Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization 9780822392446

Citation preview

Things Fall Away

Post-Contemporary Interventions Series Editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson

a john hope franklin center book

Things Fall Away Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization neferti x. m. tadiar

duke university press

durham and london 2009

∫ 2009 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Katy Clove Typeset in Carter & Cone Galliard by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction Loosed Upon the World 1 part i.

Feminization One Prostituted Filipinas and the Crisis of Philippine Culture 25 Two Women Alone 59 Three Poetics of Filipina Export 103

part ii.

Urbanization Four Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’ 143 Five Petty Adventures in (the Nation’s) Capital 183 Six Metropolitan Debris 217

part iii.

Revolution Seven Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses 265 Eight Guerilla Passion and the Unfinished Cultural Revolution 299 Nine The Sorrows of People 333 Notes 379 Bibliography 445 Index 469

Acknowledgments

In the writing of this book, I have accumulated more intellectual and social debts than I can recount here. I owe a great debt to Fredric Jameson, whose intellectual gifts, generosity, and enthusiasm encouraged the amplification rather than disciplining of my own intellectual resources at the beginning of this project. It is perhaps only belatedly that one can fully recognize the important influence of a teacher’s ideas and understanding on one’s formation. Ken Surin and Arif Dirlik o√ered very valuable support and guidance early on. For Vince Rafael’s abiding and tenacious support of and belief in this book, throughout the many stages of writing, including long fallow periods, I will always be grateful. For their embrace, understanding, endorsement, and encouragement of the imagination of this work, I thank my former colleagues in the Department of History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Angela Davis, Donna Haraway, Jim Cli√ord, Teresa de Lauretis, Barbara Epstein, and David Marriot, as well as my uc Santa Cruz colleagues and friends Anjali Arondekar, Gina Dent, Anna Tsing, Lisa Rofel, Chris Connery, Carla Freccero, Jennifer Gonzalez, Warren Sack, Mary Scott, Susan Harding, and Gail Hershatter. I especially thank Anjali Arondekar, Angela Davis, and Gina Dent and the graduate students in HistCon, in particular my own students, Niki Akhavan, Cindy Bello, Darshan Campos, Paula Ioanide, Nicole Santos, Mari Spira, Gina Velasco, and Kalindi Vora, for their intellectual and political camaraderie and passion. The writing of this book greatly benefited from the invaluable theoretical and political education I received from all of them. This book would not have been possible without the literary materials and

critical resources and perspectives that Edel Garcellano and Nick Atienza o√ered me over the years. Nick’s untimely death last year has left me with a deep sadness. He died of an illness profoundly shaped by the very same political forces I talk about in this book, such that the loss of his life has come to be a profound and painful embodiment of things that fall away, which I write of here. For more than twenty years, he and Edel Garcellano have been key touchstones and interlocutors in my continuing search for a politics as uncompromising in its radical criticism of our existing social worlds and yet steadfastly open to the potentials of the compromised humans who animate those worlds as I experienced and envisioned through their own politics. In these times when resurgent fascism and imperious life have become increasingly at home in the world, settling in the hearts and minds of a global political humanity, such examples of other politics practiced and lived sustain the compass that orients my work. In the Philippines and elsewhere, I thank Caroline Hau, Roland Tolentino, Sarah Raymundo, Gelacio Guillermo, and Lucy Burns for their enabling engagements with my work. Parts of this book were presented to di√erent audiences, whose questions have been very helpful in my revisions. I thank the organizers of these presentations, including Jane Winston, Shu-Mei Shih, Françoise Lionnet, Esha De, Shari Huhndorf, Robyn Rodriguez, Louiza Odysseos and Hakan Seckinelgin, and Lila Abu-Lughod. Thanks too to Eleanor Kaufmann, Judith Butler, Karl Britto, Marion Grau, and David Lloyd for their supportive and generative comments. And, finally, much appreciation to Reynolds Smith for his great patience for and confidence in this project. A version of chapter 1 was previously published in Millennium: Journal of International Relations and republished in Gendering the International, ed. Louiza Odysseos and Hakan Seckinelgin. Part of chapter 5 was previously published in Qui Parle? I thank Jared Sexton and Armando Manalo and the journal’s editorial board for their comments and suggestions.

I thank my family for continuing to make a home I can always return to, adjusting to all the changes in the world and in our own lives that none of us could ever have foreseen: my parents, Fred and Florence; my siblings, Aisha, Carlo, Thea, Alfredo, and Gino; and the loved ones they have introduced into our family, viii

acknowledgments

Mae, Annika, Ric, Arianna, and Seren. Only Jon knows the depth and complexity of my feelings for the world, so little of which I have been able to convey in writing. For the beauty of his understanding and sharing of the life beneath my thought, I have no words to express the profundity of my gratitude. Luna moves me in ways I may never have known without her being in the world. To Jon and Luna, I dedicate this book with abiding love.

Acknowledgments

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Introduction

Loosed upon the World Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. —w. b. yeats For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. —walter benjamin As this century with its bloodstained record draws to a close, the nineteenth-century dream of one world has re-emerged, this time as a nightmare. —ashis nandy

In 1958, a young Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe, published his first novel. An important work in the movement of literary decolonization sweeping West Africa and, more generally, the third world, this novel, Things Fall Apart, depicted the disastrous moment of colonization through the historical experience of the Igbo people. Achebe took his title from a poem by the Irish writer W. B. Yeats called ‘‘The Second Coming,’’ which decades earlier had depicted a modern world besieged by turmoil and a sense of impending doom, to convey the sense of anarchy and drowned innocence that imbued the lives of his Igbo characters in the face of the historical destruction of their previous world.∞ A sense of

colonialism’s apocalyptic destruction of the life-worlds of entire peoples stoked the imaginations of anti-imperialist national liberation struggles all over the third world. Entwined with this modern sensibility of violent chaos and catastrophic change was a prophetic will to freedom of new nations from the imposed destiny of their conquerors. Today, fifty years later, the world is proclaimed to be in a similar moment of tremendous, rapid, and unprecedented change, an epochal moment widely understood as globalization. Once again ‘‘The Second Coming’’ comes to mind. For Jean and John Comaro√, anthropologists of South Africa, a ‘‘messianic, millennial capitalism’’ is what is ‘‘slouching towards Bethlehem,’’ waiting to be born: ‘‘a capitalism that [despite being universally destructive] presents itself as a gospel of salvation; a capitalism that, if rightly harnessed, is invested with the capacity wholly to transform the universe of the marginalized and disempowered.’’≤ At the turn of the millennium, globalization appears to threaten with dissolution all the familiar structures and relations of an older modern world, an apocalyptic vision that not paradoxically also bears promises of universal redemption. Now we witness the uncanny return but also transmogrification of an older, imperial, some would say totalitarian politics. And it would seem that the world has yielded the ‘‘rough beast, its hour come round at last.’’ In the Philippines, which finds itself both in the midst of and at the edges of this maelstrom, things are indeed falling apart. In the face of the ostensible features of accelerated processes of late modernization and globalization— namely, the feminization of labor and the worldwide movements of this labor, rapid urbanization and the explosion of a surplus floating population, the deracination of the rural peasantry, and the waging and putative defeat of a revolutionary people’s war—older cultural forms and social ties, not to mention countless lives, seem to be on the brink of permanent ruin. Crisis becomes common currency for understanding the conditions of contemporary Philippine life. What in the moment of decolonization was a radicalizing historical insight— Achebe’s intimation that colonialism is the foundational crisis that lies at the heart of the felt anarchy and anxiety of Yeats’s modern world—has been the shared truth of postindependence countries of the former colonial world in the past forty years. It is perhaps no longer a matter of rare political insight to recognize that the permanent crisis of the third world, as well as of the fourth and second worlds, or more generally the global south, has been the very motor of development of (and ever-immanent menace to) the capitalist first world or 2

introduction

the global north. In the Philippines, crisis has served as the cause of e√orts by both the state and radical social movements to steer the course of history in a moment when the world would appear to be in the hands of forces beyond anyone’s control. Since the popular deposing of the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, itself a permanent state of emergency built on the worsening economic, social, and political crisis from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, one crisis situation after another has obtained. From attempted military coups to murdered overseas domestic workers, from the crisis of the Philippine Left to the crisis of the new Asian economy, from the kidnappings of Chinese-Filipinos by parapolice criminal networks to the slayings and bombings in Mindanao by paramilitary criminal groups—each crisis claimed as the basis of progressive as well as reactionary actions. Crisis launches both forces: liberatory social movements and state repression. People Power 2, the progressive popular uprising in 2001 that unseated the corrupt presidential regime of Joseph Estrada, is closely followed by Balikatan 02–1, the joint U.S.–Philippine military exercises in the ongoing global war on terrorism. While the first aspired to achieve a new moral social order (civil democracy), the second pretends to protect that same moral social order on behalf of which it wages yet another, now seemingly endless war. In the meantime, as more and more resources are channeled into this widening gyre of crisis, in grave e√orts to keep things together and hold on to familiar and determinate paths of becoming, more and more things fall away from the privileged and ever narrower worlds that remain. Refurbished as well as unreconstructed nationalisms and transnationalisms, battles for state power and civil liberties, identity-based claims to political and economic enfranchisement, liberal-democratic ideals of civil society—such are the familiar trajectories of world-historical agency in these times, trajectories from which all other manner of human and parahuman lives, pasts, presents, and futures, cultural imaginations, and virtual realities are jettisoned. These things fall away, and their barely apprehended importance to our worlds is lost to us, who seek di√erent holds on our immanent futures.

Decolonizing Struggles Faced with the signs of vanishing everywhere that point to the seemingly inexorable vortex of destruction and disappearance that characterizes our global history, how are we to continue the struggle for freedom against the new fate of these Loosed upon the World

3

millennial capitalist times? It seems to me that, in this particular and latest moment of world crisis, we, who live and work in some form of opposition to the orders and imperatives of global hegemonic powers, are in need of a supplement to the decolonizing truth Things Fall Apart. Things Fall Away is an attempt to provide one such supplementary theory and practice that at once takes after and departs from the decolonizing struggles in which Achebe’s literary practice took part, and, more modestly, to o√er by means of this analytical method a di√erently politicized interpretation of the recent history of the Philippines. Recasting some common notions, ‘‘the Philippines,’’ ‘‘literature,’’ and ‘‘historical experience,’’ to this end, this book develops a theory and method of reading experience as living labor that I hope will aid in our collective e√orts to come to a new understanding of politics in the contemporary global moment. Indeed, the interpretation of late twentieth-century Philippine transformations that I arrive at through this theoretical perspective provides grounds for the reconceptualization of feminized labor and migration, modern authoritarianism, crony capitalism, civil society, and the cultural practice and political ontology of revolution. As a key instrument of national liberation movements throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America, third world literatures sought to restore the historical experiences of peoples struggling against the destructive regimes of colonialism and neocolonialism, thereby bringing into being what Dolores Feria has called ‘‘the new humanism of the dispossessed.’’≥ Third world literatures were part and parcel of the movement of decolonization to the extent that they sought to unearth and represent these experiences as the enabling means of reclaiming subjective agency and sovereignty in the face of subjugation, dependency, and marginalization on the world stage of history. The emergent culture of struggle of the colonized would consist of this process of freeing into expressivity the whole range of social life that colonialism impeded, if not obliterated. Culture was this very process of creative restitution and expressive action that Frantz Fanon argued was commensurate with the concrete, practical struggle ‘‘to bring into existence the history of the nation—the history of decolonization.’’ This book contends that the task of creating empowered historical subjects through the representation of submerged historical experiences was and continues to be of the utmost necessity. As E. San Juan Jr. argues, ‘‘These heterogeneous projects of resistance and revolt, inscribed in poems, stories, testimonios, and other performances of those formerly silenced and made invisible, are what ultimately reproduce the ‘Third World’ as a permanent political-cultural agency 4

introduction

of global transformation . . . these performances can be used to fashion emancipatory constituent subjects who are equipped with ‘a memory of the future,’ a recollection of hopes and dreams from which the future is extrapolated.’’∂ And yet, as important as the task of creating emancipatory subjects remains, equally vital is the task of putting into language modes of experiential practice that fall short of received proper forms of historical subjectivity and social experience and yet serve as crucial means of everyday life struggles. Tangential to the aims of both hegemonic and counterhegemonic forms of political agency, these seemingly obsolescent modes of experience propel and shape the production of the very conditions of life around which organized politics revolve, as they are the inventions of people struggling with those conditions. Putting these diminished experiential practices into language thus becomes a way to contemplate the creative political potentials and alternative social resources that they might spell, potentials and resources that are instead quickly jettisoned in attempts to wrest control of a world gone awry. As crisis abounds and things fall apart, rather than mere anarchy, it is the tangential aims and poiesis (the poetic creations) of people’s experiences that are ‘‘loosed upon the world,’’ turning into mere fodder for the making of new universal forms of social being and aspiration—indeed, for the makings of our present globality. To reconsider the politics of such makings, I tell a Philippine story of world transformation from the perspective of historical experiences that ‘‘fall away’’ from global capitalist and nation-state narratives of development as well as from social movement narratives of liberation. I look at feminist, urban protest, and revolutionary literatures from the 1960s to the 1990s and examine their renderings of oppressive contemporary social conditions of authoritarian rule, feminized labor exploitation, rural peasant tenant relations, and militarism. What I find is that in order to construct proper political subjects capable of transforming history, social movement literatures draw on supplementary modes of experience that serve as vital supports for the material conditions of social life and struggle. However, to the extent that they exceed the valorized forms of political subjectivity defined by feminism, urban activism, and the revolutionary movement, these vital modes of experience are necessarily eschewed by the very political subjects they help to constitute. In rechanneling this experiential labor for the constitution of a proper historical subject, progressive and radical literary works tend to subsume the alterity of those experiential practices into universal forms of subjectivity and agency, which are meaningful within the dominant field of Loosed upon the World

5

politics. The clearest example of this can be found in literary articulations in the period after the Second World War of a unitary sovereign nationalist subject as the proper historical agent of an anti-imperialist movement. Much work has been accomplished by historians in subaltern studies in deconstructing this unitary nationalist subject constructed by the elite classes of newly independent former colonies and, further, in uncovering the cultural strategies of resistance of ‘‘the people’’ whom such a nationalist subject purportedly represents (but, as Enrique Dussel says of Eurocentric history in relation to indigenous history, e√ectively ‘‘covers over’’). My own work is a continuation and critical extension of this subaltern studies project in relation to nonhegemonic, dissident national subjects in the contemporary period, and as articulated not in historiography but in literature.

Literature and Political Community They took away the language of my blood, Giving me one ‘‘more widely understood.’’ More widely understood! Now Lips can never Never with the Soul-of-Me commune Moments there are I strain, but futile ever To flute my feelings through some Native Tune. —trinidad tarrosa-subido

Literature is here not to be taken as a representation of the lived experiences of particular people. Works of postcolonial literature are rather to be viewed as experiments in broader social projects, indeed, in the very imagining of modern political communities, most evidently of the nation but not exclusively so. Insofar as postindependent national literature is actively involved in projects that construct new social relations where these would seem to be impeded by the retarding forces of a continuing colonialism, literary works will necessarily draw on subjective practices and experiential modes that exceed the very projects whose aims they are called upon to further. A brief episode in what is considered the foundational novel of the Philippine nation, José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, limns a mode of experience that will be recognized, a hundred years later, as the mode of the ‘‘other politics’’ at work in nationalism. In this episode, the grotesque Doña Consolacion, the native 6

introduction

woman whose outrageous pretensions to Spanish identity include the denial that she can understand Tagalog, orders the tragic native mother, Sisa, to sing for her. As Sisa sings the plaintive melody of the kundiman, a melancholy love song form which in the listening soldiers ‘‘awakened memories of times when they were still uncorrupted,’’ Doña Consolacion’s mocking laughter turns to pensive thought: ‘‘The voice, the meaning of the words and the song itself, impressed her. That arid and dried-up heart was perhaps thirsty for rain. She understood the song well: ‘The sadness, the cold and the moisture falling from heaven wrapped in night’s mantle,’ according to the kundiman, seemed to descend on her heart as well.’’ In perfect Tagalog, she orders Sisa to stop singing. Suddenly aware that her emotional and linguistic response has betrayed her to her native servant and feeling ashamed, she throws herself into a violent dancing frenzy, trying to force Sisa to join in her exorcist ritual by whipping at the poor woman’s feet. Doña Consolacion’s denied a√ective sensibility in this episode depicts a cultural mode of experience that Reynaldo Ileto famously interprets as forms of awa (mercy/pity) and damay (empathetic grief), which figure prominently in peasant millennarian movements against Spanish and U.S. colonialisms in the early twentieth century. In Ileto’s own subalternist argument, awa and damay were experiential modes that significantly animated and shaped Philippine nationalism, even as they could be viewed by bourgeois nationalist history only as backward, atavistic practices that needed to be brought in line with more rationalist conceptions of nationalist politics. While Rizal himself propagated a modern, Enlightenment vision of nationalist subjectivity, his literary works nevertheless invoked such cultural practices of grief and pity in order to construct the proper ilustrado nationalism embodied in his central character, Crisostomo Ibarra. The visceral power of Sisa’s singing of the kundiman—the expressive force of what TarrosaSubido, writing under U.S. colonialism, grasped as ‘‘some Native Tune’’—can thus be understood as a figuration of a mode of experience that is otherwise excised from the representation of the proper historical subject of nationalism, even as it is a motivating force of nationalism’s construction. In postcolonial theory, subalternity is identifiable only as traces or fade-out points of realities that, in their radical alterity and absolute incommensurability to notions of agency and subjectivity within an imperial episteme, can never be recovered or restored. In contrast to this notion of subalternity, the subjective practices and experiential modes that I argue fall away from the representations Loosed upon the World

7

of proper political subjects in social movement literatures are figured and enacted in those literatures out of the very materials of concrete reality they ethnographically render. It is precisely as this figural enactment that I write of ‘‘experience.’’ As figural enactments, such experiences take on the consistency and status of things known and acted upon, apprehensible realities factored into the conduct of life. Placed in expressible form, they have worldly e√ects on actual social relations (though it should be said that literary renderings do not exhaust the experiences they depict). If I have therefore depended on the powerful conceptual premise of the foreclosure accomplished by narrative and representation that has undergirded some of the most important critiques of feminist, antiracist, postcolonial, and queer scholarship in the past few decades, I have at the same time importantly heeded a few of these critiques’ attempts, beyond the careful tracking of the operations of foreclosure, to seek in the fragments and debris that mark the limits of hegemonic narratives and representations the expressible elements of unrecognized and overlooked modes of viable life. On this view, one of my main objectives in this book has been to carefully attend to the varied, creative potential of subjective practices that socially oriented and social movement literatures attempt to figuratively capture and yet tend to diminish in the fabulation of proper historical subjects. Often viewed as atavistic and mystified habits and therefore as forms of weakness and self-oppression that need to be overcome, these devalued, supplemental experiential practices nevertheless importantly create and transform the very material, social structures in which feminists, urban activists, and revolutionary forces actively seek to intervene. Very importantly, such diminished experiences have helped to bring about broad social changes in ways that these groups could not foresee. Under the dominant sway of capitalist imperatives, supplementary modes of experience have wrought the transformed conditions of the national ‘‘prostitution’’ economy, the diaspora of domestic labor, the explosion of the urban informal economy, the rise of crony capitalism, the metropolitanist restructuring of the nation’s capital, the deracination of the peasantry, the modernization of social relations in the countryside, the democratization of the nation, and the emergence of a permanent political state of emergency. These fallout experiences articulated in contemporary Philippine literatures can therefore serve as devices for tracking the dynamics of political and economic transformation, which they invisibly mediate. In this book, ‘‘the Philippines’’ serves as one important theoretical place from 8

introduction

which to view and understand the larger world within which it is situated. On the margins of the new industrializing economy of the Asia Pacific, as a principal source of undervalued labor both for the region and for the world at large, as home to one of the few living revolutionary communist movements in the world, and as a key geopolitical base for cold war and post-cold-war U.S. global politics, the Philippines is the site of heightened dynamics and social contradictions in the universalizing processes that shaped the last few decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. The Philippines therefore a√ords a view of local social conditions that underwrite the nation’s own participation in the transnational processes that have resulted in, for example, the establishment of a new international division of labor, the emergence of an urban-based transnational finance economy, and the political democratization and neoliberalist restructuring of formerly authoritarian nation-states. This peripheral story of Philippine life brings into focus the liminal makings of globalization, its endgame, and its present afterlives. By attending to the experiential predicaments and subjective hopes of those relegated to the global undersides, this story speaks broadly to the concerns of other emergent disenfranchised social groups and the similar predicaments they find themselves in, in shared contexts of global capitalism. If, after all, the contradictions of global capitalism first appear in the peripheries (by which I do not principally refer to geopolitically fixed territories or essentially defined social bodies, but to zones of subaltern activity that are to be found also in the centers of capital), then it is also there that we can find both the creative capacities of people struggling to surpass the limits of the life to which they are condemned and the apparatuses of capture minted by capital and state powers to appropriate those creative capacities and their political potential.

Historical Experience Examining Philippine literary depictions of contemporary social problems, I ask, what is the role of specific historical experiences in bringing about and shaping the large-scale transformation of the political and socioeconomic organization of Philippine life in the last thirty years of the twentieth century? The aim of this inquiry is to attend to the political seeds of an alternative future, which already exist in the form of devalued social modes of experience. As Fredric Jameson writes, ‘‘The seeds of the future already exist within the presLoosed upon the World

9

ent and must be conceptually disengaged from it, both through analysis and through political praxis (the workers of the Paris Commune, Marx once remarked in a striking phrase, ‘have no ideals to make ’; they merely sought to disengage emergent forms of new relations from the older capitalist social relations in which the former had already begun to stir).’’∑ My own analytical method follows this insight. It consists of conceptually disengaging emergent modes of social experience from older forms of politically valorized subjectivity. These emergent modes of social experience are seeds of the future to the extent that they are the means by which people extricate themselves from and thereby impel the transformation of dominant social relations. Although in contrast to Jameson I would argue that the temporality of social relations is not so straightforward. Emergent modes may well consist of older forms, which the progressive forms of (modern) experience may have supplanted or at least pushed into the recesses of ‘‘backward,’’ ‘‘developing’’ social subjects, just as older modes emerge as the fallout of the new. Thus, the seeds of the future may have long incubated in the everyday practical memories we carry with us and invoke in our literature. By ‘‘historical experience’’ I do not mean only people’s collective responses to the objective social and economic conditions in which they find themselves. I also mean the collective subjective practices they engage in that help to produce and remake those objective conditions. Experience consists of this human activity of mediation between self and social reality, that is to say, the cognitive, semiotic, a√ective, visceral, and social practices of relating to the world that individuals engage in as part of the process of producing themselves. These practices of mediation, which are socially organized, help to constitute both individual selves and the socioeconomic conditions to which they are subject. In this sense, experience does not belong to some deeply personal realm; subjective forms are products of this mediating activity as much as socioeconomic structures are products of labor. Experience is to be understood, as Teresa de Lauretis writes, ‘‘in the general sense of a process by which, for all social beings, subjectivity is constructed.’’∏ In my view, this process results not only in the e√ect of subjectivity, but also in the e√ect of worldly realities. To revise Louis Althusser’s famous thesis, there is no subject except in and for a material world. This does not mean that the relation between subject and the world is one of adequation or, as in Althusser’s view, a matter of reproduction.π Insofar as the material world consists of social relations of domination and subordination, the experiential process is at once the means and site of social struggle. The process by which 10

introduction

subjects are constituted is crucial to the maintenance and transformation of the world in and for which they are subjects. In Part I, for example, I discuss the experiential practices of syncretic sociability, or kapwa (shared subjectivity), engaged in by Filipinas that contributes to their feminization and commodification within and outside of their communities. These practices of kapwa can be seen to fundamentally support the conditions of state-sponsored prostitution that obtained during the period of the Marcos dictatorship and thereby to demonstrate, against progressive political analyses of the complete objectification of women for and by capital, the productive power of ‘‘prostituted’’ Filipinas. In a second historical moment, these same practices of extended subjectivity and permeable selfhood are to be gleaned in the faithful and fate-playing actions of great numbers of Filipina women leaving their homes and the nation to fuel the ‘‘warm-body,’’ or domestic labor export industry. Superseding the sex tourism and light-manufacturing export industries as the primary dollar-revenue-generating industries of the national economy in the postauthoritarian period, the domestic labor export industry and its determinate role in globalization can be understood as in no small measure the consequence of the experiential practices of self-making on the part of an emergent Filipina diaspora and the revitalized traditions of personhood, cosmic power, and spiritual mediation on which these experiential practices depend. Through their literary rendering of these devalued yet absolutely vital experiential practices, Filipina writers make these other social relations available as potential bases of new political movements. New and old modes of experience and subjective practices operating in emergent social formations are therefore to be viewed as cultural means of structuring and restructuring dominant social relations of production. Things Fall Away argues that the historical potential of experience as a social activity lies in its creative character. Feminists have long argued for recognizing the creative power, if not strictly value-productive character, of activities understood through the rubric of feminine reproduction.∫ They have also argued for the fundamental importance of activities contained within the realm of the private to the political and economic activities comprising the putatively broader realm of the public sphere. Bringing these feminist arguments together with Marxist arguments about exploitation as the modus operandi of capitalism, I view social experience as a form of creative or living labor that is subject to exploitation. As Antonio Negri defines it, ‘‘Exploitation is precisely the seizure, the centralization Loosed upon the World

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and the expropriation of the form and the product of social cooperation, and therefore it is an economic determination in a very meaningful way—but its form is political.’’Ω Systemic political and economic structures are predicated on the organized expropriation of the creative labor of social experience through sociocultural logics of nationhood, gender, sexuality, race, religion, and other categories of social di√erence and exclusion. Expropriation does not refer to the theft of any specific quantity of surplus labor time, as the Marxist labor theory of value would understand it. Rather, it refers to the subsumption of the immeasurable time of social cooperation, which feminists and third world intellectuals have shown to be indispensable to the productivity of labor and therefore to the creation of wealth and power.∞≠ Indeed, what Marx understood about land and other natural resources—that they are fundamental means of people’s life production and self-production, which, through processes of force as well as capitalist development, both social and technological, they are continually dispossessed of—some, including Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarrato, and Jonathan Beller, understand to be true of technologies and social practices of immaterial, intellectual, and sensorial labor. While attention to activities once classified as unproductive work, including consumption, as labor is often paid in reference to the formalization of such work under post-Fordist economies, Marxistfeminist thinking about culture, social cooperation, sex/a√ective, and reproductive women’s work (Maria Mies, Claudia von Werlhof, Victoria BennholdtThomsen, Ann Ferguson, Gayatri Spivak) has importantly demonstrated that capitalist accumulation has historically and continuously depended on the ‘‘primitive accumulation’’ of ‘‘non-capitalist’’ resources and work, embodied in the naturalized forces comprised of the activities and personhoods of women, colonized natives, and slaves.∞∞ Such thinking builds on Rosa Luxemburg’s insight about how, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperialism, capital needed noncapitalist strata to reproduce and expand beyond phases of simple profit. Contrary to her expectation, capitalism did not reach the limit of this expansion with the colonization of the entire world and the incorporation of the rest of the world’s territorial noncapitalist strata within the command of capital (a limit that would have constituted the conditions for capitalism’s collapse). What was beyond Luxemburg’s purview is the fact that capital had not exhausted other forms of noncapitalist strata as continuing sources of appropriable value. Besides spheres of labor reproduction delegated to women and to traditional 12

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or underdeveloped and semicolonial communities (including racialized underclasses within metropolitan countries), capital has found and produced new noncapitalist strata as sites of appropriation of value. As the work of Jonathan Beller argues, capital ‘‘burrows’’ into the body, ‘‘mining’’ it of value, a phenomenon remarked upon by others as the absorption of ‘‘the production of subjectivity’’ in the processes of capitalism. While capitalism has long relied on the noneconomic practices of colonialism, both of internal and external populations and their subsistence economies, as a necessary part of its logic of accumulation, it is certainly true that contemporary capitalism has found ways to incorporate arenas of human activity that had remained outside of its formal productive economy (such as domestic labor and other service work in the former colonies) within its new global industries, just as it has commodified natural resources that had remained part of the commons (such as water, seeds, and genetic material).∞≤ If we denaturalize these newly capitalized human and nonhuman resources and understand them not as freely appropriable nature but as the products of organized sentient, bodily capacities and energies (forms of cooperation that traverse human agency), then it is possible to consider social experience as an important force and means of lifeproduction of those very human and natural resources. The point is not so much to expand the concept of labor to subsume all human experience under this category, but rather to utilize the notion of labor as appropriable life-making social capacities and as a theoretico-political standpoint to examine the role of immaterial and bodily practices of experience of marginalized social groups in contemporary relations of accumulation and production. As I show in this book, just as the national sex work and domestic labor industries depend on the expropriation of the social experiential practices of women, so does the specific regime of accumulation achieved by the Marcos state known as crony capitalism depend on the expropriation of the social experiential practices of informal labor. In Part II, I discuss the latter experience in terms of adventurism, the fate-playing, speculative practices of the urban excess or lumpenproletariat, which I argue contributes both to the activist ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s and to the crony capitalist regime that establishes itself on the basis of this political crisis. In addition to the notion of historical experience as socially organized and socially producing subjective practices (experience as living labor), I am also working with the notion of historical experience as the concrete articulation Loosed upon the World

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of connections between subjective activity and socioeconomic structures (one might say, a reassemblage of heterogeneous symbolic and material practices) that provides a dynamic situated picture of a historical moment.∞≥ Jun Cruz Reyes, the author of a novelistic memoir of urban life immediately following the declaration of martial law, demonstrates this notion of historical experience in the picture of authoritarian ‘‘development’’ that he creates out of his pedestrian meandering. Adopting the mode of life of the urban poor, Reyes’s protagonist becomes a scavenger, at once refuse and refuse collector, creating a narrative collage of the unassimilable residues of Marcos’s New Society in order to map the corrupt, repressive regime on which urban development depends. Similarly, in Part II, I reassemble constitutive connections between the liminal urban experiences articulated by Jun Cruz Reyes, Jose Lacaba, and Tony Perez and the transformation of Metro Manila from national capital to protoglobal city. In doing so, I am able, like Reyes, Lacaba, and Perez, to provide a dynamic picture of late Philippine urban modernity from the point of view of its human refuse. If modernity is the project of obtaining a universal synchronicity of historical time, a project that entails the separation and hierarchic di√erentiation of social space and the sloughing o√ of populations—the production of surplus peoples —as its refuse, this is also a project that demands the devaluation and elimination of the diversity of times. Temporality is cleft between a time of history and times of waste. In the picture of urban modernity rendered by these authors, times of waste are not only the fallout of the time of catastrophe that is development; they are also diminished and disposable forms of life. To render the historical experience of late modern urbanization from the side of these disposable times and lives, I look for tangential experiential practices that, while participating in the making of a dominant order, nevertheless elude its logical categories of social and political agency. In the liberative claim to a transcendent human value as a measure of coping with urban sexual abjection that Perez articulates, for example, I find the practice of what I call a queer faith in frivolous material details (kiyeme), in times spared from exchange. These practices of faith in excess matter entail another kind of self as well as another possible form of historical agency, than the self-possessed, self-valuing, and truth-bearing masculine subject that Perez politically constructs as a liberated gay subject. Out of these practices of faith, Perez pieces together a self that is commensurate with the new metropolitan subject supporting the emergent social order of global urbanism—the subject that is called civil society. And yet the very tangential 14

introduction

experience of kiyeme through which this subject thrives can find no legitimate place within such an order. It is from the side of this contradictory historical experience that we can see the hidden human costs of metropolitan achievement. Historical experience is thus both the imaginary, a√ective, sociosubjective activity that impels and shapes prevailing relations of production in a particular sociohistorical formation and the hermeneutic perspective that recognizes alternative agencies in the making of history, which such activity a√ords. In Part III, I discuss the way outmoded or chiliastic spiritual practices continue to operate within, even as they exceed, the Messianic structure of experience of revolutionary struggle. Though diminished by party and Left criticism as semifeudal habits, practices of spiritual mediumship and of cult value are shown in revolutionary literature to operate as a√ective technologies that make possible the everyday life of the movement. A consideration of the fundamental role that these same a√ective technologies played in both the so-called spiritual revolution of the middle class that ousted Marcos and the paramilitary vigilante violence that followed on the heels of democratization demonstrates the broader unfinished process of cultural transformation, which the movement played a central part in shaping. It provides a glimpse of the surplus cultural resources invented within the course of revolutionary struggle whose political possibilities remain unexhausted by progressive political organization and strategy. The surplus of cultural resources generated out of the historical experience of social struggles attests to the surplus of meaning and activity that is intrinsic to experience. In the revolutionary movement, such surplus can be found in the form of surplus life that is produced through rituals of radicalized grief and the invocation of what I call divine sorrow, serving as the very means of continuing struggle in the face of fatal losses incurred in war. And yet, even as practices of revolutionary experience play an important role in the production of existing conditions of struggle, they necessarily exceed their role as means of existing life, even of existing hopes. Surpassing their utility for the present, experiential practices of struggle can become seeds of the future or seeds that fall by the wayside of history. What we make of such practices, just as what we do with real seeds (‘‘as the site and symbol of freedom in the age of manipulation and monopoly of life’’), will shape the fate of our struggles.∞∂ If we are not to be contained by the destinies of our own age, it is worth remembering what third world postcolonial and antiracist intellectuals have foregrounded as the modern foundational role and as yet unrealized political promise of impeded life possibilities, desires, and Loosed upon the World

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subjectivities—ontologies that have historically been prevented from coming into being, or into presencing, by symbolic as well as material orders of domination and exploitation. From this renewed standpoint of dispossessed historical experience we are thus led to envision forms of political action and alternative futures that are at once immanent in and yet seemingly outside of the dominant historical imaginations of existing social movements.

Literature and Experience The very concept of historical experience, which stems from the political exigencies of the present moment, allows a sustained consideration of the ways in which seemingly tangential subjective practices in peripheral social formations such as the Philippines participate in local makings of global subjects and their universal forms and conditions of possibility. It allows us to read social movement literatures as themselves kinds of ‘‘cultural software’’ for the transformation of dominant social relations. In this endeavor these literatures do not merely represent or thematize the historical experiences of existing social subjects (for whom they are means of expression); they also deploy socially shared modes of experience and subjective practices as a way of creating new social subjects with transformative historical agency. They are, in this regard, technological interventions in the process of subjective production of existing social relations. Almost all the literature I analyze here regards itself precisely as an instrument of subjective change, though often it articulates this task as the changing of consciousness. Since the anticolonial movement against the Spanish empire, Philippine literature has been compelled toward the evocation of transformative historical experience. Besides decoding the social and cultural organization of power at a given moment, it has articulated through the historical experiences it renders standpoints for the coming into being of new social actors who would change the material conditions in which they find themselves. This renewed attention to historical experience not merely as submerged truth-content but also as practical social media has valuable repercussions for thinking more generally about strategies of political struggle in contemporary postcolonial contexts. It also allows a reconsideration of the potential of postcolonial literatures for putting into language vital forms of acting and being in the world that fall from the purview of the modern worlds they have helped to create. An attention to literature as imaginary works forces us to consider the work 16

introduction

of mediation, not least of all the scholar’s, when we seek truths in the world. Reading literature enables us to move away from the false typicality that more conventional works of anthropology and sociology tend to read and establish by means of oral testimonies, real stories of real people.∞∑ This typicality also tends to inform minority histories, in which stories come to express the life and lifemovement of a larger, preconstituted collective identity, conceived through the given form of a hegemonic political subject. As Dipesh Chakrabarty writes, ‘‘Minority histories, one may say, in part express the struggle for inclusion and representation that are characteristic of liberal and representative democracies.’’∞∏ To the extent that they aim to be adequate to an independently existing historical, sociocultural reality, accounts of Filipino culture and social life participate in the hegemony of realist and historicist representation that continues to prevail over academic knowledge production. Although it uses literary texts as ciphers of experiential technologies, this book is not primarily concerned with the institution of literature and its products and values, or even with the political economy of world literature. Neither, however, is it concerned with literature as a transparent example of culture, conceived as a realm separate from the realm of politics and economics or as a repository of ‘‘the touch of the real,’’ which can be excavated and seized by a literary studies seeking to recover lived life.∞π Even as anthropology and history increasingly turn to literary sources to support claims about the discursive, cultural constructions of the real (while, conversely, literary criticism turns to historical archives and real events to do the same), this book does not use literature as a representation of lived experience.∞∫ As Gilles Deleuze writes, ‘‘Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond any livable or lived experience.’’∞Ω I understand writing as a practical experiment in the possibilities of experience—an exercise in becoming—that necessarily draws on prevailing social modes of experience in order to create those possibilities.≤≠ On this view, literature is a worldly artifact, subject to specific and general rules of production and both limited and open to particular kinds of relations with other worldly artifacts, such as film and music, as well as cooking utensils, overpasses, and gra≈tti, newspapers and political treatises. Thus I do not look to literature for typicality or representable realities; I look to it rather for creative possibility. Creative possibility recasts lived experience so that it no longer takes the form of incontrovertible social fact but instead takes on the experimental character of literature itself. Literary works are figurations of possibilities of life Loosed upon the World

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that authors exercise in their imaginations of historical experience; in this way, they are also theoretical perspectives on both dominant and residual cultural logics of social life. In the analyses I undertake here, literary works are thus treated as both ethnographic material (ethnography of social imagination as much as of actually lived life) and theoretical resource for writing an alternative history of the present, a history that foregrounds the creative work and transformative potential of marginalized social experiences and their unrecognized role in the making of the contemporary world. At the same time, literature is itself a technology that limits while it articulates what Sylvia Wynter calls specific ‘‘genres of being human’’ in the interest of involvement in truthful human experience.≤∞ As Michel Foucault argues, our present forms of discourse, including literature, are constrained by a will to knowledge and a need to validate themselves on the basis of true discourse. Similar to what Foucault lauds as increasing contemporary attention to discontinuities and interruptions beneath the great continuities of thought and discourse, my interest in the discontinuities of plot, subject formation, and logics of social relation lies in the uncovering of forces of flight, points of insubordination, behaviors, capacities, and conducts that exceed or escape the structures governing political narratives and the proper subjectivities of nation and social movements. My method of reading is thus not a matter of reading against the grain but rather within the grain of manifest representation, attending to those moments and gestures that stick to the analytical comb, appearing interruptive or out of joint or simply superfluous to the works’ proper aims. In thus attending to such tangential tendencies within the representation of historical experience as elements of virtual life-worlds that might yet be organized into reimagined political claims, we make way for ‘‘the living openness of history.’’≤≤

Things Fall Away is divided into three parts, each focusing on a zone of historical experience of late Philippine modernity. These zones—namely, the feminization of labor, accelerated urbanization, and revolution—serve as sites for viewing the social, economic, and political transformations that have taken place since the early 1970s. Each part is composed of three chapters delineating the transformations experienced in a particular social zone in several moments. In the first part,

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introduction

‘‘Feminization,’’ these moments are marked as (1) the restructuring of the Philippines into a female-fueled, export-oriented prostitution economy from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s and (2) the transformation of this economy into a domestic labor (or warm-body) export industry from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. In the second part, ‘‘Urbanization,’’ these two moments are marked as (1) the developmentalist modernization of Metro Manila as the national capital under the Marcos regime and (2) the transformation of the metropolis into a global city in the post-Marcos period. In the last part, ‘‘Revolution,’’ these two moments are marked as (1) the generation of a radical movement underground and the waging of a revolutionary people’s war against the state and the ruling socioeconomic order and (2) the decimation of the revolutionary forces by an intensified counterinsurgency campaign and the preemptive weakening of the movement through the supposed restoration of democracy brought about by a revolt led by the middle class that deposed Marcos in 1986. In each part, I examine the construction of the proper political subjects produced by the respective literary/social movements of feminism, urban activism, and revolution. I trace constitutive relations between, on the one hand, the modes of experience thematized and deployed in the construction of these political subjects and, on the other, the dominant socioeconomic relations against which these dissident subjects struggled. I then examine the subaltern subjective practices that fall away from the universal forms of political agency that these proper political subjects aspire to. These universal forms of political agency are delimited by the social categories of the commodity, money, and capital. Wynter argues that bourgeois European humanism inaugurated an economic conception of being human that now dominates our experience of ourselves, a domination propagated and furthered not least by the institution of literature. As she writes: ‘‘The economic conception of the human—Man—. . . unifies us as a species in economically rather than, as before, in theologically absolute terms.’’≤≥ Wynter argues further that ‘‘it is the bioeconomic conception of the human that we inscript and institute by means of our present disciplines and their epistemic order, as Foucault shows so incisively, that determines the hegemony of the economic system over the social and political systems—even more, that mandates the functioning of the capitalist mode of production as the everyday expression of that hegemony.’’≤∂ It is on this view that we can understand the universal categories of commodity, money, and capital as dominant social representational

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categories that serve as measures by which certain experiential practices fall into subalternity and, correspondingly, as the interpretative horizons beyond which it behooves us to imagine other possibilities for political agency.

Global South Theory The specific modalities of social life in a seemingly peripheral social formation such as the Philippines do not merely demonstrate the localization or vernacularization of global forms, as many accounts of alternative modernities would have it. Rather, these modalities of social life provide hermeneutic elements for understanding the productive dimensions of local, cultural activity and, by extension, the unrecognized productive forces of globalization itself. (If globalization is the very process of generalization and universalization of life forms through the interpellation of diverse cultural practices, Philippine authors are explicitly as well as tacitly involved in social projects that are themselves part of these processes insofar as they have universalist political aims.) But this is not a localist argument, to the extent that I very much rely on the analytical resources generated out of other postcolonial or global south contexts. Scholarly works on minority contexts and the historical experiences of slavery and immigration in the United States as well as transnational feminist works in Egypt, for example, provide important resources and a≈liative solidarity for thinking about overseas Filipina domestic labor and contemporary nonsecularist forms of belonging; other works on political forms and informal work and non-work in the contexts of Puerto Rico, Cameroon, and Tanzania inform my interpretation of urban informal labor and adventurism; and revolutionary imagination in Latin America and China shapes my views of the Philippine revolutionary movement. These works of and from the global south, as the site of some of the most vigorous processes of labor exploitation and social dispossession as well as some of the most vibrant historical and contemporary social movements in the world today, have shaped the hermeneutic possibilities I have found in the Philippine context. In this collective endeavor to understand the periphery of the advanced capitalist world beyond Eurocentric accounts of it, I find an emergent theory of hidden and unacknowledged productive forces of the global economy. Thus, features of postmodernity that appear to characterize some of the historical experiences I describe here can be seen to derive to a great extent from the inventions and innovations of marginalized global peoples struggling to mate20

introduction

rially imagine themselves out of present, discrepant conditions of modernity.≤∑ Only through hermeneutic perspectives a√orded by subaltern historical experiences of globalization can these inventions and innovations and their tangential roles in the making of generalized forms of globality such as postmodernity be recognized, hopefully to be recast in the directions of histories that are truly alternative to the ones now available to us. In the mode of creative restitution proposed here, experiences that seem destined for disappearance and loss will no longer be the inevitable leavings of those proper liberatory struggles that, from the distance of an achieved global system, appear to have failed. Rather, they can become the very means to realize as yet untried, if not unimagined, viable, just modes of social life. Unlike early subaltern studies work, I locate cultural subalternity not in clearly delineated realms of indigenous or traditional practice outside of capitalist structures but rather precisely within capitalist processes and relations. This book is premised on the idea that the outsides of capitalism are everywhere to be found in cultural practices in the moment prior to their subsumption by universal capitalist forms. ‘‘Outside,’’ then, refers not to a particular spatial or social location on the field of political exchange but to a missed temporal dimension subsisting within and yet di√erent from the time of capital. It refers to what Dussel describes as the seemingly trivial, useless, and unproductive practices of people’s experiential activity, which remain invisible to the capitalist economy and continue to ‘‘bypass the oppressor’s ‘universal culture.’ ’’≤∏ If, as Fanon reminds us, ‘‘every human problem must be considered from the standpoint of time,’’ it is by understanding these cultural practices within the diversity of their times—what appear here as the times of waste and of su√ering as well as the time of castaways, of passion and divine sorrow—that we can view the dynamism of human creativity and struggle. Raymond Williams writes, ‘‘No mode of production, and therefore no dominant society or order of society, and therefore no dominant culture, in reality exhausts the full range of human practice, human energy, human intention.’’≤π The recognition of those dimensions of human practice, energy, and intention that are not exhausted depends on conceptual apparatuses provided by their practitioners and on the epistemological/cosmological instruments they employ. These practitioners are not a unified group—they are socialities in the making, socialities whose constitutive limits are created and defined by the very structures of experience they invent and draw upon in the course of their social Loosed upon the World

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(not simply class) struggles. Members of that middling stratum known as the postcolonial petty bourgeoisie, the authors discussed here show their participation in these struggles as they attempt to go beyond the imaginary limits of their own social destinies, becoming in the course of these struggles, among other things, feminists, activists, and revolutionaries. In doing so, they show themselves to be part of the very forces creating the dynamism of changing Philippine social relations. The growing global social polarities and antagonisms everywhere remarked upon are thus produced by people themselves, not merely by the inhuman structures of capitalism and other hypostatized agents of oppression. In the literary works I analyze here, we witness this negative kind of social agency, which is infrequently commented upon in the celebratory accounts of agency as resistance that abound. Here we see liberatory practices intricately intertwined with practices of devaluation, diminishment, and suppression. On the other hand, social practices that appear to support the material conditions of prostitution, crony capitalism, and semifeudal social relations, which stand readily condemned from the available moral-political positions of progressive thought, are shown to yield other political potentials, creative cultural resources that are continually stolen by dominant social groups and then used by these groups to make damning moral judgments against their inventors. This is a tale of dispossession and lost potential, told, like many other tales of dispossession and loss, with some measure of anger, some measure of sadness, and some measure of hope. In my estimation, e√orts to remake the world, not from a transcendent or idealist site of politics but rather from within an evercompromised yet also ever-promising world, must have these measures—anger, sadness, hope, such paltry words considering what they might invoke and what changes the experiences of tangential life might yet bring about.

22

introduction

Chapter One

Prostituted Filipinas and the Crisis of Philippine Culture During the 1980s, a decade since the beginning of Ferdinand Marcos’s authoritarian regime, a bad joke was making rounds in the Philippines: ‘‘Gas, rice, sugar—everything is going up! The only things coming down are panties!’’ What people were remarking upon in this bit of tendentious humor was the massive growth of prostitution that had taken place since the beginning of the military dictatorship in 1972 and that had consequently earned Manila the reputation of being the sex capital of the world. As disclosed by the word ‘‘panties,’’ the sexual goods on the market were not ungendered; they were almost exclusively female. During this period, between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand prostituted women were working in the areas surrounding the U.S. bases, impelling one U.S. soldier to remark, ‘‘Pussy, that’s what the Philippines is all about.’’∞ In this misogynist, homophobic, racist worldview, pussy is not only what the Philippines has, it is what the Philippines is. The interpretation of this particular nation as ‘‘female’’ sex owes its deplorable truth to what I have elsewhere called a heterosexist fantasy of political-economic relations and practices at work among nations.≤ In this libidinal new world order, in which gendered sexualities are

signifiers of the organizing principles of national economies and their political status in the international community, the Philippines functions as a hostess nation, catering to the demands and desires of her clients—multinational capital and the U.S. government and military. That the national economic crisis should be depicted by Filipinos themselves as the clearance sale of female sexual goods thus comes as no surprise.≥ In this period, prostitution became the central metaphor for the state-directed turning over of the national economy to exportoriented industrialization and tourism, which meant, for those who vigorously objected, turning the national body—its people, its resources—over to multinational capital dominated by the United States. Prostituted women thus became the symptoms of the crisis of the nation. They were not only specific instances of the general debasing, corrupt, and corrupting enterprise overseen by the state, but also the symbolic embodiment of the inconsistencies threatening the ideal consistency of the nation, a consistency conceived in the moral, political, and economic terms of sovereignty and integrity. The figure of the prostitute becomes the paradigmatic figure of the crisis of Philippine culture to the extent that the national economy drives its people to the same kind of living. As it was once put to me, ‘‘We are a nation of prostitutes.’’ Taking the synecdochic part of the nation in crisis, the prostituted woman is the figure for the sacrifice of one’s moral integrity, conceived as feminine sexuality, and the trammeling of one’s sovereignty, conceived as masculine authority, losses which the culture, as a result of its state-keepers’ betrayal, now su√ers.

The Crisis of Culture The discourse of the crisis of Philippine culture is not new. It is as old as the concept of Philippine culture. That is because the anticolonial nation is itself born of crisis, defined by crisis, and, to the extent that it is successful in maintaining itself, perpetuating and perpetuated by crisis. Geraldine Heng and Janadas Devan explain the inclination of postcolonial governments to generate narratives of national crisis: ‘‘By repeatedly focusing anxiety on the fragility of the new nation, its ostensible vulnerability to every kind of exigency, the state’s originating agency is periodically reinvoked and ratified, its access to wide-ranging instruments of power in the service of national protection continually consolidated.’’∂ Certainly, this was demonstrated by Marcos’s constant invocation of the

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communist threat with the intention of securing for himself a permanent presidency. The crises that beset the nation are, however, many, and not necessarily invoked by the state. Marcos’s own narrative was a response precisely to the crisis posed by a competing narrative of crisis, deployed by the anti-imperialist nationalisms of bourgeois and socialist social movements alike. To the antiimperialist nationalists, Philippine culture was su√ocating under the weight of Western powers, duped by colonial mentality, weakened through brain drain, alienated and divided from itself, all to the economic and political detriment of the people. In Renato Constantino’s version of this narrative, a version widely held in the wake of national political independence ‘‘granted’’ by the United States in 1946, true Philippine culture was itself oppressed, prevented from coming into authentic, unalienated, and empowered being: ‘‘Victims of cultural Westernization, we su√er a crisis of identity as well.’’∑ The narrative of cultural crisis deployed by radical nationalists in the 1960s and 1970s and directly addressed by the Marcos regime’s own nationalist cultural mythology did not take on an explicitly female form. The gendered and sexual presumptions of this narrative are, however, already implicit in the representation of a culture rendered impotent by its multiple personality, its lack of identity and sovereignty, what the nationalist statesman Claro M. Recto described as its incomplete separation from and lingering dependence on the United States and its servile mentality and hysterical obsession with what Americans thought. Under the new international economic order of the 1970s and 1980s, years during which the Philippines mounted developmentalist economic projects that invited foreign capital investment, the crisis of culture comes to be expressed through the gendered and sexual imagery of prostitution. Feminized bodies and natural resources, which are rightfully the territory and domain of the nation, are immorally used by multinational capital. Under the new global order of the 1980s and 1990s, the crisis of culture comes to be expressed through the gendered and sexual imagery of overseas domestic work. The threat is now globalization and diasporic dispersion, and the threatened are conceived less in terms of body and territory than in terms of capacity and ethnicity. As crucial elements of the cultural order, mothers, sisters, and daughters who take their reproductive caring skills elsewhere are seen as causing the disintegration not only of their own families, but, by logical extension, of the values and indeed the moral fabric of Philippine society.∏ In short, what is a crisis of cultural sovereignty within a

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27

world of nationalisms and internationalisms becomes, within a world of postnationalisms and cosmopolitanisms, a crisis of cultural dislocation, di√usion, and dysfunction. Throughout, ‘‘culture’’ is the ‘‘loss’’ of the nation, a loss embodied and e√ected by Filipinas and shaped by the forces of globalizing capital. Considerable work has been done on the signifying roles of genders and sexualities in the making of various nationalisms, whether of revolutions or of nation-states. Much of this work has been on the representations—tropes and images—of gender and sex deployed in discourses of the nation, discourses which are recognized to have material e√ects on actual men and women. As bearers, keepers, and guardians of cultural traditions and values and national identity, women and the meanings of women become foregrounded in discourses of crisis. In much of this work, however, meanings of gender and sexuality are understood to serve as ‘‘vehicles of social and political commentary’’ about changes which have come about from other causes, causes like modernization and globalization.π Culturally circumscribing concepts such as ‘‘sex/gender system,’’ ‘‘gender relations,’’ and ‘‘gender and sexuality ideologies’’ take on an autonomy that forecloses analysis of constitutive relations between this thing called culture and this thing called capital (indeed, of the very gendered and sexualized thinking about and separation of these incommensurable realms). Such culturalist and economistic frameworks o√er us an untenable dialectic between culture and capital: capital uses cultural meanings and practices of gender and sexuality to create new forms of production; cultural meanings and practices of gender and sexuality are in turn transformed by these new forms of production of capital. In e√ect, although they are shown to interact, culture and capital are neatly separated in their respective symbolic and material realms. The ‘‘prostitution’’ of the Philippines consists, however, of a much more muddled involvement of symbolic and material practices. In the following, I analyze the concept of the feminization of Philippine labor as a crucial aspect of the prostitution of the nation. I then examine the role of gender and sexuality in the constitution of the general category of labor. Finally, I examine the ways in which Fanny Garcia, in a short story, theorizes the sociosubjective practices engaged in by Filipina women which contribute to their feminization and commodification—in a word, their prostitution—within and outside of their communities, practices which might also serve as the means of their transformative power.

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Prostituting the Nation: Feminization As a receptive, pliable, permeable body, investment in which yields value, the Filipina seems to be the private simulation of the Philippines, the very corporeal embodiment of the country’s putatively legendary openness and hospitality, except that in the subcontracting of their bodies they both share the same military and corporate clients and produce the same surplus values: political power and capital, values that not only exceed the grasp of their producers but moreover return as even greater forces for their exploitation. In e√ecting the restructuring of the Philippines into an economic formation of export-processing zones, the conditionality attached to loans and other forms of financing extended to the Philippines by international multilateral agencies throughout the 1970s and 1980s directly applied to the individual bodies of female labor who worked in these zones as well as in other sectors converted to export-oriented production and services: increasingly, the bodies of Filipinas were employed to satisfy this conditionality, restructured to corporeally conform to the specific forms and operations of labor required in tourism, prostitution, manufacturing, and other export-led industries.∫ On this view, strategies of production which characterize the latest modes in global capitalism, such as privatization of national industries, decentralization of corporations, deregulation, informalization, and flexibilization of labor operations—all these processes are brought to bear on the Filipina body. For example, particular zones of Filipina bodies are marked and transformed for export-processing operations—hands, fingers, eyes as well as sexual orifices are detailed for increasingly specialized and fragmented tasks in the electronics, garments, textiles, and sex-work industries. The subcontracting of production processes hence entails the subcontracting of Filipina body parts and their respective skills. Such a correlation represents the national body and the individual body as sites for the reception and processing of capital-intensive flows and, therefore, as e√ects of the same gendered and gendering, sexualized and sexualizing global production processes. This is the perspective one arrives at when one proceeds from the presumption of the privileged, unified determining agency of capital. The history of these transformations, which are widely recognized as developments concomitant with the establishment of the New International Division of

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Labor, cannot be rendered, however, merely as the dire consequences and necessary conditions of the actions and processes of capital. The restructuring of global production also depends, after all, on the restructuring of labor. And inasmuch as they engage in their own transformation as well as in their own production, Filipinas are not only products but also producers.Ω Prostituted Filipinas contribute significantly not only to the maintenance of the U.S. military, the security system of transnational capital, but also to its almost exclusively male international managerial class, especially that of the dominant economic power in the region, Japan.∞≠ The sexual as well as domestic services they provide to their international clientele are composed of complex skills they must acquire and refine; in the process of developing these skills and reshaping their bodies in order to ensure their marketability, they must also develop strategies of selfsustenance—psychical and social strategies that enable them to go on laboring under conditions they might otherwise find impossible to bear.∞∞ Prostituted as well by transnational manufacturing industries, Filipinas compose a significant part of the female global labor force whose socially gendered skills and subsistence work give it the flexibility and cheap reproductive cost exploited and demanded by capital. Prostitution thus pertains not only to the metaphorical construction of the Philippines as both female and feminine (signifying its lack of political and economic power and its status as possessed territory with permeable boundaries), but also to the actual conscription of female workers and their sexualized labor. Recognizing that post-Fordist strategies of accumulation have brought about a radical shift in the composition of the global labor force, including the feminization and informalization of labor in cheaper wage-zones across the world, Kenneth Surin points out the need to reconstitute the category of labor.∞≤ He asserts furthermore that ‘‘it will be possible to reconfigure labor as a category only if there is first an analysis of the structure of productive social cooperation, since this structure is the ontological basis for the mode of production.’’∞≥ The structure of productive cooperation consists of a complex of noneconomic systems of value (of gender, race, sexuality), each of which interacts with the others in the creation, maintenance, and modification of their respective terms of valence; each of these systems, including that of economic value, serves as a system of variables for the others. Thus feminization is not merely the subsumption by capital of an entirely separate logic of social reproduction which en-genders labor power. Women are 30

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not products of a traditional sex-gender system, which has of late been incorporated into the mode of production. This perspective gives rise to attributions of the overreadiness or ready-madeness of more traditional, less-modernized, i.e., third world, women for the ‘‘age-old’’ domestic-related tasks required in the Taylorist production processes in the ‘‘free trade zones.’’ Here, patriarchy and tradition both function as pre- or noncapitalist systems which capitalism has subcontracted for the cheap production of this custom-made labor. Produced by older systems on consignment to capital, third world women and children are treated, conceptually and materially, as component parts that are then easily inserted into the capitalist mode of production.∞∂ Apart from ignoring the systematic violence deployed in the manufacturing industries to maintain this labor force and the militant protests, strikes, and other forms of resistance indefatigably put up by women workers and their communities (which completely disprove what is often posited either as the willingness, acquiescence, or predisposition of women to the kinds of tasks required in these industries), accounts of feminization that view it as the deployment or transposition of older structures of social cooperation into capitalist production maintain a rigid distinction between the economic and the noneconomic as well as a distinction between capitalist and traditional patriarchal practices, with which it tends to converge.∞∑ As such, they cannot explicate the ways in which forms of gender and sexuality are constructed through (and not just tapped by) production, in other words, the ways in which gender and sexual logics of cooperation have been at once product and object of capitalist exploitation. Elizabeth Eviota shows how the gendering of particular skills and kinds of work in the Philippines has been the result of the historical interaction between traditional, colonial, and capitalist practices and institutions.∞∏ Among the institutions and structures introduced through Spanish colonization and subsequently reinforced by U.S. colonization that figured prominently in the organization of gender roles were Christianity, the Catholic Church, the state form, private property, commercialized agricultural production (including cash crops for export), and a national marketing system. Eviota shows, for example, how the granting of land titles to men during the Spanish period transformed women’s relation to the land and subordinated their agricultural work to that of their fathers and husbands. Additionally, the colonial conscription of male labor not only separated men from shared tasks, but also devalued traditional women’s work, such as handicrafts work. While giving a very useful overview of the Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture

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historical imbrication of political economy and gender ideology throughout the Spanish and U.S. colonial periods up to the present, Eviota nevertheless subscribes to the account of feminization as a process of gender ideology informing production, which allows her to conclude that in today’s garments industry ‘‘gender has come to determine class.’’∞π My point is not merely that the organization of gender and sexuality is imbricated in the organization of labor and capital, and vice versa; it is also that the sign systems of gender and value are constitutively related.∞∫ Luce Irigaray suggests this latter relation in positing that Marx’s analysis of commodities can be reconsidered as an interpretation of the social status of women.∞Ω She asserts that the analogism of her own interpretation is the means of a ‘‘going back’’ to the question of sexual di√erence, inasmuch as the relation of form to matter (on which Marx’s analysis of commodities depends) was determined in the first place by analogy to the relation between masculine and feminine. Irigaray e√ectively shows ways in which gender categories are constitutive principles of the system of value, suggesting that the symbolic system on which patriarchal societies are organized ‘‘contain in nuclear form the developments that Marx defines as characteristic of a capitalist regime.’’≤≠ Foremost among these developments is the submission of a nature correlated with women to the labor of men, whereby that nature is converted into commodities exchanged among men according to a standard of value which they themselves provide. What Irigaray postulates, in other words, is the confluence between the money-form and the phallic function, between the system of economic value of capitalism and the system of sexual value of what she calls ‘‘hom(m)o-sexuality.’’ This confluence is based on a shared principle of organization: the masculinity of its subjects and of its metaphysical representative (the transcendental sexual standard of value).≤∞ While Irigaray’s analysis precludes understanding women as labor except as the filling in of a masculine category, her suggestion of the determining significance of gender in the theory of value can serve as a basis for reexamining the very constitution of the category of labor. I suggest that a fundamental dimension of labor is constructed through notions of the feminine —just as notions of femininity are constructed through conceptions of labor— and, further, that the symbolic logic of this construction is inextricable from the logic of social cooperation at work in the constitution of feminized labor. This understanding enables us to consider the so-called feminization of labor as the realization of a historical tendency rather than, as the discourse of crisis would 32

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have it, a radically new development and, further, to view the prostitution of the Philippines which is predicated on this tendency as the e√ect of these intertwined logics.

The Gendered and Sexualized Constitution of Labor The feminine dimension of labor can be gleaned from Marx’s well-known assertion that ‘‘prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the laborer.’’≤≤ The use of the metaphor of general prostitution to characterize the condition of labor depends on the construction of female prostitution as the selling of one’s body as a commodity. Labor can be said to be prostituted and thus feminized in its function as a commodity with respect to capital. This feminine condition of labor is foregrounded in Friedrich Engels’s characterization of marital sexual relations in terms of relations of production: ‘‘Within the family [the husband] is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat. . . . [The wife] only di√ers from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let out her body on piecework as a wage worker, but sells it once and for all into slavery.’’≤≥ Wage work is women’s work to the extent that it consists of ‘‘letting out’’ or selling one’s body. The worker thus becomes feminized in his reduction to mere corporeality. Marx invokes the metaphor of prostitution in order to show this corporeal debasement of the worker under capitalism. In capitalist relations, ‘‘labour always appears as repulsive, always external, forced labour; and not labour by contrast as ‘freedom and happiness.’ ’’≤∂ The debasement of labor lies in its function as ‘‘a mere being for something else’’≤∑ and, more particularly, as a mere bodily being to be used and exchanged by and for capital. To emphasize the worker’s debasement, Marx constructs this condition of labor as a repulsive condition of feminization and emasculation. On the one hand, existence as a mere body, as an object of nature, is viewed as feminine inasmuch as nature, as the object of man’s labor, is defined as that which is not man’s body. On the other hand, being used by one’s own alienated and objectified labor (capital) is viewed as emasculating to the extent that capital, as the compounding of male labor, is masculine.≤∏ Prostitution thus becomes the expression of the unnatural condition of labor which workers must rise against. The unnaturalness of this condition is, of course, predicated on the presumption of workers as male and therefore as entitled to their heteromasculinity. Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture

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The construction of the feminine condition of labor through prostitution is not, however, merely rhetorical. It formalizes a social logic already at work in capitalist gender and sexual relations. We can see the operations of this social logic by looking at the symbolic operations necessary in order for the metaphor to work. Although female prostitution is posited as the specific expression of the general prostitution of the laborer, the general prostitution of the laborer is distinguished from female prostitution in that it entails productive labor while female prostitution entails ‘‘labor as mere service for the satisfaction of immediate needs.’’≤π The di√erence between female prostitution and the general prostitution of labor hence lies in the surplus value that is extracted from labor. How then can nonproductive labor be a specific expression of productive labor? Another kind of surplus must overcome this contradiction, a qualitative leap which is paradigmatically performed by capital in relation to labor: ‘‘Labour must of course correspond to the particular substance of which a particular capital consists as a particular labor; but since capital as such is indi√erent to every particularity of its substance, and is both the totality of all its particularities as well as the abstraction from all of them, labour confronting capital has subjectively this same totality and abstraction in itself.’’≤∫ General prostitution is the condition of labor qua labor (labor confronting capital) and as such is indi√erent to the particularities or specific expressions of its substance. It is the condition of labor as the totality of all its particularities and the abstraction from all of them. As we will see later, this totalization and abstraction are essential sociosymbolic operations in the prostitution of Filipina labor. The indi√erence to the particularities of female prostitution, which the metaphor of general prostitution requires, is, moreover, a sexual indi√erence. Labor qua labor must be capable of producing new value. Inasmuch as this value as a ‘‘being-for-itself ’’ is realized in the labor which exceeds necessary or reproductive labor, labor qua labor is realized in its di√erence from its feminine condition as a ‘‘mere being for something else.’’≤Ω Labor for capital is this (potential) value-foritself that is objectified surplus labor. From the standpoint of capital, labor is already objectified—it resembles the machines that it produced in the past but that now serve as its conditions. As such, labor is separated from itself, from itself as living labor. Labor experiences this di√erence as ‘‘the independent being-foritself of value vis-à-vis living labour capacity, hence its being as capital; the objective self-su≈cient indi√erence, the separateness of the objective conditions

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of labor vis-à-vis living labor capacity.’’≥≠ The detachment of labor as capital means also the detachment from the gendered significance of living labor, which Marx implies in his description of ‘‘the potentialities resting in living labour’s own womb.’’≥∞ Inasmuch as labor comes to mean not living labor, but ‘‘value endowed with its own power and will,’’ it partakes of the masculinity of capital, the being for whom the laborer is prostituted.≥≤ The category of labor does in fact assume this masculinity in its distinction from reproductive or nonproductive activities.≥≥ The surplus labor-time objectified in the surplus value that is extracted from the generally prostituted laborer is labor-time expended in areas of production and activities that have historically —within Western industrialized societies—been dominated (and designated to be dominated) by men. The surplus labor that hence distinguishes productive general prostitution from reproductive specific prostitution (reproductive in its mere satisfying of immediate needs) is gendered as masculine labor. It is this masculine labor that is represented in the category of abstract universal labortime, the measure of value which now applies generally to all labor and that therefore predicates the gendered di√erence between so-called productive and nonproductive activity. Thus the sexual di√erence which helps to constitute the category of labor as productive is removed from the category itself, which now appears sexually indi√erent. Along with other Marxist-feminists, Leopoldina Fortunati argues that within the capitalist system, the male/female relationship is a formal relation of production.≥∂ Capitalism requires the development of sex work as nondirectly waged work engaged in the reproduction of labor power: ‘‘It is the positing of reproduction as non-value that enables both production and reproduction to function as the production of value.’’≥∑ In the continuously aggressive expansion of capital accumulation through increased expropriation of surplus labor, feminization names the drive toward the increased devaluation of the worker’s necessary labor toward nonvalue, that is, the tendency of labor toward reproductive labor ‘‘which appear[s] to have had all value stripped from [it] by capital.’’≥∏ This condition is feminine inasmuch as it is created by work gendered as female, i.e., work that is viewed as a ‘‘natural force of social labor’’ engaged in the reproduction of labor power. Moreover, it is ‘‘feminine to the extent that it consists of activities considered inalienable from the body, indeed, commensurate with the body.’’ This feminine work comes to stand in for other forms of corporeal labor,

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embodied in slavery and colonial labor, which might be said to be the paradigm of the nonvalue of the natural force of reproductive labor. As Fortunati shows, while such work creates value for capital, this value remains hidden, incorporated, as it were, within the forms of masculine labor power which are visibly expropriated by capital. It is precisely the disappearance of the value-productive labor of prostitution in the appearance of the female worker’s body as nonvalue that enables capital to expropriate her labor. Capital’s subsumption of the value produced by female prostitution work through male labor power is a practice repeated by the metaphorical subsumption of the di√erence of general prostitution as productive labor from specific prostitution as reproductive labor. The operations that enable the disappearance of the value created by reproductive work and its hidden expropriation by capital are repeated in the symbolic construction of the concept of universal labor. These operations include the simultaneous construction and sublated negation of sexual di√erence to constitute the unmarked yet masculinist category of productive labor. I argue that the masculinist and heterosexist logic of the construction of this concept enables the intensified expropriation of surplus value outside of conventional spheres of production by defining feminine work as free, and, furthermore, that this construction and its subsumption of feminine labor are determined by the position of labor confronting capital. The feminization of labor is realized, therefore, from the same standpoint from which it is configured as masculine, that is, from the standpoint of capital. Hence, the prostitution of Filipinas is not merely the specific expression of the general prostitution of labor except from this standpoint. The prostitution of Pilipinas, the country, is realized as a metaphor for the prostitution of Filipinas, the women, only through its totalization of and abstraction from the particularities of Filipinas. As a corollary of this, the synecdochic deployment of the figure of the prostitute to signify the third world nation (as a figure of global labor) rests on the objectifying detachment of this part and the subsumption of the particularities of this part, as part, to signify the whole. I argue that the synecdoche is a crucial apparatus in the logic of social cooperation that underwrites the historical tendency of Filipinas toward prostitution. In the movement to undo this tendency, we must recognize the specific practices of the prostitution of Filipinas as constitutive of the general prostitution of the nation. That is, we must look at the feminized commodification of Philippine labor from the standpoint of Filipinas. 36

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The Experience of Labor It is important to recognize that even as Filipinas are produced as commodity objects from the standpoint of capital, they are never just objects. There is a dimension of their existence that exceeds this objectification: what Marx described as ‘‘labor which is still objectifying itself, labor as subjectivity.’’≥π The problem with some feminist critiques of the objectification of women and their tra≈cking as goods among men is a too strict adherence to the distinction between subject and object, often expressed as the psychoanalytic distinction between having and being. This Western philosophical distinction, which is also predicated on the related ‘‘scientific’’ divide between animate and inanimate, enables, for example, Gayle Rubin’s argument in her foundational essay ‘‘The Tra≈c in Women’’ that ‘‘if women are for men to dispose of, they are in no position to give themselves away,’’ an assertion that implies a necessary passivity of the exchanged goods and the completeness of their objectification.≥∫ What systems-oriented, exchange-focused analyses such as Rubin’s fail to recognize is the role of the subjective activity, that is, the experience of objectified women, in the making of the abstract systems—the very order of exchange—that appear to regulate their lives. Such oversight is characteristic of contemporary analyses of feminized labor in the context of globalization, including so-called sex tra≈cking, which tend to discover women’s agency within the system in the form of women’s negotiation of given rules and processes. I am arguing, in contrast, that it is not simply that women are exchanged through existing relationships. Rather, the structure of exchange and exchange relationships themselves are produced by women and other members of society in their active mediation, realization, and socialization of phenomenological di√erences. To attend to this activity is to recognize the ontological primacy of mediation in the production of the very di√erences on which relationships of exchange, exploitation and oppression are predicated. Analyses of the tra≈c of women that forget this activity (even if it is meant to be included later, after the patriarchal/capitalist system has been fully rendered) erect the system of relationships itself as the cause, the determining agent, of the oppression of women. As Marx writes, ‘‘The exchange relationship establishes itself as a power external to and independent of the producers.’’≥Ω Moreover, such analyses forget that women are themselves produced as the objects to be exchanged by men. How they are produced hence becomes a crucial question, one which the elaboration of a static system of Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture

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exchange forecloses. Instead, women are viewed as finished products whose subordinate status in society is a result of their place in an already operative system of relationships, which, as Irigaray states, they do not participate in making. Women are products but they are also producers. As such, they participate in the process of their own production. In keeping with Marx, the work of Antonio Negri emphasizes that ‘‘what seems an objective structure is in fact the product of subjective activity. The economy is not a system of ‘objective’ laws operating independently of social agents.’’∂≠ It is in the realm of the subjective that humans will themselves to live and subsist (and by ‘‘will’’ here I mean the energy they expend in the practical decision, desire, and work to go on—a form of labor that exceeds the concept of both necessary and reproductive labor), and it is their lives that are necessary for the production and operation of objective structures. This cannot be emphasized enough: the myriad fields of signification and orientation of subjective forms and the structures of sociality and social cooperation that are viewed as now having been subsumed by capital are themselves produced by the activity of humans, by labor that has not yet become being.∂∞ On this view, the category of experience as activity, as doing, is crucial if we are to realize the participation of Philippine labor in the production and transformation of the social reality to which they are subject, that is, in the making of history. This concept of experience has two registers: first, as the psychical, passional, visceral, cognitive, physical, and social practices of mediation between self and environment that individuals engage in as part of the process of producing themselves and their social reality. In this register, experience as subjective activity is historical to the extent that its elements and operations are collectively available and at work in a social formation it bears constitutive connections to. Second, experience as the concrete articulation of the determinative relations between subjective activity and socioeconomic structures, a concrete assemblage of heterogeneous practices and matter. In this register, experience is not an object to be described but an event to reconstruct through the making of relations, the grasping of connections, among di√erent kinds of practices and structures. It is, in other words, the making of a socioeconomic fabric, a connective tissue that also images a historical moment.∂≤ The dimension of Filipinas that goes beyond their being-for-something-else, that is, beyond their objectification for capital and their production of masculin-

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ist value, lies in the particularities of their experience as subjective activity. This still-objectifying living labor is engaged in a complex of systems of signs, values, and practices in which gender, sexuality, nationality, and race function not only as central organizing principles of production but also as e√ects of those practices. Fanny Garcia renders this subjective activity and the practices that constitute the historical tendency toward the prostitution of Filipinas in ‘‘Pina, Pina, Saan Ka Pupunta?’’ (Pina, Pina, Where Are You Going?), a short story she wrote in 1982 about a young woman named Pina.∂≥ In brief, Pina, a poor, barely educated young woman, dreams of striking it rich by marrying an American. Through a pen pal magazine, she finds Sammy, an American businessman, with whom she begins a romantic correspondence. Sammy comes over, laden with gifts and money for her and her family, takes her around and enjoys her sexual companionship for a month and then leaves. Pina finds out that she is pregnant and that Sammy has no plans to return for her; she aborts the fetus. ‘‘Pina, Pina, Saan Ka Pupunta?’’ depicts the activities and practices that give rise to the historical plot of Philippine–U.S. relations: the unalterable fate of the Philippines as kept mistress of the United States. The national allegorical character of the story is supported by a long epigraph from the speech given by President William McKinley of the United States in November 1899, in which he narrates how the decision to colonize the Philippines came to him one night in an epiphany as he prayed for guidance from God. In depicting the particular activities that give rise to Pina’s prostitution before and as they become totalized and abstracted in the allegorical function of her story, Garcia reconstructs the particular sociosymbolic operations that allow Pina’s living labor to be objectified as a sexual plaything for Sammy and that also allow her, as this already objectified being, to stand in for her country, that is, to serve, symbolically and materially, as a Filipina. Garcia not only shows the process of expropriation of Filipina labor, but also renders the activity and agency of Filipinas in the production of their national destiny. Such activity by Filipinas can be viewed precisely in the unraveling of the story’s details which, when brought out of the story, become elements of a historical experience that exceeds the dominant national plot. For one thing, what seems to be an allegorical story about ’Pinas (Filipino slang for Pilipinas, or Philippines) starts with and for awhile remains a narrative about two fast and firm friends, Carmen and Pina, ‘‘the Fat and Thin of Looban’’

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(Looban, meaning compound, the name residents use to refer to their inner city neighborhood). In fact, it is Carmen who, as she is looking through the classifieds, first stumbles upon the foreigners’ ads for pen pals and wives, and while it is Pina who decides to respond, it is only with the indispensable help of Carmen that she is able to do so. What first signals and e√ects a fissure in the coupling of Carmen and Pina, and the subsequent narrative prominence taken by Pina, is the ads’ requirement of photographs: ‘‘half-body, full-body, and there were some that even asked for bathing-suit shots’’ (112). Reading this, Carmen folds the paper, resigned to her e√ective exclusion from this work option. In e√ect, the photographic representation of the corporeal di√erence between Carmen and Pina retroactively realizes the daily enforcement of their fundamental sameness as women. Both Carmen and Pina are gendered through work, work that is delimited by the skills they can learn as girls and also by what they, as members of the lower classes, can a√ord to learn. Both ‘‘grew into young women on a variety of small jobs,’’ that is, on the small, feminine tasks of domestic work. Carmen’s departure from femininity because of her failure to solicit proper sexual demand for it, that is, because of her failure to meet the definition of a suitable body for heterosexist reproduction, is based on her prior gendering through domestic work. Through domestic work, both Carmen and Pina are fitted as domesticated machines for the replenishment of the needs and natural functions with which women are identified.∂∂ While Pina does not fail the feminine corporeal requirement, she does fail to visibly comply with what Adrienne Rich calls compulsory heterosexuality, refusing each suitor with the explanation that she considered him only as a brother. Thus ‘‘in the opinion of the people of Looban, the destiny of Fat and Thin was fixed: the fast and firm friends would both grow into old maids’’ (108). The deviant condition of spinsterhood is a fate, however, that, at least for Pina, is interrupted by the new work option Carmen has discovered. This interruption, which is also the interruption of the relations between Pina and Carmen, together with the two women’s gendered sameness, which enables the interruption, is a fundamental condition of Pina’s feminization and her conversion into a heterosexual commodity. What the community cannot draw from her, through the daily social practices of approbation and disapprobation, is exacted finally through the relations she establishes with the international market.

