WHO IS AFRAID OF ZIZEK?

ON ZIZEK’S POPULARITY IN DILIMAN, PHILIPPINES, AND THE PROBLEM OF FREUDIAN AND LACANIAN SPECULATIONS FOR SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE PHILIPPINES AND ELSEWHERE: A Brief Comment


By E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

Friends from U.P. Diliman have continually informed me that the most popular author among students and teachers today is Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian exile, now residing in London, UK. Not Ambeth Ocampo nor Jessica Zafra. Of course, Joma Sison is still around; but he has become trivialized, if not banalized, not less by his detractors now shooting polemical missiles from Japan, Australia, and Europe. Joma may have become the victim of an insidious repetition-compulsion (embodied in the habitus/ethos of megamalling/consumerism and migration) which has also wreaked havoc on the cult-groupie adherents of sikolohiyang Pilipino and its more exclusivist offsprings: pantayong pananaw, regional sectarian enclaves, etc. etc. If Mao and Joma are fading, will Che Guevara and Fanon—not to mention Antonio Gramsci, W.E.B.Du Bois, and Renato Constantino--be coming up soon in a revivalist trend, side by side with ‘Pareng Barack, Beyonce and Rihanna? No, Zizek has taken over!

Aside from his books on Lacan (applied to Hollywood films) and Hegel, Zizek has suddenly become a kind of Leninist after migrating to the UK where he heads a think-tank for the floating and eclectic intellectuals of the global North, including the not-so-mighty USA. The pragmatic US elite act like bricoleurs in raiding new ideas anywhere and commodifying them. (Except maybe for the original hypotheses of Charles Sanders Peirce, the real founder of pragmaticism, since then vulgarized by his epigones.) In the “belly of the beast,” academics are still looking to the French and the German thinkers (after Habermas, Derrida and Foucault, the Italian Agamben and the French Badiou are trying to catch up, jousting with Adorno, Bakhtin, and Walter Benjamin) for needed sustenance. They cannot get it from the late Rorty, nor the Hardt and Negri of Empire; much less from postcolonialists like Bhabha, Spivak, Appadurai, etc. Of course, the anarchists and neo-marxists proliferate, but they are impotent in affecting public discourse and institutional practices. As for the U.S.left, one hopes that someone will come to revive this dead Lazarus. Meanwhile, third-world immigrants are mobilizing….

Meanwhile, Zizek is still alive and functioning. From his launching-pad in London, and his video self-promotions in YOUTUBE and the Internet, Zizek has achieved some kind of hegemonic status among elite pundits and public intellectuals in the metropoles and hinterlands like the Philippines. My colleagues are not reading Chomsky, Zinn. Charles Taylor, or The Nation—they are perusing the humor and humours of Zizek.

Zizek’s entire corpus is based on Lacanian axioms, with heavy allusions to Freud, Marx, Hegel of course, and the anti-Cartesian and Nietzschean archive. This Lacanian foundation has never been questioned, presumably because it is obscure and highly speculative. Not the least daunting is the fact that there is a breed called Lacanian feminists (Kristeva may be one), just as there used to be Freudian feminists (Juliet Mitchell comes to mind). Aside from the linguistic orientation of Lacan, the whole Freudian apparatus of the analytic situation and its metapsychological implications are fully invested in the Zizek utterance-machine. Lacan in fact boasted that he restored the original Freud, or rescued him from the perfidious revisionists. Lacan’s logocentrism informs the wide-ranging applications deployed by Zizek in his commentaries on current issues and quotidian happenings. Zizek’s eclecticism appeals to the pedestrian scholars and practitioners of mainstream cultural studies all over the world, afraid of socialist or other utopian alternatives to the status quo.

One commentator in the field, Jean Laplanche, in his Essays on Otherness, has acutely provided illuminating distinctions in the levels of theoretical sophistication found in Freudian discourse.
Among his many shrewd insights, I offer for readers Laplanche’s view that “the theory of seduction” (which underlies Freud’s transference theory, the key lesson of the “talking cure”) is not a reading language one can use universally for all communication situations. Rather, it is chiefly an attempt to understand the analytical practice of Freudian therapists. To apply it elsewhere is a gross imposition bound to generate misreadings and misrecognitions. In fact, Laplanche emphasizes, what is known as “psychoanalytical reading” is “a direct means of repression.” This is an ironical finding that seems to rival the “shock and awe” of Bush’s infamous “global war on terror.”

In this context, the British philosopher Peter Osborne aptly comments on the “repetitive structure” of Zizek’s work: “’Psychoanalytical readings are a means of repression to the extent that they shield the reader from the productive enigma of the text/object/practice by imposing a standardized narrative interpretation: the Oedipal reading, the ‘depressive position’ reading, the Real reading…. Such readings offer the comfort, not of strangers, but of all-too-familiar codings of strangeness which serve to reinforce the interpreting subject’s existing formation. As such, they offer a theoretical version of the pleasure in repetition which is an essential part of all cultural experience” (Philosophy in Cultural Theory, London, 2000, pp. 114-15). Who would want to reject repetition if it gives pleasure? The obsession with affects, the body, Butler’s performative and ludic exhibitions, and of course sexual/erotic fantasies, is still universal.

It is, I think, precisely this pleasure in repetition of now familiar Freudian/Lacanian strategies of reading that we find in Zizek.Take, for example, a typical performance illustrated by his article “The Not-so-Quiet American” in IN THESE TIMES (Feb. 14, 2005). This is vintage Zizek. Here he criticizes U.S. imperial policy in Iraq as a perfect illustration of Graham Greene’s satiric portrayal of the “quiet American” who, in spite of or because of humanitarian, altruistic motives produce enormous disaster and death, the opposite of his good intentions. The Freudian paradigm of the libidinal unconscious wrecking all the master plans of the rational ego is obvious here. Lacan observes that the Iraqi people react ungratefully to the U.S. gift of democracy and freedom—“they look at the proverbial gift horse in the mouth, and America then responds like a sullen child in reaction of the ingratitude of those it selflessly helped.” Lacan follows this up with the method of double reading, one that looks backward in a genealogical fashion to what lies behind appearances (the hidden motive) and one that looks forward to the eschatological effect (the result that validates the discovery of what’s hidden). After excavation, then an allegory of anticipation and, if there’s no transference, repetition. This formula is applied to the excavation of the U.S. motive. Zizek diagnoses further: “The underlying presupposition is that under our skin, if we scratch the surface, we are all Americans. That is our true desire—all that is needed is just to give people a chance, liberate them from their imposed constraints and they will join us in our ideological dream.” Hence, US feminists’ self-righetous crusade against clitoridectomy in Africa, the Middle East, and everywhere.

Zizek tries to complicate his rather conventional Freudian/Lacanian reading by inscribing in his text the authoritarian/totalitarian binary introduced by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a neoconservative policy bureaucrat during the Reagan administration. Semantic and ludic discriminations take over. Kirkpatrick approved the pragmatic authoritarian dictators supported by the US in the seventies and eighties (Marcos,Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, etc.) but disapproved the totalitarian rulers modeled after Soviet and Chinese communist teachings. Lacan seizes on the irony of the U.S. overthrowing the pragmatic authoritarian Saddam Hussein, thus proving that its real and authentic desire—yes, the hidden subterranean drive—is for totalitarian domination, the exercise of absolute power over everyone. In effect, Lacan has revealed the real motive, the source of the imperial drive, in analyzing the process of transference by using Saddam Hussein, and the US policy in Iraq, as the enigmatic signifiers whose binding and unbinding can produce the cure. But by confining himself to the discourse of the texts he reads, its concepts and assumptions, Zizek reproduces all the ironies and ambiguities he is trying to resolve. We thought everything was clear, we include in the “overall picture the ideological and political effects” of US occupation, but the Iraqis remain the victims. Iraq remains occupied with at least a million Iraqis dead and thousands of Americans killed. And the redeeming Gospel of Zizek has not changed the picture. (Recently, the African American political commentator Melissa Harris-Lacewell cogently argued that what changed the picture, at least within the US consensus, is the Katrina-New Orleans disaster and its erosion of support for Bush’s unilaterialist, war-mongering racialist policy.)

Armed with Zizek’s apercus disseminated in numerous books and articles circulated all over the world, are we any wiser or more fully informed of the total picture of the world today after his brilliant disclosure? Are we more adequately mobilized to confront Obama’s imperial mission in Afghanistan and all over the world, including the Philippines, via the subservient neocolonial Arroyo regime? Can the Lacanian-Freudian theoretical framework clarify the root and solution to the unprecedented global economic crisis started by the financial collapse of 2008? Is US hegemony still standing after the powerful Zizek diagnosis of self-deception, seduction, and traumatic cathexes?

