolished icon, we end up being distanced - mediated - again.26 Struth's photographs, we might say, achieve their power by allowing the collective unconscious to occur. Everything hinges on how we read these chance effects in the photograph: the woman being photographed shifting into blur every so slightly, the stone lion bearing down on her from behind, the military man out of uniform just behind the cameraman. The thrust of Benjamin's thesis was that such terms as the 'indexicality' of a photograph shielded the more threatening problem of the unknowable origin of a work of art. That the maker of the artwork was fundamentally inhuman: for Benjamin, the cameraman now resembled a surgeon, a mere technician next to the unfathomable workings of the bodily interior. God and Nature gave their cues, as we stand in awed silence.27 We confront this empty space in front of the Forbidden City, and up come the ghosts of June 1989. Capitalism's last frontier used to be the Kantian division between the phenomenal and the noumenal world, a barrier which once kept the commodity at bay. [There was a limit or moment to which you couldn't fully 'know' a cup, for instance. Its brute materiality couldn't be apprehended. By making the thing-in-itself radically other to human understanding, Kant in a sense kept God safe from humanity.] That changed sometime during the late nineteenth century28, and again after the 1960s. The new commodity penetrated into this deep material substructure of object, reducing the manufactured product to a function of its image [Klein tells this story brilliantly in its 1990s phase]. Not to penetrate the outer sheen but to fully regloss; commodities now came without their thingly cores. We were given objects with emptied-out interiors.29 For Gurksy, that remaking of the object as part of his photographic process - he occasionally manufactures structures within his photographs and photographs them again - serves as both promise and critique. And if Prada I and II share a sense of mystifying wonder - mystifying because one can never tell whether he's parodying capitalism or critiquing it, immersing in the spectacle or maintaining a distance from it - this is offset by a certain pathos, for the first photograph was taken after the Guggenheim Museum Soho had been transformed into a showcase of consumptive luxury in 1998.30 One cannot be more literal in the destruction of aura - except that another kind of aura has taken its place. And the global implications of Gurksy's photographs remain to be played out: several of his pictures provide the viewer with a glimpse of the totality of global capitalism [for example, the port machinery in Salerno [1990] receding infinitely into the distance], but they reverberate too dangerously against the destructive winds of mobile capital that struck many non-Western countries in the late 1990s. Some of these are 'total landscapes', without an outside of nature: the global economy played out as a fantasy of the interior. In his narrative, Naipaul reveals a growing empathy for his guide Shafi, who remains the author's main link to the Malaysian country. Yet, by the end of the visit, Naipaul still has difficulty in understanding the youth, and, despite having ascertained revealing aspects of his character and history - his reformist bent, his deep attachment to his childhood kampung31 - Shafi remains an enigma. We're supplied with another curious anecdote: Some days later... Shafi came again. We took a taxi and made a tour. We drove about the new residential developments in the beautiful hilly land to the west of the city. I saw a well-kept city where the money seemed to be spreading down fast, but that wasn't what Shafi wanted me to see. The difference between the old and the new was the difference between Malay and Chinese. And even when the houses were new, Shafi could spot the Malay house and the Chinese house. I began to play a game with him. I was a novice; I chose easy examples. We passed a house stacked around with lumber. I said, 'Chinese house?' Shafi said, 'Chinese house.' We passed a house with rows of orchids in the front garden. I said, 'Malay house?' Shafi said, 'No. Chinese.' I gave up.32 In coming to Gill's Dalam for the first time, we are unsure as how to take it all in: the entire wall is covered with the array of two hundred and fifty-eight photos; the hard concision of the whole seems to push the viewer away. We move into each photograph individually, trying to feel our way into the work, grasping onto something that we can identify with. Almost immediately, we lapse into Naipaul's ethnic guessing game. "Chinese living room?","Chinese living room.""Malay living room?","Chinese living room." We give up. Gill's pictures deny easy identification, whether of class, race or ethnicity. But there is a will or inclination to put these spaces into ethnic categories, which isn't simply 'false'. Race cannot be so easily dismissed, especially in postcolonial Malaysia. There is a deeper significance to this muted iconoclastic gesture in Dalam - its peculiar transcendence or relocation of markers of identity like race, its denial of figuration - even if figuration 'returns' as animate chair or thing. We continue to be marked after the fall of the colonial icon. Or perhaps that marking has been more elusive: the Malaysian bumiputera or 