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Teaching/LearningThe Humanities in Other Words/Worlds

"These objects, forcibly uprooted from their historicalcontext, their specific function, and their original meaning,standing before us in their glass display cases, strike our eyeas enigmatic divinities and command our adoration. Their transfer from the cathedral, the palace, the nomad's tent, thecourtesan's boudoir, and the witch's cavern to the museumwas a magico-religious transmutation. Objects became

icons."

- Octavio Paz "Use and Contemplation"

"My exhibition at the Art and Project Gallery in Amsterdan inDecember, '69 will last two weeks. I asked them to lock thedoor and nail my announcement to it, reading: For theexhibition the gallery will be closed.'"

- Robert Barry

Why is it when some people talk about "culture" they talk about formsand practices that are different and far removed from what they actuallycome in contact with, perform, and go through every day? Culture meansgoing to the museum and admiring the beauty of an expensivemasterpiece. Culture means listening to a piano recital amid the

inviolable silence of a concert hall, watching a ballet performance seatedand mute, or reading a book in solitude. To be "cultured" means to becivilized and literate, to possess a refined sensibility attuned to the"superior" values of the "good life" and to the "best" that has beenthought and said and rendered in "artistic" form.

But how come it is not the way of the cultured to find "beauty" in the mator in the weave or in the kitchen utensil many people use, becausenecessary and functional, in everyday life? How come the reality of culture cannot be discerned in and. consequently, "aesthetic pleasure"be derived from ritual, from a radio serial, or from the act of readingkomiks as one hums a folk lullaby or the refrain of the latest jukebox hit?

The answers to these questions must lead us to interrogate prevailingassumptions about culture. It seems culture in conventional sense andusage refers to a specialized sphere of activity that is traditionally knownand recognized as artistic.

But what, in the first place, is art? Or, better still, what constitutes theartistic? Isn't it that when we bring art to notice, recognize, identify, andspecify it, we already involve society in the very mode of expressing theconcept and the power to express it?

When we speak of art, we must not delude ourselves into believing thatthe term corresponds to some natural, objective, and fixed body of works"out there" to which the category of art is made to operate merely as adescriptive rubric. Rather, we must understand it as a concept, not as anatural, preordained "creation," but a theoretical construction of a"circumscribed set of texts felt to be of special value"1 by the variousinstitutions of the art world:

"A work of art is of value only if it is valued, and if it can be valued only inrelation to some particular set of' valuational criteria, be they moral,political or aesthetic. The problem of value is the problem of the socialproduction of value; it refers to the ever ongoing process whereby whichtexts are to be valued and on what grounds...Value is not somethingwhich the text possesses. It is not an attribute of the text; it is rather something produced for the text."2

It is this aura of artistic value that constrains us to regard some things as

"artistic" and some as not. The question now is: Who sets the standardsand what compels us to adopt these standards? Who codifies theprotocol of art?

Criticism and TheoryA critic writes: "Different criticisms... pro pose different concepts of 'literature, although all agree that 'literature' is to be defined as, in onesense or another, a special type of writing which needs to be dealt withby a special level of theorizing... Ultimately, the 'literature' with whichdifferent critical traditions deal is not the same 'literature.' Even wherethere is broad agreement about precisely which texts are to be regardedas 'literary,' these may be held to be 'literary' in quite different ways and



But swinging to the other end of formalism is orthodox sociology, whichproposes that art is a direct reflection of its socio-economic environment,and so denies art its specific mode of articulation and signification. Artmerely becomes a mirror that automatically reflects the images of theworld at one particular moment. The artist in turn can only operate withinthe limits of that spatio-temporal surface, which is conceived in terms of linear, diachronic development. It is as if art were indistinguishable fromthe other aspects of reality, when in fact art can speak for itself, canconfigure and transform social reality artistically — a distinct socialreality, to be sure, that does not forget the society from which it emerges,

a distinct social reality that remembers its society as it is remembered byit.

