THE CEBUANO RADIO DRAMA AS POPULAR CULTURE

The systematic treatment of popular culture has been gaining more and more legitimacy and acceptance even in the international and local academic enclaves. But the choice of focusing an aesthetic study on Cebuano radio drama needs a little justification. The first reason why this paper opted to investigate on Cebuano radio drama is because this popular cultural practice belongs to one of the biggest ethnolinguistic blocks in our country. Resil Mojares, former director of Center for Cebuano Studies, says: "As a language, Cebuano is spoken in Cebu, Bohol, western Leyte, Negros Oriental, the northern and eastern coasts of Mindanao, and parts of Bukidnon, Agusan, Surigao, Davao, Cotabato, and Zamboanga del Sur. Differences exists but in many of these places the variations are slight."¹ This huge ethnic block sprawling in a wide geographical area of our map is the locus of the Cebuano. It only follows that an investigation on popular culture focusing on one of its practices would contribute much to the agenda of Philippine popular and cultural studies. Second, a mere visit to an average Cebuano household, or a short stay in a Cebuano speaking community would reveal how Cebuanos are devotedly listening to these plays. A survey conducted during the second half of the seventies revealed that 70 to 75 percent of the total number of listeners in the Cebuano ethnolinguistic area tune up their radios to these plays.² Though that research is already dated, its findings have remained substantially valid. Mojares, in a 1994 article, states "Radio drama or soap opera remains an important form. It is estimated that around 20% of Cebu AM radio time is devoted to drama in Cebuano."³ Furthermore, it has been noted very recently, that some stations that were previously specialized in music and news service have now joined the other drama producing Cebuano stations in airing their productions every 30 minutes, for almost twelve hours daily, from Monday to Saturday.

THE IDEA OF AESTHETICS

Though the subject of beauty had been pursued by philosophers since ancient times, the term aesthetics, as designating the philosophical field that is concerned with the investigation on the essence and perception of the beautiful, emerged only in 1753 when it was coined by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, through his epistemological investigations on the nature of the judgments of taste, created an almost indelible stamp on modern aesthetics. Kant declared that objects are said to be beautiful if they satisfy a person's disinterested desire. For the reason that its appreciation does not involve any personal interests or needs on the part of the perceiver, beauty has no specific purpose and is universal, in the sense that although any person can never be certain that what he takes as beautiful, is also taken as such by other persons, he or she can at least say that others ought to take it as such. Kantian aesthetics, side by side with the Romantic Movement, eventually generated the very predominant and highly bourgeois attitude called aestheticism. At the heart of aestheticism is the conviction that "art should be valued for itself alone and not for any other purpose or function it may happen to serve, and thus opposed to all instrumentalist theories of art."⁴ The connoisseur's distanced, dispassionate and disinterested engagement with a work of art is the paragon of the aestheticist stance. Here, artistic objects are deemed valuable and beautiful solely on their intrinsic qualities and never on the basis of whatever relationship these objects may have to extrinsic things like nature, moral or political contexts, and even their audiences' esteem. Thus, instead of fidelity, uprightness, aptness, or popularity, the aestheticist connoisseur looks for beauty, elegance, grace, daintiness, sweetness of sound, balance, design, unity, harmony, expressiveness, depth, movement, texture, and atmosphere. Art for art's sake emerged as the battle cry of this aesthetic attitude.

