The Scum of the Light

Jeffrey Deyto

November 25, 2020, Polytechnic University of the Philippines

The initial motivation for this text was an invitation to synthesize three topics: philosophy, popular
culture, and the Philippines. My engagement with the first is almost very recent and at times very
marginal that I can’t consider this engagement a practice. With this in mind, my intervention with
philosophy for this text will be left very marginally too.

An anecdote about philosophy and popular culture: there are dominant forms of thinking popular
culture through philosophy, as a friend advised me, where popular culture, or at least the objects of
it, are often treated as objects of reflection. To go out of this treatment, to study popular culture in
its own properties, I think, is already to jump to cultural studies. While Cultural Studies often
borrow from philosophical methods, it is not by itself philosophy as such. My main discipline as a
media scholar depends more on the repositories available to cultural studies (this includes formal
analyses which are not necessarily philosophical in-nature), philosophy only comes second.

In line with the three topics mentioned above, this text also attempts to make sense of the anxiety
of contemporary times within the concept of ‘endarkenment.’ But less about the darkness, or
“endarkening”, I argue for a conception of popular culture as a surplus product of the bourgeois
enlightenment that arrived from the colonialist Europe. While this is the core of my core claim; I
apologize in advance that this was never really coherently organized in the body of the text. This
claim can be glimpsed within the eight fragments, including this introduction, and an attempt to
synthesize the convoluted syntheses of the fragments.

As mentioned above, I refer to popular culture as we receive it now as the surplus of bourgeois
enlightenment. By surplus, I mean that produce that is caught between disposability and
exploitability of whatever that came out of the enlightenment. The scum of the light. This surplus of
the bourgeois enlightenment, with emphasis on the bourgeoisie, bears with it the very
contradictions that revolve within the developments on various aspects of life from the renaissance
onwards. Contradictions as the bourgeois public sphere, the so-called civil society, the forerunners
of the values of enlightenment runs counter not just with the state authorities (in a manner of

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internal class contradiction) but also with the productive classes of the society as an outward
manifestation of class struggle.

Culture as imposed from above the class structure, as imposed by the civic society, resulted in a
transmuted version once it becomes popular. Developments in modern capitalism has paved way
for mass production of objects needed and wanted. Even more so in the peak of the enlightenment,
the popularization of print media, that reproductions of products of bourgeois culture have become
available for everybody to see, it’s only a matter of literacy and access to circulation.

This is where it becomes quite nuanced: the democratization that mass production of cultural
products has resulted to democratization of meaning. Of class struggle even in the regimes of signs
and aesthetics. As the late Mark Fisher noted:

Mass culture was a terrain of struggle rather than a dominion of capital. The relationship
between aesthetic forms and politics was unstable and inchoate — aesthetic forms did not
simply “express” some already-existing capitalist reality, they anticipated and actually
produced new possibilities. Commodification was not the point at which this tension would
always and inevitably be resolved in favour of capital; rather, commodities could
themselves be the means by which rebellious currents could propagate. (761-762)

But we must remember that Fisher will be speaking from a quite alien reality from us, as we shall
see later, the popular culture that emerged in the Philippines resonates authoritarian regimes that
first condition of domination is not financial capitalism’s soft power but a more primitive
enactment of power – colonialism and the feudalism it brought with it – which later produced more
debauch form of authority: bureaucratic capitalism that abets globalist imperialism. But
nonetheless, and more particularly on contemporary popular culture, the terrain of struggle is
being paved.

That being said, it is inevitable that we talk about developments in the capitalist mode of
production alongside with the technological developments in mass media if we are to talk about
popular culture, as popular culture is dependent to this mode of surplus production in mass
production and mass mediation. If we really are to believe that mass culture is and should be
thought and treated as a terrain of struggle, it is more important for us to know the mechanisms to
which popular culture moves.

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 II

Before we proceed, let’s try to settle some terms:

Culture, in its more popular use as a word, refers to “ways of life” or “ways of living.” The concept
has more to do with practices. And by practice, we mean that culture has more to do with
appearances (in Plato’s sense) and our interaction with it. Culture is a process of living.

While culture should be something that is… popular… we’ve reached a demarcation about Culture
with a capital C, or what we refer to as ‘high culture’, and ‘popular culture.’ The distinction between
the two has less to do culture as processes, but on objects.

