Teaching/Learning The answers to these questions must lead us to interrogate prevailing
The Humanities in Other Words/Worlds assumptions about culture. It seems culture in conventional sense and
"These objects, forcibly uprooted from their historical
context, their specific function, and their original meaning,
standing before us in their glass display cases, strike our eye
as enigmatic divinities and command our adoration. Their
transfer from the cathedral, the palace, the nomad's tent, the
courtesan's boudoir, and the witch's cavern to the museum
was a magico-religious transmutation. Objects became
icons."
- Octavio Paz "Use and Contemplation"
"My exhibition at the Art and Project Gallery in Amsterdan in
December, '69 will last two weeks. I asked them to lock the
door and nail my announcement to it, reading: For the
exhibition the gallery will be closed.'"
- Robert Barry
Why is it when some people talk about "culture" they talk about forms
and practices that are different and far removed from what they actually
come in contact with, perform, and go through every day? Culture means
going to the museum and admiring the beauty of an expensive
masterpiece. Culture means listening to a piano recital amid the
inviolable silence of a concert hall, watching a ballet performance seated
and mute, or reading a book in solitude. To be "cultured" means to be
civilized and literate, to possess a refined sensibility attuned to the
"superior" values of the "good life" and to the "best" that has been
thought and said and rendered in "artistic" form.
But how come it is not the way of the cultured to find "beauty" in the mat
or in the weave or in the kitchen utensil many people use, because
necessary 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 reading
komiks as one hums a folk lullaby or the refrain of the latest jukebox hit?
usage refers to a specialized sphere of activity that is traditionally known
and recognized as artistic.
But what, in the first place, is art? Or, better still, what constitutes the
artistic? Isn't it that when we bring art to notice, recognize, identify, and
specify it, we already involve society in the very mode of expressing the
concept and the power to express it?
When we speak of art, we must not delude ourselves into believing that
the 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 a
descriptive rubric. Rather, we must understand it as a concept, not as a
natural, preordained "creation," but a theoretical construction of a
"circumscribed set of texts felt to be of special value"1 by the various
institutions of the art world:
"A work of art is of value only if it is valued, and if it can be valued only in
relation to some particular set of' valuational criteria, be they moral,
political or aesthetic. The problem of value is the problem of the social
production of value; it refers to the ever ongoing process whereby which
texts are to be valued and on what grounds...Value is not something
which 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 standards
and what compels us to adopt these standards? Who codifies the
protocol of art?
Criticism and Theory
A critic writes: "Different criticisms... pro pose different concepts of
'literature, although all agree that 'literature' is to be defined as, in one
sense or another, a special type of writing which needs to be dealt with
by a special level of theorizing... Ultimately, the 'literature' with which
different critical traditions deal is not the same 'literature.' Even where
there is broad agreement about precisely which texts are to be regarded
as 'literary,' these may be held to be 'literary' in quite different ways and
may, accordingly, be approached and studied from quite different
perspectives with often radically different aims in view."3
Given the differences in the paradigms and knowledge systems through
which the practice of art is appraised, it is necessary to understand the
specific conceptual frameworks informing these critical strategies. For
the purposes of a Humanities course, it might be fruitful to zero in on the
strongest tendencies that underlie evaluations of texts - that is, those
centering on the opposition between "form" and "content" or between
"formalistic/intrinsic" and "sociological/extrinsic" perspectives.
Form and Content
It was German philosopher Immanuel Kant who foregrounded the notion
of aesthetic pleasure as that which is to be distinguished from other
pleasures and as that which is disinterested. Aesthetic disinterest is a
result of "disciplining the senses." of perceiving something not as a
means but as an end and achievement in itself, of grasping something
for its own sake and not for any other purpose — be it moral, social,
political, or other.