'sons of the soil' would on the one hand seem to be the group most on the 'inside', most economically favored.33 Yet, on the other hand, that propping up can be a deeper kind of marking or hindrance, and, because so embedded and assumed, perhaps the worst kind of all. We seem to be entering a deep contradiction in Dalam, where to be 'inside' doesn't necessarily promise easy sanctuary nor plenitude. Identity is merely a lure; home isn't a haven. Such was the contradiction that Dr Mahathir Mohamed faced in his controversial book The Malay Dilemma [1970], where he tried to address the problem of the backwardness of the Malay race within a fast-modernising postcolonial country. The problem wasn't simply one of painting ethnic Malays as victims, then removing the hindrances to that victimhood. [We are at Naipaul's moment here; Shafi's dilemma is in many ways Mahathir's own.] "Racial inequality continues despite the [Malay Land Reserve Laws]", Mahathir writes at one point, "but it is an inequality that can only be aggravated by removing the laws. The unfortunate position of the Malays, which prompted the laws in the first place, has not been completely corrected. And certainly without these laws the Malays will slide back into worse situations and increase existing inequality."34 Damned if you don't, damned if you do. Something deeper is at stake in this preservation of an unmarked-yet-favoured race in the new post-war situation, as though the country's future growth lay in this open secret of the bumiputera. Indeed, scholars like John Hilley have seen the 1970s as a successful taming of ethnicity in order to facilitate an economic growth regime.35 Mahathir somehow managed in his New Economic Policy [NEP] programme to ally the state with an emerging middle class, even if part of that strategy was to marginalise labour. [It was Mahathir's text which allowed him back into UMNO in 1972, and gave him a platform.] "The new state-class placed bumiputeraism at the core of both its political and economic agenda", Hilley writes, "by appearing to promote expanded economic rights for all Malays, the new state-class was able to establish a populist rationale for selective direction of the economy, privileged access to state resources and control over the distribution of wealth."36 By and large, Mahathir succeeded in achieving a hegemony of the middle class, allied to a specific form of protectionist capital, in Malaysia's NEP phase [1971-1991].37 An intrinsic component of that hegemony involved race, because it masked what was more threatening to the new economic foundation: class.38 Yet we have been here before: Mahathir's stance toward ethnicity is remarkably similar to the 'divide and rule' colonial model of race, in which the state allowed a controlled ethnic rivalry between Malays, Chinese and Indians in order to keep the economic structure in place. Racial tension during the colonial period was thus not something natural, due to the 'inherent' feuding histories between Malays, Chinese and Indians, but a direct and necessary consequence of a cultural ideology in the service of a historically-specific capitalist process. Intervention in the Malay states in the 1860s was necessitated by a larger shift on the part of the British from mercantile to investment capital, or from trade to labour-intensive systems. To protect this new influx of capital investment and the immigration of cheap labour, 'good government' was seen to be necessary. To maximise profits in the new industrial economy, it was not merely a question of the availability of labour per se, but rather the need for an abundant supply of cheap labour.39 What emerged was the myth of the 'lazy' Malay native, an ideology that was put into place to allow the importation of large numbers of Chinese and Indian immigrant workers. In fact what fed the myth of the inherent incapacity of Malays for work was the independence of the Malay peasantry from wage employment, which threatened British interests. The British soon faced a dilemma: how to keep open the flow of non-Malay immigrants into the country, necessary to attract investments abroad, when the greater the number of immigrants imported would be seen as a threat to the Malays, with the potential of creating widespread racial disorder. The British came up with the policy of indirect rule, whereby the Malays would be granted a token of political power. All that remained was an ideological manoeuvre to put Malays and non-Malays in mutual opposition. As the then Governor of the Straits Settlements, Frank Swettenham, remarked: The land is Malaya and he is the Malay. Let the infidel Chinese and the evil-smelling Hindu from Southern India toil, but of their work let some share of the profits come to him. They are strangers and unbelievers; and while he is quite willing to tolerate them, to be amused, rather than angered, by their strange forms of idolatry, their vulgar speech in harsh tongues, and their repulsive customs, he thinks it only fitting that they should contribute to his comfort and be ready to answer to his behests.40 Note how Swettenham writes from the point-of-view of the Malay native, all the while putting himself out of the picture, a deus ex machina orchestrating the theatrics of the communal play below. The emergence of the bumiputera can only be understood in the context of