Is Marquis de Sade, as the reputation that precedes him intimate, the sexually transgressive aristocrat par excellence? This element seems to be missing in the two short stories published by Hesperus Press in the thin volume Betrayal: “The Magistrate Mocked” and “Emilie de Tourville.”

As John Burnside observed in his foreword to the book, the popular notion that Sade “was all about sex, and that ‘sadism’ – the ritualization of an exquisite sexual cruelty – was something that the ‘Divine Marquis’ had invented” somehow misses the point.[1] Sade’s obsession is with power and humiliation, two themes that overshadow the stories.

I haven’t read any of the Marquis’ other more popular works like Justine, One Hundred Days of Sodom, or Philosophy in the Boudoir to actually verify it with my own eyes, but if we are to believe Burnside “sex in his [Sade’s] writings is usually rather unceremonious, devoid of sensuality, tenderness or erotic charge.”[2] Burnside adds:

Set any of his books beside Venus in Furs, or L’Histoire d’O, and it soon becomes obvious that Sade cares not a whit for the ceremonies of sex, or for the nuances of power play between dominant and submissive partners. Sade is all about force… play hardly ever come[s] into it.[3]

“The Magistrate Mocked” begins with the following epigraph: “For you can take my word: these people I will so / Depict that they will never more their faces show.”[4] And indeed, the whole story is simply about such a humiliation. An aristocrat’s younger daughter is arranged to be married to a corrupt magistrate. Her lover, older sister, and brother-in-law conspire to humiliate and ultimately drive away the unfortunate visitor.

The denigration of blacks in the text aside, what I found distasteful in the story is the underlying condescension against the non-aristocratic classes. The figure of the magistrate, who is representative of the rising provincial bourgeois, is conveniently defined as corrupt, ugly, stiff, and so on. The villain’s provincial accent, for instance, is made fun of, etc. The aristocratic protagonists, meanwhile, are projected as upright, beautiful, playful, etc. Behind the hilarious presentation is an aristocratic bitchiness set against the ascendant bourgeois, provincials, and hapless prostitutes.

“Emilie de Tourville,” on the other hand, is also about a younger daughter, this time victim of the cruel punishment of her elder, lawyer brothers who detest her compromising of their family’s honor. The question posed by de Sade at the onset of the story pretty much sums up this tale of “Brotherly Cruelty” – “who is guiltier in the eyes of reason: a weak and deceived girl, or some relative or other who, by setting up as a family’s avenger, becomes the tormentor of the hapless creature?”[5]

But for all of de Sade’s supposed moral bravado or mania with perverse sexual practices, this story’s the conclusion is quite within the confines of the polite order. A girl gets abused by some sort of dandy. She is punished by her cruel brothers. But at the end all she can do is accept the apologies and of her abuser. Marriage is presented as the only option.

At the end of the day, all this reminds me of Žižek’s expounding of Lacan’s point in “Kant with Sade”:

Today, in our post-idealist era of the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” doesn’t everybody know what the point of the “with” is – the truth of Kant’s ethical rigorism is the sadism of the law, i.e., the Kantian law is a superego agency that sadistically enjoys the subject’s deadlock, his inability to meet its inexorable demands, like the proverbial teacher who tortures pupils with impossible tasks and secretly savors their failings? Lacan’s point, however, is the exact opposite of this first association: it is not Kant who was a closet sadist, it is Sade who was a closet Kantian.[6] ■

[1] John Burnside, foreword to Betrayal by Marquis de Sade (London: Hesperus Classics, 2006), vii.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid. Perhaps this is one more reason why I think Sade would come late in my reading lists.

[4] Marquis de Sade, Betrayal, translated by Andrew Brown (London: Hesperus Classics, 2006), 4.

[5] Ibid, 83.

[6] Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 194-195.

Patuloy pa rin sa paghahanap ang mga magulang nina Karen Empeño at Sherlyn Cadapan. / PW files

And no, I am not writing the body of this text in Filipino. I confess that I cannot write a decent sentence in the national language (patawarin niyo po ako, sa totoo ay sinasanay ko pa ang sarili ko na magsulat sa Filipino – bigo ata ang paghulma sakin ng sistemang pangedukasyon sa larangang ito). And though I’ve been compelling myself to read Filipino texts these past months, I still find reading them difficult.

So why the title? For one, it captures the message of what I thought I would briefly mention here before all of this unnecessary rationalizations came up. Secondly, I actually take a fetishistic pleasure (sa kabila ng aking paghihirap) in the articulation of militant tracts in Filipino (ang mga islogan at agit sa partikular – mangahas, mangahas, mangahas na makibaka) in the same way that I enjoy apparently pointless K-Pop choruses – gee, gee, gee, gee, baby, baby, baby (not to mention the Korean lyrics of which I understand not a word).

Now that explains the linguistic discontinuity between the title and the body of this blog entry. But that is not important.

Pandarahas

These days, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that not a day passes without one’s hearing a report of a human right violation – be it extrajudicial killings, abductions, illegal detentions, massacres, harassment, etc.

And this is not just a matter of statistics (the human rights alliance KARAPATAN has documented over a thousand extrajudicial killings and two hundred enforced disappearances since the present regime’s assumption of power).

Just this semestral break and this is the news that greeted my brief homecoming, Karlo Cabahug and Cai Alvarico (both of whom I got the honor of working with in a few student advocacies when I was still studying in Cebu) were illegally detained by elements of the Philippine Army while they were researching on the conditions of peasants in Zamboanguita, Negros Oriental.