But looking at how objects are produced, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that the motivation for a
‘Popular Culture’ also comes from where High Culture emerges, that popular culture bears with it
the interest of the ruling class. However, we can hear from the bourgeoisie that they condemn the
“vulgar” nature of Popular Culture, and always blame this vulgarity to the masses in the name of the
sacred Culture. This gesture is exactly the main point of Popular Culture: it reinforces the stature of
the culture that they want to preserve along with the ruling classes’ hostility against the working
class.

Bourgeois high culture, the way that we see it today, do not just involve modernist / postmodernist
forms, moralisms, gallery art, classical music and arthouse cinema, but also landgrabbing, worker
exploitation, and fascist violence. The bourgeois high culture can be identified with ruling class
impunity and murder. Popular culture is the overdetermination of this via commodity fetishism: the
excess class impunity and murder as spectacle.

And like all forms of production from places where capitalism and imperialism reside, popular
culture is enriched by its productive classes. We, the workers, are creative. And we, the workers,
know who we want to kill. But it is the unproductive classes, the ruling classes, that benefits from
such fruits of labor: our creative murders are being plotted against us, with popular culture as its
training ground.

Popular culture often has an idealist intent. In its more popular manifestation in cinema, Andre
Bazin correctly pointed this out: cinema is an idealistic phenomenon (17). The goal of the
production of a popular culture object is not the production of the object itself, but rather the
reproduction of the dominating order of class impunity and murder. From education reproducing
the ideal aesthetic for the bourgeois taste, that is being reinforced by cultural products, popular

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culture may just be the very concrete manifestation of capitalism as actually existing metaphysics,
as Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle points out (15).

III

Another process separates the two cultures, the High and the Popular, a process which has been
quite unique with the capitalist mode of production.

Popular culture, as properly identified by Rolando Tolentino, is a culture that is mass-mediated, or a

culture that is reproduced via the mass media (iii). The content of a popular cultural product is
dependent upon the interest of media channels. This interest is often euphemized into Mass Media’s
pseudo-ethical insistence of the “stakeholder” which includes its audience, but ultimately, the end
goal of mass mediation, the production of mass media products, has always been the benefit of its
network’s owners, like most enterprise under imperialism. Ethics-talk in media is always emptied
by this.

A side note: It’s also best to remember that Popular culture is not an indigenous culture. While
indigenous culture sometimes finds its way towards mass media channels, the point is not always
the reproduction of such cultures, but rather to celebrate the capability of mass media networks for
“inclusion.”

Popular culture, as inherently spectacular, is “where the ruling class endlessly discourse upon itself
in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise” (Debord $24). What we can recognize this in the first
manifestations of popular culture as mass mediated bourgeois excess with the adventure novels of
the 18th century.

Stories such as Robinson Crusoe or Captain Singleton reproduces a representation of adventure and
leaves a fantasy of it for its masses to read. This fantasy is the excess of the capability of the ruling
classes to actualize adventure. Despite of the disparity in the representation of the characters, say
Pirates or Hooligans, are fantasies made out of boredom of bourgeois Everyday Life. In a manner of
overdetermination, of course, this also became a convenient excuse for the ruling classes to be
conscious of their own excessiveness as popular literature often contain moralism against greed.
But this moralism, as intended by the circulation of the popular-cultural objects, often reach not the
ruling classes, but the masses who read them. In effect, popular literature becomes a pacifying
piece, and be settled with what you already have, even you do not really have anything at all.

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 IV

In the Philippines, it is also the print technology that brought us what we now refer to as popular
culture. But unlike the effect of print in Europe, where the print technology has brought about not
just some really good pastime, but also advances in thought and science (which eventually lead to
revolutions of different kinds, from Protestantism, the enlightenment up until the French
Revolution), the effect of Print technology, as it was brought to the colonies early in its colonization
phase, the effect is reactionary.

Different contexts, but one of the earliest mass-mediated culture that we have digested… is
Christianity. We have the Doctrina Christiana recorded as the first book published in the
Philippines. Dated in 1593, the book is written in both Spanish and Hispanized Tagalog to ensure
popularization among the population, at least among the tagalog-speaking population. Later on, of
course, religious pamphlets on other languages in the islands surfaced.

Christianity, like Hollywood, is a culture that was brought in here for colonial intentions. There’s a
need for this culture to be popular here: for the subjects to abide by the need of the colonial
masters. It’s not that we openly embraced it, nor are we brainwashed. Our conversion to
Christianity involves years of struggles, as our natives also have traditions they want to preserve.
Struggles form synthesis. This explains the very spectacular nature of OUR Christianity.

The spectacular nature of our Christianity affirms another aspect of popular culture that Tolentino
identified: popular culture is Overdetermined.

Overdetermination is a term popularized by Louis Althusser in his theory of ideology.