The problem is our uncritical acceptance of Freud’s flawed premises and fundamentally complicit world-view. Despite the heroic efforts of Marcuse, Fromm, Wolfenstein, Reich, Ollman, and others, Freud remains a seriously misleading explainer of what is wrong with Western civilization, and the human psyche in general. The Freudian doctrine has of course been repudiated by psychologists and psychiatrists trained in scientific positivism, as well as by social scientists in general. However, Freud’s metapsychology (as elaborated in Civilization and Its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion, for example) continue to exercise a profound and pervasive influence on humanists, writers, artists, and so on. This is not the space for an extended critique of Freud, or even a review of everything wrong and counterproductive in Freud if we are concerned with advancing a revolutionary, socialist project. Allow me to quote Richard Lichtman’s concluding judgment in his important but neglected book, The Production of Desire (Lichtman’s caveats on Freud complement Christopher Caudwell’s critique of Freud in Studies in a Dying Culture):

…This is precisely Freud’s weakness; he lacks an understanding of social relations and therefore of the social nature of ‘individual’ existence. Consequently, his efforts at the demystification of personal experience always reproduce some critical aspect of that mystification., for he never escapes taking the consequence of capitalist individualism for its cause. The framework through which he reveals the reality of the human condition is limited by the inhumanity of the capitalist condition which is then mistaken for the human condition itself. So, while Freud eschews any assertion of the significance of social structure, he reproduces this very structure in his uncritical acceptance of the deepest aspects of the capitalist world view” (1982, 258).

I think Lichtman’s analysis and evaluation of Freud’s whole psychoanalytic cosmos are solidly grounded on a historical-materialist critique and seems to me irrefutable; and, mutatis mutandis, they apply also to Lacan and Zizek. May it reach our friends in Diliman, “sitting in darkness,” to use Mark Twain’s ironic epithet of the U.S. civilizing mission, the brutal “Benevolent Assimilation” conquest of the islands that led to 1.4 million dead Filipinas/os and its other toxic consequences. --##

By E. SAN JUAN, Jr.: BALIKBAYANG SINTA: AN E. SAN JUAN READER & FROM GLOBALIZATION TO NATIONAL LIBERATION

NICOLE STRIKES BACK FROM INSIDE "THE BELLY OF THE BEAST"

PAHIWATIG MULA SA 'BELLY OF THE BEAST" NI MS. NICOLASA ALIAS "NICOLE": "THIS BODY MY PROPERTY"

[Mensahe para sa mga Kababaihang Nakiramay at Nagmalasakit]

"Yankee go home, but take me with you"
--Sign on a placard during the anti-bases demo in 1991 in Subic Bay, Philippines




Tinuligsa ako't tinusok ng madla
Tinuhog akong parang baboy
Ay, Inay ko, walang-hiya raw ako
Tinumbok at tinadyakan tinigpas hinalay inupakan
Nilait minura dinuraan Wala raw akong puri o hiya
Anong alam nila?

Tuloy-tuluyan tagus-tagusan sa 'king katawan
Sagad-butong gahasa't alipusta
Lahat pinakialaman
Labis pa sa lamuyot lamusak kubabaw ni Daniel Smith

Malayo na ako ngayon sa mura't tungayawan
Malayo na sa Zamboanga at Subic Bay
Inagaw binawi ko na ang kaluluwa ko sa dahas at titig ng madla
Inangkin ko muli ang pag-aari ko ang pagkatao ko
Wala silang pakialam
Sumpa ko sa 'yo-- Pangako ko sa 'ting pagsasamahan--
Akong mananagot sa kasarinlan ng kasarian:

"This body my property... Keep off!
Walang VFA dito, salamat, Diyos ko, malaya na ako
Sa hustisya ng Inang Bayang nakapailalim pa rin ...."

Kailangang bumangon na, Darlin'....

--E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

BRITNEY SPEARS SNEAKS INTO THE PHILIPPINES

SNEAKING INTO THE PHILIPPINES, ALONG THE RIVERS OF BABYLON:

AN INTERVENTION INTO THE LANGUAGE QUESTION


by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.
Dept of English & Comparative Literature
University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City




I’m Miss American Dream since I was 17
Don’t matter if I step on the scene or sneak away to the Philippines
They still goin’ put pictures of my derriere in the magazine
You want a piece of me? You want a piece of me?

---BRITNEY SPEARS, “Piece of Me”


By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion…..
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign tongue?

--PSALM 137


It is also a misfortune to understand various languages because thus one has more occasions to hear stupidities and nonsense.

--JOSE RIZAL, “Travel Diary, 4 July 1889





In this current situation of portentous upheaval in the Philippines, any discussion of the “language question,” like the “woman question,” is bound to be imcendiary and contentious. The issue of language is always explosive, a crux of symptoms afflicting the body politic. It is like a fuse or trigger that ignites a whole bundle of inflammable issues, scandalously questioning the existence of God in front of an audience of believers. Or the immortality of souls among the faithful. Perhaps my saying outright that I am a partisan for a national language, Filipino, may outrage the postmodernists and cosmopolites among you—how can you say such a thing when you are speaking in English? Or, as Senator Diokno once said, “English of a sort.” How dare I infuriate the loyal speakers of Cebuano, Ilocano, Pampagueno, Ilonggo, Taglish, Filipino English, and a hundred or more languages used in these seven thousand islands. One gives up: it can’t be helped. Or we can help lift the ideological smog and draw more lucidly the lines of demarcation in the battleground of ideas and social practices.

One suspects that this is almost unavoidable, in a society where to raise the need for one national language, say “Filipino” (as mandated by the Constitution) is certain to arouse immediate opposition. Or, if not immediately, it is deferred and sublimated into other pretexts for debate and argumentation. Fortunately, we have not reached the point of armed skirmishes and violent confrontations for the sake of our mother/father tongue, as in India and other countries. My partisanship for Filipino (not Tagalog) is bound to inflame Cebuanos, Bicolanos, Ilocanos, and so on, including Filipino speakers-writers of English, or Filipino English. We probably try to defuse any brewing conflict quickly by using the colonizer’s tongue, or compromise babel-wise. My view is that only a continuing historical analysis can help explain the present contradictory conjuncture, and disclose the options it offers us. Only engagement in the current political struggles can resolve the linguistic aporia/antinomy and clarify the import and consequence of the controversy over the national language, over the fate of Filipino and English in our society.
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Sa kasalukuyang matinding sigalot sa bansa, anumang talakayan hinggil sa wika ay tiyak na magbubunsod sa isang away o maingay na pagtatalo. Kahawig nito ang usapin ng kababaihan. Laging matinik ang isyu ng pambansang wika, isang sintomas ng pinaglikom na mga sakit ng body politic. Tila ito isang mitsang magpapasabog sa pinakabuod na mga kontradiksiyong bumubuo sa istruktura ng lipunang siyang nakatanghal na larangan ng digmaan ng mga uri at iba’t ibang sektor.

Lalong masahol siguro kung sabihin kong nasa panig ako ng mga nagsususog sa isang pambansang wikang tinaguriang “Filipino.” Tiyak na tututol ang mga Sebuano, Ilokano, Ilonggo, mga alagad ng Taglish, o Ingles, o Filipino-Ingles. Ngunit hindi ito maiiwasan, kaya tuloy na tayong makipagbuno sa usaping ito upang mailinaw ang linya ng paghahati’t pamumukod, at sa gayo’y makarating sa antas ng pagtutuos at pagpapasiya.
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One would expect that this issue would have been resolved a long time ago. But, given the dire condition of the Philippine political economy in this epoch of globalized terrorism of the U.S. hegemon, a plight that is the product of more than a century of colonial/neocolonial domination, all the controversies surrounding this proposal of a national language since the time of the Philippine Commonwealth when Quezon convened the Institute of National Language under Jaime de Veyra, have risen again like ravenous ghouls. I believe this specter can never be properly laid to rest until we have acquired genuine sovereignty, until national self-determination has been fully exercised, and the Filipino people—three thousand everyday, more than a million every year--will no longer be leaving in droves as Overseas Contract Workers, the whole nation becoming a global subaltern to the transnational corporations, to the World Bank-World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the predatory finance capital of the global North. If we cannot help but be interpellated by the sirens of the global market and transformed into exchangeable warm bodies, we can at least interrogate the conditions of our subordination—if only as a gesture of resistance by a nascent, irrepressible agency.
_________________

Saan mang lugar, ang usapin ng pambansang wika ay kumakatawan sa pagtatalo tungkol sa mga mahalagang usapin sa pulitika at ekonomya. Buti naman, hindi pa tayo nagpapatayan sa ngalan ng wika, tulad ng nangyayari sa India at iba pang bansa. Marahil, napapahinahon ang bawat isa kung Ingles, ang wika ng dating kolonisador, ang wika ng globalisasyon ngayon, ang ating gagamitin. Di ko lang tiyak kung maiging magkakaunawaan ang lahat sapagkat ang pagsasalin o translation, kalimitan, ang siyang nagbubunga ng karagdagang basag-gulo. Ngunit ang pagbaling sa Ingles ay pagsuko lamang sa dominasyon ng kapangyarihang global sa ilalim ng kasalukuyang hegemon, ang Estados Unidos. Ang makalulutas ng krisis, sa tingin ko, ay isang pakikisangkot sa nangyayaring labanang pampulitika at pang-ideolohya, laluna ang pakikibaka tungo sa tunay na kasarinlan at demokrasyang popular, sa gitna ng dominasyon ng mga mayayama’t makapangyarihang bansa sa Europa, Norte Amerika, Hapon, at iba pa.

