Padd Solutions

Converted by Falcon Hive

Don't give up on English to oppose it

Posted by moses @ 11:08 • , , , • 0 comments



Illustration by Don Daily

As a debate plays out this weekend regarding the use of Singlish, let us recall the fable of the Fox and the Grapes. It's a story that is familiar to us, in which a fox, unable to reach some grapes, disparages them as sour grapes.

The term 'sour grapes' has come to signify envy, but there is an element of the pathetic in the fable: Unable to obtain something, the fox takes refuge his rejection of that thing.

Those who entertain thoughts of replacing English with Singlish should remember this tale. The idea of replacing English entails doing away with it altogether, and, if they have resistance in mind, that would not constitute a gesture of resistance.

Why is that so?

An act of resistance without a centre or a point to which it is opposed is untenable. While it might seem clear that communicating in Singlish can be conceived of as an act of resistance that is externally directed against the officious imposition of standard English, it would—recalling the fable—be reduced to a desperate cry if it does not arise from an internally-directed conflict.

This argument is motivated by the mirror-image of the maxim that external opposition is inevitably a reflection of internal contradiction—that a deliberate work of art must be internally coherent to project a meaningful opposition externally. The act of speaking Singlish, if it is to be a performance that mimetically mocks or deconstructs official language, must achieve this internal coherence through the act of conscious and deliberate resistance by the speaker, who has the capability to communicate in standard English and yet chooses not to do so. Without this capability and the actor's power to choose to begin with, the act loses its strength.

It seems eminently foolish to oppose centres of power by reducing what power you have to enact gestures of resistance. Even if those who are for replacing English do not intend it as an act of resistance, their position would still be tantamount to advocating the weakening of the power to resist standard English as a symbol of coercive authority. That would certainly impoverish any speak Singlish movement.

Art and its media

Posted by moses @ 11:26 • , , , , • 0 comments


The difficulty of praxis in art is compounded by the intrusion of the empirical or the purely practical. The definition of art is a political matter; it is bound up with the power to dictate or influence what is considered art and what is not. Perhaps the philosophy of art can exist in parallel with the power structures that, in our reality, define art and the beautiful. However, one gets the feeling that praxis should still entail the reconciling of aesthetic theory with aesthetics in practice, if not overcome the latter altoghether.

The trouble for aesthetic theory is, even if it has revealed the secret of the beautiful and why art is art, it frequently does not account for the practical preoccupation with the medium as a crucial determinant of what can be considered art. A digital image is at most 'art' in a much more qualified sense than is a painting on a canvas. This is because it does not in itself (without relying on the reputation of the artist or on physical installations), by virtue of its medium, typically garner the kind of recognition as an artwork that comes with socially-bestowed value and that can provide the artist with the material means to continue his work.

A way of dealing with this reality is to call for an anti-elitist view of art that disregards or devalues the importance of the art establishment, the respected institutions that serve as gatekeepers for universally-recognised art. Such a view would not discriminate between career artists and those who are not or between one medium and another.

Yet, as suggested earlier, this conception of art would only exist in parallel with the politics of art in practice. Praxis becomes viable but constrained, maintaining itself only by the act of a splintering, by taking itself away from dominant trends.

What is needed is an aesthetic theory that critically engages with the politics of art and, in a dialectical fashion, brings theory and practice together under an all-encompassing praxis. If the medium indeed plays a part in deciding what is art and what is not, such a theory would, as is done in Hegel's philosophy of art, explore the essential elements of art and show how they create qualitative differences between different media. However, it would also have to be cognisant of and explicate the power relations that mediate social perceptions of art.

In this sense, only a synthesis between aesthetic theory and the sociology of art can provide an all-encompassing praxis for art.