My thoughts swirled from Hegel’s primacy of thought to Althusser’s ISAs as I ran from my class from the new Physics building to Palma Hall. This exam is perhaps one of the most important tests I would have to take as an undergraduate in this university. Every moment I spend inside classroom is as valuable and as fleeting as the morning rain in the middle of summer. The brevity of that midterm examination carried much weight so much so that its result would inevitably define my future. As I composed my scattered thoughts on what are ISAs and RSAs, my mind wandered off to the far far away land of what-ifs. What if I did poorly on this exam? Will this eventually affect who I am and who I will be in the future? If my probable failure in this endeavour, heavens forbid, does come to fruition, what does the future hold for me then? Will I still be able to look at myself in the mirror after seeing my blue book full of uncertainty?
I had to force my way out of my dimming lucidity for me to escape the stark reality that was slowly percolating inside my thoughts. Positive thoughts were my friend, but at that instant they were rare and seemingly unreachable. As I tried to collect my composure, my reflections led me to consider that unlike RSAs, ISAs are social mechanisms employed by influential social institutions in order to maintain the status quo of ideology and politico-juridical factors in place in a society. In doing so, a social institution may promulgate the current mode of production thus maintaining its stronghold on its unknowing and unwilling subjects. Unlike a RSA, an ISA blends with its background, rendering itself invisible to any uncritical eye. It is by this cloak of invisibility that allowed the Church to establish itself as the most dominant ISA during the time of Rizal.
Midterm examinations such as this one have always inspired me to know myself better amidst the back drop of a particular field of study. Lectures in my Philippine Institutions 100 class have always been enlightening. History should be viewed with a critical and a curious eye if one wishes to see history as it is – flawed and biased. Even so, one should not be discouraged at this imperfect system of history-writing. If there’s something that really stood from I have learned from Renato Constantino, then it would be this. Though one can never be objective in writing history, one could always use the instruments of history to craft a nationalistic history that would enable its people to reuse their past and move toward their historic goal of a better way of life. It is in this paradox of history that could unravel the complexities of one’s golden past. At the end of the day, the reading of history ultimately depends on an individual’s ability to sift through history’s maze and use only what would benefit most one’s agenda. It is therefore true that an individual makes one’s own history and not anyone else for him; it is only a question of how one would choose to look at the continuum of events at one’s own time and context. (01/27/2011)
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