Traveling the political road as an ordinary experience

It has only recently occurred to me that my everyday journey from home to my workplace is a revealing travelogue of how politics has taken hold of my everyday life. This journey has also allowed me to deconstruct the political, from the vantage point of a space that political scientists would never dare call a domain of politics.

 

My everyday travel starts from a place which I associate with; a university I used to work at, and which treated me very badly. But it's also where my family lives. It's a university which nurtured me, which I still call “home”, but where there was a time I felt I could no longer possibly live in without losing my sanity and self-respect. That is why I had to leave. 

 

It is a place where I was objectified, despite the fact that I thought I was empowered as a professor.  

 

This led me to realize the complexity of everyday politics, and aroused my interest about those whom I feel are disempowered yet are actually empowered; and those who are empowered yet are actually the opposite. 

 

I have these reflections whenever I see the neon signs of the nightclubs along the road when I go home at night. Or when I watch the early morning and early evening news, and the heavy dose of soap operas, which I also helplessly watch as they unravel in front of me, courtesy of bus lines like HM Transport, Greenstar and now DLTB.

 

These are the representations of the political travels I have to undergo everyday when I commute—the place that disempowered me, yet also the place where my family and friends live. The lights along the road that remind me of women who are victimized, yet may in fact have more choices than those women who have the privilege to be called housewives.  

 

They also include a TV screen on the bus and at home showing the news that is supposedly there to inform me, yet could also misinform and render me ignorant. This is the same TV screen that later shows soap operas that reflect my everyday life, even as they can also reshape it and escape from it, through a plethora of reality shows that fantasize about simulated conflict, and fantasy dramas that provide spaces to turn to when reality becomes a bad dream.

 

The travels that I have to go through everyday are not simply about moving from one place to another, but have become daily rituals in which I find myself circumscribed within the politics of spaces that would appear mundane, non-political and without theory. Yet they are representations of what I have come to realize politics is all about: power in its raw form. 

 

This is a journey, a movement across a distance that begins with a space I call home, and ends at a space where Plato and Aristotle are taught. Along this journey, I see Marx very much alive in the faces of the proletariat and their lumpen cohorts I see floating by the window of the vehicle I am riding; they occasionally board the bus to solicit funds for the strikes they wage against their capitalist oppressors, or knock on my car window to sell merchandise such as cheap towels and chamois, or to beg for money.  

 

The relevance of my profession is at the core of this journey, in the sense that when I gaze at the margins of the road I travel, I only see a representation of something that I thought was already captured in the great works of dead white men.

Is it all about the state and who should rule it, as Plato conjured? Is it about the best form of such a state, which was the preoccupation of Aristotle, considered the father of the discipline at the inner sanctum of which I now take refuge as a student pretending to be an expert, just because I have a Ph.D. attached to my name? Or is it about the revolution that Marx theorized about when such a state becomes an agent of the economic system that strangles the working classes? 

 

Yet there is a more fundamental deconstructive question: Am I asking the right questions here?

 

These questions continue to confront me, even as I hand over to the authorities of the bus the payment that I owe them. I sometimes take the bus and submit myself to the power of the driver, even though I also have my own vehicle where I have full control -- if only to dramatize the point that the privileges I have are not enough for me to travel at all times. 

 

My own car is my own kingdom, but it is one that I sometimes leave at home in order for me to arrive at my destination. This is basically the political puzzle that is deeply hidden in, and from, the discourse of political science, as it tackles the issue of power. Political science simplifies politics, for all its complexity, by taking power as a possession that those who dominate have, and those that are dominated do not have. It is a property of the state and its instruments, and individuals can only have it if they are part of those who collectively affirm it as citizens or reject it as rebels and revolutionaries.

 

This view of power—as a possession, and of politics—as a process that exists only in the demesne of the state as it is formed, maintained, and transformed, is extremely problematic when one looks at how everyday journeys occur from one place to another. A bifurcation of the powerful and the powerless, of the dominant and the dominated, of the center and the periphery, are dualisms that are extracted from the myths of a great, grand narrative of power residing in a central structure; one where redemption rests on messiahs and utopias.  

 

The intention of getting there is reduced as a uni-linear journey along a straight path, from a state of powerlessness to a state of empowerment—a linearity of dark to light that conveniently hides the complexity of political life. 

 

Now, things have changed. I always drive my car. But I still see the same scenes along the road. I leave the place I call home which oppressed me, in order to go to a place I have begun to call home too, but where I also feel marginalized, despite having a Ph.D. attached to my name.

 

So, how can we even think that the redemption of this country lies in a metaphor of straight roads or “daang matuwid” when such a path does not even exist in the journeys that we travel in our ordinary and everyday lives? – KDM, GMA News