Jeepney spirituality

Darren L. Gustafson
Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

Thesis Eleven
112(1) 8797
The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/0725513612450501
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Abstract
The orientation of public space is either logocentric or eclectic. The surface of a Philippine
jeepney is an example of a successful inversion of American militaristic individualism into a
place for the celebration of idiosyncrasies. Using Walter Benjamins differentiation
between allegory and symbolism and photographs of Philippine jeepney art this essay
problematizes the collapse of contemporary spirituality into a political demographic.
Keywords
allegory, city, eclecticism, jeepney, Manila, street art, symbol

Two cities
John Giordano (2005) describes two views of the city in his essay Confessions of a
Flaneur: the datascape and the organic undergrowth of the shantytown what Michel
de Certeau calls the proper space and the fact of the city (Giordano 2005: 82). He
prints a graphic of two exemplary cities built along a waterfront: carefully laid out streets
and straightened waterways gently correct the natural contours of the coast line or else
they just violently cube off a new mechanical boundary. Seen from the air, the city
represents development and commercialization. But zoom in closer, look into the places
where people actually live and work, and you will see something quite different.
Abstract systems and datascapes would emphasize an uprooting, a loss of place and space, a
destruction of time and nature. But the shantytown embeds itself along those very areas
most exposed to Nature (rivers, ocean fronts, flood-prone areas, typhoon-prone areas). It
deploys waste material in its construction and emerges in a tangle of fascinating organic
architecture. It follows an older logic of what Levi-Strauss calls the bricoleur as opposed

Corresponding author:
Darren L. Gustafson, Department of Philosophy, Ateneo de Manila University, Loyola Heights, Quezon City,
Philippines
Email: afterthales@yahoo.ca

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to the engineer. It falls back upon older forms of transportation such as boats, the rail-car. It
fosters a real community, a down-to-earth logic and rationality. (2005: 7980)

B(u)ill(ding)boards
A billboard is an odd thing, isnt it? A gaunt, skeletal structure holds images of lush,
idyllic life up against an empty sky. The contrast between its mechanism and its message, content and effect, is absolute. Delicate skin pop-riveted onto angle-iron frames.
Ice cold halo-halo baked onto the side of a concrete building. Supple flesh draped over
a bony skeleton.
And then you will see, nailed to an improvised corner post in a squatters shack, the
ruggedly handsome face of the Marlboro Man. And it is not upside-down either. It serves
as a wall in the stead of an engineers store-bought building materials; but it is not haphazardly chosen either. It is as if a bricoleur is another kind of engineer who riffles
through the garbage for just the thing, prefabricated for just this use. It has an honorific
place now, as an object of beauty, after its proper commercial value has expired. The
residents of this Marlboro Country may not even smoke, and if they do they are not
necessarily loyal to the Marlboro brand. They just know fine finish when they see it.
Striking landscapes, colorful and handsome letters (belles-lettres), pretty faces, nice
horses. America.
The commercial facade is brought interior to the impoverished domicile. The effect is
like an Andy Warhol detail of religious Renaissance painting: the exaggerated size of a
small portion of the original, dislocated into a new context, leaves the viewer to supply
the rest of the scene. The cramped, impoverished environment of the shack is given a
grandeur and a view, like importing scenery indoors. Imported in the dual sense of
foreign and eclectic: bringing the exterior interior, the public materials become homely
and the diverse becomes thematic. The cramped interior takes on an exteriority that is
expansive, even scenic. Whether through a television set with antennae constructed out
of scrap wire and cooking utensils, or through the over-sized and hyper-finished building
materials, the vista of poverty is shot through with extravagance. One stands at the porthole between worlds, for all the separation that obtains between the rich and the poor.

The object of allegory

Advertising is a great example of the opacity of allegory. In the popular notion of
allegory, the image(ry) is nothing more than a hieroglyphic. You could just as well
replace the image used to represent its concept with a linguistic description. But for
Walter Benjamin, the logos-character of allegory is not a liability. Instead, the language
of allegory acquires a shape and body of its own, alongside the concept it represents.
Jacqueline Hitchon and Jerzy Jura (1997) point out that advertising is becoming more
and more intertextual. Where it used to directly reference the qualities of the product,
postmodern advertising is seldom connected to an out-of-text reality; more and more it
references other texts: movies, popular events, or even other advertisements.
Likewise, building materials comprised of advertisements make intertextual reference to cultural phenomena, eliding the shabby structure they actually constitute. Its as

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Figure 1. The Ilong Ranger

though they themselves constitute something more real than what is constructed with
them. If generic building materials reference domesticity more or less directly, organic,
recycled materials reference an international, cosmopolitan culture. When an interior
wall references exteriority, it becomes a thing in itself rather than just the housing for
other objects.

