Arief Budiman, Activism and Public Discourse

Kompas

A book about Arief Budiman by KH Mustofa Bisri

Arief Budiman is a person who quite often caused confusion and even controversy, not only during his life, but even after his death on April 23, 2020.

What would make his attitude and thoughts always attract attention and public debate? Before going to the United States to continue his studies, he was heavily involved in artistic and literary activities. He was acquainted with many painters and even tried to practice painting even though he had never made an exhibition of his paintings. In other words, Arief had no work contributions in painting even though he was known and popular among painters such as Zaini and Nashar.

In literature, his name cannot be missed because he was active in writing a lot of essays in Star Weekly magazine where PK Ojong worked as a journalist before establishing Kompas. He became one of the signatories to the Cultural Manifesto, with the concept developed by Wiratmo Soekito and announced on August 17, 1963.

The manifesto was signed by a number of artists, literary and cultural figures, several painters and a musician. Arief Budiman also signed the manifest with his original name, Soe Hok Djin, together with names that were commonly known such as HB Jassin, Wiratmo Soekito, Trisno Sumardjo, Goenawan Mohamad, Bur Rasuanto, Boen Sri Oemarjati, painters Nashar and Zaini, musician Binsar Sitompul, as well as a number of other artists.

His name cannot be missed because he was active in writing a lot of essays in Star Weekly magazine where PK Ojong worked as a journalist before establishing Kompas.

The manifesto was met with substantial attacks from left-wing artists in Lekra (the People’s Cultural Association) and was then banned by President Soekarno. The ban caused several people who worked in government offices to lose their jobs, such as HB Jassin, Wiratmo Soekito and Boen Sri Oemarjati.

After the G30S incident, and with the state of literature and culture calm and free from intimidation by left-wing artists due to the dissolution of the PKI (now-defunct Indonesian Communist Party), Arief Budiman together with poet Taufiq Ismail and short story writer Ras Siregar met with Mochtar Lubis to discuss the idea of publishing a cultural magazine. Mochtar Lubis was met at a prison on Jalan Keagungan in his ninth year of detention, along with other political prisoners such as M. Natsir, Syafrudin Prawiranegara, Yunan Nasution and several other figures. The three young people asked Mochtar Lubis (who would be released in the next few days) to be the editor-in-chief and person in charge of the planned cultural magazine.

Even though it was unclear where the funding came from or from whom, Mochtar Lubis agreed to the request. The magazine was given the name Horizon with the first issue published on July 1, 1966. The founding group of the Horizon magazine consisted of Mochtar Lubis, PK Ojong, Zaini, Arief Budiman and Taufiq Ismail. The first editorial staff consisted of Mochtar Lubis as editor-in-chief and person in charge, with editorial members HB Jassin, Zaini, Taufiq Ismail, DS Moeljanto and Arief Budiman.

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Kompas

Photo of Arief Budiman (bottom left) and the founders of another Horizon literary magazine displayed when the writer Taufik Ismail explained the history of the Horizon\'s founding up to the age of 50 during the 50-year Horizon celebration in Jakarta, Tuesday (26/7/2016).

In 2016, Horizon was half a century old and the oldest literary magazine in Indonesia, as well as one of the oldest in the world. There was a thought to shift this magazine from the printed version to an online magazine on August 1, 2016. Because three founders (Mochtar Lubis, PK Ojong, and Zaini) had died previously, the remaining two founders, Arief Budiman and Taufiq Ismail, decided to make a big change in the form and shape of the magazine.

It should be noted that Arief Budiman was not a writer in the traditional sense, because he did not write poems, novels or short stories that were published. He wrote many essays that were not always directly related to literature but proposed thoughts that influenced responses to literature. His attention to literary criticism and literary theory was quite apparent when he and Goenawan Mohamad announced a form of criticism based on the German Gestaltpsychologie, which was formulated as Ganzheit\'s criticism.

