雷智宇 Zikri Rahman

病態中的「憤世代」

文／雷智宇（國立交通大學社會與文化研究所）

譯／黃雋浩（國立交通大學亞際文化研究學程）

在我這個簡短的策展說明中，如果要介定社會病態，我認為它的概念並不局限於醫學實踐或學科本身，而是必須將之與整個社會脈絡扣連起來。 因此，這裡的社會病態意味著我們需要追問，當中所帶來社會結構失序和瓦解之間的關聯。 而作為民眾、公眾、被統治者、群眾、平民、rakyat （編按：馬來語「人民」）──我們設法從這些維度，去理解集體焦慮如何在眾多細微差異不斷相互形塑，構成複雜的集體。

倘要說明我們何以肩負起理解這個社會結構的責任，恐怕不能不先闡清當中的細微差異是什麼。舉例說，讓我們先把上世紀80年代，馬來西亞的意識形態慾望──所謂的「發展主義」，視為其中一個的細微差異的關鍵時刻。正正源於以西方為中心的支配性超資本網絡邏輯，在跨國政治經濟的驅動下，馬來西亞出口導向工業化為本的政策，與深受日本影響的「向東政策」（Look East Policy ）相互交纏。馬來西亞處身這個交匯中，被稱為「亞洲四小虎」之一，而不論被迫還是自願地接受這個稱號，馬來西亞乃是其最虔誠而忠實的嚴格信徒之一。於是，基於馬來西亞的後殖民構成，不論在物質還是非物質的資源上，都一直在依賴性發展的號召下被不斷徵用，並自相矛盾的，驅使我們以充滿宗教意味的方式擁抱所理解的現代性。

現代性延續著碎片化切割和重新配置的邏輯，當中要求個人功能化地「運作」（function）。而馬來西亞，在「2020年宏願」──在2020年實現發達國家地位──的願景下，每個人多少少少被我們的集體所規訓，必須提供生產力並發揮作用，以實現這個成為發達國家的集體想像。 這種維持內外壓迫而成就發達國家的動力，變成促成同時累積集體焦慮的源頭。而依據市場自由化形式的複合軌跡正在展開──通過引入女性勞動力作為新生勞動力、從周邊引入跨國移民──馬來西亞從原來的地理和文化地景上，以創傷性手法將人口轉移到嚴峻的工業化複合體。如是者，新的人口實況構成，並與其他固有的社會結構和身份發生衝突。

容我將上述現象定義為社會功能和關係在多個場景和景觀中的異化，其異化源於市場自由化形式的特定軌跡，這為我們提供理解社會疾病最重要的渠道。 如果在社會的認知中，「社會」只被局限於狹隘的關係邏輯中「功能性」地運作，那些渴望釋放出情感差異的聲音，將被視為對權力的破壞——包括那些巨大沉默下的矛盾心理 、關於愛之不羈的政治性、超越宗教組織的信仰、流淌在性別化身體的眼淚等等。而現代主義的不足及其所帶來的現代性論述，正好能普遍地捕捉社會病態的複雜模式。

在此，通過電影節的選片、一系列的討論和講座而帶出的共同主題──「焦慮的年代」，不僅整體上讓我們窺探各式各樣鮮活而微妙的情感呈現，同時也通過將馬來西亞經驗置放於全球南方的不同領域，對所形構的社會政治脈絡下的多樣徵狀，提出迫切而反身內省的回應。由此路徑，社會病態提供了非常重要的缺口，讓我們從不論是焦慮、感覺、情緒等不同的情感波動展開考掘，將之作為主體化持續過程中不可拋棄的東西，而非視之為一個被動「工具人」的個別病例。而我深信，在我們的「憤世代」中，這些情緒都是需要被看到的。

(R)age of Maladies

/ Zikri Rahman (Institute for Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Chiao Tung University)

The social maladies. In contextualising this brief curatorial note of mine, the notion of maladies here is not to be confined within the medical practices or disciplines per se but as a compulsion to relate it with the social milieu. Therefore, social maladies in here represent the need to interrogate the articulation of the disorder and disruption of societal configuration it entails. The dimensions where we are struggling to comprehend the complex collectivity transpire of how our collective anxieties -as the people, the public, the governed, masses, plebs, the rakyat - are continuously being shaped reciprocally in multiple nuances.

It is inevitable that the nuances have to be explicated, to make a statement of how we designate to understand the societal configurations. For example, let’s take one such nuance with the ideological lust we call developmentalism in Malaysia circa 1980s as a critical juncture. It was when the export-industrialization based policy interwoven with the Japanese influenced Look East Policy driven by the transnational political economy to follow the logic of dominant hyper-capital networks centered in the West. Malaysia in this exact locus - where formerly it is collectively being dubbed as the Tiger cub economies - is to be, either forcefully or voluntary, one of its strictest adherents. A pious and loyal one indeed. Since its postcolonial formation, the resources, both material and immaterial, have been continuously expropriated under the banner of dependent-development, to embrace what we understand as modernity, religiously; a paradox pun-intended.

With modernity, it entails the logic of fragmentation and configuration where one’s task is to function. Everyone has to be productive and plays a role, to a certain extent, disciplined within our collectivity to achieve the collective imagination as developed country vis-a-vis Wawasan 2020 -a vision of achieving the developed country status by the year 2020. To sustain the urge of being forced, externally and internally, to be a developed country trigger and cumulatively become the source of collective anxieties. Multiple trajectories took place in the form of market liberalization, for example, through the introduction of female workforce as a neophyte labour, and the influx of transnational immigrants from the peripheries of which engage in the traumatic displacing of the population from its geographical and cultural landscape to rigorous process of industrial-complex, and thus constitute emerging demographic realities in conflicts with the inherent social fabrics and identities among others.

The foreignization of social functions and relations within multiple sites and scapes, if I may define it that way, as a result of these particular trajectories provide the utmost importance channel for us to understand the social maladies. Where the social in the society supposedly only to function within the confined logics of relations, those who are willing to shed shades of emotions are to be considered as representing disruptions to the power that be – the ambivalence of deafening silence, the ungoverned politics of love, devotion beyond organized religions, the flowing tears of the gendered bodies, etc. The inadequacy of Modernism and its consequential modernity as a discourse proved to be prevalent in capturing the complex modes of social maladies.

In here, through the Age of Anxiety as the collective theme of the film festival represented through the corpus of films selected, series of discussions and lectures to be presented, it provides us not only the glimpse of vivid yet subtle forms of appearance of emotions in its totality, but as an urgent and central reflection to situate Malaysian experiences through the diverse manifestations of socio-political contexts taking shape in different sphere of the global South as a response. The social maladies provide the ruptures much needed, not to be perceived as an isolated phenomenon of merely a passive object-human, but to excavate emotions in its different strands - be it anxieties, feelings, sentiments, etc as the continuous process of subjectivation not to be forsaken. The emotions, it demands to be seen in our (r)age.