Reader response criticism and sacred texts

Question: how useful is reader response criticism in understanding a community’s relationship with its ‘sacred texts’? In what ways does reader response criticism challenge the meaningfulness of the term ‘sacred’?

A book does not read itself. Meaning does not happen when there is no one there to make it.

Reader response (RR) criticism or theories can demonstrate that the text does not have inherent meaning of its own, but rather created by the reader and shared between individuals and communities. An accepted interpretation of a particular text is very much a reflection of the community’s context and motivated by what the community wants to see or at least thinks it sees in the text. What RR theories can also show is the instability of meaning of the text, and that interpretation of the text can evolve, be accepted and rejected, or completely disappear over time. And thus with regard to ‘sacred’ texts, the sacredness is to a certain extent created and maintained by religious communities. Outside such communities, the meaning of sacredness in the text is understood differently, perhaps not as ‘sacred’ at all. RR criticisms challenge the ‘sacredness’ of a text when they highlight the constructed nature of interpretation that exists, inter alia, in the mind of the individual reader or as a group interpretation of the text (influenced by compromise, politicking, and other biases because we’re all human with interests to protect) instead of something that is received in a supernatural and decontextualised manner. By implicating the reader in the meaning-making process that bestows upon the text its ‘sacredness’, this means that the ‘sacredness’ of the text is not autonomous nor it is pre-formed and waiting to be found. RR criticism calls into question the ‘sacredness’ of the physical book that sits on the shelf or the desk unread. Instead it considers the ‘sacred’ nature of the book that only ‘materialises’ when reading it is tantamount to a religious experience. In other words, ‘sacredness’ is an event that occurs in a particular time and place rather than something that just is.

On the viability of ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ as categories in Malaysia

The first thing that would be useful when thinking about genders and sexualities in Malaysia is that the categories of ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ are far from native and natural in the national language, Bahasa Malaysia. What is meant by ‘native’ and ‘natural’ refers to the fact that gender and sexuality are relatively recent loanwords. And as loanwords, they have a history and serve particular functions. Does the fact that ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ are loanwords from the English language and emerge from a Western medical, sociological and philosophical tradition mean that their meaning in the Malaysian context is foreign and out of place?

When ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ and their different linguistic incarnations reflective of the country’s multilingual fabric appear at all, they are sporadic, infrequent, and usually enmeshed in the discourse of academia, feminism, and human rights. ‘Gender’ and ‘sexuality’ are words and currency of those privileged by education and class background. Having rigorous knowledge and interest in gender and queer theory is often the preserve of liberal, queer, activist and/or intellectuals. So there is a spectrum rather than a discrete know/don’t know in the level of knowledge and use of the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ in Malaysia.

The entry of new terms into a language and the development of those terms are governed by multiple factors beyond the will of one individual. Although the viability of terms in a language will require the consensus of collective acceptance and use, the fate of the terms’s cultural connotations are harder to predict. We can have the words ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ in public usage, but how would people react to these terms? What are the assumptions, misconceptions, prejudices, and the kind of curiosities these words invite? But above all, why does an interrogation into the genealogies of ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ in Malaysia matter at all? The answer to these questions has huge political implications with regard to the state of queer and feminist activism in Malaysia. Because language matters.

The banning of the LGBT rights festival, Seksualiti Merdeka, in 2011 precipitated the circulation of false descriptions and connotations of the festival in the Malaysian media as a ‘free sex’ event. With ‘merdeka’ to mean ‘independence’ or ‘liberation’ but with ‘seksualiti’ not gaining much linguistic traction in Malay, the very name of the festival became subject to misunderstanding. However, machinations leading to such a misunderstanding was far from innocent.

News reports and opinion editorials about transgender, gay, and lesbian individuals in Malaysia in the local mainstream media activate and reproduce transphobic and homophobic sentiments in a moralising tenor. Outside the manipulation of emotive issues and moral panics that serve partisan politics lies a broken linguistic and cultural landscape that seems, at first sight, inhospitable to the development of a local gender and sexuality discourse.

First and foremost, let us consider the westernness of ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’. In the present situation, the words ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ are already in usage and in circulation in Malaysia. There’s not much we can do about that. Of course words do become obsolete and ‘die out’, but I’m not convinced that the terms used in one of the most influential discourses in recent times will become obsolete anytime soon. In opposition to Francis Fukuyama’s eurocentric assertions of the ‘end of history’, our history of gender and sexuality in Malaysia is only beginning to be told.

In their current usage, we have to pick up and analyse the perceived and ‘real’ cultural connotations of the terms, i.e. as concepts, they are ‘western’. Of course this accusation is true, as concepts ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ emerge out of western philosophy (which was once upon a time, an amalgamation of medicine, politics, mathematics, among other pre-specialised disciplines).