Karlo and Cai are now free. The charge of rebellion filed against them was dismissed by the Prosecutor’s Office in Dumaguete City for lack of probable cause. They only spent more than two weeks in jail.

But not everyone is as lucky (swerte dahil hindi pinalabas ng militar na missing, atbp. – isa pang indikasyon sa perverted na kaayusan ng lipunan na umiiral sa kasalukuyan).

Last year, Rachelle Mae Palang, who I also got the honor of working with for a while when she was editor-in-chief of her college’s student paper and officer of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines, became a martyr for the cause of social transformation.

It is often said that every Filipino has a relative or a friend or at least someone close who is working abroad. With the way things are going, I’m sure the day is not far when the same can be said of victims of the State terrorism.

Dukot

It is therefore good to hear that the recent film Dukot is tackling the pervasive issue of human rights violations in the country. I was told that Dukot will be shown sometime this November or December.

Written by Bonifacio Ilagan and directed by Joel Lamangan, Dukot follows in the tradition of the great Filipino classic films, such as Orapronobis by Lino Brocka and Sister Stella L. by Mike de Leon, that portrays the country’s ugly realities.

I hope Dukot becomes a truly material force not only for raising awareness (and mapping the contours of the present crisis) but also moving people to emancipatory collective action. Will be waiting to see the film. For now, we can check out the trailer and the soundtrack music video:

Looking for a book missing from an expensive bookstore’s shelves, I stumbled upon another title which immediately finds itself in my hands. The front cover, a violet expanse with a lower corner inhabited by an army of minuscule letter E’s in different pink shades, caught my attention. I turned to the blurbs in the back cover and read The New Yorker praise it as “A true tour de force: a full-length novel containing not a single ‘E.’ An entertaining post-modern detective story.”

Now how about that? Straight away, I returned Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Rolando Tolentino’s National/Transnational: Subject Formation in and on the Philippines (thinking it’s in the university library anyway), Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and Edward Said’s Orientalism, among others, back on the shelf – I not having the financial capability to acquire all of them – and bought Georges Perec’s A Void at the counter.

Thus having relegated Said for Christmas (or perhaps my next birthday), I began leafing through A Void and learned that the book was originally in French and that the author, perhaps to compensate for the lack of E’s in A Void, also wrote a shorter text using only E as a vowel. Meanwhile, the award-winning translator and novelist Gilbert Adair also made sure that the English translation made use of not a single E!

Now how about that? Ruminating on such an oddity, the first thing that entered my mind is an old vulgar joke which came to me first from – of all people – one of my old professors in the university. A rakish American cowboy, the joke goes, came across an Indian village. To test the Indian chief’s virility, the arrogant cowboy asked the chief how many wives he had.

“I’ve tried all the women in the village including the little girls,” said the chief coolly.

“Oh boy,” the visitor exclaimed after this revelation.

“That includes the boys,” answered the chief.

“Holy cow!” The cowboy couldn’t resist from crying.

“Yes, I also did the cows.”

Again shocked, the white man yelled, “Oh dear!”

Yes, the Indian chief calmly added, even the deers but only when I can catch them. And the deer, of course, swift as it is, is never caught (it is always out there!). Such is the case in this novel of Perec’s, which has as its formal premise quite a ludicrous constraint.

In the novel’s postscript, Perec claims to have drawn inspiration from “a (modish) linguistic dogma claiming primacy for what Saussurian structuralists call a significant…” which he claims was “not a handicap, not a constriction, but, all in all, a spur to my imagination.” He likewise professes to have had a lot of fun writing it principally “by locating and disclosing that contradiction in which all syntactic, structural or symbolic signification is bound up.”

Suffice to say, certain lovers of “meaningful Literature,” bred on the privileging of a literary text’s organic unity, clarity, and polish, would readily dismiss the rawness and systematic chaos of A Void as superficial and pretentious.

On the other hand, Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson (before his structuralist turn), and the rest of the Russian School of Formalism should find in Perec’s novel a posterboy for their tenets of “defamiliarization,” that curious literary doxa that assigns the “literariness” of a text to its deviation from the ordinary use of language or what Jakobson calls an “organized violence committed on ordinary speech.”

A Void begins with the unveiling of an affliction that’s been gnawing Anton Vowl’s mind, an affliction that took shape (or the lack thereof) from the lost of the letter E from the world around him:

His mind runs riot. Lost in thought, scrutinizing his rug, Vowl starts imagining 5, 6, 26 distinct visual combinations, absorbing but also insubstantial, as though an artist’s rough drafts but of what? – that, possibly, which a psychiatrist would call Jungian slips, an infinity of dark, mythic, anonymous portraits flitting through his brain, as it burrows for a solitary, global signal that might satisfy his natural human lust for signification both instant and lasting, a signal that might commandingly stand out from this chain of discontinuous links, this miasma of shadowy tracings, all of which, or so you would think, ought to knit up to form a kind of paradigmatic configuration, of which such partial motifs can furnish only anagrams and insipid approximations… (5)

Fast-forward a few pages and Vowl suddenly disappears. His friends look for any hint as to his whereabouts by digging through his diary, notes, and manuscripts – texts which Vowl’s companions have described in the following revealing way:

“I said just an instant ago that only Champollion would know how to crack such a conundrum,” says Augustus sadly. “But now I doubt if Champollion could pull it off. A Chomsky might in a pinch, though.”