The seemingly innocuous Kantian aesthetics and the Kantian-inspired attitude of perceptual refinement left at least four disjoined links along their pathway. First is the link between the subject and the object-or between the perceiver and the artistic production-which is severed by the connoisseur's paradigmatic distanced, dispassionate, and disinterested engagement. Second is the more immediate and primordial connection between an artistic object and the other extrinsic realities circumscribing this same object which is eliminated by the Kantian dictum of non-purposiveness as well as by the aestheticist principle of evaluating objects solely on the basis of their inherent aesthetic properties. Third is the creative bond between the artistic producers and their audiences which is destroyed by the aestheticist narrow-sighted emphasis on the same inherent aesthetic properties. "The pursuit of purely artistic values, and the production of art for the sake of art alone," explains David Novitz in his essay Function of Art, "meant that many artists were no longer concerned with what ordinary people wanted from art. Their attention was wholly absorbed by the demands of the medium, and it was largely because of this that artists grew increasingly out of touch with what their audiences expected and could understand."⁵ The alienation between the artistic producers and their audiences precipitated the division between high and low art when the greater sections the society could no longer appreciate and make sense out of their society's artistic creations, and started looking for other things that they regarded as interesting and sensible. Fourth is the interconnecting links that bound together the audiences that are disjoined by the impact of the division between high and low art. By alienating the greater masses, aestheticism became the aesthetics of the dominant class, the people who can afford to simulate a disinterested engagement with artistic objects. Those who cannot help but attempt to evaluate art according to its fidelity to nature, its political or moral messages, or popularity are considered the vulgar, the uninitiated, or the unsophisticated folk. Instead of capturing the idea of the beautiful it its holistic form, Kantian aesthetics and the Kantian inspired aestheticism only created an extremely broken world of artistic appreciation. The aesthetics of the Cebuano radio drama does not exist, and cannot exist, in this disheveled world, and the former's reconstruction can only take form after the latter's disjoint things are properly mended.

The German philosopher of hermeneutics Hans-Georg Gadamer is one of the theorists who launced a massive counterattack against the divisive impulse of Kantian aesthetics and aestheticism. For him, the aestheticist paradigm of distanced, dispassionate, and disinterested engagement with artistic productions, which he called aesthetic differentiation, does not satisfactorily describe an authentic aesthetic engagement. In his work Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method), Gadamer wrote "The experience of art. . . does not leave him who has it unchanged."⁶ Instead of the connoisseur's haughty stance, he proposes the model of festive and playful involvement. "It is characteristic of festive celebration," Gadamer explains in his essay The Relevance of the Beautiful, "that it is meaningful only for those actually taking part. As such, it represents a unique kind of presence that must be fully appreciated."⁷ In a festival, or in a game, the participating subjects momentarily lose their subjectivity, just as the festival and the game lose their objectivity, as they all swirl into a dialectical event that suspends the distinction between the subject and the object. In this festive and playful model the interaction between the subject and the artistic object becomes closed, passionate and endowed with interest, that runs in total opposition with the aestheticist cold engagement. With the Gadamerian model in mind, we can now question the aestheticist practice of treating art as a momentary realm unto which one may escape from the everyday existence which is likewise momentarily bracketed. With art, one must learn to tarry beside and be engulfed in its presence. Gadamer said, "when we dwell upon the work, there is not tedium involved, for the longer we allow ourselves, the more it displays its manifold riches to us."⁸ Thus, instead of disjoining the perceiver and the artistic object, he formulated a more relationally involved form of aesthetic engagement, that consequently mended the first Kantian and aestheticist damage.

Gadamer also launched a restorative campaign regarding the second disjoined link left by the wake of Kantian aesthetics and aestheticism, which is the connection between an artistic object and the other extrinsic realities circumscribing this same object. For him, aesthetic experience, just like human understanding and interpretation, is founded on the lifeworld of the perceiving subject. Gadamer, ever hostile to the phenomenological procedure of Edmund Husserl that requires a bracketing of the perceiver's lifeworld, saw the Kantian and the aestheticist dictum-as requiring a similar bracketing of interests, functions and all other extra-objective considerations-not only futile but epistemologically impossible. Because a lifeworld is holistic and cannot be bracketed, aesthetic engagement is also holistic and must not require the bracketing of its perceiver's lifeworld. Thus, on this ground Gadamerian aesthetics refutes the Kantian aesthetics and aestheticism's isolation of the artistic object from the other extrinsic realities circumscribing this same object. Furthermore, since aesthetic experience for Gadamer, like human understanding and interpretation, involves the process of dialogue between the perceiver's and the artistic object's lifeworlds that ideally would result into a change of the perceiver's lifeworld, then artistic experience cannot be separated from its functionalist impact on its perceivers' lifeworlds. "If we really have had a genuine experience of art," Gadamer wrote, "then the world has become both brighter and less burdensome."⁹ Artistic objects and the beautiful have one radical function that is inseparable from their very constitution: to change their perceivers' lifeworlds and to affect them in a certain special manner. Thus, instead of isolating an artistic object from its circumscribing extrinsic realities, he formulated an inter-relational and functionalist aesthetic theory. Gadamer's massive counterattack against the divisive impulse of Kantian aesthetics and aestheticism, however, failed to address the third and fourth pairs of disjoined things. Their restoration therefore has to be secured somewhere else.