It is basically this concept of aesthetic disinterest that steels the core of
the formalist method. Formalist criticism privileges technique as the
acme of artistic endeavor, sequestering the text as a private domain so
that it could be ransacked of an inner logic not referrable to "external"
contexts, but to a formal configuration of defamiliarizing devices
hermetically contained therein. To defamiliarize, according to Russian
Formalist Victor Shklovsky. is "to make objects 'unfamiliar.' to make
forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because
the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be
prolonged."4
It is the purpose of art to "recover the sensation of life; it exists to make
one feel things, to make the stone stony"5 through the various formal
devices the artist employs to render reality in a particular style, to wrest
reality "away from the terms of seeing they propose, thereby making it
the focus of renewed interest and attentiveness."6 Formalist technicism
thus lays bare how art's repertoire of techniques constructs reality,
revealing the modes with which it works on habitual perception —
everyday experience, object, event, and so on— and the manner in
which it transforms the clichés of commonsense into artifacts of art
through the deliberate handling of the various elements.
Pursuing the argument of what is referred to as the "intrinsic approach."
scholars Rene Wellek and Austin Warren insist that literature "has its
own justification and aim," and that the "chief and prime function of art" is
"fidelity to its own nature"7 American poet Archibald Macleish states that
"The poem should not mean but be"8 and Jose Garcia Villa9 can only
supplement the vision:
Proem
The meaning of a poem is not a meaning
of words.
The meaning of a poem is a symbol like
the breathlessness of birds.
A poem cannot be repeated in paraphrase.
A poem is not a thought but a grace.
A poem has no meaning but loneliness.
A poem has no purpose than to caress.
The most fatal implication of the formalist premise, in spite of its vision of
transgressing the conventionalized schemes of perception, is the
severance of art from "life," or to be more accurate, from the discourses
on life, precisely because, like a self-developing organism, art has a life
autonomously unto itself. It is this distance and alienation that encourage
us to valorize an art object as something worthy of and, in fact, requiring
reverence and preservation, that renders the aesthetic document
authentic and timeless.
Art in effect becomes a specialized field. It is a universe unto its own, a
constellation of formal conventions, a Rubik's cube of the ideal/idealized
reader who is supposed to intuit the truth of technique. The "intrinsic
approach" finally freezes art in some transhistorical, crosscultural,
classless, androgynous mode, and so effectively repressing its
sociological determinations. It teaches us to forget that art is always
situational, historical, ideological, culture and class specific, gender-
sensitive, and sexualized.
But swinging to the other end of formalism is orthodox sociology, which
proposes that art is a direct reflection of its socio-economic environment,
and so denies art its specific mode of articulation and signification. Art
merely becomes a mirror that automatically reflects the images of the
world at one particular moment. The artist in turn can only operate within
the limits of that spatio-temporal surface, which is conceived in terms of
linear, diachronic development. It is as if art were indistinguishable from
the other aspects of reality, when in fact art can speak for itself, can
configure and transform social reality artistically — a distinct social
reality, 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 by
it.
A reductionist or simplistic assessment would therefore just grasp a text
as pure form or pure determination of the economic.10 It would be blind
and deaf and mute to the overdetermined construction of the text as
socio-historical practice and production, failing to account for the multiple
forces that conspire to produce it, the vastly varied and oftentimes
contentiously 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 have
become inextricably intertwined.
Worse, an analysis of a text could be altogether sapped of rigour as in
humanist, moralist, romantic, and biographical methods in which the text
is merely teased out for the metaphysical significant human experience,
moral calculations on good and evil, the divine inspiration of genius, and
authorial intention. These modes of analysis do not give justice to the
complexity of art and its production.
We have to inevitably realize that to understand Philippine painter
Fernando Amorsolo, for example, is to implicate the numerous factors
which could have come into play in the making of his works, to situate his
status and his works as part of the complex historical articulations of his
time and the conditions under which we make sense of them today, as
part of the "specific overdetermined conjuncture" of his society, our
history, and the future.