A reductionist or simplistic assessment would therefore just grasp a textas pure form or pure determination of the economic.10 It would be blindand deaf and mute to the overdetermined construction of the text associo-historical practice and production, failing to account for the multipleforces that conspire to produce it, the vastly varied and oftentimescontentiously contradictory layers of mediation-political economy,aesthetic ideology, authorial background, institutional constraints,representational strategies, semiotic significance of form and style,medium and technique, and so on-that intervene in the projection of context into the text, and vice-versa, so that in the end both shall havebecome inextricably intertwined.

Worse, an analysis of a text could be altogether sapped of rigour as inhumanist, moralist, romantic, and biographical methods in which the textis merely teased out for the metaphysical significant human experience,moral calculations on good and evil, the divine inspiration of genius, andauthorial intention. These modes of analysis do not give justice to thecomplexity of art and its production.

We have to inevitably realize that to understand Philippine painter Fernando Amorsolo, for example, is to implicate the numerous factorswhich could have come into play in the making of his works, to situate hisstatus and his works as part of the complex historical articulations of histime and the conditions under which we make sense of them today, aspart of the "specific overdetermined conjuncture" of his society, our history, and the future.

We must study his artistic vocabulary that mainly consisted of pastoralthemes — rural idylls, harvest and fiesta scenes, dalagang bukid in prettyposes, sunsets — all evoking a sense of wartime nostalgia for thecountryside, which greatly appealed to tourists. We must inquire into hisstyle that tried to capture the glowing effects of the Philippine sun on thelandscape by employing the contra luz lighting technique and "topping off composition with chrome yellow lights to accent contours where thebacklight struck.”11 We must learn about his preoccupation with the oil-on-canvas and painterly style that he maximized to simulate the density,texture, and luster of supposedly natural surroundings.

We must not neglect any discussion of the genera! mode of productionobtaining during the time when he practised his art and his socialsituation as Filipino artist working within the American colonial context,which had introduced the privately owned gallery as a pivotal node in thedistribution and marketing process, indeed an institution of patronage nolonger controlled by the Church and the highly exclusive elite circle as ithad been during Spanish colonial Philippines. We must not paper over his popularity as artist-celebrity who practically dominated the art scenefor almost three decades (1920s-40s) and became known for hisillustrations in advertisements for the car Marquette and the soap Ivory ,in movie posters for Ideal Theater, in brochures and programs for the1924 Manila Carnival.

We must not be remiss in evaluating the artistic education he acquiredfrom the University of the Philippines School of Fine Arts, the premier artschool of the time which considered as models paintings of classico-romantic sensibility: and from the Royal Academy of San Fernandothrough which the aesthetic temper of Juan Luna. Felix ResurreccionHidalgo, and Jose Rizal was forged. We must be illuminated on hisavowed admiration for the Velasquez style and his hesitance to embracemodernism as this would entail "jumping over the rules of good taste andbeauty."12 We must be able to contextualize his conservative position inrelation to the moderns's as espoused by the likes of Galo Ocampo, whohad declared that he was already "sick" of the Amorsolo school. We mustthink about his stagnation as artist at a juncture in his career when hewould be so swamped with local and international commissions that hehad to come up with a catalogue of photographs from which customerscould choose. Lastly, we must calculate the effects of his canonization bythe Marcos government as National Artist.



subsidize-not only under the auspices of economic but also of culturalpower-this newly acquired taste for something supposedly superior toTlnikling and disco dancing?

We must realize that art forms are inscribed in conventions and noteveryone is "free" to become privy to these, no matter how themanufacturing sector insists that the consumer has the option to chooseand the market is all that liberal. The very definitions of art and even thespecificity of art to form reality are suffused through and through withmatters that have to do with how power circulates in society--a power

that overdetermines the production of art, artists, the art world, andcertain commonsensical notions of art.

