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.