Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Nothing Writes So Much As Blood
Mentor and pupil
While both Greek philosophers were preoccupied with the concept of poetry as imitation, or representation of nature, it is interesting to note how their ideas collided, which started the ball rolling for the classic/al clash between poetry and philosophy, or rather which allowed for more beneficial concepts in the study of literature.
In his dialogues Republic, Ion and Phaedrus, Plato banishes poets from his ideal state, based on several grounds. First, according to Plato, the poet’s works are an imitation, twice removed from the Ideal World of forms. Second, poets are said to compose under inspiration, or even divine madness, and without using reason, which is instrumental in finding Truth. Next, poetry is considered to be ignorant of what it teaches and therefore teaches the wrong things. And last, poetry is dangerous to the soul, producing the wrong emotions in the audience, and interfering with the striving towards pure reason which is the proper conduct of the good soul. Plato did not see the importance of poets in the Republic because they are said to just evoke such pleasures and emotions in the audience and not at all benefit the state as a whole.
From these attacks on poetry— two challenges arise. First, Plato raises the question why representations of people [who are] suffering is a pleasurable experience. Second, because he considered the poetic pursuit as irrational, Plato has issued a challenge to those who would argue for a rightful place for poetry in his philosophical utopian state.
Now, taking off from what his teacher laid out, Aristotle comes to the defense in his Poetics. Like Plato, Aristotle believed that imitation is the basis of pleasure derived from all forms of art. But unlike Plato, Aristotle says poetry is more than a simulated representation of reality.
First, Aristotle considers poetry as a skill, with rational rules (like shipbuilding), and not really a process of inspiration.
In Poetics, Aristotle attempts to explain 'poetry' through 'first principles' and by discerning its different genres and component elements, with an analysis of tragedy constituting the core of his discussion. Such principles of poetic composition demonstrate that poetry is not simply inspired. It is rather a skill which can be learned, and has rules that are comprehensible by reason.
Second, for Aristotle, poetry represents reality in a useful way from which we can learn. While Plato says poetry does not teach practical wisdom, and—since the poet does not understand horse bits and reins—he is two removes from the truth, Aristotle counters that the poet is [even] the one who approaches the truth more directly because he focuses on what is universal—rather than incidental or particular—about human experience. While history represents particulars, poetry represents universals.
Then, while it is true that poetry evokes pity and fear in the audience—more important, it also arouses these emotions in such a way as to increase our ability to control them. Aristotle’s concept of catharsis—either purgation cleansing, or even now, intellectual clarification, rather validates why poetry is a more interesting pursuit because of its ability for moral instruction.
What follows is a graphical representation of their arguments and/or counterarguments.
PLATO vs. ARISTOTLE
- Poet’s works are an imitation, twice removed from the World of forms.
- Poetry is a skill, with rational rules (like shipbuilding), and not really a process of inspiration. The principles of poetic composition demonstrate that poetry is rather a skill which can be learned, and has rules comprehensible by reason.
- Poets compose under inspiration, without using reason.
- Poetry is ignorant of what it teaches—it teaches the wrong things.
- Poetry represents reality in a useful way from which we can learn—the poet is the one who approaches the truth more directly because he focuses on what is universal.
- Poetry elicits in the audience emotions that are not in accord with reason.
- Poetry arouses emotions in such a way as to increase our ability to control them.
With these two giant figures of the period, classical theory and criticism has mapped out two directions for consideration in the literary study—it emphasized, if not deliberately campaigned on understanding literature as a mode of representation; and it also highlighted didacticism, the property of literary works that seek to teach important tenets of life, hinged on its ability to render moral instruction to the audience.
I Dialogues
I.
Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. (Lenin 109)
Whereas the old Marxist view showed how ideologies are false by pointing to the real world hidden by ideology, Althusser says, by contrast, ideology does not reflect the real world but represents the imaginary relationships of individuals to the real world. The thing ideology [mis] represents is itself already at one remove from the real.
Borrowing Jacques Lacan’s Imaginary, Althusser says we are always within ideology because of our reliance on language to establish our reality. This means—that different ideologies are but different representations of our social and imaginary ‘reality,’ not a representation of the real itself.