Bourdieu writes that the "sacralizing of culture and art fulfills a vitalfunction by contributing to the consecration of the social order: to enableeducated men to believe in barbarism and persuade their barbarianswithin the gates of their own barbarity, all they must and need do is tomanage to conceal themselves and to conceal the social conditionswhich render possible...the legitimized predominance of a particular definition of culture."20

As a visitor in Versailles had once remarked: "This chateau was notmade for the people, and it has not changed."21

In the same way that the SM Megamall Art Walk, while it cohabits withupscale sari-sari stores and high-class carinderia within the sprawlingpostmodern complex, was meant for those who can buy paintings, thosewho can pretend to be au courant with antiques, those who can seepotential investment value through the canvas, and those who can duringglittering exhibit openings blurt out lines like: "That looks likeChagall...that's derivative of the worst elements of AbstractExpressionism..."

And we say that the market is free? In order to reposition ourselves awayfrom the contemporary ethos of making and consuming art, it isimperative to be skeptical and suspicious about how we regard art,always keeping in mind that the term is mainly a construct, a category of social activity not justified by essence-that is. an object like a urinal doesnot become art because there is something inherently artistic about it—but by status which is arbitrarily conferred by the institutions. And so,

taste or predisposition for and towards practices and productionsdeemed as art is an inculcated norm conditioned by conventions andnourished by the consensus entered into by a community of artists andaudiences, a symptom in fact of certain assumptions about how realitymust unfold, how things must look, how texts must be read, how their effects in society must be calculated.

Moreover, we must continually be wary of the manner in whichhegemonic discourses attempt to totalize experience and universalizetaste, as if contradictions and disparities did not exist in this world. As

part of its objectives, the canon, for instance, foregrounds such artificialcategories as fine, folk, and popular, as well as a range of differentiationsas in high, serious, avant-garde art which is distinguished againstlow/illegitimate /bad art, artisanal craft, kitsch, entertainment,commercial, mass, and pulp. Wedded into these boundaries arehierarchies that, according to Bourdieu, valuate some works as "worthyof being admired" and treat the rest as outside the domain of criticalreception, and so not part of the "cultural wealth" of a particular history.

Between Nick Joaquin's Cave and Shadows and Nerissa Cabral's BukasLuluhod ang Mga Tala, which work is more legitimate and has the right tobe taken up in "literature" classes and published in anthologies?Between Puccini's Madama Butterfly and the Pasyon, which of the twocontains "better" music? Between film superstar Nora Aunor andarchitect Leandro Locsin, who deserves to be declared National Artist?And between abstractionist Jose Joya and Mabini painter Peck Piñon,who is more eligible for a retrospective grant from the Main Gallery of theCultural Center of the Philippines? Why? Why not? Why cannot the studyof painting, the technique of putting pigments on two dimensionalsurface, accommodate movie billboard making in its perspective? Whycannot the business of literature deal with the underground poetry of theNew Peoples Army cadres or the daily "narratives" of tabloids?

The canon sets up parameters beyond which we cannot see and know. Itcharts histories and sanctifies paradigms against which others are butmere aspirations. And, of course, it cogently enforces particular socialconfigurations: "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Socialsubjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by thedistinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, thedistinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective



classifications is expressed or betrayed...The denial of lower, coarse,vulgar, venal, servile-in a word, natural-enjoyment, which constitutes thesacred sphere of culture .-implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested,gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That iswhy art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously anddeliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimizing socialdifferences."22

The process of consolidating a canon needs to be rendered problematic

because it is a political project. The canon does not operate by whim. Itspractice is never idiosyncratic; it is always ideological. Ideologicalbecause when the canon insists on Art with a capital A. it posits auniversal view of the world, a mystification that obscures the power behind the so-called universal unity. When a white middle-classRepublican professor and his student, a third world woman of color,confront a Vietnam film, the dominant institutions and traditions of interpretations generally expect, or better yet, interpellate the latter toassume and subscribe to the canonical reading of the former by virtue of power relations: the yuppie of an Ivy leaguer is more authoritative to

