Every year we celebrate our Buwan ng mga Wika at Kultura (The Month of Philippine Languages and Culture), and each time we get caught up in some sort of time warp by displaying Filipino: Catholic masses are held in Tagalog and other Philippine languages, radio stations play Original Pilipino Music, schools hold literary contests and parades, etc. It is as if the whole year round, we forget how Filipino we are, only to be reminded in August when we don our best Filipino costumes.
There’s nothing wrong with displaying Filipino, especially if we see this as an occasion to teach the young on how we construct identities and hoping that in the future they will be more creative, discerning, and politically astute about nationalism. The problem lies not in nationalism per se, but in tokenism, when we speak Filipino only during rituals and believe that Filipino can not be used to articulate our profound thoughts and scientific ideas, when we hold literary contests but fail to encourage readership, or when we honor Balagtas poetry yet are blind to see the poetics of Eraserheads or rap music. Filipino becomes antiquated and our culture petrified that we cannot see anymore its connection with the tradition and worse, its possible trajections in the future. Consequently, we don’t see the relevance of Filipino or the significance of the study of Philippine languages. Ironically, we celebrate Buwan ng mga Wika but we do it in order to commit our languages and cultures to oblivion.
The French linguist Ferdinand Saussure offered some insights regarding how we can make the study of language relevant. His findings on how language is a close system of binary oppositions that produce arbitrary meanings would be influential in reviving not only language studies but also in changing the paradigm of research and our worldview. In the early 60’s and 70’s, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Claude Levi Strauss were quick to apply Saussurean Linguistics in their own fields of study. Foucault, for instance, would declare that the history of western civilization is a function of its history of madness or the birth of its asylums. Derrida would challenge philosophy for its logocentrism. Barthes would study popular culture and see it as an arena or contestations of meanings. Kristeva would foreground the problem of feminine ecriture. Strauss would debunk the superiority of Western civilization and extol primitive societies as equally scientific and rational.
What Saussure and the rest of French scholars have succeeded in doing is not just foregrounding language studies but making any research, production of knowledge, cultural practice, or philosophy primarily as a problem of language. To see history as a language, for instance, is to see it as a product of binary relations and its parallel functions. Such that, what we read as Philippine History becomes not the official and uncontested narrative of our past but a version of our past that needs to be constantly interrogated and examined, if only to contribute dialectically to our formation and constitution as people or nation. Here in the Philippines, we see some resonances of such scholarship in Reynaldo Ileto’s reading of Pasyon not just as an ideological state apparatus of colonialism but as an instrument for articulating dissent and resistance against the hegemony of Catholic Spain, Vicente Rafael arguing for a “short-circuiting” or a “contracting” of colonialism using cultural appropriation, Caroline Hau citing the necessity of fictions in our bid for nationalism, Oscar Campomanes working on Filipino diaspora studies and contributing to Asian-American scholarship, and Soledad Reyes or Roland Tolentino reading popular culture as an arena for geopolitics.
The list actually goes on and right now we see a revival of interest in Philippine Studies. However, what is sad is that the trickle down effect of these studies in terms of pedagogy in grade school, high school, and even in tertiary education is still slow. Filipino subjects are still taught as rudimentary grammar when teachers and students can actually speculate on the dislocation of language in SMS and advertisements as symptoms of global capitalism, limited to Filipino rhetoric when the State of the Nation of Address (SONA) of our president can be a case for studying flawed reasoning or fallacies. They are enthusiastic in discussing epics but remain unperturbed by the growing numbers of OFWs and immigrants. What our scholars have shown is that popular culture, politics, and economics are very much part of Filipino or Philippine studies. That in so far as we discuss Philippine literatures, we should be able to discuss concomitant discourses – Filipino as a language and Filipino as an arena for political control and subjection. In short, language studies should yield to cultural studies, cultural studies to political economy. In the end, it is not a question of whether Filipino remains to be relevant but in what way we make Filipino relevant in our discourses, in what way we seek connections and disjunctions to our nation’s narratives, and how we make Filipino both as a discourse and method of inquiry. With the linguistic turn, the term used to refer to the revolution of structuralism and post-structuralism, indeed, there can be no detour for our own Philippine Studies. We can only move forward.
Gary C. Devilles teaches Filipino and freelances for Philippine Daily Inquirer, The Manila Times, Metro, Metro Him and The Muse.