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Marketing the Filipina Body for Dreams of the Spectacular When Pina posts her picture in the pen pal magazine, she is only marketing what she has already been used to selling: her domestic labor. But in this medium she is presented not only as bodily labor but also as a sexually and racially signifying body. She functions both as an exchangeable body and as a means of exchange. Pina’s susceptibility to becoming a commodity, what Gayatri Spivak calls a susceptibility to idealization, lies in her gendered susceptibility to a corporeal identity.∂∑ As a body, Pina can be inserted into various systems of value. She is hence devalued not only through her corporealization as mere use value and her commodification, but also through the specifications of that corporeality according to other systems of value. In her insertion into a foreign pen pal circuit, she becomes a racial commodity as well as a sexual one. Her constructed race (Asian, Southeast Asian, Brown, Filipino) determines her commodifiability at the same time that it is itself realized, as a category of di√erence, through the process of commodification. Race, like and through gender, rests on even as it creates corporeality as its devalued base-term, and it is this racialized, sexualized corporeality that lends itself to the international female market. The racial devaluation of and racist desire for the Filipina body are not realized only in the moment of its commodification. On the side of the U.S. American clientele, the devaluation is inextricably tied to the historical project of the United States in its aspiration for global power. After the Second World War, this project was carried out through wars in Korea and Vietnam, wars that culminated in the development of the tourist industry in Asia.∂∏ It is not an insignificant detail that Sammy himself comes to the Philippines as a tourist, his arrival recalling the colonial arrival of the United States, which is the context of an impending event in the story’s opening epigraph. The cries of ‘‘Victory, Joe!’’ that greet Sammy’s arrival in Looban allude the fact that the ‘‘victorious’’ War of Pacification (U.S. colonialism) and the War in the Pacific (the Second World War) were the instruments of the ‘‘freeing’’ of Philippine labor into the international free market and its subsequent devaluation as cheap (rather than colonial, slave) labor. Assimilation into the world system, which is secured through war, is, after all, the prerequisite of universal devaluation. On the side of the Filipina, racial valuation is tied to Spanish and U.S. colonialism and its legacy of

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mestizoness, the fair-skinned complexion which signifies the power and beauty that are associated with, because defined by, the elite classes. Indeed, Pina’s ambitions are driven by her desire for the mestiza-like superstardom of the singer and actress Nora Aunor, whose media-staged ‘‘triumph’’ over her smallness, poverty, and darkness traces the racialized trajectory of success. Superstardom is the end of this trajectory, the achievement of spectacular capital, the visual embodiment of wealth and fame. Pina’s eagerness to respond to the pen pal ad stems from her desire to attain this spectacularity, which is achieved as much by her picture being circulated in a foreign magazine as it is by her having an American boyfriend. Her sudden energy shows the ambitious will she exerts in her photographic conversion into an image-commodity, the exchange value of which lies in its objectification of the spectacular gaze. Pina’s body acquires its exchange value as a desirable female form through this photographic medium of representation. In this spectacular economy, cinema (and its derivatives) functions as ‘‘the objective medium in which exchange values are immersed.’’∂π The media of spectacularity is the screen of political and economic representation, the scene for the definition and visibilization of value. Pina’s own spectacular value is determined by the gaze of ‘‘foreigners seeking Filipinas.’’ It is this white, masculinist gaze that operates as the abstract equivalent of female bodies and that is represented in Filipina image-commodities. Spectacularity means the reflection of the fairness of power, of the white capital of this gaze which is materialized in stardom. When news of her romantic correspondence with Sammy spreads all over Looban, Pina does in fact seem to achieve this spectacularity: How lucky Pina was, they said (raw), because she would have an American husband and mestizo children, and she would even go live in America! Hey, it was Pina’s destiny to be simply the most in the whole history of Looban. What do you know, Pina was the Nora Aunor, the superstar of Looban!

As Pina is proclaimed the Nora Aunor of Looban, she is detached from it and elevated to a symbol. Raised out of Looban (‘‘maahon na sa Looban si Pina’’), she is set apart as a mirror of the collective, a mirror that refracts a surplus: Pina is ‘‘the most ’’ (pinaka) in Looban’s entire history—Looban’s showpiece, its ideal member. Pina becomes the image-object that the entire community desires to

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be, the ideal-ego of Looban. Her life henceforth becomes the focus of all attention and energy, the object through which success can be vicariously lived, and, expectedly, the medium through which that success can be shared. Pina serves as the synecdochic part of the collective whole, the part through which Looban presents itself to the world as desirable. For Looban can see itself as desirable, worthy of investment, only by identifying with the perspective of the desiring transnational subject of spectacular capital. She is the sign of Looban’s spectacular value of and for capital, the representation of its inner resources, its potential to return the investments of the outside. Through Pina, Looban makes itself into an attractive commodity. She becomes an image-commodity, which also operates as the sign of Looban’s value in the world at large, and as such she must serve in a bodily capacity. Synecdoche, the substitution of Pina’s body for the collective body of Looban, is, in this way, the social and symbolic predicate of her ‘‘prostitution’’ as well as the condition of possibility for the allegorical, general ‘‘prostitution’’ of the collective whole of which she is a part. Pina is able to assume this synecdochic role because she refuses to marry someone from Looban. Forsaking her reproductive use value to the community, taking herself out of immediate consumption, she can therefore visibly function as Looban’s means of exchange. As this bodily means, she can also serve as the medium of expression of Looban’s collective subjectivity—that is, as its loob. Loob (inside, inner, interior) is an individual’s medium of subjective states, of emotions, attitudes, and perceptions—the matter for their expression, the place of their realization. Located within the body, loob is a physical surface on which the visceral as well as the metaphysical realization and expression of subjective forms occurs.∂∫ In e√ect, Pina serves as this physical being, this bodily core surface through and on which Looban’s subjective life is expressed. From the time the news of her correspondence spreads throughout Looban, every development in Pina’s life is shared with the community: her name becomes a household word and is ‘‘headlined’’ at every visit of the postman, her dates with Sammy are described in detail to the nightly gathering of interested neighbors at her house. The intimate, subjective connection between Pina and Looban is demonstrated in this alacritous participation of the entire community in Pina’s a√air. Everyone encourages Pina’s ambition and participates in making her body into a sign of national desirability, indeed, in making her a national body. In prepara-

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tion for Sammy’s arrival, they insist that she wear a low-cut dress deemed ‘‘stylestateside,’’ do her hair and makeup, and get a manicure and a pedicure; they encourage her to ‘‘pretend’’ she is Maria Clara, the passive, obedient, faithful heroine of José Rizal’s novel who is extolled as the ideal Filipina; and, calling on her nationalistic duty, they demand that she come out of her room and overcome her inhibitions: ‘‘Would you come out already?! Otherwise Sammy might think Filipinos are uncivilized!’’ In e√ect, the entire community participates in the ‘‘prostitution’’ of Pina. The invoking of the national enables this prostitution, for Pina serves not only as Looban’s inner natural resource, but also, by Looban’s projection of itself into the realm of the national, as the bodily resource of Pilipinas. The deployment of the national to regulate Pina’s body merely uses the same relations that enable the marketing of the Philippines by means of its women, indeed, that allow a foreigner legally to own a piece of Pilipinas by marrying a Filipina. Pina and Pilipinas are hence not only embodied structural e√ects of shared political-libidinal practices, but also isolated, objectified moments of dynamic processes which they themselves constitute. As such, woman and nation function in subsidizing and structuring relations to each other. It comes as no surprise that among the voices welcoming Sammy to Looban and cheerfully greeting this new hero as he makes his way to Pina’s house are voices shouting, ‘‘Victory Joe! Victory Joe!’’ Sammy’s relation to Pina is already shaped by the Philippines’ national relations and the history of those relations, but at the same time this sexual relation contributes to the continued process of making the national relations which provide its context and correspondingly to the making of the Philippines itself. Pina is made, through this battle cry, the object of a quasi-militaristic national enterprise; Pilipinas is made through the hospitable hosting of foreign desires. It is as image (the body as signifier) that Pina can insert herself into the prevailing economy of desire. Her prostitution consists mainly of this provision of a symbolic service—she is the medium of other people’s desires. This is not in any way to diminish the bodily service she renders or the violence of that service. It is, however, to demonstrate that, for the client, the corporeal service is also importantly symbolic. It is in this sense that she is realizing a historical tendency—the tendency toward the image-commodity that women experience as destiny. But Pina is not only made, she is making. And as she is experiencing this destiny, she is experiencing in ways that do not constantly or completely make that destiny and might even serve to break it. 44

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Women’s Syncretic Sociability, or Kapwa Pina herself participates in her own prostitution because she dreams of helping her family. Pina’s dream is part of the dream of her family and of Looban (her dream for them all), just as she is the bodily part, the part-object, through and on which Looban’s subjective life is expressed (its loob). Pina has already learned to play this auxiliary part within the family through her domestic work. This supplementary form of being or part-subjectivity constitutes what is, in the purview of modernity, understood as a weak sense of self, a sense of self that is inextricable from a sense of others. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, after Henri Wallon, calls this form of subjectivity ‘‘syncretic sociability,’’ or syncretism, in which there is no clear distinction between self and others.∂Ω Such a subjective structure, which is attributed to an incomplete severing of the maternal bond, serves as the basis of women’s presumed responsibility for the family’s cohesion and reproduction—a responsibility combining maternal and sororal functions, so that a daughter’s being is considered continuous with a mother’s being and, moreover, that this maternal-sororal being is considered an auxiliary part of the being of the family. The social connectedness that is constitutive of Pina’s self and is expressed as a continuum, a coextensity, between her loob and Looban is precisely the instrument of her exploitation: what is referred to as vulnerability. What might be negatively described as a nonautonomous, noncentered self is in fact a form of subjectivity (denigrated as feminine, infantile, or, relatedly, underdeveloped, i.e., premodern) that is easily manipulated by capital. However, this subjective form does not exist independently of the workings of capital to which it later becomes available for exploitation; rather it is the necessarily relegated component term of the modern, industrialized capital subject. Configured as a more traditional and hence cheaper because uncapitalized mode of subjectivity, it is newly deployed in postindustrial production. This syncretism is variously considered to be indicative and characteristic of the incomplete development of or regression to an infantile ego inasmuch as the self-alienation and alienation from others which are considered normal processes in the development of a mature self, that is, in the development of a modern subjective apparatus, are not fully carried out.∑≠ Virgilio Enriquez describes a similar form of syncretism in his analysis of loob as the ‘‘interior aspect of kapwa ’’ (fellow-being), which he defines as ‘‘the unity of the ‘self ’ and ‘others,’ ’’ ‘‘an inner self shared with others,’’ operating among Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture

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Filipinos.∑∞ This ‘‘extended sense of identity’’ and its pivotal value of pakikiramdam (empathy or feeling for or with another), which can be seen to have been historically developed by and among women as a viable mode of life under conditions of colonial capitalism, is newly deployed in postindustrial production, serving as a refurbished means of exploitation via a contradiction.∑≤ It is precisely the contradictory constitution of the feminine being as subjectively syncretic and bodily individuated that allows Pina to be exploited as both matter and means of exchange. Pina is vulnerable to exploitation by Sammy because while she acts and desires as a partial subject, a being-of-community, he treats her as a completely independent body. His relation to her is based precisely on his own completely sovereign sense of self, a form of subjectivity that allows, if not compels, objectifying relations. This contradiction between the so-called traditional, feminine (the markers of this developed underdevelopment) syncretic self and the modern individuated body is what underwrites the practice of self-sacrifice, which is purported to be the learned habit of women. This contradictory constitution allows the feminine body to be ‘‘let out’’ by and for the collective identity of which it is a part. The feminine body is thus conceived as a property of the collective who, in its interpellation as the true (masculine) subject (as a ‘‘free’’ nation, as ‘‘free’’ labor), acts as the seller of the creative power which it has appropriated as its own to the extent that it is led to identify with the subjectivity of power.∑≥ In this way Pina’s practices of kapwa are objectified, detached, abstracted, given a symbolic function in relation to the community from which it is detached.

Beyond Sacrifice, Beyond Allegory While there is a dimension of sacrifice for the family and community in Pina’s actions, there is also a dimension of flight. Pina’s dream is a dream of flight— literally, a dream to fly out of Looban and to break with her feminine responsibility for it. Pina’s dreams and experience exceed their being for her family and Looban and their being for capital. This exceeding can be seen in her dream of her first sexual encounter. Closing her eyes and detaching herself from the community self, Pina frees herself to enjoy her sexual pleasure. Unlike the other pleasures of class Sammy o√ers her, which are already objectified in consumer goods, Pina’s sexual pleasure is immanent in her body. It is in fact conveyed 46

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simply through the description of physical acts pertaining only to her body: the kissing, tonguing, caressing, sucking, biting of her body—her forehead, her ears, her cheeks, her neck, her lips, her tongue, her breasts, her thighs—that culminate in Sammy going down on her: ‘‘at pagkuway’y naramdaman niya, dinidilaan siya, dinidilaan nang dinidilaan.’’ [And she felt herself being licked, and licked and licked.] In the entire story, this is the only passage detailed enough in description to allow the reader to dwell on Pina’s corporeal experience. This scene of her pleasure is an odd eruption in the story, one that breaks with her politically symbolic role. The intimate depiction of Pina’s bodily enjoyment significantly departs from the symbolic-social realism of Garcia’s national allegory. Like other works of the resurgent nationalist movement from the late 1950s to the 1970s, when radical nationalism was forced underground by the imposition of martial law, Garcia’s story draws both on the political allegorical style characteristic of early anti-imperialist Philippine writing—exemplified by the allegedly seditious Tagalog plays in the early twentieth century—in which nations as well as classes are personified by characters with symbolically meaningful names, and on the invigorated social realism that socially conscious writers championed against the escapist romanticism of mainstream Philippine literature in Tagalog.∑∂ Unlike these works, however, Garcia’s story o√ers a female character as its central nationalist protagonist rather than as the embodiment of the imperiled beloved nation. It therefore puts forth a national subject that evades the heteromasculinist virtues typically extolled in similar nationalist genres. Moreover, by combining political allegorical and social realist modes, Garcia’s characterization of Pina allows for the exploration of the concrete gendered and sexualized significance of the Philippines’ national situation rendered by the metaphor of prostituted global labor. In doing so, Garcia does more than articulate the formal sociosymbolic conditions of feminized Philippine labor as a culturally specific historical experience: she deploys and limns sensory energies and experiential modes that propel and support this historical experience but that are ultimately found to be tangential to the political movements built upon it. Garcia’s nationalist project of exposing Pina’s misplaced or false desire lapses into a reliving of the experience of enjoyment, which, while it must finally be excluded from the trajectory of prostitution (just as Carmen is excluded from the fairy-tale experience of Pina), is necessary to explain Pina’s actions. While the digression is, in other words, essential, it is precisely what is unassimilable in the Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture

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allegorical plot, tangential to the aims of both capital and nation, which conspire to create this plot. The break is a leap back into what is disavowed to generalize the condition of labor—in this case, feminized Philippine labor—from female prostitution: the subjective-corporeal experience of women in relation to their worlds and to each other, not as instances of the same, but as di√erent. This other dimension of Pina’s dreams can also be gleaned in her dreams of the superstar, Nora Aunor. Pina’s desire to be like Nora is produced by spectacular forms of identification and subjectification, forms which attempt to fully subsume the meaning of her dreams. Whatever dimension of that desire might be for Nora (for Nora to like her, to see her, which is suggested by Carmen, who jealously tells Pina, ‘‘And that Nora Aunor of yours, even if you watched every movie of hers ten times, she still wouldn’t know you. And even if you saw each other in person, she might not even glance or smile at you.’’) is obliterated in Pina’s feminine configuration, just as the meaning of her corporeality to Carmen (who declares, ‘‘aminado ‘ko na kung sa ‘kin lang, maganda’t seksi ka ’’ [‘‘I’ll admit, if it was only for me to say, you’re pretty and sexy’’]) is subsumed under its meaning for masculine capital in the spectacular economy. It is only through the conversion of Pina’s relation to Nora into one of equivalence that they function as exchangeable image-commodities, that is, as parts and reflections of the same∑∑ —which commands that Pina’s desire be only to be like Nora, to take her place, the fulfillment of which is declared by Looban. But Nora Aunor is more than a spectacle reflecting man’s labor, for she is the product of an almost exclusive female following—as spectacular capital, she is produced by the labor of loving women.∑∏ Even as they exist in an economy of semblance and substitution, there is a dimension of Filipinas’ existence as labor in which they are not substitutable because they exist simultaneously and already in relation to each other. Pina’s dreams about Nora and Eva, another star, her dreams of success for herself and for Carmen, and her dream of herself and her own pleasure become places in which this other dimension can be gleaned. The dream of her own pleasure, especially, demonstrates the way in which Garcia’s relation to Pina as a female character exceeds her intention to use her as a political allegory. Garcia explains the original representational object of her story: ‘‘Paano ko kaya maipakikita kung paano at bakit tayo mapakapit nang husto, kung paano at bakit gayon na lang ang paghabol-habol natin sa U.S.? . . . Magagamit ko ba ang sex sa pulitikal na

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pakahulugan? ’’ [‘‘How, I wonder, can I show how and why we are so attached to the U.S. and how and why we pursue it in such a manner? . . . Could I use sex for a political interpretation?’’]∑π This sexualization of the political, however, takes on its own life, and empathy ( pakikiramdam), with Pina as an embodied person rather than as a personification of the nation, becomes an uppermost concern. As Garcia recalls, ‘‘I thought, how could the readers better understand Pina if I couldn’t bring out what she enjoyed?’’∑∫ In the writing of the scene of Pina’s enjoyment to which she refers, Garcia demonstrates this dimension of being of women in their relation to themselves and each other, their own bodies and the bodies of other women, which goes beyond their embodiment of nationalist, masculinist value. Writing this scene was, for Garcia, also a way of establishing a more intimate relation with Pina, as the paradigmatic figure of Filipina women. Her own desire for this intimacy stems from a recognition of the class di√erences that exist between women and prevent any easy unity or identification.∑Ω In fact, class di√erences are represented in the story when Pina receives a letter from Sammy’s other Filipina lover in the United States. The other woman, who dashes her hopes that Sammy might yet return to her, bears the recognizable ‘‘good’’ names of two powerful families. It is this discontinuity between women that Garcia is, in this work as well as in others, consistently attendant to. Her own discontinuity with women (and not simply the nation), which Pina figures, thus provokes the extension of her own self and desire to Pina in the attempt to understand and write a shared experience, one that would account for how and why we continue to cling to our exploiter. The description of Pina’s pleasure thus goes beyond any simple allegorical function, becomes in fact its own pleasure—it becomes available to the reader to savor as well. The reversibility of surfaces, of licker and licked, suggests a relation to Pina that is not so easily subsumed by a masculine desire. Pina’s pleasure might in fact be seen to involve Carmen, if only to the extent that this pleasure must, as a condition of its expression, narratively exclude her. Garcia excludes Carmen by making her disavow the possibility of becoming jealous after listening to Pina narrate the enjoyable time she has just spent with Sammy. Instead of jealousy, Carmen displays an ambivalent envy, which is predicated upon her potential substitutability for Pina. Carmen then vocally substitutes herself for Pina. In making this disavowal, Garcia frees Pina to experience her pleasure and frees herself to write it.∏≠ Undoubtedly, the freeing narratively enacted here

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conveys the very conditions of the freeing of a female body for a feminist subject, conditions which include the disavowal of the reversibility and reciprocity of female desire. These narrative operations demonstrate the thematic importance of female relationships in Garcia’s stories, and, more, their determining significance to the writing of these stories. The economy of discourse of women portrayed in this story also operates outside of it, that is, among Garcia, her characters, and her readers. As I show in the next chapter, this discourse of women as well as the turn to the body in feminist writing has as its condition of possibility the widespread unmooring of women from their naturalized social contexts as a result of the very same tendencies depicted in the story. Within the context of feminized labor, a state-sponsored prostitution industry, and increasing export of domestic labor, identity and di√erence become a central mode of structuring the subjective experience of women in relation to each other. In her writing, Garcia realizes a form of connection among women that is not, however, limited by identificatory substitution even as it makes use of it. The strong sense of the need for storytelling, the form of hearing about and hearsay, in the lives of women shapes the structure of address of her writing. Participating in Pina’s story, readers become ‘‘kau-utang dila ’’ (tongue associates), that is, gossip-mates. Here, talking and licking and hearing become modes of establishing relations that cannot be contained through spectacular media and that have instead the possibility of constituting an alternative economy of being and desire, one which rests on a di√erent deployment of kapwa, the very same subjective mode on which Pina’s prostitution depends. In shifting her narrative to Pina, Garcia deploys the interconnectedness of self and community of kapwa babae [fellow- or co-women] as a way of drawing the interpellated reader into Pina’s experience so that she might recognize and identify with Pina’s dignity and determination for change. Creating an inside or loob for her audience that rests on a gendered corporeal experience, Garcia expressively realizes the formal condition for an emergent imagined community. Using the coextensive structure of loob-Looban as the structure of her address, she prefigures the transformative feminine identification of the nation that was dramatically displayed in the popular revolt against the dictatorship in 1986.∏∞ Indeed, in the story, as the community of Looban participates in the making of Pina into its ideal image-commodity, assuming the feminine work of accommodation and hospitality, it takes over the very reproductive labor that Pina 50

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herself abandoned, thereby preparing the grounds for a collective feminine identification. Such mutually constitutive relations between self and sociality make the destination of Pina and ’Pinas (the destination implied by the question in the title) one that cannot be foreseen but that is created in the struggle to determine both. This struggle begins in the act of subjective determination, in a will-totransformation, which the story o√ers as political counsel. Pina’s abortion is precisely an act of subjective self-determination that signals the end of the inexorability (the destiny) of reproduction, both human and social:∏≤ At naramdaman at nakita ni Pina, naglandas ang mainit na dugo pababa sa kanyang kanang hita, iyo’y binuhusan niya ng isang tabong tubig, at ang kimpal ng dugo’y lumusot sa siwang ng embonong sahig, bumagsak at sumanib sa pusali. Nakatitig pa rin sa pusali, kinausap ni Pina ang sarili, ‘‘Pina, matuto ka sa mga naging pagkakamali mo sa nakalipas.’’ [And Pina felt and saw the warm blood make a path down her right thigh. She poured a container of water over it and the lump of blood squeezed through the slits in the bamboo floor, falling and landing in a mire. Still staring at the mire, Pina spoke to herself, ‘‘Pina, learn from the mistakes you have made in the past’’ . . . Pina took in a deep breath and marveled at how only a moment ago she felt so beaten down but now she felt so very strong.]

Pina’s ingestion of an abortive substance signifies and e√ects a reappropriation of her labor, labor that is not already objectified and exchangeable but, rather, labor as subjectivity. Pina makes refuse of the fetus and, in doing so, refuses to become bound to a masculinist subject of transnational power from whose perspective she and her community imagined themselves loveable, valuable. And she makes her blood flow. This is an act of what Walter Benjamin calls divine violence: ‘‘pure power over all life for the sake of living.’’ Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt call this power constituent power, potenza, the world-constitutive potential of labor. In this moment of taking command of her body and her self, the means of production, Pina defies the fixity of that sign ‘‘pussy,’’ the condensed sign of her living labor which circulates in the world market. In doing so, she taps the potential of the collective Pinas to defy the fixity which, as the epigraph shows, is the means Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture

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and end of a colonizing power: ‘‘I sent for the Chief Engineer of the War Department (our map-maker) and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States, and there they are, and there they will stay while I am president!’’ Pina’s strength comes from the abortion of Manifest Destiny. Her staring at the mired lump of blood as she speaks to herself depicts the distance she has made within herself, a di√erential between her and the parts of her that have been and continue to be fixed, objectified, and devalued—in a word, the parts of her that are the embodied perspective of capitalist and state power. The lump also appears as the permanent displacement of her synecdochic function for the nation. This distancing that wrests a space of freedom and possibility is not the liberation of a sovereign subject, even if this appears to be the proper end of the story. For Pina does return to Carmen and her family. But she returns di√erently. Her return is arguably not a reintegration into the community and hence a realignment of existing social structures and striations. Pina’s self-valorization can mean the valorization of a socially extended self (an open-ended loob) by that self rather than by an external, determining subject. For those of us who experience the altered community that her newly found subjectivity inspirits with freedom and will and recomposes with this di√erence, her story gives counsel, the wisdom of which can be fulfilled only outside the story, can be realized only in the world. That counsel is as follows: We Filipinas can transform Filipinas provided we seize our bodily beings, appropriate our feminine labor, in order to recompose our communities for ourselves. In this way can we realize our constitutive potential, our creative power, as producers of the world. This potential is the real crisis that the discourse of national crisis is a feeble attempt to quell.

Making a Di√erence By way of a return to the issues I raised in the beginning of this chapter, I want to make some remarks about the significance of this literary exegesis to our understanding of the prostitution of Philippine labor and the crisis of Philippine culture, which such prostitution has purportedly brought about. Garcia’s short story is not a veritable representation of the real experience of an actual, prostituted Filipina—a ‘‘true story.’’∏≥ To turn to this literary text for a view of the feminized commodification of Filipinas from the standpoint of Filipinas as Philippine labor is to posit that the standpoint of labor is not an authentic life 52

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perspective but a theoretical-political perspective from the social position of the marginalized within the dominant mode of production. Garcia’s story is, to my mind, an experiential articulation of this standpoint.∏∂ Heeding the literary mandate of emergent nations, Garcia mobilizes the historical experience she renders as the basis of political action and social aspiration. As historical experience, her story bears a theoretical and political significance that is implied both in its capacity to give counsel—counsel implying an interventionist rather than a simply representational relation to a real social world—and in its depiction of the sociosymbolic logics of Philippine exploitation through the allegory of Pina’s story. The allegory makes evident that the logic of signification through which Pina becomes a central character of Looban’s as well as Garcia’s story is itself the mode of her exploitation—synecdoche is the mode of the hidden expropriation of value in the feminization of labor. The articulability of an experience through which a collective subject can be constituted thus depends on this signifying logic. The historical experience articulated in a literary work as the basis of constructing a political subject will therefore demonstrate the dominant signifying logics that are at work in the constitution of broader social relations, even as they also invoke experiential practices that exceed or are tangential to the signifying orders on the basis of which the work’s social and political claims are made. As an exploration of the experiential activity of Filipinas which, on the one hand, helps to constitute the dominant sexual-national trajectory of the Philippines toward prostitution and, on the other, exceeds this historical tendency determined by a capitalist, masculinist logic, Garcia’s story is the process of constituting another, this time liberative, political, and subjective, trajectory for fellow (kapwa) Filipinas. In this way it articulates a radical, transformative standpoint inasmuch as it enables the recognition of the subjective potential of feminized labor and of Filipinas as the generalized condition of this labor. It also enables a strategy of liberation and empowerment for Filipina labor that is di√erent from dominant strategies against prostitution as victimization and emasculation, which call for state action (and, invariably, state action on and for women). By demonstrating the creative, sociosubjective practices of Filipinas, as well as the logic of their subsumption, which are at work in the prostitution of Filipinas and, moreover, by creating an intimate, involved relation to this combined process of production and capture, Garcia theorizes an emergent political form, one that can commandeer or ‘‘imagineer’’ the creative, libidinal forces that produce the world. It is precisely in approaching Filipina women as producers Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture

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that one can view production in its creative, living aspect, an aspect which nationalist accounts of the crisis of Philippine culture as a product of the entry of Filipinas in the world market ignore in their preferred focus on exchange (viewing prostitution simply as the tra≈cking of women resulting from existing international labor relations). Systemic analyses by feminists and nationalists share this static focus on exchange, which precludes a radical understanding of the productive capacity of the women who are exchanged and prostituted by others. What di√erence does it make to view the Philippines and its crisis from the side of production rather than from the side of exchange? At the level of exchange, culture is a matter of identity rather than activity; it is, like the women who are its symbolic bearers, what is acted upon, damaged, and defamed. Understood in this way, ‘‘the crisis of Philippine culture’’ can merely call for actions of saving on the part of management played by the nation-state. Viewing prostituted labor at the level of production, on the other hand, enables one to recognize the creative and desiring experiential activity—the living labor—of the objects exchanged. This recognition contradicts the treatment of Filipinas as bodies with orifices and the country itself as an orifice (‘‘pussy’’) receiving and responding to the potent forces of global capital. From the standpoint of experience as living labor, what Filipinas do exceeds the exigencies of capital (such as the historical tendency toward feminization) and of their socially learned skills of accommodation, adaptation, and coping—in short, their experience as activity exceeds the invaginated role they are seen to play from the perspective of capital. From this standpoint, culture is this doing, the activity of experiential mediation whose inventions come under the command of capital, to serve as one of its hidden productive forces. Put another way, culture comes to be seen as productive of forms that are predominantly understood to be forms of and for capital (e.g., commodity) and therefore a crucial component of the actual and theoretical reconstitution of labor. In Garcia’s story, what from the perspective of capital appears as the logic of the synecdoche at work in the prostitution of Pina by and for Looban—her assumption of the spectacular form of the image-commodity through which Looban negotiates for international value—becomes, from the point of view of labor, the structure of kapwa or syncretic sociability. The sociosubjective structure of kapwa is the form through which Pina and her community desire and act. The stories many sex workers in the prostitution industry tell about themselves often demonstrate the importance of syncretic sociability to their actions. 54

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Women help, emulate, and recruit each other through relations of kapwa. It is this cultural logic of social cooperation that comes under capitalist command. In the story, capitalist command uses national identity to place Pina in a form that is serviceable and exchangeable—a social symbol and national commodity. That capital needs to do so attests to the real crisis, which it tries to contain. As Negri writes, ‘‘Money as a ‘mere symbol’, as a ‘social symbol’, as an ‘a priori idea’—in short ‘the money-subject’—can be the result of the moment of crisis, can be one solution of crisis.’’ For, as he adds, ‘‘to command crisis is the normal situation of capitalism.’’∏∑ Under the Marcos regime, this command took the form of capitalist state sponsorship, promotion, and regulation of the prostitution industry in conjunction with the tourism and military industries. The national promotion and marketing of Philippine culture in the form of women and their sexualized labor have generated millions of dollars in profits not only for the Philippine government but also for countless middlemen connected to the sex industry: local governments, crime syndicates, tour operators, promoters, hotel and club owners, etc. This now-worldwide, billion-dollar industry not only attests to the value-productive character of sex work, which in 1998 the International Labor Organization finally, though belatedly, acknowledged in its inclusion of the sex industry as an economic sector.∏∏ It also attests to the fact that the expropriation of the creative labor of Filipinas is how agencies of capital take command of the real crisis of living Philippine culture as posed by its Filipina producers. This real crisis lies precisely in the way the experiential activity of Filipinas exceeds the gendered and sexualized logic of their constitution as feminine beingsfor-capital. Within Filipina living labor there persists a dimension of freeing themselves. Just as Pina frees herself to experience her pleasure, so Filipinas attempt to free themselves in and through their work as Filipinas—to free themselves from family, from poverty, and in general from their socially prescribed gendered and sexual functions and the measures used to enforce them (even if this is already to ascribe given content to their freeing action). In the acts of unsanctioned aspiration and enjoyment, in the acts of defiance and violence for the sake of living which women exercise in their daily work, a will-to-freedom and a will-to-enjoyment obtain that Filipinas can take command of in ways that liberate their collective subjective potential.∏π And yet, even as unsanctioned, nonreproductive desire is what propels the collective energies of her community, it is also what might most easily fall away from the proper nationalist-feminist subject that is to be forged out of such energies. The pleasure portrayed in the Prostituted Filipinas and Philippine Culture

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story, which, as much as the abortion, expressively realizes the liberative act, is itself in danger of becoming the refuse of the political allegorical plot. Pina’s sudden renewal of strength upon her purging of the sign and product of her sexual liaison retroactively casts her enjoyment as a form of weakness that needs to be overcome in order for her to achieve sovereignty over her destiny. Following the logic of the constitution of the abstract category of labor, Pina’s constitution as a symbolic figure of a sovereign national subject that is built on a refusal of sexualized political dependency finally rests on sexual indi√erence to women’s desires. What falls away is not simply a preexisting experience that is masked or suppressed by this ideology of sexual indi√erence (some specificity of women’s experience or gendered nature), but rather experiential practices that must themselves be articulated and invoked (women’s desires) in order for the allegorical political representation to proceed. In this sense these fallout experiences are not so much subaltern as they are tangential to the proper historicopolitical plot. By depicting Pina’s di√erent return to her community, Garcia suggests a strategy of transformative political action that entails a detachment from the perspective of capital and, concomitantly, a partial detachment of women from nation that is di√erent from the kind which allows women to function as synecdoches for their nation as well as from the kind which posits the universality of women and their oppression. As we will see in the next two chapters, this second kind of detachment results from and contributes to the feminization of labor and the export of domestic labor, processes which, in the last decades of the twentieth century and continuing into the first decade of the twenty-first, have defined the Philippines’ economic role in the global order as well as the condition of Filipinas in the world at large. The full detachment of Filipina women from their nation also significantly shapes the historical experience of the specificity of women’s oppression articulated in more purposively feminist writing. In contrast to the full detachment of women that will obtain at a later moment, the detachment from nation that Garcia suggests is only partial to the extent that it is accompanied by a di√erent return to community. For Garcia, the di√erence of this return lies in Filipinas’ reappropriation of the very cultural means of production that are subsumed by capital as the instrument of their exploitation. Viewed now as mediating activity, as the creative, living labor of Filipinas, Philippine culture can be wielded as precisely the world- and selfconstitutive potential that is the other side of lack and loss, the terms in which 56

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the discourse of crisis as well as that of culture itself—which points to the Philippines’ ‘‘lack’’ of venerable scriptural traditions and civilizational religious institutions of its own—has long viewed it. If we view culture or, as I cast it, historical experience as labor, then we recognize the truth of Marx’s statement that ‘‘labor is absolute poverty as object, on one side, and is, on the other side, the general possibility of wealth as subject and as activity.’’∏∫

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Chapter Two

Women Alone We live in houses of a single chamber, every space in it common to everybody in the family and within that space no doors are locked. No more than her brother does the average Filipina ever hope to enjoy, whether as child or as adult, a room she can call her own.—nick joaquin

In her poem ‘‘Babae Akong Namumuhay Nang Mag-Isa’’ (I Am a Woman Living Alone), Joi Barrios turns the situation of a woman living alone from a condition of opprobrium (‘‘a welt, a scar’’) into ‘‘a small victory.’’∞ This newly generalized social experience of Filipinas living solitary lives, which Barrios renders, is at once the consequence and enabling means of the large-scale conscription of Filipina women as labor resources of the national economy since the early 1970s. The intensification of the formal conscription of Filipina labor in the transformation of the Philippine economy into a domestic labor–exporting industry beginning in the 1980s can be seen to determine the evident proliferation of women living independently of family and kin since then. Negating all the meanings of betrayal, loss, and lack imputed to it, Barrios’s poem a≈rms that this condition of a woman living alone is a hopeful, purposeful, and active aspiration (hangad) ‘‘that my hand run the minutes and hours of my time/my heart and mind write my story/and I myself give form to my own wholeness.’’ Living alone is the product and the practice of hangad, a desiring intent, to claim

forms of one’s ‘‘ownness,’’ including ‘‘my own self ’’ as the subject of an originating resolution: ‘‘akin ang pasya ’’ [the resolution was mine]. This resolution to claim one’s ownness—‘‘my time,’’ ‘‘my story,’’ my wholeness’’—is a new social experience that spells a rupture with a previous ruling national and social order. It is also the experiential force and form of those economic processes underlying the conscription and export of Filipina labor. In this chapter, I examine the new social experience of female sovereignty and the emergence of babae (woman) as a universal category of that experience. I trace the historical genealogy of the construction of a female subject in Philippine literature and its relation to the changing social relations of production shaped by the Philippines’ export-oriented strategies of economic development and its aggressive inclusion of women as a major labor resource.

Women and Time In Luna Sicat’s short story ‘‘Ang Lohika ng mga Bula ng Sabon’’ (The Logic of Soap Bubbles) (1991), a young woman living alone in the city describes the warping loneliness of her isolated world, telling of an unseen itinerant whose untold visits bring forth this warped subjective world and its disturbing complications.≤ The woman creates this world of her imaginary out of rejection of the other world around her, the world that would limit her possibilities to the prescribed role of wife, mother, and sister. As she narrates this negative imaginary into fuller and fuller being, she gropes for reason and peace within her immanent madness, exploring the permutations of her thought and the pleasures of her painful solitude. Battling with the troubling o√spring from her intimate union with her ‘‘imaginary friend, lover and enemy,’’ Sandali, Sicat’s first-person narrator finally finds some tentative peace as these figures arising from her disquiet are one by one borne away by the soap bubbles she and her imaginary companion make in play. If for the masculine laboring subject of capital, time is money, for the feminine part-subject (labor’s auxiliary), time is body. Within this capitalist logic, the female body is inseparable from time. Unlike the masculine subject of labor whose labor-time is stolen, the feminine being doesn’t have time, that is, time that is separate from her being—she is time. The equation of her active being as natural, reproductive activity—indeed, as nature—means there is no time she can call her own. Time doesn’t circumscribe her labor. Her laboring activity is 60

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not measured by time. She is both working and being all the time. Undi√erentiated, measureless time becomes the condition of feminine being under a modern capitalist order.≥ In feminist Philippine literature of the early 1990s, recognition of this gendered embodiment of undi√erentiated measureless time underlies the portrait of a woman’s experience of monotony as the truth of her existence. As the movie usherette of Joy Dayrit’s story ‘‘Unfinished Story’’ expresses her life, ‘‘This is the quality or state of my being, it sways from tedious to dull.’’∂ The tedium of the nameless usherette’s work is continued in her home; in both places she attends to the activity of others. Her time is always already time for others, and hence she has no time she can dispose of herself—she has no free time. Repetition rules her life. Put in the service of the creators (the movies, her writer boyfriend, who writes a play based on her life), her life cannot itself be creative. This capacity to endure tedium, often described as patience, is posited as an inherently feminine capacity that can be extracted from women and, indeed, that is exploited by capital in a variety of industrial and service sector jobs. The repetitiousness of the tasks for which women are hired makes their being commensurate with undi√erentiated time.∑ And the continuity between work and home for laboring women only reinforces the relentless homogenization of their time, time that is devoted to supporting the production of others. In Dayrit’s ‘‘unfinished story,’’ the enduring condition of feminine being is thus the endurance of time, the being time. Faced with this condition, Sicat’s own nameless narrator longs for a time, a body, for herself—a moment and its particular quality for her to enjoy. Living alone and away from her own family, she rejects not only traditional domestic arrangements and the filial duties they entail (‘‘I had long erased the concept of weekly visits’’), including dutiful dreams of a modern bourgeois family of her own (‘‘a comfortable life at the side of a responsible husband, two beautiful and normal children, and a house in a clean and quiet place’’); she also rejects the conventional forms of femininity that support those forms of domesticity: ‘‘I don’t know how to cook’’; ‘‘I don’t have a boyfriend. . . . I am not like other girls who smell of baby powder and ginger-colored perfume, sometimes I smell like newly cut grass, cooked grains of rice left on a table covered with flies, pungent fish in the market.’’ Like the smells of rotting papaya and fish frying in Dayrit’s story, which, as signs of the usherette’s rank housework, set o√ and sharpen a deepening conflict between her and her intellectually aspiring boyfriend, Sicat’s Women Alone

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narrator smells like rotting leftover food, a sign of her own jetissoning of domestic femininity. Rejecting the world such domestic dreams imply and realize, she liberates her being and frees her time. Writing and musing become the means of transforming this newly ‘‘freed time,’’ making this time of flight from both formal work and social cooperation a place for ‘‘socializing in a di√erent way the relation to nature, matter, the body, language, and desire.’’∏ Time itself is denaturalized—it is liberated from its undi√erentiated, streamlike nature and from the natural surfaces, such as the bodily being of women, on which its immutable passing is recorded and its toll taken. Thus free, time comes to its writer/muser like ‘‘a visitor I can’t turn away’’: ‘‘That moment arrives, unexpected, unasked, just shows up, like a visitor, a visitor I can’t turn away, whom I will simply let in, o√er co√ee to, s/he will not drink the co√ee, s/he will only caress the cup’s handle and stare at me, from head to foot, s/he is like a child when s/he stares, and I know s/he is weighing me because I am weighing things too.’’π Time arrives as an embodied moment (sandali), personified as the one who stays the narrator’s suicide by calling her name and pinching her wrist where the blade of the knife is resting. This moment whispers to her, ‘‘tumakas ka tumakas ka [escape, escape],’’ an invitation to lie together, to climb into bed and take o√ their clothes and embark on a voyage the narrator does not resist: ‘‘I will force myself not to think, I will just let it be, s/he will return tomorrow, my door is open, I do not complain, for I want the whole world, the whole universe, to be filled with our o√spring, so I will no longer feel lonely, isn’t that right, Sandali, for that is his/her name, Sandali, s/he has no parents or siblings, nor does s/he have a permanent residence or job, s/he is not tied to anything, not even to time.’’

Bodily Pleasures This unattachedness, this breaking of ties to the world and its social forms, brings into being the narrator’s desire in (and hence for) Sandali, but also it is what in Sandali she desires to be like: ‘‘Sometimes I just want to go with the wind. . . . I just want to travel and let loose, like Sandali.’’ The release of the moment from time symbolically enacts the narrator’s desire to be released from the weight of her body, at least of the body configured by the domestic ties she eschews. In creating this moment of her desire, Sandali, she creates a new relation to her own body not only by altering her relation to time, but also by 62

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creating Sandali as the erotic intimate of her desire, as the erotic being whose own desire for her configures her body. That body is given form not by an objectifying gaze with orifice-making phallic investments but rather by this moment that caresses her body as a smooth plane, a surface: Is my lying beside Sandali a sin, I wonder, when she doesn’t even enter me, I haven’t even been split open, I am like a tangerine that is already softened but not yet peeled, how can she enter me anyway, I can’t even really hold or see or smell her in any conventional way, I will compare her to the wind, a lewd wind, which strokes one’s hair and calf and chest, is the wind really lewd, probably not, a passionate wind, a caressing wind, we are the lewd ones, we are after all the ones who give color to everything.

The narrator’s imaginary body is composed by this stroking, called into being by the energy of desire that this ‘‘lewd wind’’ bears but also generates, a desire, however, that is not penetrative (and thereby consolidating of itself and its object) but lambent, grazing, palpating. It is a body composed, moreover, by the tactile attentions of another woman, for Sandali, whose gender has hitherto been indeterminate, bears a female trait (‘‘si Sandali, may regla rin’’ [Sandali has menstrual periods too]), a trait made evident by her washing of her hands as if she were trying to wash the sin that menstruation symbolizes. The sin of womanhood taints Sandali. And in lying beside her, ‘‘I,’’ a woman, am open to sinning too. Sins mark the limits drawn by the world to my being, to my body, to my loving and being loved. My female body is sinful as a body of orifices; the blood that issues from it, the sign of that sin. My penetrability is my destiny and my sin: ‘‘I don’t like the act of purification, but here I am, performing the ritual of cleansing.’’ I am cleansing myself of the sins the world has defined as mine, not, however, by following its precepts for my being and my redemption but by releasing myself from that world and its prescribed corporeal forms and transgressions, loosening its hold on my being and my body, freeing myself from its prohibitions. Taking flight from that world’s delimited possibilities of gendered corporeality and corporeal relations, the narrator reimagines her own corporeality and conjures the desiring and desired being who will a≈rm and sustain the contours and qualities of her escaping bodily being. Sandali herself is constituted in a form that departs from the full, integral corporeality that characterizes the paradigWomen Alone

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matic modern female body—she is pure current, an intensity that does not, however, solidify into an insertional force but instead lies beside her lover, pressing against, stroking, and passing her laminar flows over ‘‘the softened but not yet peeled’’ fruit that is the narrator’s body, a fruit that is not only not consumed but also able to taste back: ‘‘Sandali kisses deliciously, it is as if you were biting into a newly picked, flush red guava, which you stole from your neighbor’s roof, which your cousin puts in a bag so others won’t pick it but which you pick anyway to annoy her/him, and it will occur to you, why does s/he bag the guavas, and for that matter, why are there people who want to claim possession over everything, even the wind?’’ The narrator tastes her being tasted; she bites into the sensation of being kissed. The osculated surfaces of her body become like taste buds, her body itself become a tongue, but also like teeth seizing this morsel of illicit, sexual pleasure. What is enjoyed must be stolen, for in the world she flees from sensuous pleasures are deemed the property of the possessive subject for whom she can only be the object of desire. Such is the universal feminist premise of the anthology, Forbidden Fruit: Women Write the Erotic, in which Sicat’s story is reprinted.∫ The narrator’s indulgence in the saporous, gustatory pleasures provided by a moment is, on this view, a defiance of the sexual subjective order that dictates that these pleasures do not belong to her but to another. The pleasures of one’s communion with the momentary cannot, after all, be possessed by anyone. They do not occur in time, time that can be objectified and thereby serve as the container of an object experience with value, which one can hold, own, and accumulate. Rather, these pleasures are themselves the interaction, the current between me and the fleeting moment, this moment that knows and calls my name, that has freed itself from measured time, from all objectification and possession, to come to me to be enjoyed and to enjoy me. It is this freedom that the narrator seeks and finds in whiling away her body, whiling away her time. Giving herself to this moment of time, the narrator allows both of them to wander together and embark on a voyage that lends shape to the place where it takes, that is, that creates their very bodies as the agent and medium of this passage. The narrator’s own body is created in the giving of herself to this fleeting moment and the wandering it allows. Her bodily becoming is the fleeing that she performs with the fleeting Sandali. As the locus for this playing out of self, her imaginary body does not take form then through a specular image but

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instead through breath, through the narrator’s telling of herself and her visitor: ‘‘I would have liked to breathe (ihinga) a word about her to another person.’’ Telling is respiration, the exhaling (hinga, breath) of one’s being, and for the narrator, taking a breath ( pahinga, rest), from the world of duties.Ω It is the issuing of one’s soul as a form of breath, the traditional term for spirit, like one’s smell: ‘‘Only [Sandali] knows my smell, each person has a smell . . . everyone is aware of my smell but they can’t name it.’’ The narrator’s elusive smell is like Sandali’s being: ‘‘S/he is like a poem, a poem has no name, if people name/expose a poem as a poem, it disappears, dissolves like bubbles, can never be held.’’ Remaining nameless herself, the narrator expresses her being, not in any solid shapes (the shape of the consolidated subject whose imaginary bodily organization is repeated internally in the structuring of the psyche)∞≠, but in e√usions, in the permeating form of smells that spread through seepage and a wavelike movement of a√ect, image, and free associative thought. This self does not congeal. Its writing is di√usive, dispersing in digressions and drivel into incoherent parts, which become embodied in the wayward particle-like figures born of her erotic indulgence in time. The genesis of these o√spring (supling) of her erotic union with Sandali defies the logic of filiative reproduction, for these ‘‘children’’ multiply through some form of budding or vegetative propagation. Proliferating uncontrollably, they begin to overrun the narrator, to take over her self, her body, her mind: para silang mga dagang naghahabulan sa kisame, sa kisame ng aking utak, at pinamumukha nila sa akin na hindi ko sila matatakasan, na ang bawat isa sa kanila’y kailangan kong pagkapehin, pataluyin sa aking loob, hanggang sa sila’y dumami, sinusunod lang nila ang bilin ng Testamento, humayo kayo at magparami, at hindi ako dapat tumutol, hahanapin nila ako kahit saan ako magpunta, at sisisihin ko naman ang aking sarili, ang aking libog, alipin ako ng libog kay Sandali, kaya hindi ako masaya dahil palagi ko siyang hinahanap-hanap, gusto kong tapalan ang lahat ng puwerta sa aking loob, mula sa aking mga mata, tenga, ilong, bibig, hanggang sa aking dakilang butas, pero walang silbi ang tapal, talaga namang wala akong alam sa vulcanizing kahit noon pa man, isa lamang akong bulok na gulong, sarhan ko kaya ang mga pinto at bintana ng kuwartong ito, tapalan ko na kaya ang butas ng lumulundong kisame, kapalan ko kaya ang semento ng pader, saan naman ako hahagilip ng semento, wala rin akong alam sa konstruksyon, nand’yan na sila,

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pabilis nang pabilis ang kanilang mga kilos, hindi, wala, walang mangyayari, makakahanap pa rin sila ng malulusutan, ang masaklap, nagiging kamukha ko silang lahat, at ako mismo’y nalilito sa aming repleksyon sa salamin, punong-puno ng aking mga kawangis ang buong silid, ang buong apartment, ang buong kalye, ang buong silid, ang buong siyudad, ang buong planeta, ang buong sanisukob . . . they are like rats chasing about on the ceiling, the ceiling of my mind, and they make it clear to me that I cannot escape them, that I must o√er co√ee to each and every one of them, must let them in my inner self (aking loob), until they multiply, they are only heeding the command of the Testament, go forth and multiply, and I should not object, they will find me wherever I go, and again I reproach myself (aking sarili), my lust, I am enslaved by my lust for Sandali, that is why I am unhappy because I am always looking for her, I want to patch up all the entrances to my inside (aking loob), from my eyes, ears, nose, mouth, to my great hole, but a patch is useless, I really don’t know anything about vulcanizing, I’m nothing but a rotten tire, maybe I should shut all the doors and windows of this room, perhaps patch up all the holes of the sagging ceiling, thicken the concrete of the walls, where would I scrounge for some cement, I don’t know anything about construction either, they’re already there, their movements are becoming more and more rapid, no, nothing, nothing will happen, they will still be able to find a place to squeeze through, the bitter thing is, they are all beginning to look like me, and I myself am confusing our reflections in the mirror, my likenesses fill the entire room, the entire apartment, the entire street, the entire city, the entire planet, the entire universe.]

This multiplication of the narrator’s self into parts that confuse her imaginary identity (‘‘I myself am confusing our reflections in the mirror’’) as they rampage all over her mind, her self, her body, can only be expressed as madness. Their proliferating movement follows the ‘‘logic’’ of foam and froth, issuing not only at the mouth but through the continuous space of brain, self, body, room, apartment, street, city, planet, universe. Such a departure from normative selfcontained and self-containing subjective and bodily forms can only be madness. That is, it is madness from the perspective that determines in this self, a lack of integration. There is no breach or boundary between her inside (loob) and the insides of room, city, universe. Here, the self spills over into the rest of the world, turning inside out so that it is all inside, all is inside, and there is no more outside. 66

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Madness as Social Form This madness is both liberative and aΔictive. While it allows the configuration of an opposing imaginary, it also brings about the tortuous turbulence the narrator experiences. For this Filipina, aloneness is independence, the cost of which is the madness of loneliness. Loneliness is severance from social subjectivity, a breaking of one’s syncretic sociability. The narrator’s imaginary arises out of a withdrawal. In severing her constitutive relations with others, she grasps herself as an individuated being, which can roam freely. But then she must confront the open subjective conduits of her auxiliary being once these constitutive family and community connections are withdrawn. This self proliferates inasmuch as all her ties, all the channels through which others have invested in her, through which passed others’ desires and interests, are cut o√: all those self-parts are thereby released at once as molecular compounds of her essential smell, and as free radicals/rats corroding the emergent integrity of a newly individuating self. I am trying to pull myself together, but these cut-o√ parts of my self are tearing me apart. The narrator’s expressed desire to seal her entrances and close o√ her interior (loob) is precisely the desire for a self-possessed, individualist subjectivity. This desire for an interiority not defined as a bodily orifice (that is, by her ‘‘dakilang butas ’’ [great hole]), in which the desires of others are constantly invested, can be read as a desire to escape the exogamous orientation and objectification of the Filipina bodily being that enabled the state-sponsored prostitution of Filipinas during martial law and culminated in the systematic export of their domesticlaboring bodies. This objectification, which is enforced daily in the treatment of women as fruits, food, commodities, is written about and against, represented and repudiated, by many feminists. Here it is simultaneously depicted and dissolved: the narrator likens herself to leftover rice and pungent fish, not in corporeal form but in smell—she is what escapes and emanates from their matter. Here feminine objecthood is exploded by the animating of an interiority surpassing bodily boundaries, by a subjective current that is uncontained and hence impenetrable, whose form shifts seamlessly from a sensual palate tasting the sexual pleasures a√orded by the moment, to an unregulated, spreading stream of air vaporizing a female-embodied time. Certainly, this madness, which fulfills the narrator’s desires, is, first and foremost, a flight whose permutations and figurations leave a palimpsest of the Women Alone

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structures it departs from. Her desire to close all her orifices and windows and doors, for example, attests to the constitution of the Filipina body as porous and permeable, and to what I discussed in chapter 1 as the equivalence and continuity between this body and the house. The porousness and permeability of both—symbolized by her body’s portals and the leaking, sagging ceiling—is characteristic of residual cultural and subjective forms—the extendable family, the syncretic self—as well as the regressive e√ect of the lack of money. When this struggling self mentions her nonaccess to masculine technology (vulcanizing, cement, and construction), she alludes to her lack of the socioeconomic capital necessary to maintain the subjective autonomy and self-containment she seeks. Even as the disposable time on which her imaginary flight is predicated evidences some measure of economic independence, it is not enough to assure her the hermetic boundaries of the bourgeois modern subject, which it would seem might allow her a completely private inner life (the interiority of stream of consciousness). It is precisely this remaining dependence on the economic system through which she has gained some autonomy that impels her desire for such boundaries. Her permeability is, after all, what makes for her oppression and therefore what she attempts to escape. So she tries to seal o√ her mind from the penetrating reaches of inquisitive people, transforming it into a camera that keeps taking candid pictures without anyone’s permission, performing a placid femininity while privately she imagines the running over and decapitation of a man. Enacting the same gaze that makes commodity spectacles of the female body, such private imagining betrays the desire for this impervious sexually and economically enfranchised position. It is no accident that following this enactment, she imagines the decapitated man’s head rolling down the street ‘‘like loose change,’’ for the sexual-economic order that makes women’s bodies commodities also posits an equivalence between the masculine head and money, and it is this order she wants to overturn. And yet, lacking money and the gendered entailments of bourgeois individualist subjectivity, she cannot seal her inside o√ completely. This incomplete sealing o√ of her severed sociosubjective conduits makes for the explosion of contradictions embodied by the unruly o√spring of her desire. Born out of the narrator’s breaking away from the socialities of which she would have been a supportive, domestic part, they begin to pester and finally overrun her newfound autonomous subjective being. Ferociously gnawing at her mind, they act out the insistent questioning of her self, which allows her no peace. The 68

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imaginary ratlike beings infest her imaginary, corrode her self-possession, and inundate her body/her house. Her madness itself a form of exit from female domesticity, it is not surprising that these invasive o√spring who will not leave her in peace appear as her likenesses and, moreover, that they take over not only her house but her domestic activities as well. What has erupted within the imaginary of her maddening loneliness is a female crowd.

History and the Imaginary By 1991, the date this story was published, innumerable Filipinas were living alone or living alone with others and for others. Sexual workers, migrant domestic helpers, overseas contract workers, unmarried mothers, mistresses, and other single women by force and by choice lived separately from their families, ‘‘freed’’ from older social networks and the feminine roles on which both these networks and the national mode of production depended. This widespread freeing up of females from their supposed traditional social ground and the consequent commodification of their individuated bodily beings comprised precisely the general ‘‘prostitution’’ of Filipinas accomplished through the modernization schemes initiated by the Marcos regime. The proliferation of Filipino women leading solitary or independent lives was not, however, merely the product of authoritarian modernization. It was also the product of a collective movement. In their quest for better lives for themselves and their families, countless women wrenched themselves free from their respective communities and embarked on lives of their own, and in doing so disengaged their experiences from the national experience, which they had previously allegorized. Indeed, the gendered national crisis, which came to a head in the antagonistic political confrontation between Ferdinand Marcos and Corazon Aquino during the popular revolt of 1986, and appeared to be resolved in the succession of Aquino as president, was in no small part the consequence of the mobilizing actions of numerous new women’s groups and a popular national identification with feminine su√ering and power. With the removal of the authoritarian Marcos state and the postauthoritarian democratic state’s eager adoption of neoliberalist restructuring programs pushed by international financial institutions, the national allegorical character of the plight of women began to wane. The social contradictions embodied by the prostitution of the nation came to be increasingly framed in terms of local, sectoral interests, buoyed by the Women Alone

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new political emphasis on democratic citizenship in which gender rights legitimately figured. The sexualized commodification of women, for example, was now viewed as relatively autonomous from the national and political sphere, even if the economy was recognized as a primary factor in the prevalence of female prostitution. Feminist groups that were not in any alliance with broader social justice political movements, such as the national democratic movement, emerged. In their view, women’s oppression was separate from the class-based oppressions that the revolutionary movement addressed. What arguably replaced the national government as the unifying agent of women’s oppression was the national Catholic Church. The feminine-identified character of the revolt in 1986 paved the way for a Marian revival, and Aquino’s own deeply religious personality brought a new emphasis on religion in national politics.∞∞ The strong symbolic role of the Virgin Mary that Marianism intensely propagated revitalized the political status of the Catholic Church, which, with the zealous participation of religious women’s groups, now took an even more active part in the redefining of women’s being according to female biological functions. Increasingly for middle-class feminist groups, the struggle of women became focused on their sex-specified bodies, with some of the most vigorous battles staged on the issue of sexual and reproductive rights. Exacerbated by the state’s cooptation of women’s struggles through sectoralist political representation, this bodily focus has led to the problems of women largely becoming viewed as the problems of females. Situated in this context, it is not therefore surprising that Sicat’s struggling woman finds no alliances in her battle against the world except in these imaginary replications of herself, or that this battle should take place over her body and over her subjective being. The Catholic Church and its prescriptions and prohibitions concerning the female body are here transgressed not only by the narrator’s avowed desire to use contraception, to kill even her multiplying o√spring, for ‘‘population control,’’ but by the perverse maternal function she embodies, that is, by the unnatural form of reproduction she engages in. Nevertheless, this is the limit of her transformative e√orts. Her refusal of the social order has brought about the containment of her feminist struggle to the individual body, and its subjectivity, leaving her ‘‘likenesses,’’ that is, other women, to erupt as the contradictions of that containment. These clonelike self-parts are the imaginary reflections of countless ‘‘other souls like her’’ similarly embracing the bodily figure of isolated time, innumer70

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able other beings who have become corporeally intimate with the time of loneliness. Until Sandali is made to remain at this writing self ’s side, Sandali is a gust that cannot be held by anyone—she arrives in countless other lives, joining with them and propagating their kind: ‘‘She knows how to get along with everyone, she can multiply even without me, she just has to find another soul like me, she says, anyway the world is cluttered with our kind, I just don’t know that, because I live too much in doubt.’’ The population explosion of this self ’s likenesses is thus engendered by the profusion of such loneliness in the world, by the multitudinousness of people, of women, like her. It is these unattached, free-floating female bodily beings that gnaw at her desired peace, that are in fact the vital force of her psychical aΔiction. ‘‘Gawin mo akong alagad ng iyong katahimikan’’ [Make me the agents of your peace], her likenesses tell her in a suddenly unified voice. But Sicat’s writing self ignores this plea and finally settles on another kind of peace—the peace of an individualist imaginary and its private pleasures. This utopic peace is achieved through the spiriting away of those eruptive contradictions: one by one the unruly progeny of her loneliness are carried away by soap bubbles that she and the moment she now claims as her own make in play: ‘‘This is paradise, I whispered to myself, paradise is a woman playing with soap bubbles, with her shadows and her Moment at her side.’’ While the peace she finds departs from the peace that her seminarian friend finds (her corporeal paradise flying in the face of the spiritual paradise promised by the Church), it nevertheless depends on the evaporation of those troubling like-selves who constituted her disturbance and the liberatory subjective potential it a√orded. By finally dissipating all the parts of her mad, plural, di√usive imaginary body, those parts that were her conduits to others like her, she seals that body and realizes her self-containment in the kind of insulated peace it implies. In chapter 1, I discussed the contradictory constitution of the feminine being of Filipinas as at once subjectively syncretic and bodily individuated. Refurbished under the conditions of multinational capitalism, this contradictory constitution is what allows the feminine body to be let out by and for the collective identity of which it is a part, and thereby what enables and supports the widespread sexualized commodification of Filipinas under the Marcos regime. In literature, the synecdochic role played by Filipinas is expressed as and through the national allegorical character of women. This role is the product, on the one hand, of their own individuating desires and the cultural practice of kapwa (exWomen Alone

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tended identity) and, on the other, of the capture of both by the transnational sexual-economic hermeneutic of capital. Luna Sicat’s story articulates the existential predicament faced by Filipina women at the end of the century as the implosion of these contradictory tendencies. The fragile subjective containment that the story o√ers as a resolution of the unbearable paradoxical condition of aloneness and crowdedness is not, however, an escapist flight from real conditions that is without consequence. This claim of self as a matter of ‘‘ownness’’ (sarili) must be viewed, rather, as a social experiential practice that results from and brings about the transformation of the logic of synecdoche and the dominant Philippine social relations of production that the latter served to organize.