Directly or indirectly, Ganzheit\'s criticism became an alternative to the academic criticism developed by the Rawamangun camp at that time, which basically departed from the analysis of literary works by Indonesian literary lecturers. Ganzheit\'s method is a literary work that must be responded to as a whole because only in the whole work does it show a living meaning.

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On the contrary, with analysis, a work is divided into separate parts, making the work something dead and allowing it to lose its meaning.

Viewed from the present, Ganzheit and analysis are not two methods that need and can be antagonistically contrasted.

Contextualization, decontextualization and re-contextualization

A German philosopher, Georg Gadamer, using hermeneutic theory, shows three stages of understanding that will always be found in everyone\'s perception of an object. In the first stage, each object is always responded to as a meaningful Gestalt or Ganzheit. Gadamer used the Latin term and called it subtilitas intelligendi. People only capture the perception of something they understand, and on the contrary, something that is not understood will escape perception.

The second stage, called the subtilitas explicandi, is about making explicit the parts of a whole; to study how they form a wholeness. This is the stage commonly known in literary criticism as analysis. In automotive engineering, this is the stage for reviewing parts of a car or motorcycle, for example.

However, this analytical stage is useful as preparation for the third stage, which is called subtilitas applicandi. This is about arranging parts differently so that they become a new whole. Imagine people decipher the various parts of a car to see the possibility of reconstructing it into a tank in war. The car is the old whole, but through the description of its parts, the possibility of arranging them differently can be seen, so an object that appears is also meaningful, but has new meaning and new benefits.

Arief\'s role in literature was basically the role of an activist who drove literary life with ideas that disturbed or shook feelings of complacency among literary writers or literary critics. In this activity, he did not always see comprehensively the ideas he proposed, both in other aspects that might be important in the matter and in the existing relationships with other ideas about the same problem.

KOMPAS/ADITYA PUTRA PERDANA

A number of flower boards at Arief Budiman\'s funeral in Bancaan Cemetery, Salatiga City, Central Java, Thursday (23/4/2020).

Arief\'s peculiarity was to focus on a theme, giving him strong pressure without much sophistication so that it was easily understood and accepted by others. Another peculiarity was that it was expressed with sincerity, honesty and love, which resulted in many things that were not seen and easily forgiven. In his article titled "Essays on Essays", he quoted the Encyclopedia Britannica, which defines essays as "prose which questions a problem easily and at first glance – precisely to question a problem as long as it stimulates the heart of the writer".

This was repeated in literary discussions after he returned from his studies in the United States. He introduced what is called contextual literature, namely, literature written based on the life experience of a writer in the context of life that he experiences and knows from close range. According to him, an Indonesian writer is more convincing to write about life in the villages or urban life he knows as a migrant rather than fantasizing about winter snow, or trees that seem to molt in autumn and flowers that appear simultaneously in the spring in a cold country. Of course this is a proposal about realism which was implemented, for example, by Russian author Maxim Gorky (nominated five times for the Nobel Prize for literature, without success), who made many trips to various places in Russia before writing his novels. The peculiarity of Arief\'s proposal is that realism should be contextual, starting from the context of life that is lived in, and deepened in the story that is developed.

Theories about context in literature were outlined by the French post-structuralist philosopher Paul Ricoeur. According to Ricoeur, the context is never static, because context can always be decontextualized and can then be re-contextualized again. This applies in literature, in philosophy, in politics, and even in economics. The context of Shakespeare\'s Macbeth drama was the Kingdom of Scotland in the 16th century. A royal general was known to be successful and brave in every battle.

Arief said that poverty in Indonesia would not disappear if the economy continued to follow the capitalist path.

The story goes like this: His name is Macbeth. Once upon a time three magicians predicted that he would be king of Scotland. Encouraged by his own ambitions, Macbeth killed Duncan, who was king of Scotland at that time. Macbeth took over the royal throne. However, he could not avoid feeling guilty and paranoia always chased him. To secure himself and his power, he killed more and more people and ruled as a tyrant. Then there came chaos and civil war that made Macbeth and Lady Macbeth crazy before they eventually died.