the Emergency [1948-1951] and its aftermath. A restructuring of capitalist relations occurred under the guise of counter-insurgency. Several intersecting aspects were at work: as the internal forest frontier expanded since the depression of the 1930s, this shifted the basis of the rural economy in the Malay peninsula. New migratory labour patterns were established as a means of coping with that depression and wartime subsistence crisis, and led to the emergence of a large number of 'squatters' throughout the rural fringes. The Communist insurgency and Emergency exacerbated this situation, as the countryside increasingly became politicised - yet that politicisation was a specific response to economic difficulty, rather than an imposition from political groups from above. Squatters and rural folk were drawn into wider solidarities, primary among them being the Communists. This led in turn to a communalisation of what was in fact a town/country conflict - the Emergency was painted as a struggle between pro-Communist Chinese squatter cultivators who threatened the sanctity of the Malay rural economy [the Malay was already beginning to be idealised].41 The state, being drawn inexorably into the conflict, viewed itself as charged with the mission of 'restoring' order. It thereby saw the opportunity to extend its power and control, especially over the rural countryside, coming out overtly in support of the Malays and Islam, against the threat of Chinese communism [race and creed newly aligned]. Yet the counter-insurgency had a deeper, longer-lasting impact: it entailed an attempt to remake both the socioeconomic as well as the ethnic geography of the peninsula through the resettlement of the rural population into protected settlements, and the provision of land for the rural Chinese. The trigger for state action came when the control of cultivation became equated with the political control of remote areas.42 But it is important to see the resettlement as part of a larger move for the control and domestication of labour.43 If the internal frontier had already been expanding before the war, during the Emergency the state achieved a dominant foothold into the countryside. All through the resettlement's New Villages, artificial 'tabula rasa' communities were created which were designed to prevent the re-establishment of alternative [Communist] social groupings.44 Not only did the Emergency change people's sense of settlement and belonging - their understanding of home and place - the massive militarised resettlement disrupted long-established work patterns tied to the land and to cycles of nature. For instance, many rural Chinese had difficulty "in adjusting to settled smallholder agriculture, and abandoned serious cultivation for work on rubber estates, ending a process of diversification in the rural economy and becoming dependent on the vissicitudes of the rubber market."45 "Resettlement," T. N. Harper writes,"transformed the human ecology of the interior."46 If colonial extraction increased in the Malay peninsula from the 1920s, that deforestation accelerated during the war, for fears of a timber shortage that would retard mining and the urban economy after the war - despite pleas from foresters of the spectre of environmental catastrophe. Rainforests had always been a vital colonial resource, but as the extraction continued through the war and the Emergency period, the government spared little effort in understanding how that deforestation debilitated conditions of production - and created the increasingly political problem of squatters. [The counter-insurgency state praised itself for putting out proverbial fires in the countryside - fires which were in large part of its own creation.] The rubber industry - anxious to modernise by replanting with high-yielding trees in anticipation of competition with synthetic rubber for the lion's share of the world market, saw squatters as 'interfering' with this process.47 By 1947, the forces of capital were already beginning to mobilise. The emergence of the bumiputera was intrinsically tied to the restructuring of the rural economy. Though traditional patterns of subsistence and participation in the cash economy had long been evolving side by side, by the 1950s, as Malay peasant agriculture increasingly became commercialised, proponents of agrarian reform began to prosper at the expense of less-advantaged Malays, resulting in greater economic inequality in the countryside.48 Communal tensions obscured more structural changes in the rural economy: an increase in tenancy and a concomitant tendency to concentration of wealth, which in many places consolidated a rural elite with ties to commerce. Communalism became the only means of expressing what were in fact real grievances; in many ways it shielded the Malay from the harsh effects of modernity. New forms of dependency set in as the inequality gap widened for many in the countryside. Many padi cultivators became subject to the volatility of the global rice market.49 "Planters were either becomingŠ specialised growersŠ or they were moving into other employment. For the dominant groups in the countryside this meant the acquisition of larger holdings; for the disadvantaged cultivator this meant tenancy or agricultural labour, or migration towards wage labour opportunities. The countryside was