Even the discourse of biological sex did not begin with the oppositional or complimentary notion of sexual dichotomy. In Greek philosophy (and throughout much of western thought), women were considered lesser men or simply ‘incomplete’ as people. For instance, morphologically, the naming of women’s sexual anatomy (vagina, or the invagination of the women’s ‘penis’) was once part and parcel of the discourse that justified women’s inferiority. It would take hundreds of years for feminist theory to pick up on misogynist philosophical texts of a bygone era to develop what we can recognise today as gender theory. There are certainly differences in female and male anatomy, but the way they are talked about have changed during the course of history.

But what of the idea of ‘concepts’ themselves? The methods in the development of an idea are perhaps western in origin, too. Concepts are frameworks for systematic thinking and analysis. They are the vessels in which discourse reside, but they are permeable to other elements – the cultural and historical. Take for instance the differences we see in women and men; how people talk about women and men, and why they dress the way they do. In systematic thinking and analysis, what groups women and men together in how we describe them is gender. How we systematically think and analyse the erotics and legal history of desire is conveniently described through the concept of ‘sexuality’.

Remember, the term ‘gender’ or ‘sexuality’ had not come into popular existence until the last century. This means that gender is a cultural and historical construction as much as it a social construct. Gender is also an analytical construction in that we now have a framework to understand how femininity and masculinity exist as ‘effects’ of political and religious culture. More recently, people have begun to talk about how even sexuality is constructed. The idea and discourses pertaining to homosexuality had only come into existence in the late nineteenth century. Before, what is considered same-sex practices did not have a name. Now, not only does the term ‘homosexuality’ exist, but so does the identity and personhood of the ‘homosexual’.

Accused as more western than ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ are perhaps ‘homosexuality’, gay, and lesbian identities. Again, the westernness of gay and lesbian identities cannot be disputed as the origins of the discourse of homosexuality did emerge from the medical annals of European doctors and the reclamation of the discourse by gay communities did take place in the west. More belatedly, heterosexuality is now understood as a construct.

To ignore for a moment those who are still obsessed with the Kipling-esque binaries of east and west, globalisation is now the order of the day and changed how we think about world geopolitics. Globalisation of media and the internet assisted in the travel of ideas and concepts. Among them are the concept and connotations of gay and lesbian identities that were adopted by communities in their quest for belonging, identification, and legitimacy. Those with access to knowledge about gay and lesbian culture are those with class and educational privilege. The greater the privilege, the more savvy one becomes with the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’.

In a way, Malaysian public discourse picks up the terms gender and sexuality halfway in the narrative history of gender and queer theory, when the discourses regarding the two have developed in highly sophisticated ways in the west. By comparison, our own versions of ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ remain remotely peripheral to the ways gender and sexuality are discussed in the west and neighboring Southeast Asian countries. As discourses, our ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ are non-existent. Only until we develop our own discursive ‘centre’ of gender and sexuality can we begin to talk about decentering western ones.

Currently, we rely on the anthropological data of mainly western academics to piece together a puzzle that is the history of gender and sexuality in Malaysia. But will using the frameworks of ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ to look into the past when such ideas may have been non-existent risks being anachronistic? A reflexive historian never forgets that we can only look through the prism of the present and construct a historical narrative using the modern conveniences of theories that help us ‘see’ gender and sexuality of the past.

Thanks to the accommodating nature of the Malay language in its absorption of foreign words, we have the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ in the national Malay language dictionary. But surely this is not enough. Behind the definitions of terms lies a lack of depth. We are beset by a number of factors exacerbating the isolation and negative connotations of the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ in Malaysia. First, they are not used enough in the mass media and everyday parlance. Second, there is not enough interest in the studying of gender and sexuality. Third, our academic culture is stifled by rigid institutional barriers against ‘controversial’ and ‘liberal’ topics like gender and sexuality.

As concepts or theories, ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ needn’t be western if we can develop our own concepts and theories for even the notion of concepts and theories can be de-westernised. And with the critical mass of talk, writing, and visualising to develop a local discourse, the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ can be reclaimed from the clutches of negative connotations to become viable, positive, and culturally robust. In the mass of inconsequential commentary, there are gems to be had. During the age of globalisation where nation and local cultures are safeguarded from the ‘outside’, locality and indigenous concepts have greater legitimacy to withstand critique from within.

Derrida, the life of the philosopher, and the ‘biopic’

‘He was born. He thought. He died’

                                                                                        Heidegger on the ‘life’ of Aristotle

A review of Derrida’s biography by Benoît Peeters in The Guardian today made me think about whether or not the biography is crucial or incidental to understanding a philosopher’s thought. Does knowing (or not knowing) about Derrida’s life enable us to understand what is at stake in the process of deconstruction? What role does the biography, and in particular the 2002 ‘biopic’ by Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick, play? And since we’re talking about Derrida here, how is the biography deconstructed?

An image representing Jacques Derrida in his later years.