Woman-Nation: Liberation and Sovereignty For no nation is free if its women are in chains. —marra lanot, Déjà Vu and Other Essays

One important feminist response in the early 1970s to the synecdochic role of women was to create a model of sovereign subjectivity for women closely articulated with the model of national sovereignty. With women’s political organizations emerging out of struggles for national democracy, liberation for women was articulated through, if not wholly circumscribed by, a framework of nationalist liberation. Among these organizations was the Malayang Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan (Free Movement of New Women), known as makibaka (struggle), founded by Ma. Lorena Barros, an activist student who had joined the Communist Movement’s New People’s Army.∞≤ The first important action of makibaka (also the slogan of the national democratic movement) was to picket the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant held in Manila in 1970 in a demonstration against both imperialism and the sexual objectification of women. Buttressed by the evident relation between the hospitality national economy developing under Marcos and the increasing conscription and abuse of women in sex tourism as well as manufacturing industries, the equation of the selling of ‘‘our women’’ and the selling of national sovereignty continued well into the late 1980s, underwriting claims for the dual liberation of nation and woman and shaping the women’s movement as a struggle for both nationalist sovereignty and the bodily sovereignty of women.∞≥ During this time, feminist concerns in literature came to be expressed as 72

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inextricable from nationalist concerns. Women’s political agency was conceived in terms of the ideals of national sovereignty and democratic citizenship. Lualhati Bautista, for example, wrought images of women as strong, liberated individual citizens. In novels such as Bata, Bata, Paano Ka Ginawa (Child, Child, How Were You Made) and Dekada ’70 (The Decade of the 70’s), Bautista created leading women characters whose responsibilities to others, particularly their children, are attuned to their responsibilities to the nation. While they defy the sexist attitudes of their society, they do not relinquish but rather actively take up their duties to bring a truly civil and democratic society into being. Bautista’s liberated mother is a remaking of the metaphorical role of Inang Bayan (mother nation) fashioned for women by postindependence nationalist discourse. No longer a mere symbol of male-led liberation struggles, Bautista’s liberated mother participates in the transformation of the nation by fulfilling her potential in her responsibilities to others, as a productive member of society, as well as her own potential, as a valuable member of humanity. As Bautista’s lead character, Lea, explains to her son in Bata, Bata, ‘‘Take me, for example: if I were only the wife of your father, I would only have fulfillment as a wife. As your mom, I have fulfillment as a mother. But I still need another kind of fulfillment . . . my fulfillment as a human being.’’ In Bautista’s work, female characters are social examples of and pedagogical models for the rounded, complex, and profound personhood or humanity ( pagkatao) of women. This personhood or humanity is predicated on a productive relation to society and to self, whereby one’s self-fulfillment emerges out of one’s development of his or her humanness, conceived as the ideal capacities and potentials of members of that universal community called humanity from which Filipinos were, as a consequence of continuing colonialism, excluded. Thus while Bautista portrays women’s claims to humanity as a mode of resistance to their subordination as women, independent of nationalist struggles, these claims are to some extent already predicated on a universal humanism inseparable from a universal notion of citizenship to which nationalist struggles subscribed. Lea’s triumph as a sovereign subject, against all the forces that would make her ‘‘only a wife’’ and ‘‘only a mother,’’ is thus portrayed in her recognition by the national institution par excellence: the educational system. In being asked to give the graduation address at her children’s school, Lea’s self-liberation from confining gendered roles and expectations is given legitimate form as good citizenship. While her sexually insubordinate behavior leads to her final separation from Women Alone

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both men in her life, thus giving her independence, this independence as freedom of the single individual is tempered by her intensified embrace of her responsibilities as a mother. In this way she becomes liberated as a modern (national) subject. It is the latent subscription to a model of woman as citizen-subject that the Marcos regime institutionalized in the Balikatan sa Kaunlaran (Partners in Development) Movement, a project designed to bring about ‘‘the total integration of women’’ in the new development strategies. Sponsored by the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women, which was created in 1975 in keeping with the United Nations Declaration of the Decade of Women and chaired by Imelda Marcos, this project was one of many cultural programs which attempted to ‘‘harness’’ the great energy issuing from and propelling young women who were already actively transforming all areas of national life and to channel their ‘‘creative potentials’’ into full participation in employment.∞∂ Whether they were participating in the growing student demonstrations against the government or in the revolutionary movement in the countryside, or exercising unprecedented popular desires expressed in the emerging ‘‘cult of stars,’’ particularly female stars, overtaking Philippine cinema, women’s social force had begun to make itself felt on a scale palpable to the ruling dispensation.∞∑ The assimilation of women into the national program for development was, on the face of it, their transformation into citizen-subjects. The other face of women’s liberation as equal partners in development was as new labor freed from traditional, feudal constraints.∞∏ In this way the energy exhibited by women’s various forms of insubordination was harnessed as the creative potential of citizen-laborers that the nation-state could then market. The liberative actions of women were thus channeled toward the humanism of capitalist development. The desire for sovereign subjectivity represented by woman character models, such as in Bautista’s novels, was not, however, merely the result of the state’s modernizationist interpretation. It was also shaped by the anticolonial and anti-imperialist nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the revolutionary momentum of which Marcos tried to capture by means of his authoritarian regime’s programme for a ‘‘Revolution from the Center.’’∞π Women’s oppression was largely perceived from within these movements as having the same root causes identified by nationalist struggles. Before it was shut down after the declaration of martial law in 1972, makibaka had called and worked for

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women’s emancipation from within the struggle for national democracy, viewing women’s oppression as the consequence of semifeudal and neocolonial relations that were seen to persist in sexist tendencies within the movement itself.∞∫ What these antistate nationalist movements had in common with Marcos nationalism was the subscription to a universal model of sovereign subjectivity articulated in postindependence literary constructions of citizen-subjects against the ‘‘thingification’’ or objectification and dependency Filipinos experienced under neocolonialism.∞Ω Overdetermined by the conditions of the nation within which they are situated, the rebellion of Bautista’s women thus necessarily assumes the qualities of autonomous will, personal freedom, and individual rights fundamental to sovereign subjectivity. Even as the assumption of such qualities is in part shaped by the ideals of the European Enlightenment inherited in the course of anticolonial Filipino nationalist struggles by the national intelligentsia of the postindependence era,≤≠ the claim to tao (human, person) fundamental to this rebellion is not, however, entirely or finally subsumable by the bourgeois individualism of advanced capitalist nations. While individual, Bautista’s characters are experientially enmeshed in social relations that are inextricable from conditions of the nation. In contrast, however, to women characters in the nationalist literary tradition who served largely as metaphors of the crisis of the nation or as victims of the collusion between colonialism and a repressive morality, Bautista’s women characters do not coincide with the nation.≤∞ They are, rather, sovereign agents participating in national liberatory struggle. Bautista’s transformation of Inang Bayan into a citizen-subject demonstrates the practice whereby women infused agency into their national symbolical roles through the incarnation of these feminine signifiers as real persons within the nation. This concretization of the biological substantive, babae (female),≤≤ as actual women with social roles, is exemplified by the rearticulation of motherhood in numerous poems, such as Grace Monte de Ramos’s ‘‘Brave Woman,’’ which mourns ‘‘a woman’s/bitter lot: to give birth to men/who kill and are killed.’’ Here, a mother is no longer the idealized motherland for whom nationalist sons die, but rather a real mother su√ering the losses brought about by nationalism itself. The concretization, through the making-human (tao), of women’s symbolic functions is also enacted by animating or addressing archetypal, fictional, and mythical female images as if they were real persons (tao). Joi

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Barrios does the first in ‘‘Kay Birheng Maria’’ (For Virgin Mary).≤≥ Here, among all the images of the Virgin Mary surrounding the poetic persona’s innocent youth, ‘‘Isa lamang ang nanatiling buhay ’’ (Only one remains alive), and that is of her ‘‘smiling peacefully, / as she crushes the serpents beneath her feet.’’ While in this poem Barrios activates the national feminine symbol of the Virgin Mary into a warrior woman, in ‘‘Maria Makiling’’ and ‘‘Kay Maria Clara at Iba Pang Binibini ng Kanyang Panahon’’ (To Maria Clara and Other Women of Her Time), Barrios addresses mythical and fictional women who have significantly shaped notions of Filipina womanhood as if they were living persons, acting and dreaming in ways that exceed their scripted roles. Such strategies, which drew on invigorated social realist tendencies in literary and cultural production, more generally, loosened the symbolic coincidence of women with the nation. Opposed to the status of colonial-ward and the symbol of the unrealized nation (the utopic image of the impeded community in the figure of the idealized Mother), the making-human of women intially meant making them citizen-subjects, as the concrete proof and means of realization of the nation in present actuality. It is as citizen-subjects that women can rethink their roles, that is, that they can see themselves as having roles in society.≤∂ Personal freedom becomes distinguishable from national freedom, and a notion of the individual’s social responsibility intervenes to link one to the other. It is this alienation of women as persons (tao) from the implicitly feminine nation as well as from the socially sanctioned kinship roles on which the gendering of the nation continues to be based (mother, sister, daughter) that later allows the full-scale emergence of the very notion of the specificity of women’s struggles, the notion of women as second-class citizens, the idea that women’s concerns are autonomous but ‘‘connected’’ to larger social issues,≤∑ and the concept of the ‘‘double burden’’ constituted, on the one hand, by women’s private, domestic oppression and, on the other, by their public, class, and national oppression.≤∏ In a word, this alienation allows the constitution of the identity of women as women. Women writers began to express this alienation by thematizing the slippage between woman and nation. In Elynia Mabanglo’s poem ‘‘Regla,’’ first published in 1977, for example, this slippage is embodied in the double meaning of the word ‘‘regla’’ to signify both menstruation and law.≤π Here the regulatory function of menstruation is seen not as symbolically parallel to the regulatory func-

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tion of the law but as directly shaped by it. A woman’s fearful apprehension about her body leads to a lament about the moral prohibitions of society that shape her fear: only because society prohibits women from bearing children out of wedlock is the missing of her period cause for grief. The separation of the female body from the social body implied in this conversion of the analogy of regla (period/regulation) into a direct and actual social relation is the process through which women become subjects in society, subjects who can speak to their specific unhappiness as women.

‘‘Ang Maging Babae ’’ (To Be a Woman): The Making of Identity With the rupture of the allegorical link between women and nation, the category of babae (female) takes precedence over Filipinas. The claim to being tao (person) is now specifically opposed to the objectification of women as women. Babae becomes subject, in other words, through her separation from the presumed objecthood of the female substance. Hence, in ‘‘Babae Kami,’’ a poem published in the first anthology of Philippine women’s literature in 1984 entitled Filipina, Marra PL Lanot denies that women are food, dolls, or land, in a word, things, and declares, ‘‘Babae kami / Tao rin naman’’ (We are women / also human, after all).≤∫ Here the humanity of women is constructed against and alongside the understood human status of its addressee, men (implied by the use of kami, the exclusionary ‘‘we’’), and proved by activities which they know how to do: ‘‘Who know how to commune with / A soul about to fall / Who know how to love / A remembering heart / Who know how to fight / And right what is wrong / While creating a garden / For the beauty of the world.’’ The daughter of the well-known journalist Serafin Lanot and the wife of the poet-journalist Jose Lacaba (whose work I discuss in chapter 5), Lanot later describes her own feminist turn in terms of a self-alienating consciousness of the freedom and resources at her husband’s command in the literary world in contrast to her own domestic confinement, a confinement she memorably renders as ‘‘fishbowl silence’’ in her poem ‘‘Wife.’’≤Ω In ‘‘Kasalo’’ (Dinner Partner), Joi Barrios argues against the practical interpretation of woman as food—rice, meat, dessert—served for the pleasure and satisfaction of man. Like Lanot, Barrios claims woman’s humanity on the basis

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of the characteristics she has in common with man and the activities she shares with him. The making human of woman is her transformation from food for man to producer and consumer of food, with and like man. Like man, she is a creature of needs and desires: ‘‘She too has a belly that grumbles / a stomach that needs to be filled / a heart that should be caressed.’’ Together with man, she lives and works for a common future: ‘‘Kaharap at kasalo sa kinabukasan ’’ (face to face, companion at the table of tomorrow). Woman claims her rightful place as an equal partner in the household that is society by proving both her human need and social productivity. Subscribing to egalitarian ideals, Lanot and Barrios invoke lalaki as the standard by which women are subordinated and as the agent of that subordination. The want of woman is thus recognizable against the privileged powers and capacities of man in civil society. Addressed to man, their poem arguments are, in form and content, juridical rebuttals of male authority. Hence, babae as tao is a subject-in-action, a coming into being-subject through productive activities, paradigmatically, the creative activity of writing. As woman rises as the subject questioning and refuting man and his authority, so does woman become the object of a questioning and refusal that is itself an uprising, a subjective becoming. Babae is thus a≈rmed as subject only after it has already become denaturalized, wrenched from ontological being and placed in historical time. In ‘‘Ang Maging Babae ’’ (To Be a Woman), Mabanglo writes: What a curse to be a woman in this time. A definition inherited from the past and the present. A form molded out of longing and need.

Babae is a spell cast by past and present powers. It is a curse because it is an imprisoning conceit, form, role, shaped and enforced by every father, brother and husband who act, respectively, as prison guard, spy, and padlock. It is at once container and contained, form and content, meaning and means—a ‘‘you’’ without subjectivity, a personification without human capacities, merely a bearer, signifier, and accessory of prior desires. 78

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You are the source and destination. of countless things. The staple and dessert of coveting and longing. What love or sacrifice? What service or endurance? You are a brief ’s bottom, a necktie, the embroidery on a handkerchief and an undershirt. Your beauty is measured on the bed, your mind, by the money earned.

Like the woman invoked as ‘‘you,’’ the category of babae is tried, measured, perused, its multiple functions and forms pulled out like a screwdriver, blade, and file from a utility knife. Under the curse of babae, Filipina women are shown to be what many feminists by this time, 1979, know them to be: kasangkapan— personal belongings, domestic utensils, household implements. With the nation’s export-oriented hospitality economy in full swing, thriving on the domestic female bodily labor it let out in prostitution, tourism, garment manufacturing, and electronic industries, this ‘‘truth’’ of babae was everywhere to be seen— the truth of it, that is, as a commodity form. No longer in a state of nature, babae is objectified, abstracted, estranged from its naturalized social referents. It becomes visible as a representation standing in for a subject who does not exist. It is, however, precisely in this alienated state of the commodity, fully in the realm of representation, that babae can serve as a new means of subjectification. In Lanot’s and Barrios’s poems, it is in the negation of babae in representation that babae becomes a subject. In Mabanglo’s poem, a self (ang sarili) emerges from the overturning of the curse that is achieved by the wounding act of ‘‘fierce reflection and study.’’ The alienation from babae is what allows this same empty signifier to be appropriated as a political identity. After all, in freeing women as commodities, statesponsored prostitution and other modern industries were at the same time e√ectively positing their identity in their exchange value. Hence as babae took hold as a framework for experiencing oppression, it began to achieve substance as a form of being-in-itself, a humankind with characteristics, meanings, and capacities, in a Women Alone

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word, a wholeness of its own. The poet Benilda S. Santos recalls that in the mid-1980s, when the discourse of resistance against the Marcos dictatorship was fully formed, ‘‘that is when I first realised the divergence of my textual experiments from the prevailing literary discourse. I discovered that the topics that first appealed to me were becoming more distant from topics concerning the political life of the nation and the protest against American imperialism. . . . It wasn’t that I didn’t have feelings for the indigent and the oppressed, or that I didn’t sympathize with the nation. Rather it was because the call of my own womanhood was so much stronger.’’≥≠ The notion of sariling pagkababae (own womanhood) with its own meaning and nature depends not only on the growing distance Santos speaks of between what were considered ‘‘larger political concerns’’ and the experience of daily life or even the distance between daily life and representations of women. It also depends on the very representability of babae, whose condition of possibility is the process of abstraction posited by the commodification of female labor. The interrogation of the meaning of babae and its constitution as an identity thus depends on the prior abstraction of babae as a representational category. By the mid-1980s, this abstraction was widespread. Babae could thus become a form of possessive selfhood (sarili), a self that one could claim as one’s own (sarilihin) but, moreover, that could be a source of experience, meaning, and value. Hence in her poem, ‘‘Regla sa Buwan ng Hunyo’’ (Period in the Month of June), Mabanglo could positively interpret what was the means of woman’s oppression as the essential substance of her being, that is, as equivalent to babae, now seen as the ‘‘who’’ that is oppressed: Let this force be— This: the entirety of my personhood, entirety of all my di√erence and similarities with all people, the entirety of my saved recollections and my squandered present the entirety of a future pawned to the calender

In Mabanglo’s poem ‘‘Regla’’ (1977) menstrual blood is the uninvited visitor to a woman’s body, the flow she anxiously waits for and pleads to come, fearful that 80

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it will lose its way and tears will rain ‘‘like the tears sowed / by one who loved me.’’ Its flow tracing woman’s oppression, menstrual blood has become the entirety or totality (kabuuan) of female personhood. What in the earlier poem was a means of oppression and liberation becomes in the later poem the object that is oppressed and therefore the objective, the end, of liberation. The transformation of babae as a curse into the apparent positivity of female being invoked in Mabanglo’s 1985 poem demonstrates the extent to which babae had by this time become unmoored both from the Philippines and Filipinas as well as from the intimate relation between the two. This autonomization of babae in literature encapsulates, enacts, and extends the process of detachment from territorial forms of identity and community undertaken by countless women since the early 1970s, a process of detachment which by the mid-1980s brought about the burgeoning of the so-called warm-body export phenomenon.≥∞ In this light, the experiential practices I describe as comprising the prostitution of women in an earlier moment can be seen to be in a continuous and constitutive relation to the experiential practices comprising their global export in a later moment. Or, put di√erently, the experiential practices of Filipina export are the result of an intensification and qualitative transformation of the contradictory poles structuring the experiential practices of Filipina prostitution: on the one hand, the practices of individuating flight, on the other, the practices of syncretic sociability. While I talk about earlier and later moments, I do not mean to construct a linear historical continuum in which these moments have fixed temporal places. By moments, I refer to analytically identifiable phases in a dynamic assemblage of modalities of experience.≥≤ These phases might coexist in the synchronic structure of historicist time but they precede and succeed each other in the diachronic movement of historical time. The two moments I refer to are therefore two aspects of Filipina historical experience of the social and subjective process called the feminization of labor, paradigmatically realized in the sex tourist and light manufacturing industries and the Filipina domestic labor export industry. Two kinds of Filipina visual artists’ works express the two moments in the constitution of Filipina as an autonomous gender identity. In the first moment, Filipinas, the metaphor of the nation, become a person (tao) through the creation of a new national subject: Filipina. Anna Fer’s paintings India and Ilustrada (Female Indian and Enlightened Class) and Lupang Tigang (Wasteland) visuWomen Alone

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ally render the detachment of Filipina from Philippines and the imbuing of the former, hitherto only a metaphor, with autonomous agency. In these paintings, the Filipina is a collective national subject pondering not only the crisis of the nation, now viewed as separate from her, but also her relation to it. The collective subjectification of Filipinas is thus carried out vis-à-vis the nation. Put another way, the Filipina gains subjective agency in the process of her separation from the nation. The nation hence becomes the object through which she understands her own struggle for liberation. In the second moment, the Filipina becomes woman through her separation from the category human. Agnes Arellano’s Cornucopia and Imelda Cajipe-Endaya’s Ang Asawa Ko’y dh (My Wife Is a D[omestic] H[elper]) both create sculptural bodily installations of a headless woman, portraying the violent objectification and commodification of Filipina women. In both, the female body stands alone, eviscerated and reassembled as a resource function caught in a world of mass production. Such images of female dehumanization become the transformative points of women’s human subjectification.

‘‘Arrivederci’’: Alienation and Individuating Detachments If the alienation of Filipinas from the Philippines can be seen to have been brought about by women’s constitutive impetus in movements that ostensibly departed from any sense of national destiny, it was also, for middle-class women, brought about by the recognition of the gap between the so-called progress of the nation and the ‘‘increasing degradation of the Filipina,’’ which served as a defining moment of Filipina feminism.≥≥ As I showed in chapter 1, the prostitution of women under the postcolonial, capitalist regime of the nation itself consists of practices of women freeing themselves in and through unsanctioned practices of aspiration and enjoyment. The alienation of women from the nation in the first moment might thus be seen to be motivated by women’s actions exceeding the synecdochic role they are tapped to play in behalf of the capitalsubjectified nation. Already in this synecdochic role we see the individuating forces motivating bodily commodification as the precondition of the subsequent actual alienation of Filipina women from their country in their widespread export as overseas contract workers. In other words, the alienation of Filipina women from their naturalized (national) being as babae—that is, from their traditional gendered syncretic sociability—is, in a second moment, the product 82

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of liberative flights from the capitalist subsumption of their colonial-feudal roles in the process of their commodification as natural resources of the nation.≥∂ The autonomization of babae in literature and the literary practices predicated on the objectification of babae (such as the redefinition and a≈rmation of babae by feminist writers) might thus be seen as an inscription of modes of experience emerging out of and as forms of the contradictory struggles of women. This ‘‘capture by literature’’ (pagsangkot sa pagpapanitikan), as Benilda Santos puts it, does not merely secure the hegemonic position of some preexisting social class in relation to struggle.≥∑ Writers do not merely ‘‘capture’’ modes they have not themselves invented. They also inflect them in ways that further or contain the forms of struggle they express. In other words, writers extend and reconstitute experiential practices of struggle in everyday life. They therefore give form not only to prevailing modes of experience and the forms of subjectivity and sociality produced as the agents of such experience. They also give form to modes of experience that escape and challenge the organization of subjective practices within dominant social relations of production. As a rearticulation of the practices of mediation comprising particular modes of experience, literature attempts to realize and transform the sociosubjective means of production of relations that express and support the hegemonic organization of life. Hence, feminist literary deployments of the category of babae, either as a system of oppressive representational forms or as a new political subject position, draw from the alienation of babae already obtaining in dominant social relations of production. In other words, the status of babae as a sociopolitical construct, as a means of representation owned and regulated by a ruling, masculinist order and appropriable by its objects, women—this abstract condition of babae is already the product of women’s actual practices of alienation in leaving their homes and families, in refusing the sexual entailments of their gendered work, and in representing themselves in various ways to gain employment. Feminist literary concerns over representations of babae might thus be seen as reiterations of the practices of enacted representation that women themselves engaged in as they detached themselves from their parts in traditional socialities. These practices of enacted representation and their constitutive connections to the processes of alienation, abstraction, and individuation that produce babae as exportable commodities are rendered in Fanny Garcia’s short story ‘‘Arrivederci’’ (1983). Two Filipina domestic workers in Italy get to know each other Women Alone

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on a Sunday outing of Filipinos working in Rome. Both of them, Nelly and Vicenta, are lured to Italy by representations and dreams of other lives they might have there. Once in Italy, they themselves represent their lives to their friends and relatives at home, keeping from them the fact of their actual work as housekeeper and servant. The alienation of these women results neither from their leaving the Philippines nor from their creating fictional representations of themselves. Rather, their alienation is the active process through which they bring themselves to leave in the first place. It is through this alienating journey on which they embark in search of some life beyond the one they already know that they come into being as individual selves with the potential capacity for representation. For each of them there is an originary moment in this journey. For Nelly it is when she picks up a Christmas card sent to her sister that shows a picture of a house with a chimney and an evergreen tree surrounded by snow: ‘‘How beautiful the white Christmas in another country was! I wish there were snow in the Philippines, she thought. She asked her older sister Myrna if she could keep that card.’’ For Vicenta it is when the school she works at honors her with a celebration and a certificate for fifteen years of teaching: ‘‘I cried in happiness. But at home, by midnight, holding on to that certificate, I still couldn’t sleep. So the teaching I o√ered with heart and mind came to no more than this one piece of paper.’’ Each woman is confronted by a representation that denatures her being and life, produces in her a state of lack, and o√ers a reflection of her surroundings as nondestined, contingent, changeable. It is through a specific representational object, which is at the same time also a necessary, functional exchange symbol in imperialist institutions (education, commercialized religion), that whatever unarticulated yearning or palpable absence might have already been stirring in them, moving their life, now gains form as a desire for something. In this imaginary moment, each separates from the place of her being, now become the background against which she sees herself as a subject in want. This originary place itself becomes a place that is wanting, a context that can and should be changed. Thus embarked on similar journeys for change, Nelly and Vicenta (who is ‘‘baptized’’ by the Filipinos in Italy as Vicky) nevertheless trace divergent destinies. After a period of seeing each other on their Sundays o√, Nelly isolates herself from the group, idles away time after work, and begins planning an independent tour through the rest of Europe. In the meantime, Vicenta sinks 84

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into ever-deepening loneliness, failing to gain the intimacy she seeks in Nelly, who rebu√s her e√orts to become close friends. While Nelly preoccupies herself with ‘‘questions of self ’’ and daydreams about future travels, content with her independence in mapping her own destiny, Vicenta loses control not only over the self-representations she has sent home, but also over her real role in her present household. Unable to find the relations she longs for, Vicenta cannot keep command of her socially unmoored self or protect herself from the sexual invasions of her employer. Finally, she jumps to her death. While shaped by the di√erent classes they belong to in the Philippines, the di√erence in Nelly’s and Vicenta’s paths is not, however, completely determined by class. In fact, this class di√erence must be continuously reasserted, represented, in the face of their presumed sameness as Filipina domestic workers. Describing her situation as ‘‘unique’’ not only because she ‘‘lived out’’ of her workplace but also because her employers were out during her work hours, Nelly presents herself as making an enviable independent living. She stresses the big income she was making as a researcher in the Philippines in order to ground her unique case on her prior di√erence from the rest of the overseas Filipinos who reconstitute the national community outside of its geographical boundaries. Indeed, it is through their encounter that both Nelly and Vicenta realize their lives as abstract individual forms (what Nelly calls their respective ‘‘cases’’), forms of equivalence through which they recognize the di√erences between them and figure out the kind of relationship they might have to each other.

Pagkakatulad (Likeness) Garcia’s story demonstrates the way the abstract individuation of babae takes place through active practices of alienation and disembedding of self from naturalized contexts and communities. It is in fact Nelly’s attempts to detach herself from the reconstituted nation abroad by means of class signifiers that at once invokes her shared identity with Vicenta and their insurmountable di√erence. In her desire for intimacy, Vicenta continuously feels for their likeness or being of a kind ( pagkakatulad). At one point, she takes Nelly’s hand and strokes it, remarking that Nelly had no callouses: ‘‘Hindi tulad ng sa ‘kin, ng iba pang tulad natin’’ (Not like mine, not like the rest of those like us). The relations of shared origins and a≈liation implied in the notion of kababayan (being of the same community) become, in this moment, relations of identity and di√erence. It is paradigWomen Alone

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matically through such acts of equivalence and exception in the course of the outing they are on that Nelly and Vicenta produce each other as two particular abstract individual forms: Nelly assumes the form of the consumer-subject, able to convert her surroundings into souvenirs that would reflect an image of herself as owner of meaningful life experiences: ‘‘those are what would prove that she didn’t waste her days on earth’’; and Vicenta assumes the form of the commodity-object, helpless in commanding herself as the mere medium of others’ desires and hence unable to ward o√ the unwanted sexual advances of her employer. In e√ect, the precipitous end of Vicenta proves the ‘‘waste’’ that Nelly perceived to be the life of her kababayan—their life of excursions and diversions on days o√ that was like ‘‘isang relo—hindi nagbabago ng anyo, ng direksyon, ng mga numero’’ (a wristwatch—whose form, direction, numbers, never changed). This waste that Nelly shuns is, however, also the ‘‘waste product’’ of her own subjectification. It is no coincidence that as Nelly becomes more and more her own person, Vicenta steadily wastes away and that finally, as Nelly’s mind is sojourning at the Ei√el Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, map in hand, Vicenta jumps to her death from her employer’s apartment, shattering her face and skull. The tourist subject rises out of the destruction of the human countenance of her other. The possibility of other relations of kindness exceeding the relation of identity and di√erence, which is suggested in Vicky’s intimate gesture of stroking Nelly’s hand, is squelched by Nelly’s attempt to eschew the parochial and monotonous life of her compatriots. Hence, while Vicenta looks for some sort of kindness from Nelly, Nelly wards o√ likeness to Vicenta. To her apartment mates’ teasings about Vicenta’s constant ‘‘overtures’’ toward her—‘‘Really, what was the relationship between her and Vicenta? Mother-daughter? Sisters? Cousins? Friends? Or maybe . . . Who between them was the man?’’—she o√ers a placid smile, inwardly rejecting the meaninglessness of the others’ routines, the dead-endness of their all-too-familiar stories and diversions, and, finally, dismissing Vicenta herself: ‘‘More valuable to her were questions of self.’’ Nelly’s private, individual, subjective form is predicated on a homophobic class detachment from the national and gendered sameness e√ected by and on the community which constitutes itself out of a prior movement of alienation. This sameness of identity is not only what motivates Nelly’s self-di√erentiation—her sexual indi√erence; it is also what is realized as the consequence of her active separation from the affinities among and desires of ‘‘the others like her.’’ Like Sicat’s narrator, Nelly’s 86

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private, autonomous self is the e√ect of an active process of alienation from those others figured in Vicky, who acts as the immobile, blank medium through which Nelly achieves mobility and the power to produce meaning and representation. Hence, in the end, Nelly is the one chosen to break the news of Vicenta’s death to her family. On Vicenta’s dead, all too material (but nevertheless abstract) body, Nelly becomes an authorial subject: ‘‘Holding her ballpoint pen and staring at the blank, white piece of paper placed on the table, Nelly thought, she should also remember: in San Isidro, Vicenta and Vicky were Bising.’’ These very practices by which Filipinas, as feminized national labor, become identifiable individual babae are reenacted by Garcia through the structure of repetition and juxtaposition (or montage) of Vicenta’s and Nelly’s experiences. Even as the story performs this comparative search for similarity and singularity in parallel Filipina lives, it imagines direct relations between them. As Vicenta faints, Nelly slips into the memory of her father’s dying moments in a hospital. The intensities of Nelly’s social context are resolved into inner memories, into an inner meaning the indefinite search for which becomes the very process of her subjectification. Nelly’s mobility as a subject becoming universal can thus be viewed as predicated on the immobilization of other Filipinas (as national labor) and the objectification of their liberative desires. These desires as (first) activity of alienation from the nation are what produce the objectified, deterritorialized, gendered, and racialized identity Filipina,≥∏ from which a (second) active alienation produces private, individual babae-subjects possessing the independent power of representation they can now exercise over women in general. What Marx observes of the relation between the worker and the nonworker (the owner of property) can be seen to also hold for the relation between Filipinas, as members of free-floating Filipina labor in the process of class di√erentiation: ‘‘that the worker’s real, practical attitude in production and to the product (as a state of mind) appears in the non-worker confronting him as theoretical attitude.’’≥π The ‘‘curdling’’ of Vicenta into Vicky and Bising, which is enabled by Vicenta’s liberative practices of alienation, becomes a problem whose resolution is the constitutive task of Nelly’s authorial role.≥∫ Although Nelly’s authorial role might suggest the feminist need to take collective authorship of the story of Filipina women, the closure that can constitute a proper story is not an easy one. The remains of identity that are Vicky’s several names cannot, at least for the reader, be so neatly dissolved by the letter Nelly will write informing her family that she Women Alone

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died in a car accident. They persist as disturbing elements in the constitution of the private individual subject writing herself out of being babae. The inadequation of Vicenta to Vicky and to Bising points to her failure to achieve a selfsustained and self-possessed self. Or rather, it points to the heterogeneity and mutability of self that are disclaimed by the form of sovereign subjectivity Nelly aspires to and from whose progressive perspective Vicky’s behavior comes to be read as a regressive tendency to kindness, in the disparaging sense of a proclivity for excessive attachments and intimacy with the same, now a racialized and sexualized sameness.≥Ω Moreover, the persistent insolubility of Vicenta’s identity attests to the multiple temporalities of life that cannot be integrated into a sovereign individual subject nor assimilated into the ‘‘one clock’’ of the diasporic community. The subjective predicament explored by Sicat depicts this contradictory precipitation, which lies at the heart of the constitution of babae as the identitysubject of feminist liberation. Embodied in the population explosion of the narrator’s likenesses is the irruption of the rest from which the writing subject must sever her socially constitutive connections in order to be a woman-in-andfor-herself. Although those connections are not entirely subsumable by the relations of equivalence posited by capital, they continue to be cast as forms of the same under the heteronormative imperatives shaping sovereign subjectivity (and its dialectics of self and other). Like the writing subject in Sicat’s story who rejects prevailing social roles of babae, Nelly rejects the re-created familial contexts Filipinas make of their domestic work situations and the daughter roles they perform within them. While liberating herself into autonomous, individual subjectivity, her dissociation from the forms of reconstituted national colonial relations among Filipinas abroad reifies the heterogeneous practices of socializing as forms of stagnation, weakness, and dependence. As one in constant want of her company, Vicenta can hence only be ‘‘parang asong bubuntot-buntot ito sa kanya’’ (like a dog tailing after her), a woman beside herself, barely human, in need of mastery and a√ection. However, in reconstructing the trajectory of Nelly’s becoming subject, Garcia also rehearses its necessary leavings. ‘‘Arrivederci’’ alludes to these leavings, to the grave losses created by the freedom of individual mobility and subjective experience embraced by Filipinas who submit to the universal forms and logic of global capitalism that they help to expand. Among these losses are experiential practices that comprise and predicate an alternative logic of social coopera88

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tion subsumed within the mode of production of late capital. For example, the practices of communion of the other Filipinas—their sharing of food and stories, their collective participation in rituals of entertainment as well as religion (watching porn movies and going to church)—forge intimate social relationships that, while serving as a low-maintenance means of reproduction of immigrant labor (no longer through the extended natural family), are also vital social means of striving against the conditions of commodification, objectification, and exploitation that they regularly face. While Nelly’s private, individual subjectivity might be viewed as emerging out of a disowning of such practices of reproductive communion, it is nevertheless itself a means of striving as well, to the extent that it refuses the nonessential, auxiliary character of reproductive work with which Filipinas, as universal domestic helpers, are equated. Against their objectification as kasangkapan, as lifetime object-media of others’ needs and desires, both Nelly’s desires for uniqueness and sovereignty and Vicky’s desires for intimate attachments and likeness between them (to be alike, to like each other) are modes of subjective struggle. Thus, on the one side, the two responses are modes of experience that are incorporated into and transubstantiated as universal, institutionalized representational forms of social relations: the money-form and the commodity-form.∂≠ Nelly’s practices of flight from repetition and emptiness, and her desire for her own selfhood thus become assimilated into the position of the money-subject, possessing independent power and value, while Vicky’s practices of flight from isolation and loneliness of unattached selfhood becomes assimilated into the position of the commodity-medium, without will or agency of its own, dependent on others for the determinations of its use and on a transcendent system of value for the determinations of its own worth.

‘‘Souring Sensation’’: Times of Waste, Time of Reproduction Two apparently contradictory modes of subjectivity thus confront each other in the figures of Nelly and Vicky. On the one hand, there is the sovereign representing subject, the self as site of ‘‘owness,’’ which Barrios’s poem ‘‘I Am a Woman Living Alone’’ claims as the source and agent of purposeful and active desire (hangad). On the other hand, there is the weak, needy self, which is falling apart, unable to properly cohere into a stable identity. As Garcia’s story shows, however, the two sides of babae remain tied together in a subjective economy. Even as Women Alone

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Nelly aspires to the money-form, she cannot entirely free herself from the contradiction of others, and it is precisely this predicament that comes to a crisis in the madness of Sicat’s narrator. Viewed from the side of exchange, the field within which identity-di√erence obtains as a dominant mode of experience and social relation, such madness appears as the experience of simultaneously increasing solitude and increasing crowdedness, at once a loss of and liberation from the control of one’s boundaries. From the side of exchange, within which babae is constituted as a commodity and a representational identity, this latter mode of experience of movements surpassing individual human finitude and its organizing, spatialized social forms (body, room, house, city, planet, universe—each successively containing the others), can appear only as the verso or constitutive alterity of the experience of sovereign subjectivity—like Vicky’s faint constitution, lachrymose behavior, and multiple names, which can only attest to her lack of self-possession, a weak and insu≈cient self who acts as a mediator of experiences or times that course through it, but that it cannot own, control, or contain. To view historical experience from the side of production—that is, as creative activity—allows us to see the ways in which cultural modes of experience that emerge out of and fuel ways of working under capitalist command (here the modes of experience of Filipinas as a specific form of feminized labor) also bear dimensions that are tangential to the universal subjective forms and logic of global capital. Enrique Dussel describes this dimension of praxis as ‘‘an experience of exteriority ’’: the aspects of people’s praxis that are regarded as ‘‘unproductive,’’ trivial, useless, ‘‘aspects that do not generate wealth in the form of profit for capital [but] are nevertheless part of the life of the people.’’∂∞ Garcia hints at this dimension, which Nelly eschews when she turns away from the loud and rowdy fuss caused by the appearance of green mangoes brought over as pasalubong (homecoming present) from a new ‘‘Pinay’’ recently arrived from the Philippines: ‘‘Nangasim, naglaway si Nelly, nanindig ang balahibo sa kanyang mga braso . . . Tumingin siya sa malayo upang palipasin ang pangangasim’’ (Nelly’s mouth soured, watered, the hair on her arms stood up. . . . She looked to a distance to let the souring sensation pass) (15). Nelly’s visceral response to this gift act of realizing community, pasalubong (a symbolic present that obeys a distinct sociocultural economy which overlaps but does not fully coincide with the economy of commodity exchange), points to modes of social experience and cultural technologies of subjectivity that are at work within the dominant social

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relations of Filipina labor and yet, at the same time, remain, if not exterior, at least tangential to its productive aims. This visceral experience instantiated by that ‘‘souring sensation,’’ which Nelly suppresses, is characterized by an involuntary permeability of self that negates and overwhelms and yet also inheres in the logic and experience of autonomous subjectivity she would like to achieve. Nelly looks to a distance to let this momentary dissolution of her boundaries pass, in an evident bodily subjective e√ort to eschew the practices of communion and social pleasure that the others engage in. For her, these activities of enjoyment are forms of idling, part of that time of waste, which they have made of their lives. Engaged in during their outings on days o√, the other Filipinas’ social pleasures appear as waste to the extent that they do not produce any use values, not even the nonmaterial use values which they produce for their employers as waged domestic work. Just as, during industrial capitalism, the necessary work time in labor’s reproduction disappeared in devalued natural forms of nonwork or supplementary women’s work, so here, in the postindustrial context of waged housework, the time of Filipinas’ enjoyment, now conducted outside of the home as workplace, in public and other spaces converted into places of leisure, appears as sheer unproductive consumption, and therefore a waste, of time.∂≤ However, this ‘‘time in which labor-power ‘belongs’ to itself,’’ this time of waste, is, as Filipina domestic work is in relation to their workers’ employers, a new vanishing time of reproduction, often reduced to one day of rest a week or expelled from the workweek altogether, during which the women are working all the time, as producers of time (both free time and additional work time) for their employers.∂≥ As devalued, racialized feminine labor within the process of reproduction of valorized labor power (middle-class, racially and economically enfranchised professional and whitecollar workers), a position demarcated by the postcolonial international division of labor, Filipina labor reproduces itself and its new social relations not only within the spaces of domestic work, but also in spaces outside of the home, through activities of enjoyment that appear, in contrast to their work as producers of time, as a waste of time. The time of waste can be viewed as a time of recovery and restoration—indeed, the restoration of (life) times lost in the production of time for others. Within this new time of reproduction, practices of socializing among other Filipinas and other supposedly unproductive practices of enjoyment support not

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only other women freeing themselves from their own naturalized reproductive functions, including Filipinas attaining sovereign subjectivity (the proletarian subject of feminized labor, reconceived in literature as feminist). These idle practices also support their own reproduction as waged reproductive labor (indeed, in place of the time-discipline regimes of the factory and the houseworkplace, serving as a form of their socialization as feminized labor).∂∂ Equally important, Filipina experiential use of this free time bears dimensions of their own freeing from commodified reproductive labor. On this view, the visceral ‘‘souring sensation’’ set o√ in Nelly by the pasalubong of green mangoes calls attention to a mode of experience and organization of subjectivity that is not fully encompassed by either the synecdochic logic through which Filipinas are marketed for international exchange (their commodity part in relation to the nation as a whole), or the logic of autonomous subjectivity achieved through detachment from the concrete commodity-function of babae (the money-subject). Indeed, the logic of soap bubbles exceeds the signifying logic of these capitalist forms of representational identity, which in an earlier moment subsumed the social practices of freeing women from older social structures of domesticity, as the subsistence limits of the latter were reached. In contrast to the figure of reproduction under capital naturalized in the female body as womb or orifice, housing labor, we witness a logic of sprouting and sporogenesis and a figure of female being not as domestic implements, such as food and soap, but of what issues out of and escapes them (smell, bubbles). An ambivalent form of subjective seepage, the visceral experience eschewed by Nelly points precisely to this subjective logic of flight rendered in Sicat’s narrator’s imagining of herself as the smell of grass and rotting food. This experience of self as seepage, as that which exceeds one’s being as food, a form of surplus that is not the same substance as the object with which women are equated, but rather its emanation, can be read as a vital mode of subjectivity that sustains women’s relations beyond their commodified role as reproductive labor power. That these souring sensations by which one is involuntarily swayed through seepage, her boundaries made to give way in communion with others—that this is the mode through which Sicat’s narrator experiences the erotic pleasures of her own idling escape shows that despite its necessary eschewing to achieve sovereign subjectivity, these other subjective modes are subsumed within dominant subjects, but as internal contradictory forms. The experience of identity di√erence thus gives way to this other immanent mode of permeable and mutable 92

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subjectivity, which while appearing to be the consequence of the new autonomy of women can also be seen as an impetus of women’s continuing alienation from their naturalized functions. In the next chapter, I write about the articulation of this mode and its strategies of freeing in the poetry of Elynia Mabanglo. In the rest of this chapter, I want to examine the ways in which the experiential practices of feminist struggle in Philippine literature cite the universal forms of agency they oppose, yet at the same time retain the outlines of heterogeneous, cultural practices of subjectivity which it would appear to have overcome. Just as the universal claims to sovereign agency by male Tagalog and other Filipino writers become the occasion for feminist claims to di√erence as the object and means of women’s liberation, so feminist claims to babae as gender identity become new occasions for playing out other modes of subjectivity and ways of relating to others. If the representation of universal sovereign agency sets o√ contradictory claims to it (female sovereignty as against masculine sovereignty), the proliferation of others is the contradictory consequence of the feminist claim to the identity of babae. The form of this eruption—the permeability and budding movement of the self, its simultaneous implosion and explosion—suggests other experiential practices, which I will argue also shape the social movement and experience comprising the diasporicization of the nation. Thus, while enabled by the time of identity di√erence, these other emergent modes cannot, however, be fully realized within it.

Ako/Babae [I/Woman] Identity and Di√erence Barrios’s poem ‘‘Ako, babae, ibang daigdig’’ (I, woman, another world) deploys the structure of identity-di√erence as a feminist response to the masculinist godlike agency claimed by the Tagalog modernist poet Alejandro G. Abadilla. Starting out accusingly with the word, ‘‘you,’’ the poem ‘‘talks back’’ to the Poet as Creator, mimicking and mocking the insolent form and content of Abadilla’s self-pronouncement as divine cause: ikaw

you

ang daigdig

(are) the world

ng tula

of the poem

ang tula

the poem

ng daigdig

of the world Women Alone

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The mocking poetic voice then calls the unsaid, boldly revealing the gender identity of God’s usurper: ikaw/lalaki (you/man). In the second part of the poem, which starts with ‘‘I’’ (ako), the babae who claims this voice and identifies it with an ‘‘I’’ (ako/babae) asks why she writes poems if the world of the poem is a man (‘‘Kung/lalaki/ang daigdig/ng tula ’’), to which she herself replies: Ibang daigdig.

Another world.

Ibang akda.

A di√erent text.

Babae

Woman

ako.

I.

Barrios claims not only this ‘‘I,’’ whose eruption on the scene of Tagalog writing in the 1940s was a radical rupture with the cultural and literary tradition of anticolonial romanticism.∂∑ She also claims another world of which she is the creator. She a≈rms and appropriates the Self that Abadilla had proclaimed as the site of a new freedom but redefines it with a di√erence (iba): as Woman. The newfound feminist agency, Babae/ako thus emerges out of a structure of mimicry and reversal, negation and a≈rmation, repetition and variation, of modernist, masculinist subjectivity.∂∏ Constituted through the structure of identity di√erence with Man, the ‘‘I’’ of Babae (Babae as Ako) appears like her masculinist counterpart as a self-creative, sovereign agent with the power to remake the world through words (where words serve as a means of representation as well as forms of action on the world). As against her role as invisible auxiliary to community, woman redeems her humanness through her appropriation of the masculinist capacity to actively make meaning.∂π However, unlike the masculinist subject (whose naturalized assumption of the ‘‘I’’ is broken by the mocking poetic voice), this capacity is obtained in the space opened up between babae and ako, which allows a new self to emerge as the oscillating movement between the two. This oscillation is what prevents the full adequation of ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘woman’’ and, moreover, what allows a reconfiguration of the meanings of both. Barrios can thereby pry loose the ‘‘I’’ from ‘‘woman’’ and its conceptual entailments, and thereby reduce the latter’s practical meanings to empty symbolic gestures. As she writes in the poem, ‘‘Puta’’ [Whore], ‘‘though society might consign me / to this prison cell, / I alone hold/the key to freedom, / for this word, ‘whore’ / is but a word, / a mere word.’’ Reduced to ‘‘mere words,’’ the

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symbolic apparatuses used to structure and confine women’s lives now become the objects of her action: Paslangin ang bawat salita

Slay every word

na humamak sa kasarian

that has degraded gender

...

...

Isagawa ang pagpaslang

Carry out the slaying

sa araw na maliwanag,

in broad daylight,

sa harap ng lahat.

in front of everyone.

The public slaying conveys the social role of the woman-author. Executed in civic-political speech, Barrios’s declamatory style, it exhibits the structure of consciousness-raising demonstrations against a repressive regime. These demonstrations were attempts not only to negate the false representations of the latter but also to erect counterrepresentations, the act of recognition of which would unify the people against the ruling powers. In this way, Barrios’s poetry can be viewed as an example of what Lilia Quindoza-Santiago categorizes as ‘‘tulang babaylan o panlabas ’’ (public or babaylan poetry), which criticizes iniquitous events and calls for quick and decisive action.∂∫ ‘‘Here, the poet serves as a herald of the feelings of a whole community or gathering of people. She serves as the value-keeper of the sentiments of a public—she sees to their public presentation or leads a group in their incantation.’’ Quindoza-Santiago traces this role of the poet to the babaylan, or priestess, a spiritual and social leader of pre-Spanish colonial communities. While Barrios’s poetry can be said to draw from this persistence of indigenous cultural forms, I would argue that it is also shaped by more contemporary ideals. Barrios’s poetry emits an audibly modern, secular, civil, and public voice raised in opposition to the uncivil society in which it strains to be heard and to whose oppressiveness it is a surviving testament. A public demonstration against and rebuttal of masculinist power and authority, Barrios’s poetry presences an ‘‘I’’ that draws its contours from the character it opposes. ‘‘Ako’’ issues forth as a representational subject, one who not only attempts to alter prevailing representations with her countertruths, but who might also serve as a representative figure and dissenting voice of Woman, the political adversary of and opposition to Batas ng Lalaki (the Law of Man). In this modality, the self acts within and upon society, conceived as a modern

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lipunan (society), a gathering of preconstituted persons figured in the public theater, a form she also writes for and extols for the making public of the concerns of women. If the female self is trapped and contained in the prison boxes of images, roles, and notions in which she has become at home (‘‘Ang kasuotang ito’y bilangguan’’ [The dress is a prison]), women’s subjectification consists of the process of liberation from the prison houses they wear, from the dress boxes that encase them as the ‘‘wares’’ of men.∂Ω Babae-Ako asserts herself as opposed to this containment and posits herself as a frontal, genuine equivalent (katapat) to the human ideal assumed by Man. Rather than ‘‘rice/served at the table of matrimony,’’ ‘‘meat/fingered and weighed,’’ ‘‘dessert/for your satiation,’’ Babae-Ako is his equal partner (katuwang) in the human endeavor to fulfill shared needs. As the feminist counterpart of the male human subject, the ‘‘I’’ claimed by woman adopts an objective (object-directed as opposed to object-assumptive) stance. This stance enables a knowledge-based consciousness independent of the object reality that it confronts (and no longer embodies). Barrios’s criticism of women’s unconscious performance of role functions formulated for them by man is predicated on the political vision of their liberation from these symbolic constraints through the creative act of a representing, rational consciousness. It is on the basis of this consciousness that women might ‘‘look beyond the competition’’ in which, as commodity-objects, they are placed, beyond their function as measuring sticks for the other, and finally come together as speaking subjects. ‘‘Kausapin mo ako, kapatid’’ [Talk to me, sibling] is the speech-act that gives form to Babae-Ako as a subject whose collective sororal-fraternal ideal is based on the matrimonial ideal expressed in ‘‘Kasalo ’’ [dinner companion]. In ‘‘Usapang Babae ’’ (Woman Talk), we glean this collective ideal of kababaihan [womenhood] as the contractual constitution of the political community of women speaking subjects. What is failed or as yet unfulfilled in the marriage of men and women finds fulfillment in new communities of women. As a response to the exclusion performed by the social-rhetorical form, ‘‘usapang lalaki ’’ (men talk), ‘‘usapang babae’’ expresses a sovereign collective patterned after the forms of fraternal, civil institutions of masculinist power. The empowerment of babae as ako is hence predicated on her accession to the money-subject form, which allows her to exercise the power of comparison— the power to wield, and not be wielded by, the bodily identity, babae. For Barrios, identity allows mobility across historical periods, across national con96

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texts. Through this category, Barrios combs myth, fiction, and history to recuperate, by subjectifying them, women from all times. In poems such as ‘‘Kina Sinderela, Snow White at Sleeping Beauty’’ [For Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty] and ‘‘Para sa Mga Kapatid na Manunulat na Nabaliw at Nagpatiwakal’’ [For Sister-Writers Who Went Mad and Took Their Lives], the ‘‘I’’ searches for herself through similarities and di√erences with other women. Through this search she constitutes the community, kababaihan as a political collectivity of women subjects living under a universal system of patriarchal oppression.∑≠ Women come together on the basis of their consciousness of this system of patriarchy that is the root cause of the sameness of babae. Di√erence is viewed as the product of another system, this time of class. In ‘‘Sionny and Manang’’ Barrios uses two almost identical stanzas describing the tasks of her maid and her older sister, who is someone’s wife. While in this poem Barrios employs repetition to underscore the sameness of women as domestic workers, in another poem, ‘‘Sa Aking Katulong’’ (To My Maid), she demonstrates her class ability to escape this sameness and to ‘‘buy her freedom’’ by passing on her female tasks to her maid. In these voiced reflections, Barrios sees through sameness to see gender and through di√erence to see class: ‘‘In the final analysis / the plight of woman / is still an issue / of class.’’ Identity and di√erence structure the experience of women relating to other women once they attain the autonomous individual commodity form. Hence in the poem, ‘‘Ako ay Ikaw’’ (I Am You), Marra Lanot contemplates her situation and the situation of a sex dancer whom she is watching by first demarcating their absolute di√erence (positioning her gaze alongside the gaze of tourists and men watching with her) and then realizing the form of their sameness: ‘‘Are we really di√erent from each other/Even if our worlds are far apart?/You are me while I am observing you/I will be you later in bed.’’ For Barrios, this structure of experience through identity and di√erence is aimed ultimately at discovering the underlying structures determining it. It is through this searching, investigative activity ( pagsusuri) that Babae/ako comes into being as a feminist subject with consciousness.

Fear and Dreaming: To Be a Woman / To Live and Be Free In an article entitled ‘‘Kung Bakit Lagi Kong Pinapanood Ang Mga Pelikula ni Sharon Cuneta’’ (Why I Always Watch the Movies of Sharon Cuneta), Barrios Women Alone

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dwells on the role of women’s identificatory practices in the reproduction of the conditions of their own gendered oppression.∑∞ For Barrios, the representations of the lives of women on the movie screen induce a gendered dreaming that only serves to keep women from understanding the real causes of their poverty and su√ering. What becomes clear from Barrios’s description of her own attraction to the hugely popular movie romances exemplified by Sharon Cuneta’s films is that it is not in spite but precisely because of class stratification that practices of gender identification take place in such dreaming. ‘‘That is why, I, like other women, am led to dream as well.’’ Contrary to her own analytical assumptions, Barrios’s summary of the dreaming action of her viewing demonstrates that such identification is not at all a matter of seeing sameness in personhood. It is predicated less on identity (and character) than on the possibility of repeating the life presented. The dreaming consists not so much of an adequation or identification between person forms (a conflation of viewer and viewed, spectator and image) but of an abstraction of the principles of narrative plots as principles of good fortune. Barrios expresses the feeling stirred in her by popular romance movies in the thought ‘‘maari ako rin’’ (It could be me as well). This apprehensive feeling or premonition is an experience of the immanence of repetition of destiny. It suggests the apprehension of a logic or force surpassing the agency of the individual subject, designated by Barrios as suwerte (luck or chance). The mode of experience through identity and di√erence expressed here is hence not that of the achieved bourgeois, individual consumer subject but rather that of the becoming commodity. In this respect, the premonition of maari ako rin includes an experience of the capitalist logic of production surpassing and governing the individual commodity’s own life but here perceived through the hermeneutic of chance. Chance does not mean, however, fatalism. Maari, conveying possibility, expresses a realm of likely outcomes opened up by claims made, for example, in the actions of women escaping their everyday lives or detaching themselves from their surroundings. Where Barrios sees a woeful ignorance of a deeper, ultimately determining reality denied by the illusory stories pro√erred by the movies, one might instead see the practice of making claims on those stories and on the model of life possibility, of chance, of another future, that they represent. The decision to follow in the footsteps of other women, to answer the calling expressed not only through the movies (a calling made by women themselves to 98

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the extent that they are the audience subject for whom these movies were made) but also increasingly by overseas women sending representations of their successful life stories home, is precisely the claim act of thousands and later millions of Filipinas ‘‘recklessly’’ leaving their homes in search of a better life elsewhere.∑≤ This claim is also an act of gambling, the act of what overseas Filipinas, in explaining their decision to go abroad, have called pakikipagsapalaran (fate playing or adventure) and pagbakasali (adventure). It is an act of faith within the cosmic order of suwerte, an order not outside of but rather resembling the order of global capitalism. In opposing the movies’ observance of formulas to gambling, Barrios suggests the possibility of this risky adventure but does not perceive it as a practical gesture made by women themselves.∑≥ She does not see, as I will demonstrate in Mabanglo’s work in the next chapter, that women wager themselves, that they produce themselves as coinage for the game, as ante. They make themselves into individual characters as part of taking the gamble they have made of life.∑∂ Their dreaming does not consist of merely watching a scripted unfolding. It consists, rather, of a wishful acting out—a willed repetition—of the outlines of a fabulous script, but in the realm of one’s personal life. Movies, television, and other hegemonic representational apparatuses, including development research projects on women’s livelihood, etc., are hermeneutical-entrepreneurial aids, o√ering not only stock characters but also script formulas for individual start-ups. Barrios recognizes this rational aspect of the practice of identification and o√ers, through her own rewritings of both female figures and female genres (such as romance novels), alternative character models and forms of consciousness (of class oppression, of gender rivalry, etc.) with which to combat such mindless dreaming. The representation of the universal autonomous subjectivity and agency of women is certainly one such hermeneutical-entrepreneurial aid. But the predication on identity-di√erence of this political strategy itself occludes the experiential practice of fate playing, which indicates a history of venturous acts and tradition of bravery, leadership, entrepreneurship, and political power on the part of Filipinas that contemporary feminists, in their exclusive emphasis on the abject conditions of women’s commodification and domestic oppression, are all too apt to forget, even as their own activism attests otherwise.∑∑ The experiential modality of identity-di√erence also occludes the mode of experience of one’s permeability, divisibility, and extensibility, portrayed in the proliferation of Women Alone

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Sicat’s narrator’s ‘‘likenesses’’ and the spilling over of her self into the world— i.e., the simultaneous loss of and liberation from the control of one’s boundaries, that comes from contemporary acts of fate playing in the context of women’s commodification. There is thus yet another aspect of identification to be gleaned from Barrios’s visceral response to a play about women: ‘‘I couldn’t separate my life from the life I was watching.’’ Barrios’s incapacity to separate her own life from the life of others is registered and induced by the experience of fear: ‘‘It is true I am not a domestic helper . . . but I know the violence inflicted by society on women. I know the fear. And I know the silence borne by this fear.’’∑∏ In ‘‘Ang Pagiging Babae Ay Pamumuhay Sa Panahon ng Digma’’ (To Be a Woman Is to Live in a Time of War), Barrios depicts this ever-abiding fear as part of the condition of women as ‘‘living in a time of war.’’ Pamumuhay here refers both to living and to livelihood. To be a woman, therefore, is a way of life in a time of war; it is to make a living out of conditions of war. In characterizing women’s being as a living, Barrios underscores the aspect of woman’s being (pagiging babae) as an active undertaking, a becoming-woman (pagiging babae). In this way, being and becoming are cast as a form of work and survival as well as the practice of defiance under general, socialized terror: ‘‘No moment / Is without danger. / In one’s own home, / To speak, to defy / Is to court pain. / In the street, to walk at night / is to invite injury. / In my society, / to protest against oppression / is to lay oneself open to even greater violence.’’ The other side of this fear is pakikibaka (struggle). Studying ‘‘the full extent and depth’’ of this war, the ‘‘I’’ finally understands ‘‘that to be a woman / is a never-ending struggle / to live and be free.’’ Pakikibaka is the activity of living and freeing oneself from this abiding fear. Being and becoming woman thus loses their normal and natural character and take on this historical experiential character of transformative struggle. As the condition of being/becoming woman, fear indicates the daring, risktaking aspects of women’s practices of following to the extent that this fear is brought about precisely by the gambling gestures women make in their attempt to follow the life examples of others. Fear is the condition in which the links between babae and ako lose their natural guarantees, a loss that is both consequence and condition of their moves to reclaim and risk (by playing with) ‘‘a future/hinged/to the men of my life.’’ Fear thus indexes an indeterminacy, permeability, and divisibility of the finite subject form that women are, in the war-

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time of national development, enjoined to inhabit as citizen workers and labor commodities. It presents the other side of the realm of possibility, in which one’s life can be recast in the hope of achieving another destiny. Fear moves through the di√usive, aΔictive logic produced out of the rupture with women’s sociability as auxiliary beings, entering through the open conduits left by a liberative severance of their constitutive ties. Like the ratlike o√spring of Sicat’s narrator, gnawing at the putative peace of a room and a self of one’s own, fear moves feminists to recognize women’s likeness, not only to each other but also to di√erent others with whom they might share their struggles. In another poem, ‘‘Ang Simula ay Simulain’’ (We Begin with Principles), Barrios writes about the fear that physically assaults her faculties of memory, conscience, and belief, only for this fear to become the basis of her renewed commitment to social revolution. Through the very divisibility and permeability of self that would appear to be women’s weakness, she can share in the becomings/beings of others, recognizing herself part ‘‘of every worker, farmer, citizen.’’ The ‘‘I’’ is now a member-part (kabahagi) as well as partaker of a shared experience that fear adumbrates, which is the struggle to live and become free. The hair-raising experience of fear can be viewed in its visceral correspondence to the mode of experience of involuntary permeability suppressed by the selfpossessed, sovereign self, which Garcia represents as a ‘‘souring sensation.’’ As an experience of living and becoming free, this ‘‘souring sensation’’ embodies a di√erent mode of relation to others (of socializing di√erently), which is the product and means of illicit economies of pleasure in stolen times, of erotic indulgences in the moment, of defiant forms of idling and playing with time. This visceral mode of experience, which is an ambivalent form of subjective seepage, calls attention to an organization of subjectivity and social relations that is not fully encompassed by the synecdochic logic through which Filipinas are marketed or the metaphorical logic through which they are consumed. Rather than part to whole, Filipina—woman—in relation to Pilipinas—nation—and tangential to the autonomous subject of Filipina detached from its commodityfunction—babae—there are experiences of social communion and pleasure as well as social danger that are constitutive of Filipinas as labor, experiences that also serve as sites of the struggle of being/becoming woman. And yet the time of souring sensations, as the time of reproductive labor (in Garcia’s story, the idle time of their outings), is dismissed as inconsequential or tangential to the value

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of the sovereign subject of Filipina woman, even as this time is an important dimension of the creative experiential activity of ‘‘women alone’’ that impels their constitution and movement as exported feminized labor. It is a time of suppressed modes of social cooperation and pleasure emerging out of new relations of ‘‘women together,’’ a time of ‘‘waste,’’ of unrepresentable value, that might also usher in a new time of politics.∑π

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Chapter Three

Poetics of Filipina Export The massive exodus of women from the Philippines in the last quarter of the twentieth century has become, in both popular and scholarly imaginations, a striking image and illustration of the changes leading to and characterizing the contemporary global moment. Viewed in terms of transnational migration linked to the explosion of a global service economy, the phenomenon of millions of Filipinas leaving the nation to work as maids, nannies, nurses, entertainers, and sex workers all over the world is seen as largely, if not wholly, the consequence of those processes of transformation of the capitalist world economy which have come to be widely known as globalization. The export-oriented developmentalist strategies of the authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos during the 1970s can be said to culminate in the expansion during the 1980s and 1990s of the ‘‘warmbody export’’ industry, as the needs of the global economy increasingly turned to the service sector and as the Philippine state submitted to labor-hostile neoliberalist policies and structural adjustment programs imposed by international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.∞ What has struck many feminist scholars and activists in particular is the female profile of this national export industry. Today, there are around 8.1 million Filipino contract workers and migrants who live and work overseas (more than 10 percent of the Philippine population). Of the overseas Filipino contract workers, over 65 percent are women. Many accounts of this feminization of labor

have emphasized both the structural vulnerability of women to disenfranchisement and exploitation in times of economic crisis and the patriarchal capitalist demand for women as cheap, docile, and flexible labor whose natural dispositions make them suitable for certain varieties of unskilled work, including care work and sex work. While recognizing and relying on the explanatory power of these accounts, which attend to the conditions of women under capitalism, my own work has focused on the role that gender, race, and sexuality play as organizing principles of the Philippine economy and its political and economic relations with other capitalist nation-states. As categories for signifying, by way of organizing, social relations of power and production, gender, race, and sexuality not only structure the practical, material relations and practices of the nation-state and the world economy, but also shape and set limits to political imaginations of change. As I argue elsewhere, the cultural logic of heteronormative sexual relations that is historically constituted through Western imperial relations to the colonies shapes the ‘‘prostitution’’ economy developed under the authoritarian regime of Marcos and the Philippines’ sexual economic relations with its clientele of advanced capitalist nations.≤ What appears to be merely the metaphorical feminization and commodification of the Philippine nation within the free market of the international community consists of actual gendered, sexualized practices of foreign investment, labor management, and state political and economic policy that, as most clearly evidenced in the state-sponsored industries of sex tourism and military prostitution, brought about the all too material production, exploitation, and violation of women as bodily resources of the nation. In the postauthoritarian period, from 1986 to 2001, these bodily national resources become deterritorialized through a labor export industry whose recruitment and marketing strategies depend on the objectification of the Philippines’ nationaleconomic relations in and as gender and racial attributes of Filipina labor commodities. Violence is endemic to this structure of domestic labor production. Indeed, within the private spaces of domestic work can be found refurbished social-cultural technologies of bodily dispossession and value extraction developed under modern slavery. The widely reported violent treatment of overseas Filipina domestic workers is, on this view, precisely the practice of engendering national and racial di√erence as the basis of their human devaluation (i.e., their production as objects without subjectivity, as household tools or appliances) and, correspondingly, of the greater appropriation of the surplus value of their labor. And yet, even as they are fabricated as damaged goods, if they are not 104

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completely destroyed, by this material fantasy of them as less than human, overseas Filipina domestic workers become deployed in the public imagination as mere bodily synecdoches of a beleaguered nation. Reclaimed as bioterritorial resources of the nation and as sources of dollar remittances that support the ailing economy, they continue to serve as the means by which the Philippine state can a≈rm its dubious sovereignty and reconfigure its role in the global economy. I present this brief summary of the forms of social imagination that inhere in the social practices comprising Filipina export and its dominant representations to provide a picture of the historical situation that Filipina feminist writers found themselves compelled not only to write about and against but also to locate their own liberative imaginations in relation to. In these first chapters of the book, I have tried to view the experiences of oppression, freedom, and empowerment articulated by these feminist imaginations as renderings of the other side of that objectified, feminized labor that fuels the Philippines’ sexual economy, that is, in Marx’s words, ‘‘labor that is still objectifying itself, labor as subjectivity.’’ By looking closely at this aspect of living labor, this aspect hitherto considered merely reproductive labor and which includes the experiential labor of producing selves, we are a√orded a glimpse of subjective potentials, i.e., modes of a√ective, communicative, and intellectual work, that are vital to the productivity of labor and yet fall away from narratives of both global capitalism and social resistance to it.≥ We are also a√orded alternative concepts for an emergent theory of global labor. In this chapter, I discuss the modes of experience articulated in the work of Elynia Mabanglo, a renowned Filipina poet, winner of many awards, whose own emigration to the United States in the late 1980s coincides with the diasporic movement of the Filipino workers and migrants about whom she writes. The only woman poet among the forty-five poets canonized in Virgilio Almario’s anthology Walong Dekada ng Makabagong Tulang Pilipino (Eight Decades of New Pilipino Poetry) (1981), Mabanglo was mentored by some of the most important modernist and social-realist poets and writers writing in Tagalog during the late 1960s, at the height of the radical nationalist student and labor movements. Although her first poetry collection, Supling (O√spring), came out in 1970, bringing her acclaim as a Tagalog poet, she came to be recognized as a feminist poet only with the publication in the late 1970s and early 1980s of poems that explicitly addressed what in one poem she called ‘‘the curse’’ of being a woman. As I discussed in the previous chapter, like the work of other feminist Poetics of Filipina Export

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Filipina writers during this time, Mabanglo’s poems on female experience attest to a weakening, if not full severing, of the allegorical tie that had bound Filipina to Filipinas through the hundred-year history of nationalist imagination inscribed in Philippine literature.∂ They demonstrate, further, the autonomization of babae (woman) as a category of experience, a process that enacts and extends the prior social movement of alienation on the part of women struggling to liberate themselves from their constrictive auxiliary parts in traditional socialities. As this social movement is absorbed by the warm-body export industry, however, that same autonomy which was the basis of feminist constructions of sovereign subjectivity enables, in a succeeding moment of capitalist crisis management, a renationalization of Filipina bodies as labor commodities.

Alienation and Identification This renationalization is reflected in Mabanglo’s thematization of the subjective predicaments of the Filipina diaspora in her series of poem-letters ‘‘Mga Liham ni Pinay’’ (Letters of Pinay) (1990). In this collection, the identity of babae has become relinked to nation through the series designated by Pinay.∑ Pinay designates at once the name of an individual woman and the general category of the female national, Filipina. Many di√erent Filipinas—mail-order brides, sex workers, and domestic workers—all speak as Pinay. ‘‘I’’ is not only oneself (one’s own self) but also oneself as an other within a collective serialized by what JeanPaul Sartre calls ‘‘the milieu of action.’’ The milieu of action structuring the Pinay series is indicated by the multiple places from which all these Pinays write—‘‘ . . . Mula sa Singapore,’’ ‘‘ . . . Mula sa Kuwait,’’ ‘‘ . . . Mula sa Brunei,’’ ‘‘ . . . Mula sa Japan,’’ and so on—and by the ellipses of destinations before them. It is the economic zone of transnational movement of countless Filipinas between these various alien places of ‘‘fromness’’ marked by Pinay’s letters and their implicit address: home. The letter-poems in Mga Liham ni Pinay trace the experiential outlines of this zone of export with the itineraries they embark on and express. Expressing forms of lament, supplication, salutation, confession, and longing intimately linked to and sustained by the absent presences of those at home to whom these calls are directed, these letter-poems would appear to express that existential condition of ‘‘between-ness’’ or ‘‘dwelling-in-displacement’’ constitutive of the diasporic experience.∏ As media of what Ien Ang describes as ‘‘the ineradicable space in106

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between, the structural border zone from where the diasporic subject is compelled to construct herself into a syncretic cultural being,’’ the letter-poems render the experiences of Pinay through the contradiction between homeland and host country as this is played out through the structure of identity and di√erence.π Pinay from Japan, for example, compares the dream to sing and dance, which motivated the life she leaves at home, with the reality of prostitution, which she inhabits once she is abroad: The truth, the truth, is, I shall confess, The part I play is like a geisha. How nice it would be if I were a true geisha, My flight rhythmic as the flight of a sparrow. But I am a city-dove, Stark naked, sitting astride a bottle. (translation modified)

This distance between the dream flight she embarked on at home and the prop role she lands in another country is experienced by Pinay as a denatured identity, degraded by the di√erence this distance makes. Neither Japanese geisha nor Philippine maya (sparrow), Pinay’s truth is her counterfeit function. ‘‘Hindi ako yon. Hindi akin ‘yon’’ (That isn’t me. That isn’t mine), writes Pinay from Australia, a mail-order bride, denying her experience of domestic abuse. She wakes up in a hospital, stripped of memory, clothes, and name. A nurse assures her it is a common occurrence, tells her she has a loving husband to go back to, returns her clothes and her name, but does not return her memory. In this way, They gave me a new identity— Do not look for cut thread. Nothing happened, nothing happened, Imagine you are blind in one eye. Now you will place your tongue on your finger At your feet your thoughts will roam— At the window the woman one will see is already di√erent.