As far the humbler sphere of the popular art is concerned, the mending of the third disjoined link, that is the bond between the artistic producers and their audiences, does not require a keen aesthetic theorizing. One of the first tricks a Cebuano scriptwriter has to learn is how to approximate the taste, the likes, and the expectations of their audiences. Their failure to do so would hinder their inclusion into the profession of scriptwriting itself. The economic sub-structure of popular art makes popular art immune from this particular damage brought about by the Kantian aesthetics and aestheticism.

Having mended the first three disjoined links, we are left with the fourth damage concerning the compartmentalizing of the artistic objects' audiences. Though Gadamer's aesthetic theory had convincing described the authentic engagement with artistic objects, he failed to take into consideration the differentiation of aesthetic taste that is structured along the lines of cultural-based and class-based distinctions. Though obviously Gadamer did not necessarily mean it, his aesthetic theory tends to suggest a unitary and universal nature of the beautiful. The radically new way of theorizing about the beautiful, the appropriate and the tasteful of Pierre Bourdieu offers us a pathway beyond the bourgeoise orientation of Kantian aesthetics and aetheticism-which unfortunately characterizes also the Gadamerian aesthetics-and towards a class structured notion of aritistic appreciation. In his work Distinction, which is subtitled A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Bourdieu presents an ethnography of the beautiful, the appropriate and the tasteful as perceived by the different social classes of the contemporary French society. He placed the very foundation of his aesthetic theory on the perspective of the various people who ultimately determine what aesthetic pleasure is all about. If the Marxist critic would summarily relegate taste as a function of economy, Bourdieu argues beyond Marx that taste is result of the conjunction between economic, cultural, and social capitals. One's appreciation of particular paintings, music, interior design, furniture, food, beverage and clothing is an effect of a struggle for distinction deploying the economic, cultural and symbolic capitals that one posseses at his disposal. Bourdieu stressed that "taste is a practical mastery of distributions which makes it possible to sense or intuit what is likely (or unlikely) to befall - and therefore to befit - an individual occupying a given position in social space."¹⁰ Aesthetics in this sense functions as a kind of social orientation that goads the members of a specific social class towards attitudes and practices that are suitable and beneficial to their specific social standing. Contrary to the our three preceding theoretical operations that mended the first three damaged links left by the wake of Kantian aesthetics and aestheticism, Bourdieu's aesthetics does not mend, and in fact does not intend to mend, the compartmentalization of the artistic objects' audiences. What Bourdieu does is to explain that because of the differences of economic, cultural and symbolic capitals of the audiences, aesthetics has to be structured along the divisive line of social classes. This insight is already affirmed by some of our local scholars. In her monograph entitled The Aesthetics of Poverty, Brenda Fajardo, for instance stated: "In the Third World, people are confronted with problems of survival: economic, social, political, and cultural. The artist of this particular milieu struggles through the crises of his time as do his fellow members in that society. And together both artists and percipients develop a particular artistic taste and evolve a peculiar aesthetic sense fashioned by the conditions of their environment."¹¹ Fajardo, however, though working with the theatre, focused more on the visual side of theatrical production. Our analysis, with radio's purely audial medium, will dwell more closely with the rhetorical effects of the Cebuano radio drama.