Ilong Ranger
Recently Neozep utilized the visual space of public mega-taxis in Metro Manila to advertise nasal decongestants. What is postmodern and allegorical about them is that they
work intertextually between American and Filipino culture, assuming a grasp of both
English and Filipino as well as foreign cultural material. Hitchon and Jura (1997) point
out the distance added between such a texts signifier and the signified. The implied
picture of the consumer of such ads bears striking similarities to the image of a reader
pictured by Roland Barthes, a reader willing to engage in a complex and elaborate play
with the text. Indeed, if co-commuters were not familiar with both English and Filipino,
or if they didnt know American popular culture, the advertisement would be a confusing
failure. Ironically, the under-educated, geographically isolated poor have become proficient cross-cultural commuters.

Time for allegory

In contrast to the symbol, where form and content are indivisibly united in the mystical
moment of happening, allegory exacerbates the lapse between form and content. Decorative lettering on a jeepney seems to luxuriate in the time it takes just to make sense out
of the beautiful markings, while they hold our attention quite apart from any thematic
content they will eventually render. Like an outline waiting to be shaded in, the object of
allegory can appear without a referent, without meaning. Not only can its form persist
without its dialectical opposite, it can be trans-formed from one content to another. The
basic characteristic of allegory, says Hermann Cole (quoted in Benjamin 1996: 177), is
ambiguity, multiplicity of meaning.

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In the context of allegory the image is only a signature, only the monogram of essence, not
the essence itself in a mask. But there is nothing subordinate about written script; it is not
cast away in reading, like dross. It is absorbed along with what is read, as its pattern. The
printers, and indeed the writers of the baroque, paid the closest possible attention to the
pattern of the words on the page. (Benjamin 1996: 21415)

Instead of being a dispensable description of the promoted product, the language of

allegory is opaque; it takes on a bodily life of its own, as an object. In the anagrams, the
onomatopoeic phrases, and many other examples of linguistic virtuosity, word, syllable,
and sound are emancipated from any context of traditional meaning and are flaunted as
objects which can be exploited for allegorical purposes (1996: 207). It is not so much
that allegory is added value to the object, but that it becomes itself another object
alongside what it represents.
The time given for the interpretation of allegory is like an organic growth out of the
time of public transportation in Manila. This time is not consumed, but productive. Not
in the sense that we get things done with it, but in the sense that it multiplies itself,
seemingly without shame or accounting. Traffic here functions as a synonym for tardiness. Or, more properly, Filipino time was never chronological to begin with.
In contrast with the brusque, utilitarian time of communication, the time of allegory
holds and detains us. Insensitive to schedules and the drive to know, it frustrates logocentrism. It persists in itself, without being rendered into meaning. It is akin to the way
that Dantes allegory works, between the time of reading and the time of apprehension,
transforming the reader through the effort of understanding. The opacity of jeepney art is
not to be dispensed with for a deeper meaning, but lived with and celebrated in its own
right. It is effective and joyful precisely in and through the time it takes to understand.

Practical eclecticism
In the eclectic urban domicile, advertisement materials have become objects in themselves. A wall made of a discarded billboard may hold family photographs interspersed
with depictions of saints. Votive candles may flicker electric among blinking Christmas
lights; religious iconography may be peppered with Precious Moments figurines. And it
doesnt mean either good or bad Catholicism. People know when something is useful to
them. Objects are granted intrinsic, almost interchangeable value; collected for their
material worth, they have exchanged original, intended meanings for a new, decorative
value.

Exchange of economies
A pack of Marlboro cigarettes costs 18 pesos in Manila. That is a very small fraction of
their cost in a developed country. And it is usual to complain that the cigarette companies
are exploiting the poor by making their products available at such a low cost. But I
wonder what to think about people buying cigarettes by the stick. I like to smoke when I
am with a friend or walking downtown. And you can buy Marlboros on the street for P2
each. I dont want to be addicted, so I have a rule: never buy a pack of cigarettes. If I
had a pack, I would smoke them. But if I have to buy a stick every time I light up, it has a

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self-limiting effect. People, too, who cant afford it, can buy cigarettes one stick at a
time, and it surely makes habitual smoking less convenient. I tell people who smoke all
the time that I enjoy cigarettes more than they do because I only allow myself one a
week. And hasnt the advertising campaign of the almighty Flavor Country backfired
when we can enjoy their cigarettes at no practical cost and without coming to depend on
them?