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Ideology has a material existence. (Lenin 112)
It is so because an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. Ideology always manifests itself through actions which are inserted into practices—e.g. rituals, conventional behavior, and so on.
Citing Blaise Pascal’s formule for belief—“Kneel down, move your lips in prayer and you will believe, (Lenin 114)”
Althusser contends it is our performance of our relation to others and to social institutions that constantly instantiates us as subjects. (Refer to critic Judith Butler’s preoccupation with performance/ performativity is inspired and/or informed by this thought on ideology.)
What thus seems to take place outside ideology (in the street, to be precise) in reality takes place in ideology. Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology (Lenin 118)
III.
All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects. (Lenin 115)
Ideology’s purpose is in constituting concrete individuals as subjects (Lenin 116). So pervasive is ideology in its constitution of subjects that it forms our very reality and thus appears to us as true and obvious.
The rituals of ideological recognition guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and naturally irreplaceable subjects. (Lenin 117)
Through interpellation, individuals are turned into subjects (which are always ideological):
Police Officer: Hey, you there!
Assuming that the scene takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere 180° physical conversion, he becomes a subject. (Lenin 118)
The very fact that we do not recognize this interaction as ideological speaks to the power of ideology.
IV
Individuals are always-already subjects. (Ideology has no history.)
Although his example of interpellation suggests temporality—I am interpellated and thus I become a subject, I enter ideology—Althusser says that the becoming-subject happens even before we are born. Not a paradox at all, even before the child is born—it is certain in advance that it will bear its father’s name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable.
Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected’ once it has been conceived. (Lenin 119)
Most subjects accept their ideological self-constitution as reality or nature and thus rarely come into conflict with the repressive state apparatus, designed to punish anyone who rejects the dominant ideology.
It can be said therefore that hegemony is thus reliant less on such repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) as the police than it is on those ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) by which ideology is inculcated in all subjects.
Althusser says it best, thus:
“the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the subjects, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all by himself.’” (Lenin 123)
Understanding Louis Althusser’s “Ideological StateApparatuses”
By adding the concept of ideological state apparatuses, Althusser complicates the Marxist notion of the relation between base and superstructure.
For Marx, various levels in society are the infrastructure or economic base and the superstructure or political and legal institutions (law, government, and the police) and ideology (religious, moral, political, etc.) In Marxist thought, superstructure is relatively autonomous from base—it relies on economic base but can sometimes persist for a long period despite major changes in the base.
Exploring the ways in which ideology is more pervasive, and more material than previously acknowledged, Althusser distinguishes between Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) and the Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs).
ISAs include the religious (schools), family, legal, political (systems, parties), trade union, communications (press), and the cultural (arts, sports, literature). Less centralized and more heterogeneous, ISAs access the private, not the public realm. They work predominantly by ideology, including punishment or repression.
Schools and churches use suitable methods of punishment, expulsion, selection, etc. to discipline not only their shepherds but also their flocks. (Lenin 98)
State apparatuses (SAs), or Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) are agencies that function by violence, imposing punishment and privation in order to enforce power. Working predominantly by violence and secondarily by ideology, SAs include the government and administration, army and the police, courts and prisons, etc.
Though they are quite disparate, ISAs are virtually unified subscribing to a common ideology in the service of the ruling class. Indeed the ruling class must maintain a degree of control over ISAs to ensure stability of the SAs.
No class can hold state power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the ISAs.
It is much harder for the ruling class to maintain control over the multiple, heterogeneous, and relatively autonomous ISA (alternative perspectives can be voiced in each ISA)—which is why there is continual struggle for hegemony/domination in this realm.
In what may seem to me as the repute of schools being [re] defined, Althusser says, “what the bourgeoisie has installed as its dominant ISA is the educational apparatus, which has replaced in its functions the Church.”
Author! Author!
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Really, Speaking Greek
Speaking Greek
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Heaven Is a Place on Plate
Any sensible urban worker who is given no choice but fetch food from sources made accessible in a civilized jungle called a city or a university must acquire some neighborly ethics if he is to properly feed himself and achieve something through the day. Eating in cafeterias or similar types of food sources requires that he learn a number of things on how to feed on properly and hopefully be nourished.