Thus after rejoining the subject and the object, the object and its circumscribing world, the producers and their audiences, and after explaining that aesthetics has to follow the divisive lines of social classes. We are now prepared to probe into the aesthetic profile of the Cebuano radio drama.

CEBUANO CRITICAL CATEGORIES

Critical categories are usually generated by the literary or artistic spheres that textually and discursively appreciate and evaluate literary and artistic creations. For popular art, whose literary or artistic spheres are either totally absent or underdeveloped, critical categories are generally very scarce. This is the most obvious difficulty that we are going to encounter in our inquiry into the aesthetic profile of the Cebuano radio drama, because being part of popular culture whose critical spheres are practically non-existent, we can only expect very little-if at all there will be-critical categories. Wilhelmina Ramas, in her study of pre-war Sugbuanon drama, was able to scrounge some few critical concepts from "play advertisements, advance notices, and the praise and dispraise contained in the critical notes on the performance."¹² Ramas was luckier for the Cebuano pre-war theatre, at least during its time, had the benefit of a critical sphere in the local newspapers. But such a sphere had already shrunk, and today there is nothing left for it to accommodate discussions on the Cebuano radio drama. But following Ramas' creative idea, we can also glean some meager critical categories from the radio drama's advertisements, advance notices, and short descriptions. Not very surprising, the same critical categories, now at least half a century old, that Ramas collected are still recurrent for radio drama: like the categories, dili maayo (not good), maanindot (nice), maayong pagkahan-ay (well organized), mabulokon (colorful), madasigon (lively), mahinuklogon (conducive to self reflection), makalingaw (entertaining), makapahimuot (pleasurable, funny), makapanlimbaut sa balahibo (can give goose bumps), makapatandog sa balatian (emotionally stirring), matahum (beautiful), matulonanon (can give moral and practical lessons), possibling mahitabo (realistic), talagsaon (unique), tugob sa aksiyon (action packed), and walay daghang dayan-dayan (not over decorated). Even with these very meagre critical categories, we have at hand a confusing array of descriptive concepts. Alan H. Goldman, in his essay Aesthetic Properties, provides us with a way of classifying these categories.¹³ He mentions nine groups of aesthetic properties: namely, pure value properties, emotional properties, formal qualities, behavioral properties, evocative qualities, representational qualities, second order perceptual properties, and historically related properties. The chart below shows this classification of aesthetic properties, together with Goldman's own examples, Ramas' collection, and our own listing of categories.

We can see from the chart, the striking resemblance between Ramas pre-war list, and our contemporary list. This suggests that more or less, the Cebuanos' way of appreciating their literary productions have remained constant. Focusing our attention on the critical categories for the Cebuano radio drama, we notice that there is an obvious absence of formal categories. We have to bear in mind that the nine types of aesthetic properties mentioned by Goldman vary from each other in their level of perceptual immediacy. "Aesthetic properties," Golmann explains, "require taste to be perceived. Ordinary perceivers do not see sadness, balance, power and realism in artworks as readily or automatically as they perceive redness or squareness. It seems that they must be more sensitive or knowledgeable to see the former qualities."¹⁴ In this sense, seeing or appreciating the formal structures and qualities of a literary piece does not happen as easily as seeing and appreciating the other aesthetic properties. In fact for formal properties, one has to be trained within a literary or critical sphere in seeing and appreciating them. The absence of such a sphere in the sociology of the Cebuano radio drama does not allow first and foremost the generation of formal categories, nor their visibility and neither their appreciation. With Ramas' pre-war theatre, which had the benefit of some sort of a literary and critical sphere, at least two formal categories were present. In the production side of the Cebuano radio drama, however, there is an emphasis on formal categories-like the good plot, an excellent conflict and a fine writing style-but at the receiving end of the genre, the masses simply do not perceive or appreciate the genre in terms of such formal categories, for they simply have their own way of enjoying it.