“Or possibly a Roman Jakobson, who could submit a structuralist’s opinion of Ozymandias!” (110)

A Void is marked by self-reflexive parts, which some of my classmates would readily assign the label postmodern, that remind us readers that what we are reading is a fiction, a constructed world that is a step away from our own:

“From which point it’s but a hop, skip and a jump to grasping why so much was built on so rigorous a constraint, so tyrannical a curb. It was born out of a mad and morbid whim: that of wholly satisfying a fascination with linguistic gratuity, with proscription and subtraction, that of avoiding any word striking its author as too obvious, too arrogant or too common, of according its significant just a gap, a slit, a loop, so narrow, so slim and so sharp, that you instantly grasp its justification.” (177)

Racing through a tight succession of roundabout subplots, literary pastiches (E-less versions of Moby Dick, Shakespeare’s To Be Or Not To Be soliloquoy, among others), a random mention of Donald Duck, segues on the craft of literary production, namedroppings of Foucault and Lacan, absurd anecdotes, and other playful devices we finally end up with a “Maldiction,” “a Zahir,” the void that ties it all together.

And this specter that casts a long shadow over the novel, as in all texts of this mischievous type (the supposed historical artifact that creates a ruckus in Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, to cite another example, turns out to be a laundry list – not to mention the bulk of Borges’ ficciones) turns out to be something very incredulous. The text itself comments near the end:

“Voila,” says Squaw, in a sort of monosyllabic singsong, “all kaput. All kaput. Who would think of it? And, you know, I find this conclusion just a tiny but anticlimactic, a tiny but Much Ado About Nothing, a bit irritating, a bit discouraging, don’t you think?” (276)

But then sometimes, as the cliché goes, it’s not the end in sight that truly matters but the process that leads to that end. In the novel’s beginning, we are faced

“…with a haunting strand of plot working its way through a mosaic of motifs so confusing that you and I can’t possibly summon up a vision of its totality from A to Z, its organic unity, so confusing that our wish to find a significant sign in it is simply an illusion.

“But gradually, with our starting to grasp that a law is structuring its composition, this initial confusion of ours will turn to admiration – admiration at how, with such a niggardly grammatical, syntactical and punctuational construction, with a vocabulary cut down to a minimum by so many constraints of scission, omission and approximation, such an inscription can still contain so much information.” (177)

Ultimately, Perec, if we are to believe the following passage as his aim in writing A Void (and if we are to accord such authorial declarations significance), appears to have succeeded:

My ambition, as Author, my point, I would go so far as to say my fixation, my constant fixation, was primarily to concoct an artifact as original as it was illuminating, an artifact that would or just possibly might, act as a stimulant on notions of construction, of narration, of plotting, of action, a stimulant, in a word, on fiction-writing today. (281)

But as José Ortega Y Gasset writes in his treatise on love: “Falling in love automatically tends towards madness. Left to itself, it goes to utter extremes.” ■

We believe that feelings are immutable, but every sentiment, particularly the noblest and most disinterested, has a history.

Michel Foucault,
‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’

I was not always a keen reader of theory, that anamorphic genre that blends literary, sociological, philosophical, political, and other conceptual apparatuses under one appellation. Adorno, Bahktin, Barthes, Judith Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, Kristeva, Lacan, and Lyotard, were never my thing. I’ve read some Marx, some Lenin, and some Mao before. But that’s just it. It was only recently, particularly the beginning of this year that I began to develop a taste for what most readers would readily dismiss as dry and obscure texts. I have Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian guy, to thank for that.

Yes, I am a fan of Žižek in the same sense that my classmates are fans of the Korean pop boy band Super Junior, or in the way that my other friends are avid followers of J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter, or in the sense that my baby sister follows Spongebob Squarepants on television every weekend, or in the way that some of my acquaintances are obsessed with the Japanese porn star Maria Ozawa. I am a fan in the fullest sense of the word, like the Noranians of the past or the Pinoy Big Brother devotees of today.

What made me a fan of Žižek, first and foremost, is his acerbic humor, his engagement with popular culture, and of course, his reworking of Marxist ideology critique from a Lacanian lens to include the economy of enjoyment as a political factor. But what I like most about Žižek, in contrast to much of his Western postmodern liberal leftist contemporaries, is Žižek’s no nonsense endorsement of the supposed “Lost Cause” of revolutionary upheavals that aim for egalitarian emancipation as the only means of radically transforming the exploitative and oppressive order of the present.

In Michel Foucault’s theorization of power, resistance is inevitably co-opted by power in advance. Žižek, writing in his The Ticklish Subject, goes beyond Foucault by questioning this certainty. That

resistance to power is inherent and immanent to the power edifice (in the sense that it is generated by the inherent dynamic of the power edifice) in no way obliges us to draw the conclusion that every resistance is co-opted in advance, included in the eternal game Power plays with itself.[1]

For Žižek,

the key point is that through the effect of proliferation, of producing an excess of resistance, the very inherent antagonism of a system may well set in motion a process which leads to its own ultimate downfall.[2]

Žižek thus attacks the two main strands of postmodern leftism in the west: the liberal, multiculturalist, pluralist Left that aims for “capitalism with a human face” for reinforcing the rule of capital and the self-proclaimed radical anti-capitalist Left for refraining from engaging in a revolutionary project that does not eschew the excesses of such interventions: “the pious desire to deprive the revolution of this excess is simply the desire to have a revolution without revolution.”[3]

Of course, this line, in the Philippine context, does not depart much from the standard national democratic criticism of reformist and pseudo-leftist groups that mislead the people into believing that participation in the parliamentary arena and legal struggles can by themselves effect meaningful social transformation.