Bagamat mula pa noong panahon ni Quezon hanggang sa ngayon, ang isyu ng “pambansang wika” ay naipaloob na sa Konstitusyon, bumangon ito muli na tila mga kaluluwang uhaw sa dugo. Maireresolba lang ang isyung ito kung may tunay na soberanya na tayo, at namamayani ang kapangyarihan ng nakararami, mga pesante’t manggagawa, at nabuwag na ang poder ng mga may-aring kakutsaba ng imperyalismo. Sa ngayon, walang kalutasan ito, sintomas ng bayang naghihirap, hanggang ang relasyong sosyal ay kontrolado ng naghaharing uri, laluna ng mga komprador at maylupang pabor sa Ingles, wikang may prestihiyo at kinagawiang wika sa pakikipag-ugnay sa kanilang mga patrong Amerikano, Hapon, Intsik at iba pa.
_____________________

In the hope of avoiding such a situation, which is almost ineluctable, I would like to offer the following seven theses that may initiate a new approach to the question, if not offer heuristic points of departure for reflection. In contrast to the dominant neoliberal philosophically idealist-metaphysical approach, I apply a historical materialist one whose method is not only historicizing and dialectical—not merely deploying the “Aufhebung” of Hegel within an eclectic, neoWeberian framework (as Fernando Zialcita does in his provocative book--Authentic Though Not Exotic: Essays on Filipino Identity (2005)—but also, as Marx said, standing it on its head in the complex and changing social relations of production within concrete historical settings. The materialist dialectic offers a method of analysis and elucidation of the context in which questions about a national language can be clarified and the nuances of its practical implications elaborated.

Thesis 1:
Language is not a self-sufficient entity or phenomenon in itself but a component of the social forms of consciousness of any given social formation. Marx considered language a productive force, conceived as “practical consciousness,” as he elaborates in the Grundrisse: “Language itself is just as much the product of a community, as in another aspect it is the existence of the community--it is, as it were, the communal being speaking for itself” (quoted in Rossi-Landi 1983, 170). As such, it can only be properly addressed within the historical specificity of a given mode of production and attendant social-political formation. It has no history of its own but is a constituent part and constitutive of the ideological terrain on which the struggle of classes and historic blocs are fought, always in an uneven and combined mode of development. It forms part of the conflicted evolution of the integral state, as Gramsci conceived it as the combination of political society and civil society. The issue of language is located right at the heart of the construction of this integral state. Hence not only its synchronic but also diachronic dimensions should be dialectically comprehended in grasping its worth and contribution to the liberation and fulfillment of the human potential.

Thesis 2:
The function and nature of language then cannot be adequately discussed in a neutral and positivistic-empiricist way, given its insertion into conflicted relations of production, at least since the emergence of class-divided societies in history. Ferruccio Rossi-Landi explains the imbrication of language in social-historical praxis: “The typically social operation of speaking can only be performed by a historically determined individual or group; it must be performed in a given language, that is, within a determined structure which is always itself, to some extent, both an ideological product and an ideological instrument already; lastly, the audience is determined as well” by the historical-social situation (1983, 169). Language use, in short, the process of communication, cannot escape the necessity of sociopolitical overdetermination.

In the Philippines, the status and function of various languages—Spanish, English, and the numerous vernaculars or regional languages—cannot be assayed without inscribing them in the history of colonial and neocolonial domination of the peoples in these islands. In this regard, the terms “national-popular” and “nation-people”—as Gramsci (1971) employed them in a historical-materialist discourse--should be used in referring to Filipinos in the process of expressing themselves (albeit in a contradiction-filled way) as diverse communities, interpellating other nationalities, and conducting dialogue with themselves and other conversers.
It is necessary to assert the fundamental premise of the “national-popular,” the nation as constituted by the working masses (in our country, workers and peasants), not the patricians. Otherwise, the nation (in the archive of Western-oriented or Eurocentric history) is usually identified with the elite, the propertied classes, the national bourgeoisie, or the comprador bourgeoisie and its allies, the bureaucrats and feudal landlords and their retinue of gangsters, private armies, paramilitary thugs, etc. Actually, today, we inhabit a neocolony dominated by a comprador-bureaucratic bloc of the propertied classes allied with and supported in manifold ways by the U.S. hegemon and its regional accomplices.
The recent unilateral policy pronouncement of the de facto Philippine president Arroyo that English should be re-instated as the official medium of instruction in all schools can only be read as a total subservience to the ideology of English as a global language free from all imperialist intent. Obviously this is propagated by free-market ideologues inside and outside government, even though a bill has recently been proposed in the Congress to institute the mother tongue as the medium of instruction up to grade six of the elementary school. (One needs to interject here that this idea of using the mother tongue in the first years of education is not new; it was first planned and tested in the Sta. Barbara, Panay, experiment conducted by Dr. Jose V. Aguilar in the late forties and fifties. But this finding has been buried and forgotten by the neocolonialist policies of all administrations since 1946.) As Peter Ives pointed out in his Language and Hegemony in Gramsci, issues of language policy in organizing schools and testing curriculum need to be connected to “political questions of democracy, growing inequalities in wealth and neo-imperialism” (2004, 164), since the daily acts of speaking and writing--in effect, the dynamic field of social communication-- involves the struggle for hegemony in the realm of civil society, state institutions, and practices of everyday life.
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Sa halip na sipatin ang isyung ito sa kinagawiang empirical na lapit, tulad ng ginagamit ng mga postmodernistang iskolar, dapat ipataw ang isang materyalismo- istorikal na pananaw at ang diyalektikong paraan upang makalikha ng praktikang agenda na tutugon sa tanong kung ano ba ang wikang pambansang magsisilbing mabisang sandata sa mapagpalayang pakikipagsapalaran ng sambayanan.

Ang wika ay hindi isang bagay na may sariling halaga kundi bahagi ito ng kategorya ng kamalayang sosyal, isang kamalayang praktika—“practical consciousness,” ayon kay Marx—na gumaganap sa buhay bilang lakas ng produksiyon. Matutukoy lamang ito sa gitna ng isang partikular na mode of production sa isang determinadong pormasyonag sosyal. Hindi ito bukod sa pagtatagisang pang-ideolohiya. Kalahok ito sa pagbubuo ng integral state (konseptong galing kay Gramsci), tambalan ng lipunang sibil at lipunang pampulitika. Ang usapin ng wika ay di maihihiwalay sa yugto ng kasaysayan ng bayan, na laging komplikado at di-pantay ang pagsulong ng iba’t ibang bahagi---uneven and combined development. Samakatwid, sa ating sitwasyon, ang suliraning pang-wika ay di maihihiwalay sa programa tungo sa tunay na kasarinlan at kasaganaan, mula sa kasalukuyang neocolonial at naghihikahos na bayan.

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Thesis 3:
The Filipino nation is an unfinished and continuing project, an unfinished work, constantly being re-invented but not under conditions of its own making. Becoming Filipinos is a process of decolonization and radical democratization of the social formation, a sequence of collective choices. This is almost a cliché among the progressive forces with a nationalist orientation. It bears repeating that Filipino sovereignty is a dynamic totality whose premises are political independence and economic self-sufficiency. We have not yet achieved those premises.
Given the current alignment of nation-states in the world-system under U.S. hegemony, whose hegemony is unstable, precarious, sustained by manifold antagonisms, and perpetually challenged by other regional blocs, becoming Filipino is an ever-renewing trajectory of creation and re-creation, a process overdetermined by legacies of the past and unpredictable incidences of the present and the future. Within this configuration, an evolving, emergent Filipino language may be conceived as both a medium and substantive element in fashioning this sequence of becoming-Filipino, a sequence grasped not as a cultural essence but a network of dynamic political affiliations and commitments. It is also an aesthetic modality of counterhegemonic, anti-imperialist expression.

Thesis 4:
Only within the project of achieving genuine, substantive national independence and egalitarian democracy can we argue for the need for one national language as an effective means of unifying the masses of peasants, workers and middle strata and allowing them integral participation in a hegemonic process.
Note that this is not just a question of cultural identity within the larger agenda of a reformist-individualist politics of identity/recognition.
Without changing the unequal and unjust property/power relations, a distinctive Filipino culture incorporating all the diverse elements that have entered everyday lives of the masses can not be defined and allowed to flourish. Without the prosperous development of the material resources and political instrumentalities, a Filipino cultural identity can only be an artificial, hybrid fabrication of the elite—an excrescence of global consumerism, a symptom of the power of transnationalized commodity-fetishism that, right now, dominates the popular consciousness via the mass media, in particular television, films, music, food and fashion styles, packaged life-styles that permeate the everyday practices of ordinary Filipinos across class, ethnicities, age and localities.

