Southeast Asia Inside Out:

Frolll Nations to Constellations

The Frank H. Golay Lecture, Cornell Southeast Asia Program, March 25, 2003
by Aihwa Ong, professor of anthropology and chair of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies,
University of California at Berkeley

OPENING: NATIONS AN D NATIONAL

CULTURE

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n my lifetime, the postWorld War II era was an earlier era of social upheavalthe rise of America as a
global power, the processes
of decolonization around
the world, and the perceived
communist threat to the so-called "free
world ." There was a breakdown of the old
division of labor in the social sciences. At
Columbia University in the 1970s (an era
dominated by the Vietnam War), new
fields such as peasant studies and the new
nations project raised a set of questions
about the big changes transforming society and human progress. As a student, I
learned that a certain set of tools seemed
appropriate, which defined a specific
interdisciplinary mix. On the one hand,
there was the macro, unilinear approach
that viewed modernization as a series of
stages to economic growth. This modernization trajectory was contested by the
dependency school that argued for a different First World-Third World structuralization. On the other hand, social
historians such as Barrington Moore and
E. P. Thompson influenced our attempts to
grapple with industrial capitalism and its
impact on cultural formation and political
futures in late-developing countries.
In 1963, Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist influenced by William W. Rostow
and Samuel Huntington, published Agricultural Involution, which became an
instant classic. The book compares the
Japanese and Indonesian paths toward
development. My undergraduate thesis,
"Beyond Involution" (1974), showed an
attraction to Geertz's grappling with the
big questions of social change, but also
made an initial criticism of their reduction
to an issue of cultural involution. At
Columbia, anthropology was dominated
by the work of Eric Wolf- a Marxian concern with emerging class structures developing out of encounters between colonial

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16 SEAP BULLETIN Winter-Spring 2004 -2005

capitalism and pre-industrial societies.

Within a macro-micro framing, we were
taught a problem-driven approach to
explore the critique of capitalism in peasant and proletarian struggles and, perhaps as well, to find evidence for their
resolution in alternative futures not dominated by Western capitalism .
Let me situate that moment, in the
mid-1970s, when our dominant frameworks for studying modernization relied
on the nation-state and national culture.
As we know, area studies in the United
States arose in the aftermath of the
second World War. Area specialization
was soon linked to the project for the
comparative study of new nations, as
policy interests stressed the need for
expertise on particular countries in the era
of the Cold War. It was a world that
required specialization in the languages,
cultures, and histories of world regions. It
seemed natural to use the nation-state as
a unit of analysis, as scholars specialized in
national histories of anti-colonial struggles, the rise of nationalism, and the forging of postcolonial nations and identity
(e.g. Anderson 1972; Roff 1972).
In the following decades, a bipolar
scheme dominated Southeast Asian Studies: regional commonalities and contrasts
on the one hand and distinctive national
cultures on the other. Scholars tried to
paint their canvass within the geopolitical
boundaries established by military strategies. (I remember Joel Steinberg's volume
[1987]. In Search of Southeast Asia, itself a
telling title.) A back page bore a group
photograph of leading scholars pointing
to a post-World War II map of the region.
Geographers articulated the unity-indiversity quality of topography, climate,
and ecosystems. Historians described
"lands below the winds" shaped by trade
and tribute, labor bondage and relig ious
spheres (van Leur 1955; Reid 1988). Others, including anthropologists, claimed
distinctive features said to characterize
the entire region: the state, negara,

patronage systems, ethnic passing, debt

bondage, slave-raiding, wet-rice village
organization, syncretic religious forms,
and gender complementarity. This riot of
features apparently set the region off
from the Chinese and Indian continents,
which were assumed to be somehow less
in flux, unstable, loosely-structured,
hybrid, or heterogeneous. This tension
between the stabilized framework of the
postcolonial nation-state on the one hand
and the interconnectedness of peoples,
social form, and geography on the other
came to be mediated by a particular concept of culture .
By the 1970s, Geertz had turned resolutely from the study of economic development to an articulation of "culture"
that linked together a language, a symbolic system, a cultural tradition, an ethnic
and often racial heritage, a material environment, and a connection to a territory.
"Culture" also identified a source of
human dignity, defined by being "at
home" in this milieu of shared values,
practices, meanings, and traditions.
Increasingly, scholars turned to the "culture" concept-particularly the emphasis
on language, on meanings, on existential
states, on capturing the "thickness" of
experience (Geertz 1973)-as a way to
study what is distinctive about "the
human." Even in cases when the focus
shifted to modern institutions themselves-Geertz's treatment of the firm in
Peddlers and Princes (1960) and of the
state in Negara (1980) for example-it
was done through the mobilization of
"culture" to understand modern forms.
Nevertheless, there have been substantial
changes in the concept of culture over the
last thirty years. An internalist critique,
summarized in Anthropology as Cultural
Critique (Marcus and Fischer 1989) and in
Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus
1986), raised questions about the instability of cultural forms in a world of accelerated change. Critics proposed greater
analytical attention to multivocality and