In a way, the biography does matter. Because it strives to capture the humanistic accounts of the philosopher’s life as noteworthy and supportive of her/his work. It also plugs into our obsession and voyeurism of the minutiae of a person’s life, to find out what makes them tick, and what of ourselves we can find in them. The thoughts, if one wishes to practice/follow them, can only be made tangible when it is embodied in the physical realm; in locational/corporeal context. There is a reason why certain hadiths attributed to the prophet Muhammad (PBUH) are so resonant for Muslims, particularly for some men who would dress, eat, and grow a beard in a certain way that the prophet himself might have done in order to become ‘closer’ to the memory and morality of the prophet. With regard to the philosopher, it becomes a question of destabilising the division between mind and body, speech and writing, the philosopher in person and the philosopher in representations.

Depending on how Derrida’s life is represented, it will not be entirely possible to understand the circumstances from which he had arrived to explaining the process of deconstruction. If told from the point of view of the biographer with an intention to record Derrida’s intellectual upbringing, his personal life, likes and dislikes, but without interrogating the place certain significant events in Derrida’s life that can be turning points in the way he thought, we as consumers of a philosopher’s biography may not gain much insight into his thought processes.

Biography in the film assumes the role of the recording tape that records and plays back the thoughts and bits of life events that emerge yet enmeshed in their place of enunciation. But once deconstructed, elements in Derrida’s biopic which include the authority of the biography’s authorship, the unity of the text, and the neutrality of representation will all be called into question. These include the status of Derrida as the great philosopher (possibly) undermined by the banality of his life such as looking for his house keys, eating breakfast, crossing the street, etc.

A deconstructed biography is often at variance with conventional narrativising of a person’s life that invariably include ‘true’ information about the philosopher’s life (i.e. details about his birth, education, opus, (eventual) death, the “What of Derrida” as opposed to the “Who of Derrida” as exemplified in his walking, talking, eating, laughing). Most importantly, the film raises questions about the status of the biography’s author: is it a film about Derrida or merely an autobiography of the film-makers and their experiences with the great philosopher? Their names are placed on the film as author/producers; who are they in relation to the subject they film? The film-makers record and cite Derrida’s words, select and edit them to create a kind of snapshot that only has traces of Derrida taken from a specific moment in time. But we do not get the ‘real’, unitary Derrida, the person.

The cinema as house of worship

The cinema and house of worship might come across as incongruent bedfellows. From its earliest days to the present day, cinemas have either been burned to the ground or, more mercifully, closed down for being places of moral decay. Where there is compromise (thanks to heterosexist logic), female audiences are made to sit apart in the darkened theatre from their male counterpart to circumvent illicit behaviour between sexes.

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). The flickering image of a saint is more akin to religious iconography than actors in a theatrical passion play.

The story of early silent cinema has been a lot about the story of gods and prophets. More as a footnote than a celebrated touchstone in the history of cinema is the fact that seventy films with biblical themes were made in the US and Europe before the First World War. One of the first American films was about the last of days of Christ called The Passion Play of Oberammegau (1898). The ‘father of Indian cinema’, D.G. Dadasaheb Phalke was inspired by the life of Christ flickering across the screen:

‘While the life of Christ was rolling fast before my eyes I was mentally visualising the gods Shri Krishna, Shri Ramachandra, their Gokul and Ayodhya … Could we, the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen?’ [1]

The showing of the film The Life and Passion of the Christ (1908, dir. Ferdinand Zecca) in a New York theatre was criticised by a priest in Newark for not being shown in church instead. Commentators of the film suggested soothing organ music and incense to add to the religious atmosphere of the film showing in a theatre [2]. A maker of biblical epics of the silent era, D.W. Griffith was convinced that film could be used as medium of moral instruction.

In my own area of research, texts from the Quran have been represented in cinematic form in Indonesia. The 1980s became a period when certain Indonesian films began to be particularly preachy. One of the first (and only) Indonesian films to adapt Quranic texts was Kisah Anak-anak Adam (The Story of Adam’s children, 1988, dir. Ali Shahab). Kisah Anak-anak Adam is the Islamic version of the story of Adam’s rival sons, Qabil and Habil, who fight over the hand of their sister, Iqlima, with tragic results.

Clipping from Suara Karya Minggu (26 June 1988): Cara Lain Untuk Berdakwah (Another Way To Preach). Here, Qabil kills Habil to attain Iqlima for himself.

The director would lead a prayer before the shooting of the film to bless the crew and film-making process. You could also say that the prayers were also supposed to have added an aura of religiosity to the film-making experience. The film is argued to be an alternative, more popular way of proselytising (or dakwah) to audiences who were more keen to go to the cinema than to the mosque.

Beginning a film shoot with prayer is hardly a rare practice unique to Muslim film-makers. The shooting of Cecil B. De Mille King of Kings (1927) first began with a mass celebrated by the Jesuit priest Father Daniel Lord who went on to write Hollywood’s 1930 Production Code. Even the actor who played Jesus is kept away from the rest of the cast during filming to imbue mystique to his role.