judge the text in the "right" way than the illegal alien of a Chinese is. Theconstrual of the former in effect invalidates or weakens that of the latter in an attempt by the regulating agencies of reading to totalize experienceand speak for someone else, or, why not, for everyone; in an attempt tosituate all of us within a frame of reference as realized through "readinghabits" and representational strategies outside of which we cannotspeak, write, read and within which we become coherent, represented,knowing subjects. It is always an imperative of those in power to assumethe position of correctness, of proposing the most feasible truth in order to prove once and for all that, indeed, life must be lived this way andcertain things will have to prevail. By re-viewing how the canon isconstructed, we become aware of how it is arbitrarily put together, why ithas been produced in the first place, how it disseminates its effects insociety, how it impinges expectations on how people must make senseof the world through art. And how we must labor to transform the kind of society that sustains it.

The term art has a naturalizing premise. We refer to some things as artbecause those things have always been considered to be such. But sayswho? We have the tendency to take the term art as it is as if it were

"natural" (already there) and "neutral" (just there). We must learn todemolish the basis on which it achievesefficacy as a term and derail the "bottom line" with which we convenientlyformulate it.

Furthermore, the homogenizing politics of the canon occludes themultiple spaces people inhabit in their relations with society, positionsthat either seize the aegis of dominance or ache under the trauma of powerlessness. We are not people, solely; we are also "named" in termsof an "immense discontinuous network" of class, race, gender, sexuality,

language, religion, ideology, historical experience, and other more"different knottings of these strands, determined by heterogenousdeterminations which are themselves dependent upon myriadcircumstances."23 In other words, people are irreducibly different andtherefore cannot be governed by a singular culture, as this would denythe specificities with which people encounter power and wage strugglesin the name of interlocking, shifting differences and strategic alliances.George Yudice reminds us that "the member of an oppressed marginalgroup cannot escape the repercussions attached by a society to his/her skin, sex, speech, and other marginalizing marks of distinction: a black ina white world, a woman in a patriarchal culture, an unskilled worker in a(post) industrial economy."24

But nevertheless, we must strive for total, not totalitarian, transformation:to regain not a universal humanity but those human particularities andsubjectivities and the conditions under which they could flourish —something that can only and truly be realized if we confront theoppressive structures which "wound" and "refuse" them, if we "trysomehow to go right through those estranging definitions to emergesomewhere on the other side,"25 and if we think of how others might beable to coalesce with us in transforming our, their, and hopefullyeveryone's situations progressively and rigorously. As Terry Eagletonputs it: "The feminist, nationalist or trade unionist might now come torecognize that in 'the long run none of their desires is realizable withoutthe fulfillment of the others's."26

The canon though is not to be regarded as a non-changing, all-powerfulempire, a solid grand monolith that overwhelms thoroughly, massively,completely, and therefore resistant to challenge. For it is part of theliberative practice to read against the grain, to recuperate, rearticulate,



and reappropriate the potentially subversive stirrings repressed incanonical texts and realign them along revolutionary interests. Thecanon's fabric of power is not seamless. Therein are fissures,disruptions, disjunctures, ruptures, and cracks through which radicalintervention by way of strong and committed interpretations is very muchpossible and real-izable. Historian Ranajit Guha, conductingemancipatory and redemptive critical practice, secures the gains of atactical re-reading of colonial historiography: "It is of course true that thereports, dispatches, minutes, judgements, laws, letters, etc. in whichpolicemen, soldiers, -bureaucrats, landlords, usurers and others hostile

to insurgency register their sentiments, amount to a representation of their will. But these documents do not get their content from that willalone, for the latter is predicated on another will, that of the insurgent. Itshould be possible therefore to read the presence of a rebelconsciousness as a necessary and pervasive element within that body of evidence."27

The story of art, culture, and civilization is said to be the story of thewhite, heterosexual, Christian man of property. It is also a story of benevolence and beauty. History tells us, however, that repressed in thisstory is the story of violence, deracination, cultural pillage, exploitation,underdevelopment, poverty, slavery, obscurantism, imperialism,genocide. Repressed, still, are the other ways of reading, writing, looking,seeing, living, making art; the other experiences of women, people of color, peasants, workers, sexual dissidents; the other realities of ThirdWorld revolutions, socialist alternatives, ethnic societies, nationalistmovements, indigenous science and technology, folk and popular philosophies; other desires, other voices, other knowledges, other worlds, other truths, other gods.