The consumerist habitus (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s [1998] concept) acquired from decades of colonial education and indoctrination has almost entirely conquered and occupied the psyche of every Filipino, except for those consciously aware of it and collectively resisting it. With the rise of globalization, it has been a fashionable if tendentious practice among the floating litterateurs, mostly resident in colleges and universities, to advocate the maintenance of the status quo; that is, English as the prestigious language, Taglish as the media lingua franca, and Filipino and the other languages as utilitarian devices for specific tasks. But soon we find that this imitated pluralistic/multiculturalist stand only functions as the effective ploy of neoliberal finance capital. This seemingly pragmatist, accomodationist stance ultimately serves neocolonial goals: the Filipino as presumptive world-citizen functioning as compensation for the lack of effective national sovereignty. Its obverse is regional/ethnic separatism. The culturalist or civilizationalist program, often linked to NGOs and deceptive philanthropic schemes, skips the required dialectical mediation and posits an abstract universality, though disguised in a self-satisfied particularism now in vogue among postcolonial deconstructionists eulogizing the importance of place, locality, indigeneity, organic roots, etc.
We discover in time that this trend serves as a useful adjunct for enhancing the festishistic magic, aura and seductive lure of commodities—from brand-name luxury goods to the whole world of images, sounds, theoretical discourses, and multimedia confections manufactured by the transnational culture industry and marketed as symbolic capital for the pettybourgeoisie of the periphery and other subalternized sectors within the metropole.
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Sa Pilipinas, ang lagay at papel na ginagampanan ng wika ay maipapaliwanag lamang sa pagsingit nito sa ugnayang panlipunan, sa kontradiksyon ng sumusulong na puwersa ng produksyon at namamayaning balangkas na pumipigil sa pagsulong ng buong lipunan. Ang katayuan ng wika ay nakabatay sa kasaysayan ng bansa, sa kolonyal at neokolonyal na dominasyon ng Kastila, Amerika at Hapon, at sa himagsik ng sambayanan laban sa pang-aapi. Ang mga katagang “nasyonal-popular” o pambansa-makamasa—na iminungkahi ni Gramsci—ang dapat ilapat sa nakararami na nag-aadhikang makapagpahayag ng kanilang pagkatao sa iba’t ibang paraan, tigib ng kontradiksiyon na bunga ng di-pantay at pinagtambal na pagsulong ng iba’t ibang sangkap ng kabuuang istruktura ng lipunan. Ang wika ay nakalubog sa daloy ng mga kontradiksiyon sa lipunan.

Kailangang idiin ang prinsipyo ng nasyonal-popular, pambansa-makamasa, ang bansa na binubuo’t pinapatnubayan ng masang walang pag-aari—mga manggagawa, magsasaka, at gitnang sangay (mga propesyonal, petiburgesyang uri, mga minorya). Kung hindi, ang bansa ay mabibigyan-kahulugan ng mga naghaharing uri, ang iilan na nag-mamay-ari, ang oligarkong tuta ng imperyalismo, mga ahente ng global finance-capital.



Thesis 5:
Spanish and English are global languages needed for communication and participation in world affairs. They are recognized as richly developed languages of aesthetic and intellectual power useful for certain purposes—English particularly in the scientific and technical fields. But they have a political history and resonance for “third world peoples” who have suffered from their uses. Its sedimented patterns of thought and action cannot so easily be ignored or elided. The discursive genres of law, business, liturgy, pedagogy, and so on, in English and their institutionalized instrumentalities cannot be judged on their own terms without understanding the political role they played, and continue to play, as effective instruments in the colonial domination of the various peoples in the Philippines and their total subordination to the political-cultural hegemony of the Spanish empire, and then of the American empire from 1899 to 1946, and of U.S. neocolonial control after formal independence in 1946. Everyone knows that while Rizal used Spanish to reach an enlightened Spanish public and an ilustrado-influenced audience, the masses who participated in the Malolos Republic and the war against the Americans used Tagalog, and other vernaculars, in fighting for cultural autonomy and national independence. Historically the national and democratic project of the Philippine revolution—still unfinished and continuing—provides the only viable perspective within which we can explore the need for a national language as a means of uniting and mobilizing the people for this project.

Thesis 6:
The use and promotion of a national language does not imply the neglect, elimination, or inferiorization of other regional languages spoken and used by diverse communities involved in the national-democratic struggle. In fact, it implies their preservation and cultivation. But that is contingent on the attainment of genuine national sovereignty and the emancipation of the masses, their integration into active participation in governance. Their inferiorization is tied to the oppression of their users/speakers by virtue of class, nationality, religion, ethinicity, locality, and so on. (My friends in Panay who use Kinaray-a, Ilonggo or Akenaon should not fear being dominated by a Manila-centric hegemony as long as they address crucial political questions of social justice and sovereignty in a manner that commands directive force, displacing the question of form with the substantive totality of communication across ethnic and local differences to forge a flexible but principled united front for national democracy and socialist liberation.)
Meanwhile, in the course of the national-liberation struggle, all languages should and are being used for mobilization, political education, and cultural self-affirmation. Simultaneously, the dissemination and development of one national language becomes a political and economic-cultural necessity for unifying the diverse communities under a common political program—which does not imply a monolithic ideological unity-- in front of the monstrous power of finance-capital using English as an instrument of subordination and neocolonial aggression.
In this regard, I would argue that the unity and collective pride attendant on the use of one national language provides the groundwork and fundamental requisite for the promotion and development of other ethnic/regional languages within the national polity. This is a psychological-ideological imperative that cannot be deferred. A dialectical approach should be applied to the historically contentious relations between a dominant vernaculat (Tagalog) and its subalternized counterparts (Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, etc.) in order to transcend historically sedimented prejudices and promote creative dialogue and intertextuality among all the languages spoken in the Philippines.
____________________

Ang bansang Pilipinas na may kasarinlan at matipunong industriya ay isang proyektong di pa tapos, nagpapatuloy, laging iniimbento ngunit hindi sa anumang kondisyon. Ang pagiging Filipino ay isang proseso ng dekolonisasyon at demokratisasyong radikal, isang kaganapan na likha ng kolektibong pagpapasya, hindi indibidwal na kagustuhan. Ang proyektong ito ay hinuhubog at niyayari ng maraming lakas, ng minanang ugali at sari-saring idea at institusyon katutubo o hiram. Hindi ito nakatutok sa pagtatamo ng isang esensiya, kundi makikilatis ito bilang isang masalimuot na pagbubuklod ng dinamikong pakikisamang pampulitika at mga komitment. Ito’y isa ring estetikong kalakaran sa kontra-gahum na paglikhang makasining.

Sa loob lamang ng pangitaing ito, sa proyekto ng pagsisikap makamit ang tunay na pambansang kasarinlan at demokrasyang radikal makatuturang mahihimay ang problema ng pangangailangan ng wikang pambansa, isang wikang mabisang makapag-iisa sa masa at mga komunidad sa teritoryo ng Pilipinas, at makapagdudulot ng mabisang partisipasyon sa pagbuo ng isang gahum o lideratong moral-intelektwal ng masang manggagawa. Paano mayayari ang mapagpalayang gahum kung walang pagkakaisang kinakatawan ng/kumakatawan sa sariling wika ng komunikasyon at pag-iisip?

______________________

Thesis 7:
Hegemony, the moral and intellectual leadership of the Filipino working masses, the scaffold within which an authentic Filipino identity can grow, assumes the rise of organic Filipino intellectuals who will use and develop Filipino as the evolving national language. Again, this does not mean suppressing other regional languages. Nor does it mean prohibiting the use and teaching of English or other international languages (Spanish, French, Chinese, etc.). It simply means the establishment of a required platform, basis or foundation, without which the productive forces of the people within this particular geopolitical boundary can be harnessed, refined, and released in order to, first, benefit the physical and spritual health of Filipinos, repair and recover the damage inflicted by centuries of colonial oppression and exploitation, and thus be able to contribute to the cultural heritage of humankind. That is why mandating the continued teaching of English equally with Filipino, with the mother language as auxiliary, at the secondary level, betokens a schizophrenic if not treacherous and treasonous policy of the ruling class beholden to U.S. and transnational corporate interests.
Without an independent national physiognomy, Filipinos have nothing distinctive to share with other nations and peoples. Without national self-determination and a historically defined identity, there is no way Filipinos can contribute their distinctive share in global culture. In fact, it is impossible to be a global citizen unless you have fully grown and matured as an effective democratic participant in the making of a prosperous, egalitarian nation-people in a historically specific territory defined by a concretely differentiated sequence of events not replicated elsewhere.
_________________

Ang layon natin ay hindi lamang kultural na identidad, o kasiyaang pang-kalinangan. Sa gitna ng komodipikasyon ng lahat, sa gitna ng laganap na konsumerismo at paghahari ng halagang-pamalit (exchange-value), ang reipikasyon at alyenasyon ng ugnayan ng mga tao ay siyang nagpapalabo sa usapin ng wika. Hindi malulutas ang mga tanong tungkol sa wika hanggang hindi nahaharap ang mistipikasyon ng pakikipagkapwa, na ngayo’y natatabingan at nalalambungan ng mga komoditi, bilihin, salapi, na tila siyang umuugit, nagpapagalaw, namamahala’t gumagabay sa lahat ng bagay. Ang mistipikasyong ito ay mawawala lamang kung mapapanaw ang paghahari ng global na kapital, ang patakaran na tubo/yaman muna bago kapakanan ng tao—na, sa ngayon, ay nagsasalita sa Ingles, ang wika ng kongkistador na pumalit sa mga Kastila.