We must study his artistic vocabulary that mainly consisted of pastoral
themes — rural idylls, harvest and fiesta scenes, dalagang bukid in pretty
poses, sunsets — all evoking a sense of wartime nostalgia for the
countryside, which greatly appealed to tourists. We must inquire into his
style that tried to capture the glowing effects of the Philippine sun on the
landscape by employing the contra luz lighting technique and "topping off
composition with chrome yellow lights to accent contours where the
backlight 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 production
obtaining during the time when he practised his art and his social
situation as Filipino artist working within the American colonial context,
which had introduced the privately owned gallery as a pivotal node in the
distribution and marketing process, indeed an institution of patronage no
longer controlled by the Church and the highly exclusive elite circle as it
had been during Spanish colonial Philippines. We must not paper over
his popularity as artist-celebrity who practically dominated the art scene
for almost three decades (1920s-40s) and became known for his
illustrations in advertisements for the car Marquette and the soap Ivory,
in movie posters for Ideal Theater, in brochures and programs for the
1924 Manila Carnival.
We must not be remiss in evaluating the artistic education he acquired
from the University of the Philippines School of Fine Arts, the premier art
school of the time which considered as models paintings of classico-
romantic sensibility: and from the Royal Academy of San Fernando
through which the aesthetic temper of Juan Luna. Felix Resurreccion
Hidalgo, and Jose Rizal was forged. We must be illuminated on his
avowed admiration for the Velasquez style and his hesitance to embrace
modernism as this would entail "jumping over the rules of good taste and
beauty."12 We must be able to contextualize his conservative position in
relation to the moderns's as espoused by the likes of Galo Ocampo, who
had declared that he was already "sick" of the Amorsolo school. We must
think about his stagnation as artist at a juncture in his career when he
would be so swamped with local and international commissions that he
had to come up with a catalogue of photographs from which customers
could choose. Lastly, we must calculate the effects of his canonization by
the Marcos government as National Artist.

To say that art is solely a function of form or a mirror of its economic
milieu is to posit the idea that art as a category of cultural practice is not
invested with specific determinations which precisely make it "real"--not
realistic, surely: realism being just one of the ways of constructing and
constituting reality-but unnatural, and so simplify the reasons by which
artistic productions are introduced to the world. It indeed negates the
position that culture does not, because it cannot, transcend its complex
relationships with historical conditions.
Moreover, culture cannot escape that which bears on it because culture
is not merely a display window of lifeways and worldviews, something
abstract and ideational, something out of the distant past and up there in
the clouds. Culture is always part of the daily struggle to cut spaces in
the processes of social formation and representation.
There is no one world; there is no one society. There is no one culture;
there is no one art. There are, however, assiduous and systematic
attempts to set up and privilege norms, morals, and modes of social
relations. In other words, there is a canon or a set of cultural practices
and productions propped up as the concretization of the "aesthetic" and
of "civilization," of "Art" and "Culture," in the process interpreting culture
as universal, reified from the mechanisms and power relations in the
social formation.
The canon operates according to the inclusion/exclusion principle. If
there are certain texts, discourses, knowledges, and practices that are
included and epitomized, there are also certain texts, discourses,
knowledges, and practices that are excluded and preempted. It must be
insisted that the canon exercises this dominative role from a position of
power. The existence of the canon, undoubtedly, spawns a network of
problems.
Why do we, for instance, assume that something is art? Why do we,
assume that a notion of art exists?
The Institutions of the Art World
The institutional theory of art13 forwards some answers. Arthur Danto
asserts that an object will be admitted to be art if it can be related to
already acknowledged objects or by way of a theoretical justification.
Danto requires that a theory must validate the existence of the object
(e.g. a painting, a poem, a dance performance, a film, a musical
composition), a theory "testifying" that the said object and, let us say,
Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa share common features which are both
aesthetically legitimate.
