The Assembly – the political organization of the Ateneo de Manila University – has always prided itself for introducing into the dominant structure of discussions within the university a discursive tradition that speaks from the voices, experience and analysis of alterity, of the margins, of the periphery, of the oppressed.
It has since 2001, always recognized that the political field is a power-invested field where the dominant modes of reasoning are not necessarily the most rational ones, but are dominant because they have been the more successful in seizing the opportunity, the structures and the perhaps the resources to gain such dominant status.
As a concrete response to this analysis of the political field, The Assembly has striven to expose the contradictions of existing dominant ways of reason and analysis not because it seeks to disagree with them for the sake of disagreement, but because of a humble yet joyful acceptance of the organization’s role as a catalyst for the politicization of the student body.
Often misunderstood, politicization, simply means, revealing how the field of language, culture, economy and social relations are deeply invested with political struggles rather than driven by some natural order of things. The tradition therefore is very specific, particular and as such concrete. The tradition of the oppressed from which The Assembly speaks is a tradition that demands singular harmonization from within the organization’s ranks. This singularity of voice and of opinion is what animates The Assembly’s task in political engagement – it is through this singularity that the dominant field is pluralized.
This tradition – this singular voice and its unique, distinctive message – from where The Assembly speaks, in my opinion, is today under threat. And it behooves me to point out some points of reflection that may allow us to collectively discern how to engage these threats and identify some ways to alleviate, if not, harness the danger towards the organization’s reinvigoration.
The threats are coming from a lack of appreciation of the tradition’s role in the university. The threats are a result of an inflexible, unwilling and to an extent, lazy attitude towards learning its sources and locating oneself within it parameters. What are these threats?
First, the threat of simplicity, comprehensibility and flexibility.
The Assembly, they say speaks from a voice that cannot be understood by the large majority of the student population.
Woe then to the majority of the student population! It is not The Assembly’s fault that they cannot understand what the organization means by the oppression of capitalism or by the preferential option for the poor, or by the structural sources of social issues. Much woe because, alas it is also not their own individual faults! It is, rather the fault of our specific stage in history that has forced them to refuse understanding.
This preference for a more palatable political vocabulary – to one that can easily be understood – is a disturbing demon that The Assembly should not succumb into but should rather take by the horns and exorcise. It is reflective of today’s attitude against all and any form of intellectualism, especially, a brand of intellectualism that really challenges the assumptions lurking beneath proclamations of certainty.
It is an appeal for emotivism, for economism and for the naturalism of things.
It transforms the political activity of speaking and deliberation into a consumerist carnival where the speaker’s ideas are only applauded and accepted if they satisfy the fetishes and dark deep secret desires of the audience which they shroud with proclamations of rationality.
Full comprehensibility, full understanding and flexibility to the demands of the majority will transform the organization into a commodity whose value depends upon the satisfactory relation of exchange. Knowledge however should cut, knowledge should bleed, knowledge if it is true knowledge rather than a submission into the seductions of the outcries of the unthinking, feeling and emotive majority, then it must strike, shake, rattle but not roll.
One who reads, listens and speaks with any member or officer of The Assembly must experience what one philosopher has called “tremendum et fascinosum” – fear and trembling, an encounter proper to truth. This truth from where we speak, is not, however the Truth of God, or of the Divine Will.
Rather, it is the truth of the oppressed, the truth of the margins. Unlike the truth of God which resides in some invisible realm, our Truth, The Assembly’s truth is a publicly, empirically, practically articulated truth. And precisely because we do not speak the Truth of God, The Assembly’s Truth is historically situated.
The clamor for simplicity, the clamor for flexibility then is exposed as a clamor to abandon our historicity, to no longer pay attention to the historical forms of domination and power relations that shape who we are. This threat must be crushed with the weight of more precise intellectual critique, with an unabashed, unapologetic language that resists incorporation into the simplistic, naturalistic and deluded self-determined thinking of the majority of the student body.
That The Assembly cannot be understood, entails not reforming The Assembly in order for it to be understood, the challenge is clear: how can The Assembly engage and transform the structures, processes and arrangements that produce an audience that can, now, finally understand The Assembly. This, not the former, is the political project.
The tradition of the oppressed from where The Assembly speaks is a tradition that cannot be understood and will remain incomprehensible so long as the audience is not predisposed or is already predetermined by the institutional arrangements, processes and structures of a system that makes them blind to the voices of the margins.
Giving voice to that voice which would rather not be heard by the established and dominant order of today’s world is akin to giving voice to a dying man who wishes to convey to the world his existence to the last breath. A man who asserts his freedom over nature, his freedom to die, his triumph over death.
