Pencitraan Polemik Ekonomi Orang Melayu dalam Filem Abang

Artikel ini membicarakan isu dan polemik ekonomi masyarakat Melayu yang diangkat sebagai subjek dalam filem Abang (1981) arahan sutradara Rahim Razali. Secara umumnya orang Melayu mengalami perubahan dalam ekonomi yang ketara apabila kerajaan Malaysia mewujudkan Dasar Ekonomi Baru (DEB)pada tahun 1971 melalui Rancangan Malaysia kedua (RMK-2). Pembentukan dasar ini bertujuan untuk mewujudkan keseimbangan sosioekonomi kepada semua rakyat serta membentuk perpaduan antara kaum. Pelaksanaan DEB ini banyak membuka ruang kepada orang Melayu untuk mengambil peluang daripada pertumbuhan ekonomi negara yang pesat ketika itu namun secara tidak langsung transformasi ini juga telah mencetuskan konflik dan polemik baharu dalam kalangan orang Melayu. Filem yang dibuat selepas 10 tahun dasar baru ini dilancarkan secara dasarnya merupakan kritik sosial Rahim Razali terhadap masyarakat Melayu dalam era 80-an terutamanya yang berkaitan dengan jati diri serta cabaran semasa dalam menjunjung adat dan budaya bangsa. Kesemua pencitraan polemik ekonomi Orang Melayu telah diterjemahkan melalui watak-watak keluarga Dato’ Din manakala watak-watak orang kampung pula merupakan representasi realisme masyarakat Melayu yang tidak terkesan dengan transformasi ekonomi ini. Kajian ini menggunakan kaedah kualitatif iaitu dengan menganalisis teks sebagai kaedah kajian utama dan temubual serta pengumpulan data sekunder sebagai pendekatan tambahan. Pendekatan sosiologi sastera (Hippolyte Taine) juga digunakan untuk menganalisis hubungan langsung antara filem dengan zaman, ras dan milieunya. Kata kunci: Ekonomi, Dasar Ekonomi Baru (DEB), filem Rahim Razali, isu Melayu, jati diri.

Bewegung, Mythologie der Moderne

Paul Valéryʼs remark »Nouvelle mythologie / les formes en mouvement / connaître c’est former« (1894) states the argument of the present article. Its intention is to highlight the importance of movement in modern arts and research studies. It observes the fascination which movement held for artists and scientists who were trying to comprehend the dynamics of physical and mental processes in creative work and to find appropriate forms for volatility and complexity in traditional and recent arts and media. The focal point of this article are the works of Charles Baudelaire, Hippolyte Taine and the futurist avantgarde, especially Umberto Boccioni, as well as physiological studies on the effects of huge cities, crowds, sports, acceleration, and aeroplanes (Angelo Mosso, William James). In this context, Valéry’s poems, essays and notes appear as a crossover project and Valéry himself as a protagonist of the intense dialogue between the arts, media and sciences concerningmovement as physical and mental phenomenon and stylistic challenge.

Shils and the Intellectuals

This chapter traces Edward Shils' distinctive conception of the intellectual—as indispensable to, but all too often an opponent of, social order. Shils’ aversion to intellectual disloyalty was a constant throughout his adult life, though his specifically ‘Shilsian’ take on the intellectual and his society would only cohere, in a sophisticated, original, and consistent way, in the late 1950s. The chapter reconstructs Shils’ encounter with the downcast intellectual, first as a precocious reader of Gustave Flaubert, Hippolyte Taine, and, above all, Georges Sorel. It was Sorel’s chiliastic politics of heroic violence which, in its purist clarity, helped disclose the transcendent moral impulse that, to varying degrees, leads intellectuals to judge their societies harshly. When, after World War II, the moral ideal seemed spent even within socialist movements, Shils observed its traces in the complaints of ex-radicals. Society’s loose consensus depends on public belief, he argued, which in turn depends on the social picture put forward by intellectuals. These ‘persons with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred’ could help support the fragile achievements of civil politics, but Shils was not optimistic.

Dissociation and the Unconscious Mind: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives on Mediumship

There is a long history of discussions of mediumship as related to dissociation and the unconscious mind during the Nineteenth Century. After an overview of relevant ideas and observations from the mesmeric, hypnosis, and spiritualistic literatures, I focus on the writings of Jules Baillarger, Alfred Binet, Paul Blocq, Théodore Flournoy, Jules Héricourt, William James, Pierre Janet, Ambroise August Liébeault, Frederic W.H. Myers, Julian Ochorowicz, Charles Richet, Hippolyte Taine, Paul Tascher, and Edouard von Hartmann. While some of their ideas reduced mediumship solely to intra-psychic processes, others considered as well veridical phenomena. The speculations of these individuals, involving personation, and different memory states, were part of a general interest in the unconscious mind, and in automatisms, hysteria, and hypnosis during the period in question. Similar ideas continued into the Twentieth Century.

