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THE MAD DOG AND THE ENGLISHMAN 

A critical history of the running amok as spontaneous 

naked savage 

A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the 

requirements for the degree of 

Masters of Art 

m 

Psychology 

at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand 

Rajeendemath Panikkar 

2005 



I would like to take this opportunity to state that this work from its conceptualisation to its 

realisation is indubitably of my making. While it is as indubitable that I am new to the field 

of critical theory, many ideas that pertain to this work seem novel to me if no one else. 

These include the derivation of a secular-ethical critique based on a methodological 

fragment comprising a small 'sample of critical moments' ; writing/ writhing from the body; 

the text (discourse) as antagonistic (rather than 'gnostic') and its fragmentation of the 

(textual) body of the adiscursive ahistorical subject/ object; genealogical descent as 

descending on the body in search of our lowly or impure origins ( e.g. of disease, disorder, 

and our anthropological or biological/ racial origins); and the link between Foucault's 

functionalist thesis on power with the Enlightenment doctrine of the universal struggle for 

existence/ survival. I am more than obligated to the likes of Foucault or Edward Said for 

the great insights offered me when surveying the 'discursive formations' of the Western or 

disciplinary tradition. I however also do not believe in merely paying blind obeisance and 

have instead fashioned a work that I consider to be significantly different in approach and 

content to, for example, a Madness and civilisation or Orientalism. I hope of course to 

publish much of this work elsewhere and assert my 'moral right' over this work in its 

entirety. 

Rajeendemath Panikkar 



ii 

PREFACE 

I began this work with the intention of writing a genealogy of amok, the Malay malaise, 

not long now incorporated into the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and 

Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), as a culture-bound syndrome. A 

reading of Foucault' s genealogy, and especially of its innumerable critiques, convinced 

me of the incompatibility of matching an approach steeped in the Western tradition with 

a 'syndrome' of a people who were long colonised by this West. Foucault's 

conceptualization, and attributions, of power were also instrumental in my rejection of 

his incitement to 'write genealogies' (Sawicki, 1991; p. 15), as a method of resisting the 

'often oppressive rationalities of discourse in the human sciences' (Lash, 1991; p. 259). 

In departing from the genealogical approach I have also gravitated to a postcolonial 

critique of the writing of the Malay and his amok, which I consider to be far more 

compatible, given his/ her colonisation by a succession of European imperial powers. 

Not coincidentally, as he is one of Foucault' s most vehement critics, I have refracted 

this critical history of amok through Edward Said's secular-ethical working of the 

postcolonial thesis . This is my attempt to avoid what Said views to be the 'retreat of 

intellectual work' from the 'actual society in which it works' (Ashcroft, 2003; p. 264), 

and into ' the 'labyrinth of textuality' constructed out of 'the mystical and disinfected 

matter of literary theory' where a 'precious jargon has advanced' (Said, 1983; p. 4). I 

have then very deliberately attempted to minimise this 'precious jargon' to make this 

work more accessible. 

I have not included a literature review in this work and instead furnish the excuse that iy 

is (this work) a literature review of sorts. It is a literary critique of the historical writing 

of the Malay and his malaise. A final word concerns the likely controversial use of the 

term, the 'White Man', which reprises a longstanding, and antagonistic, racial 

dichotomy which I and many others believe to be fundamental to 'modem' history. 

Though I explain my use of this term in my work, I make my sincere apologies to those 

who feel aggrieved with my continual reference to the 'White Man'. At times I have 

felt as aggrieved but, in considering various alternatives, could not in all honesty 

disregard the only too apparent authority this self-proclaimed 'White Man' has exerted 

on history, and more particularly, in the context of this thesis, on the Malay World. 

R. Panikkar 



lll 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

I would like firstly to thank Massey University for granting me a Masterate 

scholarship towards the writing of this thesis 

I am also indebted to the Turitea psychology department and especially Dr. Mandy 

Morgan for providing me with the financial support to conduct a significant amount 

of field work and writing in Malaysia. This thesis would certainly have been very 

different without this assistance. 

I owe several members of the staff at the University Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) 

in Bangi, Selangor, a debt of gratitude for their very warm hospitality, and many 

insights that were of immense value in writing this thesis. In particular I would to 

thank Associate Professor Noriah Mohamad, Professor Mohd. Shaharom Hatta, 

Professor Shamsul, Professsor Nik Hassan, and Professor Zahwia Yahya. 

My thesis supervisor, Dr. Mandy Morgan, has very generously given me a free hand 

and much encouragement in writing this work. I thank her many times over for her 

unstinting support of and belief in this work. 



IV 

CONTENTS 

Contents Page no. 

PREFACE....................................................................................... ....... ............ 11 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................ ..... ...................................... ....... 111 

CONTENTS....................................................................................................... IV 

PART 1: INTRODUCTION, ANTECEDENTS AND FOUNDATIONS 

FOR A CRITICAL HISTORY ON THE MALAY AND HIS AMOK.. 1 

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION AND ANTECEDENTS................ ..... ... ...... 2 

Biograph ............... .................... ... .. .... .... ... ........ ..... .. ......................... ........ 2 

My view of postcolonial Malaysia .................................. ...... ...... ................ 3 

CHAPTER 2: DRIVING AND GUIDING A CRITIQUE OF THE HISTORY 

OF THE MALAY AND HIS MALAISE.... ... ............................................. ....... 8 

'Writing genealogies'.................... ......... .... ..... ............................................ 8 

Foucault and the non-secular non-ethical critique. .......... ............................. 9 

Moving from literary theory to postcolonial critique: the Saidean 

approach to critical work........ ...... .... .... ...... .. ... .......... ....................... .... .... ... 11 

'Writing genealogies' and 'writing for power'.................... ....... .... ...... ........ 13 

Foucault' s functionalist view of power...................................... ..... .. ......... .. 16 

Deriving a methodological fragment for this critique: a secular -ethical 

approach comprising a small sample of critical moments................. ............ 23 

More critical moments: the anti-colonialism of Frantz Fanon (the 'Black 

Foucault')... ........... .. ........... .. ....................................................................... 29 

Writing in a 'wordly' style .... .. ....... .. .......... .. . .. . . . .............. ... . . . ... .. ..... ...... .. . .. 32 

CHAPTER 3: SOME KEY CONCEPTS........................ ......... .. .... ................... 34 

Representation and race in colonialist discourse.......................................... 34 

The syndrome in contemporary psychiatric discourse.................................. 3 5 



V 

And some necessary disclaimers................................................................. 39 

CHAPTER 4: WRITING/ WRITHING FROM THE BODY....... .. ..... ............ 40 

Blending literary theory with the literary tradition...... ...................... ... ...... .. 40 

Contemporary literature and the principle of power..................................... 45 

Toni Morrison's Beloved as critical historiography..................................... 47 

The African-American tradition V modernity................................. .. ........... 52 

Critical/ literary theory as institutional (corporate) anorexia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 

Concerning the 'modem subject' of genealogy... .. ....................................... 57 

PART 2: WRITING THE RUNNING AMOK: THE HISTORICAL 

CONST ANT OF THE 'WHITE MAN' ........ ... ..... ................ .... .. .......... ....... 60 

CHAPTER 5: PSYCHIATRY AND THE CULTURE-BOUND 

SYNDROME ............... ... ..... .... .... .... .. ... ..... .. .......... .................... ............... ... .. ..... 61 

Culture and race in psychiatric discourse.. .... .... .................. ........ ... .. ............ 63 

Of the varieties and races of man: primordial man and the native . . . . . . . .. . . . .. .. 69 

The Malay 'race' .... ....... .................................................... ........ ..... ............. 75 

The Malay of contemporary Malaysian society...................... .. .... ............... 80 

CHAPTER 6: THE 'INDIAN' AMOK.......................................... ..... ...... .. ... .... 82 

Amok as a culture-bound syndrome of the Indian of the Malabar Coast...... 82 

The historical constant of the ''white man' and his amok.......................... ... 88 

CHAPTER 7: THE HISTORICAL TRUTH OF THE MALAY AND 

HIS MALAISE................................................................................................... 92 

The martial amok of the Malay............ ... ...... .. ............. .. ... ........................... 92 

The solitary amok of the Malay.................................. .. ............................... 94 

CHAPTER 8: EPISTEMIC SHIFTS IN IMPERIALIST DISCOURSE......... 103 

The 'new world of voyages' and 'new world learning' ................................ 103 

The pragmatic scholar and his science......................................................... 104 



Vl 

Shifts in the writing of amok . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . .. . .. .. . .. . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . 107 

CHAPTER 9: PSYCHIATRIC DISCOURSE ON AMOK: THE INNATELY 

DISORDERED MALAY .... .. ..... .................................................. ....... ...... ....... .. 109 

The innately disordered Malay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. ... . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 109 

Amok as metaphor for the nature of the native/ savage.......... ...................... 110 

The absence of catharsis in Amok ................... .............. ... .... ... .......... .......... 112 

The Malay as a 'spontaneous native' ................................ ....................... .... 113 

PART 3: THE MALAY AS POLYMYTH: CONCERNING HIS AMOK, 

TREACHERY, INDOLENCE, BIGOTRY, MORAL TURPITUDE ..... 114 

CHAPTERlO: THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE MYTH OF THE 

'TREACHEROUS MOHAMMEDANS' .................... .. .... ........... ... .. .. ...... ......... 115 

Isabella Bird and The Golden Chersonese ..... .......... .......... ... .. .. .... ............... 116 

Wallace's science in service of the colonial project on the Malay 

Archipelago ........ ..... ..... .... .............. ... .... .... ..... ... ...... ........................... ......... 120 

Wallace's contradictions and the modernist tradition of anti-modernism ..... 128 

Malay civilisation as stagnant............. ....... ... ............. .................................. 129 

The Malayan trilogy: Anthony Burgess's ideological project 

on Malaya. ................ ............. ......... ... .. .... .. .... .. .............. .............. ..... .... ... ... 131 

CHAPTER 11: THE EMERGENCE OF THE MYTH OF THE INDOLENT 

MALAY .............. .... ......................... .... ...... ... ... .................... ........ ..... ... ... ..... ..... .. 134 

The Enlightenment discourse of the infantile and indolent naked savage ... .. 136 

William Robertson and the natural or 'naked' brown savage ......... ......... ... .. 140 

A ranked modem ethnography .............................. ............... .. ..................... 143 

Marsden's naked brown savage: the native of the Malay Archipelago ......... 148 

The White Man's chimera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 3 

Running amok as a contradiction of the ideal man ofreason. ......... .... ...... .... 154 

The racialised nature of Modernity ...... .................... ................................... 157 



Vll 

The racialised nature of Modernity . .. .... ... .. .. .. . ........... .. ....... .. ... .. .. .. ... . . .. ...... 157 

CHAPTER 12: REPRISING THE MYTH OF THE LAZY MALAY IN POST-

INDEPENDENCE MALAYSIA ................................................. .. ..................... 158 

Mahathir, modernity, and the indolent Malay .............................................. 159 

Malay resistance to colonial occupation and modernity . ... . . . . . . .. .. . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. . . 166 

EPILOGUE . . . . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . ... .... . . ... ... . .. . . . .. .. .. . . . .. . . . . . . . . . ... .. .. .... . .. . . .. ..... . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 170 

Postscript . . . . . . .. .. .. ... . . .. ... . . . . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . . .. . . .. . . . . . . . . ...... . . . .. .... . . . .. .. .. ... . . . . .. . . . .. . . .. . . 171 

REFERENCE LIST..................................... ............................ .... ........... ... ........ 173 

APPENDICES. ....... .................. ................ .. .. ..... ...................................... Diskette 

READING 1 ..................... ...... ............. .. ....... .. .............. ............. ... .. .. .. Diskette 

READING 2....................................................................................... Diskette 



Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, 

The Japanese don't care to, the Chinese wouldn't dare to, 

Hindus and Argentines sleep firmly from twelve to one 

But Englishmen detest-a siesta . .. . 

