Failures and Detours: For an Undisciplined Southeast Asia

I would be remiss in saying I “chose” to specialize on Cirebon, Indonesia, where I conducted fieldwork for my PhD in Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, for this would imply too much of an agency on my part in shaping my research interests. The truth is that mine was a journey of detours, accumulating debts of gratitude to the people I met as well as to friends and colleagues I knew before making this practical decision. It was this contingency of relations, not a calculated forethought concerning one’s career development, that propelled me towards Cirebon and the now precarious field of Southeast Asian Studies. Armed with my PhD, I returned home to Malaysia in 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic had struck and I soon realized I no longer could pursue in-depth research outside of Malaysia. If the traditional locus of Southeast Asian Studies resides in studying countries other than one’s own (Heryanto, 2002), or in the study of “somewheres” (Hutt, 2019), or as a trope for reconfiguring a “something else” and a “something more” (Jamkajornkeiat, 2017), I find this demand for comparison to be increasingly challenging. The anxiety for failure abounds in a field known for its comparative rigor and depth.

Though I finally landed myself a teaching job as a film lecturer, corporatized academia and the metrification of research activities paved the way for more failures. Onerous neoliberal market expectations coupled with unattainable key performance indicators (KPIs) have led some colleagues to construct an elaborate artifice of productivity. Reluctance to participate in this self-congratulatory project marks another of my failures.

To acknowledge these personal and institutional failures at the outset is to account for the ambitious demands of Southeast Asian studies when viewed from the optic of Southeast Asia. To excel in the field, one would expect a combined effort of sustained accumulation of knowledge, rigorous language training and cultural immersion (Jackson, 2019: 58-59), comparison for scale and comprehensiveness (Van Schendel, 2002: 657-660), in addition to commitments to a certain exceptionalism or “traitism” (Chua et al., 2019: 39-41). Attempting academic excellence in Southeast Asian studies is also an enormously costly project. Who can study a country other than their own? Only those Southeast Asians who “relocate to the West and produce their analyses from prestigious Western universities,” asserts Peter Jackson (2019: 63). Academic excellence requires infrastructures that enable comparison: a supportive institution, accessible and resourceful libraries, intensive training, job security, ample time, and a reasonable teaching load. This reality is hard to come by, living and working in Southeast Asia today, especially in a publish-or-perish environment.

Furthermore, as a sub-discipline of area studies whose popularity is in decline, Southeast Asian studies, too, is afflicted by endless reflections of failed narratives, of crisis upon crisis, of detours upon detours (Abraham, 2000; King, 2001; Heryanto, 2002; Goh, 2011). That the field began as a Western problematique, inescapably entwined with Cold War ideologies and geopolitics, already set a course for an accursed journey fraught with caveats. It is with this burdensome baggage of failures that I turn to Judith Halberstam’s “low theory” that “revels in detours, twists, and turns through knowing and confusion, and that seeks not to explain but to involve” (Halberstam, 2019: 15-16). To seek counterintuitive modes of knowledge production, Halberstam evokes the “undisciplined” to rethink how scholars can make sense of not succeeding, of not measuring up to scholarly code words such as “serious” and “rigorous” (2019: 6).

To respond to this baggage of failures, another detour is in order – one that is reflective of my wayward journey to becoming a film lecturer. In his “Cups-of-Gas Filmmaking vs Full Tank-cum-Credit Card Fillmaking” [sic] (1989), the self-deprecating Filipino filmmaker, Kidlat Tahimik, identifies two paths in the journey of filmmaking. The “Full Tank-cum-Credit Card Fillmaking” (FTC) is to start with a full tank and a credit card to guarantee completion. The other is to drive with a few cups of gasoline and scrounge around for more to get to the end. The cups-of-gas formula allows one to avoid the dictates of bankrollers. It is also symptomatic of the undisciplined, but discipline, says Tahimik, “is always relative to preconceived ‘laws’ of fillmaking [sic] learned in film schools” (1989: 82).

Cups-of-gas filmmaking is inefficient and is racked with detours. It is prone to failures, necessitating makeshift solutions. This could potentially give rise to unpredictability and creative explorations, enabling an artist to take “a detour from clichés” (1989: 82). As if putting Halberstam’s theory into praxis, Tahimik avers: “My lack of resources can become a blessing because my time frame escapes this deadline obsession, and allows me to discover motifs. The film becomes an interaction between me and the cosmos, because I have escaped the straitjacket of FTC fillmaking” (1989: 83).

Similarly, could we conceive of “cups-of-gas research-making”? Perhaps the digital piracy of Sci-Hub, Libgen, and Z-library are some of the fruits of indiscipline. Since leaving NUS and losing access to a range of online resources, these repositories have become my basic necessities in an environment of imperfect infrastructures. Learning to become a virtual pirate, sharing links and contributing to a network of shadow communities, too, provides occasional relief in times of need. Making friends (or friends of friends) with access to elite institutions is encouraged, but make sure to download the files and re-upload them to the cloud to activate more detours. What other undisciplined knowledge production and detours could we have imagined?

Let me end with my final detour. As a practicing visual artist, I have often observed exciting ways of theorizing Southeast Asia in the field of arts. Curators, artists, writers, filmmakers, poets, and many others actively and unselfconsciously generate and appropriate theories (“low theory” in praxis). It is a performative consequence of their doing, yet without the most punitive aspect of academia: the curse of literature review, of kowtowing to pioneering scholars, which again draws us to the “ancestral sin” of Area Studies (Chua et al.). As a discipline struggling to survive in neoliberal academia, Southeast Asian Studies may gradually cease to exist as its demands and boundaries dissipate. But it could re-emerge in the afterlife (Miyoshi and Harootunian, 2002) through indiscipline and cosmic detours, as a creative exercise or a speculative project for thinking otherwise. To heed the wisdom of Tahimik, again (1989: 85): “Cups-of-gas audiences have to be developed over time.” And so it is with an undisciplined Southeast Asian Studies, which needs to build its own audience who can attune to a new style of probing and reconfiguring Southeast Asia. In the new reconfiguration, we must acknowledge how non-academic institutions and collectives do significant theoretical works in and of Southeast Asia and how radically creative individuals’ “cups-of-gas” scholarship may offer interesting detours from clichés and points of departure, and carry us through our failures.