Ang pagbuo’t pagpapayaman ng isang pambansang wika, Filipino, ay hindi nangangahulugan ng pagsasaisantabi o pagbabalewala sa ibang mga wikang ginagamit ng maraming komunidad. Ang pagpapalawig at pagsuporta sa mga wikang ito ay matutupad kung may basehan lamang: ang kasarinlan ng bansa batay sa pagpapalaya sa masa. Sa harap ng higanteng lakas ng kapitalismong global, maisusulong lamang ang proyektong nabanggit ko kung makikibaka tayo sa programa ng pagbabago tungo sa pamamayani, gahum, ng masang gumagawa. Ang wika ay maaaring maging mapagpalayang sandata kung ito’y binubuhay ng masa sa pang-araw-araw na kilos at gawa.

__________________

Historical examples are often misleading, but sometimes elucidatory. It may be irrelevant and even Eurocentric to invoke the examples of Italy and Germany as nations that experienced unified mobilization through the affirmation of national-popular languages, Italy vis-à-vis the Papal ascendancy, and Germany vis-à-vis Latin/Roman Catholic hegemony. In any case, again, the social and historical function and character of language cannot be adequately grasped without situating them in the complex dynamics of the conflict of social classes in history since the break-up of the communal tribes in the hunting-gathering stage, since the rise of private property in the means of production, and the intricate dialectics of culture and collective psyche in the political economy of any social formation. In short, language is not just a permanently undecidable chain of signifiers, always deconstructing itself and falling into abysmal meaninglessness, a vertigo of nonsense and silly absurdities quite appropriate, of course, for pettybourgeois careerists, dilettantes, and hirelings of the oligarchs. Rather, language is a social convention and a site of struggle, the signifier conceived as “an arena of class struggle” (1986, 23) to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s synthesizing phrase.
To conclude these reflections with an open-ended marker: I believe that only from this historical materialist perspective, and within the parameters of the political project of attaining genuine autonomy as a nation-people, can the discussion of a Filipino national language be intelligible and productive. But, again, such a discussion finds its value and validity as part of the total engagement of the people for justice, authentic national independence, and all-sided emancipation from the nightmares of the past and the terrorist fascism of the present.
_____________________

Ang wika ay isang larangan o arena ng tunggalian ng mga uri, ayon kay Mikhail Bakhtin. Naniniwala ako na ang usaping ito, kung ano talaga ang wikang pambansa, ay masasagot lamang sa loob ng proyektong pampulitika, tinimbang at sinipat sa isang materyalistiko-istorikal na pananaw. Ang wika ay praktipang panlipunan, isang produktibong lakas ng sambayanan. Nakapanahon ngang maintindihan natin ito ngayon kung matagumpay na madalumat at mapahalagahann ang kolektibong saloobin ng sambayanan, na ngayon ay naisasatinig sa anagramatikong islogan: ZOBRA NA, TAMA NA, EXIT NA! Samantala, panahon na ngayon at pagkakataong mapakinggan ang iba pang tinig ng madla rito sa makasaysayang hapong ito, una muna ang kasamang Bien Lumbera.-




REFERENCES

Bakhtin, Mikhail/V/ N. Voloshinov. 1986. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, translated by Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. Practical Reason. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers.
Ives, Peter. 2004. Language and Hegemony in Gramsci. London: Pluto Press.
Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio. 1983. Language as Work and Trade. South Hadley, Mass: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc.
Zialcita, Fernando. 2005. Authentic Though Not Exotic: Essays on Filipino Identity. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

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[Remarks made on 12 March 2008, at the launching of Balik-Bayang Sinta: An E. San Juan Reader published by Ateneo University Press under the directorship of Maria Corazon Baytion, sponsored by Kritika Kultura and its editor, Prof. Maria Luisa Torres-Reyes of the Department of English, Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City, Philippines. Special thanks to Professor Bienvenido Lumbera, Ms. Esther Pacheco, and Prof. Gary Devilles for their solidarity; and to Prof. John Iremil Teodoro, director of the Fray Luis de Leon Creative Writing Center, University of San Agustin; and Prof. Tomas Talledo, head of the Creating Writing Program, University of the Philippines-Visayas, for inviting me to the historic first-All-Panay Writers Conference at the University of San Agustin, Iloilo City, entitled “Textualizing Human Rights,” on 14 February 2008, simultaneous with the book-launching of my Salud Algabre at iba pang tula published by the University of San Agustin Press. ]

A HOMAGE TO SANORA BABB & DOROTHY BABB

IF IT WERE NOT FOR THE KINDNESS AND GRACE OF THESE TWO SISTERS, WE WOULD NOT HAVE THE WRITINGS OF CARLOS BULOSAN--
SO IN THE NAME OF THE FILIPINO COMMUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE FILIPINO DIASPORA IN A DYING GLOBAL CAPITALIST ORDER, WE EXPRESS COMRADELY GRATITUDE TO SANORA BABB AND DOROTHY BABB FOR THEIR SOLIDARITY WITH THE REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE OF THE FILIPINO PEOPLE AND ALL OPPRESSED PEOPLES EVERYWHERE--

Philippines Cultural Studies Center, Connecticut, USA

Foreword to CRITIQUE & SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: LESSONS FROM ANTONIO GRAMSCI, MIKHAIL BAKHTIN & RAYMOND WILLIAMS

PREFACE

[to CRITIQUE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: LESSONS FROM ANTONIO GRAMSCI, MIKHAIL BAKHTIN AND RAYMOND WILLIAMS

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.



From 1898, the fall of the Berlin Wall, to September 11, 2001, seems in hindsight a period of relative stability and reconciliation. However, the 9/11 attack on the symbolic icons of pax Americana ushered a moment of reckoning that soon exploded in the Wall Street carnage of September 29 and October 7, with no end in sight. The crisis of global capitalism entered a pivotal stage less than a decade after the end of the Cold War and the Afghanistan/Iraq invasions. But there were already warning signs. At the height of the neoconservative celebration of triumphalist globalization, Robert Brenner anticipated finance-capital's meltdown in his article, "The Looming Crisis of World Capitalism: From Neoliberalism to Depression" (1998). And in his powerful Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire (2007), James Petras analyzed with sharp and lucid strokes the ascendancy of finance capital and the inescapable contradictions of the global capitalist system that would spell its catastrophic breakdown. But what comes after? Is it the barbarism Rosa Luxemburg predicted before the Wall Street collapse in 1929, or the outbreak of revolutionary struggles inaugurated by the Bolshevik revolution?

A recent commentary on the present crisis is the statement issued by the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism entitled "The Wall St. Bailout: A Socialist Perspective" (2008). It is an excellent summation of the diverse socioeconomic and political forces at play in contemporary US society, but it does not spell out the limits of the capitalist strategy and its possible overcoming. Critique is obligated to point out not only the contradictions but also the possibilities of transformation. While there is some criticism of particular legislation and policies, there is no adequate critique of the underlying norms and assumptions behind them. And while there have been countless prescient and acute analysis of what's going on, few have consistently used the method of totalizing critique exemplified by Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State (1843) and Grundrisse (1857-58). Lest we forget, Marx's critique of bourgeois political economy was ultimately intended to abolish it, to emancipate humanity from the rule of the economy (profit accumulation by intense labor exploitation; commodity-fetishism and the cash-nexus corrupting everything) and the domination of the privileged minority elite.
Karl Korsch noted that Marx subtitled all his major works "critique" to stress the fact that thought was not only preoccupied with the discovery of the laws of social development; it was also engaged with the subversion of bourgeois institutions and the categories that constitute it (Jacoby 1983, 524). This construal of critique as a systematic inquiry into the limits of a doctrine or concept partly derives from Kant's distinction between critical and dogmatic modes of thought. Kant held that a dogmatic view treated a concept utimately as validated by "a principle of reason," while a critical view considered a concept "in reference to our cognitive faculties and consequently to the subjective conditions of thinking it, without undertaking to decide anything about its object" (Critique of Judgment, section 74). For Kant, critique was an epistemological procedure of confining one's attention to the limits of understanding demarcated by space/time, bracketing the foundational premises of ontology. This is the sense in which critique is generally taken to be a reflective examination of the validity of the human capacity of understanding; an inquiry into the philosophical claims, conditions and consequences of employing a concept, theory, paradigm or methodology in order to ascertain its limitations and efficacy.
In Marx, however, the labor of critique acquired a different meaning. With the consolidation of industrial capitalism from the ruins of mercantilism, Hegel restored the inner movement of subject and object from an idealist perspective. Feuerbach reversed Hegel and posited a contemplative materialism which Marx corrected in his "Theses on Feuerbach" by reconceptualizing the object as "sensuous human activity, practice...." And this practice takes on a radical charge when Marx elaborates its implication:

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator himself.... The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionizing practice (1978, 144).