Another very glaring characteristic of the aesthetics of the Cebuano radio drama, that we can see from the chart above, is the absence of emotional properties, which is also true to the pre-war listing of Ramas. Again, bearing in mind the differences of the aesthetic properties' perceptual immediacy, we come to understand that the Cebuano radio drama audiences do not mind the emotions portrayed in the genre as much as they mind the emotions evoked by the genre, in which case they have an overwhelming number of categories. The emotionality of the Cebuano radio drama, therefore, is not based on the raw display of emotions but on the power of the genre to evoke the different emotional hues among its listeners.

AESTHETICS AND PLEASURE

Though the various theories on aesthetics are conflicting on a number of aspects, they hold some basic propositions in common, propositions that are taken as obvious, immediate and undebatable. One of these is the idea that beauty has connections with pleasure: all beautiful things give us pleasure, though not all pleasurable things are beautiful. Even the distanced, dispassionate and disinterested stance of Kantian aesthetics is founded on pleasure. Pleasure ultimately explains the Cebuano radio drama's tremendous audience and their phenomenal faithfulness. But what exactly is this pleasure all about?

There are a number of things that constitute pleasure for the audiences of the Cebuano radio drama. First one would be on the mimetic presentation of the fictive personalities, their fictive interaction, in their fictive world. "A great deal of aesthetic pleasure," attests James Thomas in his book Script Analysis for Actors, Directors, and Designers, "comes from penetrating the secret thinking of the character."¹⁵ Maybe this has something to do with the deep-seated drive in every person to curiously snoop on the other persons' lives. Personalities, interactions, and worlds are complex things for our ordinary understanding, when they are simplified and foreshortened within and by the genre they are rendered pleasurably transparent for the audiences. The genre offers the audiences a sort of transcendence from the only life and world that they in reality have by bringing them in contact with other lives and worlds, though fictive they may be. The heavily evocative nature of Cebuano aesthetics, as suggested by our analysis of the Cebuano aesthetic categories, even makes this particular pleasure more intense when they are colored with the various emotional responses. The aesthetic theorist Roger Scruton wrote about this intense yet relaxing involvement:

We can feel towards these fictitious scenes a version of the emotions which animate us in our real existence. Yet-because the objects of these emotions are not only unreal but known to be so-we are not motivated to act as we should normally act. On the contrary, we relax into our emotions, and live for a while on a plane of pure untroubled sympathy, laughing and crying without the slightest moral or physical cost.¹⁶

The second thing that constitutes pleasure for the audiences of the Cebuano radio drama comes from the protracted physical structure of the genre that spans through a number of months. Based on the genre's principle of 30-minute daily installment, an additional pleasurable experience is brought about by prolonged anticipation. Third is the pleasures arising from the listeners' more cognitive and projective engagement with the genre, in which they move ahead of the presentation, involved in the process of problem solving, hypothesis testing, inference making, and logically predicting the forthcoming unfolding of the plot. Such a cognitive pleasure increases when such anticipations are indeed realized, while their failure can potentially add more cognitive pleasures in the audiences' effort to make sense of the unexpected turn of the plot and their failure to make the right predictions. Fourth is another cognitive type of pleasure generated by the audiences' moral analysis of the characters and situations of the genre. There is another human tendency to make moral judgments on other people or events, and this is reinforced by the genre's mimetic process of simplification and foreshortening side by side with the cues and hints of the moralizing intent of most scriptwriters. The situation of relaxing but intense emotional involvement suggested by Scruton-wherein the audiences are cognitively aware that they are not part of the fictive world but are emotionally intertwined with it and its characters-provides an excellent panoramic and realistically detailed vantage point. Audiences, specially the more mature ones derive a certain enjoyment from their moral judgments on characters and evens specially if these include dilemmas. The fifth thing that constitutes pleasure for the audiences of the Cebuano radio drama has something to do with the stirring of the deepest psychological needs of humanity through the inclusion of the universal dilemmas and conflicts of man in the genre's plot. Lastly, another type of pleasure is derived when the listeners discuss and share views, appreciation and anticipations about the genre within an interpretive community, a sort of quasi-literary sphere found among neighbors, friends and colleagues.