differential perspectives on cultural

change. This moment of critical reflection,
however, did not dislodge culture as the
key domain of anthropological inquiry.
The question of the human and ethical
articulation, it came to be assumed, can
only be raised in the cultural domain, displaced though it may be from earlier
bounded political spaces.
In my first book, Spirits of Resistance
(1987), my goal was to go beyond the tradition-modernity framing and the culturestructure divide. At that time, building
runaway factories was part of a new strategy of economic globalization, and I went
back to Malaysia to study the effects of
multinational corporations on Malay
peasant society. Inspired in part by Jim
Scott's Moral Economy of the Peasant
(1976), I looked for a structuralization of
class and cultural resistance in the industrial process. I found, however, very little
class struggle of the classic kind, but
instead control and surveillance-by corporations, state authorities, and public
opinion-over labor, gender, culture, and
religion . Thus, I shifted from Marxian to
other categories and looked at techniques
that combined Taylorist methods with biological discourses about Asian subjects
and the inscription of new values of selfcontrol and self-scrutiny-by managerial
policy as well as the religious police-in
the everyday lives of factory women .
Resistance was expressed dramatically in
episodes of spirit possession, but more frequently in mundane acts of subversion .
Instead of looking at "capitalism" as a
total social order with deep structures, I
was looking at these things in a much
more local sense and at much more specific modes of reconfiguration and regula tion, related not to the invisible hand of a
logic of class domination, but to specific
kinds of techniques and counter-strategies. These became part of an answer to
what kinds of modern Muslim subjects the
rural women were becoming, that is,
what kind of "the human" was being generated out of the interaction of capitalist
networks, managerial control, and religious self-disciplining.
Obviously then, the current moment is
a different instance of interdiscipl inary
conjuncture than in the 1970s and early
1980s. I am now concerned about linking
questions of "the human" to different
forms of rationality. This interest in the
techniques of knowing and of managing
populations, and thus in redefining who
they should or can be, has found a powerful resonance in Foucault's work on governmentality, on modern ways of

managing life and death. In my more

recent work-on flexible managers and
refugee-citizens-I have drawn more fully
on Foucauldian categories of governmentality and concern with the form of the
human in other globalizing situations.
On the one hand, there are the power
effects of the state, capital, and multilateral agencies. On the other, ways of being
human are being problematized and
reconstituted within various regimes of
regulation, negotiation, and self-making.
I was increasingly attracted to work that
variously
problematized
technical
power- the technical interventions into
society, living forms, and nature in general-as a force of modernity and "as a
movement of planetary extension"
(Stiegler 1998). The question was: how to
study the technological constitution of
society and of human beings today?
In Southeast Asian Studies, two brilliant scholars broke free of the dominant
frameworks: the structural approach
derived from peasant studies and the culture concept from anthropology. Benedict
Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983)
and Thongchai Winichakul's Siam Mapped
(1991) were still concerned about modern
nation-building, but attention was now
directed towards technologies for constituting new nations and citizens. Both
works directed attention towards mobile
knowledges and technologies-print capitalism, geographical sciences-in defining the kinds of emerging spaces that
shaped and contained emergent Southeast Asian nations. In Seeing Like a State
(1998), Jim Scott continued in this vein,
elucidating the kinds of statistical and surveillance technologies that went into
state power. The theoretical sophistication
of these approaches protected Southeast
Asianists from the lures of Subaltern Studies, especially its reliance on culturalist
accounts of subject formation, power
dynamics, and social change.
Nevertheless, the majority of Southeast Asian scholars have remained resolutely focused on a national framing of
problems, a sense of the moral project of
the nation. Another continuity is a primordialist notion of culture and the view
that modern Southeast Asian subjects are
exclusively shaped by local and national
cultural forms. Clearly, the analytical entities of the nation-state and national culture are less coherent and often miss the
point in a world of increasing mobility,
interconnectedness, and flux, where
neoliberal rationality, diverse technologies, and actors are increasingly brought
into novel alignments, thereby constitut-

ing to an increasing degree our social life

as well as a sense of who we are.