Perhaps this uncompromising oppositional stance can account for a bomb threat that cut short Žižek’s talk on his new book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, to an audience of 800 in New York City last week? Žižek’s new book, after all, calls on the disparate Lefts of the west “to discard the narratives of the crisis that blame the meltdown on contingent deviations, and expose the mortal flaws of the global capitalist system as such.”

Being a fan of someone doesn’t mean eating him hook, line and sinker though. I, as a fan, also have many hesitations about Žižek. For one, I still can’t follow much of his elaborate discussion of Lacanian Psychoanalysis and German Idealism. Secondly, there’s the matter of some of the notions advanced in his vast body of texts. I don’t agree with Žižek, for example, on his line that the only alternative to U.S. imperialism and China’s emergence as an authoritarian-capitalist power is Europe. Recent developments, such as the Maoist victories in Nepal, the Naxalite upsurge in India, and the unwavering march of the national democratic movement here in the Philippines contradicts Žižek’s comment that “The Third World cannot generate a strong enough resistance to the ideology of the American Dream.”[4] I am also suspicious of Žižek’s opposition of theory and action and the privileging of the former as too easy a way out:

You know, Marx thesis eleven: philosophers have only interpreted the world; the time is, we have now to change it. Maybe, as good Marxists, we should turn it around. Maybe we are trying to change it too much. It’s time to redraw and to interpret it again, because do we really know what is going on today?

We need theory more than ever. Don’t be—don’t feel guilty for withdrawing from immediate engagement and for trying to understand what’s going on.[5]

Shouldn’t the two go side by side instead? ■

[1] Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 2000), 256.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Slavoj Žižek, Revolution at the Gates: Žižek on Lenin, the 1917 Writings (London: Verso, 2002), 261.

[4] Slavoj Žižek, “Thanks, But We’ll Do It Ourselves against Enlightened Administration,” In These Times, 19 June 2005, http://www.lacan.com/zizekamish.htm.

[5] Slavoj Žižek, interviewed by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, 12 May 2008, http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/12/world_renowned_philosopher_slavoj_zizek_on

Hello.

Bad habits die hard. I’ve been trying to stop myself from writing you. But then, it seems even in the middle of performing what I’m supposed to be “officially” doing, I’m still trying to write you! I guess there’s not much we can do about it, no?

But language never communicates in a straightforward manner (a friend said language doesn’t communicate at all while my other self is questioning this whole enterprise of communication).

To put things simply, let’s just say that we often say things we don’t mean and mean things that we don’t say, which goes to say that some things (like this one) are better left unsaid.

All this reminds me of a poem I recently read from the cover of a book I came across somewhere in the library:

            My love
            Is like the grasses
            Hidden in the deep mountain:
            Through its abundance increases,
            There is none that knows.

That would have been the best for all of us. Then again, I was watching the new on TV the other day and realized something: Typhoons, as we all know, have been battering the country these past weeks. They pour too much water on rivers that overflow and flood the towns and cities. Such an abundance does not fail to make its presence felt. ■

“What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his eyes if he’s a painter, or ears if he’s a musician, or a lyre at every level of his art if he’s a poet, or even, if he’s a boxer, just his muscles? On the contrary, he’s at the same time a political being, constantly alive to heartrending, fiery or happy events to which he responds in every way. How would it be possible to feel no interest in other people and by virtue of an ivory indifference to detach yourself from the life which they so copiously bring you? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.”

Pablo Picasso

I remember the second time I visited SM City Iloilo this year quite vividly for the simple reason that I heard a familiar tune playing over the mall’s intercom. I was with my two titas and their baby boy when we noticed Inang Laya’s song “Babae” reverberating across the mall interior.

I was way younger when I first listened to the song. I cannot recall the circumstances of those childhood moments anymore but I can recollect the song’s melody just fine anytime. I was older when I came across the song again and that was also the time when I learned the lyrics:

“Babae”

By Inang Laya

Kayo ba ang mga Maria Clara
Mga Hule at mga Sisa
Na di maruning na lumaban?
Kaapiha’y bakit iniluluha?
Mga babae, kayo ba’y sadyang mahina?

Kayo ba ang mga Cinderella
Na lalake, ang tanging pag-asa?
Kayo nga ba ang mga Nena
Na katawan ay ibinebenta?
Mga babae, kayo ba’y sadyang pang-kama?

Ang ating isip ay buksan
At lipuna’y pag-aralan,
Ang nahubog ninyong isipan
At tanggaping kayo’y mga libangan
Mga babae, ito nga ba’y kapalaran?

Bakit ba mayroong mga Gabriela
Mga Teresa at Tandang Sora
Na di umasa sa luha’t awa?
Sila’y nagsipaghawak ng sandata
Nakilaban, ang mithiin ay lumaya.

Bakit ba mayrong mga Lisa
Mga Liliosa at mga Lorena
Na di natakot makibaka
At ngayo’y marami nang kasama?
Mga babae, ang mithiin ay lumaya!

“Women hold half the sky,” Mao once said. But in a society like the Philippines, women are subjected to the double oppression, among others, of class and sex. “Babae,” a favorite during women’s month commemoration affairs during March and protest actions involving women’s issues, is a song that problematizes the gender role assigned by the social order to women since their childhood.

