The New In A Few, Part D(')eux

As a continuation of my decompression from the six months of working with Mark Cayanan and Conchitina Cruz co-editing the Kritika Kultura Anthology of New Philippine Writing in English and also as part of my countdown to its eventual release next week, here are my notes specifically on the antho's contents and just why they are worthy to be labelled as "new."


Again, the following is merely my fraction of the thinking done for the antho, specifically for the antho's intro. It helped give it initial form, but only as far as how artistic conversations in general help give our actual artistic endeavors form, what more collaborative artistic endeavors. I post them here for the people who are interested in catching a glimpse of the many intellectual, academic, and artistic engagements, compromises, considerations and reconsiderations one (or three) goes through towards building and/or improving upon a certain type of taxonomy (as however loosely deployed the term is, it is still taxonomy).


Also, of course, this is intended to be a showcase of how smart and cool and relevant I am, but that goes without saying (but something still worth saying, if you ask me). Enjoy!



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This is the New in dialogue with Tradition, with “Tradition” at this point in time largely defined as “New Criticism,” and the conversation is both additive and annihilatory.

Plenty are the works that aren’t so much as have less focus with formalist concerns and more with the theoretical as they are products of the threesome of Theory, Form, and Content where the one always dictates the other two; plenty are the work where the well-wrought urn is replaced with a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle set of a 600-dpi 64-megapixel picture of a well-wrought urn; plenty are works that second-guess the reliability of the narrator, of the authorial voice, largely a reaction to the endless spectacle of the self in the various hyper-mediated representations of reality, thus plenty too are works that attempt to mediate the various hyper-mediated representations of reality in an effort to make them represent a more honestly subjective thus a more honest perception of the world; plenty are the works that attempt to mediate the various hyper-mediated representations of reality via a plagiarism of the language, the mannerisms, and the texts themselves of the various hyper-mediated representations of reality; plenty are the works that play with the readers’ and writers’ anticipations, expectations, and perceptions of the page and thus the readers’ and writers’ anticipations, expectations, and perceptions of reading and writing.

In short, the New in this anthology exhibits a healthy and lively pairing of the creative with the critical, begetting works that are both beautiful and intelligent, fragile and articulate, well-formed and well-informed; the New in this anthology exhibits a healthy and lively critique of the author and authorship by way of problematising the persona and promoting plagiarism, effectively questioning the concepts of originality, subjectivity, and authorial intent; the New in this anthology exhibits a confidence in mixing genres and in appropriating extra-literary textual artefacts, and an admiration for the importance of process and constraint, resulting in strange self-invented forms that demand from their readers and writers a deeper engagement than with “normal” genres and forms as new forms and genres deserve new methods of writing and reading.

One cannot also help but situate the New in this anthology as being the product of the new millennium’s first decade, from 2001 to 2010, its particular cultural, technological, and socio-political conditions: from the doubting of the author as pronouncer of truths to the sustained tone of filigreed hysteria to the DIY forms cobbled together via desktop publishing tools to the viability of outright plagiarism as a form of creation, the New in this anthology would never have manifested if it wasn’t for 9/11 and piracy and call centers and komikons and copyleft and Hello Garci and Facebook and self-publishing and LangPo bloggers and flash mobs and Modest Mouse and Flarf and Emo and the Great Book Blockade and the Maguindanao Massacre and hole-in-the-wall forums for downloadable PDFs of Jenkins, Ranciere, and Zizek and your neighbour’s broadband wifi hotspot you steal bandwidth from every once in a while, if it wasn’t for all the disappointment and elation and shock and awe and terror and wonder of the first ten years of the new millennium in a Philippines up to its tits in globalisation.

It is a writer’s job to sift through all the noise of everything and come out with a pronouncement that is coherent and articulate. This is it. How can a writer be heard amidst the noise of everything? This is how.