Commercial organicism I
Isnt there something of a full circle described in the return of advertising materials to
their materiality in the form of building supplies? A man finds a discarded advertising
canvas and turns it upside-down to make a labyrinth for prayer. He walks over the grinning faces of model fast food customers reciting the Our Father.

Landscape I
An American service jeep is made for four people. And its rugged angularity is basically
militaristic, even when it is used for leisure. It is an icon of individualism, with a machine
gun mounted at each corner for combat and the socius protected/provided by four
combatants watching one anothers backs always facing away from one another. But a
service vehicle in the Philippines is a family vehicle. When something is borrowed in
Philippine culture it will inevitably be domesticated. So, when the Americans left surplus
jeeps here, they were extended the back seats were turned sideways so that passengers
could scarcely see out, but rather sit facing one another, so that they could hold more
people.
And then the camouflage has to be changed for another kind of jungle. The inside and
outside are decorated with colorful words and pictures of unimaginable eclecticism.
Scripture and pornography, family portraits and pop stars, wildlife and science fiction,
confederate flags and advertising for weight loss/gain programs are all brought together
into the same public space. Each one of these represents a system of value in its own
rights. And their marketing depends (to one extent or another) on mutual exclusivity.

Jeepney spirituality
Growing up a Christian in Canada, one of the favorite topics for youth is the challenge of
Christian witness in a secular society. It is simply not cool there to express Christian
conviction. And, of course, if you do then you are expected to avoid conflicting
expressions. A vehicles bumper stickers will almost always represent a morally
coherent view, if not an express theme. What would the Filipino jeepney do to Western
piety?
Western piety is a kind of corrected datascape. It is a kind of conviction by demographics. Political elections conform to an aerial schematic where the contours of
individuals convictions and personal experience are straightened or simplified,
mechanized or commercialized into politically recognizable identities. Candidates are
chosen on the basis of their careful, usually enigmatic responses to the current moral

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issues. A pro-life stance gets a person elected without regard for the rest of their policy
(or lack thereof).
What is patently obvious is that an individual is more complicated than a demographic. The human person is more like a jeepney than a billboard. Our symbols fail us in
their pretension to collect all our energies under one heading. Even God is dead.
There is no absolute so absolute as to deserve all my worship. Or, perhaps he does
deserve it; but the fact of my worship (as opposed to the datascape of a liturgy) is that
much of what I perhaps feel should be reserved for the absolute is fizzled away on the
lesser gods of education, personal advancement, even just bacchanal pleasure.
I feel self-consciously blasphemous writing these lines, but I also know that to write
differently would be hypocritical. Perhaps there is a kind of faith that misses expression
in a catechism. Perhaps the jeepney represents a confidence that praise will emerge of
itself from the human heart. That if we keep silent, even the /jeepneys/ will break forth
in song (cf. Luke 19:40 and Matthew 21:16). The way that Barbara Stern (1990) calls
allegory a protean device, perhaps this is a protean faith that draws meaning from whatever context it is in. Protean and organic, faith is emergent and incipient rather than
demographic.

Landscape II
We cannot imagine the jeepney as simply more practical than the American jeep. The
domestication of the jeep does more than just fit more people into it; it transforms the
orientation of public space from an individual looking out onto a quadrant of the horizon
into a shared (if smaller) space of people facing one another. This communitarian,
collective, domestic orientation is as basic to the modification of the jeep into the
jeepney as is the expansion of passenger capacity. The jeepneys sides are extended (and
enclosed) for the aesthetic purpose of creating more canvas space, more surface for the
convergence of disparate symbolisms. In this way, a jeepney is more than just an
inexpensive mode of public transportation; it represents a mode of public space that
incorporates rather than excludes difference.
The jeepney, then, is a resource for peaceful being-together. People do not have to
agree or even converse any more than images need to be thematically coherent. They can
simply cohabitate as precious idiosyncrasies. It is partly our individual uniqueness that
makes each person valuable to others.