We have already pointed out above that the Cebuano radio drama, like the Cebuano literature, leans heavily on the genre's evocative aesthetic properties. For the most popular sub-genres-love story/heavy drama and action--and to a certain degree for the other sub-genres-comedy, horror, and fantasy-the greatest pleasure that the audiences can derive has something to do with this evocative nature of Cebuano aesthetic, as well as with the old Aristotelian principle of catharsis. A young Cebuano scriptwriter Suzzette Eyas attests that the most powerful of all emotions as far as radio drama scriptwriting is concerned are kasakit (suffering), kaguol (sadness), kalagot (hatred), and kapungot (anger). She elaborates: "kini ang mga emosyon nga makaapektar sa mga listener psychologically wherein mobukal ang ilang dugo ug mo-uban sila sa emosyon sa character, kining tungora mohilak na usab sila, magsakit ang ilang dughan ug magbaton ug kalagot ngadto sa antagonist."¹⁷ In Greek, katharsis literally means 'purification'. Aristotle's extant writings offer only a very hazy idea of what he really meant by aesthetic catharsis. In his Poetics, he merely scribbled the cryptic description: "achieving through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions." Probably owing to this very same heremetic description that the category of aesthetic catharsis has been freely interpreted and re-interpreted by various theorists, subsequently enriching its meaning in the process. The neoclassicism of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, for instance, rendered a heavily Stoic reading of this Aristotelian idea, stressing the moral aspect of catharsis as having something to do with the extirpation of dangerous passions and the acquistion of moral fortitude. During the 19^th century, Jacob Bernays made a quasi-medical reading of the term that influenced Sigmund Freud's integration of catharsis into psychoanalysis, which fruitfully developed the same concept. It became inevitable that when the literary and aesthetic theorists reclaimed the Aristotelian idea back to aesthetics they have to work under the shadows of Stoicism and Freudian psychoanalysis. These considerations explain why the current thoughts on catharsis are heavily leaning on psychology.

Catharsis, as we understand the term today, runs parallel with Gadamerian aesthetics in the sense that the former is similarly founded on the dialogue of lifeworlds. If Gadamerian aesthetics stresses the more cognitive side of dialogue, catharsis stresses the more emotional side. It is the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotskii who first argued that catharsis is not a mere purification of the emotions evoked by the genre during its performance, rather catharsis includes the purification of all other similar emotions piling up within the audiences' life-world that are subsequently brought in contact with the performance's life-world. In this way, catharsis is premised on the emotional dialogue between the audiences' and the genre's life-worlds. When Eyas was asked regarding the conspicuous predominance of the emotions kalooy (sympathy) and kalagot (hatred) she replied: "Kay niining tungura mapukaw man ang pag bati sa listener kay dali ra man ni niyang I-compare sa iyang kaugalingong pagbati usa ka higayon niana sa iyang kinabuhi."¹⁸ Catharis becomes operational, specifies Vygotskii in his work Psikhologiia, only to the point that the audiences have pent-up emotions in their psyche that are unleashed in a precise moment, not in the world of reality but in the fictive world of fantasy. The anthropologist Bruno Bettelheim suggests that the cathartic dialogue of lifeworlds processes not only the conscious emotions of the audiences but also the "chaotic pressures of the unconscious."¹⁹ Bettelheim is referring here to the semi-conscious psychic elements, that we oftentimes tuck away behind our minds unsorted and unclarified. These, says Paul Debreczeny explaining Bettelheim's thoughts, "must be at work in all the psychological transactions in which we have seen readers engage: they must influence what readers select from a text and incorporate in their own personality; they must dictate what past self-images need to be reshaped in order to arrive at happier future ones."²⁰ In this sense, the "the chaotic pressures of the unconscious" are part of the emotional dross that needs to be cleansed through the cathartic process.