George Dickie, on the other hand, advances the view that artistic
distinction can be conferred by anyone who can conceive of himself or
herself as an agent of the art world and operates within the appropriate
institutional contexts. Thus, a soup can becomes art if an acknowledged
artist puts it up for sale, a curator displays it in a museum, an art critic
gives it a review, an art historian includes it in a book, an art teacher
discusses its aesthetic merits in school, and so on.
An ordinary urinal in an ordinary public toilet is not art. But Marcel
Duchamp's 1917 urinals14, mostly entitled Fountain, which were exhibited
in various museums and are now in the possession of State and private
collections, are. In the same vein, the kala, a bracelet, is just one of
those daily fashion accessories worn by T'boli women. When a curator
hangs it on the wall of a museum, it "becomes" a work of art. Also, a
street play performed amid a protest rally or a hunger strike cannot be
art. But when it is staged within the context of the so-called legitimate
theater, its value changes. The urinal is not just for urine anymore but for
the aesthetic sensibility. The kala is no longer part of everyday wear; it
has become an artifact, an ethnographic evidence to be looked at and
observed. The street play ceases to be "propaganda," it has transformed
into drama.
Simply put, the agencies of the art world-academe, media, the
gallery/museum network, the art market, State cultural bureaucracies,
connoisseurs and collectors, publicists and dealers, culture industries-
send off to their publics the "signals" of art, locating them within the
proper institutional scheme, and ingraining in them the appropriate
aesthetic reception, disposition, or attitude to accept and include some
things as art and reject and exclude others as anything but art.
It is in this context that our notions of art are constructed, validated,
reproduced, and disseminated to "others" whom we think must be guided
by the same principles. The art world has taught us since our
kindergarten drawing-and-music-lessons days, for example, how to
render line, space, and color correctly, or how to reach the correct pitch
of a tone. An art critic points out that some people are in touch with and
"know" such particular art concepts as musical patterns (e.g. the diatonic
scale and the major triad) "because anyone who has grown up in any
Western country, lived as a child there, and, especially, gone to its
schools, will know them. From our earliest days in a culture which uses
scales and harmonies, we hear songs-lullabies, nursery rhymes, and,
later, popular songs of all kinds-based on these ubiquitous conventional
building blocks of Western music. When we enter school, we learn the
names of those notes (in the conventional do-re-mi notation and in
conventional notation on the staff, with the letter names C, D, E, and so
forth), and learn to sing them on cue when we see the notes."15
In short, this education has made us part of an art world that privileges
specific norms governing and regulating the production of art. This is why
it has become almost second nature for us to judge the artistic credence
of something as if that something were "naturally" artistic or non-artistic.
What we have forgotten or what has been hidden from our "sight" is that
these judgements are just constructions of a particular culture and of an
industry of culture And there are other cultures that would construe art in
different terms, in different scales and harmonies. Who is to say that their
standards are any less valid?
It is not only the concept of art that must be analyzed, however, but also
that of artist. A critic relates that deeply embedded in the mindsets of
many people is the Romantic myth of the artist as the superstar who is
driven to make art by torture and inspiration, a heroic soul or genius who
"agonized to produce a masterpiece,"16 very much like "Edgar Allan Poe
drinking his way to greatness, or Byron, the aristocratic individualist
riding his horse and declaring rebellion against tyranny."17 This imaging
of the artist elides the political process which leads a person to take on
the position of artist, who definitely is not born as such but is rather
turned into one by society: Jackson Pollock who spills and splashes paint
onto his canvas is an artist, but a San Fernando lantern-maker is not.
The contrivances that make people artists-the hype, the awards, the
publicity, the reputation, the cult adulation, the artistic license, the hocus-
pocus of self-expression-are simply that, devices, which we must
dismantle in order to understand and explain the reasons by which artists
are "recognized," "assessed," and gain the credibility and credentials of
artistry, in other words, how they are able to appropriate the competence
to practice art and make sure that their art is made available to the
public.
