Anapolethics

by Rommel A. Curaming

To herald the birth of this blogsite, allow me to coin a new word, anapolethics. This anagram combines three words—analytics, politics and ethics. In addition to Southeast Asia, which serves as my empirical base for exploration, these are the main themes that run through the short and long pieces that will come out of this blogsite. 

Let me take neologism a step further. Anapolethics has two components. First, ana(po)lytics or ana(po)lytical which signifies the close entwining of the analytic and the political, as if to say the analytical is political. Second, polethics or polethical which presupposes the ethical dimension of things or acts within the political sphere, if one may grant autonomy to such a sphere.

The political nature of scholarship has long been mooted and it has been the main stuff that fuels much of the poststructuralist, postmodern and postcolonial criticisms. The notion of anapolytics as I use here builds upon, but will endeavour not to rehearse, this long-standing tradition. What I aim to examine and demonstrate in this blogsite is, among others,  how in the micro-level the analytic act may at the same time be a political act. Put differently, I wish to explore the question how it becomes possible to imagine a space beyond the political that the scholarly is supposed to inhabit.  All this may sound inane and hifalutin; I will clarify in due course the origins, full import, justifications and implications of this question.

The politics-ethics nexus is also an age-old question. The self-serving, dirty play for power that has long been associated with real politik, however, has hijacked the otherwise conceptually equal and neutral relationship, and has brought it to the realm of negativity. Analytic (and I should admit, also political) imperatives demand the re-imagining of this relationship back into its primordial—original—state. As I will also clarify in due course, this is necessary to enable the shedding of a number of analytic blinders that conceal the (sometimes insidious) relationship between scholarship, politics and, ultimately, ethics.

In the anagram anapolethics, I deliberately grant ethics the full name simply because I take it as the hinge around which the other two ought to revolve. Whereas analysis and politics are a means, I envision ethics as the end. One may argue that ultimately politics subsumes ethics, for in final analysis, so the argument  goes, it is the political that decides what is ethical. I do not disagree, particularly from a purely analytic standpoint. From a political standpoint, on the other hand, it is one’s subjectivity as analyst that will decide, and I am one among those who elevate ethics as perhaps the highest (and sublime?) form of the political. I recognize the attendant philosophical challenges in this position, which I hope to elucidate and deal with in due time.

The above is more than enough to make this blogsite unpalatable to many people. I recognize these high-flown pronouncements might easily be misconstrued as no more than empty musings of someone who have ample time to spare, which is not true, of course, given my workload. Too academic or pedantic or too philosophical, even pretentious, some might say. One thing I can assure my reader, the target of the whole excise is of fundamental importance to our life as individual: its aim is primarily to contribute towards expanding the sphere of freedom--freedom held back by unlikely sources, which have to be exposed for what they are.

It will be largely academic in flavour, as it reflects what am I, but I will try my best to write in a manner accessible to broad intelligent audiences who may be interested in Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, Indonesia and to an extent Malaysia, in addition to those who are keen about the intricacies of knowledge politics and ethics of scholarly practice. Long before, I wanted to be a journalist, one who writes regular columns in opinion page of a widely circulated newspaper. That dream was aborted, about which I will tell more about later. After so much dilly-dallying, it is time, though this blogsite, that I try to approximate, if not re-live, that dream.

With great pleasure, I welcome you to my imaginary world!