The cinematic visualisation of religious stories made with the very intent of moral didactism goes to the heart of the belief that film can be educational, spiritual, and above all, a source of moral good to be absorbed by ‘the masses’. Film with religious messages routinely begin with excerpts from sacred texts, a sermon, or a statement which alludes that something highly moral and religious is to be learned from watching the film.

Defying all classical theories of secularisation and the retreat of religion to the private sphere, religion in the 20th and 21st centuries, repackaged in a more popular format (some say commodified) have always found its way into public consciousness in brighter, glossier ways. With more films adapted from biblical texts still in the making, it seems as if the tension between cinemas as morally suspect places and religion may never be resolved once and for all.

____________________
Reference
[1] Rachel Dwyer (2006) Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema, Routledge.
[2] Jeffrey A. Smith (2001) ‘Hollywood theology: The commodification of religion in twentieth-century films’, Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Vol 11 No 2, pp 191-231.

The street as stage: Muslims participating in peaceful protests

While in Denmark and Indonesia this year, I found myself standing alongside people who took to the streets to demand the end of oppression against Muslims. In Copenhagen in late summer was a protest against the retainment of the Danish armed forces in Afghanistan. In Jakarta on Valentine’s Day feminist and Muslim activists and members of the film-making community stood outside on Bunderan HI to demand the end of the extremist group Front Pembela Islam’s (violent and at times, murderous) activities. Of course Muslim people are more than capable of protesting peacefully, having tea and biscuits while at it, and always happy to chat with passersby-cum-inadvertent-participants like myself about why they were out there.

Film director Hanung Bramantyo speaking to the press and the public.

Commodification of Islam in Malaysia: A postmodern condition

First published on New Mandala on 8 November 2012.

At the World Halal Week held annually in Kuala Lumpur, you can purchase halal bone china, an exemplar of luxury and piety rolled into one. Malaysia is the leader in halal certification and a major promoter of the global halal industry. With markets saturated with a mind-boggling array of sharia-compliant goods that cater to a more discerning Muslim middle class, Islam can be seen as having entered more deeply into the lives of Malaysian Muslims in more commodified ways than ever before. The line between the sacred and the consumable profane have blurred, and true to the dictum that Islam is ‘a way of life’,  anything which supports the notion of good Muslim personhood can now be made halal. The explosion of consumer goods imbued with spiritual meaning is a new phenomenon spurred on by the broadening middle classes disenchanted with meaningless consumerism. Now consumer goods can have real intrinsic, spiritual meaning. But how did everything beyond consumables (and indeed items beyond meat) become halal.

Commodification of culture started as a phenomenon that emerged from the early capitalist period of Fordist mass production which then intensified during late capitalism. Flexible and geographically mobile post-Fordist market approaches shifted from mass production to a more fragmented, niche market to suit every possible types of lifestyle. The ‘religious’ lifestyle or public piety characterised by halal crockery, toothpaste, make-up, and even beer can be regarded an outcome of post-Fordist modes of production. Marx’s concept of ‘commodity fetish’ may be the most relevant point of entry into understanding the commodification of objects and practices that were previously not considered commercial.

In Marx’s analysis, commodity fetish requires the concealment of the origins and processes involved in the production of a consumer product from the consumer in order to maintain the ‘religious fog’ that justifies the mystery of its self-evident value. Religious symbols and meaning as commodity fetish may behave in the same manner, in that the deeper engagement of the purpose and context of a particular symbol are sidestepped and usurped by other distracting elements that vie for the attention of the consumer. The self-evident value of a religious commodity is intrinsically located within itself rather than the processes that lead to its points of ‘origin’.

The abstraction of all other factors involved in the production of a commodity has profound consequences on not just our relationship with literal consumer products but also with symbols, religious or otherwise. The post-Fordist condition demands the proliferation of diversity and thrives on the specialisation of products (and labour). Driven by the perpetuated need for ‘new’ and ‘ever more novel-seeming goods’, styles and signifiers are extracted from their previous associations and fused together to produce new products in what Jameson calls ‘pastiche’ for new consumers in new contexts. The ease with which such meaning and symbols are removed from their original contexts may point to their increasingly depthless, untethered, and frictionless qualities.

Investigations into religious commodification have challenged theories of secularisation in modern society demonstrating that far from a wholesale decline in public belief in God and church membership, modern and rational societies, in particular those in Asia and the United States, continue to embrace religion and imbue public life with notions of religious essence. The rise of religious commodification has been argued to go hand in hand with the emergence of ‘Islamic modernity’, a political and cultural sensibility whereby modernity is embraced alongside a commitment to Islam as part of the project of modernity in its own terms as much as its approximations to western notions of modernity.