Vlll 

. . . In the Malay States, there are hats like plates which the Britishers won't wear. 

At twelve noon the natives swoon and no further work is done, 

But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. 

It's such a surprise for the Eastern eyes to see, 

that though the English are effete, they're quite impervious to heat, 

When the white man rides every native hides in glee, 

Because the simple creatures hope he will impale his solar topee on a tree . .. 

Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun . . . . 

. . . In a jungle town where the sun beats down to the rage of man and beast 

The English garb of the English sahib merely gets a bit more creased. 

In Bangkok at twelve o'clock they foam at the mouth and run, 

But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. 

Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. 

The smallest Malay rabbit deplores this foolish habit . . . . 

. . . In Bengal to move at all is seldom ever done, 

But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. 

[Abbreviated from Mad Dogs and Englishmen; Noel Coward, 1932] 



1 

PARTl 

INTRODUCTION,ANTECEDENTSAND 

FOUNDATIONS FOR A CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE 

MALAY AND HIS MALAISE 



2 

CHAPTER 1: ANTECEDENTS AND INTRODUCTION 

Biograph 

Born oflndian migrants in post-independence Malaysia I am very much a child of 

postcolonial Malaysia, infused with the rhetoric of independence, anti-imperialism and 

nationalism. When I say Indian I should specify that I am of Malayalee descent. My 

parents were born in Kerala, formerly the Malabar Coast of the southwest of India, and 

once were of the colonized peoples. The Malayalee are renowned, in India and 

Malaysia at least, as Marxists, unionists, and inveterate curmudgeons and itinerants, 

traits that Arundhati Roy readily testifies to (Roy, 2004). My parents also infused me 

with an appreciation of those dispossessed, and that most precious of all things for me, a 

love for the literary tradition ( of writing fiction) . Our bookshelves were lined with the 

great texts of both East and West, of the Mahabaratta and Macbeth, ofTagore and 

Tolstoy. I have somehow combined the two, and of all my individual and customary 

values, beliefs and practices, of all the things I believe in and the things I do, none is as 

irretrievable as my relationship with, my love for the literature of the dispossessed. 

Perhaps I remain that child of the (late) sixties fixated on those enduring memories of 

M. L. King, Malcolm X, Gloria Steinham, the Solyuz/ Apollo flights, the Vietnam War, 

Kent state, and the great independence, civil liberties and feminist movements. 

The following story is probably apocryphal. Years ago, almost two decades now, my 

father, learned man that he is, once took me to task for my knee-jerk bias towards those 

oppressed and dispossessed. 'You should be objective and neutral' , he admonished me, 

a stance he thought more befitting my status as a scientist. I retorted that far from being 

neutral it is often the intellectual who is only too ready to align himself with the 

oppressor, citing that Orwell had in Homage to Catalonia written of the alacrity with 

which the German and French intelligentsia rushed to join the ranks of the Nazis. I 

thought little more of this at times heated exchange, until I went in search of this much­

treasured book. I eventually found it in my father's suitcase in our hotel room (I was 

returning from one of my visits home, and he had insisted on driving me all the way to 

Singapore). Presumably he had planned on using it for course or lecture material for 

the strategic studies unit he ran at University Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, on his return. 

Having lived a little more than the first half of my life in Malaysia, I arrived in New 

Zealand in the mid I980's to pursue a tertiary education, but stayed on when that 



3 

opportunity was offered me. I regularly visit Malaysia, staying for several months at a 

time, as I have both family and a familiar environment that gives me much pleasure, 

and often enough pain, to return to. I am as attached to my other home, New Zealand, 

having stayed because it seemed to me that, in the 1980's at least, that this was as close 

to an egalitarian society as I had encountered I in my limited experience. This society is 

now a distant memory erased by the implementation of the disproportionating 

ideologies, of the 'realities', of the globalised marketplace of competing labour forces, 

or the 'postmodem' industrial revolution. It's imagining, however delusional or 

illusory, remains with me. 

I was once of the pure sciences, highly trained in the 'hard' technologies of chemistry 

and genetics, but not as it turns out in the arcane maneuverings of corporatised science 

for 'public good' (really more public subsidized privatised or corporate gain). I have 

come to realize ironically however that the sophistic (professional) ' neutral' scientist 

and public good have long been at odds. The scientist, as once was I, has long been 

embedded in the culture of the corporatist (rather than merely capitalist) mode of 

production, rather than that of the public. Having rejected and been rejected by 

corporate science, I chose to follow what I thought to be a more ethical as well as 

' useful' path, that of the psychologist (as opposed to say philosopher). Deluded I might 

have been but at the very least it has allowed me, with the kind assistance of the 

exceptional individual, some freedom to express my resistance to the contaminated 

truths, those heavily prescribed inevitabilities of modernity. 

My view of postcolonial Malaysia 

Frantz Fanon argued that the nationalism of the modern nation state, instead of 

liberating the colonized, evolves into forms of racism and separatism in which colonial 

hegemony is replaced by the bourgeois nationalism of the dominant ethnic group 

(Fanon, 1963 & 1968). It might seem that more than five hundred years of modem 

imperialism have taught us, the once colonized, very little apart from the highly 

cultivated, modem methods of oppressing others2
• This new hegemony is expediently 

and ironically, propagated through many of the same mechanisms, processes, 

1 I recognise of course that many groups, including Maori, and other 'minoritised groups' , 'Chinese' 
especially, and women, had a very different experience of this egalitarian society. 
2 The most disturbing colonial practice reprised, for me, is the system of indentured labour, really 
slavery. The indentured labour of Malaysia today are, for example, the Indonesian maids that serves 
the demands of practically every middle class household, and the construction and plantation workers 
and restaurant hands from the 'poorer ' nations of South Asia. 



4 

apparatuses and institutions that are the legacy of the coloniser. Notable examples of 

these dominant ethnic groups are perhaps the Hindi speaking predominantly 'Aryan' 

north Indian of India, the Malay of Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia, and the Chinese of 

Singapore and, one could as easily say, the English of the United Kingdom, or the 

German of a now unified Germany. That this new hegemony has developed should 

come as little surprise as colonisation appears to have wrought essentially what it, 

functionally speaking, is meant to. A 'new' territory is occupied by an opportunistic 

organism and its physical and social/ cultural landscapes converted to benefit the 

colonizing organism, perhaps irretrievably in many instances. What is alarming to me, 

however, is the vigour with which we have adopted all much of what we once, and very 

recently at that, as vigorously opposed and discredited. 

Dr. Zahwia Yahya, a noted Malaysian postcolonial/ critical/ feminist theorist of Malay 

ethnicity and author of as elegant and incisive a work on colonialist discourse as I have 

come across, expresses little surprise at this development. She offers that its enduring 

legacy is a measure of the force with which colonial ideology has been inscribed on the 

'national' and, more especially, the Malay 1 consciousness (Yahya, 2003). In this 

instance the opportunistic organism was the European who had serendipitously 

'discovered', and brutally and rapidly conquered the rich and diverse civilisations of the 

East (Orient), the West (Americas) and the South (Africa), in the 15th and 16th century, 

through the 'new world of voyages' (Andaya, 2001; Chomsky, 1993; Hampson, 2000; 

Menzies, 2003; Said, 1993; White, 2002). Independence may have brought about 

exchange rather than change, as separate groups compete to occupy the colonial legacy, 

its ideologies and suprastructures of government, commerce and even custom. It is as if 

inevitably, as with Foucault's notion of power or Darwin's evolutionary mechanics, a 

new era of dominance/ hegemony has emerged from this struggle for liberation from the 

break with a preceding hegemony (Darwin, 1901 & 1964; Foucault, 1977). 

As one of that very minority race oflndians of the fledgling nation of Malaysia I can 

attest to these views promulgated by Fanon first, and by Foucault later. I have much of 

which I can accuse the Malay, the politically dominant, if nothing else, 'race' of 

Malaysia, and it comes easily enough as I view the environmental and social wreckage 

wrought by a contemporary and unswerving 'drive to modernity' (Bunnell, 2004; 

1 Ironically, and tragically, it is the Malay, albeit of an elite group, that is most vehement in 
continuing the colonialist notion of the Malay. 



5 

Mabry, 1998; Mohamad, 2002; Shamsul, 1996). The 'Indian', the 'Chinese', the 

'African', and for that matter the English, American or Russian, however, have done as 

much and only too often, much much more. 

There is little that is more familiar to me than this ancient intermingling of the three 

main 'races ' of the 'Malay', 'Chinese', and ' Indian'; the 'plural society par excellence' 

as Professor Shamsul calls it, with more than a little irony and skepticism of course 

(Shamsul, 1996; p.16). Growing up in immediate post-independence1 Malaysia, my 

neighbourhoods were an amazing diverse ethnic and cultural mix. Being well 

acquainted with the customs, values and beliefs of this great plurality, I walked into the 

homes of a Muslim Malay, Catholic Indian, or Buddhist Chinese with the utmost 

comfort, practicing as they did as ifby second nature. It seemed as natural to be proud 

to be part of such a diverse society that so casually, outwardly at least, embraced and 

celebrated difference. I was well aware of racism but had little idea that racialisation 

was itself racism. I spoke of race as most did, as a natural/ scientific fact that very 

visibly 'biologically' segregated this multi-cultural society, along colour lines2
• It was, 

and still is, common to speak of our 'natural' attributes, inclinations, customs, beliefs 

and values in terms of the race paradigm that significantly structures this plurality par 

excellence. A very notable example is former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, 

who will not even deign to use the word ethnicity in place of race. As a unified multi­

racial society both under the British, and now the dominant political party of 

independent Malaysia, the Malay, Chinese, and Indian races purportedly lived in 

harmony, bar the odd racial or communist insurrection, practising our particular 

customs and beliefs, doing the things that we were 'best suited' to. 