ceasing to resemble, if it ever had done so, the idyll of kampung life that figured so largely in the imagination of British officials."50 The emergence of the Malay dilemma came about as a consequence of the restructuring of the economy - this was the moment of the myth's naturalisation. British attempts to foster local initiatives to aid the condition of the Malay led by the mid-1950s to a pattern of corporatist intervention in the rural economy.51 Yet these efforts failed; not only did many Malay politicians look increasingly to the state to redress communal imbalances in the economy, the British themselves were confused as to "whether they ought to be turning the Malays into kulaks or capitalists."52 The failure of various agrarian improvement schemes in some ways led directly to rapid growth of a Malay wage labouring class. As wage employment disrupted much older patterns of work, the stereotype of the 'lazy native' returned, no longer a ritualistic invocation than part of the cultural mindset. Several critics, including Singapore's S. Rajaratnam, recognised early on the paradox of the bumiputera, which later became entrenched in the constitution: a Malay capitalism was being fostered by 'uncapitalistic methods' - by certain preferential interventions of the state.53 But the issue, again, was never simply one of affirmative action: that ethnic figuration enabled the rise of a particular state-class alliance, while the iconisation carried at its core the failed dreams of a truly Malay bourgeoisie.54 Dalam seems to draw us into an attachment to things that penetrates their outer sheen, penetrates the barrier of the noumenal. This isn't however to necessarily turn objects into fetishes - if a fetish is something that substitutes for the interior55, the mother falsely within, here instead it seems as though we are being asked to move without. In Gursky's Prada I the object hovers between fabricated thing and real commodity - teasingly asking us whether real commodities are nothing more than fabricated images, brands serving only to unconcretise feelings. The strength of Gursky's photos lies in the perpetual instability between cult value and exchange value; we are asked for that difference. In Gill's photos we are invited to form familial attachments to things, to almost relate to them in a human way [naively so]. The question here is not between reality and falsity, but rather the uncertainty about where the boundary between my 'self' and 'world' lies. Dalam doesn't have the literal quality we find in so many of Struth's photographs - the purging of perspectival distortion and consequent flattening of the figure within 'into' an object. [This he learned from his teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher.] In Tien An Men that literality is somewhat subsumed into the hard diagonal of the wall behind. Yet Gill's interiors share with Struth's photographs their control of space: the cavity in the middle of the picture where presences are allowed to lurk, where history is allowed to intrude. We attend to our preconceptual attachment to a place, our binding to the image. Like Struth's street scenes in the global ethnoscape, Gill's homes are 'ready' for their viewers. If Gursky's photos lack an outside, Gill's seem to depict the inside as outside - it is almost as if we're confronting nature, in this filling of the empty space in front of us. Spaces already 'filled' by their owners, marked by their absent presence. We see traces of their presence [at one point even the artist's] in the reflected gaze of a TV screen or cabinet glass. We're asked to merge with the objects in the room, have them be extensions of our selves. There is an indistinction to the things in the room; and at the same time each object stands out, anthropomorphising in front of us. Chairs and sofas beckon to the viewer. But it's almost as if we're not asked to shift our orientation - our bodily position seems to project itself [automatically?] into these receptacles for our body. These are pictures in which the dead are memorialised, remembered [a picture of a loved one hangs in a hallway entrance; joss sticks and prayers watch over the just-departed]. And by letting natural light into the room, Gill opens up the room to the outside, allows that interpenetration of nature and culture, allows the room to straddle that indistinction. This is the relevance of her choice of 23.5 cm. And as we turn between image and object, vision and body, we turn between the nature and culture of Malaysia's history: when the emergence of the bumiputera marked a greater contradiction between capitalism and nature, and set the stage for the dominance of transnational capital to come. We shift from a ready-made seeing of the series to a more aestheticised viewing of each room - and realise that that move into the 'aesthetic' as such already involved a departure from nature, from a more primordial kind of seeing. Gill's iconoclasm keeps us turning between icon and empty space. "Did you think the hills beautiful when you were a child? And the young rice plants?" "To us it was a common sight. We never thought whether it was beautiful or not. But we read in a few novels about paddy fields and the wind blowing through the bamboos making a kind of sound, natural sound, and that made us realise the beauty around us." "You said this morning, showing me the houses, that the Chinese planted for commercial reasons and the Malays for aesthetic values." "I didn't say aesthetic." But he had. The word had made an impression on me. Perhaps - though the word could be justified - he hadn't used the word he intended. He meant that the Chinese house and yard was a commercial establishment; that the people in the house with the orchids in rows grew those orchids for money. The Malay yard was a garden, part of a home; it remained part of the good earth, part of Nature, even if some of the fruit and food it produced was meant for sale. There was no one word to describe that. 