THE PROBLEM-SPACES OF
GLOBALIZATION
In the past two decades, the term " globalization" seems to have become the term
used for the current framing of social and
intellectual problems . Social scientists,
scholars in the humanities, and everyone
else, for that matter, cannot seem to avoid
the term, no matter what their specific
projects are about. While there have been
heated disagreements over what globalization means, there is also a radical sense
of urgency across the social sciences that
we are confronted with new empirical
realities and with a new set of problems
that pose new demands on conventional
tools and modes of analysis.
Regionalism
One set of approaches across a number of
disciplines has treated "globalization" as
designating a new unit of analysis or spatial form through which familiar categories can be studied . For instance, some
approaches in sociology have maintained
a neo-Wallersteinian focus on structures
of connectivity and spatial integration.
This world-economy approach seems to
have been the dominant influence on the
way Asian Studies has reacted to the
globalization challenge . The bipolar focus
on nation and region has remained, but in
an era of economic boom, interlinked
financial markets, money politics, and
Asian values, scholars of Southeast Asia
speak increasingly of regionalism and
regional integration . This dynamic of
turning inwards and outwards-from
nation to region-is dominated by concerns about how nation-states seek to formalize their relations with one another
through regional organizations such as
ASEAN. The rise of the so-called "Asian
tigers" and trade agencies, including
ASEAN plus 3, provided yet another political economic space for examining social
change. In history, scholars have become
more interested in studying the interactions and interrelations between regions.
A China-centered regionalism, for
instance, has dominated recent scholarly
claims about the historical rise of Chinadominated market capitalism and the
contemporary emergence of greater
China (Frank 1998; Liu 2001 ; Hamashita
1997). The analytic of regionalism has
been influenced as well by postcolonial
studies that seek to reject Western universals
and
European
parochialism
(Chakrabarty 2000). A new culturalist
SEAP BULLETIN Winter-Sprin g 2004 -2005 17