Pinay rearranges her corporeal-subjective parts to accept this new identity (kaakuhan, or selfhood)—blind in one eye, tongue on finger, thoughts at her feet— Poetics of Filipina Export

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which is o√ered to her like the lipstick, comb and toothbrush placed in her hands. Speech and thought hinged on the body, she emerges as a di√erent woman. But shadows of cruelty and savagery rise to haunt her memory. She sees the bruises on her skin, the surfacing of past pain that she must deny: ‘‘Hindi ako ‘yon. Hindi akin ‘yon. / Huwag nang tuntunin ang tumakas na kahapon’’ (That isn’t me. That isn’t mine. / Search no more for yesterdays run away). While Pinay in Japan laments her substitution, swallowing her grief, Pinay in Australia embraces it, shrouding her bruised body in hope. Nevertheless, both express the sexual trauma they su√er abroad as an estrangement and disjointment of identity, a displacement of self. Like Pinay in Australia, who takes on a new identity through a disaggregation of her body, Pinay in other places experiences the liminality of her life abroad through strange and violent bodily disfigurations. Her womb ‘‘keyed’’ by her employer, Pinay in Kuwait is ‘‘a skeleton without bones’’ (Kalansay akong walang buto), inseminated with a baby whose ‘‘mind and heart will become foreign / because it will be born without a tongue and ears.’’ In the host country, Pinay becomes a structure without substance, a room—like her own room, ‘‘a white niche’’—hosting another being without senses. As subjective enactments of the dispossession of the captive body, which Hortense Spillers describes in terms of the female slave’s vestibular function for her captor’s desires, Pinay’s experience is the experience of ‘‘a subject ‘racialized’ in the experiencing of gender.’’∫ The absence of home translates into palpable absences within and of Pinay’s body, her o√spring disfigured by her own violation. Territorial displacement translates into a dislocation of her sense organs of subjectivity (tongue on finger, thoughts at her feet), while her body, serving as a dwelling for another, a home ‘‘keyed’’ to host another, stages the internalized reversal of the contradiction she experiences between homeland and host country. Put di√erently, Pinay’s alienation from her homeland is borne on her body, which not only acts as a symptom of the absent homeland, while also bearing its own symptom in the form of an internal alien. Hence, on the one hand, Pinay’s experience performatively repeats the synecdochic logic tying Filipina and Pilipinas, woman and nation. On the other hand, her experience is also a bodily rendering of the experience of racialized migration. Resonating with the condition of racial melancholia that David Eng and Shinhee Han analyze as the consequence of the unstable immigration and suspended assimilation of Asian Americans (a melancholia that other scholars have related to marginalized conditions of postcoloniality and sexuality), as well as 108

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with the pain of exile rendered in Filipino American literature, Pinay’s su√ering of the contradiction between home and host cultures in terms of loss and mutilation of self, identity under erasure, and psychic splitting suggests similarities between the subjective e√ects of U.S. domestic racism experienced by ethnic minorities and the e√ects of the international racism experienced by overseas contract workers;Ω it further underscores the way in which the nationalized laboring body serves as the transnationally racialized medium through which gender is experienced.∞≠ Structured through the dialectical relation between identity and di√erence, self and other, home and abroad, this mode of experience of the unmoored national female subject rendered by Mabanglo is precisely what enables experiential connections to other forms of what Benedict Anderson calls bounded seriality, such as raced immigrant and ethnic minority subjects, o√ering the basis of a politics of community.∞∞ Trying to disillusion others implicated in this series through the narrative structure of testimony, Mabanglo writes by way of bodily identification with overseas Filipinas, in a feminist reversal (but therefore also in a reinstantiation) of that process of women’s emulation of other women to which the reproduction of exportable Filipina labor has, in many feminist critiques, been attributed. If by ‘‘identification’’ we mean a process whereby an individual subject is constituted and transformed by means of a trait on the model of the other,∞≤ it becomes evident that the trait through which Pinays can identify with each other is precisely the female body as the objectification of domestic labor, or, as Pinay in Brunei writes of herself, ‘‘Isang babae . . . Kaulyaw ng batya, kaldero at kama’’ (A woman . . . Intimate companion-echo of the washtub, kettle and bed). Treated as an all-around domestic tool, Pinay in Singapore thus makes the appeal for empathetic identification, on which Mabanglo bases her pedagogical feminist intent, through subjective-bodily equivalence: ‘‘Whose eyes would not be shattered? Whose tongue would not be set ablaze?’’ Mabanglo’s writing practice of empathetic embodiment would thus seem to exemplify a practice of identification, predicated on a generalized subject-form (here, of the disembedded racialized, feminized national body of domestic labor, Pinay, which is the provision and consequence of the commodification of Filipinas in the world market). From another vantage point, however, this practice might be better understood in terms of a venture of self, similar to that undertaken by Pinay from Kuwait, as she tenders herself as an objective token for the purposes of fulfilling a prior social contract: Poetics of Filipina Export

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Inako kay Inang ang dingding na butas, Ipinangako sa kapatid ang maningning na bukas (33) (To Mother, I promised to answer for the wall full of holes, To my siblings, I promised a brilliant tomorrow)

The ‘‘I’’ (akó) of Pinay, who would appear to be the culpable origin of agency and desire (‘‘Ako ba’y masisisi? ’’ [Am I to blame?]), is also the issue of a guarantee (akò) and a promise (pangakò), an active part-means of a familial lot and aspiration. The subject Pinay is produced in the process of being let out as the collective’s medium of exchange, which serves as well as a medium of negotiation for the passage from a wanting present and past to a fulfilling future. Here we see Pinay’s departure, the act of parting, from which she emerges as the individual subject, as an act of gambling, for which the ‘‘I’’ is lent as the collective ante, a subjective wager. As Pinay from Singapore recalls: Yesterday was gloomy, tomorrow unclear But it was necessary to risk even your simple kisses and embraces.

Like Pinay’s depiction of her departure as the act of risking (ipakipagsapalaran) love, overseas Filipino workers’ use of the words pakikipagsapalaran (fate playing or adventure) and pagbabasakali (chance taking) to characterize their act of going abroad suggests that the act of self-export is a taking on of chance/destiny, an embarkation which hazards present fate ( palad) and all its precious guarantees to create an opening for a change of fortune. Within this act of cosmic gamble, Pinay emerges as a self-possessed subject, though under conditions of great strain and injury: I left with a thorn of fear in my side In the company of torment and a nameless fatigue. A stinging pain was piercing the courage I was dressed in But it was necessary to free us from the manacles of debt.

The repetition of ‘‘kailangan ’’ (it was necessary) suggests a milieu of social forces (‘‘the manacles of debt’’) coercing Pinay’s subjective ‘‘dress’’ of courage, 110

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against other unnamed forces in the form of materialized feelings (fear, fatigue, pain) threatening to pierce through and perhaps rend the person form she produces as legal tender. The self-contained identity of Pinay is thus a tentative performance, the dutiful, finicky performance of comporting one’s personhood that Pinay in Kuwait likens to performance of domestic tasks: I meant for the comportment of my personhood [katauhan] to be finicky Like the ritual of washtub and frying pan

The production of a commodifiable self is made in accordance to a social calculus of contradictory material and immaterial forces, in the course of a cosmic gamble with the fixed fates of home, including the fate of being a woman. The fate Pinay from Brunei takes flight from is, indeed, the wearying and ‘‘cursed’’ identity of woman, ‘‘fixed by one’s (sexual) part / to be cursed to broom, laundry and lullaby,’’ the objects that define her life. It is the life of a ‘‘teacher, wife and mother,’’ which she describes as ‘‘the daily route— /Exasperation spread over the length / between house and school, / kitchen and bed.’’ For Pinay from Singapore, departure is accompanied not only by ‘‘a thorn of fear,’’ but also by the ‘‘urge of a dream,’’ to rise (maahon) from hardship, to escape the ‘‘fate of snacks of sweet potatoes and bananas,’’ and to live a life of leisure and aimless pleasure (‘‘To bathe in perfume on Saturdays and Sunday / And take carefree strolls in the park’’). What is clear from this dream and other dreams is that an urge (udyok) for movement, for flight, from the fixed fates and routes/routines of lived life causes the unitary ‘‘I’’ to come into prominence as the dream’s enabling subjective medium and condition. Personhood ( pagkatao) is, after all, a malleable, mutable, even tenuous form. From this perspective, we see another dimension to Pinay’s experiences of her diasporic condition beyond the predicament of identity. The oppression that Pinay in Japan experiences, for example, is expressed not only as a substitution and imitation of identity (being a geisha copy instead of a true geisha, a city-dove instead of a Philippine sparrow), but also as a shackling of rhythmic flight, an arrest of the movements of song and dance. The oppression consists of the conversion of the unquenchable yearning movement coursing through her (‘‘Pag-aasam ko’y di mapanatag’’ [My longing cannot be settled]) into a fixed, frozen container, a swallowing orifice prohibited its own movements of urgency, desire, and will (‘‘Sister, I gulp down tears and come, / But can’t even writhe, the guard is too harsh’’). It is in the face of a universe Poetics of Filipina Export

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of possibilities opened up by hopeful rhythmic flight that Pinay in Singapore experiences her land(ing) as a ‘‘collapse’’ (sadlak). For Pinay in Kuwait, the land(ing) is her dreams’ asphyxiating end: ‘‘I set my dreams afoot on a desert road / a fish risen [umahon] to dry ground/a soaring kite plunged down.’’ What appears therefore as a metaphorics of substitution and imitation, resemblance and refraction, identity and di√erence can also be understood as a metaphorics of fixity and flux, aridity and fluidity, cursed fate and hopeful rising, containment and freedom. The same metaphorics of life-flow against the cursed fixity of inherited form (or ‘‘the manacles of gender’’) can be found in Mabanglo’s earlier poem, ‘‘Maging Babae’’ (To Become a Woman). Here, to overturn the curse of being woman would mean to open up di√erent channels of life-flow: ‘‘so that the blood / That only through the sex part flows, / might also make its way to thought and imagination.’’ In another poem that plays on the double meaning of the word regla as ‘‘menstrual period’’ and as ‘‘law,’’ Mabanglo images this escaping lifeflow as a primordial ‘‘force’’—‘‘strength that rises [umaahon] from the womb, / seething heat, flowing, rebounding, / purposively freeing and indulging [lumalaya’t lumalayaw], / even if suppressed.’’∞≥ Described in radical, nationalist terms as ‘‘the stream of people’s advance’’ (ang agos ng madlang pagsulong), this bodily-imaginative life force or flow not only appears as a thematic content of Mabanglo’s poems; it is also demonstrated in the linguistic and formal qualities of her poetry. In writing, this force is the liberative potential of language, exercised through what she calls ‘‘softness of tongue.’’

Softness of Tongue Mabanglo invokes ‘‘softness of tongue’’ (lambot ng dila) as the potential power of women poets in opposition to the conventional dominant power of men poets, which is founded upon the ‘‘hardness of penis/possession’’ (tigas ng ari).∞∂ Inscribing the power of personality in figurative speech, men poets create ‘‘egotistical idioms, like the egotism of their private part/property [ari]. They brag even in verse about the hardness of their penises, which they symbolize in words and phrases that scorn women, indi√erent to feelings and sco≈ng at love.’’∞∑ Urging male poets to free themselves of ‘‘the fear of all men’’ of losing this hardness, she counsels, ‘‘the sti√ness of penis/possession can always be replaced by the pliant softness of the tongue.’’ 112

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Ironically, Mabanglo’s inclusion in Almario’s all-male poetic anthology Eight Decades of Filipino Poetry rested on her demonstration of literary qualities that were understood as masculine. Almario introduced Mabanglo then as ‘‘a young lady, the robustness of whose poetry many say is more ‘masculine’ than the weepy verses of many poets.’’∞∏ Against feminist critiques of this exclusion of all other women poets from the canonical construction of ‘‘New Pilipino Poetry,’’ Almario justified his selection more than ten years later as being based less on sexism than on the tenets of a vanguardist modernism: ‘‘This had much more to do with realism in language and perception of things and was against what we deemed old-fashioned and ‘sentimental’ verse-making.’’ For Almario, ‘‘lalaki ’’ (male or masculine) referred to tactics of verse making that defined the modernist movement—‘‘sparing, suggestive, and restrained in emotion, a vocabulary and subject immersed in the now.’’∞π Mabanglo’s inclusion in the modernist movement of the 1960s signifies her achievement in poetry of what Almario himself had defined as the masculine ideals of self-control, boldness of verse, fearless rebellion against convention and tradition, and the power to confront and express the experience and truth of the contemporary crisis.∞∫ Using ‘‘street language’’ and colloquial, sexually explicit and otherwise ‘‘vulgar’’ expressions in the style of the modernist poets of the 1960s, who rebelled against both traditional, beautiful verse and the new ‘‘court’’ or ‘‘patronage’’ poetry developing under the Marcos regime, Mabanglo’s poetry certainly articulated in everyday language the features of a contemporary crisis—that of Filipina women. Hence, at the same time she was extolled for her display of masculine literary prowess, she was hailed as a feminist writer. Feminist critics such as Lilia Quindoza Santiago and Jhoanna Lynn Cruz praised her for exploring the social issues of women’s oppression as well as for boldly breaking out of the confines of feminine language.∞Ω Edel Garcellano o√ers a contrary reading of Mabanglo’s work.≤≠ For Garcellano, Mabanglo’s supplicatory tone and essentialist, bodily constructions of feminine being are proof of her inability to go beyond the received forms of phallocentrism. The poem ‘‘Regla sa Buwan ng Hunyo’’ (Law/Period in the Month of June) is o√ered as an example of Mabanglo’s submission to forms of feminine subjectivity, which uphold dominant gendered relations. As he contends, the poem’s refrain, ‘‘Grant this force,’’ is ‘‘a naïve revolutionary plea, a toothless assault at the jugular of the status quo.’’ Furthermore, the poem’s ‘‘geography of oppression/subordination, so to speak, merely delineates what is already given as constitutive of the female body and behaviorist construct.’’≤∞ In Poetics of Filipina Export

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Garcellano’s analysis, Mabanglo’s work is not feminist because its mere inversion of masculinist supremacy fails to radically question, much less transform, the ideological buttresses of phallocentrism and its configuration of sexual di√erence; this criticism is echoed by Cruz, who faults Mabanglo for portraying women who submit to the feeble feelings of femininity and thereby surrender to the ideological conditions of their oppression.≤≤ It seems to me, however, that the contradictory assessments of Mabanglo’s work rest on a shared assumption about freedom and power as a matter of modernist rebellion or radical feminist refusal of traditional feminine forms. Despite the evident features of the literary and political sensibilities of both national modernist and feminist writing, her employment of the plaintive tones of more traditional, sentimental and romantic verse, particularly her adoption of the traditional lament (tagulaylay) in the section of poems commemorating the victims of contemporary political violence, points to her embrace of just such feminine forms, which prevailing notions of political literature eschewed. Far from rejecting Balagtasismo, the romantic anticolonial poetic tradition that began with and remained heavily influenced by Francisco Balthazar (Balagtas) (1788–1882), a tradition to which, Almario argued, Tagalog modernism was fundamentally opposed, Mabanglo drew on its features, particularly its romantic adventure narrative forms, its use of emotion as determinant of subject matter, and its use of folk aphorisms.≤≥ For Mabanglo, the themes and sentiments of anticolonialism and nationalism first expressed in Balagtas have historically become ‘‘fixed qualities of Tagalog poetry,’’ abounding today and continuing to grow, insofar as ‘‘colonialism still exists.’’≤∂ In one poem, she writes of a renewed covenant with Balagtas.≤∑ The reconstitution of these seemingly outmoded forms and sentimental properties of Balagtasismo in Mabanglo’s poetry, under social conditions in which both masculinist modernism and feminism had obtained as properly radical political responses, signals a di√erent notion of freedom and agency than, I believe, her critics would espouse. Indeed, what appears in these critics’ assessments of Mabanglo’s poetry as a contradiction between masterful restraint and bold rebellion, on the one hand, and pathetic supplication and excessive pliancy, on the other, can be viewed as constituting precisely another modality of poetic agency apart from the agency of sovereign subjectivity that was upheld as a literary and political ideal. I understand this other modality of poetic agency in terms of what is at work in Mabanglo’s description of the potentially liberating use of language by means of the 114

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‘‘suppleness of the tongue.’’ For Mabanglo, ‘‘If the woman poet is imprisoned, and words are the utensils of poetry, the poet will be liberated through the use of language. The bottle [bote] should become a boot [bota], should become a seed or bone [buto], should become a stone [bato]!’’ The radicalizing movement in the transformation of matter, bote-bota-buto-bato! (bottle-boot-seed/bone-stone!), is enabled precisely by that ‘‘softness of tongue’’ that is the source and means of the female poet’s power.≤∏ The vowel changes in Mabanglo’s example demonstrate a linguistic-poetic agency that transforms through pliancy—we might say, the agency of morphing, of transfiguring di√erentiation, rather than of radical opposition or resistance. Mabanglo’s poetry engages in such subtle plays in morphemic and phonetic di√erence through infixing and su≈xing, making change immanent in the very act of enunciation. For example, consider the lines quoted earlier from ‘‘ . . . Mula sa Kuwait’’: Inako kay Inang ang dingding na butas, Ipinangako sa kapatid ang maningning na bukas (33) [To Mother, I promised to answer for the wall full of holes, To my siblings, I promised a brilliant tomorrow]

Here the phrase ‘‘ang dingding na butas’’ (a wall full of holes) aurally almost replicates ‘‘ang maningning na bukas’’ (a brilliant tomorrow), but with slight consonant alterations that semantically convert material loss and lack into a temporal opening (bukas, meaning tomorrow as well as opening). That alteration is repeated in the move from inako to ipinangako, from obligation to promise. By means of infixing, inserting additional syllables within aurally similar lines, the supple and nimble tongue coaxes the promise of a radiant future out of a dire and heavy liability. Furthermore, through this linguistic practice, Mabanglo performatively evokes the thematically suggested feeling of anticipation by increasing the rhythmic speed (in an expansion of the syllabic count of its rhythmic components) of the line. The immanence of change that the ‘‘softness of tongue’’ can produce is therefore not only in the content of the poetic statement but also in the emotional and tonal e√ect of its utterance. It is with respect to this emotional power of poetic utterance that Mabanglo compares the female poet to the mythical female sorcerer: Poetics of Filipina Export

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The female sorcerer has power in words: rewarding or punishing; glorifying or oppressing [lumuluwalhati o dumuduhagi]; caressing or flogging [humihimas o humahampas]. The poet in turn has power in metaphor: weaving conundrums, stroking our hard inner beings until they soften, pacifying the whirlpools of our rage, obliterating even our hidden fears; and then, bringing us closer to, almost pressing us against, the heart of God.

The supple tongue bears a practical, tangible, incantatory power. Rather than being simply the means of representing the potency of property, as Mabanglo argues is the case with masculinist poetry, word signs bear a quasi-physical agency vis-à-vis our sentient souls. Adept at wielding these word signs in the making of talinghaga (metaphor, mystery, aphorism), the supple tongue can utter the slight phonic alterations that will spell the di√erence between glorifying (lumuluwalhati) or oppressing (dumuduhagi), caressing (humihimas) or flogging (humahampas). The liberative agency of the female poet is thus exercised not by destroying or escaping from the figurative bottle within which she is imprisoned and her powers contained, but by making it yield to the immanence of its radical transformation (bottle-boot-bone-stone!). Freedom is not to be found outside of or in opposition to the symbolic order and means of her oppression but in the exercise of a certain kind of pliancy or fluency—one might say, a form of virtuosity that others might eschew. Notably, poetic practices concord with, if not approximate, the very practices of self-making on the part of the diasporic Filipinas she writes about. In Mabanglo’s poetry, we see the practices of accommodation, compliance, shrouding of wounds, remaking of selves, self-denial, and denial of human need and loss that make up the living labor of subjective survival that helps to produce the objectified humans of capitalist tra≈c. The self wielded ‘‘as an ocw’’ (overseas contract worker), in her poem of that name, ‘‘Bilang ocw,’’ is a permeable, sentient medium, vulnerable to the subjective emissions and extensions of others: ‘‘My tongue remembers your wounded taste. / Under the cover of my face / Your shadow hides; / My shoulder / Your su√ering stabs.’’ The soft tongue is also the remembering surface. From this self we read a capacity for su√ering, which, as Marx implies in his characterizations of the emasculated, sensuous worker, is the posited subjective condition of alienated labor, an alienation conceived in gendered and sexualized terms of devaluation.≤π The capacity for su√ering is also importantly the legacy of colonial labor, which, following the logic 116

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that Achille Mbembe argues necessitates keeping the slave in a state of injury, is produced as a being-in-pain.≤∫ In the shadow of this colonial contract, the ‘‘I’’ of the ocw relies on such capacities in the practice of surrender, a surrender to the condition, which Mbembe calls ‘‘death in life’’: ‘‘I will wager everything I can / I will erase my accent / I will change my personhood [ pagkatao] / To accord / concord [makiayon/makaayon] with you / My conqueror. / Open your door / Let me in / to your country, / to my cell, To my tomb.’’ From these passages of vulnerable subjectivity and willed surrender, we are, however, able to glean another mode of experience at work in Mabanglo’s poetry, one that suggests not only the experiential labor of coping with and surviving the alienation, objectification, and commodification that are the given conditions of racialized, feminized labor. This other mode of experience, which depends on older practices of self-making, fate playing, and spiritual mediation, also suggests an unrecognized form of subjective labor that is a vital, productive force impelling and shaping the movement of Filipina export. In this mode, the practice of su√ering and surrender does not simply mean the reproduction of oppression and the denial of freedom but rather bears with it a transformative political potential.

Passion and Resurrection Although you are alone in this su√ering, you share in the unknown with others whom you have yet to know. —édouard glissant It makes no di√erence now How the fingers Disappeared And the body became one mass of words Amen. —ma. lorena barros

In ‘‘Mga Liham ni Pinay,’’ Filipinas appear linked together through the numerative identity form in a bounded seriality. But in Mabanglo’s later work they are Poetics of Filipina Export

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linked and gathered through moments of an archetypal passage of experience as su√ering, or karanasan (danas as time, experience, dumanas, to undergo, suffer, feel, taste hardship). The form of such su√ering is drawn from the literary traditions of the pasyon (the dramatic reading/chanting of the Passion of Christ), awit (metrical romance), and korido (religious narrative poem) that Mabanglo was both well versed in and influenced by.≤Ω Hence, in ‘‘Bayan ng Lunggati, Bayan ng Pighati’’ (translated as ‘‘Land of Desire, Land of Grief,’’ although bayan can also be translated as nation, town, people), Mabanglo depicts the zone of movement of overseas Filipino workers in five moments like stations of the cross, five emotional substances (desire, paper, blood, fire, grief), each corresponding to the stages in the ‘‘passion’’ of a community (bayan) that is constituted as such precisely through this passage: the flight abroad (Lunggati [Desire]), the arrest at the border (Papel [Paper/Role]), the remolding of the body (Dugo [Blood]), the consumption of life force (Apoy [Fire]), and death and its returns of life (Pighati [Grief]). Mabanglo renders this diasporic experience through an intimate dynamic of finitude and infinitude, a mode of experience of self in and as a collective passion. Infinitude is experienced in the soaring flight abroad. It is the realm of possibility opened up by this flight, the open sky, the mystical firmament where blessing and grace might be found. Infinitude is experienced as movement, as flows, as the forces of a cosmic order, palad (destiny), in which one is thrown but also in which one throws oneself in the dreaming action of flight abroad. Finitude is experienced in the form of ‘‘rusted roofs / dark esteros [urban canals] / a sea that will not be known / a stretch of land’’ that one watches in mid-flight, receding behind and into the past. It is ‘‘trampled tears, a small pain to be forgotten.’’ Finitude is expressed as the names and places of origin engraved on suitcase, bag, folder, identifying signs of one’s personhood and humanity. It is the passport, ‘‘the piece of paper that says one’s name, proves one’s humanity, that is the proof of baptism, school, marriage, departure’’—it is the identity of citizenship. Finitude is experienced as the fixity of this identity and of one’s itinerary, as if in flight ‘‘one were tied, already and still, to one’s destination.’’ It is what, abiding with one in anticipation and guarantee of a future, ‘‘already and still,’’ can be taken away. As a form of finitude, identity is at once the instrument of one’s oppressive confinement and the object of one’s loss and desire. It is also the hemming in of the self by a minor language and culture, the isolation and seemingly insur-

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mountable containment in incommunicability. For, as Avita Kumar writes, ‘‘It is in that country called language that immigrants are reviled.’’≥≠ One’s singularity is edged out by the identitarian imperatives of a foreign country where one discovers ‘‘I am / not me’’: ‘‘I was / not me / says whoever / says the people / in the language I cannot understand.’’ A majoritarian language that hems in the self is the social and state measure used to instill an isolation and insurmountable containment and ostracization of experience. ‘‘I was made to ride / an experience / foreign even to my feelings.’’ Identity becomes a form of finitude that serves as at once the instrument of one’s oppressive confinement. ‘‘I walked / blessed by paper / I was betrayed / by my paper (papel)’’≥∞ —and the object of one’s longing: we need to scatter throughout the world in order to reach for a view of the sky to name the land a≈xed to the soles of shoes

The finite identity which one simultaneously flees and reaches for is grasped upon the threat of its erasure in the realm of infinitude (the world, the sky, heaven) to which one appeals, upon which one calls, in the liberative action of dreaming. Infinitude obtains in the time in which the ‘‘I’’ is cast: ‘‘as dark as death / is the time / but as red as the spurting blood of miscarriage / is the flame of loneliness.’’ The time of aloneness is deathly, violent, and warm. The body itself is experienced both in its finitude as ‘‘clay with average weight’’ and in its infinitude as ‘‘clay that preserves / past / and future,’’ on which ‘‘smolders / salt / tears / blood / saliva / come / opium.’’ These fluids figure the life forces that are drained from people, consumed like time (which makes for the oscillation between tao/taon [person/year]). In this poem we see the dynamic of finitude-infinitude shaping the experience of one’s arrest and incarceration at immigration (criminalized for carrying a passport declared to be fake because it is from a suspect nation) and, with the confiscation of one’s passport-identity,≥≤ the racism of one’s undoing—the experience of one’s English, one’s reasoning, even one’s life, scattering, going astray,

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unable to hold together in the face of denied personhood. We see infinitude in the allusion to the realm of saints to whom one appeals for succor, the order of chance on which one wagers one’s body. Finitude shapes the experience of the body, its strength and time slowly consumed until it is boxed in a co≈n and sent across the ocean back home; infinitude shapes the experience of life forces surpassing existential bodily forms. ‘‘In sensation / escapes / the soul’s fire.’’ Infinitude makes possible the search for intangible wounds, wounds persisting beyond the individual physical body, wounds that stretch across forms of persons and biographical time. In a poem about Flor Contemplacion, the domestic helper who was sentenced to death by hanging in a Singaporean court, these wounds are ‘‘images that / cannot be erased . . . persisting / persisting / like / unpaid labor,’’ haunting the material present with the immanence of resurrection. Here, the ‘‘I’’ is not Christ, but rather Christ-time: ‘‘ako ang gabing / walang huling hapunan’’ (I am the night / without a last supper); ‘‘ako ang gabing / di nagdaan kay Pilato’’ (I am the night / that didn’t pass before Pilate); ‘‘ako ang gabi / sa Golgotha’’ (I am the night / at Golgotha); ‘‘ako ang gabi ng muling pagkabuhay’’ (I am the night of resurrection). In this dynamic of passage whereby a desecrated life can fertilize the departures of others (bayaang ang buhay kong / nalapastangan / maging pataba ng paglisan / ng iyong paglisan), I read the mode of Mabanglo’s own poetics. Indeed, the recurrent image in her poems of the vital power of remains in fueling new life movements is repeated in her description of her own experiential encounters with images of Filipinos, during her first opportunity ‘‘to fulfill the parable of going overseas’’ in 1986, as ‘‘the ash that blazed my first poems on the diaspora.’’ ‘‘Buhay ko—nakatanim sa buhay ng iba’’ (My life—sown in the lives of others), Mabanglo writes in the preface to this collection of poems. This involvement of a life in the lives of others is no longer to be understood as a form of identification. It is better understood as a form of su√ering or passion, which is not a property or action of a subject but precisely a process of subjectivation within the larger movement it helps to bring about. For Mabanglo, this movement is the movement of pangingibang-bayan (changing-country), the diverse images of which have become grafted onto the sense organs of her bodily subjectivity and expressed in her poetry. There are many images of going overseas—sad, happy, glittering, taut. They are all staked in the pupil of my consciousness. Some are mapped onto my skin, 120

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especially stabbed in my heart, clenched even in my soul. They are all laid bare here—in the words, in the metaphors, even in the small spaces between the lines (those that will never be read).

Su√ering or passion, then, should be viewed not only as the content of Mabanglo’s poetry but also, more importantly, the very form of her poetics. That Mabanglo should view the act of life movement abroad, pangingibang-lupa (changing-land), as itself an act of poetic figuration (as pananalinghaga, parable making or allegory making), a mystery or enigma, suggests that the form of her poetic labor ( poiesis), as a mode of passion and resurrection, can be read as a living poiesis of diasporic movement and struggle. That struggle is portrayed in the poem ‘‘Anyaya ng Imperyalista’’ (Invitation of an Imperialist), in which the female guestworker is invited for dinner by the seductive host, the idealized wealthy male patron (‘‘heaven is this person I now face’’), a heteronormatively gendered relation of nations that is unmasked as a relation between consumer/predator and its food/prey. Upon arrival, the female guestworker is turned into ‘‘the food to be attacked. / I am first split at the stomach / The liver of need is disgorged / Apparently pleased by my distending entrails / He begins to gnaw on my gall bladder and intestines.’’ The seduceremployer-host bites and eats until he reaches the writing hand, and as he bites o√ the fingers, new ones sprout. A budding movement ensues, and we are left with an image of rage burgeoning, rising hands continuously sprouting from ‘‘the womb of uprising thousands of hands,’’ Left and right, Even the feet sometimes—They will seethe, becoming thousands of eyes and mouths Until they produce di√erent sounds, Rhythm and imagination On millions of paper, Until they become rising fists Hands that cannot be counted: Subverting you, Su√ocating you, Smothering you.

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The movement of passion becomes the way in which a collective is constituted, in the vivification of subjectifying parts, and an appeal to supernatural destiny to recover one’s losses displaces the search for identity. In the ‘‘enlarged frame of experience’’ that the images of the diaspora comprise, the self is a pliant mediator of transformation, one who doesn’t remake the world through the pronouncement of the sovereign word, but rather who is open to ‘‘possession’’ by the remains of other consumed lives, at the very moment of her own destruction. Incorporating those remains, the devoured self can become the generative site of an insurrectionary passion—the ‘‘sounds, rhythm and imagination’’ produced by the seething parts of a collective uprising—the place of resurrection of life through the poetic channeling of life flows. What rises is, however, not one body subject (as Ileto argues was the case with early twentieth-century millenarian Filipino peasant revolts shaped by the passion of Christ, where the emotive forces of damay and compassion manifest and bring about ‘‘a whole and controlled loob,’’ the unified and fortified inner being of the son’s redemption’’),≥≥ but rather multiplying feet, fists, eyes, mouths.≥∂

Capitalism of the Spirit and the Politics of Passage Commodities cannot themselves go to market and perform exchanges in their own right.—karl marx, Capital

How do we begin to consider the political possibilities presented by these modes of experience articulated by Mabanglo? On the one hand, practices of the su√ering, accommodating self, the self in and as passion, contribute to the reproduction of the transnational domestic laboring race-class toward which overseas Filipina workers increasingly belong. This reproduction is evident in the resurgence of Christian spirituality and faith as measures for coping and for a≈rming the ethos of self-sacrifice among these workers. The burden of ‘‘assimilating’’ ( pakikiayon) and accommodating constantly to the demands of the oppressive host nation and employer race-class—this subjective perviousness whose economic correlative is the capacity of the domestic helper to absorb all kinds of costs (not only of her production but also of the production of her employers and of her dependent kin at home)—is buoyed and alleviated by the comforts of a resurgent Christian spirituality.≥∑ The threat of erasure of identity is staved o√ by a mythos of transcendence and redemption in Christlike su√ering. Such 122

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su√ering was in fact the intended end of the Marianist campaign of the Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos governments to construct the Filipina diaspora as ‘‘mga bagong bayani ’’ (the new heroes of the nation). This campaign aimed to encourage the strains of martyrdom in the actions of overseas Filipina workers, martyrdom through which their nation and families, as the rightful beneficiaries of their ‘‘sacrifice,’’ could make claims to the products of their labor (currently $8 billion in annual remittances). Sacrifice thus becomes the means by which overseas Filipinas are enjoined to put their su√ering work toward the reproduction of the labor pool at home. No doubt there is a strong tendency in Mabanglo’s work toward just this end: sacrifice.≥∏ In many poems, dreaming and desiring become the original sin for which penance must be paid.≥π Guilt as self-blame impels the trajectory of redemption: Christlike sacrifice for the nation’s salvation. The feminist-empathetic structure of her poetry on which moral-political redemption depends thus embraces the experience of the Filipina as a commodity. As Benjamin put it, ‘‘If the commodity had a soul, it would be the most empathetic soul.’’≥∫ On the other hand, while Mabanglo tries to find primordial cause for the restlessness impelling Filipina flight, either in Filipinas themselves—which makes for both guilt and the necessity of self-redemption—or in the objective, external condition of poverty—which makes for the strains of pity and the a√ect of compulsive martyrdom—there remains in her poems a kind of action that, as I’ve tried to show, cannot be contained by such discrete and determinate notions of subjective or objective cause. This noncausative action is conveyed by the movement of Bayan ng Lunggati, Bayan ng Pighati (People of Desire or Yearning, People of Grief), which is impelled by transformative moments/substances rather than by sovereign agents, and by the very dynamic of finitude and infinitude that characterizes this collective experiential passage (karanasan) as Christtime. This movement takes place between a√ective moments of desire or yearning and grief, which, while being moments of embarkation and arrival, cannot be thought of as beginning and end insofar as they obtain in an unworldly time. It is a collective processual action in which lives are wagered, powers are summoned, and individual decisions are made, in a cosmic gamble of fate, generating other possible destinies for the bayan, or nation, that is its subject. It is the generative agency of this processual action that, even in the midst of tragic events and abjection, makes for the palpable exhilaration of Mabanglo’s passion poetry. The parable of changing-land consists, after all, of the movement Poetics of Filipina Export

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of metamorphic passage for which the details and pieces of a multitude of lives are essential, formative moments. For the self, this potential for transformation means the opening up of one’s finitude to a realm of unknown possibilities, extending beyond one’s given limited being, taking part(s) in and of other lives as new vectors of subjectivation and becoming. It is to the dynamics of this metamorphic passage that Mabanglo’s writing can be said to surrender. On this view, the poetic ecstasy of loneliness, which she first explored in her earliest collection, Supling (O√spring), could be said to derive from the possibilities of experiencing a life extending not only beyond a particular territorially bound identity but also beyond the person-form we inhabit in daily life—the bloody possibilities of emergence and birth (luwal). Against critics who dismissed her earlier poetry as apolitical, reactionary, even decadent in its individualistic selfindulgence, yet hailed her later poetry as being feminist, Mabanglo argues, ‘‘No one noticed the rebellion of a young poet sprouting (there)—the ashes of a nationalist / political rebellion. . . . Whatever the force was that pushed me to express the dispositions and beliefs and experiences of female experience in my verses, it was the very same force that pushed me to write about loneliness, aloneness, selfhood, and the search for identity in my first poems.’’≥Ω To speak in terms of finitude and infinitude is to invoke that dominant realm of modern experience: capitalism. ‘‘As figure,’’ wrote Jean-François Lyotard, ‘‘capitalism derives its force from the Idea of infinity. It can appear in human experience as the desire for money, the desire for power, or the desire for novelty. All this can seem very ugly, very disquieting. But these desires are the anthropological translation of something that is ontologically the ‘instantiation’ of infinity in the will.’’∂≠ A recent ethnographic work on the Philippines o√ers a curious variation (one might say, an anthropological retranslation) of this ontological instantiation of infinity. It depicts the desires of Filipinas, which are expressed through cultural practices, as desires for freedom from tradition (desires nevertheless claimed to be latent in tradition).∂∞ Not surprisingly, this freedom can be realized only in capitalist forms of modernity such as consumption.∂≤ Turning its attention to the phenomenon of Filipinas working abroad, this work is led to argue for ‘‘the importance of consumption in [Filipinas’] desire for, and experience of, work abroad.’’∂≥ Dependent as it is on the oppositions between alienable relations under capitalist modernity and inalienable relations under noncapitalist tradition, this account finally demonstrates its congruence with the o≈cial state

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view of ocws as heroes, to the extent that it interprets Filipina subjective practices in terms of a valorized capitalism of the spirit. My own tendency is to move away from the category of consumption in trying to understand the structure of and means for the social-subjective movement I have been calling Filipina export. To do so is to wrench free Filipina subjective practices from both the ‘‘work of consumption’’ that subsequently subsumes them and the sociosymbolic logic of representation within which these practices achieve expression as politics—what is often understood as a politics of identity and di√erence.∂∂ To suspend the interpretative framework constituted by the epistemic categories of consumption, representation, and identity is to open up the realm of action within which Filipinas move and, therefore, to broaden and alter the field of symbolic and material significance within which their practices have meaning.∂∑ What appear then to be practices of self-making through consumptive mimicry and identification might instead be seen to draw upon practices of spiritual mediation that historically obtained as the domain of female-gendered members in precolonial Philippine societies.∂∏ If overseas Filipina women appear to be now ‘‘forced onto a di√erent arena of feminised mediation’’ by the cultural logic of global capitalism, it may be that this di√erent arena of overseas domestic labor is itself also the product of older practices of spiritual mediation, which are revitalized and reinvented in the actions of Filipinas selling and sending themselves as labor commodities for export.∂π On this view, such acts of self-lending and surrendering/su√ering can be understood as faithful actions of subjective becoming, in which part-objects or image-remains of other lives gone ahead into that mystery of changing-land are less traits of identification than things containing otherworldly powers that enable one’s transformation and transport elsewhere. Like Mabanglo’s words, such thingly remainders play incantatory parts in everyday rites of production of selfhood and sociality. As attributes, these sign objects serve as the means of engaging in empowering expressive performances that others have described as rites of becoming beautiful. In contrast to research which privileges poverty as a primary cause, Yasushi Uchiyamada, for example, approaches Filipina out-migration from the rural areas to Manila as ‘‘a question of aesthetics, self-making and life-cycle combined with economic calculus rather than treating it exclusively as that caused by poverty alone.’’∂∫ The farther the distance traveled, the more glamorous and more complete the transformation.

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The gendered aesthetic basis for embarking on this rite of passage is not removed, however, from claims to power. As Uchiyamada writes, ‘‘Becoming beautiful in a far-away place is relevant to the question of ‘better lives,’ because beauty can be translated into political power.’’∂Ω In a similar context, Fenella Cannell writes, ‘‘Becoming beautiful in the Philippines has historically been seen as a protective process, emphasising a person’s humanity and right to respect, and conferring (via amulets and tattoos) a layering of power, logics which still apply to the use of anting-anting and the practice of embalming the dead.’’∑≠ If viewed in light of such persistent practices of dressing and ornamentation as a summoning of powers, the image-remains of other lives, as much as the word signs of Mabanglo’s poetry, perform a function similar to that of anting-anting (amulets). Bearing bisa (potency), these signifying objects are not so much consumed as wielded. The notion of bisa, which vernacularizes the logic of fetishism, operates in tension and confluence with the notion of visa, which symbolizes the power or, more correctly, the authorized license to cross national boundaries.∑∞ While ‘‘visa’’ implies and demands state structures of recognition, ‘‘bisa’’ implies an otherworldly transformative potential present in everyday things. The rites of becoming beautiful or practices of passage thus depend on and instantiate a realm of finitude-surpassing power, a realm of possibility and change, that is not confined to the figures of capitalism, including the figure of personal freedom, or by the figures of representative democracy, including the figure of social identity. Jane Margold sees in Filipina beauty pageants in Hong Kong not only rituals of reversal but also ‘‘rituals of expansion in which the self is reclaimed in all its social alliance and achievement.’’∑≤ As she puts it, ‘‘Being paraded was an assertion and a≈rmation of social connectedness.’’∑≥ More than performing a representation of this social connectedness, whether disparaged or not, the Filipina beauty contestants acted out a kind of self-transformation by means of things acquired through (and become attributes of) such social connectedness. This is a realm in which costumes, objects and accessories, paraphernalia, and scripts enable all kinds of self-extension, reachings (abot), which others delight to see to the extent that they too can participate in the infinitudinal possibilities put on display. In using the term ‘‘display,’’ I mean to recast the pageantry of the beauty contests in terms other than the terms of spectacular representation. When understood through the notion of Catholic pageantry, display is a process of enjoining in the passage of su√ering and resurrection exemplified by the 126

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passion of Christ. In this register, it refers to a processional act that calls the self into a personal and collective a√ective passage, a passage that is also the very making of a particular sociality. The notion of display helps to illuminate the poetics of display and passage in Mabanglo’s work. It allows us to interpret the display of flight, su√ering, sacrifice, and resurrectionary power as an acting out of and enjoinment to selftransformation, a becoming through taking part(s). Mabanglo’s formal practice of incorporating aphoristic fragments of others’ locutions in her poems as well as her linguistic practice—that ‘‘softness of tongue’’ which performatively realizes the immanence of change—enacts precisely those capacities and logics of power that the above ethnographic works observe in the rites of becoming beautiful. Viewed from the side of the sacred, display bears signifying possibilities that do not quite accord with consumptive and representational models of subjectivity and the politics of identification and di√erence through which the practices of Filipina export might be readily interpreted. The artist Judy Sibayan’s project Scapular Gallery Nomad exemplifies the alternative signifying possibilities of the notion of display. Hanging miniature artworks around her neck and on her backpack like scapulars, she uses her body as a mobile gallery and altar that has traveled to and from the United States, Europe, and Asia.∑∂ These symbolic sacramental objects that she curates and layers on herself like potent charms serve as image-media of new relations between herself and others. As everyday ‘‘passports’’ to other worlds-in-between people, they bear unpredictable subjective and communitarian potentials for those who take part(s) in the performance of self and social passage that they serve to mediate. Such subjective and communitarian potentials are as yet only barely glimpsed in the informal economies and networks of cooperation forged by this diaspora, in parks, churches, homes, and in the limited public spaces of their minor language communication. In Servants of Globalization, a masterful sociological study of these informal economies and gatherings of migrant Filipina domestic workers, Rhacel Parreñas argues that as a response to the dislocation of nonbelonging and partial citizenship that they experience, Filipina domestic workers actively participate in the commercialization of their own friendships and the commodification of their own familial ties.∑∑ Parreñas acknowledges, ‘‘Informal microbusiness enterprises, which are remarkably prevalent in the community . . . alienate domestic workers from one another with the reduction of the daily rituals of community life to financial transactions.’’∑∏ The reading of such microbusinesses, most of Poetics of Filipina Export

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which, Parreñas acknowledges, ‘‘generate little profit,’’ as ‘‘capitalist activities’’ and therefore as opposed to relations of intimacy supports the interpretation of the petty-commodity trade of Filipina migrant workers as inherently alienating. While practices of mutual assistance and social gathering appear to contribute to feelings of belonging and solidarity, the very circulation of money and goods among the domestic workers is viewed as ‘‘instill[ing] anomie and consequently aggravat[ing] the dislocation of nonbelonging.’’∑π However, the perception that monetary exchanges are endemic to alienated capitalist social relations itself participates in the abstraction on which capitalist exchange depends, that is to say, it abstracts the objects and practices of migrant women’s gatherings from their sensuous characteristics and concrete significance.∑∫ It follows that real change can be found only in the elimination or transcendence of a system that is itself abstract, viewed as lying outside the immediate sphere of women’s actions and yet determining the meanings of such actions. If, in contrast, one were to view these goods, including money, as object signs bearing bisa and serving as an alternative form of sociosymbolic currency (a material language or semiotic-practical media of social relations neither fully contained nor exhausted by the logic of the market), one may perhaps see these other generative social practices and meanings that fall beyond the purview of a ready moral and political notion of proper resistance against capitalist exploitation. This refracted view takes into account a much longer history of Filipina entrepreneurship than any analysis of them as an e√ect of globalization can acknowledge.∑Ω From this refracted perspective, women’s practices of negosyo (business, negotiation) are as much cultural practices of taking part(s) in social networks of communication and cooperative activity, which create forms of self-enhancement and social power, as they are market practices of selling and purchasing, which generate only individual profit and subjective alienation. Inasmuch as these informal economies are carried out through personal giftgiving relationships, we can understand these practices of negosyo (consisting of both consuming and dealing) that women engage in as forms of tapping into and wielding social power, a power predicated on an order of fluency that they invoke. As the media of this social fluency, money and goods are one means by which overseas Filipina workers exceed their role as export commodities and the strictures of the dominant economy of exchange and desire within which they func-

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tion. Within these spaces of gathering, Filipinas already enact some measure of Luce Irigaray’s envisioned alternate world: ‘‘Commodities can only enter into relationships under the watchful eyes of their ‘guardians.’ It is out of the question for them to go to ‘market’ on their own, enjoy their own worth among themselves, speak to each other, desire each other, free from the control of sellerbuyer-consumer subjects. . . . But what if these ‘commodities’ refused to go to ‘market’? What if they maintained ‘another’ kind of commerce, among themselves?’’∏≠ On the level of dominant exchange, that is, on the strategic field of subjects, which is overcoded in terms of national citizenship as the terms of their labor and belonging, Filipinas certainly make identity claims, claims that participate in making the conditions of their semialienation from the dominant polity or partial citizenship.∏∞ And yet, on the level of signifying practices, the semioticmaterial relational acts or praxis they engage in within their gatherings, whether beauty contests, negosyo, or collective outings, may very well be guided by or instantiate other social logics and exact di√erent political terms from that of subject claims of citizenship. These semiotic-material practices can be said to be part and parcel of the languages that women freeing themselves from their being as commodities speak among themselves. Marx writes, ‘‘If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange values.’’∏≤ Filipina women-as-commodities certainly relate to each other through the equivalences of gendered, national, racial, and class identity. It is on this level, which accords with the strictures of market exchange, that their practices generate structures of both solidarity and rivalry. They become owners of their own value, which the things they acquire come to represent. However, to the extent that relations of indentured service and personal debt relations obtain in the spaces of their work, the practices of migrant workers in spaces elsewhere will also bear dimensions of freeing them from the social relations within which they serve as mere commodities and from the dominant language of their exchange.∏≥ Within these peripheral pools of informal commerce, overseas Filipina workers thus engage in social signifying practices that at once conform to and draw away from the language of commodities, speaking what Irigaray calls ‘‘mostly dialects and patios, languages hard for ‘subjects’ to understand.’’∏∂ In this other register, material goods, pieces of gossip, and speech as well as

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visible money or cash∏∑ are less symbols of one’s value than they are part-objects in a reconstitutive, metamorphic process of potentially empowering but also potentially devastating personal and social passage.∏∏

The Times of Su√ering, the Time of Global Labor: Theorizing Post-Fordist Servility This ‘‘outside’ I think of, following Derrida, as something attached to the category ‘‘capital’’ itself, something that straddles a border zone of temporality, that conforms to the temporal code within which capital comes into being even as it violates that code, something that we are able to see only because we can think/theorize capital, but that also always reminds us that other temporalities, other forms of worlding, coexist and are possible. —dipesh chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Di√erence

Recent attempts to theorize contemporary labor struggles against global capitalism have seized on the objective conditions characterizing post-Fordist production and the dynamics of a postmodern global economy to imagine and call into realization a new revolutionary global proletarian subject, which, among others, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call the multitude. Hardt and Negri have compellingly argued that it is the creative forces of labor, in their struggles against national and identitarian boundaries, that have brought about the restructuring of production on a world scale, including the new conditions of labor that shape its constitutive features, indeed, its new subjectivity and subjective potential as a revolutionary global class. Those constitutive features can be deduced from the new forms of post-Fordist labor, whose paradigmatic examples Hardt and Negri find in the information and service industries and which appear, in their formulations of immaterial and a√ective labor, to subsume the historically definitive features of deterritorialized or immigrant labor and women’s work or reproductive labor. (Interestingly, these leftist scholars appear to have stepped in where global feminism left o√, i.e., the multitude takes over the global feminist subject.) However, even as they brilliantly grasp the objective conditions and forms of postindustrial labor, and indeed the productive force of these forms of labor as subjectivity, these works fail to take into theoretical-political account the histori130

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cal experience, seen now as subjective labor, of those very populations who have continued to embody and comprise the older, yet extant, forms of labor that the post-Fordist global economy now appears to have fully subsumed, i.e., immigrant labor and women’s work, the related conditions of which can now be seen to have been combined in the scattered industry of overseas Filipina labor. In a foreword to Paolo Virno’s The Grammar of the Multitude, Sylvére Lotringer recalls Mario Tronti’s argument that ‘‘workers are a class for themselves before being a class against capital.’’∏π Critiquing Hardt’s and Negri’s own formulations of this class (and their particular reformulation of the theoretico-political legacy of Italian ‘‘workerism’’), Lotringer writes, ‘‘Anyone who cares for the multitude, should first figure out what it is about and what could be expected from it, not derive its mode of being from some revolutionary essence.’’∏∫ I would argue, furthermore, that who workers are as a class for themselves, in their dimension before objectification, i.e., as subjectivity, importantly consists of the cultural capacities and communicative and a√ective praxis of those historical, embodied beings who incarnate both new forms of labor and their colonial and postcolonial antecedents. In Virno’s account, these capacities, including linguistic-cognitive competencies and emotional tonalities, are ‘‘the basis of productive cooperation in general,’’ which is itself the characteristic condition of the post-Fordist economy. For Virno and Hardt and Negri, the contemporary moment in global capitalism is characterized by the real, as opposed to merely formal, subsumption of society by capital, that is to say, in Negri’s formulation, ‘‘the e√ective, functional and organic subjugation of all the social conditions of production and, concomitantly, of labor as an associated force.’’∏Ω This notion of real subsumption, which animates much of the theoretical and political energy of recent Left thinking, enables the recognition of the productivity of those activities hitherto confined to the reproductive sphere and, indeed, the recognition of the breakdown, in the postmodern economy, of those divisions between reproductive work and productive labor that shaped both previous conceptions of labor and imaginations of struggle. It allows the consideration of the full range of human activity in what Negri calls ‘‘the social factory’’ as source of wealth and radical opposition. In his own analysis of the implications of real subsumption for post-Fordist labor, Virno draws on Marx’s observation that artistic performance and servile labor resemble each other to the extent that they are both forms of nonproductive labor. For Virno, virtuosity and servility characterize the communicative Poetics of Filipina Export

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activities of workers (and the social, communicative, cognitive, and a√ective capacities they exercise) that are continuously subsumed by capital as the basis of productive social cooperation. These communicative activities, which draw on ‘‘linguistic competence, knowledge, imagination, etc.,’’ can be considered forms of servile, nonproductive labor, or ‘‘non-remunerated life,’’ that constitutes the new basis for the exploitation of post-Fordist labor. He writes, ‘‘Virtuosic activity shows itself as universal servile work. The a≈nity between a pianist and a waiter, which Marx had foreseen, finds an unexpected confirmation in the epoch in which all wage labor has something in common with the ‘performing artist.’ It is just that the very labor which produces surplus-value is what takes on the appearance of servile labor.’’π≠ Virno argues for what Marxist feminists have in fact long argued, that is, a broadening of the parameters within which productive activity or work that produces surplus value is defined. Virno does this by defining ‘‘ ‘production time’ as that indissoluble unity of remunerated life and non-remunerated life, labor and non-labor, emerged social cooperation and submerged social cooperation.’’π∞ Servility characterizes this submerged social cooperation, which is nonremunerated life. In this chapter I have attempted to attend to these subjective practices and cultural capacities of submerged social cooperation in the context of Filipina export, precisely as productive forces that are already a part of the making of the objective conditions of contemporary immigrant labor, which stands as an exemplary instance of post-Fordist labor. I would say even that insofar as the forms of gendered, racialized, and sexualized forms of servile (domestic) labor, including modern colonial slave labor, prefigure and indeed pave the way for new forms of global labor, the subjective capacities of the former bear great theoretico-political importance for the present and future of global struggle. As the historical instance of and paradigm for the subsumption of the entire being of the worker, domestic labor is an indispensable figure for the structure of immaterial labor. It is also the site of production of what Rosa Luxemburg termed ‘‘non-capitalist strata,’’ social formations which appear to exist prior to and outside of capital.π≤ Contrary to Luxemburg’s view, which valuably pointed to capital’s need for these strata outside of it for its expanded reproduction, ‘‘non-capitalist strata’’ are not merely the preexisting objects of violent conquest necessitated by the global expansion of capital; they are critically also the very products or consequences of this expansion. That is to say, ‘‘non-capitalist strata’’ continue to be created in and as outmoded, backward, or traditional forms of 132

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personhood, cultural capacities, practices of social cooperation, and ways of life, through new and renewed structures of dispossession and exclusion. The capitalist subsumption, or appropriation and subjection to the regime of exchange value, of these ‘‘non-capitalist strata’’ depends precisely on the positing of di√erences that certain kinds of people are made to inhabit, di√erences that serve as the basis of the use value of their natural predispositions and of the tendency toward the reduction of the cost of that use value to nothing, such that it may be appropriated freely. What has recently garnered renewed attention in the geopolitical sphere as acts of ‘‘primitive accumulation’’—appropriation through allegedly extraeconomic practices of violent coercion and force—can thus be seen to obtain in contemporary practices of social dispossession through gendered, racialized human exclusion and marginalization. To the extent that the conditions and forms of labor in the post-Fordist economy, which are grasped in terms of servile labor, subsume the historically definitive features of colonial, immigrant, and women’s reproductive labor (not least of all in the appearance of this labor as their entire being), attempts to theorize the subjectivity of this new form of global labor will only negate through subsumptive abstraction the historical experiences, i.e., the cultural capacities and communicative and a√ective praxis, of those concrete populations who actually embody both new forms of labor and their colonial and postcolonial antecedents.π≥ Moreover, they will overcode the latter’s creative sociocultural practices in the languages and cultural-linguistic competencies of those who represent the highest stage of the labor forms that subsume them. In a way similar to that in which the category of labor is constituted through a disavowed sexual di√erentiation from reproductive labor (as I discussed in chapter 1), the category of post-Fordist servility will be constituted through an unacknowledged, theoretical subsumption of the concrete living labor of third world traditional servility. I argue in these first chapters that the phenomenon of the feminization of labor, which is exemplified in the prostitution and commodification for export of Filipina labor, obtains as a consequence of the involvement of what used to be described as extraeconomic practices in the free market of exchange. Today these practices would be understood within the category of productive social cooperation and through the notion of the real subsumption of society by capital. If primitive accumulation again makes sense in the advanced capitalist world as a result of the blatant contemporary exercises of U.S. imperialism, it is important to recognize that this is a modality of accumulation by dispossession Poetics of Filipina Export

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that has moved from applying on a broad socioeconomic scale, reorganizing entire territories under colonialism and neocolonialism, to much smaller social units, organizing subjectivities, and social relations through the dispossession and disenfranchisement of persons. The point is, real subsumption builds on the production of renewed colonial structures and relations within the social imperatives and productive cooperative structures of global, Western capitalist modernity. Mabanglo’s poetry reminds us of this other side of post-Fordist productive social cooperation that becomes embodied in outmoded forms of personhood, whether embodied in parts of oneself or in others, inhabiting states of di√erence. The conditions of incommunicability that Mabanglos’s poetry at once thematizes and is governed by attest to this other side that is sheared o√ in capitalist imperatives of subjectivity and forms of life.π∂ What this means is that a site of antagonism and struggle opens up within subjects, indeed, between different conceptions of subjectivity and life. My argument thus joins the work of transnational, postcolonial feminists in their simultaneous emphasis on the agency of women as a crucial part of globalization and critique of any unitary category of woman, including third world woman, as the necessary form of this agency.π∑ More important, in the face of readily recognizable constructions of gender, sexuality, class, and race that we see, for example, in domestic labor, transnational and postcolonial feminist attention to the problem of how subaltern practices become translated into global contexts of understanding and what gets lost in the process becomes especially pertinent.π∏ Within one such global context of understanding, heterogeneous practices and languages of experience become subsumed under notions of citizenship rights and resistance, sovereign agency and structural reform—notions pro√ering an economic-realist perspective shared by states, policy makers and advocates, and global civil society and, further, predicated on a politics of recognition and liberal-democratic consensus. Against what Gayatri Spivak critiques as continuist narratives of the production of value, the very notion of export that I mobilize here suggests more than a linguistic process of translation and codification (as predominantly conceived in comparative literature scholarship).ππ It suggests also a process of reformatting—of materially converting—submerged logics of self- and social making, or poetics, of Filipina labor into generalized forms of contemporary global labor. What I read in Mabanglo’s poetry is precisely the minor cultural logics and subjective experiential labor of Filipina export that is productive of both power 134

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and capital but falls away from the proper political subjects, including the subject of global labor, that are assumed or expected to emerge from the new conditions of the global economy. These are vital modes of being and acting that, insofar as they are carried out in a minor cultural language (‘‘hard for subjects to understand’’), tend also to fall away from continuist theoretical narratives of the contemporary moment written in the time of capital. I want to be clear that I do not mean to suggest that Mabanglo’s poetic rendering of experience represents the actual or authentic life experiences of overseas Filipina contract workers. Rather, I see her poetry as itself a making of historical experience—a subjective communicative act out of a minor language community—that o√ers a hermeneutic for recognizing and understanding peripheral cultural capacities that might otherwise escape political reflection and valorization. Mabanglo’s own culturallinguistic virtuosity in a globally minor communicative tradition (a kind of minor a√ective commons) can be viewed as an exemplifying, rather than representative, instance of vital productive forces of social cooperation that are subsumed by post-Fordist servility. It is a virtuosity that, however, remains foreign to the general intellect or totality of productive human communicative capacities—the ‘‘intellectuality of the masses’’—which constitutes the living labor and subjective potential of the revolutionary post-Fordist global multitude.π∫ It remains foreign to the extent that it consists of socially productive, communicative, and imaginative capacities that are excluded from and serve as the means of exclusion from the domains of sharing or social cooperation constitutive of the ‘‘mass intellectuality’’ of their host or employer societies, even as they vitally support the forms of life in these dominant ‘‘social factories.’’ Mabanglo’s poiesis draws on and enacts what Virno calls ‘‘emotional tonalities’’ or social ways of being and feeling that are active components in the creation of the subjectivities and social relations of production that I have described in this chapter as comprising the structures of immigrant domestic labor.πΩ In this way, I also understand it as contributing to what Anna Tsing calls (and calls for) a ‘‘polyglot political theory’’ for understanding ‘‘the role of di√erence in constituting the basic relations of production in these times.’’∫≠ Tsing writes, ‘‘Making people into labor is not easy. It involves what one might call ‘labor subjectification,’ that is, the process of creating laboring predispositions. In our world today labor subjectification basically never happens without the coercions and temptations of gender, race and national status.’’ As structural features, gender, race, and national status compose the operative di√erences of what she Poetics of Filipina Export

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calls ‘‘niche-based global capitalism’’: ‘‘Niche-based global capitalism draws on pre-existing ways of life, social distinctions, and notions of personhood, even as it remakes these repertoires to make profit possible.’’ The notion of niche is apt insofar as it indicates a certain entombment of living labor—an entombment, which, as we’ve seen, can be violently imposed through those very di√erences in race, gender, nationality, and language; it thereby conveys the viewpoint of capital toward segments of labor as objectified activity and capacity, that is to say, their real abstraction as forms of identity on the level of exchange, such as expressed by the categorizing of care work as women’s work. Beyond this aspect of objectified labor as di√erences, which I have tried to show are produced out of the violent structures of racism and sexism shaping diasporic Filipina experiences of su√ering, are those creative social, communicative, cognitive, and affective capacities and cultural practices of living labor, which I have tried to exemplify in Mabanglo’s poetic practices. I view Mabanglo’s performances of linguistic-a√ective virtuosity not only in terms of submerged productive logics of social poiesis (making and relating), which crucially supplement and subsidize the new post-Fordist transnational industries of immaterial labor, but also, very importantly, as overlooked exercises of freedom and power within the constraints of global servility.∫∞ The modalities of experience of self in and as passion, of vulnerable subjectivity and willed surrender, the dynamic of finitude and infinitude, of passion and resurrection that I read here can be seen to contribute to the reproduction of the transnational laboring race-class to which overseas Filipina workers belong; yet they also bear a dimension of liberative flight, drawing on older but revitalized traditions of personhood, power, and spiritual mediation to structure practical acts of freeing them from the social relations within which they serve as mere commodities and from the dominant languages of their exchange. Against the secularist and economic realism of some accounts, including feminist accounts that view Filipina actions and experiences in terms of uneven claims to citizenship (cultural or legal) and sovereign agency, my e√ort has been to attend to the poetics and politics of submission and accommodation that other scholars, such as Saba Mahmood, foreground. In the context of Egyptian women’s participation in Islamic discourses and practices of piety, Mahmood argues for the need ‘‘to analyze agency in terms of the di√erent modalities it takes and the grammar of concepts in which its particular a√ect, meaning, and form reside.’’∫≤ In this chapter I attempt to contribute to the grammar—or, as I have been 136

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calling it, the poetics—of servility that defines the mode of being of post-Fordist labor. I also address the question of freedom and agency raised by Mahmood, Lila Abu-Lughod, and many others who confront the contradictions between the ideals of a dominant Western feminism and the lives of women in nonWestern societies. As Abu-Lughod asks, ‘‘What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, always raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world?’’∫≥ Those communities are not simply given but, indeed, shaped by and called into being by the very cultural practices of freedom and power that Filipinas exercise through their imaginative and bodily capacities, capacities that remain outside the purview of contemporary accounts of global labor. The grammars of freedom and agency that can be gleaned from Mabanglo’s poetry are not, however, to be opposed to those we readily recognize as capitalist. Rather they are what inhere in capitalist relations, though they inhere within those relations as included exclusions or constitutive outsides. They are what are incommensurable within, but also what gain figuration through, universal forms of capitalist subjectivity and sociality as subaltern forms, given positivity in literary and other forms of representation. On this view, the modalities of experience, which Mabanglo renders, can be characterized in terms of transgressions of and flows across identitarian and territorializing forms of equivalent boundedness or forms of exchange value and as performing the visible liquidity of movement of diasporic labor that serves to underwrite as well as corrode the invisible hypermobility of global capital. Such experiences posit a relation to part-objects as means of self-becoming and social fluency within another cosmological system of possibilities (testifying to the ever-shifting role of women as media), a relation evinced in the fate-playing actions of Filipinas leaving as well as in their daily rituals of negosyo. These experiences of negotiating finitude and infinitude, possibility and limit, attachment and confinement as well as power and extension, rendered in Mabanglo’s own virtuoso performances, suggest the ways by which Filipina women have made what we might recognize as the global economy a vague, unencompassable kind of cosmic order. While the possibilities, operations, and principles of this order may appear indistinguishable from (because so inextricably intertwined with) the rationality and logic of capital and its state agencies, this order nonetheless retains traces of other realms of reference, what Félix Guattari calls ‘‘universes of virtuality,’’ which might show us paths toward futures other than Poetics of Filipina Export

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the ones already laid out before us by the history of the global present. Nowhere is the universe of virtuality of Filipina export better presented visually than in the artwork of Brenda Fajardo. Fajardo’s series of fortune card paintings of overseas Filipina communities depicts the fate-playing dimensions of their individual and collective trajectories, and in this way suggests an immanent otherworldly, cosmological realm of experience that could serve as the political context of new social formations of struggle.∫∂ Like Fajardo’s paintings, Mabanglo’s poetry is an attempt to convey an immanent universe of reference, a planetary chronotope of struggle, for an overseas bayan (people), which emerges out of a particular national homeland but is no longer restricted to it. At the same time, this bayan is not free-floating; it continues to be tied to the struggles of the homeland, the place where, even as her body and thought live elsewhere, Mabanglo writes, her soul still dwells. Beyond identitarian notions of diaspora, this reconstructed and resurrected people must be seen as a product of a spiritual passage of overseas labor, structured by the double-hold of lunggati/pighati (yearning/grief). This bayan is not an unmarked, abstract universal class of people, a multitude. Rather, it is peopled with Filipino men as well as Filipina women and other non-Filipina women, Indian, Thai, Sri Lankan. It is constituted by gendered and racialized practices of accommodation and self-mutation on the part of peoples whose relations to the privileges and rights of citizenship and settlement, life and well-being are extremely tenuous, sundered, or abused. Reshaped by new performances, linguistic-cultural and social virtuosities that interrupt the very notion of multitude even as it may serve as one example of it, this bayan is shaped by a culturally specific and yet politically open mythos of bodily su√ering and social resurrection (rather than moral redemption), a mythos which finds spiritual resources with the historical experiences of other su√ering peoples and in the narrative and poetic traditions of colonial labor. This poetics of passage is akin to what Edouard Glissant, speaking from the Caribbean, calls a poetics of Relation—a poetics through which the particulars of cultures su√ering under the violence of a dominant modernity might mingle in a life- and language-creative process of becoming. This poetics of Relation implies a creolization of the prevailing theory and politics of global labor through an opening up of the historical and contemporary experiential antecedents of post-Fordist servility, beyond the unifying time of capital. In Mabanglo’s figuration of the sacrificed Filipina domestic worker as Christ138

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time (the time of passion), we see the di√raction of the chronotope of capitalism (the time of progress as the accumulation of dead labor time) into a chronotope of planetary struggle and political communion. Within ‘‘the historical process in and through which the logical presuppositions of capital being are realized’’ there subsist living pasts and present futures that present us with the hermeneutical resources for releasing the creative potentials of subjective labor. Chakrabarty calls these living pasts and present futures that are ever only partly subsumed by the cultural logic of capital as History 2.∫∑ As he writes, ‘‘In the reproduction of its own life-process, capital encounters relationships that present it with double possibilities. These relations could be central to capital’s selfreproduction, and yet it is also possible for them to be oriented to structures that do not contribute to such reproduction. History 2’s are thus not pasts separate from capital; they are pasts that inhere in capital and yet interrupt and punctuate the run of capital’s own logic.’’∫∏ Like the ‘‘time of the gods’’ that Chakrabarty sees as the specific, uncanny lifeworlds of labor that become translated into the time of history, the History 1 of capital, the times of su√ering that Mabanglo’s poetics highlights can be understood as experiential practices of ‘‘non-renumerated life’’ that are a crucial part of the enlarged production time of global capital. As ‘‘non-renumerated life,’’ these times of su√ering constitute the hidden toll that the work of changing-land entails, older times supporting, serving, and assuming untold costs of reproduction of the newer times of labor. As we have seen (and will see again in subsequent chapters), these times extend beyond the geographical space of the host country to the home country, where other informal economies sustain the production of labor of and for export— that seemingly inexhaustible natural resource of surplus peoples that serves as global labor’s reserve. What is more, the times of su√ering are resources drawn upon in the development of global capital’s productive forces beyond and in conflict with the existing social relations of racist and sexist dispossession that hold them captive to the order of our times. Here, then, fate playing through self-lending, the cosmic universe of passion, the exhilaration and trepidation of passages of self transformation and becoming, and the resurrection of human life-value can all be considered vital components in the reimagining and revival of submerged economies of faith that are already productively though tangentially at work within the international market economy of global capitalism. They allow us to partake of ‘‘the mystery of changing-land’’ (ang pananalinghaga sa pangingibang-lupa) whose poetics Poetics of Filipina Export

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Mabanglo probes, the mystery of catastrophic su√ering and death giving rise to a new life, a fractured and uncertain destiny, a painfully mixed hope: Iba’t ibang bahagi ko ang namamatay Sa habampanahong karera Ng agap, utak at tatag— Pinapaslang ako Ginugutay, Ang mga alaala’y binubura’t pinaglalaho Walang malay. Walang malay, Isang bagong ako Ang nabubuhay. [Di√erent parts of me are dying In the eternal race Of speed, brains and endurance— I am desecrated Rent to pieces, Memories obliterated and eclipsed Without consciousness. Without consciousness A new I Is being born.]

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Chapter Four

Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’ These are troubling times. Like many others, I am troubled by the gradual obliteration of the past’s capacity to disturb our present. Today, there is an increasing obliteration of the violent conditions of possibility not only of the past authoritarian regime of the Marcoses but also of the present state of a√airs, which owes its shape and viability to both the Marcos regime and the struggles against it. The history that now seems to be vanishing before us is the history of the disappeared—the lives and life energies taken, expropriated, and expunged for the accumulation of wealth and the aggrandizement of power that rules in the name of the nation. It is the history of the disappearing—the taking, the expropriating, and the expunging—but also of the living, of the activity of living, on which all human value and power depend. My generation as well as the generation now emerging from the institutions of higher education are products of this vanishing history we have yet to truly understand and, more, truly be impelled by. Our individual and national successes and failures are so profoundly the e√ects of those times, which we seem to have no time to remember and therefore seem to be doomed only to repeat. The success of democracy in the People Power revolt of 1986 against autocratic rule, its failure in People Power’s last sequel in 2001, mob rule; the success of capitalist development in the Southeast Asian ‘‘miracle’’ during the early and mid-1990s and its failure shortly thereafter in the economic crash of 1997—these successes

and failures begin to appear as permanent conditions of Philippine life. We repeat not only these successes and failures but also the systems of value that help to produce them as such. Soon, when those who can still experience déjà vu are no longer around, all the apparent recurrences of authoritarian-dynastic rule will no longer be recognizable as repetitions of history, but will be seen only as temporary aberrations, if not as the way things are and have always been. Such apparent recurrences, including the recurrence of forgetting, are proof of the abiding crisis that fueled the consolidations of power of the military-state dictatorship and its successor, the crony-capitalist-oligarchic-state ‘‘democracy.’’ In this chapter, I examine two very di√erent metropolitanist texts that, in registering a sensibility of the urban milieu as trauma, provide the occasion for thinking about this history of disappearing and forgetting which is embedded in the urban space. In representing the traumatic character of the urban milieu in the form of, respectively, noise and garbage, each text produces an object for the recovery of a particular kind of urban subject. I discuss the politics of these two kinds of urban experience via an account of the social conditions and consequences of the subjectifying work they perform.

