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172 Epilogue Turning Time: An Interview Temporal Coordination Etienne Turpin: Your work is based on a coordination of time and space that serves as a framework for your analysis of Jakarta. Could you tell us something about how you read this coordination? Abidin Kusno: While every aspect of our activities is largely governed by time, we are in many ways constructing time as well, for time is a social and political construct. We invest time with narrative, which gives meaning to our life. The state also invests time with a narrative that gives life to the nation. The state therefore always seeks to control time. The whole ideology of development during Suharto’s era (1966–1998), for instance, is based on a temporal assumption drawn from modernization theory. There were series of five-year plans of development that would eventually lead Indonesia to lepas landas (take off) like an airplane. Lepas means free: free from poverty, among others, so as to achieve the national goal of “a society that is just and prosperous.” To arrive at the platform for takeoff, the whole society would have to follow the order of the state as development needs political stability, or so the story goes. The whole nation here is given a homogenous time occupied by an idea of development. As a member of a generation who grew up in the time of Suharto, I was given the idea (via school and media) that we were moving upward as long as we followed the order of the state. Yet, it was also unavoidable that we saw things that contradicted the linear time of development. I moved to Jakarta in the late 1980s, and anyone who was in the city at that time witnessed not only progress but also contradictions. This was the time of the construction boom. turning time: an interview 173 Capital accumulation and authoritarianism came hand in hand moving forward frantically in the form of city-building to outpace the growth of kampung settlements. This is an example of the contradiction of the time of development . I have since then sought to understand such contradictory expressions in the city, and an analysis of space offers such an opportunity. Unlike time, space cannot be fully controlled. Space reveals the contradiction of development time. There seems to be a gap between time and space. This is the gap that the state has sought to deny by seeing it as a transitional phenomenon. Yet such a gap never seems to go away. I became interested in seeing how such a gap shapes the subjectivity of people who are living there. How did the state, the professionals , and the citizens respond to the contradiction of development? ET: How has that ideology of development changed, or how do you see it as having changed, since the Suharto period? AK: I am not sure if the ideology of development has changed since the end of Suharto. Development has a history longer than the Suharto regime. We could trace the idea back to colonial time. Is there a new construct of time after the end of the Suharto New Order? My work on the post-Suharto era is an attempt to answer this question. What have time and space done to each other after the New Order? This is not just a research question, but also a moral and political question. When we analyze the Suharto era, we assume an “anti-authoritarian” position without much difficulty, but how about today fifteen years into reformasi ? How should we develop a critical relation to the new time? Framing the post-Suharto era as a new time opens up many ways to conceive power and construct possibilities. I remember at the beginning of the reform era the keyword was rakyat (poor people). Perhaps because of democratization , the notion of rakyat suddenly appeared everywhere. Rakyat seemed to be the majority at a time when the middle class found themselves in decline as they lost their jobs following the financial crisis. Rakyat seems to not only represent the new time, but it survives the New Order. The development ideology of Suharto was supposed to emancipate them, but after more than thirty years rakyat still remains poor and marginal. Perhaps the emergence of “rakyat” in the post-Suharto era represents the failure of developmentalist ideology. This has led me to consider how rakyat was situated in the developmentalist time of Suharto. Did they stay outside the hegemonic time of development? The post...

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