 |
Sunday, October 09, 2005
An old friend of mine posted an essay by Domingo Castro de Guzman in her blog. Check it out:
http://sarahbelle.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/2005/10/why_be_a_revolu.html
The essay, like a lot of the discourse on liberation and freedom these days, smacks of the postmodern tendency to take post-structuralist assumptions to their logical conclusion--a totalizing discourse that ironically started out to combat totalizing discourses.
I feel uneasy about the essay, suspicious that there might be verbal sleight-of-hand involved. First, it defines the revolution as negative liberation, liberation "from" something instead of freedom "toward" something. Then it lists down almost everything that can be construed as an object for idolism. some of the items in the list are even things some of us don't view as "bad" or needing freedom from ("the nation," "work," etc.) It pushes us and challenges us to take away any metaphysical ground beneath our feet. It denounces "God, Man, society, the proletariat, the race the nation, the party, the feminine, the masculine, the androgyne" because it "amounts to the same thing--dolism." It basically warns us against the dangers of fetishism.
At this point in the essay, I was expecting one of two things: that he would either 1) pursue this liberation viewed negtively to its radical conclusion and theorize how a social order free from everything would even look like, or 2) replace the vacuum of the metaphysical idols he denounces with something else. I think that it is the second option he chooses to do. For work, science, nation, God, even the proletariat are now replaced by the just-as-metaphysical "love." Granted that he avoids metaphysical love by drawing our attentions to personal love, he nevertheless leaves the issue of how personal love can translate into structural freedom. The worst totalitarian rulers can be very loving fathers and husbands, after all. And even if were all to be magically transformed into Mother Teresa, the poor would still be poor.
I'm not saying love is not a good thing. I'm saying love here seems to be fetishized just as badly as we fetishize God or the proletariat. Moreover, i have a nagging suspicion that "freedom" itself is here being fetishized. The second paragraph describing his ideal society reads like a hippie commune. This is essentially what you get when "liberation viewed negatively" is itself fetishized. Why should freedom be an end in itself? And why should freedom from the Collective necessarily be a good thing. We human beings have always operated on two levels when it comes to love--the personal where we love people around us "as persons" and the political where we love "the collective," be it family, tribe, or nation not because we are idolists but because the collective is part of who we are. So added to my suspicion of his concept of "love," i am also wary of the extreme individualism of his version of liberation.
So where am I coming from? My own contention, until I become otherwise convinced by a good essay, is that we cannot escape a metaphysical ground. Now, i can be convinced otherwise if an essay can show how it is to be done. I feel that in this essay, however, the author fails to do this and merely replaces the fetish of God and nation with the fetish of an anarchist community founded on personal love. Until it can be truly demonstrated that we can live without idols, then we may have to content ourselves with choosing our idols intelligently. Moreover, I am suspicious of discourses that try to transcend totalizing concepts such as God or other "idols" by wanting to destroy all these concepts in a manner that seem just as totalizing as the next discourse.
in short, i think the author is as much an idolist as i am now. Despite the supposed radical epistemological breaks occuring these days, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes is still right: "there is nothing new under the sun." Now, as in the old days, battles are still being fought in the name of idols. Perhaps they always will be.
Posted at 04:57 pm by bloodchilde
Permalink
Sunday, September 04, 2005
If we were to accept the version of Philippine history as an unfinished revolution, a revolution initiated by the "revolt of the masses" but was later hi-jacked by the bourgeoisie, then what we have is a divided nation. In fact, our nationhood is even suspect. Once upon a time, the masses dreamed of and fought for a nationhood of free citizens only to wake up in a nightmare of internal colonialism. The old Spanish masters have been replaced by local ones who in turn serve the interests of the old regime now transformed into the universal fellowship of capitalists, otherwise known as globalization. The masses remain enslaved. There is no nation, at least for them. The nation-state is invented by the bourgeosie for the bourgeoisie. The masses have been silenced.
Part of this silence is the peasant/proletarian complicity in the narrative of the nation. Filipino television has created a nationhood not based on a fellowship of free citizens but an affinity based on Nora Aunor, Joseph Estrada, FPJ, Sharon Cuneta, and Judy Ann Santos--icons defining the wall between the adoring masses and the godlike elite. This is a nationhood that structures salvation not in terms of a peasant revolution but in terms of begging. Thousands among the urban poor fall in line every day at the studios of GMA and ABS-CBN for a chance at winning money from noontime game shows. Urban poor communities pray that Willie Revillame should come down from heaven and perform miraculous deeds and build schools and houses in his program, Willingly Yours, which is just the newest incarnation of older models such as Kapwa Ko, Mahal Ko--programs that ease the bourgeoise guilt through benevolence in the form of ephemeral consumables that do nothing to change the material relations that enslave the poor or to give them the means to transcend these material relations. While the proletarian of Europe have failed to achieve their revolutionary potential because they have become too comfortable, the proletarian of the Phillipines is continuing to fail because it has become complicit in a narrative of nationhood that naturalizes poverty.
The same television industry that promotes a nationhood based on such shallow icons such as actors is the same industry that ignored the EDSA 3 of the lumpen who marched to Malacanang palace to demand the return to power of a deposed president Joseph Estrada. The irony lies in the fact that Joseph Estrada was created by the media to serve as the opiate the masses (the entertainment industry becoming a kind of religion with its own casts of prophets and heroes). Subversion, no matter how much it is repressed in the national unconscious, has funny ways of re-surfacing.
BUt the fact remains that our tradition of EDSA revolutions is losing its revolutionary potential (the most recent one having even failed to crystallize) because it remains trapped in the ideology of the nation. All three EDSA revolutions are, in fact, counter-revolutionary. They have merely wasted the crisis of capitalism that have pushed the poor to act, wasted all that energy, in order to manifest a "people power" that is nothing less than a lie. People power is a hegemonic and unconscious drive of the bourgeois nation-state that directs the wrath of the masses into the wrong targets in order to reinstate its hegemonic order. So EDSA I had its toppling of Marcos that enshrined Cory, EDSA II had its toppling of Erap that enshrined Gloria, EDSA III had its attempt to topple Gloria to restore Erap, the almost-EDSA IV again targeted Gloria but failed to crystallize because it had nothing and no one with which to replace her. All this energy, this mass rage, the Philippine Left is unable to harness for the proletarian revolution.