Symbol or allegory?
The jeepney could represent the transubstantiative character of allegory over against the
homosubstantiative character of symbolism. Symbolism corresponds to the datascape of
mega-development. It is a logocentric form for the communication of X from A to B.
Allegory corresponds to the organic, living and magical character of street-level thinking. Allegory does not bear meaning the way a word can be thought to represent a
signified; it enacts meaning, bringing it to life in ways that are always surprisingly
(dis)connected to/from the situation it emerges out of. In contrast with the brusque,
utilitarian time of communication, the time of allegory holds and detains us. Insensitive
to schedules and the drive to know, it frustrates logocentrism. It persists in itself, without

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Figure 2.

being rendered into meaning. In the same way that Dantes allegory takes effect in the
time of reading and apprehension, transforming the reader through the very effort of
understanding, the opacity of jeepney art is not to be dispensed with for a deeper meaning, but appreciated in its own right.1 It is effective and meaningful precisely in and
through the time it takes to understand.

Muddy flapping
Beautiful, decorative lettering is not unusual on jeepneys but somehow, especially on
the mud flaps, like an afterword mumbled under your breath, when speech has been
thoroughly muddied, not only by the weather and the dirty, congested streets, but also
from the exhaustion of confused communication smattered all over, inside and outside,
the jeepney somehow, especially on the mud(dy) flaps, language seems to break down
as a form of communication. The word seems to fail in the logistical task of bearing
forward a (recognizable) meaning. Letters become so ornate that they give up their
alphabetical role of marking a phonetic syllable. Maybe they revert to a kind of preHispanic character/ideogram. The letters value as an object seems to supplant the meaning of the word it (fails to) enunciate. Maybe it is like a sermon where the tone/pitch and
a recognizable set of staged pauses and decorative turns of phrase seem to better represent authority/authenticity than does orthodox theology.2 The word has become a living

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Word and bears more than a semantic meaning. It bears life in the way of a fetish or
talisman. It is more of a performative incantation than an indicative expression.
So cigarettes bend to replace letters (the way social norms often communicate better
than any specific content), a padlock replaces the letter A (seeming to lock its meaning
safely away from the uninitiated), the face of a stuck up woman replaces one of the
vowels in the word suplada, while spread/naked legs replace the other. It is as if
meaning is being teased out of us. We see not the clear, unambiguous communication of
the other, but the fantasy of the self. Decorative lettering on a jeepney seems to luxuriate
in the time it takes to make sense out of the beautiful markings. They hold our attention
quite apart from any thematic content they will eventually render. Sometimes the
reversal of sign and signified is so complete that it becomes necessary to understand the
concept communicated before you can confidently interpret the individual letters which,
in principle, were meant to have rendered it. Rather than serving the purpose of communication, communication seems to have served the higher purpose of generating time
for the act of interpretation.
The meaning of a symbol emerges from the symbol itself. In contrast, the allegory is
without meaning in itself, and colonizes its meaning from its surroundings. This is why
Benjamin says symbols expire (1996: 183). Correspondingly, advertisements lose
their efficacy over time as the popular culture they refer to passes out of memory.
But the object-character of allegory outlives the memory of its referent. The opacity
of allegory means that it can be re-inscribed with new meaning in a new situation.
The time lapse while the corpse of an allegory awaits new assignment, perhaps in
a private home is hopeful for the emergence of new value, value that is not tied to
the marketplace.

Effective allegory
Benjamins separation of the allegorical from the symbolic, which represents a kind of
failure of symbolism, leads to an important and interesting critique of history. But on the
other hand, this approach aggressively distances the intellectual from the manner that
symbols are still operating, still alive, and still have something divine about them. (Giordano 2005: 88)

The billboard that has become building material has not ceased operating it is still
alive and still has something divine about it. It represents the beyond brought into the
center of the place and way we live. If this has not been the purpose of our imagery from
the beginning, then it has already failed and become preaching, propaganda, terrorism.
And it is ironic, but perhaps advertising, with its inherently practical raison detre, with
its allegorical intertextuality, is uniquely adapted to persist in a disposable economy.
People know what is useful to them. They know phony sentiment. They know when
something will not help them.

Commercial organicism II
Perhaps it is the wealthy and not the poor who are exploited by mass advertising
incentives. Jeepney drivers and lavenderas do not buy cell phones for status symbols. To

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Figure 3.

sell their phones in the developing world, companies like Nokia have to parcel out their
product in few-peso packages. Ironically, this means that the poor as if subsidized by
the wealthy consumer use the product exactly as much as they want, while leaving its

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surplus value on the shelf. There is a fissure that runs through the totalizing systems of
globalization where another economy grows organically.