One belief that is still pervasive in this racial plurality is that the Malay is somewhat 

backward and needs help to rise to the level of the Chinese especially in terms of 

intellectual and economic achievement (as per a 'look eastwards' policy). The cause of 

this backwardness is purportedly the Malay's inherent indolence, probably the most 

commonly held racial belief in Malaysia. To this day I am informed of this fact in the 

everyday conversations I have with family, friends, and acquaintances, and even 

strangers and ' foreigners' . My parents to their great credit never prescribed these 

views. That the Encyclopaedia Britannica defined the Malay as a lazy but gentlemanly 

1 Independence from the English was gained on August 31 st 1957. 
2 A racial hierarchy privileging those light-skinned is as firmly entrenched in Malaysian society, 
as it is anywhere in the world. 



6 

race 1 was, however, a source of amusement to my father. To tell the truth while I never 

spoke of the Malay as such, and still do not, I might have in other subtle ways have 

subscribed to this pervasive belief, especially with regards to his/ her academic abilities. 

The Malay was perhaps somewhat backward and superstitious, practiced magic of both 

_!cinds, and was given to running amok without warning. These commonly promulgated 

beliefs, however, do not match my actual experiences of living intimately with Malay 

for more than thirty years. I have yet to witness an amok attack or any magical powers 

bar the occasional and to me commonplace act of his shamans. 

While familiarising my self with that master text of psychiatry, clinical psychology, and 

psychopathology, the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-IV 

& DSM-IV-TR; APA, 1994 & 2000), I was a little surprised and even amused to find 

amok classified as a culture-bound syndrome (CBS). It soon occurred to me however 
' that most if not all the CBSs are syndromes of cultures that could be classified as other 

than western, modem or developed. Not only were these the exotic syndromes of the 

so-called third world peoples, I was also struck by the highly pejorative nature of their 

writing. Reading historical, and psychiatric or psychological descriptions of amok only 

reinforced this impression. At some point, inevitably, it struck me that this writing was 

largely, even entirely, fictional, having no material existence outside of my very 

intimate experiences of Malay people, and their culture. 

Of all the means or even methods of taking the life of another authenticated by this 

history, none are as dramatic in its senseless ferocity, none as gratuitous as that of the 

legendary running amok. In comparison an assassination is politically motivated, and 

murder is an act that similarly requires reason, mens rea, for its modem legal 

assignment (Alexander & Kessler, 1997; Binder, 2000; Slobogin, 2003). That the 

Malay customarily, according to history at least, 'runs amok' in his homicidal acts, and 

does so as if spontaneously, suggests that he is largely bereft of reason and thus not 

culpable. The fate of the homicidal Malay was either death or confinement to the 

psychiatric institution of the day (from the middle of the nineteenth century. Ellis, 

1893; Spores, 1988). 

Psychiatric and lay characterizations of the Malay malaise of amok are invariably as 

dramatic and incendiary as the act itself - so much so that they tend towards cliche. It 

1 A characterisation not long ago removed on petition by the Malaysian government 



7 

was at this moment that something transcending that relativistic notion of competing 

beliefs, ideologies, values, epistemologies, et cetera, of great clarity coalesced. The still 

persisting discourse on the Malay was a fiction, even delusion, of a colonialist writing 

that I already thought of as being oppressive. It seemed appropriate that I then sought a 

means of 'using' this psychiatric discourse on amok, and the Malay, as a means of 

exposing the mythical nature of the Malay. It is improbable to me that I could have, 

given his savage nature, lived peaceably amongst this Malay for decades, and even 

more impossibly, survived to write this tale. 



8 

CHAPTER 2: DRIVING AND GUIDING A CRITIQUE OF THE HISTORY 

OF THE MALAY AND HIS MALAISE 

I have realised for sometime now that I have rapidly retreated from the theory/ method 

obsessive, deontologised mainstream methods employed in defining the human 

condition. Having arrived at the social sciences disillusioned with the 'pure' natural 

sciences, I am now as sceptical of 'scientised' psychology particularly in light of what I 

construe to be the ritualistic and authoritative expediency with which constructs are 

derived, and our behaviours, words and thoughts sampled, analysed and categorised. 

All as if they were intrinsic to some inestimable truth, our 'will to' which as scientists 

and intellectuals is wholly and unquestionably righteous. Mainstream psychology 

seems as divorced from philosophical inquiry as mainstream physics or chemistry, so 

aligned is it with what Husserl calls the ' natural attitude' (Anderson, Hughes, & 

Sharrock, 1986; p. 85). 

'Writing genealogies' 

Foucault and Derrida, for obvious reasons, loom large in my brief foray into the 

ontologised inquiries ofpsychology 1
• As much 'fun' as Derrida 's deconstructionism 

promises to be, I am steeped in an 'eastern' tradition that views text itself as sacred and 

have little desire to scar it, as ifl had danced the dance macabre on a minefield. The 

narrative for me is the one true thing, and which is the aim of language itself, that stands 

between sense and non-sense in this world. What after all are narratives but our-stories 

of meaning making, be they grand or petit or fictional or fact, however indistinguishable 

ultimately the one may be from the other? And how sense-less then would we be 

without our stories? 

In linking text with the arrow of time I also specifically engage with the 

historiographical approaches of Michel Foucault, particularly that called genealogy, 

surely the method de }our of the aspiring or recently anointed critical theorists in of the 

human sciences. Historiography as critical theory/ literary theory or criticism is very 

much the domain ofFoucault and his project (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982; Said, 1983; 

Stevens, 2003; Tamboukou, 1999). Having however embarked on that first task, 

though necessarily limited, ofreading Foucault's genealogy, and waxed and waned over 

1 Our postgraduate courses on critical psychology contain a large dose of French literary or 
critical theory. 



9 

its seductive combination of poetics and resistance ('radical chic'), I have, almost 

inevitably, rejected his specific instruction to 'write genealogies' (Sawicki, 1991; p. 15). 

This momentous, for me, reference to 'writing genealogies' derives from an account of 

a conversation between Jan Sawicki and Foucault that occurred during a seminar on the 

Technologies of the self, held at the University of Vermont in 1983. Discomfited with 

being the focus of this conversation, Foucault suggested that Sawicki not expend energy 

talking about him and instead do as he was doing, namely 'write genealogies'. This 

suggestion initially introduced for me a specific 'condition of possibility' that I believe 

to be very largely excluded by the instrumental (cold and dispassionate) rigor of 

conventional scholarship. My preference in writing critically is to write in a lyrical, 

partisan but nevertheless erudite fashion, as would a John Steinbeck, an Edward Said, 

Toni Morrison or Foucault himself. Said for his part may have described this type of 

critical work as a form of secular-ethical criticism (Ashcroft & Ahluwalia, 2001; Said, 

1994). Having duly conducted my reading of Foucault's historiographical approaches I 

have, however, come to view this instruction as Foucault's bid in 'the endless play of 

dominations' (Foucault, 1977; p. 148). A very successful one, I might add, considering 

the burgeoning economy that has grown out of his investments in the knowledge 

industry. In my view, albeit informed by my limited reading, too many of Foucault's 

disciples have glossed over the very glaring omissions, the particular specificity or neo­

liberalism/ new conservatism of his project, while vigorously promoting it as a panacea 

for the 'dislocatedness' of academic endeavour (Deacon, 2000; Dreyfus & Rabino;.v, 

1982; During, 1992; Lash, 1991; Rabin ow & Rose, 1994; Sawicki, 1991; Stevens, 

2003; Tamboukou, 1999). 

Foucault and the non-secular non-ethical critique 

Foucault's limited, non-secular applications of his critical inquiries are often dismissed 

as an issue, highly problematic though it may be given its fervent and often 

reprehensible Kantian and Nietzschean antecedents. As budding critical theorists we 

are expected to pay blind obeisance to Foucault's 'good intentions', and those of his 

lineage (effectively the Western Canon) (Deacon, 2000; Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982; 

During, 1992; Foucault, 2003b; Lash, 1991; Stevens, 2002; Tamboukou, 1999). Having 

conducted a reading of genealogy facilitated by several Platonic like1 interpretations of 

his 'great' project, I am expected to take stock ofFoucault's good intentions and 



10 

obediently write my own genealogy ( of amok), fulfilling his self-serving argument of 

the 'play of dominations'. It is very clear to me that genealogy has emerged as the 

dominant method from this epistemological 'play', or more accurately, 'struggle' (from 

which the dominant strain then emerges). Far from being the victims of their inevitable 

only too human limitations (so often resulting in inhuman applications), that 'men of 

their times' syndrome, it seems very evident to me that they ( of the lineage of the 

Western Canon) were/ are complicit with modem imperialism and its various 

manifestations through its history (of some 500 years; Chomsky, 1993; Fanon, 1963; 

Said, 1978 & 1993). 

Foucault's genealogy can be thought of as the dominant method of those inquiries into 

the human condition by the social sciences, that has emerged to be, and already is, 

repeated formally ad nauseum until another method de jour emerges from our next 

crisis of failure, that struggle with the poststructuralist anxiety (of pure textuality) 

'which often haunts contemporary critical practice' (Ashcroft, 2003; p. 261). This 

anxiety can be said to derive from critical theory's arguable tendency towards 

relativism or nihilism, which Habermas suggests derives from a complete immersion in 

the local (non-secular) which gives us no way to judge it (ethically, morally and 

aesthetically), and is thus doomed to accommodation with the given (Habermas, 1981 

& 1986). 

Edward Said also attributes this tendency to the undue emphasis placed on anarchic 

linguistic play within critical theory (Said, 1983). I would go so far as to say that our 

'heroicization' of a Foucault or Derrida, which is a transcendental narcissism of sorts 

(because we aspire to be like them), blinds us to their and their project's innate faults, 

and dooms us to repeat what Jane Flax views to be their contaminated solutions (Flax, 

1990). Adorno (1973), and Deleuze and Guattari (1994) consider that the crisis of 

failure of critical theory is inevitable, as once concepts and theories leave their 

philosophical home to enter its 'marketplace' of competing theories to become a 

method, their 'critical ethos is drained away' (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1994; p. 99). One 

could then also say that that I have already, very rapidly, had encountered this crisis. 