The claim of the Philippine Left is that they have no illusions about EDSA revolutions and are merely working on a tactical alliance with the right-wing elements. For what? They think that by helping to disrupt the operation of liberal democracy, the masses will get enraged and will one day rebel. But the masses already are enraged. All that these fruitless, misdirected people power revolutions are accomplishing is to demoralize them even further, show them that mass action accomplishes nothing, thereby killing their sense of agency that crucial historical moments have managed to produce. Worse, these "tactical alliances" are doing nothing to help the Left build credibility in the eyes of the people. Most people see the "tactical alliances" for what they are--political opportunism.
EDSA revolutions are not revolutions. If we are to transcend the nation, we must first explode the concept. The grip of a shallow nationhood on the minds of our people must be broken and replaced by something else. If there's one group of people who can help create what that "something" else, it's the Philippine Left. So why don't we stop on the silliness of these "people powers" and move on to more serious business?
Posted at 05:11 pm by bloodchilde
Permalink
Sunday, August 21, 2005
The Bible, and Christianity with it, has been condemned time and again as phallocentric. The fact is overlooked that the dominant discourse during the time of its inscription was phallocentric. The Bible, after all, is the word of God inspired in men and not the actual word of God. So why should contemporary feminists fault Biblical writers for not being feminists? And even if the Bible were hypotetically the actual word of God, like the Koran is believed to be so, why should God (who would be speaking to humanity in order to be understood) speak using a discourse that would be centuries ahead of its time culturally and politically? In short, we should always be conscious of the gulf between us and the original audience of the Bible. Instead of condemning it for failing the discursive standards of modern cultural politics, why not praise it for the radical elements that allowed it to transcend its cultural context? After all, St. Paul talked about how there was neither slave nor freeman (and neither man nor woman) in the presence of Christ. And this, eighteen centuries before the abolition of slavery in Western society!
But non-Christian feminists can also not be blamed for their reaction to the Bible. In truth, they're not really reacting to the Bible but to the phallocentric discourse of our time that uses the Bible to justify itself. I hate it when the Bible is used to justify the most reactionary of views, further giving the impression that Christianity is a reactionary religion. The Bible is presented as an unassailable arbiter of issues, but it is presented through the kind of commentaries written in the Middle Ages.
One particular discourse that seems to promote patriarchy is this whole reading of Eve as the sinner who led Adam to sin. The popular view is that Eve bought the serpent's sales talk when she ate the forbidden fruit and gave some to Adam who unwittingly ate some as well. A close reading of the text, however, would show that this a false reading:
"And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and thatit was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make onewise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also untoher husband with her; and he did eat." (Genesis 3: 6, King James Version)
Notice that the husband was "with her." Other versions make this fact even more self-evident:
"She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it" (New International Version).
"She also gave some to her husband, who was with her" (New Living Translation).
"She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate" (New King James Version).
In other words, the view that Adam was off somewhere while Eve listened to the serpent and eventually seduced him into sin is wrong. He was with Eve. He was listening to the serpent, too. But it was Eve who was doing all the talking. Some of the modern commentaries call this episode not the "The Temptation of Eve" but "The Silence of Adam." This is actually the basis for Dr. Larry Crabb's book, The Silence of Adam: Becoming Men of Courage in a World of Chaos.
Catholic commentaries in the Middle Ages drew heavily on St. Paul's interpretation that Eve led Man to sin and would be redeemed through the pain of childbirth. But we should take Paulinian epistles for what they are--commentaries bound by their culture. This is what exegesis and hermeneutics are for--to find out the original meaning of a text relative to its cultural context and to see how this meaning translates into ours. Ignorant Christians do the exact opposite--they read the text using modern systems of meaning (such as the meaning that condemns the homosexual when the homosexual subjectivity, as opposed to the homosexual act, is a product of modernity), and then try to apply the wrongly perceived meaning of a centuries-old text into our own time.
Paul's interpretation of The Fall was his commentary, his exegesis and hermeneutics that were a product of his age, not ours. It is our task to investigate the truth not only by examing Paul, but by going straight to the source: Genesis 3: 6.
Genesis 3: 6 tells us that Adam was with Eve while the serpent was giving them the sales talk. What was the motivation then for Adam's silence? The context was that God told them they could eat from the tree of life, but could not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Prohibition from the knowledge of good evil here does not refer to the trite interpretation that our ancestors were amoral like innocent animals. Good and evil are categories that shift according to subject positions. Good and evil are not pre-existing categories; certainly they do not pre-exist God. It is the ultimate Subject, God, "the ground of our being," who has created these categories because all things emanate from Him. Therefore, it is in the nature of good and evil to become categories not in the process of discovering a pre-existing moral condition, but in creating that moral standard. To "know" good and evil is not to find it, but to create it. In other words, God forbid Adam and Eve access not to the moral order but to the means of creating a moral order. Defining good and evil is supposed to be for God alone. To chart your own moral course, to be existentially "free" in an absurd world with no script to follow but your own (because God's moral order, representing God in our consciousness, is dead) is to become like God. Adam and Eve were, during that time, immortal but were not like God. By partaking of this tree with the power over good and evil, they would become like God.
So Adam was silent because on the one hand he was seduced by the power, but he was also afraid of God's warning that they would die. He thinks: what if the serpent is wrong? What if i eat and fall dead. So he allows Eve to be led by the serpent, allows her to eat the fruit, observes whether or not she will fall down dead, and when he realizes that she did not die and therefore the fruit of power was perfectly safe to eat, he had some himself. Adam turned Eve, the love of his life ("flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones"), into his personal guinea pig.