Homi Bhabha enjoins us to retell these struggles and the narratives of our histories in our own gatherings, indeed in this classroom: "Gatheringsof exiles and emigres and refugees, gathering on the edge of "foreign'cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos or cafes of city centres; gathering in the half-life half-light of foreign tongues, or inthe uncanny fluency of another's language; gathering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses, disciplines; gathering thememories of underdevelopment, of other worlds lived retroactively;gathering the past in a ritual of revival; gathering the present. Also thegathering of the people in diaspora; indentured, migrant, interned; the

gathering of incriminatory statistics, educational performance, legalstatutes, immigration status-the genealogy of the lonely figure that JohnBerger named the seventh man. The gathering of clouds from which thePalestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish asks "where should the birds fly after the last sky?'"28

It becomes a daily revolution to foreground and empower all these other tales, retrieve them from the periphery, and purge them of the stigma of otherness. This necessarily entails the struggle of enlisting the people insupport of ideological agenda, configuring an exchange of power and

meaning that does not, because cannot, degenerate into playfulpluralism and bourgeois tolerance, but one steeled by a politics of transgression and transformation.

As Indian feminist thinker Gayatri Spivak states: "Tolerance doesn't workboth ways. The rich and the poor are not equally free to sleep under thebridges of Paris. Tolerance is a loaded virtue because you have to havea base of power to practice it. You cannot ask certain people to 'tolerate'a culture that has historically ignored them at the same time that their children are being indoctrinated into it."29 What is at hand, hence, is thepassionate clash of discourses, a purposive battle of positions on howsociety must be arranged, and not just a celebration of diversity. Andwhat is at stake is no less than the invalidation of totalitarian systems andthe transformation of society, a transformation that involves not merelythe reversal of roles (from oppressed to oppressor, from slave to master),but a vehement refusal to extol anything as absolute and at the sametime a joyful commitment to a complex, creative humanity and a life of struggle and solidarity.

This rethinking must, for instance, inform the feminist practice of reappropriating texts and practices from the margins. Nerissa Cabral anda Cordillera weaver are to be recovered not only for the sake of gender or racial pride, but also for the purpose of reclaiming the term "art" toencompass productions subjected to the epistemic violence of canonicaldiscrimination and of blasting away the ideological binarisms of art/non-art, fine art/folk art, literary/commercial, and soon. This demands that thereading and making of the aforementioned productions transcend theconservative limitations of normative classifications and instead grapplewith the intricacies of signification and mode of production. It is notenough to invoke basketry as testimony to women's creativity; it is



important to examine the processes by which baskets are transformedfrom, let us say, communal expressions into commodities inserted intothe marketplaces of capitalism, critique the exploitative moments ranklingin the imbalances brought about by the dislocation, and map out positivepotentialities within a new locus of activity that is at once displaced andreconstituted.Reading and writing alternative texts and practices must then be no lessthan strategies of empowerment, in which women30 are able to locatethemselves and redefine according to their politics more liberating foci of art and culture, explore the cracks and gaps of the field through which

they can pursue their struggles, and so ultimately resist the resistancesof patriarchy.

Cultures are terrains of contestation and sites of struggle. Cultures mustcompete in the ideological arena, continually deconstruct the monopolyof the canon, construct new possibilities of meaning, and prefigureconditions of visibility for more human futures. It is only in this way-thisrecuperation of the specific struggles within society's heterogenousconstituencies and permeating life with freedom-that art and the"Humanities" shall finally become meaningful and urgent for all thosewho work to conceive a life that "obliges them over and over again togive birth to themselves,"31 so that there would emerge "a new andsweeping Utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for othershow they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible."32

(Patrick D. Flores)



1 Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1979), 7.