For Vygotskii, however, the mere release of pent-up emotions does not yet constitute the essence of cathartic aesthetics. Catharsis is founded on the pleasure and the feeling of well being that the audience experiences, despite unpleasant and repressive nature of the circumscribing real world. Paul Debreczeny, explaining the thought of Vygotskii, wrote:

This "harmonizing" or edifying effect is achieved because catharsis involves a "distancing form one's self," a sense of being carried beyond the boundaries of one's own person" (Florenskaia 153-54). This sense of merging with humanity, however wretched a tribe that may be, offers, if not exactly; consolation, at least a new perspective that brings a measure of conciliation.²¹

It is the transcendence from the narrow confines of one's own life-world, and crossing over into the collective psyche of the whole humanity, which is the essence of catharsis. It satisfies our deep-seated drive to be human, against the most powerful and crushing dehumanizing forces of the society. This attains a special significance bearing in mind the stark contradictions between the romantically beautiful fictive worlds of the genre and the harsh economic realities of the Cebuano areas. Richard Kuhns in his work Psychoanalytic Theory of Art, founded catharsis on the Freudian idea of the splitting of the ego making it tolerant to the conflict between the pleasure seeking and gratifying tendencies of human nature and the prohibitive measures present and exerted by the social and the physical reality. Vygotskii stated that such a cathartic pleasure attains a different level of significance when "for one reason or another there exists a wide gap between reality and potentiality."²² For the Cebuano radio drama, then, catharsis is the cognitive, emotive and sub-conscious engagement of the listener with the genre that provides the pleasure, no matter how momentary and ephemeral this may be, or experiencing the plenitude of reality and humanity. Catharsis is the paragon of, the most complicated form of, and the most intense instantiation of the pleasures offered by the genre. It is also the most dynamic in the sense that it has the power to dialogically change the consciousness of the audiences.

AESTHETICS AND MORALITY

From our preceding investigations, we have already learned that the audiences' phenomenal faithfulness to the Cebuano radio drama is primarily motivated by their desire for kalingawan (entertainment) and a thirst for pagtulun-an (practical and everyday wisdom). This combination of the rather disparate motives is also affirmed by almost all of the station managers, directors, and scriptwriters that we have interviewed, who when asked about their criteria in discerning what is a finely crafted radio drama script, replied that among other things it is the capacity of the script to provide pagtulun-an. For Cebuano radio drama, therefore, there is a tendency among both the producing and the receiving sides to bind aesthetics and morality together. From the perspective of the academicians who are mostly trained in the tradition of formalistic distinctions, such a tendency is already a little bit out of the ordinary, and from the perspective of Kantian aesthetics and the Kantian-inspired aestheticism, such a coupling of aesthetics and morality is simply horrifyingly vulgar. But after going through the re-suturing processes and explanations by Gadamer and Bourdieu, side by side with the Freudian rendering of catharsis by Vygotskii, Bettelheim and Kuhns, the Cebuano radio drama's tendency of intertwining aesthetics and morality would not anymore appear far-fetched. Bourdieu explained to us clearly that each social class of every society has its own distinctive way of aesthetic appreciation, and that there is no such thing as universal aesthetics. Enforcing the norms of Kantian aesthetics will not make any sense, because the Cebuanos have their own distinctive way of appreciating their radio drama. Gadamer demonstrated to us the dialogical power of aesthetics to change our subjective lifeworlds, to which Vygotskii, Bettelheim and Kuhns assented from their psychoanalytic points of view, establishing the dynamic connection between the fictive world, the collective consciousness and action, thereby implicitly laying out a foundation of a strongly moralistic aesthetic theory. Aristotle himself, like his mentor Plato, was already aware that if aesthetics affects the human psychology, then it also affects the society, establishing in the process the inherent interconnections between aesthetics, morality and even politics.