The Silence ofAdam marks an event in the history of male/female relationship when the unity of marriage was torn asunder by personal desire separate from the desire of the diffused identities of Man and Woman as a couple. There was a breakdown of communication, not because they passively lost the means to understand each other, but because Man deliberately and actively decided to pursue his own desire (for godhood), structuring the woman's subjectivity to fit this desire and turning her into a mere object for the achievement of power. The Silence of Adam (not the Temptation of Eve) marks the the birth of the patriarchy.
Phallocentric Christian discourse claims God put Eve under the dominion of Man because of her sin. On the contrary, by destroying the original unity of man and woman through his selfish desires, it was Adam who had already subjected Eve under his dominion in order to become like God. Patriarchy was thus born before they were even driven from Eden, and patriarchy is the is the reason why God drove them from Eden. Patriarchy represents the rending of Man's (and Woman's) relationship with God and the rending of Man's unity with Woman. Driven out of Eden, Man and Woman attempt to restore this unity by making a family, but it is gone. They speak different languages, create different meanings, and experience different desires. The sacrament of marriage becomes the imperfect vessel through which we try to restore the unity of Woman to Man, as well as our unity with God. It is exactly when communication breaks down in the marriage, when desires and priorities become so incompatible and irreconcilable and both parties give up communicating in order to pursue isolation, that marriage fails and mirrors the original failure of humanity to achieve wholeness caused by The Silence of Adam.
The battle of the sexes is a fallen condition, a fallenness structured by patriarchy or the Law of the Father. The Father of this Law is not God but Adam whose "genes" we men indeed share. These genes are asleep during the masquerade of romance but awakens like a hidden monster as we move through the fallen structures of culture in which we play and re-play in an endless dialectic of "what-could-be" and "what-could-have-been" the institution of marriage, beginning from the honeymoon of our youth, the having and rearing of children, all the way to aging and the confrontation of mortality.
Posted at 02:22 pm by bloodchilde
Permalink
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Of Ironies and Sexual Repression
An old friend once told me how she broke up with a guy because they were going too far. She was the first person who introduced to me the meaning of the phrase "everything but the girl." I did not judge her for "going too far" and I did not judge her for moving away, running away to a different direction to find new friends of whom I was one. People set their own limits. The interplay of id and superego is personal business, and for Christians it's usually the superego that wins.
I guess this is all part of carrying your cross--relinquishing unauthorized happiness.
I've always wished her well.
The last year or so, I heard she was in a relationship. Good for her. She seemed really in love.
Irony of ironies: the guy recently broke up with her. The repressed bastard is now blogging about how he should have done this a long time ago, how he should have known to "flee temptation," to be strong-willed with regard to his "holiness."
Poetic justice? More like a bad plot that keeps turning up in Christian romance.
I have yet to offer any awkward word of comfort or stupid questions. How are you? What hapened? What for? I can read between the lines. It just irritates the hell out of me how pharasaical instincts can get so much in the way of happiness, especially for responsible adults who should no longer be bound by irrational, unbending rules.
I always wished for her to be happy. And for a while there, she was.
Posted at 10:34 pm by bloodchilde
Permalink
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Alienation, they say, can be traced to the industrial revolution when craftsmen were forced to become factory workers. They simply could not compete either by way of volume or quality against the factory. And so they had to give in to the new world order. In their workshops, they owned the means of production; in the factories, they didn’t. In their workshops, they were the masters; they made and sold products. In the factories, they were little more than slaves; they sold their labour power for products owned by the company and driven by capital. In their workshops, they were involved in all stages of a product’s creation; they were like artists infusing each product with their creativity. In the factories, the manufacturing process was fragmented into distinct stages, each requiring one worker to a series of repetitive actions. There is no creativity there.
A factory worker doesn’t look at a factory product and say, “It was I who made that.” The worker becomes part of the machine and is just as expendable as any spare part. A factory worker cannot take a factory product and say, “This is mine and I will sell it.” It is not his. It is owned by the factory. Alienation is the phenomenon in which a worker becomes divorced from his labour and the work of his hands, an abomination that is so far removed from our natural ability to, like God, admire our work and say, “It is good.”
I think, however, that the feeling of alienation resulting from this divorce between a labourer and his labour does not depend on the method of manufacturing per se. For example, Japanese management styles (at least in the middle of the 20th century) were very effective in keeping workers happy. The workers, despite working under Western-style factories, did not feel alienated. This was because the Japanese management system was designed to effectively allow the Japanese worker to identify with the factory. Workers were “employed for life,” subjected to a corporate culture that developed company loyalty—singing pro-company songs in the morning, attending company parties, being exposed to all sorts of propaganda about the goodness of the company, the progress of the company, the superiority of the company over its rivals. The worker, in identifying with the company, allows his subjectivity to be diffused into this collective identity, this community bound by the common goal of increased production and profit.
This is propaganda at it’s best. After all, the workers do not, in supposedly sharing in the company’s dreams, actually get shares in the company’s profit. But it is exactly the genius of “motivational activities” that allows the worker to identify with the company while all the company needs to do is maintain an appearance of identifying with the workers. The Japanese were pretty good at it, and so their workers were blinded and unable to see the reality of their alienation. Ignorance is bliss. But this is one way in which alienation is countered—if I am made to believe that I am an integral part of the company (not just an expendable worker but a consciousness among a community of subjectivities united as one identity, one community) then I can be made to believe that I made the company’s products, I own the company as the company owns me, and I share the company’s success.
This success of corporate management in imposing this process of identification is apparent when managers announce the status of the company to their workers. When the company experiences success, the workers rejoice, they feel “good”—even though their salaries don’t really change. And so they work harder to maintain this good feeling of success and are even prepared to make sacrifices for the company (forced overtime, delayed salary raise, etc.) if the company experiences difficulty because they see the company’s success or failure as their own.
In the past, people thought of alienation as something that only plagued the workers. Most of us have gotten over this naiveté. It has become obvious that professionals, though exploited in different terms, are likewise vulnerable to alienation.
The modern office is not that different, after all, from a factory. Writers who learned so much about their craft in college end up doing dull, generic reports and letters. Like the factory worker, they can find themselves drained of any capacity for creativity as they are driven by demands of efficiency to use word processors to cut and paste generic texts from one document to another.