First finish or get done with your salivation; perhaps only after then can you start & think of your salvation.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
After Making Love, You Hear Footsteps*
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
King of Pain
I saw Pepeng Kaliwete starring Fernando Poe, Jr. when I was a first-grader. In those days, Mother was fond of movies that on weekends, she would bring her children to downtown Naga and there we watched all kinds of movies—in Emily, Bichara, Alex or Vic—the movie theaters owned by the Bicharas in Naga City.
Nothing reminds me of the movie except cringing at the sight of Pepe’s hands being twisted by a moving wooden motor—by the goons of the kontrabida led by the proverbial villain Paquito Diaz. Who can ever forget the ngilo just watching that scene? Since then, I have looked forward to watching FPJ’s movies.
Enough said.
Some thirty years later, I feel fine because it is now official. This year, President Benigno Aquino III conferred a posthumous National Artist award to the late Fernando Poe, Jr., King of Philippine Movies. Aquino’s Proclamation No. 435 only confirmed an earlier declaration of Poe as National Artist in 2006, two years after Poe’s death. But at the time controversy took over.
I recall the award was refused by FPJ’s family from then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whom they thought, rigged the 2004 elections in which FPJ ran for president. This year, the family has accepted the recognition from the current president.
I suppose the national recognition of this prolific artist is appropriate. For one, a National Artist is one who has helped “build a Filipino sense of nationhood through the content and form of their works.” Through some 50 years of his career in the movie industry, FPJ had been a household word for his honest portrayals of the plight of the Filipino, particularly the underprivileged and the marginalized.
An average Filipino like me knows an FPJ movie or the role he portrayed simply because he portrayed the life of the ordinary people, who compose the lot of the population. Whether in film biographies—from Pepeng Kaliwete to Eseng ng Tondo or other movies he produced, directed and acted in, it's he who sacrifices for the other person.
Up to his sixties, FPJ’s roles had been consistently that—particularly favoring the underprivileged or defending the marginalized, but all the while lionizing the good. If at all, FPJ’s movies melodramas helped define the generation to which I belong. But because his roles have been mimicked and parodied by other fellow actors, it only goes to show they touched a chord in the Filipino everyman.
In some 250 movies where he probably punched all the thugs and gave back the stolen candy bars to their rightful owners, his character was not only our muscle but also our soul, a Robin Hood of sorts in our part of the world who delivered justice for the poor because it was denied them by the privileged and the greedy. His manner of delivering justice the Christian way did not only save us from boredom or tedium, but also “redeemed” us. And for this, FPJ can hardly be replicated.
We confer on him the award because we seek to immortalize a paragon of the good—whose pains and struggles inspire us to always seek what is just. We choose to do this because we humans need a(nother) Christ-like figure whom we can emulate. We take to placing one FPJ as such only because we need to remind ourselves that in everything we do, or despite our perennial struggles, we can always choose to do the good.
King of Pain

Monday, October 08, 2012
After Making Love, You Hear Footsteps*
dawa garo mayo man; huna nindo lang
pirming igwang nagdadangadang. Ika
handal tibaad an saimong kasaruan,
sabi mong haloy nang nawara, basang
na sanang magbutwa; siya man masundan
daa kan ilusyon na an sugid haloy niya
nang itinalbong, alagad ngonyan saiya
tibaad nag-iidong-idong.
Sa laog kain saindong kwarto garo igwang
nakahiriling saindo. Sa saindong pinapaiplian
garo man sana dai kamo nalilipudan. Pagmati nindo
pirmi kamong linalamag kan kun anong duwang kalag.
Dai man daw basang na sana sinda nindong binarayaan
ta nganing sa kada saro kamo magpasiram-siram?
Sa saindang kasuyaan, dae ninda aram
kun sain maduman. Yaraon sinda bisan diin
kamo magduman. Sa saindang kasusupgan,
dai ninda kamo tinatantanan. Mga kalag sindang
dai nagkamirisahan. Ara-aldaw ninda kamong
sisingilon kan saindang kamurawayan.
*Dispensa ki Galway Kinnell
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