Overdetermination is used to describe “the effects of the contradictions in each practice
constituting the social formation on the social formation as a whole, and hence back on each
practice and each contradiction” (253). Christianity as determined by the colonizers has been
overdetermined by the interaction of the colonial subjects to it: in a way that it overcodes
preexisting sign-systems of the colonizers by other preexisting sign-systems of the colonial
subjects. This is synthesis, but not as balanced as it would seem.

For Althusser, overdetermination defines “the pattern of dominance and subordination, antagonism
and non-antagonism of the contradictions in the structure in dominance at any given historical
moment.” (253) At a given moment, say, the moment Filipinos learned of Christianity, it understood
Christianity through its own epistemic reserve, but always subjected to colonial violence. There’s
always a relapse, or an attempt to relapse to the core understanding of the colonizers.

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The church is the medium, and the medium is the message.

We can sense the same pattern of learning and overdetermination in our import of Cinema. In the
same manner as the founding of the Hispanic superstructures of the Spaniards, that the coming of
the new colonizers also brought with them establishment of church-like infrastructures.

Historian Nick Deocampo identified the following as the “six areas” of influence of the Americans in
the emergence of Cinema in the Philippines (9):

• The assembly line from production-distribution-exhibition or the film business. This has
brought with it imported technology to make them happen, although none of these
technologies are locally manufactured, even today, a true mark of imperialist intentions for
monopoly. These are the areas of Technology and Capital for Deocampo
• Film language that we learned, despite being closer to European sensibilities, is what is
called the “Classical Hollywood Narrative” which emphasizes on continuity, realism,
linearity and psychological motivation for character development.
• In the aesthetic dimension, genres and the studio and the star system are adapted. There
are studio specialties in the early phases and the post-war cinema. Which means, there are
only particular studios who made a particular genre of film. Sampaguita Pictures rarely
ventured to crime genre, unlike LVN.
• A weird claim of “Reception” is placed by Deocampo on his identification of the areas. For
him, American cinema has influenced its audience to become captive audiences of
Hollywood and is targeted for “collective escapist fantasies.” This is closely related to the
next one
• Ideology – American cinema outwardly served as a superstructure to promote American
way of living to its colonies.

What came out of this, is of course, the same manner of budgeted spectacularization of what’s
already spectacular: parodies and pastiche.

Common “criticism” against Philippine Cinema prior to the digital age, is that its most popular
works are often knock-offs of popular titles from Hollywood. Knock-offs of James Bond or Batman.

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This is also apparent in Filipino Comic books. These criticisms often miss the logic of colonialism
and imperialism.

Parodies and pastische as phenomena capture precisely the mechanisms of colonialism and
imperialism. Hollywood is overcoded by the sensibilities and sign systems of the Filipino filmmaker.
The colonial influence is apparent, of course. The imperialist implication is that, it still points the
profit towards the one being copied to. The culturalist view of such is that they are at least
“entertaining” to some extent. But this fun is already a fun in-excess.

As we mentioned earlier, popular culture, particularly in the semicolonies, always run on surplus.
The Philippine has always been the direction and the source of surplus value. In popular culture,
this is apparent: from the 70s to the 2000s, the Philippines often receive the extremes of American
films: the blockbusters and the flops; the big-budget and the b-movies. The country has also been
shooting location for films that exploits narratives of Vietnam war, which of course, also ranges to
Big budget productions to cheap-fly-by-night producers. I think this still happens till today.

VI

But the gist of these developments in popular culture is a point of spectacularization of colonialism
and imperialism, to make them digestible. As the past revolutions and uprisings in the country will
tell us, the spectacle did not make colonial culture acceptable, of course. But we understand it.
Understand it enough to hate it.

Renato Constantino provided a heavy polemic against popular culture, or what he refers to as
“synthetic culture” as one that results to standardization of culture that aids the growing
transnationalization of the world, a trend towards a “world culture” that “desensitizes the citizens
of the advanced countries to the effects of their governments’ economic policies in the Third World
and, on the other hand, threatens with extinction, or at least modifies indigenous national cultures
in Third World countries to suit neocolonial purposes” (3).

What kinds of subjects does this transnationalization of culture develop? This provides the
“dominant classes with happy, exploited people whose minds are sedated with entertainment” (36).
While the intentions are right, against the neocolonial aggression of globalization, what Constantino
misses is how does this actually affect the semicolonial subjects in practice, due to his own
conservativism that blinds him much not to engage properly with the products of popular culture.