The Trauma of Authoritarian Modernization In a Condé Nast Traveler article about his pilgrimage to the Philippine national capital in the early 1990s, Spalding Gray recounts the trauma of his arrival: ‘‘I was still in the taxi coming from the airport when I realized how dreadful a city Manila really is. It’s not just bad. It’s a hell pit. If you took Calcutta, Bangkok and Jakarta and mixed them together, that would give you just a hint of how chaotic and confusing Manila is.’’∞ It is significant that this contemporary mass media storyteller is fresh o√ the airplane when he comes to the realization of Manila’s hellishness and that he must and can invoke three other cities in one swift swoop, cities, of course, already easily understood by his Condé Nast Traveler readers, already signifying what he has come to learn. What this reveals is less the fact of Manila’s chaos and confusion than the place from which one can take those three other cities and mix them all together to arrive at the degree of Manila’s dreadfulness: that is, the place of transnational transit. So the transnational subject can’t take Manila. But, as he continues, ‘‘fortunately I hadn’t come for the sights. I’d come for my sight.’’ In fact he has come for his sight, searching for a psychic remedy for his macular pucker, an eye 144

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problem a√ecting the retina’s ability to perceive detail. Learning of the Philippines’ reputation for psychic healers, he has come, as many other ill Westerners before him have, to find an alternative cure for an ailment deemed incurable by Western medical science. Gray’s search for sight and insight, however, is continuously disturbed by Manila’s intolerable excess, the magnitude of which has necessitated lumping three similar cities together merely to give his kin-intransit a hint of the real thing. One interference after another interrupts his quest, not to mention his narrative: gridlock, ‘‘pollution . . . so foul you had to roll the windows up,’’ ‘‘horns constantly honking,’’ a woman who keeps singing Tracy Chapman songs outside of his inexpensive hotel—he cannot sleep, and after the woman with her insistent singing drives him to desperation and a change of room, a bulldozer that roars all night long. It becomes clear that what encapsulates Manila’s chaos and confusion is its incessant blare of discordant sounds. Gray wouldn’t have been able to take in the sights even if he had wanted to: in Manila, there is so much noise that it gets in the way of seeing.≤ It isn’t just the din that makes for the noise of everyday life in Metro Manila, although the audible dissonance in itself expresses the social discord of the metropolis, the clash of various ways of life and modes of production in it. Noise is more generally the disturbance created by the free-floating artifacts of unregulated activities, activities of the urban excess, which spills over everywhere. As a Philippine columnist enumerates, ‘‘Its quota of the dregs of humanity . . . its poverty, its street children, its streetwalkers, its army of unemployed, the stench of its uncollected garbage both in its streets and its rivers and canals, the collection of polluted air and soot.’’≥ Such are the flotsam and jetsam produced by the crisis that is the Philippines, collecting in the dump that is Manila. And to the extent that they embody the social contradictions of global modern life, they are noise. Jacques Attali writes, ‘‘Noise is violence: it disturbs. To make noise is to interrupt a transmission, to disconnect, to kill.’’∂ Historically, ‘‘noise had always been experienced as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, an aggression.’’∑ Noise is the failure of representation. For Spalding Gray, Manila’s noise is its failure as a representation of a city and, to the extent that the modern city is by definition a place of representation and a representable place, its permanent failure as a city. This failure, to which Gray attributes his own failure to see and represent Manila, is experienced as a continuous wave of o√enses against his person, a constant violation of his being. One might say that the failure of the modern self as Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’

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well as of the modern city is the combined result of the violence perpetrated by the presence and activities of the urban excess.∏ The urban excess is, however, itself the product of the abiding crisis that defines and fuels so-called national development and its modern metropolitan dreams. The hegemonic figuration of that crisis on a national scale in terms of the bodily su√ering of prostitution and overseas domestic work, which I discussed in earlier chapters, becomes, on the metropolitan scale, one of ceaseless assaults on the modern senses by human garbage. As the complaining writer who calls Metro Manila ‘‘the putripolis’’ notes, ‘‘What assaults the eyes is equalled in o√ense by what hits the olfactories. It’s a socio-environmental horror in drab technicolor and sharp smellorama.’’π What makes for Manila’s assaults is its overwhelming excess, an excess that comes about precisely as the necessary leavings of the modernist political economy and aesthetic of development. Perhaps nowhere is this better demonstrated than by the fact that the surplus population that comprises the urban excess consists of refugees from the extant civil war waged by the government against popular dissidence in the rural areas in the name of development. Having as its objective profitable incorporation into the New World Order, this latest war was begun as part of the economic restructuring undertaken during the structural crisis in the 1970s and led by the authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos with supporting funds from the International Monetary Fund (imf) and the World Bank. The urban refuse is thus a result both of the state’s program of development and its failure. The Marcos-imf-World Bank partnership had hoped that surplus rural migrant workers would form a pool of cheap labor for the export-oriented industrialization strategy, which they had o≈cially adopted as a new economic policy. But at the same time as they provided this cheap labor, the urban excess overran the government’s expectations, and slum dwellers, squatters, scavengers, and other unregulated subsistence workers became more of a liability and a threat than a resource, especially when they protested militantly. In fact, as we shall see in the next chapter, the urban excess was already implicated in the unrest that purportedly provoked Marcos’s declaration of a state of emergency and thus constituted a chronic problem for the regime’s political stability. In its flagrant and aggressive disclosure of the crisis underlying and supporting national development, these social strata continuously undermined the Marcos regime’s bid to attract foreign investment. On this account, the new governor of Metro Manila and minister of human settlements, Imelda Marcos, launched her ‘‘beau146

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tification’’ program, which consisted of, among other things, the demolition and relocation of squatter settlements she called eyesores.∫ Hotels, restaurants, financial and commercial centers, and other monolithic edifices with an eye on foreign investment were built in areas reclaimed from squatter communities as well as from the surrounding sea (in both cases, attempts to reclaim solid capital from excess liquidity), as part of the process of beautifying and modernizing, as she dubbed it, ‘‘the City of Man.’’ One economist has argued that ‘‘the dictatorship was the most concrete manifestation of the longstanding features of the Philippines’s underdeveloped state.’’Ω I would certainly agree with this argument, which by now has reached a consensus among analysts of Philippine political economy, but only with the provision that we understand ‘‘underdeveloped’’ as an actively produced condition and, furthermore, if by manifestation we also see transformation. As I elucidate in this chapter, the act of symbolic manifestation or representation, such as in the case of literary representation, is necessarily a process of transformation, of reinvention. Representation obtains as a key force of production and a feature of the developmentalist modernity that the dictatorship was said to institute. On this view, the Marcos state can be seen as a reinvention of dominant modes of political power and economic extraction developed by the elite classes during the postindependence period. The Marcos regime actively transformed the prevailing uses of the national bureaucratic apparatus within a broader system of social practices of accumulation, practices that shaped the putative underdeveloped character of the Philippine state into the very institutional mode of the authoritarian state. Described primarily as forms of rent seeking but also describable in terms of ‘‘the allocation of utilities and enjoyments’’ characteristic of postcolonial commandment, these widespread social practices of the oligarchic elite were consolidated and monopolized by the Marcos state through its representative subsumption of other contending social practices and forces of the poor.∞≠ As Marcos himself spelled out, ‘‘The great task of economic development involves the energies of the many, and for the many who are poor, any involvement must meet the test of sincerity: they must participate in whatever boons there are now so that they will freely o√er their brain and brawn to achieve collective ends.’’∞∞ Those collective ends were to be represented by none other than the state. Authoritarianism can be understood in this regard as the formal political expression of the repressive and extractive process through which contradictory, heterogeneous, vital strivings of people are transformed into the unitary state Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’

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subject, a subject that comes to stand in as the desiring agent of national development. None other than the strongman himself comes to personify that subject. Authoritarianism was, in other words, the consequence of and means for the violent transformation of these strivings into productive labor for the profit and power of the Marcos state, the real and symbolic site for the realization of national development. Marcos was the author of this development to the extent that all the energy expropriated in and as part of its process accrued to his person and to the massive social-military apparatus that extended out of it as at once its outgrowth and its skeletal support. The fact of the matter is, however, that much of this energy, and the living sources of this energy, escaped authoritarian control and expropriation. It is for this reason that the developed or fully modern subject whom Gray figures finds himself assaulted by Metro Manila’s noise. This boundless, engulfing mass of discordance and cacophony—a surfeit of unsightly bodies, things, and intolerable smells—also assaults the senses and sensibilities of today’s transnationalizing, upwardly mobilizing elite strata, persistently interrupting the vision of development that serves as the ultimate meaning and direction of, indeed, the very provision for, the latter’s modern humanity. Noise is indeed the failure of representation, the failure of the nation’s capital to represent itself in the arena of global humanity. The ever-growing surplus of human bodies and their disposable accoutrements for living—squatters and their shanties, scavengers and garbage heaps—pollutes the global-metropolitan milieu that attempts to rise out of its ruins. Noise thus comes to represent the traumatic impossibility of the metropolitanist subject ever attaining, like its first world counterpart in already modernized societies, the status of full development. The very persistence of the urban excess beyond the regime of its elimination leads us to conclude that the ‘‘urban excess’’ consists not only of the necessary leavings of the political economy and aesthetic of development, but also, very importantly, its vital refuse. On the one hand, this surplus consists of necessary leavings of development—human waste products of the process of extraction of surplus labor. On the other hand, it consists of the vital refuse and refusal of development—human life in excess and in defiance of its draining and destruction by forces of authoritarian modernization, the formal strategy for the pursuit of New World Order development inaugurated with the declaration of martial law in 1972. The periodic eruption of these living, contradictory, antagonistic, and wayward social compounds onto the surface of the metropolis—in protest 148

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rallies and demonstrations and simply in the overabundance of street dwellers, streetwalkers, and street vendors—is hence the expression of at once compulsion and possibility, necessity and freedom. Characterized, from the standpoint of development, by the overcongestion and oversaturation of urban space by excess matter, the present conditions of experience in Metro Manila can therefore be viewed as the consequence of both the enterprise of Marcos development and its failure. And yet the failure and the violence attendant to the very enterprise of development have become naturalized to the point of almost being completely forgotten or at least unseen. It is, however, precisely these conditions of the aftermath of martial law that point to the notion of the metropolis as trauma. Metro Manila is traumatic in two senses: it is a traumatic experience, and it is the product of the historical trauma of martial law. As both the symptom and instrument of authoritarian development, Metro Manila is itself a testimony to the trauma of martial law. Today that testimony is registered in the very physical characteristics of the urban environment—by its noisy matter—and, furthermore, by the experience of its disposable inhabitants—its excess human bodies. This testimony is the survival of historical memory in a time of historical erasure. Today the regime of martial law is increasingly forgotten (it is forgotten over and over again), even as its e√ects continue to be realized daily, even as what it set out to do is now either an accomplished fact or in the process of being accomplished, even as its purported failure has become the enabling conceit and structural ground for the violence of the present state. The prolonged event of dictatorship is relegated to the past: it has dropped out of the present metropolitan consciousness, become a dead fact of history, one which seems to have no more power in or over present metropolitan life than pure memory. Such is the case in which, as Henri Bergson writes, ‘‘powerlessness means unconsciousness.’’∞≤ The powerlessness of the memory of dictatorship in present Philippine life is the e√ect of the continuous symbolic-practical attempts of the hegemonic social consciousness to transcend the sea of development’s contradictions in order to achieve a transnational outlook. And yet, ‘‘if consciousness is but the characteristic note of the present, that is to say of the actually lived, in short of the active, then that which does not act may cease to belong to consciousness without therefore ceasing to exist in some manner.’’∞≥ Metropolitan noise exists in this other manner—as the historical leavings of the trauma of martial law modernization and what Marcos called its ‘‘revolution from the center.’’ Therefore, what I mentioned earlier as the failure of a state enterprise can also be seen as the Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’

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e√ective resistance of those subjected to it—their vital persistence in the face of strategies to eliminate them. Such persistence testifies to historical activity beyond mere survival, which, while fundamental in the making of our present conditions, remains immobilized, contained, and trashed by the material spirit of martial law in present times. If we are to bring this historical activity to life, we must look into this place and time of the forgotten, the unconscious of the metropolitan present. In this view, martial law is a lost event that can be reconstructed through the symbolic and corporeal bodies and edifices coughed up by the city. The noise that pollutes the transmetropolitan consciousness of Manila attests to this trauma as well as to the continuing actualization and materialization of this historical memory in symptomatic forms—history’s leavings. Today there are memories of martial law vocally erupting in the very places where they were once suppressed: in the streets, in the newspapers, in the universities. To construct an active relation to this event is to create the conditions for establishing oneself as a historical subject. As this discussion of the subject of state modernism should suggest, however, the establishment of a historical subject is a risky project, prone to creating new zones of unconsciousness and subalternity as well as new zones of insignificance and tangentiality. We must therefore ask, what are the objects of these remembrances? What kind of historical subjects are being forged through them? And what relation is there between these subjects issuing from such vocal eruptions and the ever-present eruptions of waste matter, which comprise metropolitan noise? How are we to render the living character of this time, which is now widely perceived as at once past and imminent? How are we to bear witness to it? In what follows, I examine a significant literary e√ort to reconstruct the trauma of martial law, in order to both mark its achievement and uncover the social jettisoning that its production of a new historical subject entails.

Pedestrian Testimony Against the Transnational Spirit Umiikot ang mundo, mabilis, pabilis ng pabilis. Hindi ako makagulapay. Hindi ako makahinga. Masikip ang aking dibdib, walang natitirang hanging, parang nasa ilalim ako ng tubig. Puputok, puputok ang aking baga, saka ko pipiliting humigit ng hanging sa aking baga, kahit huling hanging magbibigay nang huling 150

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hininga. Saka parang itatapon naman ako sa itaas, lumulutang ako sa aking pakiramdam. Para akong kalat na nakasabog sa kawalan. Ako, ang mga basura at pati ang mundo’y parang na-uunahan sa pag-ikot, pag-ikot na pabilis nang pabilis. Ako’y naiiwan, pero natatangay, nakakaladkad akong walang kinakapitan. Gusto kong tumigil kahit sandali, para ako makatayo at makasabay ulit sa ikot nila. Pero patuloy ang pag-ikot ng kalawakan, at parang sa kung saang sulok na lamang ako napatapon. Naliliyo ako. Hindi ko na alam kung alin ang itaas at alin ang ibaba, palinga-linga akong hindi rin tiyak kung alin ang kanan at alin ang kaliwa.∞∂ [The world was revolving quickly, more and more quickly. I could not budge. I could not breathe. My chest was tight, no air remained; it was as if I were under water. My lungs were on the verge of exploding, and I was straining to make the air in my lungs go further, even if the last bit of air was giving me my last breath. And it was as if I was being tossed up, and I felt I was floating. It was as if I were scattered, having exploded into nothingness. I, garbage bits, and even the world seemed to be racing in the turning, revolving faster and faster. I was lagging behind, but I was being swept up, drawn in without my holding on to anything. I wanted to stop, even for a moment, so I could stand up and catch up with their turning. But the universe kept turning, and it was as if I were simply thrown to some corner. I was growing dizzy. I no longer knew which was above and which was below, I was looking here and there, unsure what was right and what was left.]

The maelstrom experience described above fits the quintessential image of the experience of modernity that Marshall Berman revitalizes in his book All That is Solid Melts Into Air.∞∑ Berman’s title, which comes from the Communist Manifesto, depicts the revolutionizing fervor that Marx discerned in a society caught in the uninterruptible whorl of modernization, the sum processes of technological, economic, and political changes that took place in what are now called advanced industrialized nations prior to the inauguration of an integrated capitalist world market. The text I quote that seems to bear this modern sensibility is not, however, from the world Marx described but rather from within Manila in the last quarter of the twentieth century.∞∏ It is an excerpt from a novel by Jun Cruz Reyes called Tutubi, Tutubi, ‘Wag Kang Magpahuli Sa Mamang Salbahe (Dragonfly, Dragonfly, Don’t Let Yourself Be Caught by the Savage Man) (1981).∞π In this novel, a high school student named Jo narrates his brief experience of Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’

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being forced to wander the streets of Manila shortly after the imposition of martial law. Fleeing the possibility of arrest by the military, which is rooting out student activists, he roams aimlessly around the city, taking stock of the sudden changes around him and assessing his relation to his society through a variety of encounters. After days of wandering and learning, he discovers that his hometown in the provinces has been taken over and terrorized by the military, that his parents, like many others, have been forced to evacuate to the capital, and that the friends whose unknown whereabouts he has been hoping to discover were reported to have been shot by the constabulary as communist guerillas. Politically awakened, he faces his future armed with his newfound understanding and with an inner resolve to free himself from the savage forces of repression unleashed by martial law. The maelstrom Jo finds himself in is in fact the result of the upheaval of the world he knew, which is caused by Marcos’s authoritarian strategies for modernization. Authoritarian modernization was to be a process of transforming the country’s mode of production in congruence with the demands of international capital. In other words, it is the unitary time of the global that dictates the sudden and frenzied changes that sweep Jo up and draw him into their vortex. ‘‘Now things happening were like a storm, a gust of wind was changing everything.’’ Against this pressure, Jo calls for a suspension: ‘‘Stop, world, pause for me, I will get on again.’’ Cast to the side by the prevailing drive of and toward the global, Jo wants to hold it in abeyance, to catch his breath and get a grip on the seeming inexorability of the world’s progress. Suspending the accelerated turning of the historical gyre, he protests against being tossed up and about by history like an object without any agency of its own. Against this same powerlessness of being swept up by a history beyond control, Reyes rewrites Philippine history as if it has not yet happened. By writing about 1972 a decade later as a new, magical time, Reyes suspends known history, the history that unfolds as if predetermined, always already written.∞∫ In Tutubi, Tutubi, everything happens as if for the first, instantaneously transformed time. Jo is wandering the streets of Manila, with no place to go. Suddenly a forest looms before him. An oasis in the desert? he asks himself. ‘‘It was unbelievable! I rubbed my eyes. Not one detail changed. I wasn’t dreaming. I knew that that was once a place of squatters. Again I rubbed my eyes—maybe, I told myself, this was another planet I was looking at. But there was no mistake. Another new center had popped up—Ma’am is fond of those. Maybe that’s 152

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because that’s what Sir misses all the time—his own center. Cultural Center, Puericulture Center, even Agriculture Center. And now what was this?’’ The knowledge of these urban developments of the First Lady (Ma’am) is suspended not merely to restage their dramatic occurrence and the experience of seeing them ‘‘pop up,’’ but to produce this historical time as an original moment. Perry Anderson writes, ‘‘In the Third World generally, a kind of shadow configuration of what once prevailed in the First World does exist today.’’∞Ω Anderson’s depiction of the modernity of the developing world as the repetition e√ect of a conjunctural moment, rather than planar development, of capitalist history exemplifies a perspective that is echoed in critical postcolonial claims to alternative modernities, an idea that emphasizes the multiplicity and diversity of modernity as a global phenomenon, denoting a primarily cultural experience of ‘‘creative adaptation.’’≤≠ My own interest is not in the verity of either of these conceptions of modernity, but rather in the e√ective historical role that the very trope of modernity has played in creating the conditions it designates. I argue that it is precisely the representation of modernity as having already been played out (and therefore foreshadowed) elsewhere that informs the modernist drive of the Marcos regime. Marcos’s modernism was, after all, predicated upon modernity being known in advance (and, in advanced capitalist countries, serving as the hallmark of that advancement). It is in fact this knownness that stirs the desires for modern development and, moreover, that undergirds the transnational model of modernization, which the technocratic architects of the regime attempted to follow.≤∞ Timothy Mitchell’s argument about the central role of representation in the constitution of capitalist modernity is of particular relevance here. Defined as ‘‘forms of social practice that set up in the social architecture and lived experience of the world what seems an absolute distinction between image (or meaning, or structure) and reality, and thus a distinctive imagination of the real,’’ representation, Mitchell argues, creates the e√ect of an original, material reality that becomes the object of replication and reproduction through projects of urban planning, schooling, literature, and nation making.≤≤ Whether or not representation is in fact the determining feature of modernity, Mitchell’s description of its role in the universal project of modernity (as expressed and enabled by imperialism) foregrounds the importance of this arena of symbolic practice in the organization and transformation of the material, social world of developing nations, as made evident by the very undertaking known as modernization.≤≥ Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’

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The representation of modernity serves as a condition of possibility of the Marcos state’s developmentalist projects, including the restructuring of the urban capital. More, Metro Manila was itself a representational project geared not simply toward the expansion of global capital but also toward the transformation of the state into the central means of the system of extractive accumulation that the Marcoses would come to paradigmatically figure, that is, crony capitalism. Surprisingly enough, it is the possibility of discrepancy opened up by representation, which Mitchell argues is the other side of ‘‘modernity’s enormous capacity for replication and expansion,’’ that enables the ‘‘magic’’ of Marcos’s modernism—not only its straightforwardly replicative processes of modernization, but also its corruption of modern capitalist accumulation by older practices of rent extraction. In short, the representation of modernity as model and showcase of development serves as the means of material transformations that exceed the conditions it designates. To stage this historical time as an original moment, not only of real events but also of representational e√ects, is therefore also to produce the possibility of a new history. From this perspective, whereby one might have a new experiential encounter with the representational e√ects of Marcos’ modernism, Jo sees personal power and magic: ‘‘Any place Ma’am’s guests visit, ugliness is banned. Like here, an instant forest. All of a sudden trees and grass appear. Like magic. One wave of the hand of whoever holds power and everything changes. . . . It wouldn’t be surprising if Manila were considered truly a fruit of magic. As they say in English, now you see it, now you don’t [italicized words in English in the original text].’’ The magical aura of authoritarian modernization derives from witnessing its theatrical e√ects without its production and from seeing its inhuman power dynamics personified. The protest against such magic therefore first concerns itself with the objects it manipulates, the things that appear and disappear, such as squatters and grass and buildings. Precisely because the violence of modernization is made possible by the transcendent, universal representation of an achieved modernity, a force of determination from above and beyond its concrete realization, the protest against it begins from the immediate, experiential, and corporeal experience of its violence. Modernity takes on a very di√erent aspect when as a concept it is suspended and one immerses oneself in the thick of the things it seems to designate. Here that thickness of concrete historical experience is felt as Manila under martial law. Jo’s experience of the maelstrom sheds its generic semblance to—its shadow 154

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configuration of—first world modernity once it is put back into the flux of the novel and in its experiential locus (or, as Fanon puts it, in a related context, ‘‘in its proper time’’). His delirium is the physical result of hunger and exhaustion. Martial law has just been declared, and all the schools in Manila have been closed down. The military has been rounding up people who Marcos declares are ‘‘lawless elements,’’ including students suspected of subversive activities. Jo is a student like many others who joined in the massive demonstrations against the government mainly because it was the thing to do—uso ngayon ‘yon. But the regime recognizes no such distinctions of intention, recognizes no reason (‘‘reasoning was prohibited, because that wasn’t part of national development’’); one’s associations, possession of protest pamphlets, participation in demonstrations, all become signs that one is a subversive. Hence, Jo becomes a fugitive of sorts, a student turned criminal, and, having nowhere to go and no money to buy food, he wanders around Manila. The boardinghouse he was living in with other students, who are now in hiding or on the run, has been ransacked by the military. At this point he is on a bus trying to make it to the house of a well-o√ friend where he would at least be fed. But he has endured days of fear and endless walking (as he says, ‘‘For me, walking is not a diversion, but a necessity’’), little sleep, an occasional meal, and perpetual hunger. Standing in a bus, having given up his seat out of guilt for having no money to pay the fare, he finally collapses, falling into this liquid consciousness he has temporarily kept at bay. Here, then, are the material conditions of the magic of Marcos. The phantasmic character of modern development depends on a corporeal exhaustion induced by repression and persecution. The delirium of modernity is created by squeezing the breath out of Jo, emptying him of his vital force, and reducing him to a body, a human residue. Jo’s pivotal experience of modernization thus rests on his conversion into a superfluous object, a nothingness swimming with other bits of refuse in a raging whirlpool.

Modernist Magic In restaging the putative magical occurrences comprising the modernizationist restructuring of metropolitan space-time, Reyes attempts to take apart the developmental showcase Manila was touted as and to transform it into what Berman calls the ‘‘theater of cruelty and absurdity’’ that it actually was. From this restaging we begin to apprehend the vision of modernity that is said to unite Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’

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all mankind as the unitary spirit guiding the hand of the authoritarian state. Jo sights this unitary spirit as the ghostly enemy that hangs over Manila, an intangible center that he muses Marcos is missing and trying to fill in with instant infrastructural and social projects. That ghost is glimpsed in the novel in the worldly form of Imelda’s unidentified visitors, the representatives of an international network of agencies and corporations invested in the nascent transnational accumulation strategy and global hegemonic project.≤∂ This economic network is the unitary plane on which a new global class of technocrats is formed, a ‘‘floating group’’ of local and foreign businessmen, professionals, political experts, and economic planners whose graduate education in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s gives them a common language (if not common desires) that transcend national di√erences and local specificities. As Robert Stau√er points out, they ‘‘partake of the same ‘world’ business and ‘news’ media—all, need one be reminded, produced by the advanced capitalist nations —from which to be kept up to date on the agenda of issues considered salient as defined from the center, to have one definition of reality relentlessly reinforced, and to have faith in the overarching global order of the ‘free world’ reinforced.’’≤∑ While the ‘‘global order of the ‘free world’ ’’ may be a ghost, the ‘‘faith’’ in it produces real and corporeal e√ects.≤∏ The belief in the project of modernity was precisely what the Marcos regime banked on for the crucial international political and economic support that helped to place and keep it in power.≤π In this way the transnational spirit acted as the divine benefactor of the authoritarian state. The transnational spirit and the shadow configuration it casts are not to be taken lightly, for its magic is carried out by a real army of police, soldiers, teachers, landladies, priests, and parents. Reyes concerns himself with these petty functionaries of authoritarian power whose links to each other he exposes like invisible strings attached to some vague but potent figure of progress. Reyes’s suspension of both knowledge of and belief in the power of the transnational, which allows Imelda’s urban projects to appear in the novel as if by magic, might be seen in this regard as a form of bad faith. As the false tutelary god to which the dictatorship owes its power, the transnational spirit of modernity that heralds our own moment of globalization is not dismissed but only suspended, made to hover over the utterances of its functionaries like the overtones of a barely audible invocation. The invisible strings are thereby made apparent even in the staging of the magic—like the ghostly visitors for whose eyes the spectacle of these centers is made, for whose sensibilities the squatters 156

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are removed. Reyes’ bad faith expresses itself in the attitude of irony and suspension of knowledge of his narrator, which enables him to believe and disbelieve at the same time. Put another way, bad faith becomes the subjective means by which one can commute between two worlds, the world of the technocratdevelopers and the world of the urban poor, that is, those who plan the streets and those who walk them.

Martial Law, the Time of Catastrophe If the protest of Tutubi, Tutubi lies in its suspension of the terms of the transnational, temporally, it entails a delinking with world history, that is, a dropping out of world time. Martial law was ostensibly a tool to synchronize Philippine production with the demands of transnational capital, a synchronization no doubt employed as a way of immediately securing the material trappings and accoutrements of advanced capitalist economies for the regime’s direct utilization and enjoyment. However, for those struggling to make radical progressive change, it felt like a suspension of historical time, a derailing of the worldly time of decolonization that it was activists’ role to usher in. In order for the new regime (rather than the nation) to catch up with the universal time of progress of the advanced capitalist nations and profitably integrate the Philippines into the world economy, the Marcos regime had to tentatively sequester the Philippine polity in a new, ahistorical time.≤∫ Attempting to isolate it from revolutionary nationalist movements erupting in other third world countries in Asia and Africa, the regime facilitated the fabrication of a new, depoliticized, ahistorical, and mythical spatiotemporal order called the New Society that would find favor with the visionaries of world development. The adjustments needed to create the New Society necessitated a provisional rupture with all the counterhistories and alternative futures being forged by radical nationalist democratic movements within and outside of the country. Such movements had already begun to weaken o≈cial national imagination and the oligarchic hold on the state apparatus, and in this way had not only opened the path to revolution but, as we will see in the next chapter, had also opened the possibility for the ascendance of new elites, such as the Marcoses. However, martial law was the juridical means for the indefinite suspension of all radical senses of Philippine history that had emerged up until this moment.≤Ω Facetiously, Jo likens this stilling of historical time to his permanently stopped watch: Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’

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‘‘This was a watch with amnesia. . . . Poor watch, when it couldn’t take the hard knocks anymore, it got amnesia . . . have you ever seen a watch that told nap time? Father was right, I would need this in Manila one day. Now was that right one day.’’ The anticipated amnesia refers to the generation that would follow, the generation of so-called martial law babies who were born and raised under the politically and historically sequestered time of dictatorship and to whom Reyes’s novel is addressed. Their amnesia would be the stilling of the history that in the late 1960s and early 1970s seemed to be on the brink of being made by the great ferment of social rebellion and nationalist revolution. For the nascent middle classes and the traditional oligarchy, martial law removed the assumed democratic liberties and rights of a putatively liberal society. However, for the lower classes, it only intensified a perpetual state of oppression. In other words, for the former, martial law meant a palpable, even devastating, political change; for the latter, it could mean only the intensification of a prevailing catastrophe. By catastrophe I mean the sense conveyed by Walter Benjamin in his famous pronouncement, ‘‘The concept of progress is to be grounded in the idea of the catastrophe. That things ‘just go on’ is the catastrophe.’’≥≠ On this view, martial law only exposed the middle classes to the catastrophe that had never abated for the lower classes (though here that catastrophe appears as the timelessness of developmentalist lag). The suspension of history, then, can only be the experience of those who have invested in the idea and practices of historical progress, whether progress entails transnationalism or nationalist revolution. Jo initially experiences martial law as the suspension of history in part because his own projected path of development, that is, the modernizing path of education, has been cut short. Classes have been suspended indefinitely, the military have taken over the school, and his formal education has been suspended. At the same time, his other path of development, the path of progressive involvement carved out by student activist and nationalist movements, has similarly been cut short—the protestors have been broken up and driven o√ the streets. Doubly severed from the time of progress, Jo is put out alone on the streets to wander: ‘‘A child of the streets, I must have been assigned by fate to look for my fortune on street corners.’’ As early as 1965, with the making of the film Igunihit ng Tadhana [Inscribed by Destiny]: The Ferdinand Marcos Story, Marcos’s ascendancy and rule were being conceived in terms of destiny. His cultural propaganda machin-

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ery harnessed some of the most important Filipino scholars to work on the history project that Marcos was to author, entitled Tadhana (Destiny), in a bid to elevate his own role in national history into mythical time. Paradoxically, it is this martial suspension of the temporality of historical time that enables Jo to pay greater attention to exploring the spaces of history’s containment: Manila. Jo first comes to Manila ostensibly because of the exigencies of his own development, pushed out of the provinces by the ambitions of his parents, pulled to the center by the image and instruments of success: ‘‘I am a victim of many presumptions, expectations of family and society,’’ he laments. This vertical trajectory manifested and made by the path of metropolitan-directed education is, however, abruptly aborted, leaving him with only the possibility of horizontal movement. Reyes locates his protest in this horizontal movement. Seizing and intensifying the e√ect of suspended time brought about by martial law’s suspension of history, Reyes spreads it out across the urban social field, enabling the narrator and the reader to go closer to the refuse of the regime’s mythical history. That refuse consists of those who remain in horizontal pathways, neither ascending the ladder of progress nor going underground, whose experience of suspension is perpetual, and for whom ‘‘things just go on,’’ the people who just get by: the urban poor. These are the people whom Jo encounters on the streets, the people he comes not only in spatial proximity to but also to identify with. For martial law e√ected a polarization of society in which activist students and the urban poor were thrown together as the lumpen classes of the New Society. As Dolores Feria, a professor and activist, recalls of this time, ‘‘Now the student, like the urban poor, found himself living hand to mouth, on the run and among the ranks of the dispossessed.’’≥∞ In his bid for development, Marcos proclaimed the cleaning up of the metropolis, the apprehension and elimination of its ‘‘lawless elements,’’ such as the figures of rebellion like Jo, who can’t and won’t be disciplined or contained by the edifices of the New Society; the uncontrollable poverty and discontent festering within it, manifested as the ‘‘urban sprawl’’; and the radical and unsynchronizable temporalities of these anarchic and erosive elements. ‘‘Proclamation No. 1081, Proclaiming a State of Martial Law in the Philippines,’’≥≤ Marcos’s fateful decree defining this period, manifests the importance of the state’s understanding of these ‘‘lawless elements’’ as forces of destruction for the very establishment of the legitimacy of its repressive rule:

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These lawless elements, acting in concert though seemingly innocent and harmless, although destructive front organizations which have been infiltrated or deliberately formed by them, have continuously and systematically strengthened and broadened their memberships through sustained and careful recruiting and enlistment of new adherents from among our peasantry, laborers, professionals, intellectuals, students, and mass media personnel, and through such sustained and careful recruitment and enlistment have succeeded in spreading and expanding their control and influence over almost every segment and level of our society throughout the land in their ceaseless e√ort to erode and weaken the political, social, economic, legal and moral foundations of our existing government.

The erosion Marcos cast as a threat to government in order to assert political authority similarly figures in the assessment of that ‘‘Faustian developer’’ Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank and U.S. secretary of defense. McNamara invoked the threat of erosion to argue for the reorganization of urban space: ‘‘Frustrations that fester among the urban poor are readily exploited by political extremists. If cities do not begin to deal more constructively with poverty, poverty may well begin to deal more destructively with cities.’’≥≥ The consolidated concerns for political authority and economic stability thus become addressed by means of the constitution of a new, integrated metropolitan body as well as a new metropolitan state, uniting national government and city administration, to oversee this body. The restructured urban space that results from this concentration of powers— Metro Manila—becomes the field on which unassimilable elements of the New Society are channeled toward disposal, like the slum dwellers whose houses are demolished and who are relocated in keeping with the beautification program of the new regime. As Jo suddenly realizes, ‘‘Ibang panahon nga pala, ibang uso. Hindi na uso ang pangit’’ (Oh yeah, a di√erent time, a di√erent fashion. Ugliness is out). Ugliness was interference—noise—in the Marcoses’ modernism, an assault on the prevailing metropolitan aesthetic. Just as the Philippines was the United States’ ‘‘showcase of democracy’’ in the Pacific, Metro Manila was the Marcoses’ showcase of modern development, domestic e≈ciency, and amenability. As ‘‘the City of Man,’’ it was a representation of an enticing, tractable urban body ready to submit to foreign investments, a representation and instrument of and for the desires of international capital. Such was the political-aesthetic economy of World Bank–funded modernism. 160

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Modern Homelessness, the Time of Castaways Jo walks on this newly reorganized surface of the city and finds he has no place in it: ‘‘It’s a nightmare to wake up to the truth that there’s not a nook for me here in Manila.’’ Forced aside by masses of cars, overwhelmed by ‘‘parked’’ buildings, and repelled by parks and lawns with painted grass, Jo recognizes his superfluity in a city that makes no room for homeliness in public spaces. The authoritarian state has converted Metro Manila into a state-corporate body, and therefore anything that cannot be incorporated in this transnationally shaped, practical organon of autocratic desire is decreed lawless or criminal.≥∂ If he is not to be disposed of like other unassimilable elements, Jo must keep moving. It is this experience of forced homelessness—as opposed to what Georg Lukács described as the ‘‘transcendental homelessness’’ of the modern subject—that enables him to identify with squatters and the disappeared, casualties of urban development.≥∑ ‘‘Hindi ako squatter, pero parang nararamdaman ko ang kanilang kapalaran. Iisa kami, mga palaboy ng lipunan’’ (I wasn’t a squatter, but it was as if I could feel their fate. Castaways of society, we were one). Immersed in the ranks of the palaboy (castaways), Jo discovers a time di√erent from the time of the world that he experiences as the world races with its own turning. He finds the everyday time of those left behind by the worldly race, time which Mikhail Bahktin describes as ‘‘scattered, fragmented, deprived of essential connections. It is not permeated with a single temporal sequence.’’≥∏ The absence of the abstract space of a metropolitan perspective makes time a heterogeneous matter. Time is enmeshed in matter, and since this matter of the urban poor is discontinuous, dispersed, and disintegrated, so is their time. It is tied to things, to particularities that do not fall away once abstract time is extracted from them, but rather remain in traces. Objects persist, and time is in them, not above them transcendently regulating their movement. Time is movement, and movement happens through matter. That is why at the level of the street there are so many kinds of time. Under the New Society, however, the fate of the heterogeneous matter of time is the same fate as its human castaways. That fate is the history of the vanishing, the catastrophic underside of the New Society’s project of synchronizing with global modernity. Reyes attempts to restore this history of the vanishing by depositing it in existing urban structures. Against the modernist, spectacular time of the Marcos regime, in which ceaseless infrastructural changes and urban Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’

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projects took place in the ever-present time of fashion, Reyes compresses a cumulative history of losses by means of Jo’s roving pedestrian journey and accompanying mental digressions. Condemned by martial law to vagrancy, Jo’s walking the city serves as a form of remembering—he is a ‘‘lawless’’ tracer whose movements constitute a form of political memory; and when he stands still, the object he confronts becomes a tracer of the vanished history that then runs through his mind. In this way, Jo inscribes a very di√erent urban space from that which the regime hopes to develop. As he walks through the city he sees not only the disastrous developments to come, but also the losses they entail. Looking at the concrete walls and iron and barbed-wire fences enclosing each building on campus, he recalls the bushes and shrubs these armatures replace and hints at the barricade erected for twelve days by the militant university community against a police-state siege in 1971, called the Diliman Commune, whose defeat can be read in the newly secured campus.≥π For the generation that comes after him, which has always known these walls and barbed wire fences, he provides an image of another urban space, registering a disappeared world in these present structures. Testifying to the trauma of the disappeared, he furnishes the ‘‘now you see it’’ for the ‘‘now you don’t.’’ Jo therefore reinscribes the surface of the city by reading present objects for traces not only of lost times under political repression but also of the time-matter losses incurred under the regime of development. In this way, the novel serves to restore a history occluded by the spectacular, magical e√ects of a sudden modernity. For example, he looks at the road and sees a whole series of developments: The people from public works will come and pour cement over it, then after a swelling storm, small depressions will appear. A row of typhoons later, it starts to look stricken with acne. The depressions will become craters. Of course, filling up the holes takes a long time. After they’re fixed and the street looks presentable again, then here comes nawasa [the waterworks company] to work on it. Now they have the right to dig. And fill. The road’s like a person who just got operated on and suddenly has a long scar. And that’s not the end of it. When nawasa has its fill, then it’s the pldt [the telephone company] people’s turn to dig. And then other problems are spotted, well, let’s build an overpass, deepen the canals, put flood controls underneath the roads. Whatever, all of it means digging. Ugly again, it gets filled again. In the following years they say a monorail is going to be built. Then the digging will be for the posts. (115) 162

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The history of developments and urban face-lifts periodically undergone by the city is condensed in this single anticipatory view of the road. Jo’s fast-forward view conjures ‘‘the history of creative destruction written into the landscape of the actual historical geography of capital accumulation,’’ evident in this strip of urban land.≥∫ Personified, the road becomes an instance of the production of the metropolitan body, the public material for labor to work on in endless production, in projects that create surplus value out of pure labor (time), out of apparitional products—profits from transient services rendered.≥Ω Beautification becomes just another project carried out to profit those who procure the investments and contract the work for it and serves as a development necessary to attract investments in the first place. Urban changes are made in order that more urban changes can be made in order that surplus change can be extracted. The recurrent cycle plunges the country deeper into debt and increasingly fills the pockets of the many agents overseeing those changes, not to mention the co√ers of the state, which makes the crucial cuts in the deals, the material of which consists of public works, like the road. This self-perpetuating cycle of constant destruction, construction, and extraction is rendered visible in the artifact of the road, which registers each and every rollover (of cement, of profit) in its scars. In the preface to his novel, Reyes admits to the anachronisms of his historical rendering, details of later scarring that he includes in this moving picture of the early days of martial law. But this compression of time that makes chronologically separate events and things run into each other is what enables Reyes to evoke in a single object an afterimage of repressed history, that is, a still of superimposed shots of a succession of developments. Against the conventions of temporal unity employed in the modern social realist Filipino literature of the 1950s and 1960s, Reyes’s novel manipulates historical time-space unities in the interests of producing the urban environment as a legible surface. In contrast to so-called proletarian literature, which relied on naturalist and realist techniques of description in order to focus on glaring social inequities as fragments of the overriding, unifying truth of class struggle, Reyes’s novel uses space-time distortion techniques, such as free associative memory, for making the urban setting a countersignifying field in opposition to its role as central display of the dominant signifying order of the Marcos regime.∂≠ The time-compression technique is deployed, in this regard, for the purpose of creating an unplumbed depth of truthful meaning in the city beneath its false veneer of modern progress. Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’

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The excavation of this unplumbed depth becomes the very process of one’s subjectification. Rather than o√ering an action-propelling idea (the objective of socialist realism), Tutubi, Tutubi serves as a training course in the activity of political hermeneutics.∂∞ To be sure, as narrator, it is Jo himself who instructively performs this activity and, by means of a narrative style of compulsive commentary, compels the reader to occupy the subjective space he creates for himself, leaving little for the reader to do but to follow the movement of his thought. At the same time, as a character, his pedestrian movement through the urban space entwines the reader in syntagmatic routes of meaning, the tracing of which becomes the means of the reader’s own subjectification. We could say, Jo simultaneously acts as the instrument and the agent of ideology critique, the cursor on the urban display as well as the reader of its protest text. This activity of political hermeneutics or ideology critique that he facilitates and demonstrates takes on the form of scavenging.

Scavenging in Residual Pools of Urban Refuse As a lawless element, a castaway (palaboy), Jo cannot help but follow the paths of other castaways. Thus, in his meandering, aimless journey across the metropolitan surface, he finds himself constantly slipping into pools and eddies where the waste, the homeless, the floating lumpen collect and into crevices and canals into which superfluous elements of the New Society flow from regimented streets. He drops in on a funeral, gets taken into a squatter home, falls in with some rowdy, roughneck types, gets dragged to a dingy sex club, and gets into a scuΔe with some drunken goons. Pools of these slum dwellers, derelicts, prostitutes, petty crooks, thugs, and casual laborers collect like the foul sewage water that has stagnated around their areas of residence. The urban poor live here, dumped behind whitewashed walls to stagnate in their own destitution or flung out onto the edges of the city to pile up like the heaps of garbage they are forced to live on. Smokey Mountain, the dumping site of Manila’s garbage, where a community of thousands thrives on scavenging, becomes a symbol of these lives that are trashed by society, human flies living on garbage. As he explores his surroundings and gets caught in these human heaps and cesspools behind beautification walls and at the ends of dead-end streets, scattered on the inner margins of the city and shoved into dark congested rooms, Jo 164

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realizes that the entire urban space he moves through is strewn with refuse and that the world he lives in is one big dumping site. ‘‘Why isn’t there even one garbage can around here?’’ he asks. ‘‘Or is the room I entered one big garbage can that’s inside an even bigger garbage can called society? And we who are here, a mixed bag of flies and pests, roaches, mosquitoes, rats, worms.’’ The view of and from garbage not only produces a very di√erent urban space from that which the regime purports to develop. It also enables the reconstruction of a cycle of processes in which paths of profit extraction and paths of refuse disposal turn out to be the two sides of a Möbius strip, each side turning into the other in a cycle with neither beginning nor end in sight. No longer appearing as development, that cycle nevertheless proves to be an economy of accumulation, producing growing edifices of wealth and expanding pools of poverty. From the standpoint a√orded by Jo’s physical and mental slumming—his tracking of the pathways of waste—the garbage economy of Smokey Mountain thereby becomes recognizable as a real, material instance of the national economy. Jo’s immersion in the unregulated, castaway time of modernization’s refuse, on which such insight relies, allows not only the acceleration and compression of the time of development, but also a slowing down of the time of quick profit. For example, he visits his town mate, Idyo, a fixer who for a fee works on the margins of bureaucratic o≈ces, coming to the aid of helpless victims of red tape by speeding up the processing of whatever forms have to be signed and certified. As he watches Idyo take bribes, Jo alludes to the resemblance of this occupation to the larger urban economy by describing it in the same way he describes the urban developments: that is, as being ‘‘like magic.’’ In his close observation of his friend’s work Jo in fact depicts a microinstance of the larger urban economy characterized by graft and corruption: ‘‘Whenever there was someone turning round and round, in no particular direction, and looking up and around, that meant money. This is the role of the slow people in the world—to be fooled. Or, to Idyo’s mind, to be helped. Except for a fee. . . . This was above what he would ask to grease the palms of the people he was in cahoots with inside the o≈ce. . . . This is the way papers walked. By greasing every hand they passed through. And Idyo was only one of those who were tra≈cking in papers.’’ Forced onto the pedestrian path, Jo finds himself among ‘‘the slow people.’’ While the figure of the fixer will prove to be important in my discussion of the creative modes of informal labor in the next chapter, of note here is that the fixer’s position is one that a√ords a look behind the scenes of urban magic. From this place Jo can view Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’

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the structural similarity between the ‘‘fee for every signature’’ schemes of bureaucratic corruption and the profit-making schemes of urban development (a fee for every paving of the roads). Both tra≈c in the sluggishness and outmodedness produced by the very symbolic bid to e≈ciency and progress that are directed against modernity’s laggards, the ‘‘slow people.’’ Jo identifies with scavengers because he himself is reduced to being one. At the house where he boards, he and his fellow boarders periodically go on ‘‘food raids,’’ scavenging for leftovers in his landlady’s kitchen. His fate is similar to that of the Smokey Mountain residents in that he not only has no permanent place of his own to reside in the city, but the scarcity and irregularity of his income necessitates feeding on other people’s scraps: ‘‘One force makes them squatters, the other, scavengers.’’∂≤ Scavenging becomes the operative mode Jo is forced to adopt. When his friend Herbie collapses from exhaustion and starvation, ‘‘the illness of hunger,’’ he rummages through the room filled with Herbie’s junk for any medicines he might find: ‘‘I was like a scavenger groping around in the hope of chancing upon some valuable object in a heap of trash.’’ Predisposed by the new conditions of crisis, Jo employs scavenging as the form of his own personal activism: ‘‘It was necessary to move, if not now, when?’’ This slogan, which students deployed to mobilize themselves into political action, lends itself to the particular emergency Jo faces, an instance of the general state of emergency that prevails in the New Society. When Jo and his barkada (his gang) raid the refrigerator or steal vegetables from another lot, he imagines them living the lives of guerillas, acting in a time of war. Indeed, he often alludes to the ‘‘time of the Japanese,’’ producing the present as wartime, that is, as a state of emergency. Jo’s deliberate conflation of times demonstrates the activist potential in the temporality of stagnation. Recognizing that, in the words of Benjamin, ‘‘the state of emergency is not the exception but the rule,’’ Jo realizes that state of emergency in everyday life by politicizing his domestic, even bodily, problems, indulging in constant wordplay that makes ‘‘emergency’’ refer to martial law, shitting, vomiting, and breaking up. While the political problem of housing—articulated as the squatter problem—is depoliticized and domesticated by the metropolitan government through its Ministry of Human Settlements (headed by Imelda Marcos, who takes on a quasi-maternal posture even as she orders the demolition and relocation of squatter areas), it is in Reyes’s writing politicized as forced homelessness. While Marcos completely personalized his political power, Jo’s personal problems are constantly filtered through political slogans. Correspond166

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ingly, his bodily experiences filter political ideas, retooling them to transform the character of everyday life. Scavenging thus serves as a mode of activist movement through the dumpsite that is the city, becoming a version of what student activists called social investigation—the analysis of the political-economic situation that is to be transformed. Reading itself takes on the characteristics of scavenging—a mode of reusing and retooling found objects, words, ideas—as the political subject that the novel endeavors to form develops the hermeneutical tools to analyze the sociopolitical and economic situation, which has been both organized and represented by the Marcos regime. As the process of scouring the urban surface, scavenging for jettisoned times, this analysis renders a valuable object in an alternative family of squatters. The squatters make what might be called an informal family, inasmuch as they do not fit the institutional definition of one— a woman and her foster sons, a household of unrelated people without a father figure. Jo is taken into this squatter home by the mother, Mamay, after he collapses from hunger and exhaustion. Mamay and her two foster sons represent an alternative family with which he can feel kinship, di√erent from the one presented to him by the Marcoses, in the latter’s purported role as parents of the nation, or even by his or his friends’ parents. As he comments, ‘‘Parents bear an imperialistic strain . . . the home is where you will first experience dictatorship, together with the fascism of the family.’’ In this squatter home, Jo discovers a beautiful, warm, equitable world entirely di√erent from the one on the presentable side of the whitewashed walls of the city. Here too he discovers a di√erent approach to housing from that of Human Settlements, which put them behind these walls in the first place: ‘‘The houses of Mamay’s pig and pigeons were almost identical. Both were made from things that no longer had any use but could still be made to function. As far as I could see garbage wasn’t a thing for them (I’m remembering Smokey Mountain again, except over there it’s worse)—everything, even if it was worn and ugly, as long as it could still be made use of, was sure to have some function.’’ Jo discovers, in the language of economists, the creative force of the informal sector, the part of the population engaged in parasitic occupations, disguised unemployment, or unproductive activities—in other words, people who make their living, as it were, on the streets.∂≥ These marginal people who literally live o√ the streets are not fully incorporated into the formal economy and yet they provide goods and services that benefit that economy because they o√er them at Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’

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lower costs, provide a pool of reserve cheap labor, and hold down the costs of wage labor.∂∂ As Jo recognizes, garbage is necessary to maintain the lifestyles of the people who dispose of it as well as the lives of the people who pick it up. As a commodity, it also serves as a medium of relations between them, an element whose movements trace the field of social relations in the city. Like the Filipina woman who serves as the material and symbolic embodiment of the nation, refuse is both physical e√ect and semiotic matter. While Jo is certainly reduced to being refuse, political scavenging enables his transformation into a collector and reader of refuse. Thus Jo becomes a human refuse collector, creating a hodgepodge of worn and used people who make their living on the periphery and on the residues of formal economic production. Through his scavenging route he o√ers a collage of society’s residues, like the squatter’s home, which from afar looks to him like an abstract painting. Except what he o√ers with this mode, which now might be said to characterize precisely the formal mode of this novel, is not a still life but a moving picture of concrete lives. In this case, what emerges from this scavenging venture (of the activist student as well as of the novelist as activist) might better be described as a montage of these various kinds of human residues: squatters, sex workers, domestics, petty service workers (like Mamay, who is the caretaker of someone else’s pig), casually employed street workers (like Boy, one of the foster sons, who washes jeepneys), street vendors, watch-your-car boys, scavengers, bottle and newspaper buyers, and racketeers. Culminating in the picture of Mamay’s alternative family, this montage represents an unseen value: the value of hidden labor. The everyday value of hidden labor has another side: a heroic dimension that is limned in the absent figure of Mamay’s other foster son, Kuya [older brother], who has joined the revolution in the countryside. The absent but present figure of Kuya becomes for Jo an alternative ghost, representing a radically di√erent social ideal that can be read in the traces of creative and defiant life among the urban poor. Inspired by this symbolic ideal, Jo scores the urban fabric not only with signs of human loss and lost value, but also with signs of social rebellion. His markings are like the strokes of red paint that smear the whitewashed walls of the regime with slogans of protest. His feet, which are constantly itching to move, become the very driving force behind his protest: ‘‘It was as if my feet had a voice. It was as if I were hearing the chant, ‘Comrade, join the struggle, do not fear.’ ’’ His feet also serve as instruments for remarking the urban space in protest. With the imprints 168

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left by their movements, Jo’s feet draw the entire social-historical fabric, which is held from unitary view, into representation. Shaped by the conditions of the dispossessed into whose lot he is thrown, his liquidity enables him to make this moving picture of protest out of the negative remains and forgotten, castaway times of the Marcoses’ modernist urban spectacle. This defiant urban social film smears the solid, cleaned-up, timeless social edifice of the New Society with the presences of the erased, the abandoned, the eliminated, and especially the subversive, like the strokes of red paint that smear its repressive white walls. Plotting his meandering course through the inner city, Jo thereby creates a testimony to the casualties of modernization. Episodes of the novel serve as eddies where human refuse collects, pools of multiple lives and histories.∂∑ While they can be seen as comprising that sector of society I have been calling superfluous, lawless, unassimilable, unregulateable, etc., this can only be a negative identity. For these dispersed and individual figures to constitute any community would entail alignment rather than sameness. What could potentially connect them is an element in close proximity to them, like Jo, who in moving through the horizontal pathways they occupy could serve as a link of contiguity between one and the other as well as between them and himself. His bodily self would in this way act as ‘‘the place of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act upon me and the things upon which I act.’’∂∏ However, rather than the hyphen connecting the very lives he encounters, Jo’s self acts as the place of destination of his experiential movements. Moreover, as he believes that the politicization of his experience necessitates its conversion into knowledge (‘‘Iisa ng solusyon. Alamin’’ [There is only one solution. Know]), the ultimate destination of his bodily experience becomes ‘‘the inside of my brain.’’ Even as Jo mediates among the lives that surround him, he does not remain among them but rather pulls himself out of their circulation in order to grasp their value. In striking contrast to a short story by Estrella Alfon, written in 1979, which similarly follows the intimate, straggling lives of a family of squatters through the quietly doomed routes of their fate without reprieve or epiphanic release, Jo’s movements through the city figure as ultimately transcendent movements of thought. Inasmuch as the occupation and stratification of the city leaves him no freedom of movement in it, the urban space is internalized as the space of his mind: ‘‘I guess this was the only freedom that remained in my life—to think, in a corner, in peace.’’ Thus his mind becomes the street (daan), the place of Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’

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passage for the multiple experiences ( pinagdaanan) of the lives he comes to know. His mind becomes the place for the collection and recollection of these lives, the place for the recording of their presence and for the representation of their hidden value. Just as the surface of Manila serves as a screen for the representation of value (a display case) of the metropolitan body for international visitors (visitations of the international), so Jo’s consciousness acts as an alternative screen for the exposure of peripheral lives (an alternative to the white screens walling o√ their very existence). In taking himself out of the circulation of the unassimilable elements of the New Society and in serving as the locus and means for the expression of the meanings of his encounters with them, Jo behaves as a general equivalent. His understanding of his experiences primarily consists in drawing metaphorical equivalences and analogies between situations, institutions, people, and things. And the significance of most of his observations is based on their allegorization of national structures.∂π In creating ideologically illuminating equivalences, Jo embodies the money form. He bears the value of what, in coming in contact with it, he serves to symbolically express. His consciousness is thereby valorized, set to transcend the very matter that makes it possible. In this way, Jo’s scavenging testimony transforms him from an object of historical forces to a subject speaking history. It is through this subjectivating narrative function that the reexperiencing of the past can be considered progress. Here that progress is toward one’s self-constitution as a historical subject. But self-constitution as a subject of an alternative trajectory of progress has its price, one that will not be paid by Jo. As we shall see, Jo’s self-constitution as a historical subject mirrors the subject of the state, making him something like the minor term in a binary opposition that is staged between subjects and their competing versions of historical progress.

Dropping Out: Politics of Bad Form, Bad Faith We begin to see more clearly that while Jo drops out of the educational path into membership in global modernity, he does not completely abandon the levels from which the social might be viewed in some kind of totality. Instead, he is able to ply the vertical disjuncture between the world of the intelligentsia and the world of the masses, or what he jokingly represents as ‘‘the dialectical relation between brain and stomach.’’ He manages to oscillate between the conceptual 170

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and the corporeal, as demonstrated by his oscillation between rote recitation of activist slogans and empirical recording of his bodily experiences. This oscillation is due to the contradictory position he shares with the radicalized students of his generation, whose political sentiments and ideas were in many ways in conflict with those of their own class. For many newly radicalized students, the slogans and ideas tend to hover in the air to be mouthed on the streets but not necessarily to be breathed in, to enter into their o√-street lives. And yet, precisely because they hover in the air, they are readily grasped in moments of lived crisis, experiential moments to which they correspondingly give articulable form. For example, as Jo feels the hunger pangs of his stomach, the familiar call to struggle, Makibaka, Huwag Matakot suddenly comes to mind: ‘‘Join the struggle, don’t be afraid, was the cry of my stomach joining in solidarity.’’ This facetious mode, which bridges the world of the urban poor with the world of the student activists and therefore helps to realize organized resistance on an individual and familiar, everyday basis, emerges out of Jo’s halfway suspended state, his partial delinking with the terms of a world order.∂∫ Reyes performs this facetious mode in his original use of language. As Pilipino is a language spoken by no other national people—one might call it a dropout language—simply speaking it arguably constitutes an act of defiance of the transnational. As the protest singer Gary Granada once put it, ‘‘Whenever I use the Pilipino language, the very first thing I feel is an immediate ‘sense of protest’. . . . The second thing I feel is a ‘sense of community.’ ’’∂Ω Reyes goes even further than this nationalist sense in his localization of the novelistic word.∑≠ Jo’s speech is of a type spoken by urban, nonconformist students who are a mixture of activists and delinquents. It is full of code words, slogans, and slang phrases that belong exclusively neither to the street nor to the classroom. This particular discourse, however, is interspersed with the utterances of power—the English of mass media and school and New Society slogans, for example—which Jo mimics as if he had no commonsense understanding of their meanings. Jo’s suspension of understanding enables him not only to estrange these words and thereby detract from their naturalized authority, but also to play with them in such a way as to make politically significant connections between similarly naturalized agencies of power. Inasmuch as English becomes the marker of educated, metropolitan culture, Jo develops the habit of translating everyday Pilipino into English or quoting English words and phrases learned in school and from commercials and translating them into Pilipino, in order to remove the aura that surrounds the Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’

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language. This parodying mode is directed less at literary discourse than at a more generalized educated, metropolitan discourse as well as the particular sociopolitical lexicon of the New Society. Parodying might also be seen as another form of scavenging, an activity that feeds on the throwaway expressions of dominant, authoritarian discourse. Jo’s contempt for wholehearted, self-erasing imitations—for example, the folk singer he encounters who takes on the look and sound of Bob Dylan—and his own sarcastic impressions of figures and expressions of authority are directed against what he sees as the degraded culture of mimicry of a society bound to international ideals and images. This well-known anti-imperialist critique of the dominant pastiche culture of post-U.S.-colonial Philippine society, built out of the surplus products and disposable elements of U.S. culture, determines the specifically parodic form that Jo’s scavenging practices take. His parodying of English and other idioms of power, his mocking rendition of cliché forms of individual and social life, his slumming immersion in his immediate surroundings, and his pedestrian ramblings and preoccupation with trivial, petty embodiments of larger forces of power are all geared toward the corruption and delegitimation of the everyday discursive practices supporting the dominant social order. Reyes’s practices of protest thus consist of practices of symbolic scavenging, squatting, and corruption—practices using the roads, means, and materials made available by the formal symbolic economy (New Society rhetoric, television commercials, English)—geared toward the political goal of diverting their meaning for power. Besides plying back and forth between the vertical disjuncture between his corporeal encounters and experiences and the conceptual technology he learns in and around school, Jo’s thought moves laterally, that is, across di√erent figures and social situations of the same strata. He shifts around the contexts of certain slogans, words, and ideas, associating them with di√erent images, making conditions and relations clear or visible in a di√erent way. Just as he leaves track marks as he moves through the city, his pedestrian movement making links between the various figures of poverty and oppression he comes across, so his mental digressions leave connections between various figures and institutions of authority and power: between military camp, school, church, market, between soldiers, teachers, priests, vendors. Hence, while Jo drops out of school, he does not drop out of education altogether. Rather, he drops out of the trajectory of formal education and wan172

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ders onto the streets to begin his informal education. No longer serious about his studies, he nevertheless knows enough about them to make fun of them. He insists on being stupid or, more accurately, on playing stupid. This valorization of stupidity stems from the protest stupidity constitutes in the context of an educational system whose exemplary products kowtow to power, aspire to and rest on authority, and produce knowledge that is useful only for the perpetuation of the prevailing social hierarchy. As Jo asserts, ‘‘I’d rather remain stupid.’’ But Jo’s stupidity is, like his naiveté, put on, like the innocence and incompetence adopted by a clown. Indeed, he is a clown of sorts; he is what one would call pilosopo—not a philosopher but a parody of one, someone who plays with words of authority as a way of talking back, a smart aleck. Stupid here is not a matter of being street-smart, for Jo is only beginning to learn what kind of wheeling and dealing go on in these urban recesses. It is, rather, a matter of suspending the other kind of knowing that formal education implements, which is a matter of assimilation, accumulation, and application.∑∞ This suspension of belief in o≈cial knowledge enables him to corrupt and graft onto the cognitive technologies provided by formal education. Unlike the figure of the trickster, who performs the comic as a mode of overturning dominant social relations, Jo’s clown is after something in the present. The objective of his informal thought practices is finally truth. As Jo moves through the novel as well as through the city, he is continuously ideologically decoding what he encounters. His movement is driven by a desire for true consciousness (maging mulat), which is consciousness of the truth. Manila under martial law is a nightmare he must wake up from, its modernized spaces filled with dissimulating fantasies. For Jo, the truth that the authoritarian modernity of Marcos represses is the masses, and it is toward them that Jo moves. The space of displacement and discrepancy opened up by the universal project of modernity compels the desire and search for authenticity, which Jo (and countless others who would join the revolution in the countryside) locates in the struggle of the masses. From this perspective, he and other students can appear only as degraded forms of this authentic agent of history. As he says selfdisparagingly, ‘‘Kami ay nakikiuso lang’’ (We’re just following the trend). Jo’s wayward movement thus purports to be merely the means to the masses’ truth, the truth of their struggle. The consistent though nomadic center of this movement is what might be called an egological form, a thinking I that maintains itself through commentary, the prevailing mode of Jo’s narrative. ∑≤ ComModern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’

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mentary is the disclosure of another order of truth from the formal truth that the signs and symbolic structures erected by the New Society construct. Against the formalism of Marcos’s modernity as well as his aborted formalist education, Jo gropes and feels for another reality, one that as yet appears as formless, unsymbolizable, dumb matter, trapped as it were in the unconscious of the nation (which, by this logic, serves as the locus of the nation’s true desire): the masses.∑≥ However, Jo’s appeal to another ideal reality to serve as the basis of a new political subjectification continues to be deeply shaped by the form of education he purportedly suspends. His bad form is only the application of his bad faith, which is evidenced by a deep-seated belief in his own use value as truth bearer, against his vocal disavowal of his own power and freedom. Hence the didacticism at the heart of the bad form of this ‘‘dropout.’’ On this view, we might say he paradoxically internalizes the very form of power he opposes.∑∂ As the consequence of both the regime of repression and the resistance against it, a new depth structure of the social psyche obtains, which Jo imbibes.∑∑ Martial law might be said to have instituted the first real regime of repression, in the psychoanalytic, juridical sense, for the middle-class citizenry. Through strategies of censorship, such as that of the media (in the 1960s touted as the freest in Asia), this regime created a field of representational meaning in which lies and deceptions made sense as political categories and hence where truth could have semantic power. Impelled to expose the truth that the regime’s false urban phantasmagoria masks, Jo constructs a core place for this truth’s unfolding within himself. That core, as embodied in his mind, finally learns to fly, just as the dragonfly in the title is urged to flee, now free to alight on each of his experiential encounters in order to connect them all in a newfound politicized consciousness.

Begetting Truth through the Debasement of Bodies and Waste Alice Guillermo describes ‘‘the temper of the times,’’ from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, as being reflected, on the one hand, in ‘‘the poetry of a di√used and unfocused malaise, poetry seeking center for its politics, expressions of anarchic energy hitting right and left but comfortably settling into the ego’’ and, on the other, in ‘‘poetry [that] becomes political confrontation in life as in art.’’∑∏ The ‘‘di√used and unfocused’’ character of protest and the searching for a center are overriding themes of Tutubi, Tutubi. Even as Reyes’s energies cannot be said to finally produce a work whose energies comfortably settle in the ego, the politi174

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cal center he seeks takes on an egological form. The ‘‘di√used and unfocused malaise’’ enacted by Jo’s wandering, digressive narrative serves as the condition from which the honed and focused political confrontation is expected to develop. With the Marcos regime as the central agency of political repression, political protest found an antagonistic other through which it could consolidate itself into a countersubject. While Marcos looks for a center by projecting it into the monuments he constructs, Jo looks for a center of his protest by introjecting the political centralization that Marcos e√ects and by taking on the egological form of the state. To the extent that the testimony of trauma is a ‘‘project of address,’’ Reyes’s novelistic speech form constructs its addressees as the succeeding generation. They become the inheritors of the historical trauma to which he is the access.∑π Against the sterility of individual egoism, as elsewhere thematized by Reyes, Jo begets his successors as well as the liberative truth he is to pass on to them.∑∫ The truth Jo finds is not only the masses but also, very importantly, their practical knowledge and productive intelligence, the proximity of their thinking to concrete action. In contrast, the intelligence learned in bourgeois education is ‘‘sterile intelligence—firing away without producing anything.’’ The virile masculine ego is characterized, then, by the capacity to beget. In the case of the masses, it is the capacity to beget practical value. In the case of Jo, it is the capacity to beget both historical truth and the heirs to whom it will be bequeathed.∑Ω The masculinist imperative to beget—to create something outside of the body, a solidification of something beyond the body—which, as we’ve seen, shapes the notion of productive labor, drives Jo toward the production of the truth of martial law, a truth he extracts from the refuse of the Marcos regime. The truth he passes on, however, is not merely the truth he learns, but the experience he goes through in coming to this truth. In other words, Jo wants to pass on the story of his own development as an experience of coming of age that will give his addresses access to the truth he bears. Coming of age means the forging of an independent consciousness that has the capacity to beget truth. In the end this is what defines the productive time of scavenging against the sheer time of waste in which modernity’s castaways are thrown. Under the masculinist imperative to come of age and beget, Jo constitutes his historical subjectivity in identification with the state-subject he opposes. Dictatorial power is seen as despotic personal agency, in the brute form of a Savage Man (the embodiment of the masculinist humanism of authoritarian modernModern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’

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ism). Emasculated by this despotic masculinist regime, which reduces him to matter, Jo flees from state power only to empower himself through a similar, masculinist subject form. These masculinist strains of his constitution shape Jo’s contradictory relation to the standing body of Manila’s refuse, the collective disposable matter that makes up the metropolitan body. Jo understands that the repulsion and disgust stirred in him by the filth and squalor exuding from within the sex club smacks of his burgis (bourgeois) affinities. And yet he does not recognize that the repulsion he feels is also a new masculinist revulsion for the mere corporeality to which the urban poor have been reduced. Hence the defilement he associates with sexual activities and displays of sexuality ‘‘without emotion . . . without tenderness,’’ that is, without subjectivity—a disgust for a leftover corporeality. Garbage and dirt are substances without meaning, without consciousness. Prostitutes are robots performing mechanical acts, sexual bodies emptied of human desire, mere beings for others. Sex without depth is, from Jo’s newfound subjectivity, disposable, base matter. As we see here and shall see even more clearly in chapter 6, while itself the product and means of protest, the depth structure of the emergent urban subject, which supports Jo’s independent consciousness, is also the site of a new oppression and the origin of a new subjectifying regime of signification. That regime is expressed through the work of psychology that Reyes deploys as a narrative principle. Although other works in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly the work of Kerima Polotan-Tuvera and Tony Perez, dealt with psychological themes, Reyes’s novel is arguably one of the first Filipino literary works to explicitly thematize psychological processes and, moreover, to psychologize the sphere of politics. This narrative representation of psychology is what makes psychology available as an instrument of political analysis. Thus, Jo’s contempt for his teacher Miss Spermatozoa for her obscene sexualization and therefore corporeal debasement of everything becomes an occasion for Jo to demonstrate the psychology he will then shift onto Marcos. In Jo’s psychologizing view, Miss Spermatozoa acts in this way because she is repressed and sexually deprived (even as she represents sexual being, the very matter of sex, which is male-gendered). As compensation for her lack, she inserts what organizes her being (sex) everywhere. Marcos demonstrates the same pathological behavior as Miss Spermatozoa in his mania for building centers: he has an inordinate desire for centers (which organizes his regime) because he is missing one. What becomes clear from this psychologi176

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cal concordance is that Jo’s visceral responses to both are determined by an understanding that fuses together a certain logic of political power with a certain logic of sexual desire. It is an understanding, however, that participates in the political-libidinal understanding of the state itself. It depends on an international symbolic order—the order of global subjectification—that sets the scene for the interpretation of political and economic power as synonymous with masculine potency or sexual prowess, and the lack of such power as synonymous with emasculation, e√eminacy, and animality. Moreover, it depends on the personality form of power, which it contests. Hence, Jo’s contempt for both Miss Spermatozoa and Marcos takes form through this logic—he expresses his protest against their state power via the same logic of castration on which that power is predicated, by figuring them as lacking. Correspondingly, the disgust and pity provoked in him by the deteriorating bodies of the sex workers he encounters are responses rooted not only in a bourgeois valorization of solidity and order and the dryness these values imply, but also in the sexual-logical instruments utilized to achieve and maintain the solidity of this bourgeois state.∏≠ Jo’s revulsion for the sexually exploited female body is thus part of a complex produced by the collaboration between heterosexism, patriarchy, and state capitalism in the configuration of the metropolitan body as a feminized commodity. The ‘‘City of Man’’ has been treated as a female body that the state (Man) beautifies in order to sell to foreign investors. The female body is not only a paradigm for urban development and for national marketing schemes. As we’ve already seen, it is among the national resources and products exchanged for foreign capital (that is, for the Marcos city-state to be like, as well as to be liked by, the metropolitan nations, which the investment of their capital would materially and symbolically secure). The cosmetic improvements on the city act therefore as a macroinstance of a prevailing logic of commodification, which also governs the production of the prostituted Filipinas and the devaluation of women’s reproductive labor. Hence the similarity between Jo’s response to the painted grass and his response to the painted whore: ‘‘To me, they all looked like maids who were plastered with makeup.’’ When Jo sees the corrupted, aging bodies of prostitutes, he sees the e√ects of martial law on the metropolitan body as well as on the bodies of women. But he doesn’t sympathize with either kind of body. For the female body is only an index of the violence and oppression exerted by the new regime and its international fraternity. It is merely a bodily surface for the recording as well as the Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’

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masking of the real trauma of Marcos’s modernization, the figure of commodification and artifice against which the authentic spirit of struggle of the masses is opposed. Viewed through the prism of metropolitan space, the female body appears to be merely the receptacle of the true trash of history. This constitutes the contradictory predicament of the political subject constructed in antagonism to the subject of capital figured as man. In his reclamation of the human refuse of the ‘‘City of Man,’’ Jo doesn’t consider the sexually exploited woman as one of this lot. Rather, he displaces his antipathy toward the forces that induce his state of abjection onto women, thereby precluding any feelings of a≈nity for them. Instead of finding women among those ‘‘other people’’ like himself, with whom he can identify (such as his activist-teacher, Mr. Kabayan and Kuya), Jo figures them either as members and functionaries of the upper classes (such as Tess, who emotionally uses him, and his teachers) or the parasitic lumpen who, in servicing those classes, are complicit with them (such as sex workers). The only woman he portrays in a sympathetic light is Mamay. Nevertheless, the maternal image she evokes in Jo makes her a figure of symbolic inspiration rather than concrete identification and solidarity, the mother of revolutionary sons rather than a revolutionary herself. Unlike the squatter family he encounters, who demonstrate that they are not really garbage inasmuch as their practices are productive of something outside of themselves, sex workers are mere bodily matter servicing the state. On this view, which is that of the prevailing political-libidinal logic of capital, they are simply part of the lumpen proletariat, like the fixers who extract income from unproductive, worthless activities, ultimately reproducing the status quo. This is a logic that the revolutionary movement shared. As Amado Guerrero, the nom de guerre of the chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the author of Philippine Society and Revolution (one of the student activist handbooks in Jo’s possession), declares, On the basis of the high degree of unemployment in both city and countryside, the ranks of the lumpen proletariat keep on increasing. This stratum is composed of the dregs of Philippine society. It has emerged as a result of forced idleness. It is composed of thieves, robbers, gangsters, beggars, prostitutes, fakirs, vagrants and all other elements who resort to anti-social acts to make a living. They appear conspicuously in city slums. . . . The lumpen proletariat are an

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extremely unstable lot. They are easily bought o√ by the enemy and are given to senseless destruction.∏∞

What this recapitulation of an orthodox Marxist precept demonstrates is the incapacity or refusal to recognize the revolutionary possibility in the urban poor that the privileging of a proletarian, rural armed struggle and its masculinist labor metaphysic tend to support. The revolutionary proletarian community Jo imagines takes the youthful form of an old boy’s network, which relies on the exchange of a female body (Manila) or on an idealized female gaze (Mamay) as the imaginary and symbolic points of its identification. This heteronormative, homosocial construction of an alternative community is one of the ways in which Jo fails to break with the politicallibidinal mechanisms used by the state, which constructs its own world-historical agency through the subsumptive objectification of feminine subjective potential. We could say even that such masculinist complicity on the part of radical social movements could only have contributed to the mass alienation of women, which I describe in the previous chapters. It might also account for women’s search for sovereignty and other destinies, both in urban feminist politics and in other metropolitan shores away from home. As we saw in the historical experience of feminized labor articulated in Philippine feminist literature, modernity is not simply a historical-chronological development but in fact the very obtaining of a particular set of experiences of time (‘‘a form of forgetting’’).∏≤ The dominance of the temporality of exchange value, expressed as the identity of women/babae, paradoxically allows for the emergence of what consequently appear to be residual temporalities, which are themselves enabling of the temporality of modernity, even while they appear tangential to its aims. So here, the unifying time of modernization, replicated in the unifying time of political consciousness, leaves its own remainders of time, which are also remains of lives that persist only as worthless ruins. Their only political use lies in the capacity of the proper protest subject to read the history of the disappeared to which they testify. Channeled toward proper political ends, Reyes’s informal practice of scavenging thus produces its own waste in the form of those other practices, other experiences of life making, that now appear degraded and worthless, unable to produce or embody value, destined to become superfluous. These degraded forms, which are figured in the prostitute and the

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fixer, underwrite the very conditions against which the properly political urban activist protests, making them merely reproductive of dominant conditions. Politically unrecognized from the point of view of the truth-bearing, conscious antiauthoritarian subject, these degraded forms of experiential practice nevertheless become, in their heterogeneous, cultural character as modes of living labor, the very means of transforming prevailing social relations. As we shall see in the next two chapters, degraded practices of the lumpen proletariat exemplified by the fixer not only service the crony capitalist state; they also contribute to the experience of activism, which eschews them. In a later moment, some of those eschewed experiences become new modes of survival under conditions of generalized ruin, the very debris of the project of modernity put to use for the making of a new metropolitan subject.