Sociopolitical Spaces
Today, there is this shared sense of
momentous realities, and yet the views
represented here deal not with overarching structures nor do they investigate
social change simply within the structural
space or the cultural frame. The goal is to
consider globalization not merely as a
shift in the unit of analysis or as the intensification of flows of capital, people,
rational forms, practices, or values. The
global is all these things, but my approach
raises a different set of questions. The
point is to go beyond the "new con tainer" models of studying globalization
to an explicit articulation of a new kind of
problem-space or emerging problemTransnationalism
spaces, within which we confront quesThere is another scholarly response to
tions about structural changes and how
they shape new social forms and even
globalization that emerged out of the
study of capitalism and its inscription of
new meanings of being human. So, how
power in spaces not defined by the
can we rethink the problem-space beyond
nation-state. The dominant role of Southgiven global, national, and cultural units
east Asian ethnic Chinese in transnational
of analysis?
business activities and their re-engageFor Southeast Asianists, the unit of
analysis seems to have been given by the
ment with China suggested a problemspace of networks and constellations. In
scholarship on distinctive political forms in
Ungrounded
Empires,
the region. Oliver Wolters
Donald Nonini and I
(1982) proposed a "manbrought together interdisdala" model rooted in cosIn short, the fundamental problems of moderciplinary analyses of ethnic
mological beliefs about
Chinese flows and the
nity, where mobile technological and social
divine kingship and centerforms of transnational subperiphery power relations.
forms constitute modern human beings, sugjectivity shaped by techStanley Tambiah's concept
of
ruling,
gest that area specialists must consider spatial
of "galactic polity" (1976)
nologies
was based more firmly on
circumvention, and netpractices beyond those given by political
actual tributary relationworking practices cond igeography or national culture.
tioned by the conjunction
ships between central
polity and dependent satelof colonialism and capitalism in the Asia Pacific (Ong
lite principalities. Whatever
and Nonini 1997). This
one may think about the
galactic ideal-type today, it
volume, among others, has
tation; rather, they are expressions of a
influenced East Asian Studies to abandon
was useful in stressing instability, the congradually the notion that the Chinese
habitus that is finely tuned to the turbustant threat of fission between ruler and
diaspora is a residual phenomenon sepalence of late capitalism" in the Asia
local factions and alliances shifting to
rable from China proper. For instance, a
Pacific (Ong 1999, 136).
other power centers. The focus on the
new h istorica I study that traces its u nexdynamism of power relations is very valuIn short, the fundamental problems of
able indeed and goes some distance
modernity, where mobile technological
pected circuits and cultural complexity is
Adam McKeown's Chinese Migrant Netand social forms constitute modern
toward shaking up the tendency of many
works and Cultural Change: Peru,
scholars to view contemporary political
human beings, suggest that area specialChicago, Hawaii, 7900-7936 (1999) . Such
ists must consider spatial practices beyond
forms as stabilized and inflexible.
those given by political geography or
perspectives on networks and transnaCurrent concerns about the contingency of modern power do not automatitional practices have influenced a number
national culture. A more fundamental
of disciplines, including Asian American
cally rely on the state form for framing
problem, in globalizing times, is rethinking about the very forms and values of the
Studies, to expand their field of investigathe problem-space. For a while, scholars
individual and collective life of human
talked about "the global and the local,"
tion beyond the North American continent (Ong 2003) .
beings, beyond the large abstractions of
but these abstractions do not capture the
Furthermore, for many anthropolosociety, nation, culture, and economy.
multiple scales of political integration or
gists, global flows and the ruptures of disThere is a need to pay attention to how
regulation . More recently, geographers
placement suggest that cultures are not
such as Kris Olds and Peter Dicken in their
modern technology, rationality, and ethics
contained in nation-states and that culaffect people in Southeast Asia, influencvolume Globalisation and the Asia-Pacific
Contested Territories (1999) have stressed
tural forms become reconstituted in con ing the ways they reflect upon, know
the multi-scalar dimensions of power, thus
texts of capitalist accumulation, travel,
about, and manage themselves.
regionalism (echoing perhaps the claims
of Asian politicians) views Southeast Asia
variously as a region of Islamic renaissance, of Confucian capitalism, and of the
Chinese periphery. But the understandable desire to hold on to regional expertise has become a barrier to more complex
theoretical formulations. In other words,
scholars have followed the lead of spatial
categories given by the entrenched division of area knowledge, by politicians,
and the news media. But these geographical spaces are not always the most appropriate for evaluating emerging social
phenomena and their effects on human
beings and society.

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18 SEAP BULLETIN Winter-Spring 2004 -2005

and displacement. However, claims by

globalists about the decline of the
nation-state and culturalist explanations
of transnational behavior are seldom
grounded in actual research. My book
Flexible Citizenship (1999) is an attempt
to produce an ethnography of transnational practices and linkages. My claim is
that, in an era of globalization, individuals and governments develop a flexible
notion of citizenship in their strategies
devised for accumulating capital and
power. I examine in particular how the
flexible practices of overseas Chinese
respond fluidly and opportunistically to
changing political-economic conditions.
This focus on flexible strategies of accumulation shows that mobile managers
and professionals seek both to circumvent and benefit from different nationstate regimes by selecting diverse sites for
investment, work, and family relocation
(Ong 1999, 112). Overseas Chinese come
to embody the neoliberal homo economicus figure, I argue, but "there may not be
anything uniquely Chinese about flexible
personal discipline, disposition and orien-

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situating the effects of globalizing forces

