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eBook details

• Title: The Thai Regime of Images.
• Author : SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia
• Release Date : January 01, 2004
• Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 245 KB

Description

In this article I draw together the observations of a range of scholars of modern Thailand who, despite disciplinary and analytical differences, present remarkably similar accounts of the distinctiveness of Thai forms of power. While they do not always refer directly to each others' work on this topic, each of the researchers considered here nonetheless presents evidence that the distinctiveness of Thai power lies in an intense concern to monitor and police surface effects, images, public behaviours, and representations combined with a relative disinterest in controlling the private domain of life. Rosalind Morris variously describes this many-sided phenomenon as the Thai "order of appearances" (2000 p. 173), "the love of the disciplined surface" (2000 p. 180), and "an overinvestment in appearances" (Morris 2000, p. 5). She argues that in Thailand's century-and-a-half of modernization, political power has not required the creation of a national subjectivity or an essential Thai personhood, but rather, "the appearance or the performance of ideally nationalist behaviour. It requires that one conform oneself to the ideals of the national, and it makes performance the criterion of proper citizenship." (Morris 2000, p. 147). Under this modernizing regime, interior phenomena of thought and desire are not monitored but external shows, performances, and public discourses are intensely policed, "In Thailand, modernity rests on the fetishism of appearances, on the demand for a signifying surface, and on a representational politics in which the processes of enframement are repressed." (Morris 2000, p. 238). While arguing that there is an intense "anxiety over appearances" in Thailand, Morris says that it is wrong to construe this as reflecting "a desire for appearances to reflect or disclose--indeed to exfoliate--an inner truth, a private reality" (Morris 2002, p. 53). On the contrary, Morris emphasizes: In Morris's view Thai modernity is built upon a mode of power that operates laterally across surfaces rather than vertically in the panoptic or "all-seeing" mode that Foucault (1980a) described as characterizing modern Western polities and cultures. This means that while modernizing power in Thailand is authoritarian in moulding normative public presentations it is comparatively tolerant of private diversities. Morris describes the operation of this regime of appearances in the sexual domain as follows:

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