By means of this "revolutionizing practice," object and subject reciprocally interact; humans change their behavior and thought while they alter their social relations. The two processes of change constitute a single whole. From critique in the limited Kantian sphere of cognition, we move to the sociological category of critique as transformative practice, "practical-critical activity," revolutionary practice conceived as "the unity of freedom and necessity, of men's subjective activity and the objective consequences of their activity" (Oizerman 1977, 349-50).

Given the dominance of the bourgeois world-outlook from Descartes up to Locke, the humanities and social science disciplines have foisted an empiricist and nominalist, generally idealist, mode of interpreting and judging events and experiences. Commodity production and exchange produced a pervasive reification of social life, the dissociation of appearance and reality, so that a mere empirical notation of phenomena can never yield a grasp of the whole situation and the truth of its internal relations. The task of critique is to demonstrate the mystifying nature of phenomenal forms in capitalist society, and in the process expose the immediate social forms of consciousness that spontaneously manifest specific production relations. Critique dialectically connects immanent and transcendental analysis of manifold forces constituting events and protagonists. Derek Sayers aptly formulates Marx's project as a rigorous critique of experience and everyday life in the alienated world of modern bourgeois society:

Marx's own theoretical concepts are grounded in a critique of appearances, of 'natural, self-understood forms of social life' and their corresponding categories....I see Marx's critique, analogously to Kant's, as entailing an excavation of the conditions of 'possibility or impossibility' and therewith the origins, extents and limits' of its object....Given [Marx's] materialist assumption of 'correspondence' between phenomenal forms and categories of thought, such an analysis of the conditions of 'possibility or impossibility' of the forms themselves is simultaneously an exposure of the 'origins, extents and limits' of the theoretical categories in which they are conventionally apprehended (187, 131).

Consequently, Marx's critique moves from the "imagined concrete," the given realm of phenomenal forms of culture and quotidian life, to the abstract, the domain of concepts embodying the essential relations explaining the phenomena. From this abstract level, the organon of critique then returns to "a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought," the term "concrete" here referring to the totality of historical determinations that constitute real living individuals and their interaction. Using this approach of critique in elucidating problems of alienation, racism, war, poverty, colonialism, genocide, and so on, we can begin to approximate the particular steps needed by the oppressed subaltern groups--women, peasants, workers, indigenes, people of color, and so on--to carry out the task of a wide-ranging revolutionary transformation of social life.

The three intellectuals chosen here--Mikhail Bakhtin, Antonio Gramsci, and Raymond Williams--do not need any introduction to an informed audience. All three are revolutionary thinkers who, each in their own specific historical milieux, fashioned their own singular styles of critique as they confronted diverse problems, resources, and agencies. Other thinkers in the Marxist tradition, such as Georg Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, or the members of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Marcuse), have also contributed immensely to refining and developing the method of materialist critique, in particular the dialectical social criticism of the Enlightenment project of harmonizing reason and freedom (see Ingram 1990). But that requires another narrative of genealogy and investigation (San Juan 1972; 1995). Here I confine myself to the limited scope of investigating certain aspects of the works of Bakhtin, Gramsci and Williams that bear on the complex nuanced relation between the mode of production (what used to be designated as the economic "base") and the ideological/social relations ("superstructure") in disparate historical environments and conjunctures, this relation being the crux of grasping the vicissitudes of the class struggle in our time.
The discovery of Bakhtin's anti-formalist approach has been liberating for a generation of scholars indoctrinated by New Criticism and its sequel, Cold-War deconstruction and New Age aestheticism. Bakhtin was of course a marginalized, suspect and subterranean figure in the Stalinist Soviet Union. Given the entrenched orthodoxies of feudal Russia and its sequel (with its mirror-image, Western consumerist society of the spectacle), Bakhtin confronted authoritarian tradition with the logic of carnival and its parodic laughter, with the metamorphic and disruptive potential of masks in people's festivals. For Bakhtin, Rabelais can be refunctioned to outwit the police and the party apparatchik. Constrained by state censorship, Bakhtin refurbished the polyphonic, ironic, and dialogical discourse of Dostoevsky as a means of challenging the monolithic and official language of bureaucracy. Bakhtin's notion of dialogism, suspicious of all dogmatism and fixed hierarchies, can be utilized to analyze the linguistic nuances and rhetorical complexities of national-liberation discourses that defy the cooptative cosmopolitanisms and seductive transculturalizing ruses of the neoliberal era. No doubt Bakhtin can be adapted to serve neoconservative metaphysics, but I opt for articulating Bakhtinian critique in an emancipatory direction.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Gramsci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, has served as the catalyst for a renewal of Marxism as a philosophy of praxis, a praxis immanent in the self-activity of workers' councils and peasant insurrections. For Gramsci, critique took the form of analyzing the shifting lines of political forces in any conjuncture in order to elucidate the dynamic process of hegemony, the simultaneously coercive and consensual ascendancy of a historic bloc of class forces at any given historical epoch. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci emphasized the function of intellectuals in educating and directing popular consciousness toward a revolutionary goal. He subjected common sense--the mentality of subalterns--to critical reflection, valuing surrealist/futurist experiments as pedagogical devices in the strategy of a united front mobilized for a proletarian revolution. Gramsci's influence in the re-invention or renovation of cultural inquiry has been salutary and provocative, as witnessed in the writings of Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, among other practitioners in the ecumenical socialist tradition.
Raymond Williams is, by consensus, the founder of the multidisciplinary field of cultural studies in the English-speaking world. Perhaps the term "cultural materialism" is more appropriate since Williams examined both the conditions of production and reception of culture in history, analyzing "all forms of signification" in the context of their actual production. All cultural practice has political significance, and all writing produce meaning and value. These are key axioms in Williams' major texts, Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961); in the latter, he invented the phrase "structures of feeling" to refer to the lived experience of a community at a particular moment in history. This was Williams' inflection of Gramsci's notion of hegemony and of Bakhtin's heteroglossia. The phrase designates selective patterns of inclusion and exclusion that determine social reproduction and resistance, linkages and order among heterogeneous social practices.
Reacting to the language paradigm and the arbitrary sign of post-structuralist critics, Williams stressed the imbrication of all signifying practices with political and economic structures and experiences. His signal contribution to the archive of materialist critique, Marxism and Literature (1977), develops both Voloshinov/Bakhtin's "contextualized pragmatics of human communication" (Merrell 1997, 38) and Gramsci's idea of hegemony in a new way. Culture becomes the battleground of dominant, residual, and emergent tendencies/trends of forces interlocked at every moment of history, a theory of the simultaneous domination/resistance complex that Fredric Jameson reformulates, in The Political Unconscious (1982), as the fused combinatory of ideology and utopia. So far, Williams' massive inquiries into media, TV, film and theater have not been given the full appreciation they deserve.

Today, in the turmoil of disintegrating global capitalism, the necessity for critique proves itself more urgent and uncompromising. The always imminent danger of nuclear war, devastation of the eco-system, large-scale hunger, the legitimation of torture, genocide/ethnic cleansing, and other forms of transnational barbarism, accelerate every day under the guise of a universal, unending "war on terrorism" that continue to defy international law and the charter of the United Nations. It is an unprecedented time of pathological symptoms characterized by reactionaries as "the clash of civilizations," an interregnum between the old dying order and a new one undergoing enigmatic birth-pangs. Bakhtin, Gramsci and Williams lived in a time when they faced similar emergencies and their critiques responded to their historically specific needs and exigencies.
Our plight is much more perilous now than before. We need to beware the trauma of anti-capitalist revulsion that rendered the Frankfurt critical theorists paralyzed, unable to move from philosophical reflection to integration with the subversive praxis of the intransigent "wretched of the earth" (Therborn 1970). While ideology critique is necessary, as Teresa Ebert and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh have cogently demonstrated in their relentless attack on imperialist ideology, Class in Culture, they also quite aptly remind us that "it is more urgent...to also examine why such arguments, and their numerous variations in the writing of other critics, are received as arguments when their claims are repudiated every single day by the actual living conditions of the many" (2008, xxi). Our next task then, armed with the weapons afforded by Williams, Gramsci and Bakhtin, is to present in an incisive and irresistible dialectical fashion--"making hope practical, rather than despair convincing" (to quote Williams [1983, 240)--the actualities of a class-conflicted order the future of which we are all stakeholders.