'Aesthetic' [though fair enough] was only Shafi's shorthand, the word he had let slip, and was not strictly defensible. Perhaps the idea hadn't been fully worked out by him. Perhaps - though the difference was real enough, could be felt and seen - there was no definition of the difference between Malay and Chinese houses that couldn't be shot to pieces. And I wondered how far - added to the absence of the sense of history - this inability to fit words to feelings had led Shafi to where he was. Feelings, uncontrolled by words, had remained feelings, and had flowed into religion; had committed Shafi to learning the abstract articles of a missionary faith; had concealed his motives, obscured his cause, partly hidden himself from himself. Religion now buried real emotion. He loved his past, his village, now he worked to uproot it.56 Naipaul seems to be saying that modernity betrayed Shafi's 'true' feelings, that the abstraction of his faith had misled motivations that were once his own. But there is an ambiguity here, which Naipaul puts in the space of his encounter with Shafi: he hints that Shafi's history isn't just a construction that can be unmasked [by him]. Herein lies the concrete. For Naipaul/Shafi seem to be reaching for an understanding before cognition, before its Romantic aestheticisation, before language taught them how to talk about trees and things ["it remained part of the good earth, part of NatureŠ There was no one word to describe that. 'Aesthetic'Š was only Shafi's shorthand, the word he had let slip, and was not strictly defensible."]. We make that turn from abstract to concrete, culture back to nature. This, finally, is why the horizon line occupies such a central place in Dalam. At the back of the room, it often seems to hover more than halfway above the bottom of each picture, higher than any ground line. We are suddenly back outside, in nature, and the room is a landscape that we call our own. For the horizon is what motivates our body's movement, it is our prelinguistic orientation not so much to a constructed space as to the world. As though in mobilising our body, we recover our preconceptual binding to a place - to this living room, this here and now. * The original publication of this text in focas 5 included the image by Thomas Struth, Tien An Men, Beijing, 1997 Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Photograph & Slide Library, New York. Unfortunately due to the time constrictions involved in Broadsheet undertaking to reproduce Kevin Chua's text, permission for reproduction of this image was not received by the time of printing. Notes 1 V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, New York: Vintage, 1981: 262. Naipaul's reception has been difficult; he has been labelled variously a 'racist', 'casteist' and 'communalist'. See for example, 'V. S. Naipaul: Political and Social Contexts' [http://65.107.211.208/caribbean/naipaul/politicsov.html]. He has been harshly criticised by postcolonial writers like Edward Said; see Said's 'Intellectuals and the Post-Colonial World', Salmagundi 70-71, 1986: 53. 2 Naipaul: 265 3 As will become clear, the following essay does not deny the lived reality of communal and ethnic violence for participants and victims alike. Though the murder of iconoclasts can be considered another form of iconoclasm, I will restrict this discussion to the destruction of objects. For an example of writing that takes the oft-occluded violence in sectarian conflict into account, see Gyanendra Pandey, 'In Defense of the Fragment: Writing About Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today', Representations 37, 1992: 27-55. 4 Naipaul: 266 5 At issue is not simply Naipaul's contradictory writing, which is certainly the case, but the terms in which a historically-specific reading of colonialist literature like Naipaul's has subsumed the aesthetic into the political. The problem here is not the oft-heard 'aestheticisation of the political', but the way in which, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has put it, "the aesthetic moment, which resists the realism of history, creates a certain irreducible heterogeneity in the constitution of the political." [Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000: 178]. Compare his chapter 6 on the alternating acceptance and rejection of Tagore by Indian writers. 6 See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000 7 Jane Perlez, 'Thunder in Paradise: A Resilient Bali Prepares for a Storm', The New York Times, October 21, 2002. See also Jane Perlez, 'Bali's Broken Economy: As Fragile as an Eggshell', The New York Times, December 2, 2002. 