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Very apparent is Constantino’s dismissal of popular music as mere “wall of sound” to favor his
preference for “saying anything meaningful about human life” (37).

In the semicolonies, spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes image (Debord
$34). As Guy Debord rightly claimed. Popular culture is a social life of images. In a recent BBC mini-
series, Art Historian James Fox claimed that we have now become “image addicts.” His claim will
only be true if there is such a thing as a normative standard for consumption and/or production of
images. The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its
commoditization of social life ($42). The alienation that we have from our means of production has
been so perfected by commoditization that images has become part of our lives and not just mere
vices.

We are surrounded by images, and in return, turn ourselves into one. Popular culture helped with a
production of a kind of subjectivity that unites with the existing mode of production. Just as the
Church did turn island natives to Filipino Church Goers, and the Cinema Houses from Church goers
to Hollywood audiences. Subjectivity is also sold, the key commodity, through other forms of
popular culture outside of Cinema.

It is in this sense that Constantino’s claim of “cultural standardization”, his feared “synthetic
culture” becomes of value. Popular culture, as an extension of imperialism, and in semicolonies, of
bureaucratic capitalism and feudalism – a webmess of social conditions – produces the
overdetermined subject.

VII

But as noted earlier, the cultural field is not one dimensional. On a positive note, Walter Benjamin
already affirms to us that mass-production of images became a point of democratization of
meaning. What an image means, as seen through reproductions, at some point has done away with
bourgeois mystification. Mass production is humanity’s first attack against the sacredness of
images. But as spectacle developed, the sacred returned.

Popular culture has its mechanism of mythology. Hollywood brought along with the myth of hard-
work the star system. Suddenly, images become kings, gods. Or presidents, figuratively or literally.
This mechanism is the discipline of Public Relations, an image-building discipline.

The discipline is founded around the idea of propaganda. The founder of the discipline, Edward
Bernays, refer to his kind of propaganda as “a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events

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to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea, or a group” (25). Bernays’ notion of the
PR discipline comes from the context of a class society where an “intelligent minority” (similar to
the renaissance civil society) drives the mass to thinking their thoughts, but making them think as if
it’s theirs.

Years later, it was inevitable that advertising, being a core source of profit for mass media, becomes
a thing of suspicion. Constantino’s himself proclaim of a malicious intent present in popular culture
through corporate mass media’s dependence to advertising and public relations. “Media can no
longer exist without advertising: policies and decisions affecting media are therefore largely in the
hands of advertisers” (9).

The synthesis of public relations and globalization through our commoditization into images has
brought in what Jonathan Beller refers to as the attention economy. Beller refers to the attention
economy first in its manifestation in cinema.1 As a spectacle, what we pay in the movie theater is
not the ownership of the film. But rather the right to be admitted inside to witness the film. You pay
to see. In advertising, eyes, attention is what firms pay for. A particular TV show has an average
viewer of 11 million TV Sets, that would signal a higher value of commercial slots. Attention has
become valuable. Beller would note that in this sense, attention is labor.

I overheard one time at a production meeting that before the pandemic, 1-minute slot for Ang
Probinsyano costs a million pesos. Most of these values are industry “secrets,” like most values of
commodities under bureaucrat capitalism and imperialism.

In a more contemporary sense, in the internet, the option to monetize what you spectacularized are
also available. In a video uploaded by Carson Moody on October 22, 2019,2 he let his audience in on
how much youtube content creators get for 1 million views. What Moody exposed is the geopolitics
of advertising taking effect on Youtube. A comparison was made between two videos with 1 million
views. First video has more audience coming from the Philippines, while the other has a significant
portion viewing from the USA. There was a 200 dollars difference between the two, the latter being
paid higher. His explanation is that there are more advertisers willing to shell out money for a
youtube advertising in the USA than in the Philippines.

1
See, Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle.
Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006.
2
“How Much YouTube Pays For 1 MILLION VIEWS in PHILIPPINES (not clickbait)” from Youtube <
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKFhLEm_u88>

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As the lockdowns persists, following the closure of the biggest TV network in the country, there’s
been a sharp rise to online viewing activity locally. This prompted a shift to the economy of popular
culture. As the attention that can be sold now are mostly online, we are now seeing shifts of
orientation towards the screens.

Web series web advertisements, becoming-influencers, etc. Even people from cinema attempted to
jump board with their so-called “unconfined cinema” but only to fail to follow through because of
their ignorance of the practices in social media. The towering figures of popular culture suddenly
fell. And now they are trying to cope with their inconvenient “virtual cinemas.”