SEPT 22, 1892, JUAN LUNA KILLED HIS WIFE PAZ AND MOTHER-IN-LAW

">ALAY SA MGA OFWS SAAN MANG LUPALOP SA DAIGDIG

Ang bantog na Pinoy at pintor Juan Luna, kumatha ng SPOLIARIUM,
nakaisip ng bagong likha noong 22 Setyembre 1892....

Ang anak ni Donya Juliana, si Trinidad Pardo de Tavera,
tinaguriang isang "Brain of the Nation"
masugid sa programang Amerikanisason ng buong bansa

Napuna ni Marcelo del Pilar at tumuring na si Pardo ay
"isa roon sa mga kinakargahan pa lamang ang berso ay bali na
ang daliri sa pagtatakip ng tainga"--

Ay, naku, bilangin mo kung ilang daliri ang bali-bali
at baka mahigit sa siyam na milyong daliring bali-bali

Nilason si Juan Luna sa Hong Kong
Itanong mo sa multo ni Paz Luna, gumagala sa EDSA
sa mga lansangang sa Makati sa megamall
sa imburnal ng iyong kaluluwa

--E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

IMPERIAL GRAPES OF WRATH

From: NELSON PEERY, BLACK FIRE
(NEW YORK: THE NEW PRESS, 1994), pp. 276-277


If the Americans had never committed genocide against the Indian; if they had never incited wars of annihilation between the native peoples of this land; if there had never been a Trail of Tears; if America had never organized and commercialized the kidnapping and sale into slavery of a gentle and defenseless African people; if it had never developed the most widespread, brutal, exploitative system of slavery the world has ever known; if it had never held carnivals of torture and lynching of its black people; if it had never sundered and fractured and torn and ground Mexico into the dust; if it had never attacked gallant, defenseless Puerto Rico and never turned that lovely land into a cesspool to compete with the cesspool it had created in Panama; if it had never bled Latin America of her wealth and had never cast her exhausted peoples onto the dung heap of disease and ignorance and starvation; if it had never financed and braced the Fascist dictatorships; if it had never pushed Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the jaws of hell—if America had never done any of these things—history would still create a special bar of judgment for what the American people did to the Philippines.

COLONIALISM THEN AND NEOCOLONIALISM NOW--A study in iconic signification

Requiem by John Updike

The novelist John Updike died yesterday. I bumped into him a few times in Harvard U Yard when I was in graduate school there in 1960-65, just as Edward Said and Fredric Jameson were saying goodbye two years before I left in 1965. Updike's "Requiem" strikes the appropriate note at this time of the worst crisis of global capitalism.--ESJ


REQUIEM


By JOHN UPDIKE
Published: January 28, 2009

It came to me the other day:

Were I to die, no one would say,

“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full

Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

Will greet my overdue demise;

The wide response will be, I know,

“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,

And death is real, and dark, and huge.

The shock of it will register

Nowhere but where it will occur.

— JOHN UPDIKE

HAUNTED BY ANCESTAL SPIRITS: Rendezvous in Marikina, Rizal, Philippines, January 2009

E. SAN JUAN: THE RETURN
OF THE TRANFORMATIVE INTELLECTUAL

by Peter McLaren
Professor of Graduate Education
University of California, Los Angeles


The catastrophic decline of Wall Street and the global meltdown of finance capital in September and October 2008 signal a fortuitous turn in world history. It marks the beginning of the end of imperialist domination, a warning to the transnational capitalist class, and the advent of socialist reconstruction. Local and transnational movements for social justice have been significantly impacted by what has been taking place on a global basis since capital began responding to the crisis of the 1970s of Fordist-Keynesian capitalism--which William I. Robinson (2008) has characterized as capital's ferocious quest to break free of nation state constraints to accumulation and 20th century regulated capital-labor relations based on a limited number of reciprocal commitments and rights.
Accordingly, we have witnessed the development of a new transnational model of accumulation in which transnational fractions of capital have become dominant in part because of new mechanisms of accumulation which include a cheapening of labor and the growth of flexible, deregulated and de-unionized labor where women always experience super-exploitation in relation to men; the dramatic expansion of finance capital; the creation of a global and regulatory structure to facilitate the emerging global circuits of accumulation; and neoliberal structural adjustment programs which seek to create the conditions for frictionless operations of emerging transnational capital across borders and between countries. And while there still exists national capital, global capital, and regional capitals, the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale is now transnational capital. So we are seeing the profound dismantling of national economies, the reorganization and reconstitution of national economies as component elements or segments of a larger global production and financial system which is organized in a globally fragmented and a decentralized way and that is controlled by the concentrated and centralized power of the transnational capitalist class. The role of the nation state has changed to meet globally uniform laws that product capital against the interests of the international working class. The nation state still serves local capital but it can no longer fetter the transnational movement of capital with its endless chains of accumulation. But the nation state still serves the interests of capital against labor. As Marx and Engels put it, the nation state remains "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" (1977:44).
After the end of the Cold War, the world waited in expectant anticipation for a renewal of hope and a revival of the struggle for global democracy. September 11, 2001, however, blasted that hope and ushered a terrible era of what the neoconservative corporate elite called "the global war on terrorism." The horrendous death of millions of civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, etc. as well as the death of thousands of American and European soldiers, following Bush's criminal and barbaric over-kill occupation of Iraq were only preludes to the disaster we are witnessing today: the US practice of torture such as waterboarding (as seen at Abu Ghraib and the Guantanamo prison holding "unlawful combatants"), "extraordinary renditions," and the numerous violations of the US Constitution's Bill of Rights all comprising war crimes. These may have led to the ouster of the reactionary Republican administration and the historic election of Barack Obama, the first African American to occupy the White House. Let us hope that November 4, 2008 may be seen later on to have marked the decisive opening of a new page in history--the renewal of social transformation begun in the Civil Rights/national-liberation struggles and the international youth revolt of the sixties.
San Juan's book, Critique and Social Transformation: Gramsci, Bakhtin, Williams (The Edwin Mellen Press) intends to contribute to this renewal in both theory and practice not only in the United States but throughout the world. A diasporic intellectual from the Philippines, E. San Juan, Jr., a scholar with a protean international reputation, first acquired his apprenticeship in popular democracy in the nationalist movement in his homeland in the fifties. After graduate work at Harvard University (just after Edward Said finished and while Fredric Jameson was completing his groundbreaking Marxism and Form in Cambridge, Massachusetts), San Juan participated in the academic revision of the canon and opening up of the traditional disciplines of literary and comparative ethnic studies from the seventies to 2001 when he retired as chair of the Department of Comparative American Cultures, Washington State University. His numerous contributions to the radical change of perspective in comparative cultural and postcolonial studies, as well as in Asian American literary theory and Philippine-American cultural relations, continue to register effects in the scholarly practice of progressive intellectuals in North America, the Philippines, Asia, Europe, and elsewhere.
San Juan is arguably one of the most important intellectuals of our times. There are few scholars today who are able to capture with such rigor and verve the historically heterogeneous and discontinuous relations of exploitation, domination and conflict constitutive of today's social existence in the global arena of neoliberal capitalism and the system of wage labor. Part of San Juan's remarkable contribution to our understanding of contemporary social life is his profound grasp of critical social theory and his deployment of historical materialist critique to reveal both the limitations and folly of much of what passes today as postmodern and postcolonial studies.
San Juan has been hailed as a vital public intellectual by Amiri Baraka, Michael Denning, Bertell Ollman, Bruce Franklin, Alan Wald, Fredric Jameson and other prestigious scholars. Allow me to cite a few uncompromising breakthroughs marked by San Juan's books: Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle, Racial/Critical Transformations (which the noted social scientist Wilbur Zelinsky praised as unique and exceptional in grasping "the crucial actuality of race in any depth"), Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression, The Philippine Temptation, Racism and Cultural Studies, Working Through the Contradictions, and In the Wake of Terror: Class, Race, Nation and Ethnicity in the Postmodern World. His critique of the mainstream discipline of postcolonial studies, Beyond Postcolonial Theory, is already a classic text among third-world communities and committed cultural activists.