These problems cannot but confront politics and power, or to be more
specific, the economic and cultural capital that mediate our responses
towards matters involving art.
The French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu points out that "consumption
is...an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or
explicit mastery of a cipher or code...the capacity to see is the function of
knowledge, or concepts, that is, the words, that are available to name
visible things, and which are, as it were, programmes for perception. A
work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses
the cultural competence, that is, the code into which it is encoded. The
conscious or unconscious implementation of explicit or implicit schemes
of perception which constitute pictorial or musical culture is the hidden
condition for recognizing styles characteristic of a period, a school or an
author, and, more generally, for the familiarity with the internal logic of
works that aesthetic enjoyment presupposes."18 Bourdieu theorizes that
the ability to appreciate and enjoy and even to simply recognize is not
borne out of natural intelligence, but rather is learned and is in fact a
function of pedagogy: "The encounter of a work of art is not 'love at first
sight'... and the act of empathy, which is the art-lover's pleasure,
presupposes an act of cognition, a decoding operation, which implies the
implementation of a cognitive acquirement...the 'eye' is a product of
history reproduced by education."19
The activity of consuming art is therefore determined by the distribution
of knowledge in an economically and intellectually uneven social
organization. While many of our cultural technocrats bandy about the
idea of "art for all" and "democratization of culture," we cannot remain
oblivious to the real constraints of access to cultural goods, which can
only be availed of within the system of unequal distribution of
capital/power across social groups and through the pressures that the
artworld, as an ideological state apparatus, exerts on its audiences to
acquiesce to forms of valuations which have been virtually canonized by
the cultural establishment. Can we really hope that the poor people of a
squatter colony would learn to appreciate the aesthetics of ballet after
watching a prima ballerina dance sacrificingly on the basketball court?
And what if indeed they manage to "like" ballet, can they afford to
subsidize-not only under the auspices of economic but also of cultural
power-this newly acquired taste for something supposedly superior to
Tlnikling and disco dancing?
We must realize that art forms are inscribed in conventions and not
everyone is "free" to become privy to these, no matter how the
manufacturing sector insists that the consumer has the option to choose
and the market is all that liberal. The very definitions of art and even the
specificity of art to form reality are suffused through and through with
matters that have to do with how power circulates in society--a power
that overdetermines the production of art, artists, the art world, and
certain commonsensical notions of art.
Bourdieu writes that the "sacralizing of culture and art fulfills a vital
function by contributing to the consecration of the social order: to enable
educated men to believe in barbarism and persuade their barbarians
within the gates of their own barbarity, all they must and need do is to
manage to conceal themselves and to conceal the social conditions
which render possible...the legitimized predominance of a particular
definition of culture."20
As a visitor in Versailles had once remarked: "This chateau was not
made for the people, and it has not changed."21
In the same way that the SM Megamall Art Walk, while it cohabits with
upscale sari-sari stores and high-class carinderia within the sprawling
postmodern complex, was meant for those who can buy paintings, those
who can pretend to be au courant with antiques, those who can see
potential investment value through the canvas, and those who can during
glittering exhibit openings blurt out lines like: "That looks like
Chagall...that's derivative of the worst elements of Abstract
Expressionism..."
And we say that the market is free? In order to reposition ourselves away
from the contemporary ethos of making and consuming art, it is
imperative 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 does
not 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 productions
deemed as art is an inculcated norm conditioned by conventions and
nourished by the consensus entered into by a community of artists and
audiences, a symptom in fact of certain assumptions about how reality
must 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 which
hegemonic discourses attempt to totalize experience and universalize
taste, as if contradictions and disparities did not exist in this world. As
part of its objectives, the canon, for instance, foregrounds such artificial
categories as fine, folk, and popular, as well as a range of differentiations
as in high, serious, avant-garde art which is distinguished against
low/illegitimate /bad art, artisanal craft, kitsch, entertainment,
commercial, mass, and pulp. Wedded into these boundaries are
hierarchies that, according to Bourdieu, valuate some works as "worthy
of being admired" and treat the rest as outside the domain of critical
reception, and so not part of the "cultural wealth" of a particular history.
