The changing of my blog’s name from (Mis)readings to After the Dinner Party has more at stake than mere whim or impulse. This may come as a surprise for some readers. After all, I’ve been using the name (Mis)readings since I started publishing the blog for exactly two years already since August 2008.
There are two main reasons for the change. The first has to do with vanity. The second is perhaps more significant and for that reason more circuitous.
First, I simply realized that some other people are using exactly the same or related names for their own society and opinion columns in print and online dailies. The fetish for difference has as much to do with it as conceit: how could I share the same title with other less worthy beings?
Putting aside such flippancy, the more serious reason for changing my blog’s name coincides with a fundamental shift in my own offline life and commitments.
I began writing (Mis)readings during a time of personal uncertainties. I remember spending most of my time devouring a most eclectic selection of texts from the esoteric to the erotic. Having at that moment recently disconnected myself from a prior interest in the real conditions of the masses of toiling workers, landless peasants, and urban poor dwellers, I became entangled in the labyrinth of self-contained reflection of arcane theoretical treatises and high-brow literature consumed alongside the most mundane pop culture artifacts.
The deliberate use of “misreadings” for my blog’s name was in fact influenced by the post-structuralist truism that “all readings are misreadings” and that “The best a reader can achieve is a strong misreading – a reading that will in turn produce others” (Culler). Belatedly enchanted by the postmodern spirit, my horizon became limited to “clicktivism” and academic Cultural Studies as my primary means of “resistance.” I ultimately, as a relatively privileged middle class university student, simply had too much time in my hands.
My previous blog description was an accurate description of this mode of existence:
Misreading – n. an incorrect reading
(Mis)readings is a blog written from the vantage point of an optically inconvenienced, textually-predisposed and culturally dispossessed subject from the Philippines. It is, in short, nothing more than the blogger’s conceit raising its ugly head online to propagate unlettered opinions to an imaginary public audience.
The new blog name thus reflects a shunning of leisurely contemplation for the more difficult application of learning for solving the actual problems of working for meaningful social change.
London burned after a week of looting and rioting, thousands of Chilean students are clashing with police for education reforms, the Middle East and North Africa continues to rage with massive social unrest, the guerrilla war continue in India, while our very own Philippine social volcano is beginning to explode.
The immeasurable sufferings wrought on the peoples of the world by extreme hunger and inequality, the mounting financial problems besetting the advanced industrialized nations, and the intensifying protest movements, mass struggles, and armed resistance are telltale signs of the insoluble crisis confronting the world capitalist system.
We either work for the blossoming of a new system that will guarantee a just and lasting peace or fall into barbarism and destruction with the entire world as the old social order becomes embroiled in even bigger crises that it can temporarily delay through brief bubbles or wars or but never solve to the roots.
There is no more space for the kind of lazy and self-serving Žižekian opposition of “immediate engagement” and “trying to understand what’s going on.” Neither the futile Civil Society reformist initiatives that only give the system a more human face nor the equally futile armchair pipe dream of simply interpreting the world. Instead, the firm integration of both theory and practice.
Involvement in a people’s movement that aims to arouse, organize, and mobilize millions for their democratic interests entails veering away from the pursuit of studies “in the abstract and without any aim.” It cannot be like “a dinner party… it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous.”
My taking on of full-time volunteer work for Kabataan Partylist, in short, has effectively put an end the Dinner Party (well, at least for the most part). ■
vanity lang gid ang reason pwo, hahaha!
pero seriously, i like this title better. :)
thanks for liking! :)
your disagreement with zizek’s distaste for immediate engagement seems to be a very hard decision for you, as for many marxist intellectuals.. discussion ule tayo minsan haha
Hi, Levi. Musta? Not really that hard.