VIII

The lockdowns as a response to a pandemic seems to hit the bourgeois public sphere in ways they
can’t imagine. But as the ruling class that they are, they hang on to their claim to power and
continue to assume their righteousness through their images. One will ask, why isn’t there riots yet
when we are angry right now? Where’s the revolution? The answer lies in the very platforms that
we use to know the things that we are angry about, and the people who are dominating it.

Writer Carlo Cielo has pointed out this very role of the ruling class to ever halt the revolution:

Mao Tse Tsung once said that the masses are the sea in which revolutionaries swam. It is
imperative therefore for devious elites to do whatever it takes, to poison the water (127).

This passage came from an essay titled “The Killing of Agency.” In that essay, Cielo historicizes shift
in the semiotics of filmic violence in Philippine cinema. As a cinema that was formerly populated by
Lumpen proletariats who uses the gun and the fist to pave their own paths in life, we are faced with
cinema that has victims as protagonists without any resolve but mere cynicism.

Prior to the pandemic, we are already looking at a popular culture in permanent midnight. Agency,
in popular culture, is replaced with a cynicism that is pointed at everywhere, even to the self, but
not in a manner that is either critical or self-critical. A cynicism for cynicism’s sake.

The cynical subject is open for negotiation, because he trusts no one, even himself. A reversal of the
ideal subject of the enlightenment. The cynic under permanent midnight lives in precarity, and
because of that he agrees to whatever condition that is comfortable for him. This is what the
lockdown is continually bringing to us: when will we really be happy in this condition? When will

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the next paycheck arrive? When will work arrive? Will the vaccine ever arrive? Since we will never
know, we just move on.

All the while the ruling class enjoy themselves, and you watch them enjoy themselves. There are
two aspects to this enjoyment of the ruling class in the lockdown: first is their continuous
reproduction and exploitation of labor (real or abstract). A person made Dalgona coffee last April,
everybody did. We are on tiktok from time to time, watching beautiful people dance for us.

The other aspect is what they deem as “good product of popular culture” are those that makes us
mistrust ourselves. They make us believe that we are incapable. That we are weak. And the worst of
all, they are telling us that it is alright: it’s alright that we do not know what’s going on. It’s alright
that we’re not strong and we’re not capable. It’s alright that we are not doing anything. And when
we know what to do, they suspect us: do we really know?

If mass culture is a terrain of struggle, as pointed out by Fisher, then the terrain is in danger of
being poisoned.

While there indeed are attempts at popularization of resistance over at popular media channels,
most of them remain in the fringes. The poison that the elites are trying to pour into the water is
that their belief that a messiah in 2022 will come. All the while real deaths are happening in sonic
speed, and bodies fall as fast as your fiber connection at its peak, we are told to wait it out.

As technologies of popular culture shifts as fast as months change, to wait out seems counter
intuitive.

IX

Lastly, I want to talk about philosophy a bit. Thought is the realm of philosophy. Often times the
gesture for philosophizing is a step back to recollect one’s thoughts. But as developments appear in
accelerating speeds, if one wants to think of culture, popular culture in particular, one must shift
their gestures. Stepping back and waiting out is no longer an option, you must think on the run and
in the line of flight.

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Works Cited
Bazin, Andre. "The Myth of Total Cinema." What is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Vol. 1. Berkely: Univeristy
of California Press, 1967. 17-22.

Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the
Spectacle. Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006.

Bernays, Edward. Propaganda. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1928.

Brewster, Ben. "Glossary." Althusser, Louis. For Marx. London: Verso, 2005. 249-258.

Cielo, Carlo. "The Killing of Agency." White AF. Manila: Shonenbat Collective, 2019.

Constantino, Renato. Synthetic Culture and Development. Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist
Studies, Inc., 1985.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995.

Deocampo, Nick. "American Influences on Philippine Cinema." Michigan, 30 October 2012. Conference
Paper for 9th International Conference on Philippine Studies (ICOPHIL-9), Michigan State
University.

Fisher, Mark. "Acid Communism." K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-
2016). Ed. Darren Ambrose. London: Repeater Books, 2018. 751-770.

How Much YouTube Pays For 1 MILLION VIEWS in PHILIPPINES (not clickbait). Dir. Carson Moody
(Bisayang Hilaw). 2019. Youtube. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKFhLEm_u88>.

Tolentino, Rolando. "A Note from the Editor: Media and Popular Culture." Plaridel 2.2 (2005): iii-vi.

Toscano, Alberto and Jeff Kinkle. Cartographies of the Absolute. Winchester, UK: Zer0 Books, 2015.

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