Between Nick Joaquin's Cave and Shadows and Nerissa Cabral's Bukas
Luluhod ang Mga Tala, which work is more legitimate and has the right to
be taken up in "literature" classes and published in anthologies?
Between Puccini's Madama Butterfly and the Pasyon, which of the two
contains "better" music? Between film superstar Nora Aunor and
architect 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 the
Cultural Center of the Philippines? Why? Why not? Why cannot the study
of painting, the technique of putting pigments on two dimensional
surface, accommodate movie billboard making in its perspective? Why
cannot the business of literature deal with the underground poetry of the
New Peoples Army cadres or the daily "narratives" of tabloids?
The canon sets up parameters beyond which we cannot see and know. It
charts histories and sanctifies paradigms against which others are but
mere aspirations. And, of course, it cogently enforces particular social
configurations: "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social
subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the
distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the
distinguished 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 the
sacred 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 is
why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and
deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimizing social
differences."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. Its
practice is never idiosyncratic; it is always ideological. Ideological
because when the canon insists on Art with a capital A. it posits a
universal view of the world, a mystification that obscures the power
behind the so-called universal unity. When a white middle-class
Republican 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 to
assume 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. The
construal of the former in effect invalidates or weakens that of the latter
in an attempt by the regulating agencies of reading to totalize experience
and speak for someone else, or, why not, for everyone; in an attempt to
situate all of us within a frame of reference as realized through "reading
habits" and representational strategies outside of which we cannot
speak, write, read and within which we become coherent, represented,
knowing subjects. It is always an imperative of those in power to assume
the 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 and
certain things will have to prevail. By re-viewing how the canon is
constructed, we become aware of how it is arbitrarily put together, why it
has been produced in the first place, how it disseminates its effects in
society, how it impinges expectations on how people must make sense
of 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 art
because those things have always been considered to be such. But says
who? 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 to
demolish the basis on which it achieves
efficacy as a term and derail the "bottom line" with which we conveniently
formulate it.
Furthermore, the homogenizing politics of the canon occludes the
multiple spaces people inhabit in their relations with society, positions
that either seize the aegis of dominance or ache under the trauma of
powerlessness. We are not people, solely; we are also "named" in terms
of an "immense discontinuous network" of class, race, gender, sexuality,
language, religion, ideology, historical experience, and other more
"different knottings of these strands, determined by heterogenous
determinations which are themselves dependent upon myriad
circumstances."23 In other words, people are irreducibly different and
therefore cannot be governed by a singular culture, as this would deny
the specificities with which people encounter power and wage struggles
in the name of interlocking, shifting differences and strategic alliances.