It is thus inchoate, inarticulable in the language and sensibilities of the world as it is because it now occupies an irreducible space, an indistinct position between the here and the now, between the present and the future. It is a coarse, harsh voice of the dead encroaching upon the world of living and declaring that this living world is in fact, already, the dead world.
This voice is therefore not just difficult to understand, but is in fact, a shocking voice.
A voice that fractures collective certainties, a voice the disrupts the normal, a voice that reverses established hierarchies and presuppositions.
For this reason it is not arbitrary, whimsical or fantastic. One can only speak firmly and audibly from this voice after careful analysis of the objective conditions that define the exclusions of today’s world.
The ability to conduct such a thorough analysis and assessment is however, possible only from a paradigm that is willing and capable of seeing the exclusions and the contradictions that underpin historical epochs:
This paradigm can only be the socialist critique of liberalism’s false pretenses to be universal.
This paradigm can only be the socialist critique of liberal political economy’s emphasis on exchange rather than production.
This paradigm can only be the socialist critique of the violence and the class underpinnings of the liberal state.
This paradigm can only be the socialist aspiration for a simultaneous political and economic democracy.
Only the socialist paradigm today has proven itself capable of reforming its own principles in accordance with the historical conditions of the time. It is the only paradigm that can read through the signs of the times without the times itself fully colonizing the one who reads such signs.
In a world objectively dominated by the values and norms of capitalist consumerist exchange, the socialist voice is the voice enunciating the truth of the oppressed.
Second, the threat of pragmatism, convenience and popularity.
From all corners of the world today, the call for pragmatism, for a politics of convenience thunders like the voice of God.
This seems to be a contradiction of the highest order! Politics is already, always, pragmatic, that is practical.
The experience of the political – an experience that The Assembly strives to preserve – never proceeds from one’s internal convictions imposed upon the world. It does not ensue from an internal, sincere, and wholehearted reflection.
The experience of the political is an experience of the public self – a self that realizes its selfhood only in the context of history and of the concrete, practical activities of daily engagement. This resounding outcry then for pragmatism today, however, miserably misunderstands what being pragmatic means. They relocate the space of pragmatic thinking inside one’s imaginations, as a fantastic hypothetical condition that has no basis other than one’s speculation, achieved only by withdrawing from the world!
This twisted and tyrannical version of pragmatism – or as its purveyors call it, rationalism – is an experience of the world from the vantage point of isolation, as such, it has no vantage point. Why this is so seductive can perhaps be linked with the ongoing unfolding of a “political science” that is built on natural assumptions and cold, rational predictions about how men act, how men think – a perversion of the astrological sciences, its encroachment into the affairs of men, a pre-determination that is inaccessible to the mind, a capitulation into chance, an imposition of a world that has lost its ability to insert itself in between men’s preoccupations, a disenchanted world that operates upon stimulus and reflex.
From this end, the claim to be operating from a pragmatic position obscures the hard line refusal to hold one’s assumptions into the world into question. This is absolutism at its best, or worst, depending on one’s relationship with truth and the political.
The real political pragmatist on the contrary cannot simply think on the basis of his or her “own, personal” private judgment – no matter how convinced one is of one’s truth.
The real political pragmatist shapes his or her own judgment in relation to what is demanded by the concrete situations of domination, oppression and marginalization.
This is what the ancients have so long understood as the process of deliberation: one only becomes one in the field of deliberation, in one’s encounter with and interrogation of the world as it appears in the context of a collective effort to engage the world. Prior to that, the world then does not exist, the world is a mere collection of things and persons and ideas. The world has not yet demanded recognition as the world. It is in the political pragmatist’s task to define this world rather than to allow this world to overcome the activity and freedom of the political actor. Only after having defined the world, having understood what the world looks like from one’s specific position in relation to the world can one now fully declare one’s political voice.
Be warned, however, that this is a complete inconvenience on the part of the self. It demands an elision of an original self, an erasure of what one has thought of to be one’s self already. Only the courageous and the brave are capable of this.
Those who insist otherwise, can either be lazy or cowards of the lowest possible kind.
The pragmatism being advocated by the enemies of the real political pragmatists on the other hand, is a pragmatism without the world.
It is pure arbitrariness, sheer whim and capriciousness. It is precisely by prefiguring the world even before the world has been analyzed from the position of the oppressed thoroughly abstract, impractical and as such a totalizing violent imposition.
It is a denial of one’s embeddedness, a refusal of one’s responsibility, a rejection of freedom.
It is on these grounds that the tradition of the oppressed from where The Assembly speaks will never be popularized and will never sit well with the popular. “Rejoice when they persecute You!” Christ enjoins us.