Countless North American activists are indebted to San Juan's influential edition of Georg Lukacs' essays in English in 1972, Marxism and Human Liberation. Together with the anti-Marcos dictatorship movement in 1972-1986, San Juan's exposure to the impact of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China on American and Filipino youth impelled him to to explore further the prodigious and durable archive of Marxist praxis that inherits, reconfigures, and at the same time breaks with the Enlightenment tradition of humanist philosophy with roots in Greek, African, and Asian civilizations. This led San Juan to a deeper, wide-ranging inquiry into the works of Antonio Gramsci, Mikhail Bakhtin and Raymond Williams at a time when neoconservative reaction had practically commodified and prostituted all spaces for free thought. Not only is this volume of essays important in renewing a radical trend in the humanities and social theory; but it also provides an intellectual weapon and cultural resource for carrying on the struggle against reactionary neoliberal ideology that legitimizes the corporate exploitation of peoples and the profit-driven destruction of the biosphere.
What is significant in this commentary on the ideas of Gramsci, Bakhtin and Williams is San Juan's synthesis of what might be stigmatized as "Western Marxism" with the dense and complex sociohistorical formation of the Philippines. His approach is truly dialectical-materialist in form and substance. That is why he can fully appreciate Gramsci's "national-popular" as an integral element of hegemony, the intellectual-moral leadership of a historic bloc of workers, peasants and middle strata, in overthrowing capitalist oppression. Consequently San Juan's analysis of the role of organic intellectuals, as well as the function of culture, folklore and language in a revolutionary process, is closer to Gramsci's thought, given the centrality of the peasant question for both the Italian and Philippine proletarian movements. San Juan's appraisal of Gramsci's Marxism as a "philosophy of praxis" which, though grounded in the master narrative of popular liberation from the realm of necessity, grasps the concrete experience and dynamic consciousness of the subaltern masses as the motor-force in changing history. In this sense, more cogent and realistic than North American commentaries, San Juan's assessment of Prison Notebooks demonstrates the permanent usefulness of Gramsci's fundamental lesson to "renovate" and make "critical" the "already existing activity" and "common sense" immanent in everyday working life.
In the Philippines, the notion of the nation-people grew out of the revolutionary anticolonial struggles of Filipinos against Spanish colonialism and US occupation after the Filipino-American War (1899-1913), the "first Vietnam." Reacting to the comprador-landlord "nationalism" subsumed in US tutelage, Filipino historians in the sixties re-discovered the millenary sectarian movements of peasant insurgents. But it was a dead-end since folk religiosity mortgaged to charismatic leaders had always been neutralized by the demagogic populism of the corrupt, servile Filipino oligarchy. In his research into medieval culture, Bakhtin understood the duplicity of this utopian tendency. Stalinism was not the threat; fascist populism was, as happened in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere. Just like Gramsci, Bakhtin did not give up faith in the inexhaustible resources of the plebian grass-roots constituency. He valued the folk tradition of carnival, masquerades, and ritualized fantasies that symbolized anarchist freedom, equality, and convivial solidarity. San Juan deploys Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic sensibility as a mode of parsing the discourse of third-world revolutionaries in confronting the bloody specter of imperial power. He endorses Bakhtin's materialist notion of "the sign as the arena of class struggle" as a way of refuting the obsession with scholastic discourse analysis and ludic games performed by the disciples of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and other master-thinkers that still dominate the academic playground. San Juan's explanation of Bakhtin's emphasis on speech-genres, chronotope and heteroglossia is salutary in a time when a kind of spontaneous, ego-centered libertarianism is hawked by neoliberal circles as an answer to the proverbial dogmatism of the left. As San Juan points out, it is precisely the dialectic between constraining form and recalcitrant material forces that enables a revolutionary rupture to take place.
San Juan grew up under the neocolonial regime of comprador capitalism in the Philippines, legitimized by US meritocratic ideology operating in the public and private spheres. The Philippines offers an excellent laboratory milieu of an uneven, heterogeneous, conflicted social formation in which diverse modes of production co-exist. Raymond Williams proves extremely serviceable in helping San Juan to analyze the Philippine problematique of manifold contradictions. Adapting Gramsci's notion of hegemony and Bakhtin's dialogism, Williams invents the paradigm of intellectual/cultural formation. In his anatomy of Britain as a social formation, Williams discerns residual, dominant, and emergent trends intertwined in the sociopolitical conjuncture, complicating the logic of class war as it manifests itself in literature, art, film, habits, and commonsense beliefs--a complex of thought and action defined as a "structure of feeling" for a given historical epoch. "Structure of feeling" combines the structured. generic social conventions and the raw needs and desires that subtend individual experience in a fashion more dialectical than competing notions such as Derrida's "differance" or Foucault's "procedures" and "disciplinary" epistemes.
Most helpful is San Juan's focus on Williams' sense of culture as lived experience constituted and rendered intelligible by its political, economic, and linguistic contexts. San Juan articulates Williams' project in the theorizing of "cultural revolution" as the kernel of the emergent field of interdisciplinary cultural studies that Williams inaugurated before the social explosion of 1968 and its aftermath. San Juan's exposition of Williams' major themes is masterly and lucid, in no small part due to his estimation of the worth and implication of Williams' abstract propositions from the perspective of their potential efficacy in the current anti-imperialist struggle in the Philippines, as well as in the phenomenal resurgence of popular-democratic movements in the global South--particularly in Latin America, as well as in Nepal and the Philippines--catalyzed by the US-led militaristic, implicitly genocidal "war on terrorism" devastating the lives of millions of innocent civilians, polluting the environment, and precipitating the crisis in neoliberal political economies and the collapse of the globalized market which I alluded to at the outset.
In line with not only interpreting but also changing life, the process of history--both the author and his subjects--frames this valuable scholarly intervention. Gramsci, Bakhtin and Williams are all cultural materialists as well as practictioners of a historicizing critical pedagogy. They join other powerful and exemplary teachers of this tradition: Che Guevara, Paolo Freire, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, CLR James, Yuri Kochiyama, and others. In connecting these three thinkers, not exactly as "masters of suspicion" but as skillful practitioners of dialectical thinking, San Juan invokes the primacy of the category of critique. What is meant by "critique" here is not a specific type of criticism but a mode of interrogating and comprehending the process of reflection itself and its objects in a specific historical conjuncture and taking into careful consideration geopolitical influences in the fashioning of subjectivity. It involves the analysis and evaluation of the total situation of learning, understanding, problem-solving, teaching, communication, and sharing--what could be called a dynamic system of intelligibility. In effect, thinking and living are inextricably connected in the paradigms and frameworks of cognition and affective lived experience. Critique thus implies the historical situatedness of both the living body of the thinker and her thought-process. Critique implies change and unceasing transition of ideas, institutions and social systems from one historical stage to another. It involves a historicizing self-reflection that establishes the limits and potential of modes of thought in the project of liberating humanity from capitalist domination; from racist, sexist, gender and religious oppression based on alienated production relations, not just instrumentalist reification (as proposed by the Frankfurt Critical theorists Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse). Hence not all ideas or praxis are useful or valid.
In conducting the "wars" of position and of maneuver, San Juan aims for a concretely differentiated totality now anathema to cosmopolitanizing, transnationalist academics. With at times a brazen verve, San Juan deftly brushes the postcolonial project against the grain by decolonizing the postcolonial project itself in a masterful act of double negation or, as Raya Dunayevskaya would put it, absolute negativity as a seedbed for a new beginning. His project is to envision an overarching narrative that would frame the teachings of Gramsci, Bakhtin and Williams, an all-encompassing praxis that would mobilize their critique of ideology and political economy for the purpose of collective liberation from capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression.
San Juan never loses sight of the fact that the central condition for capitalist exploitation is the control of labor by capital in the global distribution of labor (Euro-core capital-labor relations and colonial-periphery capital-labor relations) and that this reality has decisive implications for the character and development of intersubjective, authority, gender, race and productive relations--relations which admittedly are historically heterogeneous, fostering forms of societal intersubjectivity which under the right conditions can ignite revolutionary hope and foster transformative possibility. What concerns San Juan is not only the distribution of power centered on relations of exploitation, domination and conflict among social groups living out a determinate history within the dank and musty precincts of capital but the primacy of speaking truth to such power relations in order to transform them. As both nuanced scholarship and rigorous critical practice, San Juan's work is a brilliant example of how a subaltern activist inhabiting the beleaguered zones of the Empire can not only speak against injustice and racist barbarism, but also write in a militantly engaged, provocative way on behalf of the satisfaction of human needs through popular, democratic, egalitarian governance. Our task is to acknowledge this example by word and deed.

References
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. (1977), Manifesto of the Communist Party. Moscow:
Progress.
William I. Robinson. (2008). Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization
Perspective. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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PETER McLAREN is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Commerce. Four of McLaren's books have won the Critic’s Choice Award of the American Education Studies Association. One of his books, Life in Schools, was chosen in 2004 as one of the 12 most significant education books in existence worldwide by an international panel of experts organized by The Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences and by the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation. McLaren was the inaugural recipient of the Paulo Freire Social Justice Award presented by Chapman University, California. The Charter for La Fundacion Peter McLaren de Pedagogia Critica (The Peter McLaren Foundation of Critical Pedagogy)was signed at the University of Tijuana, July, 2004. La Catedra Peter McLaren (The Peter McLaren Chair) was inaugurated in Venezuela in September 15, 2006, as part of a joint effort between El Centro Internacional Miranda and La Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela.---###