Following Simone de Beauvoir’s saying that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” [1], Inang Laya questions the idea that a woman is by essence weak (“Mga babae, kayo ba’y sadyang mahina?”), dependent on men (“Kayo ba ang mga Cinderella / Na lalake, ang tanging pag-asa?”), and a mere object of pleasure in bed (“Mga babae, kayo ba’y sadyang pang-kama?”).

Opposing the identity reinforced by dominant patriarchal institutions like the family, education, the law, and the media, the song advances the alternative image of the woman aspiring for liberation (“Mga babae, ang mithiin ay lumaya!”). Citing the example of heroines from Philippine history like Gabriela, Teresa and Tandang Sora as well as women martyrs in the ongoing people’s war in the countryside like Lisa, Liliosa, and Lorena, the song challenges the stereotype of women as represented in Philippine literature by the figures of Maria Claras, Hule, and Sisas.

But is this emancipation simply the discarding of the traditional view of the essential domestic woman for the “sexually-liberated” woman of the West? Capitalism dissolves women, in the words of Jean-Francois Lyotard,

into the male cycle, integrated either as workers into the production of commodities, or as mothers into the reproduction of labor power, or again, as commodities; themselves (cover-girls, prostitutes of mass media, hostesses of human relations), or even as administrators of capital (managerial functions). [2]

The problem therefore, Lyotard contends, “is not to safeguard a difference of sex against a movement towards homologation imposed by capital. The ‘difference between the sexes’ is no more exempt from masculine imperialism than its opposite…” [3]

In the Philippine context, the domination of foreign monopoly capital – and the consequent rape of our natural and human resources by foreign corporations and dislocation of both urban and rural communities – have led to a situation where Filipina women suffer exploitative and abusive work conditions to support themselves and their families. The Philippines has become the world’s top exporter of women with the sector comprising the bulk of labor migration abroad. Filipina women are turned into abused domestic helpers, poorly paid factory workers, and sex trade victims. [4]

These are the realities that the song, “Babae,” calls on to study and question (“Ang ating isip ay buksan / At lipuna’y pag-aralan”). Ultimately, Inang Laya’s song goes to the end with the message that gender roles, being social constructs resulting from the interplay of power relations in a particular historical juncture, are also arenas for struggle.

The song, moreover, demonstrates that Filipina women are not simply oppressed but have been actively participating in movements that not only seek empowerment for their sector but for other marginalized groups as well (“Sila’y nagsipaghawak ng sandata / Nakilaban, ang mithiin ay lumaya”). ■

[1] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. by H.M. Parshley, New York: Vintage Books, 1989 (1949), p. 267.

[2] Jean-Francois Lyotard, “One of the Things at Stake in Women’s Struggles,” trans. by Deborah J. Clarke with Winifred Woodhull and John Mowitt, in The Lyotard Reader, edited by Andrew Benjamin, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1989, p.116.

[3] Ibid, p.117.

[4] “The Purple Rose Campaign,” in the Gabriela Women’s Party Website, Online, Internet, 28 September 2008.

Not only do we find in the uneasy transitions of organisms engaged in reproduction the same basic violence which in physical eroticism leaves us gasping, but we also catch the inner meaning of that violence.

Georges Bataille,
Death and Sensuality

The news of students and faculty in 10 University of California campuses coming out in huge protests cheered me up, coming as I am from a university that is victim to the same neoliberal policies of budget cuts and fee increases. These cuts, Judith Butler writes,

eliminated 2,000 positions, gutted programmes that train high school teachers in science education, closed courses in East Asian languages and advanced Arabic, overburdened classrooms, shut students out of their majors, let scores of lecturers go and closed the university library on Saturday. In addition, the administration demanded of students tuition and fee increases of nearly 40%, imperilling the very notion of an affordable public university and forcing many students to leave the university or scramble for full-time jobs.

Meanwhile: “Annually the state pays $49,000 per prison inmate and less than $14,000 per UC student. If the state can lock us up, it can invest in our education for one-third of the cost,” The Guardian quoted one of the protesting student’s leaflet.

University of California Berkeley students and faculty protest against fee increases and budget cuts. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty

Sounds familiar? In the Philippines, the government has been annually decreasing the budget for education services in favor of foreign debt servicing. Of course, why should the state provide quality and accessible education if what’s in demand by the global market is cheap and docile labor?

Perhaps this is one face of what Bourdieu describes as the “contribution that the educational system makes to the reproduction of the social structure”? Think of how certain competencies are restricted to the dominant groups in the social order. [1]

The University of the Philippines will be allotted only P5.3 billion pesos by the government next year. Not only is this figure way lower than the current year’s P7.06 billion budget, it is P13 billion less than the P18 billion originally proposed by the university.

This will certainly mean another round of increases in tuition and other fees as the university struggles to cope with the budgetary lack for its continued existence: a travesty that, in the Philippine context, runs in accordance with International Monetary Fund prescriptions that is restructuring the educational system to cater to the needs of the global market (the following of which is a precondition for further World Bank loans by the government).

Education for all!

It is precisely because of this adherence that the government implemented the Long-Term Higher Education Development Plan for 2001-2010, a plan which particularly reduces the number of state universities and colleges and transforms the remaining ones into semi-corporations that generate their own income.

Although I am skeptical of Althusser’s theory that the educational institution is still the principal apparatus for conveying the dominant ideology among the masses (so pervasive is the effect of popular culture and the media these days; and yes, my professors are my pets in facebook), it cannot be denied that education is still a powerful instrument for molding minds.