There is that 'Brechtian' question of social relevance to be addressed. In rejecting 

Foucault I have also as inevitably gravitated towards a style of postcolonial critique, 

and one greatly influenced by Edward Said. I am, after all, of the postcolonial world, as 

is my intimate, the 'Malay'. Said firmly located his postcolonial critique in the social 



11 

context, in accordance with his passionate belief that intellectual work needed to 

resurrect its connections with the political realities of the society within which it occurs 

(Ashcroft, 2003; Said, 1976, 1983 & 1994). 

Moving from literary theory to postcolonial critique: the Saidean approach to 

critical work 

The concept of the text as 'worldly' or 'circumstantial', or the locatedness of theory as 

worldly, material or circumstantial, is Said's strategy for lending social relevance to his 

intellectual work (Ashcroft, 2003). For Said, text has a 'sensuous particularity' as well 

as historical contingency and is possessed of a specific situation (i.e. text as event) that 

places restraints on the interpreter and his/ her interpretation (Ashcroft & Ahluwalia, 

2001; Said, 1983). The text exists in the world and does so for conveying and 

producing meaning and crucially, for me, reinvigorates the oral tradition restoring, by 

linking it with text, its critical and fundamental necessity to any and all social process. 

In this view one purpose of language is for making and conveying meaning rather than 

providing that structural function of enabling not merely access but a one-to-one 

correspondence with reality, or rigidly 'fixing' the universal coordinates of the universe 

and its contents. One could say in this view, that what the literary tradition, as opposed 

to literary theory, sets out to do has to do with conveying and producing a non­

discursive language for 'making meaning ', and not 'inscribing truth' . This meaning 

then has certain restraints imposed on its interpretation by the textual object that is the 

product of his writing. 

Said draws from an Eleventh century debate centered 'textually' on the Koran, to 

generate his proposition of text as 'worldly', between two schools oflslamic thought on 

linguistic theory, the Zahirites and Batinists. It long anticipated the twentieth century 

debate between the structuralists and generative grammarians, from which literary 

theory effectively emerged (Said, 1983). Zahiritie derives from the Arabic word for 

clear, apparent, and phenomenal, while Batinist connotes that which is internal or 

hidden. Favouring the Zahirite focus on the phenomenal words themselves rather than 

the Batinist connotation that meaning in language is concealed (gnostic), Said views 

text as 'worldly' or 'circumstantial' or as an 'event' itself. The textual object and the 

situation (signifier and signified) then exist at the same level of surface particularity 

(Said, 1983). Accordingly, the Koran is absolutely circumstantial rather than 

indisputable immutable fact or truth, and is read in such a way that that worldliness 



12 

does not dominate the actual sense of the text (and thus avoids being deterministic). As 

a sacred text it speaks of historical events but is itself not historical, ' it repeats past 

events, condenses and particularizes, yet is not actually lived experience; it ruptures the 

human continuity oflife, yet God does not enter temporality by a sustained or concerted 

act' (Said, 1983; p. 37). Jn this view the Koran lacks the omnipotent and omniscient 

will ('to truth ') ofGod 1
• Its circumstantiality consecrates the Koran instead as the word 

of both God and man, i.e. divine and human language (an ongoing dialogue between 

man, God and their universe so to speak; Said, 1983). In many parts of the East the text 

in general is viewed as sacred and treated as such. In Indian custom, for example, 

books are kept of the floor lest one steps on them, a sacrilegious act for which it is 

customary to offer a prayer as penance. 

In the Zahirite view the Koran ( as circumstantial) evokes the memory of actions, the 

contents of which (the memory) repeat itself eternally in ways identical with itse lf. 

The Koran represents text of a particular imperative configuration that is controlled by 

the paradigmatic imperatives (fundamental to its operation) of iqra (read or recite) and 

qul (tell). The reading and telling imperatives structure the circumstantial and historical 

appearance of the Koran, and its uniqueness as an event. These imperatives are also 

complemented by the juridical notion of hadd, meaning both a logico-grammatical 

definition and a limit. The delivery of an utterance (khabar) is then the verbal 

realization of a signifying intention lying between the injunctions to read and write of 

the imperative mode. This signifying intention is synonymous exclusively with a verbal 

intention, as opposed to psychological (internal or masked), that is worldly -'it takes 

place in the world; it is occasional and circumstantial in both a very precise and wholly 

pertinent way' (Said, 1983; p. 38). Language is thus viewed as being regulated by real 

usage, according to certain lexical and syntactical rules, and not by abstract prescription 

or speculative freedom (Said, 1983). Zahirite linguistic theory opposed the Batinian 

view ofreading of text as masking a hidden level beneath the words (a gnostic view of 

text), and which thus allowed infinite interpretations (and as infinite misreadings and 

misinterpretations) of the sacred text oflslam. The readings and interpretations of the 

Koran and by extension of any text, though they may vary in number, are hence limited 

by real usage, by its social implementation; as opposed to its limited circulation of text 

in the archives of high theory. A more detailed analysis of the Said's reprise of this 

1 In this view the Koran should not be disseminated as (divine) truth. 



13 

millennium old literary debate, and his view ofFoucault's historiographies, is contained 

in Reading 2 in the appendices to this work (see CD-Rom attached). 

A technique that is then critical to Said' s critical approach is 'repetition', which 

'imposes certain constraints upon the interpretation of text, it historicizes the text as 

something which originates in the world, which insists upon its own being' (Ashcroft & 

Ahluwalia, 2001; p. 6). Repetition lends materiality to text though there are some very 

obvious caveats to this technique which make it 'double-edged'. Repetition is critical 

to method and hence to our 'textual attitude' towards the other and the world. In 

addition, as an idea crucial to this thesis, it is the persistent repetition of a discourse/ 

narrative on the other against the others silence/ absence that gives materiality or 

perhaps more accurately establishes, for example, the colonialist discourse on the Malay 

as historical truth. Repetition, ironically, as will be demonstrated in this work is of as 

much significance to colonialist discourse as it is to its pre-eminent form of critique, the 

form of postcolonial critique influenced by Said. That the colonialist discourse on the 

Malay does not match the material worldly experience of the Malay renders it as fiction 

or myth, though perhaps only for the Malay (and not the coloniser). It is here that 

Said's notion of writing back to power most comes into play. It is of little use if this 

technique ofrepetition is invoked against the silence/ absence of the coloniser/ 

oppressor. Thus one writes back to, as opposed to the oppositional against, power, 

which, in the Saidean view, has an origin. In the instance of the colonialist discourse 

this origin is the colonising organism - the authors (who is not decentred/ dead) and 

their audience of this colonialist discourse which excludes, which is written against the 

silence of, the colonised (who i~, metaphorically and often literally; dead that is). My 

own view of Said 's contemporary reworking of the 'circumstantiality of text' is that it 

locates text between the anarchic linguistic play of contemporary critical work and the 

immutable truths that are the pursuit of modem disciplinary inquiry. 

'Writing genealogies' and 'writing for power' 

The most pertinent criticisms ofFoucault's project, and of Foucault himself, that relate 

to my rejection of 'writing genealogies' derive from Edward Said, who himself readily 

acknowledged his great debt to Foucault (Ashcroft, 2003; Ashcroft & Ahluwalia, 2001; 

Said, 1978 & 1983). Said radically departs from Foucault in his critical work, and very 

deliberately rejects its critical impulse ( as futile), because of its non-secularity and its 

functionalist/ deterministic thesis on power (the latter already alluded to above). For 



14 

Said, Foucault in his Archaeology of knowledge speaks of' discourse as something that 

has its own life' and which can 'be discussed separately from the realm of the real' or 

the 'historical realm' (Ashcroft, 2003; p.269). In Orientalism, his first major work, 

Said emphatically rejects this thesis of the dislocatedness of theory/ discourse (or the 

'death of the author') by making 'discourse go hand-in-hand with an account of 

conquest, the creation of instruments of domination, and the techniques of surveillance 

that were not rooted in theory but in actual territory' (Ashcroft, 2003; p. 269). Those 

that are 'absent' in Foucault' s ' work virtually comprise the entire lacunae of the western 

tradition, the other who lacks. Amongst these are the colonized, a silence that seems 

astonishing given the tumultuous colonial and post-colonial period during which he 

produced his critical work, and that even Satre, a onetirne mentor whom some consider 

a fellow nihilist, concerned himself with to a significant and greatly influential extent1
• 

France, and the West in general, was in the process of loosing its vast empires, and no 

Frenchman could have been ignorant of the great ructions over Algeria or Vietnam, to 

say nothing of the general disintegration of the global colonial network (or to be more 

precise its transformation - one great epistemic shift that Foucault studiously ignored). 

Foucault (1977) portended the possible destruction of mankind as a consequence of this 

will to truth or knowledge, a 'passion for knowledge which fears no sacrifice, fears 

nothing but its own extinction ' (p. 163). It could said that at the base of the history of 

disciplinary knowledge, which roughly translates to the modern subject and its 

historical ontology, is a male-violence that contributes to our misery, as disenfranchised 

subjects 'literally' constituted by the western (discursive/ disciplinary) tradition. Those 

modern ventures of slavery, colonization and imperialism, to say nothing of the great 

wars and the unceasing state of warfare augmented by the great armoury of the sciences 

(human and natural), have destroyed or assisted in the worldwide destruction of 

countless numbers of peoples and cultures, to say nothing of the physical environment 

and other beings. This prolonged and extensive destruction begs the question of what 

else needs to be destroyed before modem civilization is deemed to be at some critical 

point leading Foucault, or anyone else for that matter, to prophesise the destruction of 

mankind. Fanon says of this cynical (an)nihilistic western tradition, 

1 Satre was well acquainted with Fanon, and the Black American literati exiled in France including 
Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Satre also wrote the preface to Fanon's The wretched of the 
Earth. 



Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave 
this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men 
everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own 
streets, in all corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled 
almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual 
experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual 
disintegration. (1990; p. 251) 

15 

Written in 1963, Fanon's searing prose seems as relevant now as it was then. We have 

played out before our very eyes a microcosm of the imperial/ colonial ventures of old, 

in the conquest and occupation of an Iraq rendered impotent by a decade of sanctions 

(hundreds of thousands of children and the poor were killed) by the richest nations of 

the world, its violence magnified many time over by modern, and not necessarily just 

military (consider the role of western media), technology. It is a conquest and 

occupation accompanied by a well-rehearsed but not well-practised discourse on 

freedom, justice and democracy. 