at the regional, national, and local levels.
Unfortunately, the focus on scalar
processes has been highly economistic and
structural in orientation. Furthermore, the
notion of scale as a metric for sociospatial
structuralization under capitalism is
mainly concerned about how scalar configurations are linked to global networks
of market action. But these abstracted
spaces do not tell us that new sociopolitical spaces are being produced through
global networks.
Obviously, there is the need for more
careful embedding of our inquiries in particular problem-spaces, defined by specific networks of economic, social, and
political relations. Indeed, besides the
scholarship on overseas Chinese, older
historical works have traced transnational
linkages, for example, in the investigation
of Islamic mercantilism, the flows of contract workers, and the opium trade. A
more recent view of imperial situations is
Ann Stoler's study (1995) of colonial
forms of biopower. Stoler maintains that
the identities of European bourgeois subjects in metropolitan centers were
dependent upon mechanisms that marginalized mestizo and native subjects in
the colonies. More recently, Eric Tagliacozzo (2003) presented an interesting
paper at Berkeley that focuses on the
back-and-forth struggle between smugglers and the techniques of regulation
deployed by the Dutch across the Straits
of Malacca. Nevertheless, the elucidation
of far-flung trade and lines of regulation
is still conceived largely in terms of their
necessary support to the functionings of
the colonial state.
In my view, more dynamic ideas of spatiality than the state form require a
greater sensitivity and alertness to varied
configurations of spatialized power, interest in power operating at different scales,
and connections between different scales
of action . Following Foucault (1991), I
maintain that what we call the state is the
outcome of diverse projects that translate
specific programs into general terms.
Instead of speaking about a state as a unified apparatus of rule (Scott 1998), I consider government as a critical and
variously
problematizing
activity,
informed by political rationalities that
define particular schemes for representing
and reproducing reality and for making
things thinkable and realizable through
intervention and engineering (Rose 1996,
42). At any one point, there are diverse
technologies of government or strategies
of authorities to define problems and

objects, enact programs, and assemble

procedures and techniques to produce
particular normative outcomes for individuals and society. Technologies of governmentality do not therefore have uniform
effects on the entire population or across
the national territory.
In my thinking about state power in a
region of Asian tiger economies, therefore, I consider the specific strategies that
link state authorities and global corporations, resulting in what I call "graduated
sovereignty," or the differentiated regulation over the population and the
national space (Ong 2000). First, graduated sovereignty identifies the effects of
the coordination of economic partnerships with the regulation of population.
Neoliberal reasoning adopted by technocrats stresses the differentiated regulation of the population in order to be
more economically competitive on the
one hand and letting social rights be
increasingly coordinated by market calculations on the other. Thus, pre-existing
forms of ethnic governmentality-ethnic
Chinese in Singapore, elite Malay bumiputera in Malaysia-are no longer sufficient, but must include social regulation
to enhance skills attractive to global markets (Ong 1999, ch . 8) . At the same time,
biopolitical differentiation produces disciplinary practices that discriminate against
low-skill and migrant workers. Second,
graduated sovereignty also refers to the
spatial outcomes of differentiated regulation, in that state-firm partnerships bring
about special technological zones that
come under the control of corporate
rather than political authorities. A striking example is Batamindo, the Singaporeadministered Batam Industrial Estate in
the Riau archipelago that I visited two
years ago. This technological zone is
operated by Singaporean technocrats,
while the role of Batam officials is
reduced to that of rubber-stamping the
corporate-driven policies regulating the
flows of labor, capital, and technology.
The regulation of the zone by foreigners
is reminiscent of an earlier system of dispersed administration and taxation by
river chiefs described by James Siegel in
The Rope of God (1969). In short, graduated sovereignty describes a problemspace not bound by culture, the
nation-state, or markets, but rather one
defined by particular configurations of
power relations produced by the coordination of governmentality and corporate
networks in a globalized era. These
spaces of differentiated sovereignty are
not merely technical in nature; they play

a role in shaping our ideas of what it

means to be a human being . Technological zones often smuggle in nationalist
aspirations and entail the construction or
naturalization of racial, ethnic, and
gender differences within, as well as
across, transnational networks.

Constellations- Ecologies of Flexible

Capital and Actors
An emerging trend in the human sciences
is to consider how the analytics of modern
power-technology, knowledge, and
ethics-are involved in the constitution of
diverse modern subjects (anthropos) and
social forms (oikos) (Collier and Ong
2003). This perspective allows me to think
about globalization as the spread of
global forms of rationality, technology,
and politics that shape and give value to
human life and society. Thus, instead of
using the global, national, regional, or
cultural frameworks to investigate social
change, our challenge is to engage what
Robert Merton calls "mid-range theorizing," an analytical alertness to problemspaces shaped by emerging constellations
of diverse elements-governmentality,
institutions, actors, and cultural discourse.
Elsewhere, I have argued that the
Deleuzean concept of "assemblage"
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987) allows us to
capture the intersection of disparate components, of the old and the new, and of
processes of territorialization and de-territoria lization (Collier and Ong 2003) .
"Assemblage" allows us to designate an
emerging cluster of regimes, technologies, and networks that inscribe social
forms and values. It captures the contingent way diverse elements are brought
into interaction and how their polyvalent
cultural associations and values are
shaped in these unfolding relationships.
For me then, a problem-space is defined
by a particular constellation of diverse
relationships that translates political projects from a "center of calculation" into a
network of locales dispersed across territory (Rose 1996; Latour 1986). Rapid social
change in Southeast Asia or anywhere
begs for the kind of analytical entry that
captures the ways various elementsadministrative rationality, procedures,
modes of judgment-are brought into a
kind of assemblage for re-engineering
and re-inscribing values in society.
For instance, in the aftermath of the
Asian financial crisis and the collapse of
the tiger-model of development, new
alignments between technology, governmentality, and actors reconfigured strategic relations that have their own spatial
SEAP BULLETIN Winter-Spring 2004-2005 19