As the neocolonial and semi-feudal social formation in the country persists, the educational system will remain to be colonial (because it is geared to serving what Negri and Hardt call Empire), commercialized (because it is profit-oriented), and repressive (because it denies the youth access to education). The struggle for a nationalist, scientific, and mass-oriented education and culture, likewise, continues. ■

[1] Or how not all sperms are allowed to fertilize the egg in human reproduction? Whatever!

The administration presidential candidate Gilbert Teodoro has been airing costly TV infomercials bragging about the Arroyo regime’s disaster preparations. The typhoon Ondoy proved his claims to be a big farce. The scale of human suffering that enveloped Metro Manila and other parts of the country in the aftermath of typhoon Ondoy’s onslaught is staggering. The landslides and flooding, said to be the worst in forty years, brought untold destruction on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

As we continue to extend aid to the victims of typhoon Ondoy, we should never overlook examining the convergence of various underlying factors that resulted in the disaster. The people were not merely victims of a natural catastrophe. The threat of strong tropical typhoons, considering the country’s geographic location of proximity to the Pacific Ocean, is always present. The more revealing detail is the Arroyo regime’s lack of adequate provisions for such emergencies.

Typhoon Ondoy did not only reveal problems of insufficient preparation for effective relief and rescue operations. More importantly, it exposed the government’s misaligned priorities that resulted in deficient preventive measures.

Lest we forget, even as the Arroyo regime continues to neglect urban planning, infrastructure, drainage, and flood control, the president was able to rechannel emergency funds amounting to P800 million for her foreign travels.

In a sense, typhoon Ondoy substantiates the people’s fears of an ecological breakdown that would destroy human civilization as we know it. It props up a form of thinking that can be summed up in the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s remark on how today “it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.”

But what is truly apocalyptic is not the specter of more environmental catastrophes but the reality of human actions that fail to prepare for such calamities. In the long run, we can only ready ourselves adequately for future Ondoys precisely by changing how our society is organized and the way our government is run.

Until Philippine society remains to be divided between an exploited majority of workers, peasants, and slum dwellers and an oppressive minority of big compradors and landlords who use the State for the protection of their interests, government funds intended for disaster prevention will continue to be squandered in corruption and skewed priorities.

“Cast away all illusions and prepare struggle,” Mao once said: let us turn the grief and suffering of the present into a thirst for justice. The moment this longing crystallizes will be the Day of Judgment for the callous ruling classes who have made the people suffer for the longest time. ■

Gimpei barely suppressed the urge to put his arm round the girl’s legs. But before he could do anything rash, the sudden realization that, every evening, she would walk here with her dog beneath the shade of the gingko tree and that he could watch her from a hiding place on top of the bank came to him like a ray of hope. It was like lying naked in the new grass, so cool and fresh was his sense of relief. Yes, he would watch her from the top of the bank, and she would come up the slope toward him forever… His happiness knew no bounds. (p. 86)

The Lake by Yasunari Kawabata begins with a fugitive entering a bath. He is Gimpei, a self-conscious old man with ugly feet who was suspended from teaching for seducing his teenage student. Gimpei recently took a bag dropped by a woman containing two hundred thousand yen and ran away from home, fearing the police will be after him.

Fragmented scenes and memories flashed in his head while he was bathed by the establishment’s pretty attendant. The voice and the body of the young girl stirred up his memory, haunted as he was by several ghosts from his past. So we begin to learn of the death of his father in the lake near his childhood home, the child he had with a prostitute who he abandons in the streets, and the faces of the young women in his life.

Throughout the novel, it is interesting to note that Gimpei’s voyeuristic episodes, sexual interactions, and perverse fantasies are narrated beautifully and with nostalgia as if they were the most natural thing in the world.

Meanwhile, a parallel narrative focuses on the life of Miyako, the young woman who lost her money. She gave her body to a decrepit old man in exchange for financial security. On one hand, the money she worked hard for and lost makes “the very thought of saving a bitter memory.” On the other hand, “she had felt a momentary thrill when she lost the money – a thrill of pleasure”:

It was as if some vague sensation, smoldering within her while she was being followed by the man had suddenly caught fire – almost as though her youth, lost in old Arita’s shadow, had suddenly been restored to life and had taken its revenge. If this were true, Miyako, at that precise moment, received compensation for all the shame she had endured through the long days and months it had taken to accumulate the two hundred thousand yen. And so the money was probably lost not in vain. (p. 50)

The Lake is essentially a disturbing yet poetically rendered short novel about the fantasies of a dirty old man and the twisted lives of those around him, all symbolized by the stagnant lake that fails to move forward. ■

I love systems; corporations exploit systems and deform them to channel capital. I love habits; capital destroys habits so that implements must be replaced, which requires further raw materials to be drawn and further labor added, and fetishization and idealization to be the main quality of cathexis. I love cathexes; people murder and hurt one another because their drives have been pushed into distorted images or ideas, either by genetic predisposition or by a variety of family pathologies, psychological or physical abuses, that often stem from economic factors, but cross class lines and can express themselves in large-scale non-egalitarian modes of power, as well as in their more familiar manifestations within the living space, a determiner of roles among those sharing it.

Michael Scharf,
“I Love Systems”

We all too often create our own conception of a thing that is removed from the reality of that object and dismiss the whole thing based on the wrong views that we have constructed.