Said, who having abandoned Foucault's and western critical theory gravitated towards 

Fanon's anti-colonialism, has commented that for the most part these matters were very 

largely ignored by Foucault, a view reinforced by my readings to date of the latter's 

works (Ashcroft, 2003; Said, 1994). Given Foucault's great reputation I was a little 

perplexed by this omission considering the complicity of the western knowledge 

tradition with that of imperialism, the compiicity of ihe ' new world of !earning' with the 

'new world of voyages ' or to be blunt the 'new world of conquests' (Bernasconi, 2001 ; 

Hampson, 2000; Said, 1978 & 1993). In The price of the ticket1 (1960), James 

Baldwin, perhaps the 'patriach' of the African-American literary tradition, however, has 

this to say of Foucault's lineage: 

Negroes [African-Americans/ Black p eople} want to be treated like 
men: a perfectly straightforward statement containing only seven 
words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, 
Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable. This 
statement seems to threaten profound, barely conscious assumptions. 
(Cited in Wosen & Widgery, 1991; p. 290) [My insertion]. 

1 Also the name of a film about the life and work of James Baldwin. In this film, one scene captures 
part of an interview with James Baldwin on American TV (with Studs Terkel, 1962). When asked 
how he would define himself and his work, Baldwin reflects for a moment then smiles broadly and 
impishly, as if struck by sudden self-realisation, and replies "I am a polemicist". His spontaneous 
and incandescent reaction burns brightly in my imagination to this day. 



16 

I cannot but help feel that Foucault, unlike Satre ( one time a mentor and acquainted 

with both Baldwin and Fanon1), is one who would have found this 'straightforward 

statement' impenetrable. Embedded as I am in the postcolonial world and having 

emerged out of a very different, 'eastern', tradition I cannot help but feel repelled by the 

Foucauldian project. My 'numberless beginnings' and those of the Malay and his amok 

are not to be found in any genealogy of the modern subject because the Malay (and I) 

does not quite qualify as a 'modern subject'. There is little beyond the aesthetics, its 

poetic descriptions, of Foucault's critique's that resonates for me, though it should then 

also be understood that it is not a wholesale rejection of Foucault that I intend. My first, 

and very deliberate, act of this critique is to locate myself within that space which 

Foucault seems to have deliberately kept away, that territory from which imperialism 

and the western tradition began and emerged together in the violent subjugation of the 

'deficient' races, the human lacunae, of the world. 

Foucault's functionalist view of power 

In terms of modernity or modem knowledge, Foucault argues that the modern self acts 

as a mere cipher for the circulating system of signs that is (the field of) modem 

disciplinary language, or discourse (Foucault, 1977 & 1980; Said, 1986). The author, 

reader and their relation to the text is decentred (as is meaning). As ciphers for power 

in a ncm:ork of (disciplinary) power; we have no access or cannot possess (sovereign) 

power. We act within this network of power, driven as Foucault says by an agonistic 

and antagonistic impulse confined within a network or relationships of forces and 

struggles; a will to struggle. Foucault insists in this uncontrolled and directionless, 

essentially 'entropic' (the increasing disorder of the universe), view of history or anti­

history, that 

there aren't given subjects of the struggle, one the proletariat, the other the 
bourgeoisie. Who fights against whom? We all fight each other. And 
there is always within each of us something that fights something else 
(Foucault, 1980; p. 207-208; Sarup, 1988; p. 81). 

This is his explanation for the basis of disciplinary power, that there is something 

natural in us that wants to fight, struggle, and that we are mere ciphers for this 

instinctive universal struggle (Said, 1986; Sarup, 1988). Privilege, and pleasure, are 

reduced to mere products of, as is the modem subject, or are constituted by, a notion of 

1 Satre wrote the foreword to The Wretched of the Earth 



17 

power premised on what I call the 'doctrine of the struggle'. In this view it can be 

argued that, incredibly and even outrageously for me, that privilege and pleasure, like 

power, can not be autonomously seized, possessed or exercised (as a capacity). I also 

offer that for Foucault, knowledge is not so much constituted, but rather produced 

through conflict or struggle (oppositional), what Said might call a coerced knowledge. 

What we know of the self, the other and the world is refracted through struggle, in fact 

the struggle (universal struggle for existence); produced from conflict and coercive. 

Foucault opposes the philosophical tradition which invests the subject with absolute 

autonomy/ agency, and its 'stifling anguish ofresponsibility' (Sarup, 1988; p. 83). 

Where structuralism had reduced all relations as a function of the linguistic, symbolic 

and the discursive Foucault, especially amongst the poststructuralists, linked this 

linguistic model with power and the self (the power/ knowledge/ self nexus), perceiving 

the former view to be of limited value to the inquiries of the human condition. Foucault 

however in grasping for an explanation for this view of power as an automatic, and 

ultimate, principle of social reality promotes a deterministic functionalist thesis of the 

human, or any, condition. The ultimate principle of social reality is ultimately nihilistic 

(Said, 1986). In possessing (sovereign) power we view ourselves as being able to 

posses and seize power, to give and take life. Foucault argues, however, that we have 

through the modem/ disciplinary tradition instead become products of disciplinary 

knowledge and power, driven by an automatic, and thus functionalist, impulse of 

unascertainable origin, nominally 'nature ' (instinct) that we have no a1,;1,;ess to. A 

similar and contemporary (nihilistic) biological view is that we are mere ciphers for 

DNA competing on its behest for biomolecular struggle and dominance. Regarding the 

relationship between power and knowledge Foucault suggests that 

knowledge does not slowly detach itself from its empirical roots, the initial 
needs from which it arose, to become pure speculation subject only to the 
demands of reason; its development is not tied to the constitution and 
affirmation of a free subject; rather it creates a progressive enslavement to 
its instinctive violence .... (Foucault, 1977; p. 162-163) 

Derived from a quintessentially Nietzschean view of history, Foucault' s view of the 

present, or the present location of the modern subject, is not the (Cartesian/ Kantian/ 

Hegelian) progress of an autonomous self/ individual, rather as one progressively 

enslaved by reason, and the product of instinctive violence of 'the struggle' (as it seems 

is every- and anything). This present/ self has emerged from the past though not in a 



18 

fixed, frozen product ( of knowable fixed coordinates) that can thus be defined as such 

as by discourse. Where the metaphysician freezes the present and the past, the 

genealogist attempts to leave the forces of history in motion, to 'the endlessly repeated 

play of dominations' (Foucault, 1977; p. 148). The location of this struggle at the 

origin of things, of numberless beginnings, is the location of a system of subjection and 

an aim of the genealogical endeavour. This struggle is also the basis of the Foucault's 

(and Nietzsche's) functionalist thesis on power, and of his project. In reducing power 

to this 'natural struggle', the great privileges of power, including pleasure, are 

considered irrelevant to the will to truth/ power. Edward Said in contrast considers the 

very obvious and great privileges, and pleasure, that come with power to be of 

fundamental concern to any critique of the modern tradition (of imperialism from which 

modernity is inseparable) (Ashcroft, 2003; Ashcroft & Ahluwalia, 2001). It is little 

wonder then that Said considers that Foucault not so much writes of power but for 

power, and that he takes much pleasure in doing so (Said, 1986). In inciting us to 'write 

genealogies', a form of critical history, infused with a Kantian/Nietzschean like 

appropriation of literary aesthetics he asks of us to do the same, an invitation I explicitly 

refuse in preference to accepting the Saidean invitation to instead write back to power 

(Ashcroft, 2003; Ashcroft & Ahluwalia, 2001; Said, 1994). 

In Foucaull':s agonistic view 'Ne art as mere ciphers for language/ power/ knowledge, 

locked in an agonistic relationship with the world/ reality in a textual (modern/ 

discursive/ disciplinary) world (Said, 1986; Walzer, 1986). The potential for a radical 

subversion of this textual world, however, is realized by Foucault's (and Derrida's) 

clearly stated aim of describing and producing variations on knowledge (countervailing 

powers) that neither fits 'into the prepared moulds provided by the dominant culture, 

nor the wholly predictive forms manufactured by the quasi-scientific method' (Said, 

1983; p. 182). In opposing this type of quasi-scientific knowledge 1, Said (1983) 

suggests that Foucault also promotes a 'gnostic' doctrine of the text, in which the text's 

'intention and integrity are invisible ... that perhaps the text hides something' implying 

that it also 'states, embodies, represents, but does not immediately disclose something' 

(p.184). This masking by discourse I interpret to be the 'progressive enslavement' of 

the modem subject by the 'often oppressive rationalities of discourse in the human 

1 The Batinian view ofreading of text which Said rejects in preference to the thesis of the 
circumstantiality of text (see pp. 12-13). 



19 

sciences'' (Lash, 1991; p. 259). For Said, Foucault (and Derrida) treats text as a 

'network of power-knowledge' which then allows critical readings that penetrate this 

mask, and to create an opposition to the original text. Said calls this opposition 

produced by that critic, the critical/ literary theorist, a type of 'countervailing power or 

counter-memory opposed to the hegemonic discursive practices of his or her time' 

(Said, 1983; p. 184). 

This counter-memory is also described by Foucault as a 'counter-history' (Prado, 1994), 

and as a 'non-discursive language' or the 'non-discursive critique of the often 

oppressive rationalities of discourse in the human sciences' (Lash, 1991; p. 259). 

'Writing genealogies' is a form of historical critique that has its beginnings in 

Nietzsche ' s deliberate interrogation against a conventional notion of history. 

Conventional or Kantian/ Hegelian history is that objective and positivistic, convergent 

and teleological, uni-vocal meta-narrative that is a 'natural' linear regression that plots 

man' s putative progress with time (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982; Said, 1978 & 1993; 

Sarup, 1988). A blunt interpretation might be that the universe/ the natural is ordered 

and the ordered mind, or reason, can make order or scientifically explicate them in 

terms of ordered (vectored) language, i.e. discourse, and coherent and unified theories 

and narratives2 that, to be as blunt, overwhelmingly privileges the European, or more 

accurately the munificeni ' 'vVhitc }.fan' who, not surprisingly, is the author of this 

' natural history' (Fanon, 1963; Foucault, 1977; Said, 1978 & 1993; Sarup, 1988). 