The concept of ‘Islamic modernity’ have a Lyotardian suspicion against the grand narrative of western modernity in favour of a more hybrid and reflexive modernity inflected with faith-based sensibilities where non-western contexts experience the rise of advanced economies and public cultures. The Islamic modern can be located in the popular consumption of Islamic media and Islamic forms of consumerism that at times exist, not without friction, alongside orthodox Islamic beliefs and practices.

When does a symbol cease becoming sacred and becomes simply a commodity bereft of its spiritual meaning? Can they become both? Halal products now have become more than just a spiritual choice but made to be synonymous with quality. However, there is considerable debate among practitioners and scholars about the effects of commodified forms of Islam. Some have praised the increased presence of Islam in the marketplace as it encourages the incorporation of Islamic values into the everyday practices of Muslims. Others have been less celebratory, arguing that the commercialisation of Islam appeals to superficial expressions of piety. Where does one draw the line for halal products? Does the choice to not utilise halal products make one less a conscientious Muslim?

The circulation of Islamic symbols outside the formalist domains and authority of the state and religious institutions and into the market and the media coheres with the emergence of Muslim publics. Facilitated by increasing access to new modes of communication, the creation of the Muslim public sphere challenges the authority of conventional religious institutions and fosters the building of a civil society and the ‘global ummah (community)’. The so-called Islamic revivalism across Muslim societies of the world coupled with increased communication and economic opportunities have boosted the production of things ‘Islamic’ which occurs alongside the increasing adoption of a public pious image amongst the consumer middle-class.

With all things considered, it is not an understatement to say that Islam is big business. But in Malaysia, where the conflation of ethnic and Islamic identity is a political and socioeconomic issue, consumer habits aligned with aspirational piety form just another disciplinary mode to reinforce the boundary markers of such an identity. To purchase halal products may just be another way of asserting one’s Malay identity. In the mounting challenges to Malay privilege and positive discrimination, Islamic consumerism may be a way to reinstate a sense of meaning and belonging.  Perhaps unexpectedly, Malaysia’s mall culture and ethnic/religious anxiety over the loss of institutional privilege were destined to become kindred spirits.

Will the real intellectual please stand up?

This is a response to Syahredzan Johan’s article, Rise of the pseudo-intellectuals. First published in Loyar Burok on 29 June 2012.

Is Syahredzan Johan intimidated by people who use big words and may actually be smart?

I am more than certain he would vehemently respond in the negative to the question above. However his recent article has all the implicit cues that point to a feeling of being threatened by smart-sounding people. More than intimidation perhaps is the curmudgeonly and sanctimonious attitude that can cut through the thick smokescreen of intellectual-wannabes and expose a person who, as it turns out, knows nothing.

What does he gain from this?

Notwithstanding the personal exchanges via email that prompted the writing of his article, ‘pseudo-intellectual’ is a personal attack on people who read, to varying degrees of depth and comprehension, and synthesise their ideas to produce arguments and opinions. It is an attack on people who are learning to engage intellectually in a culture that denies such levels of engagement from the get-go.

More crucially, ‘pseudo-intellectual’ is an all-to-easy label to use against someone you refuse to engage with on an intellectual level. It’s a label to belittle someone who you disagree with especially when that someone is adept at expressing themselves vividly.

The fact that Syahredzan thinks that ‘pseudos’ “challenge opinions or views as a way of making a personal attack” shows how personally he must take any kind of intellectual criticism and how emotionally fragile he becomes by an onslaught of Nietzschean quotes and valid, deeply thought-out opinions.

Interestingly, he speaks of this ‘rise’ of pseudo-intellectuals, but does not care to state the possible reasons for this apparent rise. I myself do not have an answer to explain this phenomenon but I can say a few things to people who are suspicious of ‘pseudo-intellectuals’:

You are lucky if you had the privilege and opportunity to study and travel abroad, talk with people who don’t bat an eyelid when you quote Marx, and being told you are smart without having to read and quote Marx. But if much of your life and intellectual formation remained rooted in Malaysia where you’re not taught to think and think differently, how wonderful it must have seem to discover rebel thinkers like Fanon, de Beauvoir, and Rousseau?

You are lucky if you have cultivated the art of articulating your ideas from your high-brow readings without sounding like a fool with pretensions above your reach. But in Malaysia, we do not have many avenues to articulate ‘high’ ideas and have those ideas validated by arbiters in the intelligentsia. To begin with, our intelligentsia or what we can recognise as one is tiny and institutionally, there is great resistance to a development of one. And we know that much of ‘highbrow’ thinking is suspicious of the state, the status quo, capitalism, and heteronormativity.

In the Malaysian context, we are witnessing some changes in public attitudes towards dissent.

Slowly, a culture of protest and civil disobedience is being developed. It comes to no surprise then that these events and the people inspired by them seek to nourish their minds further with theory and philosophy that chime with their experiences and help articulate raw feelings into bigger ideas. Also, many of these people who quote Sen and Gandhi are young. To denounce ‘pseudos’ is also to dismiss youthful attempts at forming an intellectual identity. It is like stomping on new blossoms in the spring.