An essay published online by John Ryan Recabar in the blog, Going Against the Current, last year questioned the continued validity of radical student activism as a means of effecting change.[1]

The disparity in the number of students participating in protest actions during the First Quarter Storm of the early 70s, and the height of the anti-dictatorship struggle in the mid 80s and the students mobilized in recent years seems to back up this view. A closer look at the topic, however, would reveal cracks in the arguments employed in the said essay to oppose what it labeled as “radical activism.”

Instead of tackling the demerits of the subject it sought to discuss, the piece only succeeds in revealing the preconceived notions of the blogger. On the one hand, it notes that “The media might have romanticized radical student activism that rendered it beyond recognition from what it truly should be” but on the other hand condemns it for this very same “romanticized” conception of activism.

But student activism is not just about going to rallies in “tubao, old shirt, torn maong pants, and slippers.” Appearing on television with a megaphone and placard in hand is just the tip of an entire range of activities that define student activism.

Protests go hand in hand with the painstaking organizing of the students, the entire university community, and the masses in general. It involves never ending meetings, the initiation of studies and critical discussions of university, sectoral, and national concerns, and the popularization of these issues. Mass actions are but the most visible means of collectively mobilizing those affected to confront the issues that affect them.

Student activists, the blogger argues, were not anymore what they truly should be by failing to address immediate matters “because they were busy fighting for concerns that were beyond their grasp.”

What this sentiment betrays is a misunderstanding of the actuality that the immediate concerns within and around the university can only be resolved by unraveling the basic problems that continue to affect greater society since this society forms the background within which the university is positioned.

The fisherfolk in Miagao still wallow in poverty despite the University in the Philippines Visayas’ being the center of excellence in fisheries development because in the first place the educational system has never been directed to address the needs of national development.

But then in a crafty spin, the student activists who have consistently fought against the prevailing colonial, commercialized, and repressive educational system are the ones who are ironically being blamed for the university’s neglect of the fishermen.

If anything, the humanitarian charity, which the blogger seems to be implying as the correct form of activism that students should enact, is one form of containment that lulls the students into thinking they are doing something significant when this, in fact, does not at all touch the fundamental problem. Charity, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek points out, “is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation.”[2]

Philippine education continues to cater to commercial and foreign interests. And this characteristic of our educational system is itself structured by a prevailing social order which continues to be subjected by foreign domination and elite rule. “True generosity,” the late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire writes, “consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.”[3]

To accuse activists in Miagao of addressing certain issues because these are the “national controversies that their counterparts in Diliman have been criticizing” betrays a failure to grasp of the societal and, hence, national scope of the problems that the students and the people confront. Local issues can never be resolved without linking them to the unjust social structures from which they are rooted.

The students of Diliman, Miagao, and other UP campuses face the same problems of the commercialization of UP education and repression in the campus in general although they have different manifestations in each setting. If the students are to advance their interests and win in their struggles, it should and always be a united stand.

What should be tackled first – local or national issues, immediate or long-term struggles, purely economic or political ones? This opposition misrecognizes what the Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani calls the parallax, “the irreducible gap between two perspectives. (To see it in action, extend your arm in front of you. Raise your index finger. Close one eye then the other. Your finger will shimmy in front of you, seemingly moving from one spot to another. Which position is its true or real one? The gap.)”[4]

Can the student sector be relied upon to carry the main burden of social change that they are now being blamed for not having changed the way of life of the marginalized people as is implied by the blogger in his essay? This raises false expectations that the students could independently solve issues confronting their sector and greater society, a myth that is precisely “beyond their grasp.”

Students, by virtue of their social position of being cloistered within the walls of the university from greater social reality, do not have the power to effect changes in the community solely on their own. As Philippine revolutionary leader Jose Ma. Sison analyzed in Struggle for National Democracy, “Students who truly stand for revolutionary change should always strive for integration with larger and even more dynamic social force, that is to say, the exploited masses of the people.”[5]

The blogger of Going Against the Current goes on to accuse radical student activists in Miagao of subscribing to Freire’s observation of a “pure activism” that “may actually perpetuate the very problems they sought to address.” Then he proceeds to throw a cheap shot against Lean Porquia, the present chairperson of the League of Filipino Students[6] in Iloilo, for saying “nothing different from the same canned statement we hear from a bunch of radical student activists where he proudly says he belongs.”

What the blogger forgets to add is the fact that the League of Filipino Students and other national democratic mass organizations, far from having regressed to “pure activism,” all subscribe to the principle of the mass line, a principle which recognizes the primacy of the masses in the creation of history.

Far from treating “the masses as mere recipients of denied opportunity without giving then [sic] a chance for reflection,” the point of departure of genuine student activism is to serve the people. This principle is encapsulated in the line “mula sa masa, tungo sa masa” (from the masses, for the masses). Freire himself qualifies that the people’s struggles “cannot be purely intellectual but must involve action; nor can it be limited to mere activism, but must include serious reflection: only then will it be a praxis.”[7]

Nowhere in Freire’s works did he say that “radical activism” only leads to the manipulation of the masses by the radicals themselves. What Freire warns against is a “pure activism” that eschews the combination of theory and practice or praxis, a superficial form of action that is never radical in the first place. For Freire, “to surmount the situation of oppression, men must first critically recognize its causes,”[8] and this relating of instances of oppression to their root or origin is radicalism at its purest and most basic.