George Yudice reminds us that "the member of an oppressed marginal
group cannot escape the repercussions attached by a society to his/her
skin, sex, speech, and other marginalizing marks of distinction: a black in
a 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 and
subjectivities and the conditions under which they could flourish —
something that can only and truly be realized if we confront the
oppressive structures which "wound" and "refuse" them, if we "try
somehow to go right through those estranging definitions to emerge
somewhere on the other side,"25 and if we think of how others might be
able to coalesce with us in transforming our, their, and hopefully
everyone's situations progressively and rigorously. As Terry Eagleton
puts it: "The feminist, nationalist or trade unionist might now come to
recognize that in 'the long run none of their desires is realizable without
the fulfillment of the others's."26
The canon though is not to be regarded as a non-changing, all-powerful
empire, a solid grand monolith that overwhelms thoroughly, massively,
completely, and therefore resistant to challenge. For it is part of the
liberative practice to read against the grain, to recuperate, rearticulate,
and reappropriate the potentially subversive stirrings repressed in
canonical texts and realign them along revolutionary interests. The
canon's fabric of power is not seamless. Therein are fissures,
disruptions, disjunctures, ruptures, and cracks through which radical
intervention by way of strong and committed interpretations is very much
possible and real-izable. Historian Ranajit Guha, conducting
emancipatory and redemptive critical practice, secures the gains of a
tactical re-reading of colonial historiography: "It is of course true that the
reports, dispatches, minutes, judgements, laws, letters, etc. in which
policemen, 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 will
alone, for the latter is predicated on another will, that of the insurgent. It
should be possible therefore to read the presence of a rebel
consciousness 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 the
white, heterosexual, Christian man of property. It is also a story of
benevolence and beauty. History tells us, however, that repressed in this
story 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 Third
World revolutions, socialist alternatives, ethnic societies, nationalist
movements, 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: "Gatherings
of 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 in
the uncanny fluency of another's language; gathering the signs of
approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses, disciplines; gathering the
memories of underdevelopment, of other worlds lived retroactively;
gathering the past in a ritual of revival; gathering the present. Also the
gathering of the people in diaspora; indentured, migrant, interned; the
gathering of incriminatory statistics, educational performance, legal
statutes, immigration status-the genealogy of the lonely figure that John
Berger named the seventh man. The gathering of clouds from which the
Palestinian 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 in
support of ideological agenda, configuring an exchange of power and
meaning that does not, because cannot, degenerate into playful
pluralism and bourgeois tolerance, but one steeled by a politics of
transgression and transformation.
As Indian feminist thinker Gayatri Spivak states: "Tolerance doesn't work
both ways. The rich and the poor are not equally free to sleep under the
bridges of Paris. Tolerance is a loaded virtue because you have to have
a 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 the
passionate clash of discourses, a purposive battle of positions on how
society must be arranged, and not just a celebration of diversity. And
what is at stake is no less than the invalidation of totalitarian systems and
the transformation of society, a transformation that involves not merely
the reversal of roles (from oppressed to oppressor, from slave to master),
but a vehement refusal to extol anything as absolute and at the same
time 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 and
a 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" to
encompass productions subjected to the epistemic violence of canonical
discrimination and of blasting away the ideological binarisms of art/non-
art, fine art/folk art, literary/commercial, and soon. This demands that the
reading and making of the aforementioned productions transcend the
conservative limitations of normative classifications and instead grapple
with the intricacies of signification and mode of production. It is not
enough to invoke basketry as testimony to women's creativity; it is
important to examine the processes by which baskets are transformed
from, let us say, communal expressions into commodities inserted into
the marketplaces of capitalism, critique the exploitative moments rankling
in the imbalances brought about by the dislocation, and map out positive
potentialities within a new locus of activity that is at once displaced and
reconstituted.
Reading and writing alternative texts and practices must then be no less
than strategies of empowerment, in which women30 are able to locate
themselves 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 resistances
of patriarchy.

Cultures are terrains of contestation and sites of struggle. Cultures must

compete in the ideological arena, continually deconstruct the monopoly
of the canon, construct new possibilities of meaning, and prefigure
conditions of visibility for more human futures. It is only in this way-this
recuperation of the specific struggles within society's heterogenous
constituencies and permeating life with freedom-that art and the
"Humanities" shall finally become meaningful and urgent for all those
who work to conceive a life that "obliges them over and over again to
give birth to themselves,"31 so that there would emerge "a new and
sweeping Utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others
how 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 ideological
significance is to be sought not merely in its abstractable political content, but more rewardingly in its forms — in its narrative structures and generic rules, its
habits of language and characterization, its mode of imagery and technical mechanisms. History and ideology are not merely the extraneous outworks of a
literary text: as the intimately informing pressures at work within its very capacity to signify, they are constitutive of its very being." (in A Dictionary of Modern
Critical 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 a
urinal 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 special
meanings; 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. 204-205
28
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 art
is 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 social
situation, 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." (in The 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.