I am reminded of Bubbles Guerrero who said one evening while photocopying hundreds of materials way into the wee hours of dawn (8 hours of overtime): “I can’t believe I studied twelve units of Philosophy in college for this.”
In truth, many young professionals entering junior corporate positions are experiencing this alienation, leading to a phenomenon that has been dubbed the “quarter-life crisis,” a time when the promises of youth are broken in the face of alienating professional reality.
Not all yuppies suffer from this, of course. Some companies, especially multi-national companies, are particularly good at making junior employees feel good. These employees are given all sorts of bonuses and incentives and indoctrinated into company values of loyalty and honour. These things encourage identification with the company. Like the Japanese workers of half a century ago, modern yuppies can feel just as happy—and be just as blind to the alienating circumstances of their professional labour. Call centre employees in the Philippines, for example, can become ecstatic over freebies and bonuses, they feel lucky for belonging with the company as opposed to working for some pathetic organization where workers are unappreciated and underpaid (like, say, a Philippine government agency)—all the while ignoring the fact that their foreign counterparts are earning several times as much.
This feeling of superiority that leads individuals to read other people’s lives and beliefs as somehow wrong or inferior while failing to realize the contradictions in our own lives—contradictions that upon realization could lead either to suicide or revolt—is a result “ideology” as formulated by Louis Althusser. Ideology is what keeps us happy, what allows us the privilege of bliss in ignorance of the things that ideology allows us not to see. The ideology of social mobility, for example, that has driven millions of Filipino youth to study in order to achieve personal success is a type of ideology propagated by the State and by the educational ideological state apparatus. This ideology, by pointing to the educational system as the official means toward personal progress, allows the State to shift the blame from itself (for its corruption and inefficiency) to the people themselves. In fact, the educational system itself is the means in which the ruling class keeps class boundaries and counters the social mobility it is supposed to produce. For example, students in public schools (where poor people go) are blamed for not reading when their libraries have no books, for not being smart enough when their teachers are overworked and underpaid, and for not passing entrance exams to prestigious universities when the difference between the quality of education in public schools and private schools (where the children of the middle-class and the elite go) is so vast.
Poor children are allowed by the state to go through the school experience so that in the end, when they end up in some dead-end job, they can be made to believe that their failure in life is nobody else’s fault but their own—a belief that is essential in an ideal worker who is submissive and obedient because he knows his “natural” place. But how can it be their fault when they never had a chance from the very beginning? Their poverty forced them to avail themselves of poor-quality education—education for the poor—which in turn determined that they would remain poor and deserve to be so.
Not all poor children fail. Some are able to rise despite the fact that the game is rigged. These are the people who become the poster boys and girls for the ideology that education must lead to success. I was once (and still is?) such a poster boy.
This, then, is the role of ideology. Ideology is the comfortable cage that blinds us from seeing that we are in fact imprisoned. The full force of alienation occurs when ideology, for some reason, crumbles. We are either forced to suffer the alienation or forced to find release by seeking escape.
In my previous post, I sounded as if, just because of the fact that I had decided to pursue an academic career, I have somehow escaped alienation. Because I no longer needed to cut and paste texts onto generic documents but was now in an environment where I could read what I wanted and write what I wanted, I made the silly assumption that I have now “awakened from my torpor” and am now "resurrected." This is wrong. At the end of the day, I know that I’ll be working in institutions where dissent is expressed not in order to inspire radical change but in order to be contained. And who is to say, even if one were to be inspired to revolution, that the acts and institutions of revolution are themselves free from subtler but no less dark machinations of ideology?
Ideology is inescapable. I merely transfered myself to another part of the cage. I laugh at myself and my previous entry.
Still, I go on. I go on believing that, despite the realization that there is no way out of the cage, there must still be avenues for redemption.
Posted at 01:24 pm by bloodchilde
Permalink
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Apparentlly I'm sticking with this one, and Reflections on Subjectivity
Ok, so I'm in Singapore now. I had to be here to complete registration formalities at the National University of Singapore last week. In the meantime, there's nothing to do for at least one more week but to read. No matter, I love the libraries here, and the constant reading (6-8 hours a day) is doing wonders for expanding my intellectual horizons that have remained stagnant during my three-year stint with the corporate world.
So about my initial plans of ditching this blogrive account for blogspot--screw that. blogspot sucks. i posted something three days ago and it still won't appear.
i'm posting here what I wanted to post there, and from now on, I'm posting everything here, whether cheezy personal introspection or narratives or my heavier theorizing of culture and texts. i'm still keeping that account and will post my theorizing there. that will be my pretentious blog dealing exclusively with theory. this blogdrive account will contain BOTH theory and corny, personal stuff. Anything goes.
Below is what I posted on my blogspot account three days ago.
REFLECTIONS ON SUBJECTIVITY
This blog is a forum for my intellectual posturing and a venue for exercising my faculty for theorizing. Blogging is one of the many venues that the conditions of late capitalism and its concomitant postmodernist ideology provide me to make me believe that I am a unique individual with unique ideas and desires even as I ignore the fact that I am only as original as the millions of existing bloggers flooding the web with their own drivel. Many of us believe so much in this uniqueness, this individuality, that we come to the unwarranted conclusion that we must be interesting enough to broadcast our subjectivity for all the world to see, perhaps not seeing that in the process of capitulation—reducing our individualities to our choice of weblog service, web layout, links, personality quizzes—we are in fact allowing the internet in particular and global capitalism in general to turn us into objects. We become objects when, in this mode, we cease to become who we are and instead become something to be perceived by others. To blog is to create a representation of our subjectivity, but this representation takes on a life of its own to the point that it becomes us.