8 "'Being a Muslim country has not been a deterrent to investment,' said Rafidah Aziz, the Minister of International Trade and Industry in Malaysia, in an interview... 'We have become the kind of Muslim country that people do not fear.'" Daniel Altman, 'Wary Companies Are Staying in the Muslim World', The New York Times, October 24, 2002 9 For iconoclasm in modern art, see Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997; Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel [eds.], Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. 10 For the transition to secular capitalism, see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, New York: Scribner's, 1950. For a critique of the 'religiosity' of neoclassical economics, see Robert H. Nelson, Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond, University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 2001. 11 E.g. "In the developed world, [brands] are seen by some to have expanded into the vacuum left by the decline of organised religion." 'Who's Wearing the Trousers?', The Economist, September 6, 2001 12 For instance, many New Yorkers could only say that the horrific events they had just witnessed on September 11, 2001 were "just like a movie" - a sign of total mediation, an inability to have a frame of reference without the media. 'Real life' has been colonised by the mediatised collective unconscious. 13 Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, New York: Picador, 2000 14 To a certain extent, September 11 marked the failure of brands in certain parts of the world [e.g. in Muslim countries], or indicated a growing resistance to them. Both megabrands and counter-terrorist responses can be seen as attempts to stave off the long downturn in the US economy. On the precariousness of the revival of the US economy in 1993-1997, and the possibility of an even greater depression in the future, see Giovanni Arrighi, 'Tracking Global Turbulence', New Left Review 20, 2003: 5-71. For a pro-brand take on the Asian region, see Paul Temporal, Branding in Asia: The Creation, Development and Management of Asian Brands for the Global Market, Singapore: John Wiley & Sons, 1999. See also brandingasia.com for a list of the top brands in Asia. 15 The Economist, ibid. 16 For a discussion of some of the anthropological thematics of the work, see Ashley Carruthers, 'Simryn Gill, Dalam', focas 4, 2002: 242-256. The word dalam in Malay means 'inside' but also 'profound'. 17 By 'conceptual/ready-made' perception I mean attending to the work of art as an object, seeing it as literal rather than metaphorical. See, for example, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 'Readymade, Photography, and Painting in the Painting of Gerhard Richter', in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000: 365-403. 18 Arthur Lubow, 'Photographic Expressionism', The Threepenny Review 88, 2002 at threepennyreview.com/samples/lubow_w02.html 19 The display case is structurally different, yet its resemblance to the one in the earlier photograph is undeniable. Gursky may have constructed the display case in Prada II. See Peter Galassi, 'Gursky's World', in Thomas Gursky [exhibition catalogue], New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2001: 9-45. 20 E.g. "For photography is an imprint or transfer of the real; it is a photochemically processed trace causally connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to that of fingerprints or footprintsŠ On the family tree of images [photographs are] closer to palm prints, death masks, the Shroud of Turin, or the tracks of gulls on beaches. For technically and semiologically speaking, drawings and paintings are icons, while photographs are indexes." Rosalind E. Krauss, 'The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism', in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985: 110. In short, photography claims to be that material 'empty space' in negation of false figural iconism, a natural rather than mediated sign. 21 This 'moment' of the shift from iconism to immanent dissemination, from cult value to exchange value, occurred again in the art of the 1960s [especially in conceptual, performance and installation work]. 22 In Hannah Arendt, [ed.], Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968: 217-251. It is not a coincidence that Struth chose a related essay, Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' [1940], for his qualifying examination in 1977 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. "[Benjamin's essay] constituted 'a possible political attitude toward the world at the time' for the young artist by committing him to the necessity of critical engagement with the past instead of ignoring or suppressing it in denial. It also hinted at a provisional answer to Struth's skepticism about his religious upbringing, for despite his admiration for ideals of 'justice and peace', he could not help wondering 'What do you have, once you step away from Christianity?' a question made more urgent in the wake of disastrous 'mass movements' that promised a return to Paradise." Maria Morris Hambourg and Douglas Eklund, 'The Space of History', in Thomas Struth 1977-2002, Dallas Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002: 159 23 "Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye - if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by manŠ The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses." Benjamin, 'Work of Art': 236-237 [my italics]. In other words, the camera comes to mediate between human beings and reality. 