When Parfi (Association of Indonesian Film Artists) performed it at Teater Arena of Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM) on several days in March 1980, a bold decontextualization could be seen. The condition of the Scottish kingdom was moved to the Batak lands. We don\'t know whether the transfer of context was done by Rendra who adapted Macbeth\'s story to Makbet, or if it was done by the staging director at TIM at the time. However, it is clear that the context experienced decontextualization and re-contextualization in the performance.

The same is true in philosophy. What is the point of studying the theory of the state of Plato, who lived in Athens between the sixth century and fifth century BC, for the purposes of a modern state now in the 21st century? This is possibly done only if the context of Plato and his philosophy is decontextualized and re-contextualized for the purposes of the present state and political order.

Selfless activism

After returning from Harvard University, Arief\'s activism moved from the literary field to the socio-political and socio-economic fields. This transition was very logical because the role of an activist continued to be carried out, only in other sectors. However, what remained the same was his habit or even talent as an activist. He was able to explain a symptom clearly and simply. His friend, Goenawan Mohamad, wrote that this was possible because Arief thought based on idealization.

More technically, I think Goenawan\'s intention was to think based on an ideal type, as taught by Max Weber. An ideal type is a construction in theory that is built as a logical perfection, which means to work as a reference for comparison when an empirical study is conducted.

In that way, Arief said that poverty in Indonesia would not disappear if the economy continued to follow the capitalist path. Only in socialism can poverty be overcome. This statement is an ideal one, not an empirical proposition.

According to this ideal statement, capitalism produces capital accumulation because there is always a surplus value that is taken from the wages of workers who are paid less than the wages they deserve. In this way, workers will not improve their standard of living and well-being and suffer further.

However, in the history of industry in the West, it turns out that the standard of living of workers has been improved and can be increased, because this is intentional by the capitalists, who realize that workers must be prevented from falling into total poverty, which can lead them to revolutionary fanaticism that could destroy capitalism. What Karl Marx predicted as Verelendung or immiseration of destitution of workers in industry did not happen. What has happened is an improvement in the standard of living and welfare of workers.

On the contrary in a socialist country like the former Soviet Union, poverty can occur severely. Since 1928, Stalin ordered a big push in industry in the Soviet Union after he came to full power in 1927. The big push was done through the reallocation of resources and labor from agriculture to industry. Russia\'s economic growth reached 6 percent a year, which never happened earlier in Russia. However, productivity was concentrated in heavy industry, while agriculture experienced collectivities that eliminated the property rights of farmers, and thereby eliminated economic incentives in agriculture.

Finally, the reallocation of resources from agriculture was unable to proceed because the resources in agriculture had been used up. Economic growth stopped, the economy stalled, poverty struck the farmers and 6 million people starved to death. This means that in a socialist country Verelendung or immiseration can occur, and not in a system of capitalism. However, Arief\'s tendency as an activist was to ignore these historical and empirical developments, and continued to explain socialism based on an ideal type that was logically and theoretically perfect, but not historical and not empirical.

What saved Arief was his personal integrity as an activist. He did not try to get popularity and he was not presented as a peacock like Rendra, for example. Nor did he try to look for opportunities to gain material or political advantages from his activism, and he was honest in his actions and in his remarks. His activism in the field of literature and in the field of social politics and socio-economics gave him influence through his opinions and actions.

KOMPAS/WISNU WIDIANTORO

Ignas Kleden

Arief was not an important figure in literature, because he did not have literary works that we can read, but literature benefited from Arief\'s activism, which made the field dynamic and vibrant. Arief was also not a person who had outstanding achievements in social sciences, but social science theories came alive because of Arief, who was adept at applying his activism for social change in a simple, easy-to-understand and always interesting way. Moral idealism in Arief was transformed into an ideal type in his sociology. In the end, Arief Budiman became a figure who was remembered, respected and even loved, because he lived for selfless activism, which was capable of mobilizing public discourse – a type of discourse that he himself was possibly not fully aware of.

Ignas Kleden, Sociologist