I have, in my previous blogspot entry, relegated introspection to the realm of the unworthy. How else can I read my decision then to abandon childeoftheblood.blogdrive.com in favor of using a weblog service that most of my friends are using and justifying it in the name of “in-depth criticism of culture and society?” This is, of course, another posturing, a(n) (un)conscious attempt to distance myself from the reified masses who commodify their experiences for public consumption and instead end up being consumed by their signifier. The distancing is, of course, a failure. This very mode of discourse is already tantamount to the triumph of the autonomy of representation within me. I am already in the belly of the beast. While some theorists glory in the immanence of ideology and some reject it, I resign myself to it. This is the postmodern condition, an evil and idolatrous age that has allowed the fallen nature of the cosmos to masquerade as the actual nature of the order of things, signifying perhaps the coming of the Anti-Christ, that is, assuming that the Anti-Christ were a person. If the Anti-Christ were to be revealed instead as a condition (as I believe it is revealing itself now), then the Anti-Christ, the swallower of souls, is already here. But just because I have been swallowed, it does not mean I cannot try to hack the beast from the inside.
It would be fair to compare my assessment of the current age to millenarian utterances that were revealed by the forward march of history to be false. To claim the uniqueness of this age, of this stage of social and technological development, and draw from it ultra-pessimistic or ultra-optimistic links to the endpoint of some grand narrative is surely no different from the posturing of modernity which has been present in the world in various times, places, and forms. And yet, one cannot dismiss the phenomena that do suggest that human history is undergoing a radical “cleansing by fire”—the triumph of representation over the material and the ideal, the death of the subject brought about by capitalism’s idolatrous fetishization of human labor and commodity, and the death of the Absolute Subject, of God, in the postmodern ideology that has dominated our understanding of reality in one way or another here in the 21st century. All these point to an unraveling that shall be terrible to behold.
No other aspect of this unraveling is nearer to the experience of the upwardly mobile young professional than the death of the subject. The average yuppie glories in the consumer culture and does not give a damn about the death of God. These conditions of postmodernity do not terrify the yuppy. What will terrify the yuppy is the death of the subject. Postmodern discourse in the academe discusses this in order to desensitize us to the magnitude of its abomination and teach us, in fact, to glory in the so-called freedom in this decentralized, closed system of free-shifting signifiers. But there is nothing decentralized nor free-shifting about the order of our lives. The center is representation in the realm of theory and money in the realm of the material. The only thing that shifts freely is money, not us. We are not free—our choices are defined for us not by who we are but by what we have. The self is effectively dead, replaced by a Frankensteinian zombie created from a mish-mash of custom-made attitudes and manipulated desires.
As a graduate student studying this very sort of thing, I could of course be accused that I make these utterances from the ivory tower of the university. I could be accused of reading theories that I then force to shape my own understanding of life. Fortunately, I can back up my reading with actual experience. Five years span the gulf between my graduation from college and my present efforts at graduate school. This gulf represents my time of torpor. I am the bloodchilde and I glory in my resurrection (a resurrection that may yet be temporary or revealed to be just a dream, God forbid). In my next entry, allow me to describe this death, a death revealed in the discourses between the Dark Other and me in my previous blog. Or rather, an experience of undeath among the corporate zombies of the Philippines’ financial district.
Posted at 11:29 am by bloodchilde
Permalink
Friday, June 24, 2005
i got a new blog.
i'm maintaining this one for personal stuff--journal entries, frivolus instrospection.
for serious criticism of society and culture, this is the blog i'm maintaining:
Posted at 05:01 pm by bloodchilde
Permalink
Saturday, May 28, 2005
"You are in this world, but not of this world" is a statement that captures the Christian attitude towards secular society. St. Augustine's framework of seeing the Church as a "city" separate from secular powers has been the popular way of seeing Christianity--at least, for Christians. For outsiders, Christians (whether Catholic or evangelical) are not that different from anyone--they can be just as hypocritical and judgmental as your average Joe. Even more, in fact.
But there is one area that is such a sore spot, such a bloody battleground for the devout--sexuality. I can remember it as if were yesterday, my gay classmate in college screaming at me: "The problem with you Christians is that you guys are so repressed!" During that time, I had to agree he was right. I was so obsessed about sex, and yet I was so uptight about it. I was obsessed with sex because of the culture that tolerated sex-driven media, and let's not forget my raging hormones reinforced by being around other normal college kids who were just as obsessed about sex as I was. On the other hand, I was uptight about it as a result of my religious upbringing. In fact, I never had my first kiss until after college, with my first real girlfriend whom I ended up marrying three years later.
Hmm... wait. No, I never kissed a girl when I was in school not because of the religion, but because I was a loser when it came to girls. But that's another story. Even so, religion didn't help. I had blown off some girls during that time who were into me because I knew they were the kinds I'd end up sleeping with. And much as the Dark Other would have loved that, part of me went out of the way to deliberately sabotage prospective hook-ups and always succeeded. Yup, my struggles with the Dark Other went way back, though on different issues.
So the issue then was sex, as it had always been for Christians. I don't get it. There are lots of issues that could occupy your average student Bible study, but one way or another it always goes back to sex. Even when I was still a kid who didn't even know what sex entailed, I already knew the party line:
Don't have sex. Sex is impure. Unless you're married. It's a sin against God.
Got it.
Of course, kids can be pretty enthusiastic about things they don't understand. As far as i remember, I was a good Christian kid who looked down on all my classmates from grade school who got pregnant in high school and were now officially consigned to the dark fate of working either as starving factory workers or semi-rich prostitutes, or even not working at all, while trying to feed noisy, stinky kids that walked around naked in public. I thought they deserved this fate because they were sinners. (I still think they deserve this fate, though for a different reason--they were too stupid to use protection.)
In retrospect, I was a judgmental smart-ass. You don't have a right to be this judgmental unless you've ever been in a room with a naked, drop-dead gorgeous girl--and you walked away. But the judgmental attitude was there as a defense mechanism against the simple truth that I had no idea how I would fare against temptation. If i were, in fact, in a a situation where I could sleep with a girl, would I be able to walk away and uphold the lofty standards passed on to me by my revered elders in church and big brothers and big sisters in my Christian youth organization in college? Probably not. Did not Christ say the spirit was willing buth the flesh was weak? The Sex Elves in a Japanese manga I once read state it rather more bluntly: "You're mouth says 'No, no' but you're body says 'Yes! Yes! Yes!'"