This 'White Man' is then invariably amorphous and monolithic, heroic, masculine and 

aggressive, who located himself in an as amorphous geopolitical North, and now also 

West, who is master of a free will and destined to be master of the world/ nature (de 

Olivera, 2003; Rorty, 1986; Said, 1978 & 1993; Schrift, 2000). Fanon, and later Said, 

remarked that it is this self-professed White Man to whom this history belongs3
, it is he 

who he progresses, and in doing so brings civilisation to the stagnant even regressive 

'races' (including that race of woman) (Fanon, 1963; Said, 2001). For de Olivera 

(2003) this human being uniquely endowed with reason will fulfil in history his moral 

1 lnline with the notion perhaps, that what you do to the other you also do to yourself. 
2 Einstein, for example, was convinced, to his dying day, of the existence ofa grand unified theory 
(GUT). He had but to look no further than the 'White Man', its author, as the unifying constant of 
modem theory. 
3 I am paraphrasing here; Said said that 'one of the things that you learn about imperialism is that it is 
always the natives who don't have maps, and the white people who do' (Said, 2001; p. 270), or 
should it be it is he who makes the maps (e.g. the peace maps for the current Palestinian/ Israeli 
conflict). 



destination (destiny) - a highly specific and privileging teleology that betrays the 

historical constitution of its subjectivity. 

20 

It is common enough to hear or read about the progress of the West, its linear or 

epochal evolution, and the traditional stagnant East. The East is possessed of a history, 

and thus progresses, when engaged with the West, or rather when the West 'intervenes' 

when, for example, it brings democracy to the East. The East, the Orient and the 

Oriental, is anthropomorphised in terms of the ideal race or human that is the 'White 

Man'. It's (the East) customs and behaviours are interpreted and measured against his 

constituted subjectivity. This inscrutable impermeable Orient and Oriental otherwise 

can only stagnate or dies a fated natural death, circumstances conspicuous amongst 

other things for a deficient meta-narrative, and thus for their silence/ absence in history 

(subjects like children should be observed and not heard). The contemporaneous great 

civilising force that is modernity, that project of the Enlightenment is then 

unmistakably, and it can only be, a thing of this White Man. 

Nietzschean genealogy specifically relating to Zur genealogie der moral (The 

genealogy of morals, 1887) was effectively aimed at displacing a Kantian/ Hegelian 

linear/ dialectically synthesised ( epochal) progressive natural history of man. In its 

place Nietzsche offered a history that is discursive, socially constructed through 

language which is then itself socially constituted, rather than one that depicted an 

essentially Aristotlean, linear mechanical sequence of natural events (Stevens, 2003). 

This counter to the natural progression of an evolving man ( descent) was appropriated 

into French literary theory by Foucault, who wrote a series of historiographies in the 

1960' s and 1970' s ( de Olivera, 2003; Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982; Stevens, 2003 ). It is a 

form of literary theory that can be said to be of a Kantian lineage, via Hegel, Marx, 

Saussure and Nietzsche, amongst many. Kant may be said to have begun modern 

literary criticism with his literary critiques of (Cartesian) reason I and judgement, i.e. his 

literary criticism of the Cartesian discourse on reason. Kant also incorporated criticism 

into the aesthetic realm, and argued that aesthetic production, judgement and criticism 

was limited to the aesthete, those of an intellectual elite whose work was elevated to 

'high theory'. Considered beyond the machinations of the common man, art (aesthetics 

1 Descartes Discourse of reason being the primary text for Kant's imposition on the limits of reason 
which essentially began structuralism 



21 

and the aesthete) was thus vested with the elite and divorced from communal ground 

(Kemal, 1999). 

Edward Said considers Foucault's forms of 'dislocated' countervailing power, his 

historiographies that 'map' epistemic shifts, to be ultimately nihilistic (Ashcroft & 

Ahluwalia, 2001; Said, 1983 & 1986). Genealogy decentres, through a combination of 

its archaeological work and functionalist premise of power, the sovereignty of the 

author over the 'often oppressive rationalities of the discourses of the sciences'. 

Archaeology in 'objectifying the objectified' and 'empirifying the empirified', provides 

the counter of expanded representations and many truths to, and thus fictionalises, that 

status of the one truth contested for by the disciplinary endeavour (a play of or struggle 

for dominations). The one truth that has emerged from 'the play of dominations/ 

forces' is decentred and becomes only one amongst many 'localized knowledges' in a 

circulating field of discourse that is steeped in the instinctive violence of the (universal) 

struggle for existence for which we as its modern subjects are mere ciphers (Said, 

1986). The danger inherent in this all-important moment of poststructuralism has, 

however, become only too apparent to me today. The notion of the death of the author 

can be said to have been appropriated by the academy/ corporate/ governmental nexus 

to impose the decentered ideologies of a 'real ties of the market place' doctrine that 

overrides the very real privations of billions of the increasingly impoverished. This is a 

'dictatorship of reason' with no human author because it is that reality (thus absolving 

its author of the very inherent and gross oppressions of its praxis) of a 'globalised 

market place of competing labour' produced by the instinctive violence of a natural 

universal struggle for survival (where the many oppressed are then its true ciphers) - the 

new (post-modern) globalised industrial revolution with its circulating field of 

ideologies (as with any commodity in a Marxist materialist take on the 'natural 

struggle'). 

What is more pertinent to my rejection of the Foucauldian project is that its 

countervailing powers, including genealogies, are locked in a functionalist/ 

deterministic mode of production. The genealogist in adhering to the genealogical 

project of' leaving the forces of history in motion' submits his/ her countervailing 

power to 'the play of dominations'. It is very evident to me however that genealogy has 

emerged as the dominant method from this play/ struggle, and lost its value as a 

countervailing power (lost its critical impetus). Some might say that it could only have 



22 

been so given Foucault's very deliberate location and antecedents - his very concrete 

location in French theory and his/ its Kantian/ Nietzschean antecedents (Fraser, 1996; 

Habennas, 1986; Rorty, 1986; Said, 1983; Stevens, 2003). Among them are Habennas, 

Richard Rorty and Nancy Fraser. Fraser's (feminist) interpretation ofHabennas's view 

of Foucault's inquiries holds particular appeal for me (1996). Accordingly Habennas 

views Foucault's critique of modernity as a zealous attempt to be as radical as possible 

(as with Nietzsche and Heidegger) in aspiring to a total break with the Enlightenment 

(Fraser, 1996). Habermas's view is in a similar vein to Rorty's accusations ofradical 

chic and post-modern bourgeois liberalism, and is centred around Foucault's supposed 

rejection of humanism on conceptual and philosophical grounds (Fraser, 1996). In their 

view the public agonising and privations of Nietzsche and Foucault largely concern 

those bourgeois issues of deriving, or even appropriating, methodologies for their as 

contaminated critical inquiries of the very limited view that is conventional history 

(Fraser, 1996; Habermas, 1986; Rorty, 1986). It is little wonder to me that Foucault 

severely limits the scope of his critical inquiries, that he embraces so few with his 

approaches, and that his other is very much the other of the West, of its Enlightenment 

and its project of modernity. 

If the discursive product reflects the author-self that is its origin, then what seems very 

evident to me is that Foucault in frarning his project indulges in the very 'transcendental 

narcissism' that he instructs us to avoid in 'writing genealogies' (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 

1982; Tamboukou, 1999). His critical work concerns a modern subject that seems to 

me to be made very much in his own image. There is no reflection of the colonised, 

and of the many ' othered' in the Foucauldian discourse. Fanon was only too aware of 

the transcendental narcissism, of their self-annointed privileges, of the colonialist 

intellectual (what else were the French theorists, including Foucault, but colonial 

intellectuals). 

The colonialist bourgeoisie, in its narcissistic dialogue, expounded by 
members of its universities, had in fact deeply implanted in the minds of 
the colonized intellectual that the essential qualities remain eternal in spite 
of all the blunders men make; the essential qualities of the West1, of 
course. (Fanon, 1990; p. 36) 

1 Fanon was referring to the universal values of the western tradition, derived in the main during 
the Enlightenment. 



23 

In light ofFanon's comments Foucault's glaring omissions, his conservatism and 

bourgeois, really neo-liberalism, seem less surprising. Foucault in many respects seems 

very much (self)made in the image of the lineage that he adores. He is a good Kantian/ 

Nietzschean and like them, of the Western Canon and highly practised in constructing 

the other (Bernasconi, 2001; Deacon, 2000; Said, 1978 & 1993). It must be said though 

that where Kant and Nietzsche were actively, even aggressively (the West's hostility to 

the other), constructing the other, Foucault was more subtle in this practice. He 

remained steadfastly silent (a type of erasure?) even when pressed on, and thus 

excluded the condition, for example, of the colonised. It seems to me also that where 

the text is 'gnostic' in the instance ofFoucault's discursive products, is not so much in 

layering and obscuring the modern subject but in dissembling the very obvious 

privileges that he sought and was duly accorded, in pursuing the western tradition of 

scholarship. Fanon, the 'black Foucault' (Said, 2001), asserts that these are the 

privileges that derive from the narcissistic dialogue between the colonialist bourgeoisie 

and the academy (Fanon, 1990). 

Foucault seems to me thus to have constructed a non-secular non-ethical approach to 

the inquiry of the human condition, one underpinned by his theorisations on power. 

Power, or what we do to each other, is reduced to blind 'natural' instinct, a universal 

'struggle' for existence which is an entropic descent of and into chaos, as opposed to 

some version of an ordered history of man or anything else for that matter. That 

ultimately, according to this view, we are largely, if not entirely, devoid of agency in 

this struggle seems to me to be highly unethical especially when it also so 

conspicuously ignores the self-vested privileges inherent in exploiting and constructing 

the other. 

Deriving a methodological fragment for this critique: a secular -ethical 

approach comprising a small sample of critical1 moments 

I am looking to establish some rules of thumb for writing a historiography rather than 

make concrete enunciations of what it is or is not. I did not embark on this thesis with 

any great scheme or method in mind. More than anything it is my growing scepticism, 

and not a little outrage, of the highly pejorative representations of the Malay and his 

malaise by western psychiatric and lay discourse that is the first moment that gives and 

1 These are moments crucial to this work, as well are moments of critical approaches derived from a 
variety of sources 



24 

maintains the impetus to this work. This work is meant to speak back to the historical 

truths that have been written against the forced silence of the colonised. This work 

materializes from the reading of a nucleus of highly influential 'first' texts, namely the 

APA's DSM-N and DSM-N-TR (APA, 1994 & 2000), Edward Said's Orientalism 

(1978), Frantz Fanon's The wretched of the Earth (1963)*, William Marsden's The 

history of Sumatra (1783)*, Alfred Wallace's The Malay Archipelago (1869)*, Isabella 

Bird's The golden Chersonese (1883)*, Hugh Clifford's Studies in brown humanity 

(1898)*, Frank Swettenham's Malay sketches (1900), *Anthony Burgess's Malayan 

Trilogy (1956)*, Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), John Spores's Running amok: a 

historical inquiry (1988). In the main other texts are read as consequence of reading 

these 'first texts ' of this work. These texts were sampled from my reading history, 

dating back in some instances to my childhood, mainly on the basis that I know them to 

be connected with the colonised. 