Aesthetics' justifiable connection with morality, and much more the Cebuano radio drama's de facto intertwining of aesthetics and morality, emplots the precise moment of the conjunction between the fictive world, and the collective consciousness, forming a veritable bridge between the fictive world of the Cebuano radio drama and the discursive reality of Cebuano ideology. Indeed, through aesthetics the listeners are drawn into the world of the fictive genre, and through it they are indoctrinated into the aesthetic ideology of the true, the appropriate, the beautiful, and the good. Indeed, it is aesthetics in the end that bounds the fictive, the collective consciousness and the social praxis together.

REFLECTIONS

Our inquiry into the aesthetic profile of the Cebuano radio drama revealed to us a number of significant points. First and foremost, we have discovered that the Cebuano literary and popular aesthetics are diametrically opposed to the canons of the academically reigning Kantian aesthetic paradigm. In fact, the former's reconstruction is only possible after theoretically mending-using the philosophical thoughts of Gadamer and Bourdieu-the latter's highly divisive aesthetic world. Secondly, the critical categories that we managed to scrounged from the advanced notices and advertisements of individual radio drama productions, demonstrated striking similarities with the critical categories for Cebuano theatre collected by Ramas from pre-war productions, which suggested an appreciative unity between the Cebuano radio drama and its direct ancestor, the Cebuano theatre. Thirdly, these critical categories showed an abundance of evocative aesthetic properties and absence of formalistic aesthetic properties. Following the socio-linguistic axiom of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf specifying that the scarcity or abundance of concepts for a given phenomenon has a direct correlate with the given culture's practical concerns, we come with the ideas that the audiences of the Cebuano radio drama are not as concerned with the formal structures and characteristics of the genre as they are with its evocative properties. Thirdly, we peered into the nature of the pleasures that the listeners are deriving from the genre which are mostly founded on the mimetic operations and deep-seated human tendencies. Fourthly, we focused on the genre's most powerful and ideologically significant type of pleasure, the Aristotelian principle of catharsis, which ultimately serve as the dialogical bridge between fiction and reality. Fifth, we formulated a theoretical justification of the genre's de facto coupling of morality and aesthetics, strengthening in the process the same dialogical bridge between fiction and reality established by catharsis. Thus, in the end, our analysis of the aesthetic profile of the Cebuano radio drama, explain to us the tremendous power of the genre to attract its phenomenal listenership, while simultaneously mapping out the nature of aesthetics in general and Cebuano literary and popular aesthetics in particular as the ultimate link that bridges the fictive world of the genre and the discursive world of ideology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bernasconi, Robert. "Gadamer, Hans-Georg." David E. Cooper, Ed. A Companion to Aesthetics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell, 1992.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge, 1984.

Debreczeny, Paul. Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

Fajardo, Brenda V. The Aesthetics of Poverty: a Rationale in Designing for Philippine Theatre. Manila: Philippine Educational Theatre Association.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. "The Relevance of the Beautiful." Trans. Nicholar Walker. Ed. Robert Bernasconi. The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. London: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Goldman, Alan. "Properties, Aesthetic." David E. Cooper, Ed. A Companion to Aesthetics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell, 1992.

Novitz, David. "Function of Art." David E. Cooper, Ed. A Companion to Aesthetics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell, 1992.

Ramas, Wilhelmina. Sugbuanon Theatre From Sotto to Rodriquez and Kabahar: An Introduction to Pre-War Sugbuanon Drama. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1982.

Ramas, Wilhelmina. "Sugbuanon Literature." Roger Bresnahan, Ed. Literature and Society, Cross-Cultural Perspectives: 11th American Studies Seminary, October 1976, Los Banos, Philippines.

Scruton, Roger. "Imagination," David E. Cooper, Ed. A Companion to Aesthetics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Bail Blackwell, 1992.

Thomas, James. Script Analysis for Actors, Directors, and Designers. Boston: Focal Press, 1992.

Whewell, David. "Aestheticism." David E. Cooper, Ed. A Companion to Aesthetics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell, 1992.