To illustrate how messed up I was, I'll tell you the story about the time I experienced my first (and only?) phone sex. One time I picked up the phone and there was a girl moaning on the line. I was like, "Er...how can I help you?" And she went, "Would you like to help me come?" while moaning between phrases.
So what did i do? A normal guy would have either put the phone down if he wasn't into that or gone ahead and had phone sex with her. But my stupid heart bled for this poor sinful soul who must have gone through a lot in life for her to seek solace and self-affirmation by having phone sex with total strangers. Next thing you know I was asking her about her life and she was telling me about her parents who didn't care about her, her lousy childhood, her use of sex to find temporary gratification in a hollow, empty world. And then I was telling her about Jesus Christ and how God could fill the hole she had in her heart. I'm not sure, but I think I even spent some time praying with her. Finally she got impatient and dropped the clinching question: "Are you gonna help me come or not?"
"Okay," I said, and proceeded to touch myself.
It went terribly, of course. I was already nineteen and had heard of references to phone sex, but I was so religiously repressed that I didn't really know what it entailed. I didn't know you were supposed to roleplay and say naughty things. Instead I was just moaning on the phone as she was. I had an orgasm in thirty seconds.
"Why'd you stop?" she asked
"I...uhmm...kinda came."
"So soon?"
With this challenge to my manhood, I immediately forgot about our intimate emotional sharing and just fired back, "Serves you right, bitch!"
i'm pretty comfortable telling this story now because I now have the gift of hindsight. I know now that people my age then were struggling with worse things. But back then, i felt so disappointed in myself for failing to turn Miss Phone Sex's heart to God and even indulging her. I was weeping to God and asking for forgiveness for the next two hours. That was how young Christians of my generation were wired. Our minds knew about sex. Our bodies wanted it. But our spiritual conditioning was totally against it. So when I was out there drowning in guilt over having phone sex, I thought I was the most despicable sinner in the world.
Fast forward to what I know now: I now have the knowledge that I was pretty naive.
By the time I graduated, i knew ten people in my Christian organization in college who were having sex. And that's only the ones I knew about.
A girl I was interested in told me she didn't want to get into a relationship after her recent one. When we ended up becoming friends, i found out why. She was pretty guilty for having been sexually active with the last one.
A pastor I knew admitted in a Christian conference that 60% of Christian couples he interviewed in pre-marriage counseling admitted to engaging in pre-marital sex.
"Off the record," a Christian guy told me once, "the marriage certificate is just a piece of paper. For practical reasons, I can't marry her yet. But in my heart, we are married. So we make love. I'm not ashamed to admit it before you and before God."
Interesting sentiment. It was all off the record, of course. Officially, he still maintained the "No to Pre-marital sex" party line in Bible studies. I think his girlfriend even used to support the campaign, "True Love Waits."
The problem I have with Christian culture in the Philippines is that it has no idea what's going on. For the most part, this is everyone's fault because everyone maintains the charade. Bible studies discussing sex take the tone of "preaching to the choir" because everybody agrees with the preacher, but not everybody is abstaining from sex. This creates a culture with a gross misconception of itself. This is a common enough phenomenon in anthropology. One principle I learned there is that how a culture views itself can be radically different from how it really is. This is certainly the case with Filipino Christianity. Christians think that Christians in general are virginal and sexually conservative. This is reinforced by the conservative line that gets affirmed even by people who are not sexually conservative in action. Everyone else thinks everyone else is so pure. They think, the "impure ones" are the exception not the rule. The "impure ones" themselves look at themselves as the aberration.
Open your eyes, people. Christian youth are screwing all over the place.
I'm not saying pre-marital sex is good or bad. That's a totally different issue, one that is complicated and demands dialogue from everyone in the community. What I'm saying is, let's cut the crap and admit what's going on. Pre-marital sex is alive and well in the city of God, and unless we start admitting that, we would never be able to start an honest dialogue about this issue. You know what they say, if you don't admit there's a problem, you're never going to fix it. As long as we are ignorant of the real trends in Christian youth culture, as long as we think sexual activity in Christian yoth circles is limited to the rebellious few, ill-advised sexual activity among Christian youth leading to pregnancy, disease, or a broken heart will go on unmanaged.
Posted at 04:32 pm by bloodchilde
Permalink
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Rehashing Old Thoughts: Abortion and Law
My thoughts on abortion and law were stirred when someone from the netalive forum a couple of years ago brought up the question of whether or not law and morality should overlap. The guy claimed that law was "far more about giving structure to society in order to enable it to function smoothly and far less about any shared moral values." Naturally, my thoughts immediately turned to abortion because i personally believed in the immoral nature of abortion and yet also believed abortion should be legalized. Below are excerpts from some of these thoughts i posted in netalive.org.
I agree with the idea that personal moralities should not interefere in the crafting of public laws and polices. For example, I hate the fact that the Catholic Church is still blocking the Philippine government from coming up with population policies to decrease population growth through artificial means. This is a secular republic, not a Catholic state. I'm not Catholic, lots of people in the Philippine are not Catholic, and yet we have to suffer through the consequences of anti-contraception policies. this overpopulation is causing poverty, creating an economy that cannot support its own population and thus leading to demoralization and our own diaspora. i don't want this consequence, and yet the cause is the morality of the Catholic religious who are powerful enough to affect public policy. So this is a classic example of why I feel law and morality should not mix.
But this is one issue; abortion is totally different.
My wife's sister who worked for a women's organization was baiting me one time about abortion. Knowing that i was an evangelical, she thought i supported the political maneuverings of pro-life movements. At the time, though, I didn't. Personally, i was anti-abortion. This is because my morality told me that life was sacred and that the fetus had life. Fine. But laws define limits for everyone--including people who do not share my morality. It would be unfair to impose on them a piece of legislation based on a moral system that not everyone shared. The only thing that everyone in the state shares is--correct me if i'm wrong--the constitution. Laws cannot be ratified that contradict the constitution. It seems to me like the constitution establishes the mores accepted by everyone during the formation of the state, perhaps the nearest thing to a shared morality.