I do not profess to have any grand theory or method in writing this critique, beyond 

organising it around a small sample of moments derived from the critical work of, 

amongst others, Said, Fanon, and Foucault (and thus Nietzsche), and naturally enough 

some that are my own. Tt is my strategy to make this work irreproducible, as I hardly 

want to either replicate other work or tender it into ' the market place of competing 

methodoiogies' (not that I c!ai..111 that it is good enough to). My sample of 'moments' 

should, based on my unique life experiences, hypothetically differ from any other 

individual were he/ she asked to select a similar strategy for critical work. There will 

also undoubtedly be moments that are common if not similar to our selections, thus 

incorporating both individuality and commonality in this approach. 

Those borrowed Foucauldian and Saidean 'moments', in particular, that pertain to this 

work include a scepticism of conventional, convergent history, and of method/ theory 

('the oppressive rationalities of scientific discourse'); locating this critical work in both 

the disciplinary (discursive fields) and colonial traditions, and in their mutuality. One 

moment of my own is to immediately locate this work in, and as unequivocally for, the 

existence of they dispossessed - as a polemic of, and for, the dispossessed and of their 

humanity above all else. It is not however a work that is deliberately inserted 

Foucauldian-like in the 'market place of competing ideologies' to let the 'play of 

forces' decide its fate; which ultimately might then be that of appropriation, blind 

• These are the original dates of publications for these works. 



25 

repetition, and innumerable misreadings and misinterpretations (although this is 

obviously unavoidable), and God forbid, corporatised (very unlikely). It is work that is 

inviolable of my material experiences of being Malaysian and living intimately with 

Malay, and is specifically aimed at resisting, opposing and ultimately rejecting the still­

persisting myths of the colonised by the coloniser. 

This work is engaged in the very first instance with psychiatric discourse but will likely .. 
divert, as psychiatry is inseparable from, as is any of the sciences, of the western 

tradition in its entirety (Said, 1978; Stevens, 2000; Tamboukou, 1999). In this work I 

use an essentially F oucauldian notion of discourse, which is a 'system of statements' 

that is of the western tradition (Ashcroft & Ahluwalia, 2001; p. 14). This system of 

'signs and practices' is a firmly bounded area of social knowledge within which the 

world the world comes into being and its speakers and hearers, writers and readers, 

come to hear their place in the world (the construction of their subjectivity)' (Ashcroft 

& Ahluwalia, 2001; p. 14). I however attach a qualification to the Foucauldian notion of 

discourse, one pertaining to his functionalist thesis of knowledge/ power/ self. 

Discourse, to my mind, is ordered speech/ text, and can be said to be vectored 

(directional) as are, for example, velocity and weight compared with the directionless 

speed and mass. It is Foucault's functionalist thesis on power, after all, that makes his 

project on the knowiedge/ power/ self nexus ; ultimately, a problematic one. 

As a work written back to psychiatric discourse, this critique is also written back to its 

nearest ally amongst the human sciences, that part of a deontologised or scientific 

psychology complicit with, and even subservient to, psychiatry. This specific overlap 

can be said to be the locus of a tradition of inquiry on the human condition that is 

complicit with imperialism in that it, intentionally or otherwise, is informed by and 

perpetuates an imperialist/ colonialist discourse that is some five hundred years in the 

making (Chomsky, 1993; Jahoda, 1999; Said, 1978 & 1993; Spivak, 1988). I cannot 

but help think again here ofFanon's view of this complicity (Fanon, 1963). The 

'narcissistic' dialogue between the western scholar and the colonialist bourgeoisie, 

which produces the 'colonialist discourse', has endowed both with great privileges. I 

define a colonialist discourse as that specific set of statements organised around a 

specific coloniser/ colonised relationship, the English coloniser and the Malay colonised 

being one such relationship, which dissembles (masks) the political and material aims 



26 

of colonisation, and which is a focus of the postcolonial thesis, thus separating it from 

the genealogical critique (Alatas, 1976; Said, 1978 & 1993; Yahya, 2003). 

There are still colonies existing in this supposedly enlightened era, and the conquest of 

the geo-political East and South by West and North is only too evidently an everyday 

occurrence. Far from being some conveniently expedited and distant memory, as we 

have 'progressed' beyond this painful though 'necessary' period of our evolution, 

modem imperialism is as potent as it has ever been (Chomsky, 1993; Pilger, 2002; Said, 

1978, 1993 & 2001; Y ahya, 2003 ). The great social struggles between the imperial and 

dominated societies continue to this day, and hence it is most salient that the 'post' in 

postcolonial theory refers to 'after colonialism began' rather than after colonisation 

ended (Ashcroft & Ahluwalia, 2001; p. 15). This work is written as a postcolonial 

critique against a specific colonial discourse, while cognisant of the continuing struggle 

against this centuries old imposition, and its evolving guise. It adheres to postcolonial 

theory in that it is concerned with the impact of imperial/ colonial language on the 

colonised, particularly with those effects of the modem or imperialist discourses, such 

as the human sciences (Ashcroft, 2003; Ashcroft & Ahluwalia, 2001; Said, 1993). This 

particular 'moment' marks my irretrievable departure from the Foucauldian critique 

which generally, if ever, does not dwell on the privileges and pleasures of power (Said, 

1986; Sarup, 1988). 

A criticism of Said's Orientalism, which can be said to be the first text ofpost­

colonialism, is that the voice (his/ her resistance to Orientalist discourse) of the 

'Oriental' is not heard (Ashcroft, 2003; Ashcroft & Ahluwalia, 2001). This work is 

however as concerned with the responses of the colonised to the complex of signs and 

practices this colonial discourse represents, with one very necessary and obvious caveat. 

The scope of this work is limited to a thesis written for a thesis and can thus only hope 

to do so much. 

The lay and scientific texts of the colonialist discourse on the Malay and his malaise are 

the 'site' of the 'archaeological work' of this historiography. I maintain here that while 

Foucault directs us to read 'Don Quixote, Descartes, and a decree by Pomponne de 

Belierre about houses of internment in the same stroke' not merely as 'literature' 

(fiction as opposed to truth), "philosophy" (approximating reality), or "law" (delimiting 

practice), but as both conditions and effects of the period in question (Foucault, 1974; p. 



27 

127), this is what I (and no doubt many others) have been doing for much of my life; 

informed not by literary theory, of which till very recently I had little idea, but by the 

literary tradition. I feel thus that I arrived into literary theory from the literary tradition, 

and from a secular one at that, thanks to my parents and my Malaysian education. I 

add, where Foucault might have been reluctant to, Dostoevsky, Tagore, Neruda, Said, 

Morrison, and the numerous others of those othered by the western tradition, including 

many of this West. I see no reason to discard this 'baggage' in my venture into critical 

work. 

Though my writing even in my own estimation veers towards the polemical, my 

intention is not to insist on any truth, beyond those of the possessed and dispossessed 

by, ironically enough, truth. I also then cannot abide by the simple and tepid thesis of 

the ' text as gnostic'. What seems very evident is the extreme and overt hostility of 

much of the writing that I have to come across to date; not surprising given that many 

offer that it coincides and is complicit with western imperialism (Alatas, 1976; Said, 

1978 & 1993; Yahya, 2003) . This hostility which is of that of the West to the other, and 

a critical Derridean moment that Said incorporates in his work (Ashcroft & Ahluwalia, 

2001 ), is something that I am only too well aware off. The text does not merely 

mystically or mysteriously ' hide something '; it is antagonistic rather than gnostic. It 

violently oppresses those possessed and dispossessed, as violently as the innumerable 

conquests, colonisation and oppression of the many othered of the West which are of a 

'chronicity' already exceeding five hundred years in its various manifestations 

(Chomsky, 1993; Said, 1993). I ground this critique of colonialist/ imperialist discourse 

in the worldliness of its oppressions, in the very real and incalculable loss and grief of 

its victims and survivors, and their courageous, resilient, and often graceful irrepressible 

resistance. This is then perhaps the key 'moment' of this work. 

It is my view that when Foucault invites/ incites us to 'write genealogies', he invites us 

to descend on the 'impure' body from the elevated site of high theory. This is the site 

occupied by the western tradition (of pure reason), where Foucault's lineage, including 

Descartes, Bacon, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, were/ are resident. Descent, 

which separates the present from a unifying, constitutive past, is the key or 'first 

Nietzschean moment', Herkunft, of genealogy as historiography (including Foucault's; 

Stenson, 1987; p. 450). It is 'that moment of separation' both Nietzsche and Foucault 

use in 'debunking the noble schemes of value by pointing to their lowly origins' 



28 

(Stenson, 1987; p. 450). These lowly origins seem to me now to be little more than the 

impure origins ofKantian metaphysics (Deacon, 2000; de Olivera, 2003; Stevens, 

2003). Genealogical descent has been written as a disruptive shift, bend or break in the 

linearity of a convergent natural history of man and his universe. When considering the 

privileges of this lineage, descent however seems to me much more like a downward 

movement from their elevated site. Foucault, and Nietzsche, when they incite us to 

'write genealogies' initiate us into the rites of descent, incite us into availing ourselves 

of the self-vested right (and privileges) of descent, of their lineage. That this descent is 

made through revisiting the Western Canon, its 'field of entangled and confused 

parchments' ( of which Don Quixote is one), on documents that have been scratched 

over and recopied many times' (Foucault, 1977; p. 139), only emphasises for me his 

project's conservation of this highly privileged tradition. 