24 For 'innervation' see Miriam Hansen, 'Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street', Critical Inquiry 25:2, 1999: 313-323. 25 Benjamin, 'Work of Art': 223 26 For Benjamin, the definition of the aura involved a "distance however close [the object] may be... Unapproachability is indeed a major quality of the cult image." 'Work of Art': 243 27 It is fundamental to the icon's potency that the 'true icon' - to which all later replicas pointed - was claimed to be acheiropoietic, i.e. handed down by God and not made by man. See Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Most attempts at iconic destruction [to break through to the Real] fail to attain this elusive origin. At issue is whether in bringing forth the collective unconscious a moment of possibility is manifest, before foreclosure by 'God' or 'Nature'. 28 This is the moment captured in Benjamin's Arcades Project. 29 This is why the Kantian phenomenal/noumenal division was so important to Lukacs's account of reification. See Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971: 123-128. "Kant's ethical analysis leads us back to the unsolved methodological problem of the thing-in-itself." [125] For reification and the religious, see Timothy Bewes, Reification, or, the Anxiety of Late Capitalism, New York: Verso, 2002. 30 The Prada store renovation was done by Rem Koolhaas. 31 Kampung is the Malay word for village. 32 Naipaul: 290-291 33 They were given benefits as part of Mahathir's NEP program. On Petronas's involvement with the bumiputera: "The Petronas Towers does powerful representational work in the production of definitions of Islam and Malayness which are appropriate for a modern multicultural nation. One commentator suggests that the Petronas Towers' Islamic motifs are intended as an architectural sign of the Melaya Baru ['new Malay'], the modern Muslim, who has entered the world of commerce. The building thus offers a new international vantage point for a modern pan-national Islam which is to be practised nationally by Melayu Baru. In so doing, Malays will ultimately no longer require affirmative action which is perceived as ethnically divisive, an impediment to multicultural national unity. It was, in part, the extraction of newly-discovered petroleum reserves and rising oil prices from 1973 which had financed public sector growth for NEP affirmative action on behalf of the Malay community. Now, the national oil company, Petronas, is concerned less with financing aggregate ethnic gains than with private sector profit and a viable Malay business class. The Petronas Towers may thus be read as representative of twin strands of Vision 2020 nationalism: Malays taking their rightful place in the national economy without threatening to displace national 'others'; and a united Malaysia 'standing tall' in the world of nations." [Tim Bunnell, 'Views from Above and Below: The Petronas Twin Towers and/in Contesting Visions of Development in Contemporary Malaysia', Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 20: 1, 1999: 11]. Note that the passage takes the point of view of the builders of the Petronas Towers; whether the towers achieves their representational goals is another matter. 34 Mahathir Bin Mohamad, The Malay Dilemma, Kuala Lumpur: Federal Publications, 1970: 73 35 On the NEP phase see John Hilley, Malaysia: Mahathirism, Hegemony and the New Opposition, London: Zed Books, 2001: 32-35, 47-82. "Malay grievances and the crisis of 1969 had allowed inter-ethnic rather than intra-ethnic disparities to take centrestage, thus providing a new set of Malay 'priorities' within the state." [33] 36 Hilley: 34 37 This was the period of massive state investment, through the Heavy Industries Corporation of Malaysia [HICOM], in semi-private firms like the Petronas Corporation [which dealt with petroleum], as well as protection of infant industries. It also involved an easing of the state's relationship with non-Malay capital. What was also occuring during the 1970s and 1980s was Malaysia's integration into the New International Division of Labour [NIDL]: courting international capital also meant being vulnerable to external shocks. New forms of dependency ensued. By the late 1980s, Malaysia and other 'second-tier' Southeast Asian Newly Industrialising Countries [NICs] [Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines] became major recipients of Japanese FDI. Brands such as Sony and Hitachi began to move production to 'off-shore' low-cost production sites such as Malaysia. At the same time, there occurred a widening regional disparity in manufacturing and growth between states in Malaysia itself, and an increasing influx of foreign labour. [Hilley: 55-56] 38 Compare T. N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999: 202: "It was not until the end of the 1960s that radical new policies of state intervention were mooted and these would be directed primarily at eliminating the inequalities of race, not class." 