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forms and dynamics. Indeed, ecology has

entered the lexicon of Southeast Asian
technocrats who use terms such as "web,"
"cluster," and "ecosystem" to suggest the
new forms of linkage, exchange, and
feedback loops that are being forged
between functions systems, markets, and
the social environment. What is distinctive
about the new ecological sense of administration is the deliberate orchestration of
circulations and interactions among specific global and local institutions, actors,
and values, with the goal of generating
nonlinear dynamics. Perhaps inspired by
complexity theory, Asian technocrats hope
that such synergy between foreign institutions and local entities, expatriates, and
local populations will enhance the production of new collective economic and
intellectual properties. Such novel combinations of internal and external capital,
knowledge, and populations thus engender what I call "ecologies of flexible capital and expertise " (Ong 2005). Let me
identify two assemblages of heterogeneous components in contemporary
Southeast Asia .
The Singaporean Ecosystem
In a National Day speech launching "the
new Singapore," prime minister Goh Chok
Tong declared that:
Today, wealth is generated by new
ideas, more than by improving the
ideas of others ... The U.S. economy has
done immensely well because it enjoys
a 'brain gain' year after year. For example, one quarter of the companies in
Silicon Valley are created by or led by
Indian and Chinese immigrants. That is
why we have to bring in multi-national
talent, like the way we brought in
MNCs [multinational corporations] .
Like MNCs, multinational talent, or
MNTs, will bring in new expertise,
fresh ideas and global connections and
perspectives. I believe that they will
produce lasting benefits for Singapore. '

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Technocrats at the planning nerve

center, the Economic Development Board
(EDB), have attracted global institutions
and actors to develop local expertise in
banking, business management, and
biotechnology industry. The goal is to
build "a vibrant and effervescent enterprise ecosystem, where large and small
enterprises can thrive by leveraging on
innovation and intellectual property to
create value" (EDB 2000-2002, 9). Through
strategic partnerships between state ven-

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20 SEAP BULLETIN Winter-Spring 2004 -2 005

ture capital and "world-class institutions,"

knowledge networks link universities such
as Chicago, MIT, and Johns Hopkins to
local universities and research institutions.
The goal is to make Singapore into a
"global schoolhouse" and an Asian hub
for expertise in international business, science, and technology (Olds and Thrift
2005). These institutional networks are
conduits for funneling in foreign students
(mainly from China and India) and Western experts in order to engender the conditions for idea creation and research.
Collaborations such as the Singapore-MIT
Alliance are therefore more than about
training a new generation of Asian scientists; they are about using engineering as
a social technology to configure a transnat ional knowledge and information society
centered in Singapore.
Such an ecology of flexible capital and
expertise regulates external and internal
relationships of inclusion and exclusion,
with consequences for the meaning of
society and citizenship. New values associated with flexible knowledge regimes and
technological and risk-taking skills are
coded into the technologies of government. Foreign scientists, bankers, and
other professionals, as well as science and
business students from China and India,
have been the ones to benefit most handsomely from government funds, tax
regimes, and access to employment
opportunities. The moral demands of a socalled "technopreneurial" citizenship
have risen higher as citizens are expected
to compete with Asian foreigners on
home ground. Technopreneurial citizenship stresses knowledge and competitiveness at a regional scale so that the nation
can succeed in the informational economy. The continual influx of expatriates
and their coding as the scientific experts
or entrepreneurial subjects has coincided
with the retrenchment of less competitive
workers in a variety of fields. Growing
publ ic anxiety has surfaced in the statecontrolled media and in the streets. There
is a growing fear among members of the
ethnic Chinese majority of being renativized, of becoming members of a
second-class category in relation to privileged expatriates, especially foreign Chinese and Indians.
The Malaysia Corridor
The Malaysian project is much more
modest, and it involves an assemblage of
different elements for transforming
Malaysia into a node of high-tech circuits.
In a recent speech, the minister of finance
claims that:

We shall all become citizens of the Keconomy.. . Survival in a borderless

global economy based on knowledge
requires everyone to be equipped with
new skills and assimilate the culture of
high technology and dynamic entrepreneurship. This is not wishful thinking . In fact, the Government has
painstakingly endeavoured to build a
strong foundation, in particular
through education and human
resource development. I am confident
that there is someone in every village
who has acquired skills and knowledge
in the field of technology from an
institution of higher learning. I believe
this was not possible five or ten years
ago ...To ensure success from the new
economy, we need a pool of the best
talent from at home and abroad.
Efforts need to be taken to hire the
best brains regardless of race or
nationality, from Bangalore to California. This is a step towards creating a
world-class workforce.'
The main project of course is the Multimedia Super Corridor that grew out of
"smart partnerships" between the government and foreign business and an
alignment of a Malaysian embryonic hightech work force with Indian expatriates.
Billions of dollars from oil wealth have
been poured into the building of business
centers, highways, academic institutions,
and shopping malls in order to reposition
Malaysia as the site of high-tech sweatshops. What seems most compelling to
foreign companies about the digital corridor are its connections to other Asian
markets. The majority of the firms are
high-tech service providers that seek to
test and develop their products for the
regional markets. What appears to be of
strategic interest to foreign companies are
the multilingual skills of Malaysian workers-in English, Hindi, Malay-Indonesian,
Chinese, and Thai-and their cultural
familiarity with neighboring countries.
For giant Indian software service
providers, the corridor is also an ideal site
for expanding offshore business in Southeast Asia. Indian companies or their subsidiaries provide software packages in the
areas of banking, insurance, telecommunications, and manufacturing that are
"localized," or adapted for applications in
a variety of venues in other developing
countries. Malaysia's high-tech workers
help to translate and customize multimedia technologies such as smart cards for
use in Malaysia and in smaller markets
such as Thailand, Burma, Saudi Arabia,