What is this ‘honesty’ that Syahredzan speaks of and celebrates? Is it the admission of not knowing anything highbrow and intellectually aspirational and actually have pride in it?

For Syahredzan it seems, only some people can be deemed ‘real’ intellectuals, others not. He plays right into the hands of structural power, privilege and class if he truly believes that. Aside from the narrowly-defined established intellectuals (academicians, writers, artists), what does it take be an intellectual?

I believe that smartness is the sum of perception and institutionalised lore. Perception because you can be perceived to sound smart when you are buoyed by the gift of confident eloquence. Institutionalised lore produces who is ‘smart’ through exam results, intelligence quotients, science streaming in schools, and university degrees for example – there is no consistent evidence that these things actually make you smart, but people say they do.

Of course while smartness and intellect can mean the same thing, intellectualism is quite different; it grants status, respect, prestige, and can be very intimidating.

When you are suspicious of people who engage in an intellectual manner chances are you envious, insecure, despise people who try to be better themselves with their minds, or all of the above?

I just hope Syahredzan will see the larger context behind this ‘rise’ of pseudo-intellectuals should the phenomenon itself be real rather than a figment of his insecurities.

Pengajian tinggi diperniagakan, mutu pendidikan dipermangsakan

Disiar di Merdeka Review pada 26hb Jun 2012.

Siaran iklan di panggung wayang sebelum mulanya filem untuk sebuah universiti swasta yang menawarkan huruf-huruf azimat atas selembar kertas – BA, MA, PhD – ialah sesuatu yang sangat membimbangkan. Dahulu kala, iklan yang mempromosikan minuman keras sering disajikan buat penonton/konsumer. Kini, pengajian tinggi didagangkan seperti kereta dan telefon bimbit. Penuntut IPT (dan ibu bapa) kononnya adalah “pelanggan”, kecuali hak-hak konsumer pendidikan tidak mungkin wujud kerana pendidikan tidak boleh diukur atau ditaksir. Jika penuntut tidak puas hati dengan mutu pengajian, apakah mereka dibayar kembali ganti rugi? Apakah semua penuntut IPT (dan ibu bapa) tahu langsung akan kriteria sebuah pusat pengajaran tinggi yang bermutu dan bertaraf antarabangsa?

Bagi kesemua pertanyaan di atas, saya rasa jawabnya tidak. Secara dasarnya, pintu masuk ke alam pengajian tinggi akan dibuka mengikut kemampuan kewangan, daya intelek, dan kelayakan yang lain. Namun di Malaysia, pintu masuknya banyak dan seperti sebuah medan selera, menu kursus dan IPT yang beraneka macam boleh membingungkan sang mahasiswa (dan ibu bapa). Apakah bakal mahasiswa tahu kelebihan IPT X daripada Y selain nama dan jenis kursus yang mempamerkan prestij? Apakah ibu bapa bakal mahasiswa rela menyerah puluh ribuan ringgit dalam bentuk pinjaman atau sebaliknya untuk sebuah IPT yang belum diketahui tahap kecemerlangan graduannya? Atau apakah sijil yang berhuruf azimat sahaja yang diburu?

Susulan daripada isu hutang PTPTN yang menggempar, persoalan panas pendidikan percuma sebagai penawar bisa penghutang-penghutang muda terus membakar. Mungkinkah barisan pembangkang ingin meraih watak “hero” mahasiswa dengan umpan mereka, pendidikan “percuma”? Tetapi apakah barisan pembangkang sedar akan kos pembiayaan sebuah IPT yang bertaraf antarabangsa? Dan apakah pendidikan itu benar-benar boleh dipercumakan? Parah sekali apabila peluang untuk bersambung belajar dipolitikkan untuk mengumpan undi muda. Jika kita ingatkan kembali dana berjutaan ringgit yang disalurkan untuk penubuhan sekolah-sekolah bestari yang disalahgunakan oleh pihak pengurusan dan pentadbiran untuk lawatan luar negara, kita dapati bahawa wang ringgit institusi dan pendidikan “percuma” bagi mereka yang layak mudah dibazir kerana matlamat yang terpesong dan penyelidikan yang lemah.

Bagaimana pula dengan United Kingdom, negara yang kaya dengan IPT yang terbaik di dunia dan destinasi ribuan mahasiswa Malaysia setiap tahun? Kini kerajaan Konservatif David Cameron telah menghentikan pembiayaan awam untuk pusat-pusat pengajian tinggi dan menaikkan sebanyak tiga kali ganda yuran tahunan penuntut tempatan. Kesan terhadap mutu pendidikan di IPT British akan langsung dirasai; tenaga dan bakat pengajar baru terpaksa disekat, dan kursus yang tidak menjamin keuntungan bagi pembangunan material negara seperti sastera, falsafah, dan media dibanding kejuruteraan dan sains akan diperlekehkan. Malaysia akan menjejak langkah United Kingdom jika perbadanan awam tidak menyumbang kepada pembangunan masyarakat yang saksama dari segi pendidikan.