Two cities (reprise)

There is a difference of perspective between street level and the high-rise or the academy. Giordano (2005: 78) quotes from The Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism:
Neon signs and sumptuous window displays deck the storefronts. But the alleys between the
buildings look like human beehives, or termite colonies, with thousands of tiny cellular
dwellings plastered precariously against the high brick walls. In each alleyway, a narrow
central path, about two feet wide, separates the shacks on either side. Made of bamboo slats
and cardboard, most of the shacks consist of a single room, about six by eight feet square.
Each shack lodges a whole family. On top of the first layer of shacks balances another layer
of similar shacks, then another and another. In some alleys the shacks are stacked precariously five or six stories high. (Korten 1999: 80)

There is a danger for the academic that [he] never enters the interesting dwellings he
describes from a distance, he never talks with the people he frames in his depictions. One
never hears the voices of the city, the city is voiced only through the reflections of the
detached academic (Korten 1999: 85). If academia can only analyze the city from the
aerial view of the datascape, it has not yet engaged the city as an organism. The fact of
the city rather finds expression through organic architectures, streets with no name,
ephemeral cityscapes periodically destroyed by fires or washed away by floods, but
always re-embedding, reconstructing themselves (Korten 1999: 79).
The fact of the city is, like the Foucauldian subject, repeatedly produced. This,
Judith Butler (1995: 237) says, is not the same as being produced anew again and again.
There is no cataclysmic re-beginning for the organism. It repeatedly produces itself out
of a repetition of the same needs. Likewise, it is never finished, but continues to form
itself as regularly as an organism must feed. The facts of existence are simply too bare,
too immediate and too demanding to allow the distanciation of global reflection. The city
is always hungry. Eating, it always grows. Growing, it always changes. But this change is
not like development so much as it is like the organic, almost bacchanal, will-to-survive.
The dynamism of the city is great because its need is great. The practical, eclectic thinking of the billboard and jeepney are examples for us of thinking that works from the
street level. Only a dramatically practical philosophy that proceeds from and toward utility is of any audibility in the midst of the din of the city.
Notes
This article is dedicated to John Giordano. All photos were taken by the author.
1. This is what T.S. Eliot (1929: 207) calls Dantes lucidity of style, in contrast with a lucidity of
word/concept. I do not recommend, in first reading the first canto of the Inferno, worrying
about the identity of the Leopard, the Lion, or the She-Wolf. It is really better, at the start, not to
know or care what they mean. What we should consider is not so much the meaning of the
images (1929: 209). Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood (1929: 206).

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2. Think about the sermon at the end of Faulkners (1984) The Sound and the Fury. When the
preacher fails to make an impact speaking in proper grammar like a white man (1984: 339), he
switches to ebonics (negroid; 1984: 341) with the effect of completely involving the
attention/imagination of the congregation. It was as different as day and dark from his former
tone, with a sad, timbrous quality like an alto horn, sinking into their hearts and speaking there
again when it had ceased in fading and cumulate echoes (1984: 340). Breddren en sistuhn!
His voice rang again, with the horns. He removed his arm and stood erect and raised his hands.
I got de ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb! They didnt mark just when his intonation, his
pronunciation, became negroid, they just sat swaying a little in their seats as the voice took them
into itself (1984: 341).

References
Benjamin W (1996) The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. Osborne J. New York: Verso.
Butler J (1995) Subjection, resistance, resignification: Between Freud and Foucault. In: Rajchman
J (ed.) The Identity in Question. New York: Routledge, 229249.
Eliot TS (1975 [1929]) Dante. In: Kermode F (ed.) Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and
Faber.
Faulkner W (1984) The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage.
Giordano J (2005) Confessions of a flaneur. Budhi 1: 75103.
Hitchon JC and Jura JO (1997) Allegorically speaking: Intertextuality of the postmodern culture
and its impact on print and television advertising. Communications Studies (Summer): http://
www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3669/is_199707/ai_n8759377/print.
Korten DC (1999) The Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism. San Francisco:
Berrett-Koehler.
Stern B (1990) Other-speak: Classical allegory and contemporary advertising. Journal of Advertising (Summer): http://www.allbusiness.com/periodicals/article/130937-1.html

Biographical note
Darren L. Gustafson works for a developmental organization in Taytay, Rizal, Philippines, called HELP International Ministries, Inc, and teaches philosophy and literature part
time at Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City. He is primarily interested in the
(trans)formative effect of text in myth. Jeepneys provide light if fixating reading during
travel time in Manila.

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