Yellow drift (29 Aug 2010, Sarangani Province)

 Muni-muni ni Milan Kundera (1984) sa isang ‘teolohikal na problema’:

When I was small and would leaf through the Old Testament retold for children and illustrated in engravings by Gustave Dore, I saw the Lord God standing on a cloud. He was an old man with eyes, nose, and a long beard, and I would say to myself that if He had a mouth, He had to eat. And if He ate, He had intestines. But that thought always gave me a fright, because even though I come from a family that was not particularly religious, I felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious. Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God’s image. Either/or: either man was created in God’s image—and God has intestines!—or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him. The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus ate and drank, but did not defecate. Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil.

Mula sa gawa ni Pet (sketch: Tatlong Matalinong Unggoy, 2009)

May nakakabit-laging mga elementong pulitikal kahit sa mga maliliit na kasiyahan na natututunan ng tao sa kasalukuyang mundong kanyang ginagalawan. Dahil naging bahagi na ng mga di-pansing mga ‘panaginip’ ng (idyotiko at) ‘karaniwang-buhay’ ang maraming elemento ng sistemang Kapital, mahirap bitiwan ang mga ‘walang-kwentang’ kasiyahan (Fredric Jameson: compensatory desires and intoxications) ng kasalukuyang kaayusan para lamang mabuhay. (Tingnan: Modes of dreaming)

Mintal/Calinan (Davao City), circa 1950s

Ito ang hybrid fantasy/social realist na pabalat ng pinakahuling akda ni Fredric Jameson (Valences of the Dialectic, 2009; rebyu). Nasa sentro ng usaping teoretikal ngayon ang konsepto ng ‘dayalektika’ bilang sistema at metodo—na sa kasawiang-palad ay natagpas ayon sa dualistikong sistema/Hegel: metodo/Marx, lalong-lalo na ng mga ‘Marxistang di-seryosong natuto kay Hegel’:

[T]he Hegel revival, which seems as vigorous today as it will ever be, promises to ensure the inclusion of many indispensable “theological niceties” that a Marxism unschooled in Hegel left out or even censored.

Mangyari pa, sentral rin ang tanong kung ipagpapatuloy ang pagsasawalang-bahala sa mahahalagang konseptong nabuo ni Hegel—dala ng tradisyong Unyong Sobyet, Althusser, at iba pa, sa pagmamaliit kay Hegel bilang simpleng ‘ideyalista’ (at kung ‘ideyalista’ nga, ano ngayon?); na, maisisingit rin dito,  hindi makikita kay Lenin. Ang seryosong pagbabalik-aral kay Hegel ay may kaugnayan ngayon sa pagbubuhay-muli sa istatus ng (matatag na) pilosopiya at pamimilosopiya bilang isang natatanging praktika (at pulitika) na hindi maaaring tunawin ng kasalukuyang pagsamba sa isang magaspang na ideolohiya ng Siyensya (o tipo ng siyentismo ng ika-21 siglo).

Isang buong ‘di pa halus nagalugad na kontinente’ ang nais pasukin ni Jameson: kontra karaniwang pang-unawa tungkol sa Hegelyanismo ni Marx, binigyang-diin niya ang di-napapansing ‘Marxismo ni Hegel’. 

I would rather propose for current purposes a more unusual version, namely Hegel’s Marxism. This virtually unexplored continent would certainly include the dialectic itself, and it would find encouragement in Lukacs’ pioneering study of the formative studies of classical political economy in Berne, in Young Hegel. It would necessarily attempt to reevaluate the Master/Slave dialectic which Alexandre Kojeve famously placed on the agenda. But I like to think that, in the age of consumerism and the world market, reification would also come in for some attention.