Apabila pengajian tinggi dijadikan produk yang didagangkan semata-mata, bukan sahaja mutu pendidikan dipersia-siakan. Di sebalik fenomena penuntut yang “dipelanggankan”, ramai penuntut IPT, terumatanya IPT swasta dijadikan korban tamak haloba para “usahawan” IPT. Terdapat beberapa IPT swasta yang dilaporkan menyeleweng dan merompak secara diam-diam pinjaman PTPTN pelajar. Sesetengah penuntut IPT pula melapor penipuan nama dan pendaftaran kursus oleh pihak fakulti. Kemudahan seharian yang “basic” seperti bekalan elektrik dan air di beberapa kolej swasta yang kurang memuaskan sering dilaporkan juga.

Saya sendiri pernah menginap di asrama kolej swasta di mana bekalan elektrik dipotong setiap malam dengan sengaja untuk menjimat kos pentadbiran kolej. Pengetua kolej tersebut merupakan seorang ahli politik UMNO yang bercita-cita tinggi dan pengurus sebuah golf resort di kawasan kolej swasta tersebut. Pelajar luar negara pula sering dilayan seperti warga kasta bawahan. Selain perkauman yang berleluasa, pegawai-pegawai imigresen secara rutin menyerbu asrama pelajar luar negara IPT swasta atas pelbagai alasan yang sangat mencurigakan. Apabila pendidikan menjadi sekadar bisnes dan sebuah proses menjual-beli, pihak pengurusan IPT menjadi peniaga yang akan jarang sekali beretika.

Pendidikan bukan sebuah produk yang boleh dijual-beli. Namun sikap rakyat Malaysia yang terlalu mudah menanggap pendidikan secara prinsipnya “murni” dan secara prosesnya “diberi” seperti objek dari pengajar ke pelajar. Pendidikan, terumatanya pengajian tinggi, menyiapkan individu untuk berfikir dengan kritis sebelum melangkah ke dunia bukan sekadar sebagai pekerja, tetapi sebagai dewasa yang berpengetahuan luas. Universiti adalah institusi pengetahuan tertinggi yang melahirkan warga yang bijak-pandai, lincah berkomunikasi, dan mempunyai kesedaran sosial.

Kerana IPT (terutamanya IPTS tertentu) yang diumpamakan kilang pencetak sijil mengambil peranan sebagai penjaja pendidikan dan beriklanan merata tempat, keperluan dan hak mahasiswa jarang dibela. Ramai mahasiswa tempatan dan dari luar negara dibelenggu aturan IPT dan ugutan yang boleh menjejaskan perjalanan pengajian mereka. Oleh yang demikian, hanya hak dan kesedaran mahasiswa yang harus diperkasa, kerana pelaburan atas nama pendidikan mahasiswa amatlah besar. Kerajaan yang mengutamakan peniaga pendidikan dan meminggirkan mereka yang kurang berkuasa politik, kewangan, dan sosial akan membina masyarakat yang materialis dan anti-intelektual.

*Gambar di atas menunjukkan seorang lelaki yang menaikkan sepanduk atau notis yang bertulis ‘Education not for sale’ atau pendidikan bukan untuk dijual.

Mainstreaming Islam in the Indonesian public sphere: Ummi Aminah as a case study

The film premiere of Aditya Gumay’s newest film, Ummi Aminah (Mother Aminah) in Jakarta last January 2012 was situated at the crossroads of events in Indonesian film industry. Prior to the screening of the film, the film director’s address to the audience expressed a plea to the public to consume locally-made films. As I write this, the Indonesian film industry is experiencing a decline in cinema audience numbers. From a respectful 1 million viewers in 2010, now film-makers and producers can expect a modest half a million. Production values of current and future films, and the distribution and packaging of original DVDs will reflect the slump as well. Gumay’s latest offering, Ummi Aminah, to woo audiences is at once shrewd and chimes with the Indonesian socio-political zeitgeist.

The film is promoted as a ‘family film’ about a popular female preacher and the dramatic entanglements that befall her large family and her reputation as a religious leader. Ummi Aminah is mother to five children and grandmother of one. In her role as preacher, she is also ‘mother’ to her all-female congregation who pray with her and listen to her sermons. However, indiscretions within her family; rumours surrounding her oldest daughter Zarika’s involvement with a married man and her son Zainal’s arrest for drug trafficking move in tandem to threaten to not only tear her family apart but also tarnish her reputation as a credible leader both on the public and domestic front.

Via Wikipedia

Notes on power and the difficulties of theorising gender in Indonesian film-making

Talking about gender in Indonesian cinema is actually quite hard when you get down to establishing a sort of link between gender as an analytical construct and gender as understood in public discourse.