Tutubi, Tutubi, ‘Wag Kang Magpahuli Sa Mamang Salbahe is a novel of flight— flight from the violence and barbarism of the state (the Savage Man incarnated in the dictator and his military and police), flight from the transnational forces of development that eliminate unruly lives and streamline wayward forms. These forces are represented by the New Society slogan: ‘‘Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan’’ (For the development of the nation, discipline is required). On behalf of the state doxa, a military soldier, a puppet of the Savage Man in whose image he is made, puts a sign around Jo’s neck as he orders him to weed the grounds. On the sign is written, ‘‘i don’t have any discipline.’’ Jo experiences the weight of this state dictum in the beginning of the novel. From then on, his movements take the path of flight from the Savage Man. Berman writes of pseudo-Fausts, pseudodevelopment, and pseudoevents that fantasies and dreams of modernity have produced in the third world. At the same time, he notes the ‘‘real misery and devastation’’ and real deaths such ‘‘purely symbolic’’ modernity brings. Jo learns the corporeal significance of this formalist modernism when, at the end of his wandering (and of his narrative), he finds out that the friends who all the while have been missing have turned up dead just outside of the city—demolished and relocated, just like the squatters. While he mourns the death of his friends (the loss of their lives, their protesting spirits), however, Jo does not mourn but rather repudiates the death of prostituted women. Like the corpses of his friends, the commodified bodies of prostitutes 180

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attest to the barbarity of the Savage Man, but they are considered empty shells, dead matter, objects that have no protesting spirit or consciousness of their own. This di√erentiation in Jo’s relation to the two kinds of deaths is predicated upon the masculinist money form of liberatory subjectivity that he sets to confront the despotic man—himself a late-developing subject within the context of an already achieved and fully developed Mankind. The violence of the symbolic order that the Savage Man represents is thus not merely the order of modernity, but also, and simultaneously, the order of Man. Jo demonstrates his subjection to this symbolic order by going toward the body of human refuse of the New Society in order to beget the truth that it bears but cannot itself speak. Jo immerses himself in this metropolitan body (as feminized matter) in order to consolidate a self, a consciousness, that can transcend this matter and fly—that can, in other words, be ideologically free. In this sublimating relation to feminized matter, Jo constitutes himself as an urban masculinist subject, thereby participating in the sexual objectification experienced by women. What one needs to remind oneself of is the importance of the struggle against the symbolic order that serves as the point of this global subjectification. That struggle involves refusing to submit to the rules of that universal modern order, acting in undisciplined ways, and taking care not to get caught within the force field of the Savage Man.

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Chapter Five

Petty Adventures in (the Nation’s) Capital In his book Notes on the New Society of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos devotes an entire chapter to accounting for what he calls ‘‘the rebellion of the poor’’ and, by this measure, to converting it into the ideological basis of his new regime. For Marcos, this rebellion founds itself on ‘‘the poor’s’’ newfound sense of their oppression and on their belief in ‘‘the great potency of the political act,’’ ‘‘the miraculous powers of politics.’’∞ What Marcos discloses in this attempt to find moral justification for dictatorship is that the new regime is the product of the radicalized social experience of a general crisis in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Radical activist students, writers, intellectuals, and other members of the petty bourgeoisie joined forces with militant labor and peasant groups in a ‘‘torrent of mass protest actions’’ that focused widespread social unrest and directed it against the government. My claim is that the authoritarian state comes into being through the political usurpation of the collective power issuing from this radical social experience. Agos (torrent) and Sigwa (storm), which were also the titles of two collections of modernist social realist fiction that made their iconoclastic entrance on the stage of Philippine literature at this same historical moment, were central figurations of this experience. Such figurations helped mobilize and give inexorable form to the social movements they themselves were activated by. Stu-

dents, writers, intellectuals, and other members of the urban bourgeois and petty bourgeois strata, whose radicalization by and involvement in these social movements brought them in experiential proximity to the laboring classes with whom they joined forces—these groups came to embody the militancy and activism exhibited in the ‘‘torrent of mass protest actions’’ staged in the first few months of 1970, a rebellion that has come to be known as the First Quarter Storm. That Marcos used the so-called explosive conditions of social turmoil and popular ferment as a legitimating pretext for establishing authoritarian rule has, I believe, risen to the coveted status of a fact. By ‘‘political usurpation,’’ however, I do not mean mere ideological justification. I mean, rather, the subsumption of the growing power of nontraditional elite classes, especially the petty bourgeoisie (landless middle classes), who through contentious and radical nationalist movements in the period after the Second World War had begun to erode the authority of oligarchic rule. The ascendance of the suboligarchic or middling bourgeoisie class (educated professionals) to which the Marcoses themselves belonged can be seen as an instance of this growing power. As Petronilo Daroy writes, The Marcoses then may be said to belong to the middle sector of Philippine society from which the professional classes and the civil servants were traditionally recruited. Although the social mobility of these classes is not limited (theoretically, there are no limits to the mobility of any social class in the country) their rise has always been made possible through the drudgery and idiocy of the public service. Theirs is usually a very slow climb, but one compensated by their nearness and association with the traditionally rich, to whom they serve as adjuncts and for whom they perform their services.≤

We might thus understand the Marcoses’ own leapfrogging over their class superiors and into state power as a political coup that significantly benefited from the partial attrition of the traditional oligarchy with the rise of the urban proto- and petty bourgeoisie, including the Marcoses’ friends and relations. It was a political coup that drew on the power that these newly ambitious and upwardly mobile classes and the agitated laboring and peasant classes had begun to claim as potentially their own, thereby legitimating the regime’s takeovers of oligarchic businesses and assets, including the state.≥

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Authoritarianism can hence be understood as the assumption of the real and potential power of contradictory classes and its consolidation into the overriding and absolute power of the state. Put di√erently, it is the institutionalization of political opportunism, which, as Jose Ma. Sison argues, characterized the strategy of peasant insurgency in the 1950s under the former Communist Party leadership of the Lava brothers. Sison, the university instructor and activist who would soon become the leader of the reestablished Communist Party, calls this strategy ‘‘one of adventurism, or putschism—aiming for quick military victory within two years without laying the necessary ideological, political and organizational basis for it.’’∂ Beyond political usurpation, the Marcos regime was also a machine for the monopolization of the practices of value extraction hinged on the energies of the developing and restive social forces of production, whom Marcos gave the mythical and moralistic title of the poor. We might even say the crony capitalist state is precisely this machinery of monopolization that became the new elite’s containment and exploitation of the social antagonisms of the postwar period, manifested by virulent warlordism and banditry as well as by peasant and labor struggles and student-led militant nationalist movements. Marcos’s words for describing the newfound belief of the poor—‘‘the great potency of the political act’’ and ‘‘the miraculous powers of politics’’—today ring with the meaning of a distinct reference: ‘‘power politics.’’ It seems ironic that what Marcos attributed to the poor at that particular historical moment should now be widely accepted in academic scholarship as well as in popular civil discourse as the central tenet of a Filipino political-economic system that has essentially remain unchanged since the period of U.S. colonialism. (As I discuss further at the end of this chapter, it only seems ironic if one doesn’t take into account the ends to which this present consensus tends to be put.) To my mind, the routinization of practices referred to as power politics— reeking of graft and corruption, favoritism, and personalist rather than rational behavior in bureaucratic and private business a√airs—is precisely the historical outcome of the fraught relationship between, on the one hand, what scholars have called the patrimonial state, which I have already suggested is a form of what Achille Mbembe calls postcolonial commandment, and, on the other hand, the restive subordinate classes, including the ‘‘rebellious poor.’’∑ In my view, the emergent crony capitalist state, of which the Marcos regime was a paradigmatic

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instance (before crony capitalism went global), can be understood as a regime of accumulation that has a broader social basis and more specific historical provenance than simplistic pronouncements of corruption, influence peddling, and economic opportunism would lead us to believe.∏ This social basis is comprised of practices of living and modes of subjectivity forged under conditions of postand neocolonialism that are not easily categorized in terms of outright resistance or domination. These practices of livelihood depend on and cultivate the tributary system of revenue collection and allocation through privileged relations, which characterizes the postcolonial state, while at the same time they operated as strategies of eluding and breaking state rules and controls. Even as such practices of survival serve as resources of struggle, activism, and revolt, they are channeled into an institutionalized national system of social theft. I have designated these practices and their subjective modalities by the categorical name of adventurism. My concern here is to argue for the need to reinterpret or reevaluate the failures and lacks attributed to Philippine society— failure to progress, politically and economically—in order to recognize the politics, or creative negotiations with power, of practices that might appear to be simply reproductive instances of a prevailing logic of domination and exploitation. This is an e√ort to move away from liberal reformism as well as from the Left’s conventionally denigrating view of the subjects and practices of the dangerous, ‘‘parasitical’’ classes. For the Left, adventurism is political opportunism, the premature seizure of power exemplified by urban insurrectionists and renegade state military forces. In the words of Sison, it is ‘‘the political disease of over-estimating one’s own forces and resorting to actions which take the form of infantile radicalism.’’π In my own use, however, adventurism can also be understood as a modality of imaginative practice and social experience whose political potential exceeds the ends to which it has been put. In this chapter, I turn to the poetry of Jose Lacaba, a poet, journalist, and screenplay writer, for such forms of imaginative practice, which, I argue, accompany and shape and are internal to the conditions comprising social crisis. I try to think about these forms as generative forces, not necessarily of good changes or structures and not unequivocally progressive in their political outcomes, yet at the same time not simply microinstances of state practice. To my mind petty forms and their connotations of trivial, derivative, and nonoriginal practice raise interesting questions about the dynamics of power and the role of the fringes of entrenched classes in the main-

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tenance and transformation of prevailing social relations. My purpose here is to explore di√erent ways of understanding the modes of power and production that operate in postcolonial social formations and, therefore, for seeing the di√erent forms that everyday struggles take.

Postwar Crisis After the near collapse of the neocolonial Philippine economy in the period after the Second World War, the Philippine government’s imposition of import and exchange controls led to moderate growth in domestic industries and a more diversified economic elite. Production of domestic consumer goods and secondary industries increased urban work and led to a dramatic expansion of urban centers, especially Manila and Cebu. But state corruption reached an all-time high, and the import and currency regime led to the emergence of new cronies, businessmen whose close ties to state o≈cials gave them easy access to dollar allocation and import privileges. President Carlos Garcia’s Filipino First policy benefited the elite classes, and income distribution remained skewed in favor of a burgeoning wealthy class. In 1957, the top 20 percent of Filipino families received 55 percent of total income, while the lowest 20 percent received only 4.5 percent. The succeeding president, Diosdado Macapagal (1961–65), promised to open the Philippine economy to world trade and welcomed foreign investment. In 1962, he implemented currency decontrol, i.e., the devaluation of the peso, an early appearance of neoliberalist strategy, which meant the devaluation of real incomes of working classes. By 1965, when Marcos was elected, the country was sinking into deeper and deeper economic crisis and intensifying social contradictions. The nation that had prided itself on being the most advanced in the region faced massive economic problems. Industries could not absorb the growing numbers of people seeking work in cities, as a consequence of agricultural crisis in the rural areas, resulting in the growing urban proletarian underclass, or what I have been calling the urban excess.∫ Marcos’s reelection campaign in 1969 plunged the country into yet another balance of payment crisis as the result of his raiding of the public treasury for campaign funds. Student and labor protests grew in frequency and intensity. The declaration of martial law on September 23, 1972, resulted in the arrest of thousands of Marcos’s opponents as well as in the raiding and closing down of

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schools, religious establishments, newspapers, and radio and television stations. Silent support by the U.S. government, which believed in the strengthening of state authority for the purposes of ensuring political stability for a sound business environment and the protection of foreign investments, served as international sanction for this state of a√airs. It was during this turbulent period when Jose Lacaba, while still a college student, began his writing career as a poet. He came from an urban middle-class family. His older brother was Emmanuel Lacaba, a famous politically moderate student leader who abandoned urban life to join the armed struggle in the countryside after martial law was declared and was killed by the Philippine military in the early 1970s. Having dropped out of college in his junior year, Jose, or Pete, as he is called, was a young journalist at that time who wrote for the leading newspaper, the Philippines Free Press and covered radical student demonstrations in a new partisan style called ‘‘New Journalism.’’ During those years as a journalist, he came to know many student leaders and labor activists and became increasingly involved in the cultural activist movement. When martial law was declared, he went underground. Imprisoned by Marcos in 1974 for his partisan journalism and subversive activities, he was pardoned when his former editor, Nick Joaquin, a renowned writer who was named National Artist by the regime, asked Marcos to release Lacaba in exchange for his acceptance of the award. Lacaba was released on the day after his brother was reported to have been killed. He was unable to continue his journalistic career. After he was released from prison in 1976, Lacaba worked in a government information o≈ce (all but a couple of newspapers were shut down) and then began writing screenplays for commercial cinema, including protest, social realist films that eventually became part of what is now known as the Second Golden Age of Philippine cinema. Pete Lacaba’s life thus diverged from that of his revolutionary brother, who lived out the political ideal the younger one depicted but did not pursue. It is precisely this more contingent relation to revolutionary politics that makes for the adventurist forms of social experiences I read in his writing. To view the forms of social experience I call adventurism and their relation to more proper modes of political activism, I look at both his journalistic prose and the poems he wrote during this convulsive time before martial law and his flight underground. In his rendering of this time, we glimpse the practices of experience that generated the very conditions of unrest on which history was about to me made.

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Amazing Adventures In Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage, Lacaba’s collection of journalistic writings on the First Quarter Storm, we have an active recording of this moment: ‘‘It was a glorious time, a time of terror and of wrath, but also a time for hope. The signs of change were on the horizon. A powerful storm was sweeping the land, a storm whose inexorable advance no earthly force could stop, and the name of the storm was history.’’Ω In Lacaba’s reportage of the violent street battles between students and police we see the experiential structure shaping this storm called history as one of confrontation and antagonism. The contradiction expressed in the back and forth physical movements of the contending forces as the violent pull and clash (the ‘‘seesaw battle’’) of opposing poles is repeated in the syntax of Lacaba’s prose: ‘‘No money could be spared for public schools but billions were fed into the maws of the insatiable military beast. While Filipinos got shot like wild boars on U.S. military bases, a ‘civic action’ contingent was dispatched, in exchange for a few dollars, to support the American war in Vietnam.’’∞≠ The intensification of social contradictions into an untenable antagonism, which is thematized in many works of protest during this time,∞∞ produces a new, visceral quality about the streets: ‘‘life and energy and anger’’ animate the alleys and crannies of the city; activists and residents are thrown together, ‘‘surprised by their own unity, buoyed up by their new-found audacity, all their senses tingling to strange new sensations.’’∞≤ This new, visceral experience, this ‘‘common exhilaration,’’ occurs as the consequence of one’s being swept into the space event of class confrontation. As the site of urban clashes, where social contradictions violently erupt, the street thus becomes the place where one is shaken out of the alienated detachment of spectatorship and propelled into action.∞≥ In his collection of poems Mga Kagila-gilalas na Pakikipagsapalaran (Amazing or Wondrous Adventures), Lacaba attempts to re-create this vitalizing experience of urban shock through scenes of discordance in order to render the violence of everyday life anew.∞∂ These poems convey a perverse sense of the marvelous. They are verse kernels of the modern grotesque, full of clashes of the banal and the absurd. In ‘‘Sa Kanto ng Langit at Laong Laan’’ (On the Corner of Heaven and Ever-Ready Streets), the clash occurs in a literal road crash accident:

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The jeepney I was on, son ofabitch, lost its brakes. It missed the guy in jockey shorts, but someone in a mini who looked like a bargirl, in a hurry to cross the street, oh shit! got crushed when our jeepney banged into the taxicab ahead of us. The lady’s handbag flew into the air and there followed a merry mixup: her hips got pulverized; she turned bandy-legged; her mouth gaped open but made no sound; her lipsticked lips turned white; and down came her panties. Shantih, shantih, shantih. ... When the cops arrived, they all got a hard-on at the sight of the woman raped by jeepney and taxicab. This is what happened. I am the witness.

The persona of the poem is jolted into witnessing a shocking, violent event that turns out to be an o≈cially unremarkable occurrence (‘‘There wasn’t even a line in the papers / about the mess that took place’’). Making a mockery of peace, this everyday violence of modern urban life (suggested to be a ‘‘wasteland’’ by the quotation of the famous last line—‘‘Shantih shantih shantih’’ [‘‘the peace which passeth understanding’’]—of T. S. Eliot’s poem) is seen as continuous with and furthered by the sexual violence of a lascivious gaze aligned with the police. Here, although the witness-persona is implicated in the spectacular violence he witnesses, the detachment with which he views the occurrence separates his witnessing from the ogling gaze of the police. His wonder is a wonder without the sexual drive, and it is in this aimless amazement that his witnessing becomes a perverse vehicle for seeing the violence as opposed to merely continu190

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ing the violence through seeing. The wonder of his regard becomes the prism through which we as readers are to be startled into a suspension of that belief in the normalcy of everyday life on which the enjoyment of its violence depends.

Sadyang Gulo (Deliberate Disorder) Many of Lacaba’s poems convey this startling e√ect, a sense of surprise that is meant to nudge one out of immobility and bring one down to earth. In ‘‘Nakatingin sa bituin’’ (Staring at the Stars), the persona’s heavenly reverie is broken by his stepping on a cake of carabao shit. And in ‘‘Sabado ng Hapon’’ (Saturday Afternoon), the tranquil afternoon is interrupted by an airplane, a rupture intensified by the persona’s desire to see it explode. Lacaba writes in the preface, ‘‘In this collection there are many examples of a sudden giving of the reader of things s/he is not expecting, or of a not-giving of what s/he is expecting.’’ The poem ‘‘Uyayi’’ (Lullaby) demonstrates this strategy of springing the unexpected, withholding the expected, which conveys the disturbance immanent in a situation of apparent bliss, peace, or equanimity: Ang bunso’y ko’y mabait, tahimik na pipikit, agad na mahihimbing kahit di nilalambing. ... Tila hindi totoong anak ka ng tatay mo, pagkat wala kang hilig sa mga yapos, halik, na noon ay istorbo sa aking pagtrabaho. Ngayon kaya ay sino ang kanyang ginugulo? [My youngest is good and kind, Quietly he will close his eyes, Quickly he will fall asleep Even if he is not caressed. Petty Adventures in the Capital

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... Seems you are really not your father’s son: for you’re not at all fond of the hugs and kisses that then were a bother when I had work to do. I wonder, I wonder who he’s disturbing now.]

In troubling the reader at the end of the lullaby poem with something that has been troubling all along—here the infidelity of the absent father—Lacaba articulates the experience of a hidden but abiding crisis. This experience of immanent trouble is suggested in the repeated structure of contrast in many of Lacaba’s poems between tahimik (quiet, peaceful) and gulo [mess, disorder, chaos). The epigraph to the collection, ‘‘Pagkat sinadya po ang anumang gulo’’ (Because any chaos was on purpose), describes this strategy as an intended unruliness or deliberate chaos. Indeed, the ever-immanent upsetting of what appears at first to be an orderly form expresses the modality of experience of activist ferment. On the one hand, we get the experience of irregularity in the face of the regularizing and normalizing imperatives of dominant and hegemonic forms. We do not get this experience only in the content of the poems. We also get it in the jarring e√ect of its slightly o√ rhymes and meter, produced by Lacaba’s uneven adherence to the rules of tugma at sukat (rhyme and meter) in traditional Tagalog poetry, from which earlier modernist works had departed completely. Note, for example, the imperfect rhymes, istorbo/pagtrabaho and sino/ginugulo in the last poem (written in traditional heptasyllabic form) as well as the inconsistency, rather than complete absence, of meter in the poem ‘‘Sa Kanto ng Langit at Laong Laan.’’ In form and content, Lacaba’s poems rehearse the dialectic between law and transgression, between peace and disorder. On the other hand, we get the experience of contingency. The introduction of contingency by means of irregular form, by apparently idle propositions of explosion and peace-rupturing utterances as well as rhythms that fall short, produces the e√ect of having the rug pulled out from under one’s feet. This experience of the immanence of change—the sudden opening up of a space of 192

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possibility invisible on the smooth, regulated surfaces of normalized urban life— expresses both the restlessness that fuels activism and the experience of contingency that is the product and provision of activist mobilization. Restlessness lies, after all, in the experience of society as stasis and containment. As Lacaba discovered while covering student demonstrations, contingency was the experience of the historically recent and newly conscious social strata, untethered from traditional social bonds by education, constituted by militant university youth: ‘‘They have learned, for one thing, that by themselves they are nothing; they do not even constitute a class in society and their existence as students is transitory.’’∞∑ Street demonstrations were precisely attempts to make the ruling social order itself transitory—a generalization of the experience of contingency and transience of the laboring classes, with whom students had thrown in their lot. In his more direct protest poem from which the title of the collection is taken, ‘‘Ang mga kagila-gilalas na pakikipagsapalaran ni Juan de la Cruz’’ (The Amazing Adventures of Juan de la Cruz), Lacaba conveys this experience of transience by constructing situation after situation of impossibility and prohibition for the common tao [person]. The ‘‘amazing adventures’’ of Juan de la Cruz, the stock colonial figure of the Filipino everyman reinvented as a would-be flaneur, consist of a series of collisions between the desires borne by his body (‘‘pusturangpustura / kahit walang laman ang bulsa’’ (All spruced up / though with empty pockets) and the outer sign-strictures of metropolitan command everywhere blatantly constraining those desires: ‘‘bawal manigarilyo’’ (smoking prohibited), ‘‘bawal pumarada’’ (parking prohibited), ‘‘bawal umihi’’ (pissing prohibited), ‘‘keep off the grass,’’ ‘‘your credit is good but we need cash’’ (in English in the original text.). The repeated expulsion of Juan from every parcel of urban space that he sets foot on finally propels him out of the city altogether and into rural armed struggle: When Juan de la Cruz could swallow no more clutching a machete his clothes all tattered and torn his pockets still empty he ran up Mount Arayat the emaciated Petty Adventures in the Capital

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Juan de la Cruz wanted dead or alive said the military who blamed the goddam kids for agitating such a peaceful citizen as Juan de la Cruz.

Written at the height of urban radical student and labor movements and the launch of the armed communist movement in the countryside, Lacaba’s poem captures a principal social experience and dynamic that would characterize the succeeding decades of urban life under Marcos’s authoritarian rule. Like Jun Cruz Reyes, whose narrator’s experience of forced homelessness similarly portrays this broader social experience and dynamic, Lacaba’s ironic tone conveys the ‘‘magical’’ logic of the New Society and the lived aporia that the urban poor have to contend with within this prohibitive regime of signs. In this protest poem, Lacaba depicts the situation of forced homelessness in a foreclosed urban space as the very contradiction of the peace, law, and order these prohibitive signs everywhere purport to keep. The city as a brutal, violent world in which the rich and powerful crushed simple, often rural people’s dreams was a familiar theme in the socially conscious and realist Tagalog literature emerging out of the 1960s and would continue as a salient theme of many social realist films made under martial law, including the landmark film by Lino Brocka Maynila, Sa Kuko ng Liwanag (Maynila, At the Claws of Daylight), the screenplay of which was written by Lacaba. In a reversal of the typical relations of the country and the city portrayed in the postwar period, both Lacaba’s screenplay and protest poem epitomized a newly politicized urban experience of the metropolis as a space where future promise and transformative possibility were foreclosed, a historical experience which impelled legions of young men and women to join the revolutionary armed struggle in the countryside. As exemplified in the poem about Juan de la Cruz, Lacaba’s work exhibits the dialectical structure of prohibition and transgression shaping his poetic action. The strategy of deliberate unruliness becomes the mode of liberation from the disciplinary sociosymbolic order everywhere imposing itself on human desires and potential and soon to be expressed by the New Society slogan: ‘‘Sa ikauunlad ng Bayan, disiplina ang kailangan’’ (For the development of the Nation, 194

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discipline is necessary). Hence the iconoclastic attitudes and destructive acts rendered in many of these poems. As opposed to the pious resignation to divine and divine-like authority everywhere exacted from the lowly folk and against the necessary character of its rule, here we grasp a faithlessness, irreverence, and repulsion for the power of transcendence. Thus the kagila-gilalas (wondrous) appearance of things stems from a denatured perception of the absence of sense that abounds. In search of a presence to fill in the empty space confronting him—he whose lack of attachment to anything permanent or lasting makes him precisely that ‘‘lawless element’’ floating about—the urban apostate turns to his surroundings and finds the people. Coming down to earth becomes a strategy of getting closer to the people, not only by attending to their mundane concerns but also by giving mundane expression to poetic experience. Against the universal humanism of much commonwealth and postindependence Philippine literature in English, Philippine literature in Tagalog in the 1960s began to heed the nationalist imperative to move toward the common people, becoming what Luis Teodoro described as ‘‘a new stage in which writing is in the process of becoming one of the ‘ordinary’ person’s responses to situations that are themselves rapidly changing.’’∞∏ For Lacaba, this move toward ‘‘ordinary’’ people entailed a linguistic move toward the language and speech forms of urbanizing folk rather than the traditional language of classical Tagalog poetry. As Lacaba recalls of the informal group of poets he belonged to, besides the theoretical and philosophical orientation toward phenomenology and existentialism that the poet Rolando Tinio was articulating for them as a whole, ‘‘We Bagay [Thing] poets were also interested in using living Tagalog, that was spoken in actual conversation, not the deep Tagalog in poems published in textbooks—those ones of Corazon de Jesus, Ildefonso Santos, that sort of thing. . . . As for me, I was experimenting then with the use of traditional forms though in colloquial language, the simple everyday Tagalog. After all, I wasn’t originally Tagalog, and I didn’t have a wide vocabulary in deep Tagalog. What I knew was the Tagalog of Pateros and Pasig, which had a bit of an accent, but wasn’t far from the Tagalog of Manila. In fact, eventually Pateros and Pasig became part of Metro Manila.’’∞π Eschewing ‘‘deep’’ Tagalog, the language of a distinct region, Lacaba wrote in the more elementary, ‘‘shallow’’ lingua franca of an expanding urban population. The move toward ordinary people through the colloquialization of poetic speech also entailed, for Lacaba, translating the mythical and the sacred into the Petty Adventures in the Capital

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banal and the commonplace, thereby reversing the practices of ideological mystification of the ruling elite. In ‘‘Pasyong Mahal ni San Jose’’ (The Sacred Passion of Saint Joseph), an imperfectly rhyming eight-syllable quintet recalling the traditional short poem, tanaga, Saint Joseph’s ‘‘sacred passion’’ is so familiarized and profaned that he can be portrayed as having been cuckolded by God: ‘‘An angel tells me there’s nothing / for me to be ashamed of, / there’s no reason to cry; / in fact, I should be glad / ’cause my girl’s been raped by God.’’ Expressively enacted through a faithless, cynical obedience to sacred power (in the same irregular manner in which Lacaba obeys and transgresses the norms of traditional poetry), sacrilege, rather than demystification, becomes both the precondition and consequence of siding with the people who are coerced into submitting to the powers of the putatively divine. ‘‘The weak and the small,/I hear, are no match for Heaven.’’

Pakikibagay: Conformity and Pertinence As the poem ‘‘Pasyong Mahal ni San Jose’’ illustrates, Lacaba’s mundane expression entails practices of pakikibagay (accommodation, literally, sharing in / becoming things). On one side, this refers to practices of moving with and among the masses as the potential tide of history. In this regard, pakikibagay means adopting (or adapting to) the contemporary, communicative, and a√ective means of common people as well as a new, unsentimental, realist attention to concrete things (bagay) in everyday life, principles that were espoused by the Bagay poetry movement in keeping with the tenor of the times.∞∫ Hence in ‘‘Pasyong Mahal ni San Jose,’’ Saint Joseph speaks in the colloquial speech of an ordinary carpenter to confide his painful secret to the double-edged tool of his work—pait (bitterness or chisel). This mundane expression of sainthood as abject masculinity de-idealizes martyrdom, turning the same object means of common su√ering (pait as bitterness) into an object means of cleavage with such su√ering (pait as chisel). In this aspect, pakikibagay operates as a practice of achieving the a√ective detachment and disbelief of critical consciousness. On the other side, pakikibagay consists of conforming practices of accommodation, making oneself amenable to the surrounding mode (what Reyes calls nakikiuso, or ‘‘fitting in,’’ a practice of accommodation to present times or the mode in fashion [uso]). Lacaba’s strategy of correlation and correspondence with the mundane is, however, distinct from what Reyes deplores as the practice 196

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of pakikibagay sa lugar (conforming to one’s surroundings), which Reyes derogatorily equates with imitation, as a practice of conforming to ideal forms that reproduce the authoritarian social order. In the face of this prevalent everyday practice, Reyes deploys a counterstrategy of ironic reversal and bad faith. While Lacaba also deploys irony, his practice of pakikibagay does not produce the truth-impelled structure of negation toward which strategies of proper protest tend. As a matter of adapting to the modes of survival of the growing deracinated population, pakikibagay becomes an act of experimentation and manipulation of things rather than an act of representation of meaning. For Reyes, surrounding objects contain deposited meanings that need to be interpreted. In this way, his scavenging for history through urban remains can be seen to bear suggestive a≈nities with contemporary forms of postcolonial ethnography, which seek to uncover ‘‘the ghosts of other times, their forms and logics, their structures and irrational undersides.’’∞Ω Found objects are the repository of unconscious history, repressed violence, and exploitation. For Lacaba, whose work and time may be considered the forehistory of Reyes’s, such objects are something to interact with, something with which one is in active, direct relations with, entailing relations other than relations of interpretation, memory, and consciousness. We have only to think about the function of the uppercased sign objects in the poem ‘‘Ang mga kagila-gilalas na pakikipagsapalaran ni Juan de la Cruz’’ to see how for Lacaba word objects are less about meaning than about (in this case, prohibitive) action. After all, what Marcos called ‘‘the great potency of the political act’’ consisted precisely of largely symbolic and yet materially forceful, even life-altering, gestures. During this period of radical political movements, a new militancy thus developed around the use of words, made evident on city surfaces as well as in pamphlets, placards, slogans, and poetry: ‘‘A new word writ in blood, with an ultimatum / on walls, convents, palaces and buildings.’’≤≠ Words became tools for defacing the edifices of state power and delegitimating its rule. Given the increasingly physical repressive forces of the state that intellectuals, journalists, and writers faced, words for them came to have the materiality and political pertinence of things. As we saw in chapter 4, in Tutubi, Tutubi as well as in his collection of short stories Utos ng Hari (King’s Command), Reyes attempts to capture the conditions of casuals (casual labor / casualties of development)—‘‘kaming mga walang modo’’ (we who are out of fashion)—as the representational means for attaining a subversive consciousness. Overturning the modus operandi of the Petty Adventures in the Capital

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times by means of sarcasm and interior monologues, that consciousness finds the real sense beneath the ‘‘plastik’’ superficies of the ruling classes, a sense finally embodied in an idealized revolutionary masculinity. In contrast to this comic subversion and parody of the fads and facades of the New Society, Lacaba does not create a deep space for reflection within his poetry. Rather he exteriorizes the ironies of the times, producing the experience of external contradiction on the very surface of everyday words and things—simulating, for example, the magical prohibitive action of signs on Juan de la Cruz with symbolic enactments of the impossible, nonsensical logic governing everyday life. Word signs are staged as the emblems, icons, and images of the thaumaturgical powers of the ruling order, which strip the common man of agency and dignity, like poor ‘‘saintly’’ Joseph, cuckolded by God. In this way, Lacaba’s poetry can be understood as an iconoclastic display of the violent, godlike potency of all-too-human powers. Making the urban surface text an impossible place where sense and meaning, as all that is good and fair and all that divine compassion might represent, are banished, Lacaba re-creates the conditions propelling radical transgression and escape, conditions on which militant activist movements also depended.≤∞

Adventurism, Graft, and Corruption, and Writing by One’s Wits Before this transgressive energy comes to be channeled into conditions of activism and eventually revolution, however, the shallowness and studied superficiality of the practice of pakikibagay can be viewed as modes that enable the urban poor to cope and survive under conditions of flux and crisis. In the famous poem ‘‘Paksiw na Ayungin’’ (Fish Cooked in Vinegar), for example, Lacaba demonstrates the practice of pakikibagay as the practice of conformity to one’s circumstance. Eating slowly becomes the way in which a meager dish is stretched out into a full meal, through a meticulous enumeration of the complicated, belabored operations involved in eating a fish. This meditation on devaluation enacts the very process by which people accommodate themselves to the conditions of devaluation—that is, the very way in which people devalue themselves (through their subjective capacity to extend their food and thereby diminish their needs and desires) as the laborious condition of possibility for the devaluation of its currency.≤≤ An instruction on patience as the very form and content of the resourcefulness of the exploited classes (as patience is the resource on which one draws, to be resourceful is to have patience), the poem 198

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mimics the stretching operations through which those classes support their own exploitation. Just as the practice of pakikibagay codifies such experiential modes of coping —devaluation as the accommodation of oneself to given object means of subsistence—so the practice of sadyang gulo (intended anarchy) as purposive irregularity and contingency codify certain reproductive modes of experience attributed in particular to that stratum of urban poor called the lumpen proletariat. I want to suggest therefore that the practices of experience deployed in Lacaba’s work have di√erent modalities, which can be seen to serve, on the one hand, as experiential-infrastructural supports of activism and, on the other, as modes comprising adventurism (which in Lacaba’s poetry consists of the risk-taking practices conveyed by the notion of pakikipagsapalaran) and other modes ascribed to the lumpen proletariat. The experience of radical contingency and of the unfinished quality or mutability of reality that enables activism can also be seen to operate as the condition of possibility of petty graft and corruption. If adventurism indicates a premature deployment of revolutionary potential in a direct bid for state power, it is this bid for immediate power that lends these modes to cooptation. That is to say, the creative, transformative energies and capacities that might drive adventurism are undercut by the concession of monopolized shares of power and wealth, which is precisely the institutionalized practice of the crony capitalist regime. The fixer, who briefly appears in Reyes’s work as the ubiquitous and paradigmatic figure of low-level bureaucratic corruption, is also the unfixer of systems, one who realizes the mutability of bureaucratic rules and is thereby able to create a cut through the political machinery, the fixing of which becomes the service rendered for a fee (the cut exacts a surplus). The operative principle here is precisely what is at work in higher-level graft and corruption, that is, in the regime of bureaucratic-capitalist accumulation. The extraction of value through what we might understand as forms of infixing and a≈xing—the interstitial taxes levied at various syntactical points within the machine and the rents exacted by filial and a≈liative social connections to state o≈ces, exemplarily, the o≈ce of the president—constitutes the principles of graft and corruption that apply across social strata and comprise the logic of crony capitalism.≤≥ This logic of value generation and value extraction is predicated upon the nonrecognition of the solidity and foundational immutability of the game-systems of power bequeathed to the Philippines by modern colonialism, e.g., democratic governPetty Adventures in the Capital

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ment and the capitalist market. It is predicated upon making the laws of these reality systems bend and give way and lend themselves to fixing. Such is the situation in which irregulars, or informal workers, can magically, productively insert themselves as fixers. Marcos himself was a master fixer. That he was also a supreme confidence man only goes to show that the institutional foundations for generalized confidence, which are laid down in fully modernized societies, are here made negotiable— indeed, made into the very means of negotiation.≤∂ This created indeterminacy and plasticity of the law, the state, the banking system, and other purportedly neutral institutions of bourgeois capitalism compel one to put one’s confidence (and money) in the man or fixer. Rather than faith in the objective abstract institutions of civil society characteristic of fully modernized economies, the practice of fixing exacts a confidence in personal and social routines.≤∑ That confidence is itself a form of capital that can serve as the means of extraction of value. We could go so far as to say that this produced situation of instability and indetermination and reliance on personal-social guarantees constitutes that very high flexibility of political-economic institutions to which some analysts have attributed the East Asian miracle, particularly the Southeast Asian boom of the 1980–90s (in the Philippines, experienced during the Ramos administration, 1992–98).≤∏ My point here, however, is that the conditions of flexibility to which both crony capitalism and, later, neoliberal market capitalism owe their respective and relative successes are in no small way shaped by the activities of informal labor. These activities include the generation of the instability and indetermination on which casual or irregular work depend, characteristics that then become attributes of this social strata, e.g., the volatility of the lumpen proletariat. In Lacaba’s work we can see the operation of some of the experiential modes that support the illicit routines of informal production.≤π The fixing of a meal in ‘‘Paksiw ng Ayungin,’’ for example, symbolically extracts a form of fullness from the mean fare. Lacaba’s technique of irregularizing, or unfixing, otherwise regular rhymes and meter can be likened to the realization of surplus-producing cuts in the system. The surplus provided by such formal disruptions is a pleasure based on release or escape from dominant social conventions represented by traditional Tagalog poetry.≤∫ Thematically, this pleasure of release is provided by imagining a turn in events, by cutting a new possible scene within the stringent order of everyday life. In ‘‘Sa Kanto’’ (At the Corner), Lacaba patiently rehearses 200

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the mean rut of his daily commute and his forlorn attempts to dignify his forced pedestrian march before the indi√erent glances of tricycle drivers who wait for fares at the corner where he walks: ‘‘They know just like before / I will not ride— their inquisitive brows and fingers / no longer rise, / and they no longer threaten to come near.’’ Experiencing his superfluity in this daily urban scene, he finally muses, ‘‘One day, I think I should/surprise them, ride in one, waste a dime. / Then what would they say?’’ The imagined destruction of fixed expectations enacts the hoped-for digression from the accustomed route. In other words, the persona’s speculative act is the turn in events he desires—it is itself the liberative release. We might compare this poem to Elynia Mabanglo’s poem ‘‘Pahabol ng Dyip’’ (Running after a Jeep), in which the persona similarly rehearses her mechanization through the numbing monotony of modern urban life. While Mabanglo’s persona stands apart from the modern rut she finds herself in, thereby achieving a desiring subjectivity in opposition to it, Lacaba’s persona is inextricable from the situation confronting him, for the situation he confronts is precisely his signifying function in the presence of the tricycle drivers (‘‘My shoes are dusty / already almost as white as the asphalt street’’). Put di√erently, the persona’s subjectification ‘‘at the corner’’—his self-recognition as a fixture for others, a fixed signifier—is the urban situation he encounters. The imaginary act of unfixing this everyday life sentence one is condemned to bear opens a space not merely for new possibilities of signification but for one’s agency as the fixer of the new signifying act. This poetic action of altering the field of signification by means of a seemingly empty symbolic gesture is an example of those experiential modes supporting informal and flexible labor, modes which are incorporated, along with extant modes of the landed elite, in the regime of accumulation personified by the Marcos state. It demonstrates the dialectics of rule making and rule breaking that become characteristic of the new regime, as exhibited by the state’s contradictory reform and plunder behavior.≤Ω In its realization of the urban scene as a space for fate-playing action (realizing it as a space of radical contingency), the speculative gesture in Lacaba’s poetry can be viewed as a form of adventurism. Speculation is not an envisioning of future action—it is the exercise of one’s power over the present on the grounds of a posited future, or, more accurately, it is itself a form of predictive action, one that helps to bring into being the future it imagines as its basis. For Antonio Gramsci, prediction is a form of practical action: ‘‘In reality one can ‘foresee’ to Petty Adventures in the Capital

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the extent that one acts, to the extent that one applies a voluntary e√ort and therefore contributes concretely to creating the result ‘foreseen’. Prediction reveals itself thus not as a scientific act of knowledge, but as the abstract expression of the e√ort made, the practical way of creating a collective will.’’≥≠ I liken the speculative action exemplified in Lacaba’s poetry to adventurism not simply because it enacts an inflated sense of one’s own power (the power of one’s prediction), but also because of the pleasurable excitement it takes in the open horizon which it, as an act of hazarding the present and all its guarantees, creates. While the pleasure a√orded by Lacaba’s speculative act is meager, it is nevertheless a real surplus to the extent that it literally comes out of nothing. This making something out of nothing is an example of the kind of magic Reyes portrays as the appearance of corruption. It is also of a kind with the practice that culture of poverty studies call living by one’s wits, to the extent that it is characterized by a quickness in seizing opportunities of income generation and a quickness of mind which is inseparable from the service o√ered in the opportunity seized.≥∞ The poem ‘‘Bagay-bagay’’ (Things), for example, consists of found objects whose arrangements are contingent and fleeting, such as ‘‘ang rosaryo ng gagamba ’’ (the spider’s rosary). These objects are themselves the product of a quick eye, a seized moment. On this view, Lacaba’s poetry might be understood as a kind of writing by one’s wits. Wit is the capacity to make something, an event such as perception or knowledge, out of nothing—that is, out of a purely symbolic turn. In ‘‘Sa Isip Lang’’ (Only in Thought), the poetic persona shuns the scandal that the act of his lascivious speculation creates. Idle thought produces a new situation, a real event. In ‘‘Halaw Kay Su Tung-Po’’ (Acquired from Su TungPo), the wit of the lower classes is achieved by means of reversal through mimicry of the logic of the ruling class: Because my life was ruined by intelligence, I want my child to grow up foolish and dumb. That way he will lead a quiet life, and at a ripe age will even become a senator. 202

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Here the ruling class’s capacity to make something (power) out of nothing is at once ridiculed and emulated. Or, better, it is held up (in the proverb form) as something to adapt oneself to or conform with, in the sense of makibagay. It is emulated but with a creative twist or symbolic turn. It is this twist that demonstrates the wit the persona ostensibly wants to deprive his child of as a way of guaranteeing the latter’s success in life. Wit is, however, the persona’s trump card, the product and practice of a skill, an intelligence (talino), which here serves as the means of his self-valorization. It is in this way a substitute pleasure or compensation for his own being as the nothing out of which others (exemplarily, the cronies exposed in the famous pamphlet, ‘‘Some Are Smarter than Others’’) make their fortune. The twist might be better understood as a practice of palusot (referring to a narrow escape, most often a rhetorical move made in argument), for palusot, or squeezing through, describes the motion through which such compensatory pleasure is produced. When I refer to Lacaba’s poetry as a ‘‘writing by one’s wits’’ I am referring precisely to the style of writing one’s way out of a tight, preordained situation. The wise guy persona of these poems is that way which is made in the act of squeezing through a symbolic rift (we might say, it is the subject effect of a waylaying action). The subject produced by this writing as palusot is a fixer of signification, a playful signifier who can squeeze into and out of a narrow paradigmatic space that is opened up precisely by means of a cutting action.≥≤ These experiential practices of pakikibagay and palusot constitute a form of subjectivity that is experimental, superficial, and transient. Rather than rational economic man, the self o√ered here is a tentative postulate, yielding economic benefit through its insertion into a gap which it itself creates. Despite its ostensible postmodern appearance, this form of postulated subjectivity is not merely a cultural e√ect of postindustrial capitalism. Forged out of the kagila-gilalas na pakikipagsapalaran (amazing adventures) of the refuse of development, it is rather the instrument and form of struggle on the part of the superfluous populations of modernization, a struggle that impels the reorganization of capitalist production and its cultural apparatuses. As such, it is not merely the constant feature of some enduring Philippine political-economic structure. Nor is it merely the e√ect of the institution of new techniques and organizational forms of production under the regime of flexible accumulation.≥≥ On the contrary, we might see the new cultural conditions of postmodernity such as conditions of ephemerPetty Adventures in the Capital

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ality, flux, dispersal, etc., as in no small part the product of this emergent global stratum of urban informal labor.≥∂ My understanding of these experiential practices and socioeconomic routines that Lacaba performs recognizes within them continuities with older or premodern sociosubjective forms that persist in new ways under modern capitalism as well as creative innovations on those forms. The figure of the fixer, for example, draws on other social figures of intercession within community life. It is a figure that is fashioned with and as part of the resources relied upon by a people colonially subjected to the strange, incomprehensible, largely arbitrary rules of a foreign machine of governance. The service such a figure provides depends upon the capacity to coordinate or manipulate links between, on the one hand, the gaps in comprehension on the part of the sociality in whose behalf the fixer operates and, on the other, his own subjective malleability, in such a way that he can become the means by which a gap is filled or fixed. In order to render this service, the fixer acts neither as the atomized individual of modern urban society, represented by formal labor, nor as the socially syncretic being of traditional communities, represented by feminized labor; neither as a free subject cast in the money form nor as an unfree object cast in the commodity form. Rather he acts as some thing (bagay) with the capacity to make valuable and value-generative connections, insertions, and shortcuts within the signifying systems regulating the accumulation and extraction of power and wealth in the postcolony. Like infixes, prefixes, and su≈xes, fixers are inflective, formative, and conjugating social elements, manipulating the rules of daily life in a situation of unfair exchange, endemic injustice, and arbitrary violence. They are adventurists emerging out of the urban excess whose conditions of possibility are similar to what I’ve described as the conditions facing women in the last decades of the century: conditions of daily uncertainty and chance in employment and subsistence, dispossession and devaluation. And yet the gender di√erences that obtain between feminized labor and the urban lumpen proletariat have important consequences. Femininity accrues to selves acting as commodities, their value not their own; masculinity accrues to selves acting as fixers for gaps they open in order to rent value. Such gendered di√erences shape the political ideals to which di√erent social actors, despite sharing conditions of oppression, will aspire. While Mabanglo renders the adventurism of women ‘‘changing-land’’ in terms of the mediating powers of women and their virtuosic practice of freedom, Lacaba renders the ‘‘amazing adventures’’ of the superfluous labor populations 204

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in terms of practices of survival of the abject, defeated, and ‘‘cuckolded’’ masculinities under the thumbs of brutal and grotesquely aggressive forms of hypermasculinity exemplified by politicians, policemen, bosses, gods, and kings. These subordinated masculinities figure prominently in illicit economies built on informal practices such as racketeering, gangsterism, crime syndicates conducted both to rival and overlap with the licit, formal economy of the oligarchic state. Viewed in the context of these overlapping symbolic economies and their masculinities, the creative practices I have discussed as forms of adventurism can be seen to have helped to bring about the specific conditions of the general social crisis that the state of emergency of martial law was an attempt to exploit and capture for the purposes of its own aggrandizement.

Social Pulverization as the Fallout of an Urban-Based New World Economy It should not be a matter of great surprise to find that the long-abiding national crisis that brought about and was intensified by Marcos’s authoritarian regime of accumulation is still very much with us. The practices of adventurism that have created as well as emerged out of this crisis have been expropriated (co-opted, if you will) not only by the Marcos regime but also by subsequent regimes of accumulation, the continued powers of which depend on the infrastructures of repression inherited from the Marcos state. These practices include the manipulation of laws, or the fixing of boundaries which comprise these laws, the active fostering of regulable conditions of contingency, the eschewing of publicoriented disinterest in favor of forms of personalist, social capital, and the hazarding of rational systems. These practices are what link adventurism to corruption. Paradoxically, the practices of magical compensation that Lacaba exemplifies as a mode of coping and insubordination have been transformed into an institutionalized social system of theft. What I suggest contributed to the struggle against authoritarianism have become the enabling conditions of the graft and corruption mode, a mode which serves as a fundamental structuring principle of the Philippine political economy and whose highest, most egregious, and most profitable instance can be viewed in what is termed crony capitalism. Today, strong cries are heard for democracy and good governance (in uneasy negotiation with the rival powers of neoliberal globalization and transnational criminal capitalist networks), many issuing from an emergent global civil soPetty Adventures in the Capital

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ciety. What is left out of such attempts to install global governance and civility? What might be gained from thinking about globality not from the place of ideal subjects but from the petty, banal, and ignoble adventures of escape figured in Lacaba’s poems? Playing with the content of law and truth statement, Lacaba highlights the highly formal character of modern postcolonial civil society and its subjects. Poems like ‘‘Santong Paspasan ’’ [Holy Haste], in which the son of a congressman and his friends gang-rape and torture a movie starlet with the impunity bestowed by the dignity of political o≈ce, show the violent meanings couched in and made possible by the empty formalism of the civil and political institutions of modern postcolonial democracy. What I am calling the adventurism of his abject protagonists acknowledges the impossibility of equal exchange, the premise of which serves as the driving symbolic conceit of modern capitalism. It recognizes the absence in postcolonial societies of the material basis of bourgeois society, given their own role in the world economy as sites of continuing practices of primitive accumulation, and coercive resource extraction, which guarantee the field of exchange of capitalism proper in advanced industrialized societies. And it underscores the arbitrary, rather than naturalized, character of the law. At the same time, adventurism is a capitulation to the structural inequities of the ruling order or the open farce of some general public interest protected by the modern democratic state. This capitulation to the open farce of Philippine society is expressed at the end of ‘‘Santong Paspasan’’ in the public reactions to the release of the woman gang-raped by the congressman’s son: ‘‘her boyfriend got drunk / the papers shivered with glee / and the cops jerked themselves o√. / Mr. Congressman is set to run / in the coming elections. / Let us not forget him.’’ Lacaba portrays this open farce of modern civil society and its democratic pretensions without, however, harboring any real belief in the seriousness that underlies it, despite his political e√orts to write socially oriented plots, particularly those he wrote for the protest films directed by Lino Brocka. Lacaba’s heroes have nowhere to go. If they end up in the revolution, it is only because, as in his poem ‘‘Ang Mga Kagilalalas na Pakikipagsapalaran ni Juan de la Cruz,’’ the space of revolution is outside the field of action where the farce of modern urban society is staged. In Lacaba’s writing, as opposed to the writing of his politically radicalized older brother, the space of revolutionary transformation is merely o√stage. For Lacaba, farce hides no underlying reality that we must contend 206

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with. Farce, rather, is the reality. What is made a mockery of is not a given, preexisting reality, or ideal—say, democratic equality or the field of fair exchange —but some other nonexistent reality, some glimpsed possibility, some other future that is at once beckoned to and crushed in the banal, speculative, adventurist attempts to escape the farcical reality of our present. The flexible times of such petty, speculative acts of escape are undoubtedly entwined in the times of the ruling state of a√airs, even as they produce forms of reprieve from the impossible life sentences of the urban poor. Other scholars have found such ambivalent entanglements in di√erent contexts in the global South. María Milagros López, for example, writes about postwork sensibilities and entitlement attitudes in Puerto Rico as both accommodations and resistances to the conditions of subproletarianization in this postindustrial, welfare context.≥∑ Against what she calls the tyranny of the metaphysics of productive labor as moral arbiter, Lopez attends to the forms of enjoyment that the Puerto Rican lumpen proletariat engage in, which at once embody a refusal leveled at the state, capital, and its work discipline and operates to subsume the population to its logic. And Mbembe, writing about contemporary Cameroon, attends to what he calls the aesthetics of vulgarity—the obscene and the grotesque—as the imaginary means by which systems of domination in the African postcolony are confirmed or deconstructed.≥∏ In this context, acts of licentiousness and obscenity attest to the connivance between postcolonial commandment and those subjected to it. Looking at ‘‘the myriad ways ordinary people guide, deceive, and toy with power instead of confronting it directly,’’ Mbembe emphasizes the entanglement or ‘‘conviviality,’’ rather than the simple opposition of those in command and those who are assumed to obey, reflecting a shared world of ‘‘anxious virility’’ and grotesque, lecherous power.≥π While very di√erent in the political conclusions they draw, both Lopez and Mbembe attend to these ambivalent practices of everyday negotiations in order to challenge the moralistic precepts of proper political resistance. Similarly, in this book, I attempt to move away from the moralism and idealism that continue to shape political judgment and to move beyond an empirical, sociological realism stripped of imaginative possibility. This chapter reads poetry for its linguistic-aesthetic capacity to enact and articulate social forms of imagination and experience and their relation to power. What if we were to consider the practices of adventurism, otherwise considered contemptible at worse and of dubious worth at best (practices of capitulation and accommodation), as politiPetty Adventures in the Capital

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cally significant, even valuable? What resources might we find? What political operators and creative social agencies might we realize? In a famous piece written in 1970, Lacaba defended the idioms and sensibilities of the vulgar and tasteless (bastos and bakya) masses, particularly their desires of magical reversals and leaps in fortune in the movies, which the upper and middle classes held in disdain.≥∫ I would argue that these same sensibilities that Lacaba sought to redeem are indissociable from the very material conditions of the urban poor to whom they are attributed. As a form of enjoyment that is at once transgressive and complicitous, defiant and submissive, with respect to the regulatory institutions of elite culture, everyday practices of adventurism are practices of survival for the urban excess. As I’ve already suggested, in Lacaba’s poetic style one might find the prefiguration and indeed enabling exercises of those capacities and sensibilities of new postmodern forms of flexible labor. As Paolo Virno argues, under post-Fordism, ‘‘bad sentiments’’ such as opportunism, cynicism, and idle talk, which have developed in sites of socialization outside of formal workplaces, are now requirements of a production process characterized by permanent innovation, chronic instability, unexpected shocks, and so forth: ‘‘The post-Fordist undertaking puts to good use this practice of not having routines, this training in precariousness and variability.’’≥Ω These ‘‘emotional tonalities’’ do not, however, develop primarily out of the social unrest of labor in the advanced capitalist countries of the West; they also develop out of social practices of income generation under the conditions of extraction and subsistence endemic to neocolonial economies. In this view, I believe it worthwhile to think about crony capitalism as a regime of accumulation characterized by the monopolization of forms of value generation and social means of extraction that are invented as modes of living and thriving under conditions of neocolonialism. Crony capitalism as a mode of concessions and allocations as well as tribute and taxation developed out of direct appropriation of designated surplus value (as opposed to formal, licit capitalist exploitation which profits from surplus labor within what appears to be equal exchange) is the historically original product of postcolonial economic development. It is a gross error, I believe, to view this kind of capitalism and its authoritarian state apparatus in culturally deterministic ways. Generally, arguments about the authoritarian culture of the Philippines and of Southeast Asian countries serve as racist legitimations of dictatorial rule and military repression.∂≠ And yet similar 208

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arguments are made in references to Asian and Southeast Asian traditional social and political institutions to account for the East Asian miracle. Although the term ‘‘crony capitalism’’ emerged, to the best of my knowledge, from the national situation of the Philippines, it has come to signify the ‘‘rigidity-infused, long-term-oriented political-economic institutions’’ (closed production based on family and social networks) that apparently are characteristic of the culture of the larger East Asian region.∂∞ Those culturally determined institutions are now called to account for the remarkably rapid economic growth exhibited by these greatly varying countries in the decades before the financial crisis of 1997 as well as for the financial crisis itself.∂≤ Culture is the process of creative mediation of particular sociohistorical conditions, not their originating force. By itself, I do not see that culture holds any explanatory power. As Lacaba’s work portrays, the seemingly solid and permanent sociopolitical institutions of Philippine culture are the outcome of daily exercises of improvisatory living. It would, however, be almost as wrongheaded to view the authoritarian crony capitalism consolidated by the Marcos regime as endemic to capitalism itself.∂≥ That would merely obscure the role of local agencies in the global reorganization of capital and once again relegate culture to the backwaters of that invisible oceanic movement called the world economy. Moreover, it would occlude the singular resources that are continuously placed at the disposal of crony capitalism and comparable postcolonial bids for a criminal share of the world’s wealth (understood as parts of a ‘‘global criminal economy’’).∂∂ As a consequence, whatever political potential those resources might have for an as yet unrealized world will most certainly be lost. By ‘‘historically original’’ I mean that the regime of accumulation that is crony capitalism is a new configuration of both long-established rules and recent innovations of practice. It consists of the postcolonial nationalization of the political and economic principles of imperialism, which implies not only a localization of universal forms, but also, very importantly, the generation of new forms of struggle both for and against this localization process. Put di√erently, Marcos’s nationalization of imperialism depends on borrowed principles.∂∑ This postcolonial adoption/adaptation of the rules of imperialism allows the neocolonial state to assume some of the powers and structures of the former colonizers and still remain within the logic of the global geopolitical system: that is, to maintain its clientelist relations with metropolitan nations and multilateralfunding institutions. At the same time, it depends on new forces and social Petty Adventures in the Capital

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relations of production that are forged at all social levels in the continuous process of adjustment to and resistance against this consolidative regime of accumulation.∂∏ In her book Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania, Aili Mari Tripp argues that the informal activities of the urban poor in Tanzania in the 1980s actually compelled the state to relinquish its repressive regulations over the economy to accommodate the informal sector; in turn, this sector underwrote the social costs of structural adjustment programs, thereby serving as a bu√er for the state’s implementation of liberalization strategies.∂π In this chapter, I have argued that informal practices of selective noncompliance with and manipulation of the rules of modern governance and capitalist accumulation and exchange have resulted in the authoritarianist reform of the state as the center of gravity (and concentration of profitability) of these practices. What we have in the aftermath of martial law and its putative reversal in the period of democratization is a situation of social pulverization. Social pulverization is, first, the fallout of the regime of accumulation of crony capitalism. The monopolization of wealth and power and the means for their appropriation within the new elite stratum of Marcos and his cronies (by and for the mafia state) depends on precisely those very conditions and relations of production called the informal economy, a system of unregulated value-producing activities which is generated, though not controlled, by the surplus urban population. At the same time, crony monopolization necessitates the suppression of the formation of any stable social networks or collective bodies on the part of the urban poor that might compete with or corrode the crony network.∂∫ The atomistic, highly contingent, flexible operations of casual urban labor are thus encouraged without the stability and control of consolidative social networks, such as the compadre/kamag-anak (a≈liative/filiative) social-military apparatus of the Marcos regime, which function as forms of ‘‘organizational capital.’’∂Ω We could say that, as a whole, the urban poor acts as a virtual crony of the state— virtual in the sense that while in structural e√ect it behaves as a party to this regime, it does not have the material means to actually sustain that consolidative e√ect. The crony capitalist state presupposes the urban poor as that with which it must maintain itself in a virtual or potential relation. In other words, while the conditions of casual labor serve as the conditions of possibility of the crony capitalist regime of accumulation, the realization of surplus value on the part of the crony capitalist state depends on such excess labor remaining contradictory 210

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excess; this means at once their devaluation (the prevention of their valorization or, the expropriation of their value, as surplus value, elsewhere) and their atomization—in a word, their exclusive inclusion in the political economy of the state. Whence the antisocial tendencies attributed to this stratum. The crony capitalist state demands, therefore, not the complete eradication but only the steady process of elimination of its social contradictions by means of the latter’s infinite fragmentation or disintegration—such comprises the continuous system of ‘‘liquidation’’ of the potential capital of the urban poor.∑≠ It is at the very least in relation to these conditions of social pulverization and political liquidation that we should view the work of urban literature. If the politics of literary experience lies in its deployment and reorganization of modes of experience that both support and challenge dominant social relations of production, then at least one important way of assessing the politics of urban protest literature is on the basis of its relation to experiential modes constituting and supporting social pulverization. Despite his own intuition about the role of the lumpen proletariat in the militancy of the organized nationalist movement (‘‘the fortuitous presence of the rubble turned the demonstrators into an angry rabble’’), it seems to me that Lacaba’s work contributes to this social pulverization to the extent that it fails to provide a collective space for the reappropriation of the creative labor and transgressive activity of the urban excess.∑∞ The antisocial, anarchist attitudes he brings to bear on the ruling sociosymbolic order are left to be directed against the very social potential he has brought into view with his poetic expressions of o√ense. In the face of this negligence, the energies that to some extent fueled both activism and the tributary capitalism of the authoritarian regime thus remain dispersed, lost to history, even as other related energies and forms of the bakya classes will continue to shape the viability of life in the globalizing metropolis. Reyes’s own devaluation of the energies and forms of lumpen labor only supports this dispersion—they are, indeed, to be left behind in favor of the revolutionary class that has moved out of the suspended history of urban space and into the history-making space of the countryside. As such, the urban excess can be only history’s leavings. Paradoxically, the unfinished nature and tenuousness of reality that this excess helps to produce as a condition of its survival, agency, and thriving are returned to it as a permanent feature of life, rather than as an opportunity and precondition for its active insertion and participation in a movement to transform history. Petty Adventures in the Capital

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Form as Force: Speculation vs. Comparative Realism Much recent scholarly work on the Philippines stems from a desire to account for the purported failure of Philippine development and democracy in the context of the urban-based world economy and global political society. To my mind that failure, which is often finally anchored on the flawed political institutions and economic structures, if not culture, of the Philippines, can also be read as evidence of a broad resistance to the prevailing influence of universal global capitalism and its civil governance. By resistance I mean on a very basic level the practical registration of the impossibility of fulfillment of the latter’s promise of development for everyone, that is, of the ideals of true democracy upheld by neoliberal advocates of global capitalism. In that case, the crony capitalist state might be said to exemplify a kind of resistance to global capitalism (a form of resistance that I do not endorse).∑≤ I also mean, however, daily social struggles against the lived consequences of that impossibility. Resistance in this case would consist of those creative acts of freedom that are carried out in living life as a social contradiction, systematically fated for elimination, even if those very acts of freedom might at a later moment result in the installation of a new regime of subjection. Such creativity flouts the unstated belief, held and abundantly expressed by most analyses of Philippine political economy, in the inevitability or perpetuity, if not desirability, of capitalism. However, it is a creativity that is at once stolen by monopolists of the informal economy (the crony capitalist state apparatus) and lost on social reformists. As proof of the latter, one need only look at the global imperatives issued by well-meaning interventionist analyses of the crisis that the Philippines represents. These imperatives enjoin Filipino leaders to invest in ‘‘social software’’ (education, civic and political institutions), including ‘‘judicial independence’’ and objective and neutral government, and thereby rid the country of the irrationality and arbitrariness of cronyism and particularist or personalist behavior, which impede the operation of more rational political and economic systems. They also urge Filipino businesses to build investor confidence, by creating and maintaining a level playing field, which would in turn depend on eradicating influence peddling and power politics (in some analyses, getting rid of politics altogether). The harping on the stubborn persistence or semipermanence of the above features of a purportedly past historical phase of modern, rational capitalist 212

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accumulation is, to my mind, merely a reverse anxiety projection of the permanence and superordinate power of the universal laws of supposedly rational capitalist development. Taken as proof of its dauntingly outmoded character, these specific features of the Philippines thus become the very sites of social reform in the direction of advanced capitalist democracies. Given the meaning of the imperatives to reform in the context of the global economy, it behooves us to understand those particular social and political features of Philippine life, to which its failure to democratize and develop are attributed, as having more than a retarding influence on historical transformation. The capacity to do that, however, entails a rejection of the ubiquitous notion of form as mere manifestation (as in, the idea of the particular forms of Philippine authoritarianism and crony capitalism serving as mere manifestations of general trends in the history of underdevelopment) in favor of the notion of form as force, in this case, as a force of historical determination. The notion of form as mere manifestation is a pillar of conventional thought in comparative political and economic studies of the Philippines. One of the latest examples of this latent reflectionist perspective is contained in the following conclusion to a scholarly work on local despotic rule in the Philippines, which the author calls bossism: ‘‘Viewed in cross-national historical comparative perspective, Philippine bossism appears less a unique phenomenon than a particular manifestation of a more generalized social formation found when the trappings of formal electoral democracy are superimposed upon a state apparatus at an early stage of capital accumulation.’’∑≥ Disputing Philippine ‘‘uniqueness,’’ the author o√ers a frame for understanding Marcos’s rule as well as all the other petty authoritarianisms that abound in that locality called the Philippines as a new form of an old event, paradigmatically inaugurated in ‘‘Old Corruption’’ England.∑∂ Unsurprisingly, within this frame of comparative comprehension set against uniqueness, the routines of Philippine socioeconomic practice cannot themselves comprise a real event; instead, they can only be peculiar recapitulations of the done deeds (a past phase) of its master-predecessors. Understanding the peculiar idioms of local action in terms of a universal analytical currency of comparative political sociology, those routines of practice must be translated into their equivalent operations in the paradigmatic Western capitalist society that is the implicit narrative subject of political sociology. The functionalism of such analyses reminds one of Thoedor Adorno’s remarks on the mechanic quality that has permeated human life in such a society and the loss of possibility Petty Adventures in the Capital

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of experience that is its consequence. As he writes, ‘‘Not least to blame for the withering of experience is the fact that things, under the law of pure functionality, assume a form that limits contact with them to mere operation, and tolerates no surplus, either in freedom of conduct or in autonomy of things, which would survive as the core of experience, because it is not consumed by the moment of action.’’∑∑ Adorno’s comment instructs us to recognize how scholarship as well as activism might sometimes attain this pure functionality in relation to the end of understanding or changing history, forgetting precisely the freedom of conduct, the surplus not consumed by the moment of action, that might animate the processes of movement and transformation which we call history. To consider these routines, on the contrary, as comprising an original historical event produced by creative social forces—indeed, to view the eventfulness of this seemingly generic moment and the ‘‘freedom of conduct’’ of these social forces as the very process of the latter’s poiesis (production)—is precisely why I have found it worthwhile to examine more closely the uniqueness or, more precisely, the singularity of concrete historical experience articulated in Philippine literary forms. One might say this is my own attempt to fix the unitary time of capitalism on which global comparative political sociology depends.