Proactive student leaders must therefore make their voices echo louder by taking up the megaphone and making more placards. They should be more adroit at employing all means, including novel ones, to arouse, organize, and mobilize the students and unite their struggles with that of the people.

While it is true that some student activists have become co-opted by the system after graduating, it is also true that many have chosen to continue to serve the people after leaving university. Most choose to serve the people in their given professions, others work full time in people’s organizations, and some have laid down their lives while upholding the rights and welfare of the masses.

Rachelle Mae Palang (center), former College Editor's Guild of the Philippines Vice Chairperson for Visayas, chose to serve the exploited peasants in the countryside and was brutally murdered by the armed forces of the fascist State on the 18th of September last year.

Did the blogger of Going Against the Current make a mistake in his piece? The answer would definitely be a yes, and not just once. Do the opinions expressed in the essay go against the current? No. It in fact only reproduces the prevailing cynical and pessimistic intellectual currents, which has lost all hope for the possibility of social transformation. Recent developments, it seems to say, have made collective struggles for systemic change an impossible dream (so let’s just focus on small charity works, piecemeal reforms, etc).

But the passage of time has only presented new faces to the same old problems. Radical student activism is still the only force in the campus that can help in challenging an unjust social order.

In recent years this has been demonstrated once more from the overwhelming participation of the student and youth sectors in the second EDSA uprising in 2001, the successful mass campaigns in UP and other schools all over the country, to securing youth representation in Congress in the person of Kabataan Partylist representative Raymond “Mong” Palatino.

Our unity and collective action is still the only realistic way to achieve real peace, development, freedom, and social justice. ■

[1] I have absolutely nothing against the blogger personally, only the incorrect ideas propagated in his piece. I was told that the essay is just one of a series posted in his blog. I have yet to read the rest in the series.

[2] Slavoj Žižek, Violence, New York: Picador, 2008, p.22.

[3] Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1984 [1970], p.29.

[4] Jodi Dean, “Again and Again and Again: Real Materialism” available online at http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2009/05/again-and-again-and-again-real-materialism.html

[5] Jose Ma. Sison, “Student Power?” in Struggle for National Democracy, Manila: Amado V. Hernandez Memorial Foundation, 1972 [1967].

[6] The League of Filipino Students commemorates its 32^nd founding anniversary this month. Congratulations to Lean Porquia and LFS – Iloilo for the successful anniversary concert with Musikang Bayan held in the UPV Iloilo Auditorium last September 18, 2009.

[7] Freire, p.52

[8] Ibid, p.31

I left Miami last week after enjoying the university’s cheering contest, briefly passing by the town fiesta in Guam for dinner before flying over to Cebu early the next morning. It was a brief three-day stay with the family. I met some people and also visited the malls for, yes, window shopping.

There were yellow taxis (which are supposed to be less abusive than the ordinary white ones) in the airport already. My little sister has grown from a baby into a little girl who recited to me the poems she learned in preschool. I finally met my high school sister’s suitor, the same guy who ran away from the gate last Valentines’ Day when I went out to see who sent my sister a pink teddy bear.

And after more than half a decade of renting the house, the street that leads to our home was finally asphalted by the local government. The next local and national elections are just around the corner. An asphalt road’s supposed to be six inches thick but the one there was only two inches thin. Well, not much has changed. I’m expecting potholes and cracks the next time I visit home.

I also donated some books to Their Books, an event wherein the organizers collect books from writers, poets, editors and media practitioners, musicians, artists, book lovers, art lovers, and other prominent personalities in Cebu and put them on sale with the proceeds going to school children. There’s a list of the books they’re putting on sale at facebook. I’d like to get The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño for myself. Unfortunately, I’m not in Cebu for the event. So I guess I’d have to ask somebody to buy them for me.

Anyhow, I got myself a copy of Resil Mojares’s Origins and Rise of the Novel: A Generic Study of the Filipino Novel until 1940, a synchronic and diachronic investigation that seeks to chart the contours of the structures that underlie the Filipino novel while at the same time tracing the development of its various elements through history.

I have never been that much of an admirer of local literature, in part because my petty bourgeois habitus (the set of tastes characteristic of my class) is more inclined to consuming cultural artifacts coming from the west. Last year, this middle class colonial mentality was epitomized in a society columnist’s complaint over her daughter’s required high school class reading of Amado Hernandez’s Mga Ibong Mandaragit. Why not just let them read Hemingway, she asked?

But along with Soledad Reyes’s essays on the fictions of Filipino women writers, female characters in Filipino literary texts, and popular culture in Tellers of Tales, Singers of Songs: Selected Critical Essays, Mojares’s study has instilled in me a greater appreciation of the Philippine literary heritage. I’ve begun to see them in a new light.

I’m halfway through Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, a thick tome inhabited by a hilariously unreliable narrator. It is written in a most garish style, perhaps much too colorful for my taste but still very much worth the effort to read.

After discontinuing my previous attempt at Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject (which I was gravely unprepared for when I began reading it last December), I decided to start over and began reading the Slovenian cultural theorist’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (his first book in English) to gain an understanding his Lacanian-informed critique of ideology.

There are too many texts to read and too little time, especially when one has other things to do too – like attending classes, talking with and organizing people, daydreaming about running after a girl, losing sleep, and writing all sorts of silly stuff like this. ■

D-mension, a system of modular racks created by Nicola Zanetti.

Something on “Bookshelf etiquette” from The Guardian Books Blog. Arranging them alphabetically is not the only way to go about it. ■