2 Bennett, 173.

3 Bennett. 8.

4 Victor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique," Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (London: Edward Arnold. 1989), 18-19.

5 Ibid.

6 Bennett, 155.

7 Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, (USA:Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949).

8 Archibald Macleish, "Ars Poetica," Prism, ed. Yolanda Tomeldan et al. (Manila: National Bookstore, Inc.. 1986), 427.

9 Damiana Eugenio, et al, eds. A Textbook in Freshman English (Quezon City: Phoenix Publishing House, Inc., 1978), 627-628.10 For Terry Eagleton, the text or art work is more than an artifice or social document: "It is never merely a reflection' or "expression" of historical forces, but a

specific, highly codified social practice with its own conditions of material production and reception, its own conventions, devices and histories. Its ideologicalsignificance is to be sought not merely in its abstractable political content, but more rewardingly in itsforms — in its narrative structures and generic rules, itshabits of language and characterization, its mode of imagery and technical mechanisms. History and ideology are not merely the extraneous outworks of aliterary text: as the intimately informing pressures at work within its very capacity to signify, they are constitutive of its very being." (inA Dictionary of ModernCritical Terms, ed. Roger Fowler (London: Routledge, 1987), 143.11 Alfredo R. Roces, Amorsolo. (Manila: Filipinas Foundation. Inc. 1975), 12.12 Roces, p. 179

13 For further reading, please refer to:

Danto, Arthur C. "The Artwork!." The Journal of Philosophy 61 (January-December 1964): 574-584.George Dickie. "Defining Art." American Philosophical Quarterly 6 (July 1968): pp. 253-256.14 "A urinal is a fountain; that is, it is an object designed for discharging a stream of water. The reason most urinals are not fountains, despite their designs, is that

their locations and use differ from similar devices we do consider fountains. The objects are structurally similar, but their cultural roles are very different. Putting aurinal in a gallery makes it visible as a 'fountain' and as a work of art because the context has been changed. Cultural contexts endow objects with specialmeanings; and they determine arthood." (in "Piece: Contra Aesthetics,"The Philosophy of the Visual Arts, ed. Philip Alperson (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1992), 458.15 Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 41.

16 E. San Juan, Jr., "Ideology, Criticism, History: Textual/Sexual Politics in Third World Narratives."Writing and National Liberation: Essays in Critical

Practice (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1991), 23.17 Ibid.

18 Pierre Bourdieu. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 3.19 Ibid.

20 Pierre Bourdieu, "Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception,"International Social Science Journal 20(Winter 1968), 610.21 Ibid.

22 Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 6.

23 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics(New York: Methuen, 1987), 204.24 Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film(London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) 235.

25 Terry Eagleton, "Nationalism: Irony and Commitment,"Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature.Field Day Pamphlet Number 13 (1988): 5.

26 Eagleton, 17.

27 Spivak, pp. 204-20528 Homi Bhabha, ed. Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 291.29 "Who Needs the Great Works," forum,Harper's Magazine, September 1989: 46.30 Linda Nochlin, writing in "Why Have There Been No Great Woman Artists," explains why "natural assumptions must be questioned and the mythic basis of

much so-called 'fact' brought to light." She elaborates: "The question 'Why have there been bo great women artists?' has led us to the conclusion, so far, that artis not a free, autonomous activity of a superendowed individual, 'influenced' by previous artists, and, more vaguely and superficially, by 'social forces,' but rather,that the total situation of art making, both in terms of the development of the art maker and in the nature and quality of the work of art itself, occur in a socialsituation, are integral elements of this-social structure, and are mediated and determined by specific and definable social situations, be they art academies,systems of patronage, mythologies of the divine creator, artist as he-man or social outcast." (inThe Philosophy of the Visual Arts, 266)31 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.32 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "The Solitude of America"New York Times, February 6, 1983.

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