For the longest time, i was very comfortable with this stand: personally--pro-life, politically--pro-choice. However, i'm not so comfortable with this anymore after a friend told me off. she thought i was being a hypocrite. She said this was exactly the mistake of german christians during the time of hitler--as individuals, they probably thought genocide was wrong, but they didn't do anything politically to fight the persecution of jews. In the same way, i personally thought abortion was wrong but didn't want anything legislated so people could be forced to stop doing it.
How do we solve this dilemma? If we base law on our morality, we are in danger of persecuting the marginalized who do not share our morality; but if we do not assert our morality, we are in danger of allowing what may be truly evil deeds to happen. The tricky part of course is determining what "evil" is. The morality of abortion is still very debatable presently, but it is the general consensus now that hitler's genocide was wrong. Slavery was considered moral for a very long time, but it is considered immoral and evil now. Is abortion going to be considered truly evil by everyone two-hundred years from now? It seems defining "wrong" or "evil" is really difficult and perhaps even impossible during certain historical moments. But it doesn't change the wrongness of the action or inaction of that generation when future generations from a more objective perspective later judge them. But this is a gordian knot--for after all, we do not and cannot have the perspective of future generations and can act only on the basis of what we presently can or cannot see.
For the present, though, while I stand with women's groups on the issue of contraception, I have to stand against them on the issue of abortion, and i'll be damned if I ever end up supporting legislation for abortion. I recognize that freedom of choice is important. That is why i hope people would choose to be resposible in the expression of their sexuality and use contraceptives. However, when i try to weigh the importance of this freedom against the sanctity of the life of the unborn, i have to say that the latter should take priority. I really do think this is no less than killing.
I'm not out to judge people. Even my mother had an abortion because we were dirt poor. I just think this is an unjustifiable act. If i look at this from a bigger perspective--take away gender conflicts, take away the quality of life issue, what do we have left? The termination of life. And this is pretty serious stuff. Never mind that i'm christian and am therefore biased. One doesn't have to be christian to respect the sanctity of life. In fact, christian George W. Bush does not respect the sanctity of life and started two wars already.
I am troubled by the fact that human law can say that abortion is okay. In some countries, it is even funded by the government in the form of subsidized abortion clinics--out of taxpayers' money, not all of whom believe in abortion. People who may be traumatized by childbirth because they have been raped or people who could die because of childbirth are exceptions--in the same way that people who kill in self-defense are absolved of murder. But i think they should be the exception, not the rule.
Why is there a dichotomy between pro-choice and pro-life? I am pro-choice. As far as i'm concerned, people should have the choice--nay, the responsibility--to choose their contraceptives and be responsible sexual beings. But when you bring a new life into the equation, a being normally disregarded and treated as "wastage" with no say over his/her own life, i think that changes things. And this is where i turn pro-life. I don't think this is a moral option. And again--i believe you don't have to be religious to believe in pursuing what is good or moral. Ultimately, the heart of the issue is the life of the unborn child, not women's choice.
I'm very troubled by the fact that societies can legalize and even encourage abortion like it's a good thing. Some women are made to feel good by pro-choice people and they say things like, "i've finally decided to take control of my life." What about the unborn child's life? And where was this "taking control" of your life when you were out having unprotected sex? It is sad that the catholic church is anti-contraceptive. But never mind that. We don't need the catholic church to tell us what to do. In fact, i am speaking now not as a christian but as a concerned human being who believes that it is our responsibility to pursue what is good, protect human rights, and work against evil and injustice.
I believe in justice. I believe in overthrowing oppression. I believe in protecting the weak and innocent. So where is the justice in killing a non-aggressive being that poses no life threat to anyone? Why are fetuses allowed to be oppressed and treated as non-human, non-life? Why should the law not protect innocent life?
When we talk of public policy, we have to choose what is best, consider the consequences. But with "consequences," i assume most women's groups would be talking about the mother. Again, the unborn is left out of the equation. I'm weighing the consequence of the inconvenience created in the life of the mother against the consequence of the termination of a human life. Like i said, i'm not out to condemn and i'm not condemning my mother who had an abortion ten years ago. But sometimes i think, what if that fetus had been me? There were times in the past when, overcome by depression, I did want to commit suicide; but sometimes i really enjoyed life too. Whether or not i eventually reject the gift of life, i'd want it to be my choice, not someone else's. No solution can be perfect in an ugly situation like an unwanted pregnancy, but i'm really bothered by the killing. Is putting the baby up for adoption not an option?
I'm not a screaming anti-abortionist calling people murderers here. But how else can i communicate that i really think this is murder and it must be prevented?
Some people define morality as something determined by society according to what is best for it. Well, hitler determined that genocide was what was best for his society in order to forge his Third Reich and many people agreed with him. But we still say genocide is not moral. Or at least not good. Because what we have in genocide is a group of people who have the power deciding "what is good for them" with no concern about what is good for another group of people who are powerless to stop them. I think the unborn here is being oppressed, their rights curtailed or not even recognized, and law in many countries, is not on their side. I just don't think this is part of what makes a good society, and I don't think this should be part of the agenda of women's groups in the Philippines.
Among many intellectuals, supporting "conservative" and "religious stands" is anti-intellectual. I reject this. I reject that people need to accept a God in order to recognize or promote a universal definition of good and evil based on how we treat our fellow beings. I think interpretations may vary across cultures, but most religions and cultures do have their version of The Golden Rule. Law, in most cases, is there to facilitate social processes effeciently. But there is more to society than choosing what is efficient for the majority or the powerful at the cost of the minority or powerless. i don't want a society where effeciency is more important that human lives, human freedom, or human choice. Abortion, as the band Breed used to sing, is just "killing for convenience."
Posted at 06:34 pm by bloodchilde
Permalink
Monday, February 28, 2005
Rehasing Old Thoughts: Faith as Neurosis?