Isang ala-21 siglong pag-eensayo sa istilong dayalektikal ng Hegelyanong Penomenolohiya ng Isip ang ginawa ni Jameson sa bahaging ‘Ang Globalisasyon bilang Suliraning Pilosopikal’, isang birtusong patikim mula sa isang maestro kung paano isagawa ang isang tipo ng Hegelyanong Marxismo sa analisis ng ‘globalisasyon’ bilang dayalektikang sayaw ng mga kategoryang Identity at Difference na hahantong sa ganitong paglalagom: 

Now I have little enough time to summarize what may seem to have been a never ending series of paradoxes: such an impression would already mark a useful beginning, insofar as it awakens the suspicion that our problems lie as much in our categories of thought as in the sheer facts of the matter themselves. And that would be, I think, the meaning and function of a return to Hegel today, as over against Althusser. The latter is surely right about his materialist dialectic, his semi-autonomous levels, his structural casualty and his overdetermination: if you look for those things in Hegel you find what everybody knew all along, namely that he was simply an idealist. But the right way of using Hegel is not that way; it lies rather in precisely those things he was capable of exploring because he was an idealist, namely the categories themselves, the modes and forms of thought in which we inescapably have to think things through, but which have a logic of their own to which we ourselves fall victim if we are unaware of their existence and their informing influence on us. Thus in the most famous chapter of the Greater Logic, Hegel tells us how to handle such potentially troublesome categories as those of Identity and Difference. You begin with Identity, he says, only to find that it is always defined in terms of its Difference with something else; you turn to Difference and find out that any thoughts about that involve thoughts about the “identity” of this particular category. As you begin to watch Identity turn into Difference and Difference back into Identity, then you grasp both as an inseparable Opposition, you learn that they must always be  thought together. But after learning that you find out that they are not in opposition, you find rather, that in some other sense, they are one and the same as each other. At that point you have approached the Identity of identity and non-identity, and in the most momentous single reversal in Hegel’s entire system suddenly Opposition stands unveiled as Contradiction. 

This is always the point we want to reach in the dialectic, we want to uncover  phenomena and find their ultimate contradictions behind them. And this was Brecht’s notion of dialectic, to hold fast to the contradictions in all things, which make them change and evolve in time. But in Hegel, Contradiction then passes over into its Ground, into what I would call the situation itself; the serial view or the map of the totality in which things happen and History takes place. I like to think that it is something like this movement of the categories—producing each other, and evolving into ever new viewpoints—that Lenin saw and learned in Hegel, in his reading of him during the first weeks and months of World War I. But I would also like to think that these are lessons we can still put to use today, not least in our attempts to grasp the still ill-defined and ever emerging effects of that phenomenon we have begun to call globalization.

Ilang marhinal na tala sa isang popular na pag-unawa sa dayalektika:

(1) Senyales ng isang teoretikal na kalabuan ang paglalapat sa Dawismo/Taoismong yin/yang na pananaw sa paglalarawan ng ‘dayalektika’, lalo pa’t ang dalawang ito—yin/yang at Hegelyanong dialektik–imbes na magkapareho, ay matalas na magkataliwas. May kaugnay na komentaryo dito si Jameson:

But dualistic oppositions posit absolute equals or equivalents, turning Hegel’s minimal dialectic into an eternal alternation between identical forces which it is finally impossible to adjudicate: turning ceaselessly into one another in such a way that, as with Manichaeism, the forces of light become indistinguishable from those of darkness or good from evil. The fundamental problem of such mythic dualisms—their secret conceptual and even dialectical weakness, as it were —lies in the implication that each term or force is fully positive, and wholly autonomous in its own right. Yet as each is the opposite of the other one despite everything, it is hard to see where in that case that portion of negativity could come from which is presumably required of each term in order that it also be an opposite in the first place.

(2) Kailangan ring mabura ang pormulasyong Hegel = tesis/antitesis/sintesis dahil isang seryosong teoretikal na hadlang ito sa radikal na implikasyong pilosopikal (at metodolohikal) ng konseptong ‘dayalektika’: 

Here too, to be sure, we begin with the denunciation of that stupid old stereotype according to which Hegel works, according to a tripartite and cut-and-dried progression from thesis through antithesis to synthesis. But this is completely erroneous, as there are no real syntheses in Hegel and the dialectical operation is to be seen in an utterly different way [...].