Lacaba refers to the poetry in this collection as ‘‘mga tulang nahalungkat sa bukbuking baul’’ (poems rummaged from a worm-infested chest). It is perhaps fitting to consider the forms we find here as ‘‘rummaged’’ forms. As precisely forms of poiesis of a nearly forgotten moment (preserved in a decaying personal chest, removed from the more public forms of his properly political screenplays), these poems disclose not only the experiential practices that have exercised determinate historical force over our present conditions. They also disclose the very dynamism and creative power of everyday social practices of survival. To the extent that in the postcolony all manner of imaginary modern life forms are given well before the material realization of such forms (hence the notion of shadow modernities), rather than real subsumption by capital, postcolonial culture is always first subject to imaginary subsumption, which undergirds the most violent practices of material domination such as authoritarian modernization. In this light, Lacaba’s farcical rehearsal of the symbolic routines of petty survival can

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be read as an attempt to highlight the paradoxical imaginary creativity of the very classes to which is attributed a derivative nature. Neoliberal analyses of the Philippines impute to it a lack of stable social and political institutions detached from particular(istic) practices. I would claim that, in contrast to its implication of social inertia, such lack attests to a high level of social productivity; it attests, in other words, to the important activity of social practices in the making of those flexible routines that take the place of permanent institutions. Beyond the purview of developmental democracy, these practices become the fallout not only of the particular regime of crony capitalism but also and equally of the universal regime of global capitalism. Saved from the dustbin of a universal, transcendent, and objective (sometimes called comparative) history, Lacaba’s poems harbor some of the resources of historical experience that might yet be drawn upon to disturb the present in such a way as to open a truly amazing, unknown, and yet, for so many, longed-for future. Those resources can be gleaned in the forms he depicts as exercising a symbolic, but nonetheless real, force in and on people’s lives. Such a political evaluation of poetry is neither an illustration of the edifying function of literature nor an attempt to elucidate its sociohistorical context, as some kind of latent truth content. Instead, it is itself an adventure of sorts—a hopeful, speculative exercise in making a too well-known history happen di√erently.

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Chapter Six

Metropolitan Debris New Infrastructures of Subjectivity If, during the authoritarian modernizationist and repressive regime of Marcos, an emergent depth structure begins to define urban subjectivity both as a condition of and resistance measure against a hegemonic aesthetico-politics of surface, in the postauthoritarian period another technology of social and subjective structuring begins to take hold. This new technology is paradigmatically embodied in the flyovers, or highway overpasses, that have, since the toppling of the Marcos dictatorship and the so-called restoration of democracy by the Aquino government in 1986, restructured the urban space of the nation’s capital. As the exemplary means of realization of what I have called Manila’s new metropolitan form, flyovers attempt to provide a relatively exclusive, suspended network for the emergence of mobile, metropolitan subjects liberated from the assaulting contradictions of third world modernist development.∞ The flyover network serves as the postauthoritarian nation-state’s technology for the crisis channeling of deterritorialized urban flows. It departs from the technologies of rigid territorial control and confinement deployed by the dictatorship to maintain its monopolistic regime of accumulation. As an important part of the postauthoritarian state-corporate bid for the national capital’s inclusion in the metropolitan network of the emergent global economy, the flyover

network is a central component of the service infrastructure designed to facilitate the mobility and valorizing operations of global capital.≤ In this way, it is at once a mode of social stratification and a mode of symbolic and material production that images and supports the deregulated, decentralized, and flexible modes of postindustrial production and, in particular, the transnational telecommunicational network of finance capital.≥ This new service technology of state-corporate power produces the subject e√ect of a mobile, self-contained cell in free-flowing circulation, able to transcend the congestion and density created by the urban excess. The flyover network is designed to lift aspiring transnational subjects out of the corporeal sea of surfeit humanity and to enable their attainment of the spectatorial and cognitive privileges of their first world counterparts, including the latter’s capacity for cosmopolitan political-moral and aesthetic judgment. In this respect, Jo, the narrator of Jun Cruz Reyes’s urban novel, can be seen to prefigure the transnationalizing subject whose ‘‘surfacing’’ from the urban morass the flyover network makes both feasible and desirable. Built as a strategy of accommodation of the conflicting demands of nationalism and global capitalism as well as a strategy of di√usion of the antagonistic, unruly demands of the social contradictions of metropolitanist development, the flyover network is therefore also the consequence of people’s striving to exceed their fate as necessary leavings of development. From this point of view, it is a dominant technological apparatus designed to commandeer, contain, and transform the energies of a recalcitrant social strata in ways that would allow the continuation, permutation, and expansion of a ruling economic and political order. Although dominant metropolitan technologies of social and subjective organization are precisely the means of subsumption of people’s myriad experiences into regulatory forms, they nevertheless bear subjective possibilities that they cannot fully contain. Hence, flyovers and pedestrian overpasses can also become important sites of life-enabling, self-consolidating, and self-valorizing experience for the very social strata they were meant to bypass and relegate to the economically stagnant condition of ‘‘excess liquidity.’’∂ The story I read below is a case in point. Actively detaching themselves from their engulfing surroundings, some of the urban refuse manage to emerge from the stagnant pool of surplus labor— or to surface from underground life, where one is under the perpetual militarystate threat of liquidation—into more solidified and mobile states of metro218

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politan being, as epitomized by the new urban middle class. And yet, even as they find some measure of accommodation in dominant forms of subjectivity and metropolitan experience, these developing metropolitan subjects are always falling short of their transnational ideals.∑ Saskia Sassen argues that as sites of production of ‘‘a vast range of highly specialized services, telecommunications infrastructure, and industrial services’’ on which the new global economy depends, cities bring into focus the concrete work processes and local, material conditions that are a crucial part of economic globalization even if they are not recognized as such.∏ Looking at cities, ‘‘we recover a broad range of types of firms, types of workers, types of work cultures, types of residential milieux, never marked, recognized, or represented as being part of globalization processes. Nor are they valorized as such.’’π In my view, this realm of overlooked, unvalorized activities and conditions includes the subjective processes of production of those very firms, workers, work cultures, and residential milieux that Sassen sees as comprising the place-based infrastructures of economic globalization. For Sassen, cities serve as sites of valorization of global corporate power and devalorization of marginal or disadvantaged social actors, specifically labor. Negotiating between national sovereignty and transnational activity, the global or protoglobal city becomes ‘‘a strategic site not only for global capital but also for the transnationalization of labor and the formation of transnational identities.’’∫ In Sassen’s account, the new economic geography of centrality and marginality wrought by the dynamic of capitalist valorization realizes a parallel political geography, a transnational space within which the central claims of capital and the peripheral claims of labor on the city confront each other with sharpening intensity. While Sassen sees ‘‘the new politics [as being] made possible by globalization,’’ I look at the opposite process: that is, the new politics that makes globalization possible. By politics, however, I do not refer only to claims made by existing social subjects after the fact of their economic placement. I refer, more importantly, to the very process of self-making engaged in by emergent subjects of a transnational urban order. Practices of valorization and devalorization carried out by human agents are themselves political acts, though when they are not cast in the language of rights and recognition or entitlement and representation they are seldom interpreted as such. To the extent that it helps to produce the human, social, and physical infrastructures of the transnational urban economy (we might say, the software Metropolitan Debris

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and hardware of the service and telecommunications industries), the experiential work of producing oneself and one’s relations is productive of value. As a subjective process of social struggle, experiential praxis includes processes of valorization and devalorization enacted within oneself as well as on others. It is part of the concrete work that makes for the specific places ‘‘where the work of globalization gets done.’’

Enduring Life as Excess Matter In his short stories, plays, poems, and novellas about life in Cubao, a district of Metro Manila, Tony Perez a√ords a view of the subjective work of maintenance of the human components of small-time local service industries, including a travel agent, a call boy, a copy machine operator. These human components make up a new urban sub–middle class composing the labor forces at the lower tiers of the service industries of the metropolis. In his Cubao series, Perez’s abiding interest lies in how individual persons experientially renew themselves out of the demeaning and crushing conditions of their daily grind as small-time or casual service providers. The social and subjective movements of aspiration this sector makes out of an earlier metropolitan technology of stratification, such as pedestrian overpasses, can be seen to propel and find material expression in new metropolitan forms built to incorporate and sublate those very desiring movements. Perez depicts this subjective movement in his short story ‘‘Oberpas’’ [Overpass].Ω In this story, a young man mired in depression after his love is rejected gains the desire to continue living as he contemplates the expanse of his life from the top of a pedestrian overpass: There I viewed south and north, there I surpassed the roofs and trees, there I took possession [sakop] of the expanse of my life, beginning with my childhood. That was the boat for my habitual sea-journey of thought, a true station in a mysterious time, a passageway in the air that would pierce through here and also pierce through there, a stone bridge whose dimension consisted of a first step from I didn’t know where and headed wherever, from now headed towards later, from the present towards boundlessness.

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desire that would later come to define the metropolitan dreams claimed and expressed by Manila’s transnationalizing elite. The desires to breathe under lifesu√ocating conditions of urban congestion, to achieve transcendent relief from the overwhelming refuse of one’s surroundings, to find meaningfulness in an atmosphere of sheer noise, to seize or conquer (sakop) one’s life—all these desires come to be possessed by the subjects of Manila’s new metropolitan form. Subaltern desires help to create the infrastructural conditions of possibility for the self-possessed, self-contained, spectatorial subjects who will harbor them, no doubt to new and di√erent but also similar ends. By infrastructural conditions I refer not only to the physical road structures called flyovers but also to the electronic flyovers of Star Cable tv, the Internet, faxes, cell phones, and in general telecommunication technologies that were avidly demanded in mobile urban social spaces in the Philippines arguably before the advent of the New Economy in the postindustrial world. These flyover technologies, which reshaped the social geography of metropolitan Philippines and helped to define the emergence of a new mobile (cell) generation (Generation Txt), can retrospectively be seen as partly issuing from the subjective reachings on the margins of national-urban development.∞≠ To the extent that it is a crucial dimension of the objective contradictory conditions of capital’s global expansion, the experiential praxis of pedestrian labor (the lower service sector) shapes the production of the enabling technologies of globalization. Put another way, Manila’s new metropolitan forms are the consequence of the technologization—i.e., the material codification—and capture of the experiential inventions, demands, and claims made by the contradictory social forces of peripheral capitalism. In ‘‘Oberpas’’ we glimpse, in the subjective reach of the narrator, a prefigurative imagining of the subject-e√ects of these new flyover technologies. Under the foot of one seeking relief from the mire of his existence, the busy overpass becomes a waystation, a means of transport into memory and contemplation, a subjective place that is also a real structure, a material bridge to and from the imaginary. It is a passageway of experience ( pinagdaanan) where the narratorsubject finds the resolve to live again as he discovers a new ‘‘boundlessness’’ to one’s self possibilities. Every morning as he walks on this ‘‘skyway,’’ the narrator comes across a man who begins to absorb his thoughts and to rouse an engrossing interest in, even a little envy for, everything about him. ‘‘Who was he? Where did he live? . . . (How Metropolitan Debris

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intelligent his gaze was. How bright his face was. How strong his body, how certain his every step was. So smart was his shirt—I liked his taste, the only di√erence between us was that he had money to spend on a shirt and I had none.’’ Little by little, day by day, the narrator acquires the features and accessories of this man. Suddenly a truth unfolds that unlocks the mystery. The man is none other than himself or, rather, the man is the person he had been becoming all along—the person for whom he is the memory. ‘‘I was he whom I met every morning of my life. He is the aim and I, the origin. He is the flesh and blood and I am the memory, the mental conception. He is the person, I am only a ghost—a ghost who will not disappear, who is always there. Glimpsed (by him). Met (by him). Smiled at (by him).’’ In the inversion of the split between self and other, the narrator materializes a new subjectivity, leaving his present self as the imaginary object and source of his new (future) agency. Through divestment from a previous subjectivity, the narrator is able to pull himself out of the depths of his sorrow and despair and to discover and move toward an alternate future self in the outer world. But in moving toward this flesh-and-blood person who is his aim, the ‘‘I’’ becomes a memory, ‘‘only a ghost—a ghost who will not disappear, who is always there.’’ New metropolitan subjects thus retain past selves as ghostly presences. Such leavings will return at another time to haunt the very spaces of their transformation. In the mire of his depression, rejecting all happiness and friendship, the narrator identifies with the objects and pests and grit that constitute the pollution of the city. He wishes he were the wooden road post, which ‘‘always waits expectantly all over the city but doesn’t love.’’ He envies rats and roaches, flies and ants, and tar and dust, which ‘‘don’t desire, and so don’t get hurt.’’ In the state of delirium and dejection, he turns inward, losing his way inside himself and never arriving at his innermost being. For this private self he enters is ‘‘like a box inside a box inside a box inside a box inside a box inside a box.’’ Such bottomless subjective depth or infinitely recessive interiority characterizes one polar end of a kind of subjectivity that emerges out of the conditions of urban modernization. The other end of this new urban subjectivity is characterized by the worldimploding self of Luna Sicat’s short story ‘‘Ang Lohika ng mga Bula ng Sabon,’’ which I discussed in chapter 2 as the consequence of a rupture with the social logic of women’s syncretic sociability.∞∞ These two autonomous, psychological subjects, di√erently gendered in their expression of inner depth (one contained,

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the other explosive), are measures of recoil against the impossibility of personal desire, which the very alienation of urban life enables one to experience and articulate.∞≤ Influenced by the modernist strains of Western drama translated into the vernacular by the poet and dramatist Rolando Tinio, his mentor, Perez’s theatrical works of the late 1960s and early 1970s were already markedly psychological in their thematic and formal concerns.∞≥ Standing out against the backdrop of socially conscious and politically motivated theater, which came to the fore in the ferment of student activist and radical nationalist movements, these works dramatized the seemingly generic urban themes of alienation, existential loneliness, and individual freedom and identity that could be said to be the other side of the widespread social crisis to which others responded with political protest. Out of this urban social crisis emerges a full psychological subject, one whose potential for individualist freedom and self-determination is founded on the experience of the contradictory processes of social disintegration and reconstruction. As we saw in the last chapter, the New Society was the hegemonic attempt to reorder the dynamic social into a single national community, against which the new networks of radical activists posed their own counterhegemonic challenge. Between these antagonistic political poles of social projection, however, lay the quotidian murkiness and contingency of rapidly changing social relations. Within this fluid context, people sank or swam depending on their abilities to locate and re-create themselves as socially and economically viable subjects. In ‘‘Oberpas,’’ the narrator saves himself from drowning in the abyss of his inner recoil by finding a future life in his surroundings. Even as it serves initially as a refuge against the world of loveless, nonhuman objects toward which the urban excess are continually propelled, this pure interiority is an untenable space. For the narrator, it is a form of derangement, one within which the self is lost, perhaps never to be found. In traditional medical practice, an object that has been malevolently introduced into a person’s bodily being must be extracted in order for the person to be healed. Here, it is the self that is the object to be extracted. Rather than simply bypassing or transcending his surroundings, the narrator uses the overpass to propel his self back into the world, to take redemptive possessive view of (sakop) his entire life. The height gives him pause, and at this station he is able to find a new life in the unremarkable detail that is the man whom he is becoming: ‘‘Only a part of a thick mass of people . . . a normal detail

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of the environment, as common as the view. As the overpass. As the posted words. (‘keep right,’ ‘watch your step,’ ‘this is your overpass. please keep it clean.’) As the vehicles whizzing on the ground below the tall skyway.’’ An unremarkable human detail of the environment, the other man is composed of other details: his gaze, his face, his shirt, his shoes, his portfolio. Like the posted words that are ‘‘a normal detail of the environment, as common as the view,’’ these personal details are not signs with meaning, as they are for Reyes in his attempt to read the city for the losses of history. Neither are they completely similar to Lacaba’s signs, which are either objects of action or instruments of prohibitive agency (such as the disciplinary signs of the New Society). Rather, they are commonplace things strewn arbitrarily in one’s path, indi√erent pieces of a haphazard landscape that might serve as signifying elements for a new self. Coming across the very same shirt he sees on this other man in a department store, the narrator tries it on and decides to buy it. As he views himself in the mirror wearing this detail that he has picked out of all the other details he has chanced upon, ‘‘it was as if so many doors that were once closed opened up to me. I realized what a great e√ect a new form has on one’s spirits—a form you regard on other people but don’t think will go with yourself. Suddenly a hidden joy, a new enthusiasm, an enlargement of life, sprouted in me.’’ By inhabiting this commonplace detail of the outside world, the narrator can emerge as a new subject. This new self is created not from some inner resolve or prior tendency but through the piecemeal fashioning of oneself with and as an interpellating aspect of one’s surroundings. Becoming another, the narrator can return to those surroundings and live out the banal routines of his bare ( payak) life. He can continue to work (significantly, in a travel agency), to daydream once in awhile, and to lose himself among ‘‘the people without names.’’ This new self di√ers from the subjective formation of the discrete, mobile selves that occupy the hegemonic metropolitan consciousness inasmuch as it attends to and builds itself out of the common details of the urban excess. While it too attains some measure of transcendence over the metropolitan body, this self is able to renew its life by means of a slow and temporary upliftment. The same capacity for distance and abstraction made possible by this height contributes to the self-constitution of selves that are otherwise mere objects to be used and disposed of, parts of the metropolitan liquid mass(es) that find no hospitable places in the new human settlements of the social environment. Moving away from the organizing category of the masses—at the same time 224

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that, under martial law, the masses themselves moved away, returning to the countryside to become the motivating aim and substance of the revolution— Perez focuses on the quotidian set apart from the catastrophic, which in urban social realist literature were one and the same. He fashions unremarkable characters who, unlike the characters of Edgardo Reyes, Efren Abueg, Dominador Mirasol, and other writers of the manifesto collection of short fiction Mga Agos sa Disyerto (Current in the Desert) (1964), do not typify the ordinary people as oppressed masses. Neither, however, do they resemble the full, rounded, individual middle-class characters of writers in English of the same period, such as Nick Joaquin, Kerima Polotan-Tuvera, Gregorio Brillantes, Resil Mojares, and Ninotchka Rosca. Perez’s characters stand out from the crowd, like the man in ‘‘Oberpas,’’ and yet remain unremarkable, without any distinguishing features beyond the attention that has allowed them to surface. They are suggestions of persons, the barest outlines of a life holding only a potential for fullness and meaning—neither undi√erentiated mass nor individual subject, but figures of ordinariness. Perez’s work might be said to perform this attention, or cathexis, which detaches an element—a person, a moment, a sign, or an object (a shirt)— from the indi√erent, dissolving swirl of metropolitan debris, as an act of realizing the commonplace (karaniwan) as a bearer of hidden value. There is a sociohistorical specificity to this operation of the commonplace that sets it apart from the familiar invention of everyday life and the ordinary in Western modernity. Of the commonplace in the culture of modern cities, Rey Chow writes, ‘‘If the center is the value that transcends its local, material body to become the ‘general equivalent,’ the commonplace is the value that, in spite of its general use, remains confined to the local and the material. Paris and London, capitals of imperialism, remain to this day ‘centers’ of world civilization despite their bloody histories; Manila, Saigon, Calcutta, and Hong Kong, even though they have partaken of the same histories, are consigned to the margins. The European capitals persist as ‘origins’ from which universal value rises and flows; the (post)colonial port cities, imagined as mere recipients of such value, live the lives of the forever ‘local’ and negligible.’’∞∂ The problem for Manila, Saigon, Calcutta, and Hong Kong is not simply the imposition of a hierarchy of values onto these existing city-subjects within a world system. The problem is, rather, the process of valuation itself as world system, which constitutes them as places of nonvalue. Arguing that the commonplace, as the place of the debased, is in fact the indispensable guarantor of the center, which purports to be the source Metropolitan Debris

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and bestower of value, Chow shows the ways in which the functioning of places like Hong Kong provides the ideological consistency and material sustenance of imperial metropolitan cultures. It is for this reason, she argues, that they are associated with lesser and less authentic value. Put di√erently, it is because these marginal urban economies are expropriated of the value they produce in order to sustain dominant metropolitan economies that they appear to the latter to harbor little, if any, symbolic or, for that matter, theoretical value. Rather than using Metro Manila to read New York or Los Angeles, as Chow proposes with the common/place of Hong Kong with regard to the centers of England and China, I want to use the new salience of the commonplace in Philippine urban experience to track the local dynamics of production of the center. By center, here, I do not mean any specific colonizer but rather global capitalism itself. For the process of universal valuation as world system is the problem that serves as the condition of possibility and boundary of Perez’s valorization of the commonplace. That is to say, the new significance of the commonplace can be read in light of the full metropolitanization, or capitalist saturation, of urban Philippine life facilitated by the postauthoritarian government’s partial liberalization of capitalist investment and production. Absent the repressive strategies of the Marcos regime, the contradictions of transnationalist development flood the urban space and demand new forms of accommodation and di√usion by the liberalizing, democratizing nation-state. As part of the daily work of survival, urban experience in this sea of contradictions is how one relates to the dirt, the noise, the pollution, the excess matter of one’s surroundings. More, it is how one lives as a particle of that dirt, noise, and pollution. The explosive spilling over of the contradictions of development that the Marcos regime could not contain becomes in the aftermath a condition that the new regime of production now exploits. The dictatorial floodgates have broken open, and the historical catastrophe of authoritarian urban development and modernization has erupted, submerging the whole metropolis in the ruins, refuse, and havoc that were once kept at bay or behind white walls. In the paintings of a young generation of artists like Emmanuel Garibay, Neil Manalo, and Daniel ‘‘Dansoy’’ Coquilla, the oppressive thickness and palpable heaviness, almost airlessness, of Metro Manila’s atmosphere appears in messy, muddied colors permeating the urban surroundings. That heaviness and chaos are registered through intimations of the life-creating everyday strife of urban bodies.

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Without such experience of striving and its immanent hope and desire we would indeed be rats and roaches, flies and ants, tar and dust, or wooden posts. Between the moment of urban protest and the moment of metropolitan immersion a palpable di√erence obtains. The weight of oppression that Perez’s characters experience is not the centrally embodied weight Jo experiences under the Marcos regime (the Savage Man) but a weight that is rather more dispersed, permeating the entire atmosphere of everyday life. Manila’s noise is everywhere, emanates from everywhere, entering and a√ecting the body in ways that cannot be bodily controlled or regulated. That noise consists of the interaction of contradictory forces, forces of life and death, forces of liberation and confinement, forces without prior forms, forces of creation and destruction. Such forces are forces of determination, or what Raymond Williams describes as pressures. The life forces that make up Manila’s heavy noise are emergent forces, ‘‘pressures exerted by new formations, with their as yet unrealized intentions and demands.’’∞∑ We can read the subjective thriving depicted in Perez’s stories as part of these very pressures that compel, for example, the tendencies toward consumerism and individual upward mobility that begin to hold sway over an emergent middle class from the 1980s onward. Just as the overpass in the story ‘‘Oberpas’’ serves as the medium (a boat, a bridge) of the narrator’s process of self-renewal, the commonplace serves as the vehicle or passageway of a self-valorizing movement of consumerist subjectification. On the overpass, the narrator becomes a subject with a view. From this height and distance, he can subject (sakop) his life to memory and contemplation and embark on a journey in thought beyond all bounds. Once the narrator achieves a measure of spectatorial subjectivity, he can see himself from the point of view of another—or see another as the possibility of his own self—and through this lens of exchange see himself as desirable, worthy, a person of value. The shirt, the shoes, the portfolio now become the signs of what he lacks to become that person of value. To the extent that it fits the structure of subjectification through commodity fetishism, Perez’s deployment of the commonplace serves as a practical measure of surviving that helps to realize, as it instantiates, a universal currency of subjective valuation. At the same time, to the extent that the commonplace is a place that is produced by the pressures of emergent social formations, it also serves as a site of expression and exercise of other creative potentials of social living labor. As Liu Kang argues about the everyday, ‘‘It may also serve as a site that cri-

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tiques the contradictions and fallacies of the present, and that provides a space for imagining and practicing cultural transformation and reconstruction.’’∞∏ By focusing on the experiential production of the commonplace, we are led to consider the social contradictions of metropolitanization figured by those who pay the consequential costs of the universalization of human value (tendered in what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘‘the hard currency of human su√ering’’).∞π

Encountering Human Value What is a spirit, after all, but an untold story, a novel that awaits to be written? —tony perez The writer as such is not a patient but rather a physician, the physician of himself and of the world. The world is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with man. —gilles deleuze

In the pivotal scene of Perez’s controversial novella Cubao 1980, when Tom, the narrator, stumbles into personal salvation at a charismatic ‘‘miracle rally,’’ a seemingly inconsequential detail stands out.∞∫ While he observes the American evangelist preaching the word of God and the crowd fervently responding, approaching the stage, shouting and singing praises and prayers to the Lord, Tom beholds this striking detail: the ‘‘so very, very white’’ (ang puti-puti) countenance of the American preacher. In the face of this intense whiteness punctuating the sonorous scene of mass desire, Tom unexpectedly finds himself the receiver of divine grace and mercy, his own surprising and uncontainable emotion the very experiential proof of the intimate, earthly presence of God. ‘‘Humagulgol ako. Inisip ko, kahit pa’no, dumating and Diyos, dumating ang Diyos sa Cubao’’ (I wailed. I thought, somehow, God had arrived, God had arrived in Cubao) (73). Although the surfacing of this chromatic detail is a fleeting instant within the narrative, it is nevertheless an important and telling detail. For it is at this moment, when whiteness makes its brief, yet intense appearance, that Tom encounters something in himself that is at once the manifestation of divine presence and the very substance of universal humanness, a substance for which whiteness serves as privileged sign. As the novella will articulate it, universal humanness consists of that aspect of a person’s being that lies beyond any worldly determinant of social identity, such as gender, nation, race, and sexuality, an essence for 228

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which whiteness serves as privileged sign. Whiteness, Richard Dyer writes, involves ‘‘something that is in but not of the body.’’∞Ω For Tom, that something which whiteness involves is value. Tom’s newfound value is undoubtedly moral, as the divine mercy and forgiveness he cries out for and receives would attest. But far from being simply the e√ect of a transcendent religious symbolic order, that value is also the product of a more material, though no less symbolic, economy. Tom’s redemption is, after all, a redemption from the demeaning, petty living he makes as a call boy on the proliferating seedy inner fringes of Cubao, a commercial district of Metropolitan Manila developed under Marcos’s authoritarian regime. Under this regime, the prostitution industry became the paradigmatic industry of the national economy, an economy based on the marketing of devalued, sexualized labor to attract foreign (largely U.S.) capital investment. In 1980, the year the novella is set in and also the year it was written, the Philippine economy was more tied to international financial institutions than ever, having become dependent on foreign loans to fund its various modernization development projects for attracting greater investments of transnational capital. Tom’s redemptive moral value cannot be understood apart from the local economy within which he circulates as a sexual commodity and from the transnationalizing national economy this local sexual economy serves to supplement. For both the form and the substance of his redemption have already been shaped by these material economies inasmuch as they are the same economies that give rise to the fault or debt that compels such redemption in the first place. Put simply, Tom’s divine experience of redemptive value in the fetish form of whiteness can be understood as logical compensation for the racialized and sexualized lack that is produced in him—the form of his necessary devaluation—as the condition and consequence of the Philippines’ role within a transnational capitalist economy. Even God’s arrival in Cubao must be seen in light of its worldly preparation. As a fine and astute recording and enactment of the minute a√airs and microevents of urban subjective life, Perez’s work a√ords an exemplary view of these transformations in the realm of subjectivity that take place within the particular historical moment of Manila’s metropolitanization. But beyond the work of recording and enactment, Perez’s writing also performs a practical function. It is an apparatus of subjectification—not merely a recording technology but also a form of experiential media for the shaping of new subjects and their social relations. It is no accident that Perez worked for a few years as a psychotherapist Metropolitan Debris

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and that he should consider his chosen vocation as that of a ‘‘healer not of ailments of the body but of ailments of personality/personhood [sakit ng katauhan].’’≤≠ Perez’s rendering of Tom’s experience should thus be understood as a provision of subjective resources and measures for healing the ailment that Tom, as a particular case, su√ers. Against Perez’s understanding, I interpret the ailment of Tom as well as its solution through his personal redemption of human value in more social and historical terms. In my view, Perez’s very diagnosis and writerly treatment of subjective su√ering as ‘‘ailments of personhood,’’ i.e., as human dilemmas, constitutes a specific mode of experience, one which is sociohistorical in character and political and economic in function. As Tom’s story will bear out, this mode of experience makes consequential use of a universal currency of human su√ering as the means of creating a new local metropolitan subject-form that would be adequate to the challenges of living life in the urban recesses of the globalizing national capital. Until the publication of his Cubao series of short fiction in the early 1990s, beginning with Cubao 1980, Perez was largely known as the author of unusually keen psychological realist and existentialist plays. He first came to the attention of Philippine literature circles in the late 1960s as one of the promising young playwrights of Dulaang Sibol, a theater company that mounted original, vernacular theatrical productions under the direction of Onofre Pagsanghan. After being moribund since the late 1920s, when movies and vaudeville took over its popular audiences and consigned traditional theater to ritual occasions in the rural areas, Philippine theater found itself revived in the late 1960s as a consequence of the vigorous rise of the nationalist movement and the use of theater and performance by activist youth organizations in rallies and mobilizations.≤∞ Pagsanghan was one of those, together with Rolando Tinio, another mentor of Perez as well as a colleague of José Lacaba, who helped reorient legitimate urban theater toward popular audiences by translating modern Western drama into Tagalog and adapting them for the Philippine stage. Although they did not bear any explicit nationalist content or intent and could in fact be said to deliberately ignore the political agenda of nationalism, Perez’s original plays in Tagalog can be seen to have importantly contributed to its cultural cause.≤≤ They not only participated in the vernacular turn, which the nationalist movement had advocated as the first step toward resolving the general crisis of cultural alienation wrought by neocolonialism.≤≥ By honing the vernacular as an indigenous expres230

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sive medium, these dramatic works also participated in the project of giving more truthful representational form to local experience and a√ective life. Indeed, it was to draw directly from the raw materials of real life. As Perez puts it, ‘‘Writing in English is painting out of tubes; writing in Tagalog is painting with natural pigments.’’ This turn away from English and ready-made forms can be thought of as a turn away from the hegemonic neocolonial world of literary value, within whose terms Philippine writers in English who attempted to master the forms of Western culture had, in the period after the Second World War, continued to seek their own worth and success.≤∂ Perez’s writing e√ectively contributed to the strengthening of local expressive currencies and to the independent mode of cultural production and valorization, which the vernacular turn of the 1960s implied. In this context, it is not di≈cult to see the tacit workings of a social project even in the most psychological pieces of Perez’s work, even when he began writing more narrative fiction than dramatic plays, attending to the individual reader rather than to the collective audience. ‘‘As long as the majority of our people do not read creative works,’’ Perez declared, ‘‘we will remain a Third World country.’’ While it would be a stretch to think of Perez’s work as anti-imperialist, we can understand its tacit social project to consist of the cultural liberation of Filipinos from the conditions of underdevelopment and dependence signified by the notion of ‘‘a Third World country.’’ How, then, do we account for the appearance of whiteness as value in Cubao 1980? We have to be cognizant of the fact that Tom beholds in the face of whiteness not the value of the embodied person, the American preacher, in whom it appears or the value of the United States as the place of its origin. He sees rather his own abdicated and betrayed but ultimately recuperable human value. Whiteness has itself lifted o√ from the embodied person of the preacher to become the signifier of a value intrinsic to those who, under a previous colonial symbolic economy, would appear to have none. Relatively freed from any particular embodiment, and therefore implicitly from any bodily race, whiteness signifies the quality of humanness that can be found and developed in each and every person. That whiteness serves as the privileged mark of this human becoming is not, however, simply the expression of a dominant raciological symbolic system transported from the global-metropolitan West to the periphery. Rather, it is the product of a particular universalist claim to humanness that is made in the experiential e√ort to liberate oneself from the conMetropolitan Debris

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tradictory conditions of everyday devaluation and debasement underwriting the expansion of global capital. My point is that the racialized humanism that appears to be the sheer achievement of an expanding, dominant universal metropolitan order (and its racist system of human value) is also the uneasy achievement of a resistance against that order (and its gendered logic of production of economic value). Indeed, the perceptible identification of whiteness with recuperated human value emerges precisely out of Tom’s e√orts to countenance the experience of his own corporeal debasement under this order. This white countenance of human value practically obtains at a particular historical moment when, by means of a liberative gesture on the part of the periphery, a racialized universal currency for social and subjective practice is ironically put into e√ect. In the experience of contemporary Philippine urban life articulated by Perez we witness the concrete rendering of this moment and of the way such a global achievement and the fallout of that achievement are simultaneously realized. As the e√ect of a specific mode of subjective resistance to an older global order, the percept of whiteness, however, not only indexes the sociohistorical conditions of its possibility.≤∑ It also acts as a new point of subjectification, that is, another place from which to reorganize one’s subjectivity. The percept of whiteness, in other words, is a signifier that calls into being a new modality of urban subjectivity, one which works in the service of an emergent metropolitanist order of social relations.

The Historical Racialization of Value To a certain extent, conditions for the racialized humanism that we witness through Tom were already laid down under Spanish colonialism, with the conversion of the Tagalogs and other indigenous Philippine peoples to Christianity during the sixteenth century.≤∏ Dyer’s definition of whiteness as ‘‘something that is in but not of the body’’ highlights the foundational motif of Christianity conveyed through Spanish rule. That motif is incarnation, or the human embodiment of what transcends the body. Under Spanish theological rule, the moral virtue of native converts could be ascertained only by its derivative and mimetic relation to the spirit of Christ, as the human incarnation of God. There was, therefore, a fixed referent for the determination of moral, human virtue, a transcendent spiritual ideal toward which the natives were forcibly expected to 232

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strive but which, to the extent that the natives were the very embodiment of sinful, corporeal nature, would forever remain beyond their reach. The equation between whiteness and spiritual transcendence, on the one hand, and race and corporeality, on the other, comes to be made precisely in the course of the Spanish and Portugese colonialisms on which Christianity had embarked. Whiteness was indistinguishable from the white people who were God’s representatives. As a signifier of moral value, it could thus be experienced only externally. For whiteness to be experienced as a value intrinsic to being human, a new dynamics of social organization, a new mode of production, had to prevail. If we look at the bourgeois economic conception of value, it bears precisely the form of ‘‘in but not of the body’’ articulated by the idea of incarnation. Marx’s famous analysis of ‘‘the mysterious character of the commodity-form’’ is precisely a critique of the idea of Christian incarnation as it operates in the practices of commodity fetishism.≤π As Mark Taylor argues, both Marx’s analysis of capital (defined as ‘‘value in process’’)≤∫ and Hegel’s speculative logic, which Marx’s theory of value appropriates, are predicated on the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity.≤Ω Marx’s specific intervention, however, consists of showing how religious fetishism in relations between people (as between people and God) passes into a fetishism in the relations between things.≥≠ In the Christian cosmology of capitalism, then, money and commodities become incarnations of a hidden substance, value: ‘‘In its value-relation with the linen, the coat counts only under this aspect, counts therefore as embodied value, as the body of value. Despite its buttoned-up appearance, the linen recognizes in it a splendid kindred soul, the soul of value. . . . Its existence as value is manifested in its equality with the coat, just as the sheep-like nature of the Christian is shown in his resemblance to the Lamb of God.’’≥∞ In the course of colonial Europe’s capitalist development and industrialization, race enters into the value relation itself. Or, I should say, race begins to stand in for that which must be eschewed in order to approach value and in this way retroactively determines the meaning of value as that which is not raced. Just as a thing must transcend its sensuousness, its physical body, in order to emerge as a commodity, that is, a thing possessing value, so must the ‘‘free’’ worker transcend ‘‘his’’ corporeality, the aspect of his being which aligns him with an appropriable nature, in order to become a bearer of value (labor-power). Since race comes to signify precisely this appropriable corporeal nature as a consequence of the histories of slavery and colonization, value itself, as the invisible Metropolitan Debris

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content of an object or person distinguishable from its outward form, becomes aligned with that which is not raced.≥≤ From here on, value takes on the social aspect of those who, by virtue of their monopolistic agency over it, personify it in its ideal form as money. For, although the value inhering in money would seem to transcend all sensuousness, its enigmatic power consists precisely of its ‘‘suprasensible’’ reflection of the social characteristics of production as objective ‘‘socio-natural properties’’ of money itself.≥≥ Value reflects the racialized relations of its production, in particular the alienation of and from racialized labor, as a suprasensible quality of unmarked, immaterial, even spectral, power. The white subject is, simply put, the realization of the subjectivity of the ‘‘vanishing mediator.’’≥∂ As the personification of the money form of value in its position of disinterest and transcendence (its exclusion from the world of consumable objects), the white subject hence aspires to the highest, i.e., most fetishized, instance of itself: ‘‘capital as the subject of value in its movement of growth.’’≥∑ It is thus in its appearance as the self-moving, independently self-valorizing, capital subject that whiteness most vividly demonstrates its proximity to God. Dyer writes, ‘‘At some point, the embodied something else of whiteness took on a dynamic relation to the physical world, something caught by the ambiguous word ‘spirit’. The white spirit organises white flesh and in turn non-white flesh and other material matters: it has enterprise. Imperialism is the key historical form in which that process has been realised. Imperialism displays both the character of enterprise in the white person, and its exhilaratingly expansive relationship to the environment.’’≥∏ In the Philippine context, it is this character of enterprise and, more particularly, of capital (rather than merely territorial) expansion that distinguishes the project of U.S. imperialism from the project of Spanish colonialism. In an important historical study of the rise of a Filipino national elite class, Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr. alludes to the rigid hierarchy of racial castes imposed by Spanish colonial rule.≥π This fixed system of social stratification, Aguilar observes, is challenged in the late nineteenth century and eventually subverted by an emergent mestizo (mixed race) class through its alliance with foreign, i.e., British, French, U.S., and other European, merchant capital.≥∫ As a consequence of this alliance and the profitable ventures in the sugar export industry, which it made possible, mestizos began to feel themselves to be on par with the Filipinos, a label until then reserved for colonial-born Spaniards. With economic success came not merely the perception of equality but, perhaps more important, ‘‘a 234

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sense of uniformity that hacenderos [sugar planters] were all players in a game which, despite British and American dominance, could reward astute players with money that somehow knew no race.’’≥Ω What ‘‘knew no race’’—i.e., money —was, in actuality, the instrument of a new dynamics of racialization. With the rise of imperialism, race would become increasingly integral to capitalist class relations and their dynamic formation. Not surprisingly, the protobourgeois mestizos would be depicted by a British observer as ‘‘a remarkable commercial, industrial and speculative race,’’ to be distinguished from the indios (natives), whom he described as ‘‘ a set of deceitful, lazy vagabonds.’’∂≠ We see here not merely the conflation of class with race, but the depiction of the qualities of capital (‘‘commercial, industrial, and speculative’’) as characteristics of a superior ‘‘race.’’ More important, however, than any new racial identities is the notion that through the accumulation of value one might possibly overcome race, a notion that itself depended on the social dynamism of merchant capitalism. Through imperialism the generalization of the bourgeois mode of production begins, and with it, the generalization and intensification of the racialized production of value that had developed out of the specificities of U.S., British, and other imperialist histories. The rise to dominance of colonial capitalism in the Philippines is very much a part of this generalization process. By ‘‘generalization process’’ I do not mean the spread of a practice that remains unchanged by either its dissemination or by its practicioners, but the expansion of the constitutive, active social base of a capitalist world economy, which takes concrete form precisely through the relations and practices of its expanded base. I would insist, furthermore, that the very ways by which Filipinos embraced and inflected the forms of capital and labor constitutively contribute to what may too readily be ceded as the workings of universal capitalism and universal racism. Aguilar argues that from the perspective of Filipinos at the turn of the nineteenth century, the political and economic rivalry taking place between Spanish colonial rule and other Western powers (a rivalry which, I might add, the Filipino revolution against Spain had helped to instigate and intensify), was a cosmic ‘‘clash of spirits’’ between Friar Power and Protestant and Masonic merchant capital. The resolution of this contest in favor of capital endowed foreign merchants with a ‘‘mystical prowess’’ that the emergent local mercantile class felt it might partake of and emulate. Aguilar writes, ‘‘As mercantile economics was crowned with mythical might, the trading sections of indigenous society found an unequivocal sign that they were transacting with the powerful.’’∂∞ At the Metropolitan Debris

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behest of this sign, the native mercantile class went on to establish an exportcrop production industry that would secure their ascendancy as a national political and economic elite that would rule over the postindependence nation-state; such ascendancy would not, however, be gained without the support of continuing, vital ties to foreign capital, with which the mercantile class was led to identify. The white spirit of enterprise thus shows itself to be no less than the spirit of capital, a spirit no longer confined to the harsh dispensation of the Friar, but rather in some sense freed for those in God’s grace to draw from. Under Spanish colonialism God may have already been the white Father, but under U.S. imperialism, he gains a benevolent countenance. His spirit is evangelical, descending upon Earth to bring everyone within the democratic realm of his beneficence. Vicente Rafael writes of this spirit of U.S. imperialism as white love: ‘‘White love holds out the promise of fathering, as it were, a ‘civilized people’ capable in time of asserting its own ‘character.’ ’’∂≤ Defined by selfgovernment and self-possession, character is exemplified by the United States itself, the very place that finds the Philippines to be lacking. In this way, imputed Filipino lack sets the stage for democratic tutelage, the core political-educational project that would ultimately carry out the U.S. imperialist objective of ‘‘benevolent assimilation.’’ Rafael writes, ‘‘Collaboration was seen as an index of the success of tutelage, the measure of the Filipino’s recognition of their subordination to and desire for white authority.’’∂≥ Politically, this libidinal logic expressed itself in what Aguilar calls the U.S. colonial policy of ‘‘racist corporatism,’’ a policy which, ‘‘in stark contrast to the methods of Spanish colonial administration,’’ mandated the inclusion of Filipino elites within the American colonial state, even as such inclusion was predicated on racially discriminatory terms.∂∂ As the notions of ‘‘white love’’ and ‘‘racist corporatism’’ suggest, it is precisely the subsumption of the Philippines within the democratic, free world market capitalist regime of the United States that constitutes the neocolony as lacking. Economically, Filipino lack and di√erence allow and are maintained by the systematic extraction of surplus value from Filipino labor and its transfer to and alienation in U.S. capital. The racialization, gendering, and sexualization of this lack through material relations of economic production and political governance (relations expressively assisted by American popular figurations of Filipinos as, in the colonial moment, ‘‘little brown brothers’’ and, in the contemporary moment, ‘‘little brown fucking machines’’) are what constitute U.S. plenitude as racially transcendent, sexually sublimated, (a)gendered value, thus setting the 236

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scene for the complex dynamics of desire, identification, and abjection that become enacted in everyday Philippine life. There is a second moment of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines, namely, the moment of its nationalization under the U.S.–Marcos dictatorship. This moment is also known as authoritarian modernization. As we’ve seen, from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, the Philippines underwent a radical economic restructuring that linked it more intimately with transnational capital by orienting its production toward export. This nationalization of imperialism at once manifested itself in and realized itself through the metropolitanization of the national capital, Manila.∂∑ With transnational financial capital as both its means and its object, the Marcos state transformed the urban space into the material site for the subcontracting of multinational production. Metro Manila served simultaneously as a showcase of modernity for the attraction of predominantly U.S. capital and as the instrument for the greater integration of the Philippine economy into the international world market. Parts of the old national elite, which rose to political and economic power during the U.S. colonial and postindependence periods, together with the new cronies of the Marcos state, consolidated and parceled out the bodily resources of the nation in a strategy to attract foreign loans and investments for the ostensible purposes of development. In this way they established what would prevail during this period as the dominant mode of accumulation of foreign capital—principally characterized by what has been called ‘‘rent-seeking activities’’ closely linked to the strategy of ‘‘debt-powered growth.’’∂∏ As an attempt to synchronize Philippine urban life with the developed metropolitan world—the former acting in the desire for and identification with the latter as the highest instance of progress on earth—the metropolitanization of Manila consisted of innumerable projects of beautification, infrastructural improvements, and the construction of hotels, cultural centers, and international convention halls. The City of Man was to be one of the ‘‘many homes of mankind’’ that together would compose the envisioned end of the inexorable trajectory of progress: the earth as ‘‘a global city.’’∂π As I’ve argued, the metropolitanization of Manila created its own contradictory refuse in the form of the urban excess population and the informal economy they motored as the means of their survival. It is from the seamy side of metropolitanization’s refuse that the historical experience of whiteness as value, as well as the new order of social organization and production which it indexes, can be concretely articulated. Metropolitan Debris

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Experiencing Value In Cubao 1980 (written in 1980), this seamy side is the world of casual male sex work. Of the sociohistorical context referred to by the title, Carlo Tadiar writes, ‘‘From the late ’70s to the early ’80s, at the very height of the Marcos dictatorship, Cubao acquired national significance because it debuted American-style malls in the country. . . . Cubao allowed the masses access to a cornucopia of Americanidentified goods for the first time, finally introducing into the Philippines the fantasy sustaining full-fledged capitalism: universal consumerism—unlimited, unrestrained, free consumption. Ironically—or perhaps logically—Cubao acquired a shadow reputation as a market for male youths.’’∂∫ In Perez’s novella, these two aspects of Cubao—mass consumption and the male sex market—are brought into a logical relation in the experience of Tom, the sixteen-year-old boy who is introduced to Cubao’s dark, glittery world of boy prostitution by his friend Butch: Man, we’ve got none now, Butch said once. We were at Ali [Mall] then, wandering about, ’cause there were so many things to see, so many delicious things to buy, you just think, later, when you’ve made some money. Let it be for now. All you can do is look, pretend you have some, show o√ to the chicks, give them a couple of winks, even though they’re snobs, fun to annoy, anyway you can’t bring them to Coney or Shakey’s. We’ve got none now. What do you mean now? We never have any. I’m hungry—let’s just go home. But Butch didn’t want to go home yet. Let’s go hunting for fags, Butch said. They’ll give us some. (4)

Seeing commodities everywhere, Butch and Tom feel an absence. Butch’s refrain, ‘‘Alaws tayo ngayon ’’ (We’ve got none now), is matched by Tom’s, ‘‘Tomguts na ko,’’ a slang expression for ‘‘I’m hungry’’ which makes of the word ‘‘hungry’’ ( gutom) a play on his name. This absence prevents them from acting like real men and leads them to lend their bodies to ‘‘baklas ’’ (fags) to get what they believe would fill their lack: money and American-identified goods.∂Ω After his first sexual encounter, Tom uses the money he earns to buy a ‘‘Dyambo hat dog ’’ (Jumbo hot dog). As Carlo Tadiar reads this scene, ‘‘To bite into the hot dog is to bite into the fantasy of an American heaven of which Cubao is a terrestrial 238

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metonym, paradise on earth.’’∑≠ But like the penis of Tom’s sole American customer, which he likens to a jumbo hot dog and describes as forced into him, the fetishized object does not satisfy, leaving something to be desired—while at the same time leaving something to desire with. The exchange leaves him with the medium of desire—money—which is itself exciting, betokening seemingly infinite possibilities. Not surprisingly, as Carlo Tadiar astutely observes, when Tom receives this desiring medium in its highest form, after being raped by the American Ken, he experiences a kind of euphoria. As he remarks in awe, ‘‘That was the only time in my whole life that I ever held dollars’’ (55). Dollars, it would seem, are the real thing. As the purported universal equivalent for all currencies, the privileged medium of global exchange, the dollar acts as that unequivocal sign of power at whose behest the nascent Filipino elite would establish their own mythical prowess. The dollar indexes the very sociosymbolic order of late capitalism on which its representative status as the new gold standard (at least until the 1990s) depends. It represents not only money and the infinite possibilities it portends, but also the very place from which money seems to derive such power. By holding dollars in his hand, Tom momentarily holds the key to that sublime place where all value resides and where all desire that depends on value as its means or object is fulfilled; or, conversely, by holding this key he is himself held by it, possessed by its supreme omnipotence, whence his euphoria. In his remarkable ethnography of male sex work in Metro Manila, in which this reading of Cubao can be found, Carlo Tadiar argues that the sociosymbolic order of capitalist modernity has come to overdetermine what he locates as the driving conceit of the male sex market, that is, the notion of the essential di√erence between the customer as bakla (‘‘homosexual’’) and the kolboy (male sex worker) as lalaki (literally, ‘‘male,’’ presumed to be ‘‘heterosexual’’). Tadiar argues that the phallocentrism of this order reshapes the local sex-gender system such that relations between bakla and lalaki can take only the triangulated form of commodity relations: ‘‘Both bakla and kolboy are reaching for the phallus. Where the one thinks he is looking for a man, the other thinks he is looking for money.’’ Both man and money are incarnations of phallocentric value. Each is, as Je√rey Weeks defines it, ‘‘the representation, the signifier of the laws of the social order, the law of the Father, through which obedience to the social (and patriarchal) order is installed.’’∑∞ But the very heteronormative imperatives that shape this exchange—requiring the kolboy to be the real man—make man a Metropolitan Debris

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fallen form.∑≤ Hence, Tadiar notes, the obsession of kolboys with ‘‘oridyinal ’’ [original] commodities, that is, brand name commodities from the United States, as guarantees of the value of their personhood and, more particularly, of their manhood. Like dollars, U.S. commodities signify both real value and the origins of that value, both of which are to be found in an otherworldly place. Inasmuch as phallic value, which these commodities embody, will always lie elsewhere, the kolboys will necessarily always be lacking. Drawn into the circulation of bodies and money, in which both kolboys and baklas endlessly go ‘‘hunting’’ [hanting] for each other, Tom experiences his life as a series of sexual exchanges which amount to nothing. Time seems to stand still; he forgets what year it is: ‘‘Because the days fly by so quickly. Like money, when you spend it’’ (41). He tries to keep a list of all his ‘‘happenings,’’ ‘‘like a list of debts, a list of sins’’ (49), but he loses count. And he begins to see the people in Cubao as shadows: ‘‘At night, the shadows of the leaves on the ceiling would move and move. Like people, on the overpass, in Cubao. Moving, walking, there were so many.’’ (49). Then one day he and his friends happen upon a religious rally being held by Don Stewart, the American evangelist. Here Tom encounters the Real thing, more real even than dollars. ‘‘So very white, so very clean’’ (72), he thinks to himself about Stewart as he speaks in English (the language of those once mockingly referred to as ‘‘dollar-spokening’’) about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, ‘‘about people, about sins, about everlasting life, about those who were happy, I don’t know, about everything’’ (72). Before the all-encompassing understanding of the American evangelist, Tom is swept up in the religious euphoria of the crowd: People were shouting so loudly. Everyone was crying, wailing, hurrying to get near the stage. He was praying, his face so very, very white, saying, come near, come near to God [Diyos], to God [Gad], to Jesus, to the Holy Spirit, come near, He was there with him on stage, even if you didn’t see Him. ... My God, my God, I cried and cried, I am so bad, forgive me! I wailed. I thought, somehow, God had arrived, God had arrived in Cubao. I didn’t ask why.

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assimilation (‘‘Gad ’’).∑≥ Tom’s sins, his debts, are met by the kind countenance of a God who, unlike the distant Spanish Catholic God, is close by, humanly near, indeed, whose very arrival in this forsaken, lumpen world of Cubao is the act of his infinite forgiveness and love.∑∂ Against the merely real value of dollars and all that they portend for someone, Tom discovers a value that is for no other, a value that has neither equivalence nor relativizing condition but that, as he becomes painfully aware, he has continuously given over to others for a price. What he discovers is above all relative worth or price, i.e., a value in itself, which he bears and yet, by allowing himself to be treated as a thing, he betrays, is humanness ( pagkatao).∑∑ Thus Tom finds both his sin and his salvation in the same moment. Having encountered true Value, through its white representative, he realizes how far he is fallen from the ideal of transcendent, metropolitan humanness by means of which he can recognize and measure his own soul. He and his friends climb to the top of the coliseum where the rally is held. From this place of transcendence, which Butch likens to ‘‘the top of a big, shiny ice cream . . . a shiny ice cream, the color of silver’’ (77), they view the entirety of the world they had been immersed in. There, they decide to renounce their ways, their way of living, and to redeem their lost souls (that is, the intrinsic human value they continuously gave over to others). This recognition and the divestment from his previous debased life, including all his previous relations, which such recognition demands, constitute Tom’s personal conversion: ‘‘In other words, thanks to the act of conversion, the subject is supposed to attain a kind of alterity from the self and, in a spectacular shift of identity, thus arrive at his or her very being, whose function is to make the face of the god shine forth within.’’∑∏ The spiritual conversion Tom undergoes is also implicitly an economic one. In the transformative process of this direct communion with God, Tom’s previous experience of himself as corporeal being for others—‘‘pinag-arkilahan ng katawan, pinaggamitan ng ari, pinagbentahan ng laman’’ (whose body was rented out, whose sex was let out for use, whose substance was for sale) (78)—turns into an experience of himself as someone with at least potential value.

The Minority Costs of Human Redemption In exchange for his total surrender to this Supreme Being in Itself, in whose image he is made, Tom becomes a human subject. For Butch, the conversion to Metropolitan Debris

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human subject means reducing all his contacts, including Hermie, his steady, to shadows: ‘‘Hermie was no more—no longer human, just a name’’ (79). Such redemption depends upon the repossession of one’s self from the agency of another’s corrupting, commodifying desire, indeed, from the agency of the other who occupies one’s desire. In the wake of redemption and from the place of transcendence where it takes e√ect immediately comes the denouncing cry: ‘‘Puking ina n’yo—mga bakla kayo!’’ (You mother-whore, faggots you!) (81). Or, better, the denouncing cry becomes the enunciative act of one’s redemption. Uttered by Butch and reprised by Tom as the contents of the entire chapter that follows, this denouncement consolidates all of Tom’s very di√erent sexual experiences—all his happenings—into one social identity that remains external to him: ‘‘mga bakla kayo’’ (you faggots, but also, you are faggots). Although the category bakla bears considerable social consistency with a much longer history than this argument might suggest, it is only at this moment of enunciation that the bakla comes to be configured as the positive embodiment of the kolboy’s lack or absence, a lack which is no more fully felt than in the process of one’s redemptive constitution as human subject.∑π Unlike the extant use of bakla as a social category of persons characterized by e√eminacy of bodily form and comportment as well as cross-dressing, the denunciating cry in the novel encompasses all the customers of kolboy sex work, regardless of the gender codings of their behavior. In this way bakla becomes a category denoting, above all, a commodifying desire for the male body. Reconfigured as such, bakla comes to stand for that which must be eschewed in order to resolve the internal contradiction preventing the kolboy from becoming a fully realized human subject, in the image of the independent being-initself of value. Within the narrative context of Cubao, the bakla are the bearers of money, which is the ostensible object of the kolboy’s hunting. As he takes this money in exchange for his body, the kolboy sinks into sin, each happening converted into an ever-increasing debt that itself takes the place of his original lack. In the moment of Tom’s and Butch’s conversion, that debt, which must be settled in order for them to attain their humanness, comes to be identified with—even more, becomes the very identity of—the bakla, who is hence targeted for its payment. Carol Hau writes about a similar conflation and its origins in a related contradiction in her discussion of the spate of kidnappings of ethnic Chinese carried out by the criminal Philippine state from the late eighties to the midnineties.∑∫ 242

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Hau argues that the conflation of the Chinese with alienating capital, which the kidnapping-for-ransom enacts, can be traced to the historically contradictory roles assigned to and played by the Chinese in relation to the colonial and neocolonial state. The characterization of capital associated with the Chinese as alien, that is, as capital that cannot accrue to Filipinos, is both the consequence of the extant racialized, colonial competition set between the Filipino mestizo landholding elite and the immigrant Chinese merchant class, on the one hand, and the intensified postcolonial assimilation of Chinese entrepreneurial values (ethics, business skills, capital) connected with the rise of East Asian capitalism. In e√ect, the figure of the Chinese as alien capital is the means and object of a violent displacement of the social contradictions generated by the Philippine nation-state’s own identification with global capitalism. In another work, Hau observes the way in which this figure recurs in Philippine nationalist literary texts as part of a wider nationalist e√ort to imagine a unified body politic that could overcome the prevailing social and economic inequities generated by neocolonialism.∑Ω Her reading of Edgardo Reyes’s novel Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (At the Claws of Daylight) (1968) is pertinent here as it demonstrates the racialized personification of alienation that takes shape through the social realist imaginings of urban protest literature. In Reyes’s novel, the humanist hero, Julio Madiaga (from matiyaga, hardworking), is the Filipino Everyman who journeys from the idyllic countryside to the corrupt, exploitative national capital in search of his disappeared sweetheart, Ligaya (happiness). That journey chronicles Julio’s alienation through his absorption into the urban capitalist economy and also serves as the process of national class consciousnessraising as an instrument for overcoming that alienation. Discovering that Ligaya has become the sexual captive of Ah Tek, the figure of corrupt Chinese capital, Julio attempts to rescue her; when his plan fails and Ah Tek murders Ligaya, he takes his fatal revenge against Ah Tek instead. Hau reads this fantasy of vengeance as a nationalizing moment wherein the protest against alienation, which takes away the Everyman’s humanity (insofar as Ligaya embodies this lost, promised happiness/humanity, e√ectively does), ‘‘is directed against the Chinese, who is both an alien and instrument of capitalist alienation.’’∏≠ The figure of the Chinese becomes the embodiment of an entire social system, which is seen to prevent the humanist hero’s realization of his humanity and his attainment of happiness. Something similar is at work in Cubao 1980, in relation to the bakla, whose symbolic condensation as an identity is performed by the sinister and remote Metropolitan Debris

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figure of Hermie. Hermie is the ‘‘big-time’’ bakla who first lures Butch, himself the original kolboy in the story, into the demeaning exchanges of sex for money he subsequently disavows. Hermie is surrounded by the trappings of modern aΔuence. Like Ah Tek, he signifies money. He hovers over the narrative, intermittently invoked but virtually invisible. To Tom, he is mysterious and indecipherable, unlike any of the other bakla he has met: a bakla exuding power. Like Ah Tek, he provides well for his kept lover, is kind and materially generous but also murderously possessive. In Hermie, then, we find the symbolic figure of the Chinese as alien capital, the source of debasement and unfreedom of everyday alienation.∏∞ Like the Chinese, who ‘‘perverts the ‘true’ value of citizenship,’’ Hermie is a perversion of the true value delivered to Cubao’s forsaken by God’s white representative.∏≤ Whereas, on the level of national urban life, racism helps to resolve class antagonisms, on the level of submetropolitan life, homophobia helps to resolve the racism of the universal law of value. The sexualization of the worker’s corporeal debasement, which is already implicit in labor’s protest against its emasculation by capital, is underscored and materialized by Tom’s and Butch’s own literal prostitution.∏≥ It is in part this heterosexist sexualization of commodification that for Perez demands a homophobic solution to the problem of alienation. Tom turns away then from one heteronormatively gendered and racialized system of value underwriting the prostitution economy only to embrace the same, but di√erently calibrated, system of value underwriting the politics of humanist redemption. Hence the consolidation of bakla identity as the corrupting disease that has to be purged from the metropolitan space that upholds the humanizing self. Scorned by his self-redeeming lover, Hermie emerges out of the teeming crowd of undi√erentiated faces, ‘‘like a ghost in a dream’’ (86), and shoots Butch dead. Unlike the case of the kidnapped Chinese, the dramatic violent consequence of the kolboy’s white redemption redounds upon, not the bakla, as the purported source of the kolboy’s alienation, but upon the kolboy as the movement of identification with a universal humanness. This reversal is not, however, an overturning of the prevailing logic, merely its precipitous fulfillment. Whether the product (the alterity of identity) or the movement (identification), it all comes to a fatal, vengeful end. Blood, rain, and the chaos of bodies mix in an explosion that stops the infernal city-machine for a moment. And then it starts again, the relentless pounding tread of the crowd pouring through Cubao. Upon seeing this dramatic consequence of his and Butch’s redemption, Tom 244

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suspects the truth that lies at the core of his acts—the truth, perhaps, that he had been seeing the world from the place of his immanent redemption all along. That truth comes to him through the urban deluge, into which both Hermie and Butch disappear, a deluge that dissolves the dead still of his universal human valorization, leaving morsels of time past (pira-piraso kong nakaraan). Tom asks himself, ‘‘Who was Hermie? Who was Sonny, who was Bert, who was Ken, who were those five guys who played music at Clark and at Subic, who were all those people I allowed a piece of my life—people, faces, mere shadows?’’ (90). From the place of transcendence, all those others can appear only as a race of dark, obscure figures, what Colette Guillaumin describes as an ‘‘undi√erentiated mass, floating somewhere outside the passage of time, like an eternal essence from which no single individual stands out in space or time.’’∏∂ Shadows convey the hollowing out of persons as empty forms. However, they also suggest the full beings from which they are cast but which they necessarily obscure, the living persons they depend on but draw away from. They suggest, in other words, all that Tom doesn’t know: ‘‘What a waste, what a waste, I knew so many things, but I didn’t know’’ (89). This obscurity is itself depicted for the reader in Perez’s sparse narrative, in the emptiness of its descriptions. It is precisely the glaring blank spaces, which stand out from underneath the bare bones of this narrative, that highlight the complexities of life that are not known. ‘‘Simple lang,’’ (Its simple), is the refrain Butch uses to reassure Tom of how easy the job they are getting into is. The refrain is precisely the instrument for making this life easy. By reducing his encounters to their most minimal outlines, Tom relieves himself of the burden of knowing, of feeling and responding to the lives he comes into contact with, but also of feeling and registering his own reduction to mere corporeality, to a piece of matter like all the disposable pieces of matter that saturate Cubao. As a strategy for coping with his own abjection, Tom experiences his life in this kind of muting, obscuring, and estranged way. He views everything in its exterior form, including himself and his body, and is sparse in his descriptions and characterizations, noting only the barest physical details as isolated objects marking the spaces of his happenings. The whole narrative consists of the stark verbal and sexual exchanges he engages in, in a series of discontinuous events in which he appears to be an accidental participant. One of Perez’s noteworthy literary formal achievements lies in this almost ascetic economy of expression he brings to Tagalog fictional narrative. Rather Metropolitan Debris

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than merely a minimalist rendering of a richly textured and profoundly complex reality, in which all but the essentials are stripped from full naturalist and sentimentalist description, Perez’s narrative style might be said to perform a surfacing of perceptible object forms from the undi√erentiated sealike morass of urban existence into which everything would otherwise disappear. ‘‘I am a visual writer,’’ Perez claims.∏∑ ‘‘A word is a line. A sentence is a figure. A paragraph is a composed picture.’’ As material expressions of urban being, verbal gestures or kinds of speech (wika) are for Perez themselves objects of surfacing. As Benilda Santos comments, ‘‘For Perez, words have very di√erent qualities. These are not used to indicate a meaning or the meanings of a relationship, for example, but rather to become precisely that. That very condition of a particular relationship: the destiny or direction of that relationship.’’∏∏ This use of words as the very worldly matter of human relations places the reader in a situation similar to that of Tom, that is, of not knowing and of wanting to know. The very ghostly atmosphere that results from Perez’s sparing style only augurs other immanent yet invisible presences surrounding every surfaced word-thing, heightening the enigmatic quality and a√ective import of each commonplace detail spared from nothingness. In a play on ‘‘the mysterious character’’ of commodities, which reflect the social relations of their production as the intrinsic quality of these things, the reader is haunted by the unknown subjectivities that foregrounded word-things suggest and might contain. All those pieces that Tom spares from his impassive reading of piecemeal experiences confront him finally with some kind of truth which they portend: ‘‘—one fan, tiles, a cabinet, a mirror, a light bulb, plastic flowers, a plaster of Paris Sto. Niño, a blue taxi, papers piled up, a small refrigerator, a magazine, coconuts, a square hole, Butterfly, crushed, the ‘Everlasting Thrill’ ’’ (90). These are the undigested kernels of Tom’s encounters, leftovers of experience that cannot be absorbed in the circulation of exchangeable bodies, sex, money, and food in which he and his clients are caught. What their peripheral presence alludes to are the lives they were connected with, which remain outside of exchange. These objects attest to a life beyond the existence of ‘‘mere shadows,’’ beyond identity (beyond the disease of bakla identity that Tom conjures as the object of his fear, in order that it may be exorcised), beyond commodification. The remainders of Tom’s experiences are integral parts of those very lives they indicate, vital aspects of the sensuous and experiential activity of the individuals

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who use them. As such, they also hint at other social relations he might have had with his clients, relations that he can as yet only barely grasp. In contrast to that ‘‘substantification of time’’ which these racializing economic transactions imply, each of these fragment pieces ( piraso) suggests a di√erent time, bears the possibility of opening up into another time, another quality of time, like the square hole in the van where Tom is raped: ‘‘through it entered the wind, through it entered the sun, through it entered the noise from the outside.’’ (55).