and parts of Africa. While foreign compaidentities and that links the fate of the
eignty in the Philippines are now crystalnies and expatriates consider the corridor
lized around Islamic rebels, terrorist susMuslim country to a wider zone of Western expertise.
pects, and US troops. A new problem is
a "steppingstone" to other markets or
higher-level knowledge hubs, local politiI have argued that a neoliberalist style
emerging around the nexus formed by a
cians hope that their presence will foster
of administrative practice in Southeast
rhetoric of moderate Islam, surveillance
Asia is reconfiguring regulatory networks
conditions for the growth of a domestic
technology, and religious radicalization
cyber society.
that bring foreign institutions and experts
that is recasting the political meanings of
What, one may ask, happens to soverdirectly into play with the domestic popuMuslim society and of being Muslim in
eignty and citizenship when technologilation in order to stimulate higher levels
Southeast Asia (Ong 2002).
cal links between knowledge hubs come
of knowledge, creativity, and productivity.
The prevailing focus on nationalism
Administrative techniques in Singapore
to undermine pre-existing forms of ethnic
and culture in Southeast Asian Studies
and Malaysia have assembled rather disreveals the extent to which the moral
governmentality? Unlike Singapore,
where local students are prodded to be
tinct orders of ecological governmentalprojects of the nation and assumptions
globally competitive, the Malaysian
ity-one
develops
private-public
about a unique historical trajectory have
partnerships to become a global schooldominated our analytical endeavor. This
authorities are struggling to get Malay
bumiputera college students to be comhouse and a biotechnology hub, the other
ideological slant of championing "gena second-level center in regional technoluine" national projects is by no means
petitive just in the domestic context.
Recent moves to expose Malay students
ogy networks. Through the lens of assemunique to Southeast Asian Studies. There
to trans-ethnic competition by recruiting
blage, I have identified the particular
are however severe analytical handicaps
clusters of spatial, social, and political relathat come from adhering so closely to the
non-Malays to Malay junior science colleges raised a storm of protest. Similarly,
tionships that shape new spaces of techobjects of our study, and they do not capnew rules for English instruction in scinology and governmentality in the
ture the complex and contingent constelence and math have created a
aftermath of the Asian financial crisis.
lations of power relations that variously
shape modern sociality and subjects in
groundswell of resistance. Even among
Assemblages and Re-Assemblages
fast-changing milieus. The above examthe well-educated Malays, there is fear
Constellations of new relationships
ples suggest that we need to ask and
that the new renewed stress on English,
science, mathematics, and technology is a
brought into alignment for particular
define questions in a different way. A
plot to keep Malays down, a kind of
projects pay no attention to abstractions
focus on shifting spatiality does not mean
such as nation, economy, politics, society,
cyber-colonialism imposed by the governthat the state or the nation are no longer
important units of analysis, only that they
ment and its capitalist allies. Mahathir,
and culture. The concept of assemblage
himself a major architect of preferential
allows us to discern the disparate ways
are not always the dominant frames for
treatment for Malay bumianalyzing political power.
puteras, now claims that it
Deleuze and Guattari have
should be considered a
argued that spaces of power
Constellations of new relationships brought
"prosthesis" to be disare segmented between
carded. Indeed, the sense of
molar organization and
into alignment for particular projects pay
flows of micropolitics that
security that comes from
no attention to abstractions such as nation,
being coddled by affirma"coexist and cross over into
tive action programs is
each other" (1987, 213). The
economy, politics, society, and culture.
hollow, since it rests on the
rigid lines of the state are
cut by diagonal flows of
knowledge of others, and it
can be swept away by
political reasoning, capital,
global competition that
and technical
practices
depends on new skills and
through which nationalist,
knowledge. The Multimedia Corridor repgovernmentality, networks, and actors are
ethnic, class, and gender differences are
put into play, shaping a variety of probresents a new regime of governance that
articulated and inscribed onto the emergis pitted against the older regime where
lems and outcomes in a contingent and
ing spaces.' Our modes of inquiry would
wealth-making opportunities were based
open-ended way. For instance, a variety of
benefit from giving attention to particular
less on expertise than on racial privilege.
institutions-the immigration authorities
assemblages of intersecting lines and
Some Malays feel that they need not sucin receiving countries, recruitment agenflows and how specific relations and elecumb to pressures to acquire intellectual
cies, labor smugglers, and middle-class
ments are brought into play, with outcapital, since the natural wealth of the
families-are involved in the astonishing
comes that are not predetermined. Such
growth of flexible labor markets in Southcountry-oil, gas, timber, rubber-will
low-flying theorizing and inquiry into spekeep many comfortable. Anti-cyber resisteast Asia. Another kind of problem crecific problems are important for the reviance is simmering among Malays-even
ated by the alignment of disparate
talization of area specialization, since
when they draw material benefits from a
elements has brought together the World
concepts and observations at the middle
digital economy. Being plugged into the
Bank, local officials, and NGOs in developlevel have important comparative value
global knowledge networks inspires not
ment projects that are remaking societies
across regions and disciplines. For
the fear of being left behind, as is the
instance, there is enormous purchase to
and identities in Cambodia and Laos
case among Singaporeans, but the fear of
(Goldman 2001). In the post-September 11
concepts such as "moral economy,"
being cyber-colonized and set back by a
world, we can talk about re-assemblages
"imagined communities," "print capitalof power relations throughout the region.
technological project that gives priority
ism," and "geo-body" that have emerged
to science over race- and-religion-based
For example, issues of security and soverfrom studying configurations formed by
SEAP BULLETIN Winter-Spring 20042005 21

novel combinations of relationships

observed in Southeast Asian contexts. The
influence of these concepts in other disciplines is undeniable and something we
can be extremely proud of. But useful
analytical categories emerging out of
Southeast Asian Studies have been few
and far between (though much better
than in East Asian Studies). When we
grapple with actual problems and how

technologies, institutions, and actors are

brought together to solve them, we are
on to analytical insights that can inform
scholarship on emerging forms of individual and collective life in other global
regions. As social analysts, we are ultimately concerned about where we are in
the world and how it is changing through
multiple and unexpected constellating
forces in modernity. By paying close atten-

tion to various assemblages of technologies, politics, and ethics, we can situate

ourselves in a broader intellectual cosmopolitanism. We will be addressing the
fundamental questions of modernityhow people are constituted and think
about themselves, and what they are
about anywhere in the world today. ~

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