Émile Zola’s Climate History of the Second Empire

This article looks at Émile Zola’s novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart and argues that it describes its subject, the Second Empire, as a warming climate tending toward climate catastrophe. Zola’s affinity to the notion of climate is shown to be linked to his poetic employment of the concept of ‘milieu’, inspired by Hippolyte Taine. Close readings of selected passages from the Rougon-Macquart are used to work out the climatic difference between ‘the old’ and ‘the new Paris’, and the process of warming that characterises the Second Empire. Octave Mouret’s department store holds a special place in the article, as it is analysed through what the article suggests calling a ‘meteorotopos’: a location of intensified climatic conditions that accounts for an increased interaction between human and non-human actors. The department store is also one of the many sites in the novel cycle that locally prefigure the ‘global’ climate catastrophe of Paris burning, in which the Second Empire perishes.

Shils and the intellectuals

This chapter traces Shils' distinctive conception of the intellectual—as indispensable to, but all too often an opponent of, social order. Shils’ aversion to intellectual disloyalty was a constant throughout his adult life, though his specifically ‘Shilsian’ take on the intellectual and his society would only cohere, in a sophisticated, original, and consistent way, in the late 1950s. The chapter reconstructs Shils encounter with the downcast intellectual, first as a precocious reader of Gustave Flaubert, Hippolyte Taine, and, above all, Georges Sorel. It was Sorel’s chiliastic politics of heroic violence which, in its purist clarity, helped disclose the transcendent moral impulse that, to varying degrees, leads intellectuals to judge their societies harshly. When, after World War II, the moral ideal seemed spent even within socialist movements, Shils observed its traces in the complaints of ex-radicals. Society’s loose consensus depends on public belief, he argued, which in turn depends on the social picture put forward by intellectuals. These ‘persons with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred’ could help support the fragile achievements of civil politics, but Shils was not optimistic.

Der Raum des Politischen. Occupy und die Demokratie des Protestes

Im Herbst 2011, als Occupy Wall Street die Aufmerksamkeit der großen Medien erregte, handelte sich die Bewegung natürlich auch eine ganze Litanei an Verleumdungen seitens amerikanischer Reaktionäre ein. Frank Miller, Autor und Zeichner der Graphic Novel Batman - die Rückkehr des Dunklen Ritters, verstieg sich zu den grellen Worten: «Occupy ist nichts als ein Haufen Lümmel, Diebe und Vergewaltiger, ein renitender Mob, der von Woodstock-Nostalgie und einer ekelhaften falschen Rechtschafenheit lebt.» Ann Coulter, eine Polemikerin aus dem rechen Lager, bezog Occupy ohne viel Federlesens auf die These ihres kurz zuvor erschienenen Buches, für das sie gerade die Werbetrommel rührte, ein Werk mit dem unmissverständlichen Titel Demonic. How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America.Und David Horowitz verurteilte «diesen finsteren Karneval aus Vergwaltigung, Polizistenhasse, Haschdealen und sogar Mord.» Die Rhetorik dieser Schmähtiraden ist vertraut, ja zeitlos. In ihr klingt zweifellos auch die Sprache nach, die die jungen Sozialwissenschaften im späten 19. Jahrhundert etablierten, als Gelehrte wie Gustave Le Bon, Hippolyte Taine und Cesare Lombroso Menschenmengen als Manifestation einer Massenhysterie, als pathologische Aussetzt der individuellen Vernuft oder als evolutionären Atavismus daignostizierten.

Taine, Hippolyte-Adolphe (1828–93)

Hippolyte Taine dominated the intellectual life of France in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was seen as the leader of the positivist, empiricist, anti-clerical forces in a period characterized by dramatic advances in science and technology and inspired by the hope that scientific method could be applied to human affairs. Yet at the heart of his life and work was the rationalist, essentialist imperative of Spinoza and of Hegel: to demonstrate the world as system, as necessity, to ‘banish contingency’. The story of his life is the story of the abandonment of this project: it is a long, painful learning experience ending in the acceptance of loss; his richly varied works can be seen as the products of this philosophical journey.