39 Collin E. R. Abraham, Divide and Rule: The Roots of Race Relations in Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur: INSAN, 1997: 23 40 Frank Swettenham, The Real Malay, London, 1900: 37; cited in Abraham: 25. Swettenham became Governor of the Straits Settlements and High Commissioner for the Malay States in 1901. Harper notes that "Whereas the various censi in the States in 1891 referred to the 'nationalities' of different communities, by the first Federated Malay States census of 1911, the primary category of belonging had become 'race', as race became more central to late Victorian understandings of the world." [27] 41 "The Malayan Union scheme had questioned Britain's custodial commitment to the Malays; its defeat subjected colonial agricultural policy to new political pressures. The interests of the Malay cultivator were energetically defended, both in London - by old Malaya hands such as Sir George Maxwell - and by Malay associations within Malaya. To reassure public opinion in the wake of the Union debacle, the policy of guaranteeing Malay rights through Malay Reservations was trenchantly reasserted." Harper: 99. On the town/country conflict, see Harper: 95. 42 Ibid.: 103 43 Crucial labour struggles took place between 1947 and 1948; the turning point [labour's fall] was in the second quarter of 1947. Ibid: 142. There occurred a phasic repoliticisation of communities or labour unions, and the anxious attempts at depoliticisation by the colonial government. e.g. ibid.: 191-192. 44 Ibid.: 177 45 Ibid.: 178 46 Ibid.: 177 47 Ibid.: 99 48 For the following, see Ibid.: 237-241. 49 E.g. "In the 1954-1955 season the official price, set after fields had been planted, was much lower than that anticipated by cultivators and they suffered severe losses. The minimum price seemed to promise security and prosperity for the Malay peasant, yet the main beneficiary from cheap rice was industrial enterprise, and it has been argued that the guaranteed price only served to deflect Malays away from more remunerative employment: an important example of how state policy could perhaps restrict economic opportunity." Ibid.: 242 50 Ibid.: 243 51 Ibid.: 247 52 Kulak is a derogatory term for a particular group of Soviet peasants- turned landowners. When Vladimir Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, hoping to bolster an economy devastated by revolution and civil war, the kulaks [wealthy former peasants who had become proprietors of their own land] were at first a celebrated example of successful land reform. However, their fortunes changed after they opposed Josef Stalin's collectivisation of land. After 1929, the notion of 'dekulakisation' was invented and the kulaks were liquidated as a class by Stalin. The word kulak is related to the Russian word for 'fist', hence, connotations of 'capitalist tightfistedness'. 53 Despite [or fully in tune with] his criticism, Rajaratnam's capitalist dream of Singapore was also predicated on state intervention. 54 These issues have returned after September 11. e.g. "The issue now is whether Malaysia goes futher down this road of using political power to further Islam, as is happening in the states controlled by the Islamic Party of MalaysiaŠ A thirty year-old policy has given economic and educational advantages to the mostly Malay Muslim majority. Affirmative action has brought Malays into the modern economy. But, contrary to the usual impact of urbanisation, religious commitment may have increased. Has religious authority supplanted the feudal relationships of rural Malaysia? Or has affirmative action institutionalised dependency and a sense of inability to compete equally in the modern world?" Philip Bowring, 'Mixed Repercussions in Malaysia', International Herald Tribune, October 30, 2001 55 The literature on the interior and modernity is large. During the late nineteenth century in France, the interior served as a refuge from the sense of dislocation occasioned by Haussmanisation. See for instance Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. [In Gill's Dalam, interiority seems less a refuge from the onslaught of modernity than an attempt to permeate the interior with the exterior, with history and nature.] Walter Benjamin saw the interior as passing from a phase of primordial dwelling, to one of death and decrepitude in modernity. For him, to see the spectre of death in the 'now' of the living put the interior in true suspension: "The difficulty in reflecting on dwelling: on the one hand, there is something age-old - perhaps eternal - to be recognised here, the image of that abode of the human being in the maternal womb; on the other hand, this motif of primal history notwithstanding, we must understand dwelling in its most extreme form as a condition of nineteenth-century existence. The original form of all dwelling is existence not in the house but in the shell. The shell bears the impression of its occupant. In the most extreme instance, the dwelling becomes a shellŠ The twentieth century, with its porosity and transparency, its tendency toward the well-lit and airy, has put an end to dwelling in the old sense. Set off against the doll house in the residence of the master builder Solness are the 'homes for human beings'. Jugendstil unsettled the world of the shell in a radical way. Today this world has disappeared entirely, and dwelling has diminished: for the living, through hotel rooms; for the dead, through crematoriums." [The Arcades Project, trans. Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, convolute I, 4, 4] 56 Naipaul: 293-294