'Writing genealogies' seems to me little different from the psychiatrist who descends on 

the disordered body, 'struggles with it' to search for the mental disorder; the surgeon/ 

medical practitioner who descends on the (impure) diseased body to search for the 

(impure) disease entity; and the anthropologist (e.g. the Leakeys) who unerringly 

descend on and surgically excavate the 'dirt' (soil) of Africa, in search of the 'lowly/ 

impure' origins of man amongst the black ignoble savage'. The genealogist descends 

on the body of the modem subject from an eievated, dislocated ::md decontextua!ised 

site of high theory (a site that does not seem far off disembodied pure reason) to seek 

our impure/ lowly origins. This descent, crucially, is underpinned by Foucault's, and 

postructuralism's, deterministic conceptualisation of disciplinary power as automatic, 

and disinfected of human agency and privilege. To my mind Foucault like Rousseau, 

Kant, Darwin and Nietzsche before him, supports the doctrine of the universal struggle 

for existence, which is entrenched in western thought and which, not surprisingly, 

favours the dominance of the White Man. It is in fact fundamental to his project as it 

was to the Nietzschean, and Darwinian, project. Foucault project is more likely 

directed against the progressive enslavement of the same White Man to a discourse that 

is the product of this struggle. I reject this instruction and chose instead to write from 

the body, a location more aligned with the literary tradition than with literary theory, to 

reflect my experience of the condition of the colonised. 

1The black ignoble savage is a representation that is explained and explored in Part 3 of this work. 



29 

What is as significant to me as this reprehensible image of descending is the contrast 

between history and descent implicit in 'writing genealogies'. Where the 

Enlightenment tradition of inquiry conceived of a (Kantian) natural history that was 

linear and what I call mechano-causal (Aristotlean/ mechanical and causal), or epochal, 

univocal meta-narrative, Nietzsche and Foucault in particular rewrites this history as a 

genealogy as man ' s chaotic shifts with time (from his lowly numberless beginnings). 

Dominance when it emerges from the play of forces, the struggle, is reduced to random 

accident. Rather than making meaning, it seems to me that genealogy goes so far as to, 

even deliberately, unmake meaning making its agenda, ultimately and even deliberately, 

nihilistic. 

More critical moments: the anti-colonialism of Frantz Fanon (the 'black' 

Foucault) 

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) is of crucial influence to Said ' s postcolonial thesis . He 

viewed the space of colonial politics and culture as the representation of a primitive 

' Manichean division along the binary axes of white/ black, good/evil, primitive/ 

civilised, etc' (Prasad, 1992; p.74). One could argue that this Manichean dualism is 

reminiscent of the binary oppositions that deconstruction ism is premised on. Fanon's 

Wretched of the Earth (1963), for Said, preceded Foucault's Madness and civilisation 

( I 965) in describing, though in ditlerent ways, mechanisms of exclusion and 

confinement (colonizer/ colonized and sane/ insane) that were embedded in European 

institutions (its 'colonies' and insane asylums respectively) existing since the 

Renaissance (Said, 2001 ). What is also different for Said, however, is that Fanon ' s 

work came out of an ongoing and profound social movement, the Algerian revolution 

(against the French coloniser), as opposed to being derived within the limited confines 

of the academy. The Wretched of the Earth is then the result of a collective struggle, in 

which Fanon himself was heavily involved, as is say the work of a Pablo Neruda, 

Rabindranath Tagore, Yeats, or a John Steinbeck. 

Madness and civilisation emerged instead from a very different tradition, that of the 

'individual scholar-researcher acquiring a reputation for learning, brilliance, and so on' 

(Said, 2001; p. 39). It has more limited circulation and worldly or circumstantial value 

limited by and large to the academy and its archives. Fanon's work represents a certain 

practice of historiography that emphasises an active commitment to revolutionary 

change, solidarity, and liberation, is thus for Said, as it is for me, the more significant, 



30 

powerful and relevant of the two. Foucault even a decade after the publication of 

Madness and civilisation maintained that he believed in no positive truths, ideas, or 

ideals. It is only towards the end of his project, two decades after the death ofFanon (in 

1961 ), did the potential for great political force coalesce in his work (Said, 2001 ). 

It is through his insistence of these prior theses that Said implicates a prolonged and 

effective resistance to colonisation and imperialism, which then provides an alternative 

route for a contemporary postcolonial resistance to modernism. This resistance or 

countervailing power is one that is embedded in the common or collective struggle 

rather than in high theory resident entirely in the archives of the academy. Foucault's 

project, fluent or fragmented, method or negation, theory or fiction, and prosaic or 

poetic, was resident within the academy to the extent that he resented public or common 

acclaim of his work (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983). It is again difficult to escape the 

conclusion that he was, almost, to the last a 'good' Kantian (and Nietzschean). I would 

argue that his particular writing of power (or resistance) incorporates that Kantian 

appropriation of aesthetics into high theory or critique. Kant in doing so isolated 

cultural and aesthetic realms from the worldly domain of everyday common usage in 

his doctrines on method (particularly through his Critique a/judgement; Verhaegh, 

2001 ; Zuckert, 2002). 

lt could be said that Foucault, good Kantian that he is, does little different. Where 

Foucault diligently follows this particular tradition of the Enlightenment, in contrast the 

tradition of modern and nationalist literature is of the worldly realm of the collective 

common struggle, and not elevated above it as high theory. Accordingly Foucault's 

subversion of the aesthetic forms of literature, such as his poetics, can be read as a form 

of western bourgeois liberalism or radical chic, so evident in his nihilistic agenda, as 

described by Rorty (1986). Like Toni Morrison's literary critiques of American 

society, Said's postcolonial thesis has at its crux aesthetic forms that are firmly 

embedded in everyday, worldly usage of language. Towards the end of his work 

Orientalism Said argues that the secular-ethical stance, effected by maintaining distance 

from literary theory, allows authorial creativity or freedom through the development of 

a non-coercive knowledge. Articulated very deliberately as 'anti-Foucauldian' this 

knowledge is produced specifically as a counter to a Foucauldian/ poststructuralist 

' decentring' of the author, in which production of knowledge/ discourse is coerced 

(from conflict). This stance deliberately taken by Said opposes Foucault's functionalist 



31 

and deterministic analyses, perhaps ironical as it can then be construed as a form of 

productive resistance (Ashcroft & Ahluwalia, 2001). 

If any one truth is to be revealed then it is this singular, irreducible truth. I thus impart a 

key Saidean moment to my work, i.e. to make 'discourse go hand-in-hand with an 

account of conquest, the creation of instruments of domination, and techniques of 

surveillance that were rooted not in theory but in actual territory', and in the very 

material privileges and pleasure that come with this conquest (Ashcroft, 2003; p. 269). 

Being of the colonised, and of the other than the modem subject1
, my experience of 

colonialism's immediate aftermath, and of its impression on my parents, says to me that 

colonialist discourse goes beyond inscribing and layering the body with its truths. 

Merely revealing what is hidden will not in my estimation unveil this othered. Reading 

the various psychiatric and lay descriptions, it is almost impossible to not arrive at the 

conclusion that the Malay is savage, or at best semi-savage; that he and she, more so, is 

largely bereft of those attributes that purportedly differentiates humans from the other 

living2
. My material experience of the Malay tells me very different from the 

colonialist discourse on the Malay - that if he is a savage then we are all most 

indubitably savages. 

An initial step in resurrecting the body of the Malay is to examine the dissembling 

colonial and neo-colonial, or even post-colonial, discourse on this colonised 'object' (as 

I argue he is object rather than subject). That key Foucauldian moment of identifying 

and articulating that which is contemporaneous and problematic for me is an obvious 

one with which to initiate this work. I have, as I have already stated, great problems 

with descent in order to explicate the lowly origins of the grand schemes of man. There 

is much that is extraordinary about the 'ordinary' lives of ordinary ('lowly') men and 

women, about their poetic existence. Already in my limited reading of the writing of 

amok, and of the Malay and his/ her colonising, there seems little that is ordinary about 

their origins. To me at the very least my descent into their 'lowly' origins promises to 

reveal the extraordinary lives and events of the Malay and his world. 

1 Jimmy Carter, for example, will argue that my like are not ready for those ideas of modernity 
such as democracy. 
2 And we speak for (anthropomorphise) them; another group of othered even more oppressed 
then the human other, difficult as that is to believe initially. 



32 

Writing in a 'worldly' style 

I intend to do as Said did, write in a circumstantial way, a conversational style that is of 

a particular style of postcolonial critique that is indubitably Said's own, his locating of 

theory in the society in which his work derives. At the very heart of his postcolonial 

thesis lies an insistence of the political importance of colonization. Part of this 

insistence is that of the worldliness or materiality of text, of its production, propagation 

and reception, i.e. the material location of the text in its social and political contexts. 

The colonial text/ discourse text is thus not merely a (discursive) fragment of the 

regulated production, exchange, and circulation of utterances or language (thus 

opposing Foucault's view of discourse). This specific textual attitude (of the 

materialilty of text) has provided a powerful resource to that fundamental belief of the 

political importance of colonization. As a textual approach, Said's postcolonial critique 

locates itself in the material world as opposed to the postcolonialism that has been most 

strongly influenced by the high theory of poststructuralism, a specific example being 

Homi Bhaba's critical work (Williams, 2001). The ' hopelessly tiresome', 'excessive' 

and 'risible' jargon of this type of postcolonial thesis, for Said, constitutes a stumbling 

block in that it has that most deleterious of effects - 'luring away the intellectual from 

any sort of meaningful political engagement' (Wi lliams, 200 l ; p. 317). 

Said's postcolonial thesis incorporates ilmi idea of an amateur's retum to an accessible 

language (Ashcroft, 2003; Said, 1983), the language of a secular criticism that 

deliberately distances itself from the 'precious jargon' of the isolationist, priestly world 

of high theory (or alternatively, the sophistry of the professional intellectual). The 

informal, often conversational language of Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism are 

examples of this style of writing that imputes a non-specialist reader, and thus confirms 

the worldliness of his own text (Ashcroft, 2003). It is an approach fashioned in an 

attempt to avoid what Said views to be the 'retreat of intellectual work from the actual 

society in which it works' (Ashcroft, 2003; p. 264). It is also a retreat into the 

'labyrinth oftextuality' constructed out of 'the mystical and disinfected matter of 

literary theory' (Said, 1983; p. 4). In the labyrinth a 'precious jargon has advanced' and 

its imposing and largely impenetrable complexities has left it with increasingly little to 

say to the society from which it emerges (Said, 1983; p. 4). The worldliness of text for 

Said then allows the relocation of the critical theorist into the society from which he/ 

she has emerged, and is panacea for the poststructuralist anxiety (of pure textuality) 

'which often haunts contemporary critical practice' (Ashcroft, 2003; p. 261 ). 



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This secular criticism that is embedded in the notion of text as worldly attempts to 

produce a criticism that engages the real material ground of political and soci