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Delegitimating Authoritarianism 37

of conflict,” he explains, “because conflict, in our situation of never-ending poverty,
brings with it risk, and risk is not something that we can take.” Indonesians learn
from childhood to avoid behavior that might inflame conflict. Consequently, they
“tend to react to conflict with a lack of self-confidence.” Democracy, by contrast, is
reassuring because it admits “conflict as an integral part of us, even when we are all
within one fishpond.” Democracy is not the source of conflict; democracy is, rather,
“the management of conflict.”
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In these and other ways, the Sidelines columns repeatedly challenged the regime’s
disparagement of the West and individual rights. Yet a defining element of Moha-
mad’s style is not consistency nor conviction but a certain ambivalence. He is being
cautious, often critiquing the regime indirectly and evading the immediate threat of
censorship. But he is also employing a distinctive genre of writing he identifies as the
“essay” that presented its own challenge to Suharto’s use of integralism to maintain
control over public discourse.
Mohamad does not describe the essay genre as specifically subversive, but iden-
tifies elements that seem to run counter to integralist norms. The genre’s “use of
language and allegories,” for example, “disturbs journalistic linearity” and stands
“against the acronym-studded columns of bureaucratese” pervading New Order
public discourse. Quoting Theodor Adorno, Mohamad says that the essay “starts
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not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about . . . and stops when
it feels finished rather than when there is nothing more to say.” Its substance, in
a sense, is its form—a form with “the quality of someone in an abstracted mood
aimlessly sauntering on the sidewalk.” He concludes, “Precisely because it is largely
an insubstantial undertaking,” the essay is “polemical,” and thereby “stands against
[the government’s] mania for result and regularity.” It offers a means to “circumvent
[authoritarianism’s] utilitarian demand for predictability.”
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Taking Mohamad’s analysis further, part of the Suharto regime’s “mania for
result and regularity” was its demand for continual renewal of consensus, for reso-
lution and elimination of doubt or lingering queries. As Jennifer Lindsay notes,
Sidelines ignores this requisite, rarely delivering a sense of resolution, much less
consensus. What these columns offer instead is the opposite—not conflict, nor
even disagreement, but simply questions. “Are human rights the same as Coca-
Cola?” Mohamad asks in 1977. Later he asks, is the state—“as Hegel said—the
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defender of the common good?” and “What does the individual mean to society, in
fact?”
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Such questioning alone was potentially subversive in a culture where, as Yusuf
Bilyarta Mangunwijaya (Romo Mangun) says, asking questions had become taboo.
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Yet the ambiguity in Sidelines also presented a deeper challenge to the regime. One
can imagine the New Order’s culture of consensus as spherical, enveloping public
discourse within an orb in which conflicting views and unresolved questions were
smoothed over—“phased out,” in Suharto’s words. Tellingly, the Indonesian word
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for “unanimous” is, in fact, bulat , meaning “round” or “spherical.”
The perplexities of Sidelines resisted absorption into this self-contained public
sphere, suspended instead in tacit opposition to demands for order and certainty.
The columns’ meandering propositions, the questions they raise but do not answer,
became, in a sense, like threads hanging loose from an otherwise smooth surface of
consensus and resolution. If one were to tug at these threads, Mohamad suggests, the
regime’s very legitimacy might begin to unravel. “A slight tear in the cloth,” he notes,
“quickly can be seen as a gaping hole.”
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