A couple of years ago, someone in the netalive forum actually posited the idea that faith is a kind of neurosis. this guy had very strong beliefs in the power of logic and rational thinking. to him, christians deliberately refuse rationality and logic. however, he viewed this not just as stubbornness but as neurosis. this means christians are crazy.
before joining an online forum such as netalive, my knowledge of how westerners think was really limited. i knew there were atheists in the West, but i didn't know that there were so many. furthermore, i didn't realize that a marked anti-christianism was the dominant attitude in many Western societies, especially among intellectuals and even among non-atheists. when people talked about how christians were stupid, fanatical, and simple-minded, people didn't say it as if it were some radical, rebellious idea--they said it as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
frankly, i can't blame them. as a christian even here in the philippines i have met so many stupid, fanatical, and simple-minded christians.
so when someone pushed the idea further and speculated that christians were not only stupid but actually crazy, i had to respond. christians have persecuted and looked down on outsiders throughout history--the crusades, anti-gay campaigns, etc. i was overcome by the sense that these days, the pendulum might inevitably swinging. christian paranoia of persecution may be coming true soon, as we have alienated the secular world to the point where christian bashing in intellectual circles is not only considered acceptable but even cool. the difference between the persecution of christians in rome 2000 years ago and the possible persecution we as a church may face is simple--the ancient christians were not in power, they were of no harm to anybody, and they didn't deserve their fate. modern christians are in some areas actually in a position of power, have caused harm and death in others, and surely deserve some payback. we have blood on our hands.
so could i really blame them if some intellectual from the West argued that we were crazy? take the recent wars waged by George Bush. would any sane person argue that these wars that have resulted in countless injury and death be God's will? and yet mainstream evangelical churches and Christian magazines such as Christianity Today have indeed interpreted these events in such a manner and exhorted the faithful to pray for Bush and "democratic" America. maybe we really are crazy.
at any rate, here are some excerpts from posts i wrote in response to the guy who said faith was some sort of mental disorder.
FAITH AS MENTAL DISORDER?
"Since you label christians with very strong beliefs as "freaks," i'd like to know if you can apply the principles of categorizing people as "freaks" to people with a very strong belief in anything. Like, if my friend has been "wired" from childhood to believe that communism is evil and liberal democracy is good, should i call him a freak since all my "logical" arguments against the goodness of democracy cannot dent his "faith" in his democratic government.
"I am a christian and i have experienced being dogmatic myself. I'd like to think that my journey from simply accepting doctines to critically evaluating my faith is a journey of maturing as a person--not a journey of being healed from a neurosis. If you will classify blind belief as a neurosis, then all of us are sick because even the most open-minded and/or skeptical of us will always believe in something in an absolute manner.
"I will not try to define faith here. I am still struggling with that. Like you, my experience has allowed me to outgrow simple definitions with shallow foundations. But whatever faith is, i'm pretty sure it is not a neurosis. "Faith--even to the point of fanaticism--is not a result of mental disorder but of mental conditioning. It is the way our mind gives order to the universe, the way we create categories (good and evil) and define the relationship between these categories (binary opposition).
"When you try to talk to religious people who do not respond to your "logical arguments," it is not because they are sick but because, as you said, they are "wired" differently from you. Being mentally conditioned or wired in a certain way is the fate of all people--even me, even you.
"Your mental conditioning, for example, tells you that arguing or thinking "logically" is the way to establish truth. Hence, you feel that religious people who do not respond to your logic are freaks. You feel they have blind faith. But even your belief in your logic is a faith of some sort. The validity of logic itself is a postulate, something you take for granted and believe absolutely to be true. There are religions and systems of thought that do not depend on logic. Are they less valid? Yes, from the logical point of view, but there are other points of view. Logic assumes that truth is something that can be arrived at rationally and abstractly. All other truths are delusions.
"My point here is that all of us have been mentally conditioned one way or another--by our parents, churches, universities, media, culture, etc. You cannot escape conditioning. No one can. You think people who think differently from you (not just in content but in actual process) are brainwashed, but the truth is that we all are brainwashed and you have just been brainwashed differently. In the same way that you cannot escape conditioning, you cannot escape faith. We all have faith in something. Even atheism is faith in non-faith.
"I guess i'm a skeptic. Definitions of faith that emphasize its aspect as something that cannot be proven is meaningless to me because i believe, in the first place, that nothing can be proven. In life, you just have to choose your postulates and build your theories from there. That is faith. No one escapes that.
"The only posible exception for me are people who commit suicide because of the nauseating sense that life is meaningless. But perhaps even that shows faith in the tyranny of meaning...
"I've been thinking some more about this issue and have realized that what bothers me personally about the whole mental disorder thing is not the issue of whether or not this opinion is truthful. Granted that it is an interesting point that can lead to fruitful discussions, i am worried more about its implications rather than its validity.
"If christians are sick freaks because we stubbornly cling to our beliefs even when some of us can't argue as well as the next man, then he is entitled to his views. His defense of this view has even led me to re-evaluate soem of my positions.
"But something about this bothers me. what will happen if it becomes the dominant view in society? What if it becomes possible, for the sake of argument, to scientifically demonstrate that we christians are indeed crazy.
"What will stop the state from confining all of us to mental institutions? How different will this be from hitler's condemnation of jews as an inferior race and therefore are impurities that need to be eliminated?
"My atheist friends tell me that christians are so paranoid about "persecution." (So paranoid, in fact, that we don't notice it when we are the ones doing the persecuting, but that's another issue). In this case, however, do i not have a valid cause to be alarmed? Should i not be afraid to get labeled crazy when i am being perceived as illogical? Isn't calling us religious people freaks going too far?
In the end, maybe we deserve that because some of us also do that, too, to people who live differently from us."
Posted at 11:39 am by bloodchilde
Permalink
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
Sex, religion, politics, culture, literature, etc. The usual. Joseph Nathan Cruz hereby marks his corner of the universe with blood...
Blood flowing is life.
Blood spilled is death.
The taking of blood is immortality.
The giving of blood is history.
The drinking of blood is a promise.
The offering of blood is redemption.
The blood of the lamb is salvation.
The blood of the prophets is revolution.
I am the bloodchilde. I am of the blood and the blood is mine.
 Free Counters
|
|
|
|