What was always frustrating, was that when one began to talk about gender in film, the conversation turns into a discussion about women in film; whether they are representations of or in terms of women’s roles in film production. Even though I make it a point to bring up masculinity in film-making, the discussion continued to be steered towards what my informants thought about the role of women in film. It seems as if gender was about women, and not about men. Thus it then became inevitable that my discussion about gender in Indonesian cinema, which takes into account both femininity and masculinity, is going against the natural current of discourse requiring, by implication, greater soul-searching and reading against the grain.

This is much like in the spirit of Richard Dyer’s description of male sexuality, that it is difficult to see it and talk about it, as it is like “air – you breathe it in all the time, but you aren’t not aware of it much” [1]. But this may have to do with the fact that historically, most Indonesian films throughout the New Order have been about men and when they do feature films with prominent female roles, they speak about men’s concerns or “spheres of action” while women fulfill merely a subsidiary role [2].

While I would agree that women in New Order cinema do play a secondary tole, I am inclined however to question the essentialising of what those spheres of action are. But this is how discourse and power relations and their intimate proximity to knowledge work; by highlighting, examining, scrutinising in microscopic detail the object we wish gain control of, through knowledge – by knowing more about them so we can control (if we wanted to) various aspect of our object of study/interest. And so how gender is taken to be seen as simply about women is a manifestation of a Foucaldian way of knowing; to know more about women and to gaze an object of study/scrutiny is to have further power over women (and indeed provide the resources for resistance).

The fixation of gender as women simultaneously elides the focus on the powerful and privileged of course. In the case of looking at gender in film, much has been discussed about women, queers, non-white (Asian, Black) characterisation in cinema. Only recently do we find the tables turned on the other, more powerful half of the power equation – masculinity and whiteness in film – discussed and therefore ‘exposed’ and losing its power as the epistemological voyeur in cinema.

To not ‘notice’ masculinity demonstrates how deeply impacted we are as film viewers by the dominant discourses of gender. We can argue that examining masculinity is more than just studying the men in films, but recognise the tropes or conventions male characters habitually exhibit and how the particular concerns expressed by the male characters drive the narrative of the film.

The next step in analysing gender in Indonesian film or any film for that matter is not to look specifically at femininity or masculinity at work on screen, but the gender dynamic, how the genders play against each other on screen. What I hope this can demonstrate is some semblance of gendered power differential played out between characters. Perhaps this analytical angle may provide an avenue for better understanding the ways in which representations of misogyny & propagation of certain gendered tropes are privileged and marginalised in film.

Besides masculinity, there is another taken-for-granted power relations at work in Indonesian film: Javanese cultural dominance.

In Indonesian cinema, we find other instances of power relations still under-examined, alongside masculinity vis a vis femininity in film, such as the Javanese cultural/linguistic dominance and the regionalisation of other Indonesian film set and made outside of Java. Karl Heider in Indonesian Cinema, National Culture on Screen, argues that Indonesian cinema has never really been regionalised, but rather nationalised due to lingua franca of Bahasa Indonesia in (all?) films during the New Order. The nationalisation of film was also an expression of Javanese cultural dominance imposed by Suharto’s regime on all modes of public communication, particularly cinema. But then, Heider’s book was written in 1991.

State control over the linguistic standardisation in Indonesian films explains why films made during the New Order, which are not only made in the standardised Bahasa Indonesia, but also more easily understood by Malay-speaking Malaysians. Whereas years following Suharto’s political demise, the cinematic articulation of Indonesian cinema was reclaimed by regionalisation. Indonesian films became more difficult for Malaysians to understand.

A case in point that signalled a cultural-linguistic dissonance between the two nations was when the film Ada Apa Dengan Cinta was broadcast on Malaysian television in 2003, with Malay subtitles. The much-talked about event perplexed local audiences who had assumed they would be able to largely understand the dialogue. Before then, working class Malaysians consumed plenty of Indonesian horror films VCDs and video tapes without Malay subtitles with enough comprehension of the dialogue and narrative.

Regionalisation meant that dialogue for films set in Jakarta for example would be heavily peppered with Jakarta slang and occasional Javanese (which would then come with subtitles in Bahasa Indonesia). Regionalisation of Indonesian cinema further underscores the vivid diversity of Indonesian peoples who do not necessarily understand each other linguistically but somehow remains largely silent, as a “national cinema”, who it largely represents.

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[1] Pg. 28 from Richard Dyer’s essay Male sexuality in the media, in The Sexuality of Men edited by Andy Metcalf, 1985, Pluto Press.

[2] Pg. 116 from Krishna Sen’s essay Repression and resistance: Interpretations of the feminine in Indonesian cinema, in Culture and society in New Order Indonesia: 1965-1990 edited by V. Hooker, 1995, Oxford University Press.