Historical Transformation and Secularist Conversion What are we to draw from this interpretation of the epiphanic moment at the end of the novel? Perez’s book is subtitled First Cry of the Gay Liberation Movement in the Philippines (Unang Sigaw ng Gay Liberation Movement). Perez clarifies that this is ‘‘a cry only in one’s dreams,’’ for such a movement cannot happen within the near future. Nevertheless, in a letter to X included in this collection, Perez contemplates the objectives of such a movement, if it were to happen (kung sakali): the acceptance of one’s male body, the loving of one’s ‘‘fellow’’ bakla (kapuwa-bakla) rather than the desiring of a conventional man (karaniwang lalaki), the battle for ‘‘equal employment opportunities,’’ and the replacement of ‘‘fleeting a√airs and earthly enjoyment’’ with deep friendship and love. As Martin Manalansan and J. Neil Garcia have each pointed out, Perez’s humanist vision advocates an ethics of respect of self and others founded on the recognition in people of true selves of value beneath their worldly trappings, including the trappings of gender.∏π The deep friendship and love he envisions is a relation between equals.∏∫ As the vanishing mediator of universal subjectivity, the measure of human value (as that which cannot be bought, possessed, or governed by others, as that intrinsic worth of being), whiteness as unmarked subjectivity is thus the condition of possibility and limit of Perez’s project of humanist liberation from homosexual abjection. Value is a condition of possibility of this movement to the extent that it is the means by which Perez’s Filipino subject of ‘‘gay liberation’’ can come into being—it provides the subjective form in which this Filipino gay man can be free, but, more than that, it is the very substance in him to be freed. The value form I have been calling whiteness serves as the limit of this movement to the extent that the liberation from a gendered, racialized exploitation that it promises draws constitutive sustenance

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from the depletion of (trans)gendered others, here, figured in bakla who cling to false hopes, false ways of living and loving, false dreams, persisting in their own unfreedom. In thematizing Tom’s false redemption, Perez demonstrates the racist and heteronormative law of value supporting the demeaning sexual relations of exchange through which Tom and others are led to course their desires.∏Ω Furthermore, in returning Tom to an open-ended embeddedness in the shadow pieces of Cubao and through them behooving him to find new ways of being with others, Perez implicitly critiques the role of whiteness in the constitution of a liberated subject who would transcend and renounce those lives with whom he has come in contact. However, in constructing as the subject of that liberation a self-possessed, self-valuing, and truth-bearing masculine subject who might fully know himself and others and indeed who might author his own destiny, Perez accedes to the white, masculinist normativity of an emerging global sexual identity politics. Perez’s very use of the term ‘‘gay’’ as the umbrella concept for this movement of liberation indicates this emergent politics as well as a historical shift that has made it possible. If, as Manansalan argues, the ‘‘cultural and politico-economic milieu that allowed this concept to become a hegemonic category for describing individuals as well as groups of individuals . . . is conspicuously absent in the Philippines,’’ its ambiguous presence here evidences a new sociohistorical situation at hand.π≠ Cubao 1980 attests to a process of historical transformation—a conversion, if you will—that is under way. The conversion manifests itself, in this specific context, in the minoritization of bakla under the rubric of homosexual identity. The analogy I draw between the specific racialization of the Chinese in contemporary urban formulations of national community, which Hau analyses, and the homophobic personification of urban alienation in Cubao 1980 is meant to highlight a common historical provenance for both forms of minoritization, and the respective claims to equal civil rights and political representation to which such minoritization, in some quarters, gives rise. Hau suggests that the conflation of race and class exemplified in the case of the kidnapped Chinese has as its historical condition the fact that ‘‘the extractive logic that used to be identified with the colonial and neocolonial state vis-à-vis the Chinese has become generalized and di√used throughout society.’’π∞ The extractive logic to which Hau refers saw its highest instance in the crony capitalism of the Marcos state, the deposing of which, as well as the subsequent rise and vigorous propagation of neoliberalism 248

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and democratization that followed, ushered in precisely the generalization and di√usion of a logic that had concentrated in and created the authoritarian state. J. Neil Garcia also links the minoritization of the ‘‘newly ‘manufactured’ person’’ that is the bakla/homosexual to the authoritarian regime, locating in the seventies the nascent hegemonic practice of homo/sexualizing bakla as an identity.π≤ Although he does not provide an account of historical determination for this new phenomenon, Garcia alludes to constitutive connections between martial law and ‘‘the eΔorescence of gay culture’’ he observes in the metropolis during this period. He points to homophobia within the revolutionary struggle as one ‘‘reason for the ‘allowance’ ostensibly granted by the Marcosian dispensation to local gay discourse.’’ ‘‘So,’’ he muses, ‘‘the agonistic space which was granted Filipino gays for a good part of the Martial Law period may have become the logical trade-o√ for the generalized suppression of socialist discourse at the time.’’π≥ My own intent is to carefully track the mediations comprising this ‘‘logical trade-o√ ’’ and to see as one of its central conditions of possibility a forcible turn away from the problem of national identity, which had for more than a couple of decades preoccupied progressive, liberal, and conservative social forces and shaped dominant conflicts in political and economic policy and practice. Presidentially executed and inscribed by the declaration of martial law, this turn can also be characterized as the sublation of the problem of national identity by humanism, the state ideology of the New Society.π∂ In e√ect, martial law can be said to have overcome the abiding crisis of Philippine life through the establishment of a crisis government, a state form that arrogated to itself the powers unleashed by the intensification of this crisis in order to unify the nation under its command. The authoritarian unity of the nation accomplished by repressive means thus found in the Marcos state the symbolic realization of Philippine identity, an identity whose point of constitution was no less than Universal Humanity. On this view, we can recognize generalized humanism as both consequence and instrument of the repression of progressive, nationalist movements seeking the radical resolution of modern alienation, repression, and exploitation, which the problem of national identity attempted to articulate but could only inadequately address. For the logic of humanism’s sublation of nationalism as crisis is undoubtedly a violent, symbolic, and material accomplishment. Nowhere is this better encapsulated than in Imelda Marcos’s far-reaching e√orts to consolidate Metropolitan Debris

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the heterogeneous, autarchic areas within and around the nation’s capital as a single environment for metropolitan humanity. Imelda Marcos extolled, ‘‘A metropolis is not space alone; it is a dimension of the mind, a surge of the spirit’’ and ‘‘The call of the metropolis is truly a summons to humanity.’’π∑ The Ministry of Human Settlements, headed by Imelda Marcos, thus proceeded to eliminate from the City of Man the unassimilable debris of its own projects to attain this humanity: ‘‘Having proceeded to clean up the physical debris, we must now pay more attention to the non-physical. Having introduced measures against physical pollution, we must proceed against spiritual pollution. We go from the outer to the inner environment, from the external to the inner being, from the outreach to the in-reach of the Metropolitan Filipino.’’π∏ This process of humanization, which as the means of courting international capital yielded the regime millions of stolen dollars, helps to illuminate important connections between Perez’s text and ‘‘the Marcosian dispensation.’’ππ I am not arguing that Perez’s humanism simply mimed that of the Marcoses. I am claiming rather that Perez’s articulation of a prevailing social dilemma as well as the desired path of one’s escape from it finds its condition of possibility and limit in the generalized humanism purveyed by the newly built environment of the Marcoses’ New Society. In e√ect, the New Society is the space determining the shape of public expressions of freedom and happiness and hope, which the Marcos regime allowed. Cubao—the unprecedented focus of not only this work but also a series of works by Perez—was itself the product of this new dispensation. After all, Cubao owed its sudden commercial prominence in great part to crony connections to the Marcoses.π∫ In trying faithfully to capture the molecular operations and a√ective structures of this city-machine and the social beings that animate it, Perez inscribes the very sinews of the powerful summons that it issues and that he ambivalently heeds. This inscription is, however, also an invention. Unlike most scholarly anthropological and sociological accounts of peripheral sociocultural life, Perez’s literary rendering of urban experience is a practicum for the molding of subjective desire. The mundane striving Perez creatively inscribes serves as the very fuel and fodder for the operations of that new apparatus of capture, the City of Man. In other words, this regime of democratic subjection, within which the denizens of metropolitan Philippines found themselves equal under the law of state humanism, also greatly depends on the experiential labor of those subjects working on themselves, working to be worthy, not so much to the regime as to themselves, 250

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which, at least in the moment of their labor’s subsumption by the prevailing order, mean the same thing. This labor, whose other side is a liberative, creative becoming, is what makes the very spaces contracted as the material site of modernization. Indeed, it is what enables and supports these transformations that seem to be taking place everywhere around it. As ‘‘the material infrastructure’’ for the foundation of a ‘‘moral or spiritual infrastructure,’’ Metro Manila served as the built environment for a whole set of social, cultural, and subjective transformations whose reach we have yet to fully grasp. One of the ways we might think about these transformations is to cast them in terms of an emergent secularism that arguably had never permeated Philippine social formations to the degree that it did then and has now. This emergent secularism is by no means a turn away from religion, which clearly su√used the self-representations of the New Society and its leadership. Rather, like its Euro-American models, it is ‘‘a shifting, unsettled, and yet reasonably e≈cacious organization of public space that opened up new possibilities of freedom and action.’’πΩ Such possibilities of freedom and action depend on the privatization of moral and religious di√erences, even as a generic Christianity oversees this very organization, as well as the public space in which its own mores find expression. Certain evangelical, Protestant features characterize this generic Christianity as well as the new public sphere it sought to organize. It is no coincidence that at the height of the Marcos regime numerous mass evangelical Christian crusades took place, often at the very centers built under the regime’s auspices, as exemplified by the Don Stewart crusade at the Araneta center depicted in the novel. The space accorded such religious events confirmed and expanded the new secularism of the state. At one such crusade in 1977, Imelda Marcos gave a speech that o√ers a picture of the Protestant features of the new secularism. In the speech, Marcos describes Filipinos as being ‘‘engaged in our own miracle of resurrection,’’ a process of bodily and spiritual redemption inspired by the example of the liberation from Old World bigotry and degradation that founded American freedom and spiritual strength.∫≠ Like Billy Graham, to whom Marcos pays tribute for making ‘‘man more God-like, and God more human,’’ the United States becomes the means and ideal symbol of the mundane incarnation of God attainable by the Philippine nation: ‘‘God is not a stranger but a friend, here in the Philippines. We fully realize that as we strive to make Metro Manila the City of Man, its basic foundation is the City of God. For it is love that Metropolitan Debris

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a≈liates man to God.’’∫∞ Here we witness the familiarization and personalization of relations with God, the closing of the gap, one might say, between God and humankind, which distinguishes Protestant spirituality from Catholic piety. With the removal of the intercessionary role of priests, saints, and the Holy Church, the point of command shifts from God and his representatives to the moral subject—the national individual—who from here on must serve as the guardian of his own inner spiritual value. This value, which links the moral subject directly to and in a homologous relation with God, can be found within an inner space marked by a new privacy, a space configured as both a refuge and a site of moral redemption. It is now the individual moral subject who is responsible for his own redemption, a redemption attainable in this life. Protestant secularism opens this possibility of salvation on earth as the premise of human striving, a possibility that must also be seen partly as the achievement of the ecumenical Christian resistance to the dictatorship and its state spiritualism.∫≤ I’ve hinted at some of the Protestant features of Tom’s newfound spiritual infrastructure. God is on earth, by the side of self-determining humans for whom he has unbounded love. Tom’s redemption no longer depends on the priestly absolution of his sins but on the divine forgiveness he experiences through his own act of deeply felt personal remorse. What we witness in Cubao 1980 is precisely the conversion of a debased, commodified life into a new ethical subject characterized by a redemptive depth structure. Invented to countenance the daily self-devaluation supporting the regime’s metropolitanist aspirations, this new ethical subject nevertheless serves also as the means for the privatization of a generalized repression. Carried out by urban demolitions, elimination of dissidents, and public censorship, such repression was the condition of possibility of the nation-state’s uneasy identification with an unmarked capitalist humanity.

Faith in Kiyeme (Frivolous Detail) It is in light of these transformations and their material and spiritual infrastructure that we can account for the specific foreclosures of Perez’s political articulation of subjective liberation. The morally ascetic, Protestant self that Perez fashions as the means of this subjective liberation demands the eschewing of frivolities, the signs of superficiality, materialism, and commercialized transactions that characterized the economy of Tom’s debasement. Moreover, the pursuit of value as the proof and substance of such liberation compels Tom’s 252

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expressed disgust for the sexual acts he engages in and takes pleasure from, as the very condition of his self-worth.∫≥ While Tom sees as worthy of rescue those ‘‘pieces’’ (piraso) that are residues of his experiences of others, having faith in their immanent or potential meaningfulness, he cannot see any relation between them and those other particularities that he describes as kiyeme (silly a√ectations)—those excesses of personality, frivolous gestures, superfluous posturings, and expressive artifices which he sees as characteristic of the duplicitous and worthless e√eminacy of baklas. As Butch describes them, ‘‘They’re all pretense and airs [Mga pa-etsing-etsing lang]. Women without money, without tits, without pussies, without a future’’ (8).∫∂ Kiyeme, as well as etsingan and ek-ekan (varieties of excessive, vain, feminine arts) all bodily mark these beings who bear them as lacking the virtues of pure humanness. To the extent that such virtues continue to inform Perez’s project of gay liberation, these beings and their modes of personhood can only be what must be made to fall away—lives led in vain. We might say these ‘‘fallen forms’’ are the hidden price—the ‘‘strange fruit’’—tendered by the liberative claim to normative human value. If we understand the accoutrements of kiyeme as subjective life-creating practices rather than as mere secondary attributes of given beings, we are confronted with the objective reality couched behind this metaphor of price. In a continuum with swardspeak, the phonetically and semantically playful, paronymic, and heteronymic modes of speech wielded by the a≈rmative sward whom they help to fashion, the mercurial modes of acting denoted by kiyeme, etsingan, ekekan, kunday, kendeng must be considered as creative, life-enabling, even deathtaming practices that make for subjectively and socially viable forms of being-inthe-world.∫∑ They are, in a word, indispensable forms of subjective and social struggle on the part of a particular refuse of urban humanity seeking hospitable places of habitation as well as surpassing the dominant strictures against their own creative presencing. These practices of superfice and diversion, as social arts of self, are integral parts of the kinds of living that people have made for themselves under the name of bakla. Like lalaki, for whom the kolboy stands, bakla is a dominant fiction that means ‘‘more than a set of representational and narratological possibilities for articulating consensus. It is also a libidinal apparatus or ‘machinery for ideological investment’, an investment which is as vital as labor or exchange to the maintenance of the social formation.’’∫∏ The practices of living which create and Metropolitan Debris

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sustain this dominant fiction are productive of the value that is accumulated elsewhere and that returns as the very measure of their failed humanness, their imputed ‘‘worthlessness’’ (walang kuwenta, at no account). The dominant fiction of bakla is hence also the means of new forms of exploitation. As tools of the trade of the makers of spectacles, of beauty, and of pleasure, which are constantly appropriated by the dominant culture and for this reason seem never to inhere in or abide with them, libidinal practices of kiyeme, of ek-ekan, of feminine artifice vitally make the world they seem merely to adorn. We could say these practices make for Manila’s appearance as a city in cosmopolitan drag. Describing the reopening in 1980 of one of the landmark gay discotheques in the revived sex tourist district of Malate, a reporter gasps the queer truth of the City of Man’s metropolitanism: ‘‘quieme is reality.’’∫π Tom himself equates price and kiyeme when he contemplates the compensations a√orded by his hunting: ‘‘Give twenty, thirty, forty, a hundred. Di√erent kiyeme, di√erent happenings’’ (41–42). The ambiguity of whose kiyeme this is blurs the line of distinction between kolboy and bakla that Tom himself is at such pains to draw. After all, the ‘‘small-time’’ change Tom associates with the garapal [shameless] baklas and expresses as kiyeme applies to him as well. His earnings consist of petty cash, which serves to supplement the formal wages of real workers like his brother and thus which can only have come from nonwork and can only o√er trifling pleasures in return. This daily experience of his own smalltime existence, of happenings which lead nowhere and amount to nothing, of an excessive liquidity that cannot accumulate into a solid, worthwhile life is what impels him to embrace transcendent value. As the medium of conversion of his compensation into consumption, this experience supports the formal urban economy that appears as Cubao by day. Additionally, the cat in heat, to which he likens Cubao at night, is also himself, Tom, and all the other kolboys hunting, just as the baklas are hunting, seeking amusements or diversions [aliw] in a way that can only be described as kiyeme, happening. While Perez’s humanist claim might be seen as an expression of his conversion to the secularist universality of human individuality, this conversion can also be shown to bear its limits on the very surface of his attained subjective constitution. As Judith Butler argues, ‘‘Conventional and exclusionary norms of universality can, through perverse reiterations, produce unconventional formulations of universality that expose the limited and exclusionary features of the former

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one at the same time that they mobilize a new set of demands . . . there is no way to predict what will happen in such instances when the universal is wielded precisely by those who signify its contamination.’’∫∫ This unpredicatability is evidenced in Vicente Rafael’s discussion of the uneven and contradictory character of the Christian conversion of Tagalogs during early Spanish colonial rule. There, submission to the universal doctrinal word of Christianity was accompanied by a ‘‘hollowing out’’ of the very call to submission. The token character of the performed rites of conversion exposes the very limits of its supposed accomplishment. Similarly, the particular universalizing subjectification articulated by Perez broaches the limits of humanness, which his own identifying claim invokes. We can view those limits in the formal and thematic function of those ‘‘pieces’’ (piraso) that surface at the end of the novel. Unlike Western modernist expressions of the symptom, which, as Fredric Jameson argues, in taking its form from value can only mark the absence of the full traumatic context that gives rise to it as a lack of meaning, these pieces in Perez’s novella are neither meaningless nor latently meaningful.∫Ω They are, rather, part-objects still awaiting signification. They are traces of nonabstract relations of meaning, indeed, of new social relations, yet to be made. Even after the trauma of racialized value production that Tom experiences has become homophobically embodied in Hermie (as symptom), these part-objects remain, as if to haunt him with what, in spite of everything he knew, he didn’t know—‘‘who?’’ ‘‘Who was Hermie? Who was Sonny?’’ These remainders confront Tom with the question of the possible relations he may have foreclosed, and the potential self he might have had through them. In this way, the remainders act as details—not in the sense of a minor component of a pregiven meaningful totality (being neither merely referential nor merely symbolic, neither realist, allegorical, nor modernist), but rather in the sense of tasks to be carried out as part of the process of arriving at the who. This who is as much one’s own self as it is others’ and consists of the very process of coming to know oneself in and through others, a praxis inseparable from the urban refuse’s daily work of prevailing. The tangible details Perez spares from the worthless and undi√erentiated shadow life to which the refuse of metropolitanist humanity is condemned thus become practical tasks for the creation of a new self, a new relational being. In ‘‘Oberpas’’ (Overpass) and ‘‘Paskil’’ (Poster), stories in the same volume, Perez

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demonstrates the life importance, for the petty as well as lumpen urban dweller, of this practice of sparing detail as a practical task for the sparing of self and for the release of a di√erent subjective potential. In ‘‘Paskil,’’ Dodong, a Xerox copy machine operator, works on Malvar Street in a tiny corner by a service stairway, day in day out, his presence a constant bother for those passing through. All day, all week, his only view from where he sits is of the temporary walls built around a construction site across the street, on which posters and flyers are plastered. He looks at them attentively, fondly, thinking that all things have use and reason. And while he admits, ‘‘Yes, they were only pieces of paper stuck on the wall on the other side of the street, nevertheless they were put directly in front of his place. For him to see. For him to read. So that they could give some measure of meaning, no matter how tiny, to his life.’’ One day a new poster is put up. It is red and black and yellow, with a drawing of a young girl, her hair tied by a rope. On it is written, Quality is Our Recipe Wendy’s America’s no. 1 Hamburgers Call 922–67–01, 922–58–48 That afternoon his mother comes home from the health center, weighed down by knowledge of her terminal illness. As her illness is confirmed and steadily worsens, Dodong watches the slow deterioration of the poster, the yellowing of its paper, the curling of its edges, the fading of its colors. He looks at its tears. And then one day, at work, questioned by a friend, he suddenly weeps. He crosses the street, peels o√ the remainder of the tattered poster, his poster, folds it, and tucks it away next to his chest. ‘‘To bring home. To keep. To take care of. And with it the grief that he had for so long not wanted to face. Grief that, he didn’t know why now, was mixed with a joy that deeply wanted to prevail, for the answer to the riddle of fate lay with him, which only he, and he only, could know.’’ What this story renders is not so much the contents of Dodong’s experience as much as the mode of his experience. Here, tattered posters, which are otherwise simply particles of noise in the metropolitan environment, are used by Dodong to sort his feelings and realize ‘‘the answer to the riddle of fate.’’ Pieces of the building and decaying environment become elements in the notation (rather than representation) of his experience. Perez shows how a certain attentiveness to a detail of Manila’s noise, its fabric of disconnected, dumb, and hence dispos256

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able matter, render that detail subjectively useful. Even as Dodong sees the poster, it is its tangibility, not its visual referential meaning, that matters to his life. The detail ceases to be a detail of the world, turning rather into a detail, that is, a task, of the self in its daily work of prevailing. With the pieces of the world, Dodong replenishes his strength, restores his power, and that is how he lives. He apprehends the Wendy’s poster, the face of transnational culture, the instrumental material for capital’s interpellating campaign, and takes it into his care. He spares this object, a disposable matter like himself, in Martin Heidegger’s sense of sparing: ‘‘To save really means to set something free into its own presencing.’’Ω≠ Dodong’s keeping the poster is a form of this sparing, a releasing of its potential as something with its own power to signify and be (and to participate in one’s being), beyond the ends to which it was manufactured. It is a practice directed not, as in the modernist practices of bricolage and collage, toward producing an aesthetic experience but, as in the squatter practices of scavenging and assembling refuse, toward individual prevailing. For Dodong, this practice is part of the labor of making a life. ‘‘Paskil’’ demonstrates precisely the experiential significance of seemingly inconsequential matter. Dodong takes the crumbling poster into his care because it is what has responded to his questions, fear and sorrow, to his life, which is falling apart with the falling apart of the life of his dying mother. It has been, in fact, a part of his experience, a medium for coping with this catastrophe that has befallen his mother and thus him too. That catastrophe is his mother’s fatal illness, but it is also the transnational wealth communicated by the very Wendy’s poster he keeps, to the extent that the surplus extracted by the latter derives from the life (the labor) of the world’s poor. It is the felt connection between transnational power as promise and his mother’s depletion that moves Dodong to press the poster against his body. A similar point and poignant moment is rendered by the social realist painter Antipas ‘‘Biboy’’ Delotavo, whose works in the 1970s documented the struggle of the working classes in the urban environment: ‘‘In his well-known ‘Itak sa Puso ni Mang Juan’ (Axe in the Heart of Mang Juan) (1972), the bladelike tail of the Coca-Cola sign seems to stab the old man’s heart, drained of blood and vigor.’’Ω∞ Unlike this painting, which symbolically depicts the harsh reality of transnational corporations (the violent e√ects of its global goods), Perez’s ‘‘Paskil’’ demonstrates the individual’s pained embrace of the abstract forces of his or her oppression. Metropolitan Debris

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In such a paradoxical embrace, Perez articulates a practice of care predicated on a peculiar, perhaps queer faith in the disposable material detail. In this way, the fallout of global humanism as the achievement of Philippine metropolitanization is recast as the spiritual means of a new thriving in the world. That new form of thriving consists of a self that is no longer an atomized piece of consumable and disposable matter like Tom, but a self as a means of coordinating scattered life remainders—lifetimes spared—into a viable life of one’s own. Perez’s writing is precisely an exercise or practicum in the making of a singular life. As he proclaims, ‘‘The objective of creative writing is individuation.’’Ω≤ Individuation is not, however, a matter of di√erentiating oneself from other human beings but of opening oneself to and connecting with them, with the self managing as a communicative port through which signifying pieces of other selves might be received and reconfigured. Unlike the ideologically free self that serves as the destination of a political, activist consciousness in the urban protest writings of the period, Perez’s self serves as the agent-medium of passage for the submerged and dematerialized subjectivities dwelling in the urban unconscious. In this light, Perez’s turn in the mid-1990s to spirit quests does not really depart very far from his vocation and ambitions as a writer, which by all accounts he seemed to have abandoned.Ω≥ On the contrary, the project of searching transpersonal encounters with spirits of the deceased in ‘‘bondage to the earth-zone’’ as well as nonhuman entities dwelling in the urban fabric appears to be the occult development of this self as agent-medium for the release of the living ghosts of violation and unfulfillment, whose hollowed presences are intimated by dislocated details-signs in the urban environment.Ω∂ In these widely publicized spirit quests, Perez conjures new ‘‘alchemies’’ of faith out of a mixed assortment of New Age, Jungian, cosmopolitan native, and local mystical sources. These alchemies of faith—labeled by Perez’s publishers as ‘‘Filipino transpersonal psychology’’—serve as experiential supports for the formation of a community exemplified by the telepathic social networks he assembles into his teams of ‘‘Spirit Questors.’’ Strangely enough, these telepathic social networks not only resemble the telecommunicational social networks of ‘‘Generation Txt,’’ the new generational urban class of mobile tele-texting technology users who have freed their loci of identifications from local, territorially bound communities. The Spirit Questors are Generation Txt. The self as social coordinating medium that arises out of such alchemies of faith can be viewed as the result of the practical attempts to ameliorate the 258

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individualized subjective and bodily toll exacted by the intense exploitation and continuous devaluation of Philippine labor. Such attempts are already evident in the practices of this labor, which depends on a social network for its subsistence but in addition serves as the subsistence support for a continually devalued formal labor force. The self as a facilitative nexus of renewed relations with others appears, then, as the subjective apparatus of an emergent service class trying to stay buoyant under conditions of sinking personal, individual value. Characterized by openness, this subjective apparatus can be viewed as the consequence of a widespread social critique of the centralized, selfish power of the authoritarian state, a critique in part made up of just such struggles to escape the racialized and sexualized life devaluation on which such power depended. The crisis e√ected by this critique led to the deposing of the Marcos regime in 1986. We can even say that it helped bring about the transformation of the authoritarian state into a coalitional type of democratic government, which postures no longer as a dominant power or a mere instrument of power but as a mediator of plural political and economic desires and interests. State reform is the mirror image of social reform. What E. San Juan Jr. calls, with respect to the popular democratic movement, ‘‘mutations of sensibility’’ since 1986 can be viewed in these subjective transformations, which, in Perez’s work, attain and express the spirit of a new metropolitan form. This new metropolitan form, whose spirit is neither simply the ‘‘spirit of capitalism’’ nor the ‘‘spirit of resistance’’ but the uneasy cooperation of both, has been given the name civil society.

Specters of Prehumanity in a Posthumanist World What gives us a point of entry into the times of gods and spirits—times that are seemingly very di√erent from the empty, secular, and homogeneous time of history— is that they are never completely alien; we inhabit them to begin with. —dipesh chakrabarty

In Perez’s deployment of the detail as subjective task can be gleaned practices of experience that are at once fundamental and tangential to the social relations of production that will obtain in the postauthoritarian period. These details act as grips that allow one to wend a subjectively viable way in the quicksand conditions of life of the socially pulverized service labor classes. They are what keep one Metropolitan Debris

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afloat in and indeed enable one to rise above the stagnant liquidity that constitutes the particular economic mire of those who find themselves part of the ‘‘immobile factors of production’’ in a world of accelerated capital mobility. In Perez’s self-description as a man of innumerable functions and diverse trades (‘‘playwright, poet, fiber artist, publications and layout designer, sweater designer, collector, teacher of creative writing, puppet maker, photographer, psychotherapist, cultural journalist, theater and video director, and many more’’), we see this new self as the creative subjective modality of multitasked, multiskilled workers who lend themselves in innumerable services in order to maintain a good living. Just as the human contacts whose life significance they sometimes index comprise a social network as the means of support of one’s livelihood, the details one encounters in this work enable the creation of a subjectivity as the activity of their caring coordination. Such an activity helps to realize a meaning that, while socially mediating, is finally directed inward. In this way, Perez fabulates an emergent technology of self, one whose libidinal arts have become streamlined in favor of more puritanical, spiritually private practices of social venturing, practices that figure the petty and middling entrepreneurial activity and ethic of the new global class of civic humanity. It is not only that the claim to equal humanity entails the very production of new forms of disposable life, but also that the practices that lead to this claim already partake of the very practices of living of those who would become disposable. We might say these practices of piraso as practices of care are the Masonic obverse of practices of kiyeme, diverting practices of adventure and hanting, cleaned of bodily desire compromised by monetary exchange. Turning away from extant traditional gift relations and other older modes of social relations subsisting in bakla practices, which lend themselves to subsumption by the sexual market, and eschewing the feminized role of men as means, Perez moves toward free relations among equals as the ethical basis of this practice of care. In the midst of the substratification and disaggregation of production increasingly reliant on service labor and on the social logics of cooperation invented by the private sector, these practices of care are fundamental because they create and sustain the subjective conditions of that labor as well as the social relationships and flexible collectivities that capitalist management and production so eagerly seek as the conditions of new strategies of accumulation. At the same time, these practices of experience are tangential to the new practices of production to the extent that they foster activities and subjectivities that fall short of the ideal 260

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culture of e≈ciency, competitiveness, and private accumulation as well as capitalizeable social networks advocated by national proponents of capitalist globalization. And yet they also fall short of the progressive vision of radical, ecumenical, social movements seeking the end of capitalist exploitation and su√ering. If the local technology of self that Perez invents out of these spiritual practices of care might bear some resemblance to the new ethical cosmopolitan subject in the North who seeks spiritual, caring connections with and practices of concern for the world of diversity and its far-flung, deprived inhabitants, it bears both the latter’s promise and its aporias. In the attempt to go beyond the cultural-national boundaries of a provincial Western humanist order, this northern subject actively pursues the protection of a diversity threatened with permanent unsettlement, if not extinction. The resemblance of Perez’s local technology of self to this ethical cosmopolitan subject demonstrates neither simply the localization of globalizing forms of socioreligious being nor the influence of U.S. trends on local proclivities, but the reach and limit of the inventive aspirations of emergent metropolitan social formations. Built out of the human ruins of modernization and globalization, the emergent, vernacular cosmopolitan subject is called to heal the historical worldly wounds it, paradoxically, thrives on. What I call the specters of prehumanity are these very historical wounds risen to the present. They are evident in the spirit quest at the Manila Film Center, which brought Tony Perez public fame, where the workers who died when part of the building collapsed were left buried under the rubble because, to meet the deadline of the scheduled international film festival for which this center was built, Imelda Marcos, who commissioned the building and the festival, did not halt construction but rather ordered that it continue over the workers’ bodies. As in this sprit quest, the historical wounds take the form of ghosts and spirits making claims on those emergent cosmopolitan subjects who seek hospitable accommodation within the posthumanist world order, only by treading on layers and layers of human debris (dehumanized matter) buried beneath the edifices of metropolitan achievement.

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Chapter Seven

Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses Awakened, the masses are Messiah. —emmanuel lacaba

In the face of the practical universal humanism of civil society that begins to obtain during the postauthoritarian period, it is, I believe, important to reconsider the meanings and possibilities of the anti-imperialist solution to the national crisis in the 1960s and early 1970s. This solution took the path of revolution, a path that led precisely outside of the City of Man and its metropolitanist aspirations. Beyond the suspension of the catastrophic time of capitalist progress, revolution posed the possibility of another temporality, a radical future whose promise lay in the verso of metropolitan humanity: the masses. The distinction between revolutionary nationalism and the nationalism of the state is understood to hinge precisely upon the very content of the nation as it is defined by the notion of the masses. Hence, in direct confrontation with the conservative bourgeois nationalism of the Philippine state, Jose Ma. Sison, the leader of the Communist Party of the Philippines (cpp) since its founding in 1968, proclaims the need to clarify the term ‘‘people’’ as part of the project of a transformative national democracy: ‘‘The term ‘people’ has been much abused through populist sloganeering employed seasonally and professionally by bourgeois politicians and bourgeois publicists in the same manner that they abuse the

term ‘democracy’ to make rhetoric instead of the clarification of the forces at work in our society. Oftentimes, the term ‘people,’ like ‘democracy,’ is deliberately used to include certain classes in our society which mercilessly exploit the masses of our people.’’∞ The abuse of the term ‘‘people’’ stems from its inclusion of the exploitative classes in what should be a category of the exploited forces of production, forces that are also ‘‘the popular forces of national democracy or nationalism.’’ These forces consist, briefly, of workers and peasants, who make up 90 percent of the Filipino people. It is through the subtraction of the exploitative classes from the term ‘‘people’’ that one thus arrives at the category of ‘‘the masses,’’ which in its positive form is articulated as the political unity forged against imperialism and feudalism. Historically, the Filipino people come into being in the late nineteenthcentury revolutionary struggle against Spanish colonialism. They are the realization of the nation as a positive embodiment of the social antagonism against an alien power expressed in the Philippine revolution. As Sison asserts, ‘‘Filipino nationalism must be understood as a historical phenomenon, the commitment and practice of an entire people, which attacks the foreign exploiter but which necessarily builds up the forces of national progress through the process of struggle.’’≤ The Filipino people are therefore commensurate with the Filipino nation, which is at once the object and source of a ‘‘revolutionary imagination . . . bound by a common enemy and by the same system (of exploitation).’’≥ It is this revolutionary, antagonistic imagination which is at the same time a praxis of struggle (as opposed to the stabilizing practices of and for a hegemonic ‘‘imagined community’’) that distinguishes true—that is, progressive—Filipino nationalism from the nationalism of Western powers with which bourgeois Filipino nationalism becomes aligned. Indeed, it is through the alienation from and betrayal of this revolutionary imagination and struggle that bourgeois Filipino nationalism comes to be defined. In ‘‘The Need for a Cultural Revolution,’’ a speech given in 1966, Sison describes the contemporary deprivation of our youth and elders of the memory of ‘‘the national-democratic struggle of our people.’’ Subjected to the cultural and educational control of U.S. imperialism, Philippine youth are deprived of ‘‘the sense of national and social purpose’’—‘‘the political awareness of a national community’’ and ‘‘the desire for a modern national-democratic society’’—which infused the cultural revolution of the late nineteenth century. Youth’s forgetting of the originary purposive sense and desire of the revolutionary nation is shown 266

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by Sison to be commensurate with their alienation from the masses. The masses might thus be interpreted as the very embodiment and locus of an unfulfilled revolutionary struggle from which the bourgeois Filipino classes have, in their embrace of the mental and experiential trappings of a foreign culture, become estranged. The task of a cultural revolution or a Second Propaganda Movement would be to overturn this alienation by turning to the masses as the source of new, transformative knowledge: ‘‘Learning from the masses and being with them will make our generalizations for action and formulation of solutions more correct and more dynamic. We become immediately one with the masses in their mobilization.’’∂ The principle of learning from and becoming one with the masses serves therefore as the basis for a revolutionary literature. Following the aestheticpolitical program of Mao Tse Tung (in Talks at Yenan Forum), Sison asserts that the most important task of cadres in the realm of culture is to ‘‘serve the masses’’— that is, to render in cultural works their lives, their needs, and their desires as the social basis of revolutionary struggle.∑ ‘‘The masses’’ hence becomes the answer to the crucial question confronting writers during this time: ‘‘For Whom?’’ At the launching in 1971 of Panulat Para sa Kaunlaran ng Sambayanan (Writing for the Development of the People) (paksa), during which Sison outlines the task of cultural workers, the answer to this question which revolutionary literature provides becomes extended from a literature for the masses to ‘‘Panitikan Mula Sa Masa at Tungo sa Masa’’ (Literature from the Masses and toward the Masses). In rehearsing the tenets of cultural revolution, I am attempting to demonstrate the importance of the masses as a heuristic object for the creation and mobilization of a revolutionary nationalist subject.∏ The notion of ‘‘the Great Divide’’ within the Philippine nation came to great prominence after the Second World War, defining national politics in the postindependence era and becoming the central theme of nationalist historiography. As Carol Hau writes, ‘‘The ‘Great Divide’ provided the representational space for highlighting the emergence of the ‘masses’ out of a diversity of material and historical situations. The ‘Great Divide’ also charted the divergent trajectories taken by the so-called elite and the masses: Philippine historiography recast the ‘masses’ not as passive followers of ‘great men,’ but as the true subjects of Filipino, the true agents of social transformation.’’π As that from which educated Filipinos have become alienated and therefore that with which they must reintegrate, the masses become the revolutionary Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses

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point of subjectification for a new generation of committed writers and activist youth. In 1960, Petronilo Bn. Daroy wrote of the liberal Filipino intellectuals’ ‘‘sentimental love for the masses’’ in terms of a symbolic commitment to reality: ‘‘Now, reality for us is honorific. Lately we have come to equate it with the masses because they approximate for us the gross, unadulterated and crude aspects of the national situation. For in our sense of what constitutes reality, we have nothing more than those aspects of the cultural condition that suggest chaos and brutality. . . . So that it is this meritorious relation to reality that underlies our commitment to the masses.’’∫ And yet, in the midst of this bourgeois intellectual commitment to the masses and the attempt to approximate their supposed values and ‘‘crude, vulgar and tyrannized’’ behavior in the realms of politics and culture, the masses are pushed to the margins of national life. Daroy argues that the stunting of Philippine art and intelligence that stems from this ‘‘sentimental love’’ for a reality that is taken to be ‘‘the hard, defined and inert mass uncorrupted by perception or sensibility’’ is but the revenge of the masses for having been betrayed by the Filipino intelligentsia in the revolution against Spain. This political rejection is no doubt what accounts for the alienation of contemporary Filipino intellectuals from ‘‘the national actuality’’ and, further, the sense of guilt that is expiated by this symbolic commitment to the masses. It is precisely this fetishism of the masses in the elitist liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s as well as the hegemonic commitment to a certain kind of realism that supports such fetishism that Sison and the legions of radicalized students wanted to negate. As the symbolic lynchpin of bourgeois alienation, the masses thus became the key to the liberation of the minds and lives of the youth, who now recognized the need to go beyond a symbolic commitment to them and to begin the task of identifying with them. The task of identification with the masses generates a whole new body of literature that attempts to create solutions to the problem of alienation, solutions that might largely be described as socialist-realist. The task of identification also generates the very movement to the countryside (as a movement toward the masses) that helps to realize the course and content of the political-economic revolution. Both socialist-realist writing and the movement underground are processes of constitution of the revolutionary subject by means of the masses as the enabling object and objective of the latter’s revolutionary praxis.

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The Masses as Land The land fulfills urgent tasks in the people’s war And wages armed struggle from start to finish —jason montana

Kojin Karatani writes, ‘‘Realism in modern literature established itself within the context of landscape. Both the landscapes and the ‘ordinary people’ (what I have called people-as-landscapes) that realism represents were not ‘out there’ from the start, but had to be discovered as landscapes from which we had become alienated.’’ Karatani’s account of modernity in Japanese literature helps to illuminate the shift in the role of the masses or people-as-landscapes from social realist literature to revolutionary literature in the Philippine context. While in social realist literature the masses serve as objects of description and contemplation for the politically conscious writer, a social relation which preserves the alienation in their discovery, in revolutionary literature the masses become the objective and means of the desiring movement of revolution, which is itself the process of overcoming this alienation. We see the exemplary instance of social realist depiction of the masses in the fictional works comprising the anthology Mga Agos sa Disyerto (1964). In what amounts to a naturalist treatment, the masses are shown to be the objects of a relentless and spiraling violence whose immediate, particular sources are, from the perspective of a revolutionary class analysis, identified without its social causes being understood. As such, while they serve to awaken the consciousness of their readers, the stories o√er no indication of a necessary course of action following upon such consciousness nor any relation to the masses beyond their serving as the mute cause of the awakening.Ω Sison’s own earlier collection of poetry, Brothers (1960), accomplished a similar documentation of the brutality su√ered by the masses, a generalizing portrait of the masses as victims which, by Sison’s own later self-critical account, stemmed from a detachment from concrete, revolutionary involvement with the actual masses.∞≠ Although alluding to a comprador class in conspiracy with foreign powers at the root of such violence and therefore correct in its political viewpoint, Sison argued, these poems failed to mobilize the masses and potentially progressive classes into a revolutionary becoming.

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In Sison’s poems of the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as ‘‘The Forest Is Still Enchanted,’’ ‘‘The Coming of the Rain,’’ and ‘‘Rain and Sun on the Mountains,’’ the masses are identified with a dynamic nature, freed of the colonizing spirit of superstition and empowered with the spirit of revolutionary struggle. This nature acts at once as a source of inspiration for the revolutionary subject (‘‘The heroic prisoner is like a giant; / He draws his strength from the masses’’) and a material flux with which he becomes rhythmically integrated (‘‘The guerilla is like a poet. He has merged with the trees. . . . The guerilla is like a poet. Enrhymed with nature / The subtle rhythm of the greenery / The inner silence, the outer innocence / The steel tensile in-grace / That ensnares the enemy’’). As the objective and means of the cadre’s revolutionary becoming, the masses as nature is not a mere rhetorical device. It is, rather, a technology of imagination that is fundamental to the practical life of the movement. Sison, using his nom de guerre Amado Guerrero, authored the main theoretical works that established the ideological-political break between the new Communist Party of the Philippines and the older Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (pkp), and he had clearly seen the ideological weakness of William Pomeroy’s novelistic rendering of the nature he experienced while briefly engaged in the pkp-led armed struggle of the Huk movement, a peasant movement that evolved out of resistance against the Japanese occupation.∞∞ Against Pomeroy’s depiction of the forest as an immense, confining fortress overwhelming human agency and of the rain as a relentlessly assaulting enemy, which Guerrero charged as a defeatist displacement of the real enemy (namely, U.S. imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat-capitalism), he suggests the importance of reimagining the same, difficult rain forest conditions of Philippine nature as enabling and advantageous conditions of revolutionary warfare. This crucial turn in imagination, which Guerrero extends to the archipelagic and mountainous geography of the Philippines in the tract ‘‘Specific Characteristics of Our People’s War’’ (1974), itself developed out of the disastrous initial experience of armed struggle of the New People’s Army in the province of Isabela. It articulated a shift in military strategy from the Maoist strategy of establishing ‘‘stable base areas’’ or fixed strongholds in the countryside from which to launch major o√ensives toward the creation of spatially dispersed mass bases to serve as vital supports for mobile guerilla warfare.∞≤ The forging of a new ‘‘policy of centralized leadership and decentralized operations’’ out of the political-military challenges posed by the particularities of

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Philippine geography demonstrated the judiciousness of the newly ‘‘rectified’’ party line of attuning the theory and practice of revolution to the concrete conditions of struggle. Although it deviated from a specific Maoist strategy, it invigorated the more general Maoist injunction to ‘‘discover the truth through practice, and again through practice verify and develop the truth.’’∞≥ It also heightened the significance of the Maoist principle of self-reliance, which depended on heeding the imperative to integrate with and learn from the masses: ‘‘Selfreliance can never be overemphasized among us. The basic needs of our people’s war have to be provided for by the people’s army and the broad masses of the people themselves.’’∞∂ After all, the progressive masses were, under these reimagined conditions, what comprised the life bases of guerilla warfare. In revolutionary literature, the masses are both the material means and the symbolic object of revolutionary struggle—while they are the cause on whose behalf the struggle is waged, they also serve as vital sources of food, shelter, protection, and information for the guerilla forces. As such, they are identified with the land, which similarly functions as the terrain and objective of the movement, to the extent that the movement aims to destroy the feudal control of the land and restore it to the people. In Ruth Firmeza’s guerilla novel Gera, the masses and the land are the ground of revolutionary activity, both to be known and mastered by the guerilla; as Arman advises another comrade, ‘‘Kabisado mo ang tereyn at ang masa’’ (Master the terrain and the masses) (22). This equivalence drawn between the masses and the land as the terrain of struggle is made clear in Firmeza’s poem ‘‘Pitso Manok,’’ the name of a mountain in the zones where the guerillas move: Pitso Manok, from your embrace we have gone away to be with the masses in another place who have been waiting for so long a new zone we have established to form part of our united ranks like you, they embrace what we are fighting for.∞∑

Like the mountain, the masses are a zone of action, a field waiting to embrace the liberation that the movement brings. They inspire hope and strength as a place of revolutionary potential.

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In revolutionary literature, this place is embodied and, as such, gendered. While the nation is figured as a mother—‘‘All our lives / We o√er to you, Mother’’ (277)—the mountain, as one of the nation’s land formations, is figured as a young woman—‘‘They say the mountain is like a sleeping maiden’’ (280). While the nation is a feminized symbol serving as the point from which the revolutionary forces imagine themselves as a unified historical subject, the land is a feminized object which, as experientially shared by the revolutionary forces in the process of struggle, becomes a significant structure of collective sexual identification. This shared feminized object is the means by which the collective body of these forces becomes an acting subject; it also functions as the object of desiring action on which this fused revolutionary subject enacts its particular masculinity. Land and woman are places of tilling and insemination, defining the revolutionary action that is performed on them as heteromasculine.∞∏ The substance of revolutionary inspiration, which the land o√ers, is therefore the very same masculinist desire that is spent on its construction as the object and terrain of struggle. Watered and nourished by the blood, sweat, and tears shed by guerillas, land becomes the surface of inscription of the vicissitudes and sacrifices of the revolutionary movement. Configured as land, the masses act as a feminine object of loss through which the revolutionary subject constitutes itself as the agent of historical transformation. Guerilla zones thus become feminized substitutions for the lost object. In Levy Balgos de la Cruz’s story ‘‘Ang Mga Alaala’y Parang Mga Alitaptap’’ (Memories Are Like Fireflies), for example, a man’s loss of his mother, his wife, and his children, which he incurs when he decides to go underground and leaves them behind in the city, is replaced by the land of the revolution: ‘‘a place where the rivers are free and the springs pure. In the place of the masses and the comrades. In the middle of the path of struggle. In the spring of water and fire.’’∞π De la Cruz’s substitution of the feminine figures in his life with the feminine figure of the revolution (here embodied in nature) is supported by his quotation of Kahlil Gibran as part of his dedication to his mother: ‘‘Your children are not your true children/They are the children of their time.’’ Determining this structure of experience is the temporal construction of the revolution (‘‘their time’’) as a maternal figure, implicitly the figure of Inang Bayan (Mother Country). The close articulation of the masses and nature or land as a dynamic, empowering presence serves an extremely significant practical, heuristic function 272

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for the constitution of the revolutionary subject. The importance of the masses and nature or land and of the masses as nature to armed struggle, the main activity of the revolutionary subject, accounts for the notable recurrence of the theme of their intertwining in guerilla poetry. The poem ‘‘Summer’’ by Servando Magbanua, for example, likens the meeting of ‘‘small and silent streams’’ to ‘‘the handshake of a comrade long in waiting,’’ and the monsoon season to revolution itself: . . . that other season of fury when monsoon rain turns streams into rivers: swift earthy snakes cleansing demons of destruction sweeping all debris in frenzied abandon headlong to melt with the waiting sea. Here as elsewhere Nature behaves like patriots driven to destinies of their own making . . . ∞∫

In this and many other poems in the collection of guerilla poetry str, Mga Tula Ng Digmang Bayan sa Pilipinas (str, Poems from the People’s War in the Philippines), we witness tender descriptive tracings of the landscape’s concrete contours, which undulate unevenly with practical and symbolic significance for the revolutionary subject. This oscillation, which stylistically can be described as the proximity of documentation and metaphor characteristic of much guerilla poetry, is itself partly the e√ect of the dyadic function of the masses-land for the revolutionary forces. Hence, the figure masses-land has two aspects in relation to the revolutionary subject’s constitutive activity. On the one hand, it is the enabling practical terrain or instrumental means of armed struggle. On the other hand, it is the ideal object and end of that armed struggle—or, put di√erently, the masses and the land are what must be liberated from imperial-feudal-capitalist control and, in their freed state, what revolutionary subjects must be liberated into. These two aspects of the masses-land function bear two di√erent, though closely linked, paths of revolutionary subjectification. Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses

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The Heroic Masses and the Holy Mass In ‘‘Fragments of a Nightmare,’’ Sison’s narrative poem of the ordeal of prison torture that he underwent upon his capture in 1977, we glean the two dimensions of the revolutionary subject’s constitution. On the one hand, the masses function as what Gelacio Guillermo calls the narrator’s ‘‘devices of countero√ensive,’’ such as wit, wile, raillery, dream, poetry.∞Ω Alongside the images of the narrator’s beloved and children, the masses are poetic images wielded to battle the mortifying assaults on his body. They are ‘‘avenging angels/Armed with the sharpest of swords’’ summoned for renewed strength in the revolutionary’s heroic struggle against the inhuman demons of power. In this dimension, the process of subjectification of the revolutionary subject is a mirror-image, a reversal, of that of the bourgeois national subject whose relation to the masses is a relation to an object of negative identification. Here, love for the masses betrays a fetishistic aspect, which is also suggested by E. San Juan’s interpretation of Sison’s recurrent images as ‘‘memorializing an eroticized, Orphic harmony of nature and man.’’≤≠ On the other hand, the masses act as a movement into which the revolutionary’s ownness (his own self, his own su√ering) is dissolved: ‘‘But still my pain and su√ering is small / As I think of those who su√er more / The violence of daily exploitation / And the rampage of terror on the land.’’ Here, the masses are a humbling force, a suprahuman plane of action, the movement of su√ering, vengeance, and struggle, to which the revolutionary contributes his minor yet essential struggle: ‘‘I belittle my pain and su√ering / As I think of the people who fight / For their own redemption and freedom / And avenge the blood of martyrs.’’ The masses are more even than real avenging angels. In another poem, they are the very voice of God: ‘‘The voice of the people thunders forth / From a burning bush in the mountain, / United to overthrow the rule of terror / And the three gods of exploitation.’’ This second dimension of subjective constitution is a revolutionizing one to the extent that the masses are no longer an image-object for the creation and mobilization of a proper, leading nationalist subject. In other words, the masses here become the subject movement within which the revolutionary is a vital, poetic (that is, productive) part. From the masses and toward the masses describes the reappropriation by the people of what is their historical product, the national bourgeoisie, alienated from them by and as capital. It also describes the 274

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mediating rather than the leadership role of the revolutionary forces. The divinelike strength embodied by the masses is, in e√ect, the restoration of the power that has been alienated from them in and by ‘‘the three gods of exploitation.’’ It is the full realization of the aspiring revolutionary subject’s process of becoming-masses. The redemptive process through which the people reclaim their alienated product, the bourgeoisie, is fueled and carried out by the radicalized students and petty bourgeois intellectuals who headed out in droves to the countryside to o√er their lives in the service of the people. As famously pronounced by the martyred guerilla and poet Emmanuel Lacaba, this process on the side of the petty bourgeosie entails the dissolution of their individualist selves and lives into a belonging that surpasses all human forms of possessive, identificatory belonging, a belonging that acts as a formidable, dynamic movement of nature in the earthly fulfillment of a divine restitution: We are tribeless and all tribes are ours. We are homeless and all homes are ours. We are nameless and all names are ours. To the fascists we are the faceless enemy Who come like thieves in the night, angels of death: The ever-moving, shining, secret eye of the storm. . . . Awakened, the masses are Messiah. Here among the workers and peasants our lost Generation has found its true, its only, home.≤∞

The imaginary dissolution of petty bourgeois ownness thus finds practical expression in the actual exodus of the radicalized urban middle classes and, moreover, in their embrace of the people as the true voice of God: ‘‘Awakened, the masses are Messiah.’’ This theism of struggle is a crucial aspect of that revolutionary imagination which the everyday religion of capitalism, with its secularist metaphysics of commodity relations, induces us to forget. Revolutionary imagination here comes out of actual social practice.≤≤ We might say such imagination is the very active means and material process of revolutionizing existing social relations of production between the masses and the elite classes. To the extent that the armed struggle enables peasant-workers to transform the usurious dependency that binds them to the agricultural elite, through the reappropriation of land and other means of their production, it Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses

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succeeds in reversing the alienation of mass labor and its everyday deification in the personages of the landlord class. The e√orts to revolutionize agricultural production on the part of peasant-workers—sometimes with the direct participation of red fighters—which are documented in the literature of the movement as well as in aboveground publications, are themselves tentative material realizations of what revolutionary imagination has already prophetically made possible: the reassumption by the masses of their creative potential.≤≥ In Sison’s own prophetic practice, ‘‘whose visionary mission is to simultaneously demystify the alienated world and project images of apocalyptic rebirth,’’ revolutionary imagination dissolves existing reality into a poetic epic of struggle.≤∂ The guerilla is like a poet, but the revolutionary poet is also a worker turned guerilla to the extent that he or she rewrites and reinscribes the naturalized reality we live in as a matter of people’s poiesis.≤∑ The bladed poem, the tool of creative labor turned into arms, thus acts as the means for the reappropriation and release of the creative potential of the masses. In a poem by another revolutionary cadre, ‘‘Magsasaka: Ang Bayaning di Kilala,’’ we read of the transformation of the farmer from oppressed slave (‘‘Busabos na’y alipin pa’’) into a free producer-author of his own destiny: ‘‘Araro ang gintong plumang sa lupa’y isinusulat, / Bawat salitang matitik sa pinitak ang sambulat’’ (The golden plume writing on the land is a plow/Each written word, what is scattered in the rows).≤∏ These visions attempt to create the heroic proletarian figure out of the masses as the leading subject of the revolution, cultivator-creator of a new era. The restoration of the creative capacity of the masses as divine power is, however, di√erent from their heroicization as revolutionary subject. While the latter process pertains to the reversal of the subjectification of the bourgeoisie, who take on the heroic personality of the capitalist, the former process pertains to the assumption of the universal totality of capital itself. As the suprahuman plane of action into which, in the utopian moment, the armed struggle of revolutionary cadres dissolves, the masses are the very absolute movement of becoming that Marx describes as stolen, objectified, and hidden in the form of capitalist wealth: ‘‘In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than . . . the absolute working out of [humanity’s] creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development . . . in the absolute movement of becoming?’’≤π In the sublime face of this ‘‘absolute movement of becoming,’’ the cadre, as revolutionary subject, experiences his own struggle as a small tributary of a divine passage from su√er276

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ing to resurrection, where life is restored to the masses as its maker. In this way the revolutionary struggle, as the divine movement of the masses, assumes the ontological form and purpose of the Holy Mass.

The Underside of Messianism I draw out the contours of the theism of revolutionary struggle not to attribute it, particularly in its unified form, to actual cadres, including Sison, as if it were the inner motivation of their actions. Although this theism explicitly courses through the words and deeds of many radicalized members of religious orders who joined the movement, it is not in the sense of ideological content that I refer to the theism of revolution.≤∫ The image of the masses as Supreme Maker, whose body cadres take in Holy Communion by taking part in the revolutionary movement, is rather the historical experience of reversal of the dominant Eucharistic logic of capitalism. To the extent that it resolves the crisis of alienation articulated by the radical nationalism of the 1960s, this theism of struggle characterizing revolutionary imagination helps to account for the profound power and sacred character of the calling to join the movement in the countryside that the student youth heard and heeded. It answers that void experienced by the faithless urban middle classes, which Gregorio Brillantes depicts in his short story ‘‘Dr. Lazarus,’’ as well as that su√ocating lethargy quietly rotting comfortably contained petty bourgeois lives, which Resil Mojares depicts in his short story ‘‘A Sickness in the Towns.’’≤Ω Against the spreading disillusionment with the emptiness and confinement of petty bourgeois existence that Philippine writers in English in the late 1950s and 1960s began to increasingly portray, as well as the intolerable exploitative and repressive conditions su√ered by the majority of the people, which writers in Tagalog and other languages increasingly exposed and cried out against, not the idea but the reality of revolution o√ered a generation in crisis a new, invigorating Life, one imbued with the spirit of liberating struggle. This collective narrative is more than a mere revolutionary myth of heroic commitment fostered by the atmosphere of state repression; it is rather the mode of revolutionary experience.≥≠ As Fredric Jameson writes of Ernst Bloch’s own commitment, ‘‘The value of religion for revolutionary activity lies therefore in its structure as a hypostasis of absolute conviction, as a passionate inner subjective coming to consciousness of those deepest Utopian wishes without which Marxism remains an objective theory and is deprived of its most vital Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses

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resonances and of its most essential psychic sustenance as well.’’≥∞ Revolution was the very concrete experience of the life force in the ‘‘absolute movement of becoming’’ accumulated as capital, now restored as the movement of history through the release of humanity’s creative potentialities. It is this theism of history-making and life-creating struggle that Sison depicts, in the poem ‘‘The Forest Is Still Enchanted,’’ as the revolutionary enchantment that replaces the traditional superstitions of the people: ‘‘There is a new hymn in the wind; / There is a new magic in the dark green, / So the peasant folks say to friends. / A single fighting spirit has taken over / To lure in and astonish the intruders.’’≥≤ However, within the monotheistic spiritual experience of revolution persist other practices that are not fully subsumed by the cultural totality assumed of the revolutionary mass. These practices are evinced in Sison’s poem ‘‘Defy the Reptile,’’ in which the defiance of old beliefs is enacted through the destruction of false gods: ‘‘Thus, one crocodile god after another / Yields its teeth to the circle of spears. / And these become the amulets, tokens / Of proven willful strength of men.’’ Amulets and spears allude to other practices of imagination, other kinds of poiesis (such as the social relations instantiated in animist notions of power) that point to the concrete simultaneity of heterogeneous productive practices (not merely the practice of a single fighting spirit) at work in the revolutionary enchantment.≥≥ As the poem ‘‘O Langit, O Lupa’’ (O Sky, O Land), composed by a Waray settler-farmer reveals, many other powers besides the awakened masses’ Messianic power are called upon as a resource for the waging of revolutionary struggle: O Langit, O lupa, kami’y pakinggan Itong aming sinapit aming itutula Kung inyong maunawaan ang dahilan Ipabatid sa ibon, ilog, kakahuyan. [O Sky, O land, pray hear us What we have su√ered we will say in verse If you should understand the cause Send word to the bird, the river, the woods.]≥∂

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them returns at the end of the poem as a barely suppressible ‘‘fullness’’ in the chest, threatening to be unleashed as a deluge of stone and fire: ‘‘Our chests fill a great deal; / From them stones and fire cut loose / Until they pour out and rage in flood.’’ In this poem, we witness other theistic practices besides that of the monotheistic spiritual experience of revolution, practices of imagination that tend to be seen, within a progressive historical-materialist framework, as ‘‘chiliastic’’ predispositions. They are ‘‘accretions of tradition derived from a feudal past’’ which mark the radicalized peasantry’s still-formative development toward that awakened state of revolutionary enchantment.≥∑ From the viewpoint of political and ideological critics reassessing the status of Filipino Marxism within the movement, these peasant poems betray the persistence of an atavistic folk consciousness that the movement has not been able to overcome. Such poems confirm the suspicion of an abiding discrepancy between the lingering millenarian populism at the practical level of the mass movement and the Marxist-Maoist-Leninist worldview at the level of party doctrine.≥∏ As one of the fundamental charges against the pkp, this ideological discrepancy can be said to have helped spur the founding within it of the Marxist-MaoistLeninist group in the 1960s (splitting o√ from the Lavaite pkp leadership) and the process of ‘‘rectification’’ that formed the very basis and direction for the establishment of the new Communist Party.≥π This is the other side of the process of dealienation carried out on the part of the petty bourgeoisie: the process of sublation on the part of the peasantry of their persistent feudal tendencies. In a word, the awakening of the masses themselves. In much revolutionary peasant literature this incipient awakening can be detected in rude moments such as in the second to the last stanza of ‘‘O Langit, O Lupa,’’ where an abrupt change of address from kami (the exclusive ‘‘we,’’ addressed to Nature as divine witness or judge: kami’y pakinggan) to tayo (the inclusive ‘‘we,’’ addressed to the fellow farmer as comrade) constitutes the requisite gesture of proletarian solidarity and resistance (‘‘But shouldn’t we [tayo] fight / While there is strength in these joints?’’). Or it can be gleaned from socialist imagery and sloganeering phrasings interrupting, in a constructivist-like way (jarring rhymes, uneven rhythms, linguistic ruptures), the smooth current of the romantic popular poetic tradition identified as balagtasismo.≥∫ No doubt the discordance of poetic practices within the same forms can be attributed in no small measure to the political educational work carried out by revolutionary cadres among the peasantry. The imputation of a specific peasant mentality that Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses

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is contradictory to revolutionary subjectivity determines the process of cultural transformation and ideological advancement that constitutes the pedagogical core of mass work. We might say this peasant mentality is the motive object and product of the very work of cultural rectification that follows on the heels of the movement’s political rectification process. The work of sublation that comprises cultural rectification (or what is also known as revolutionizing people’s consciousness) serves as a powerful motivation of revolutionary literary practice as well as of the experience this literature helped to shape. We cannot a√ord to underestimate the seductive and exhilarating force of sublation as a subjective experience, nor the crucial importance of this subjective experience for the very material strength and expansive capacity of the movement. Sublation is, precisely, the experience of a superhuman power to make destiny, which on the side of the dealienating petty bourgeoisie appears messianic. At the same time, we cannot ignore the creative resurgence of traditional practices of imagination within this very structure of revolutionary experience. The appeal to nature, which suggests extant animist beliefs; the unleashing of stones and fire from one’s breast in an external deluge, which hints at the notion of a permeable self-serving as a medium of supernatural retribution; the figure of the crocodile lord, which recurs over and over again in vernacular Philippine literature and evinces a persistent mythical, pagan strain in everyday Christian thought—all these point to practices of imagination that, while not incompatible with the Christian structures of the Eucharist, redemptive death and resurrection, and the Last Judgment shaping revolutionary experience, are nonetheless incommensurable with them.≥Ω The persistence of these practices is determined to some degree by the very e√orts of cadres to introduce ‘‘new revolutionary content’’ into ‘‘old forms,’’ which means the revitalization of many traditional belief-media, including local expressive genres and languages.∂≠ But it is also attributable, in no small part, to the active coding by the radicalized masses of the social conditions and actions comprising the logic and trajectory of the movement, which they willed themselves to be swept into and to become an essential part of. That coding is not, as some would have it, a mere folding back into the categories of an older consciousness. It is, rather, a creative activity that, in the same way that it is irreducible to the universal structures of Christianity, is irreducible to the notion of historically autonomous, traditional modes of practical belief.

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Culture as Creative Persistence, Class Mediumship In Pasyon and Revolution and Filipinos and Their Revolution, Reynaldo Ileto portrays this creative cultural coding in Filipino subversive appropriations of the narrative of Christ’s life, su√ering, and death during peasant movements from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth.∂∞ Like early subaltern studies and ‘‘histories from below’’ scholarship, in whose international political and historical currents his work can be biographically and epistemologically situated, Ileto’s historical study brought into relief the particular historical instantiation of ‘‘universal history’’ wrought by ‘‘the traditional mind.’’ This local hermeneutic allowed the masses, contrary to all intellectual, elite expectation, including that of progressive, nationalist revolutionaries, to revolt against the existing political and social order. Following upon Ileto’s thesis that the peasants’ unorthodox interpretation of the Passion of Christ, combined with their belief in spiritual magic, led them to revolutionary activity, Fenella Cannell argues, in her ethnography of contemporary ‘‘lowland Christian Philippines,’’ that ‘‘the florescence of organised forms of healing which tightly combine the power of the spirits and intimacy with Christ are characteristic of periods of popular political activity.’’∂≤ The combination of a more arcane magic with Christian structures displayed with such intensity during moments of insurgency, however, rests on more mundane and less sharply articulated practices of mediumship, which reveal a prevailing ‘‘indigenous’’ model of power based on mutable and fluid relations of personal exchange as well as on ‘‘resolutely plural’’ sources of supernatural ‘‘help.’’ Cannell’s study of the culture of ‘‘people without nothing’’ usefully dwells on practices of their bodily unconscious rather than on any ‘‘mentality’’ attributable to the masses. However, emphasizing continuity with precolonial Philippine cultural practices, her examination of ‘‘lowland social imagination’’ is purposefully detached from any analysis of contemporary political and economic conditions. Even while admitting its openness to major mutations in situations of political intensity, the practices and relations of power that she retrieves as lowland culture during situations of ‘‘political quiescence,’’ such as the present of her fieldwork (1988–89), are set against rather standard relations of capitalism, conceived as unevenly intrusive forces from the outside. From this ‘‘indigenist’’ perspective, which seeks to give just representation to enduring modes of belief

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relations of a people (as evidence that they are not ‘‘culture-less’’), culture can be only a creative idiomatic relation and response to superior external powers, and its contemporary practice, ‘‘a palimpsest, the layering on top of each other of all those constructed relations’’ in a history of innovative and improvisational ritual performances. In contrast to this tacit framing of the local as a place of culture and the global as the space of fully realized capitalist production, I view both culture and capitalism as consisting of symbolic and material practices that operate quite well before and beyond the abstract realm of exchange, on which this analytical-geographical separation is predicated. As I see it, the creativity of people’s practices lies not only in the modulations of their cultural-textual performances, but also in their active production and transformation of the political and socioeconomic conditions that presumably serve as the mere context or pretext or object of those performances. On this view, cultural-spiritual negotiations of power and value are part and parcel of the particular mode of production obtaining in the countryside (tenaciously characterized as semifeudal, semicolonial, underdeveloped, and rent capitalist). This is not to argue that the animist and polytheist strains of practical consciousness or belief actions coursing through people’s contemporary practices are merely the ideological reflection of an extant precapitalist mode of production, which seems all the more evident in the rural areas. Rather, it is to argue that as signifying praxis these belief actions are, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, ‘‘tied to an assemblage, in other words, an organization of power that is already fully functioning in the economy.’’∂≥ The organization of power and accumulation that might arguably be typified as postcolonial or third world modernity is itself historically dynamic. The impossibility of casting cultural practices of mediumship as precapitalist or simply indigenous rests on the acknowledgment that such practices are contemporary, creative forces involved in the organization of the prevailing political and economic order and, therefore, are in no small measure responsible for the historical dynamism of the present. As I’ve shown in previous chapters, religion and spirituality are in political economy just as political economy is in religion and spirituality. In the Indian and Anglo-American context, the work of subaltern studies has contributed enormously to the foregrounding of the by no means new but longignored question of the political (and to a lesser degree economic) significance of non-European bourgeois forms of social and cultural practice. Ranajit Guha’s work in particular claimed a political status for the nonsecular actions of peasant 282

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insurgencies in colonial India, against hegemonic Marxist and nationalist interpretations of such actions through the category of the ‘‘prepolitical.’’ However, while Guha’s intervention brought the world of gods and spirits of the peasantry into the political time of modern history through the notion of an insurgent peasant consciousness, that consciousness itself seemed to have no history. As Partha Chatterjee puts it, ‘‘Because of his objective of isolating an invariant structural form, in line with the structuralism inherent in his method, he has not attempted to give us a history of this consciousness as a movement of selftransformation.’’∂∂ While I agree with Chatterjee on this point, I see the need to go a bit further. In my view, Chatterjee’s call for this history of peasant selftransformation demands, in turn, an account of the transformation of the conditions of life production sustaining the very social identity of this self and its historical consciousness. That is to say, it is not enough to recognize that the people undergo historical change. We also need to recognize that the people itself is a dynamic product of the continuous, active involvement of people’s cultural practices in the changing conditions of political economy. To return to the Philippine context, the political contestation over the representation of the masses can hence be viewed as part of the struggle over the very conditions of production on which the dominant meaning or content of this social identity was predicated. On this view, as a theory of the masses, Ileto’s intervention has to be seen as participating in the transformation of dominant social relations of production that is taking place at the particular historical moment when both dictatorship and revolution are in the process of consolidation. As he writes in his acknowledgments, ‘‘My choice of subject matter was determined by much the same conditions that led the Filipino youth to question the nature of their society during the late sixties and early seventies. Being home in 1971 doing research was most rewarding, not only because the libraries and archives o√ered interesting material, but also because people around me were asking similar questions about the relationship of the past to the present.’’ Those conditions leading Ileto to his own questions about the relation between intellectuals and the masses (‘‘the Great Divide’’) were the very same material political and economic conditions of the 1960s that produced youth as a distinct social group, confronted with the question of national destiny raised by the crises of the 1960s. Ileto understood the past to contain an untold, submerged history whose structures could be discovered in the mode of the popular consciousness. The Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses

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‘‘continuing past’’ that dogged present Philippine society in the form of neocolonialism was in part the consequence of the failure of the postindependent nation to hear, much less heed, ‘‘the voices from below.’’ His argument that, rather than any properly nationalist framework, ‘‘the masses’ own categories of meaning’’ fueled and shaped the peasant rebellions of the early twentieth century can hence be considered a political solution to the same profound crisis others answered with revolution.∂∑ We might say that in the radical spirit of critique shared across a wide spectrum of social actors and directed at an elite neocolonial nationalism, Ileto’s work also produces the masses as a means of intervention against dominant forms of making and writing history. However, insofar as it does so by making this substance into a subject, as it were, it unfortunately recontains, within the formal trappings of consciousness, the very political potential it set out to tap. Let us compare Ileto’s political solution (masses as subaltern consciousness to be heard) with that of the national democratic cultural revolution. Within revolutionary literature, both the people/the masses and the petty bourgeoisie act as practical limits structuring the very movement of revolutionary becoming, which such literature participates in making. The political identity of the masses, while tending in many respects toward reification, predominantly serves neither as a political end nor as a means of participation in an existing order but precisely as the very means of transformation of the social and subjective conditions of the prevailing order. Thus although revolutionary literature fabulates this identity, by using it as a point of subjective processing of cadres as well as peasants, it also compels its undoing and transformation. The masses are one pole in the process of a double negation that comprises the passion of the movement, now to be thought somewhat di√erently from the ‘‘pasyon ’’ (the Christian narrative of su√ering and redemption), by means of which an autonomous insurgent subaltern consciousness can be claimed to be structured.∂∏ The transformation that Ed de la Torre baptizes as ‘‘The Passion, Death and Resurrection of the Petty-Bourgeois Christian’’ (1972) describes only one half of the self-transformative revolutionary passion, which I am claiming falls neither solely on the side of the insurgent peasantry nor solely on the side of the radicalized intelligentsia.∂π For both the petty bourgeoisie as well as the peasantry are the presuppositions and retroactive e√ects of their passional intermingling in an emergent regime of signs and in a reorganization of power and value production to which this signifying regime is determinately connected.∂∫ 284

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Thus Lacaba’s exhilarating experience of self-dissolution on the messianic plane of the masses retroactively consolidates ‘‘the wild but shy poet/Forever writing last poem after last poem’’ of his bourgeois youth. The process of bodily and subjective change that he undergoes reveals, as it constructs, the identity limit from which his radical becoming departs: You hear he’s dark as earth, barefoot A turban round his head, a bolo at his side His ballpen blown up to a long-barreled gun: Deeper still the struggling change inside. Like husks of coconuts he tears away The billion layers of his selfishness.

This is a recurrent theme in revolutionary Philippine literature: the radical mutation of the petty bourgeois body and soul.∂Ω Rather than an act of discovery of a true self, the tearing away of layers of selfishness that Lacaba articulates is at once the process of constitution and the process of dissolution of the prerevolutionary subjective state of guerilla forces. It is, in a word, part of the process of revolutionary metamorphosis. The practice of dwelling on the physical changes becomes the very making of a new body, a new home, a new terrain, through a taking part(s) in and of peasant life—the skin of earth, bare feet, the physical labor constituting one’s self. These traits are material signs of the masses (partmasses) that serve as points of revolutionary subjectification. In this vector of subjectification, something akin to sharing, as at once a parting with one’s own and a partaking of another’s, takes place. Among and of persons, sharing denotes a phenomenon of hysterical influence that is predicated on socially contingent, extensive, and permeable forms of self, as evinced by the notion of kapwa (shared subjectivity). In chapter 3 I showed how women attempting to free themselves from the worldly confinements of their national and gendered identity engage in a transformative practice of taking part(s) that depends on preconsumerist forms of self and becoming. These older technologies of shared subjectivity or extensive selves come to be displaced onto and demanded of women in the moment of their embodiment of feminized national labor. Refurbished in the transnational context of feminized labor, such technologies become vital means for supporting women’s naturalized assumption of the commodity form. In the context of rural Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses

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labor, the sharing implied in kapwa relations among the peasantry is to be associated with conditions of land tenancy, the word for which—kasama, or sharecropper–indicates a continuing vital connection between and common historical genealogy for the particular kind of shared subjectivity expected of tenant farmers and the general kapwa sense of self associated with indigenous Filipino culture. I am suggesting that petty bourgeois practices of taking part(s) in and of peasant life to some extent themselves depend on backward subjective technologies, which creatively persist as infrastructural supports for traditional modes of labor relegated to women and the peasantry. Hence here the revolutionary subject-in-process finds power through proximation, a practice of self-transformation akin to those traditional practices of tapping into cosmic power through the tactile proximity of its sign-tools—amulets (anting-anting)—which both index and embody this power.∑≠ As ‘‘signs which give authenticity to a revolutionary life,’’ traits of the peasantry function for the radicalized petty bourgeois youth in this way: as sign-tools for the wielding of Messianic power.∑∞ What we witness in the process of revolutionary awakening, therefore, is a practice of mediumship that goes beyond emotional rites of healing and their politicized expressions of relations of inequality. Guerilla forces participate in a passion with the people, a passion that is not so much modeled on the figure of Christ as its subject as much as takes after those experiences of bodily surrender, permeability, and transfusion of life force comprising everyday practices of spiritual contagion and faith healing.∑≤ In other words, guerilla forces can be said to undergo a form of class mediumship, which entails their subjective pervasion by a spiritual energy located in the masses. This pervasion is carried out through a sharing of the masses’ traits. Rather than preconstituted human subjects in identification with the human passion of Christ, both the people and the guerillas are produced as subjective media of a revolutionary life force by their own revolutionary practices of class mediumship or class passion. Despite its idealist permutations as a merely metaphorical process, there is a mundane, practical dimension to this active practice of sharing, which I’ve already mentioned as the work of people in the rural areas serving as the lifesupport system—providing food, shelter, vital intelligence, and logistical support—for the National People’s Army (npa).∑≥ The guerilla is literally kept alive by the conduits that are the masses. In this way, he/she is their bodily product, their bodily part(ing). The masses are materially and symbolically foregrounded as life givers, thus altering their role in dominant relations of production as 286

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clients and dependents. This is what makes for the reality of the guerilla’s perception of the masses as ‘‘yaong ang tadhana’y akin din’’ (those whose fate is also mine).∑∂ Rather than a complete eradication of di√erence between guerillas and peasants, however, this active sharing re-creates the relation between them, making each a kind of medium of the other’s liberative transformation. We see this exercised, on the side of the guerillas, in the attempts to materialize the poetry of war with the labor implements of the masses. The poem becomes the worker’s machete, on one side toiling, on the other side fighting: ‘‘Grasp well the bladed poem / And let it sing in your hands / This kampilan is a talisman / Of the people in red headbands.’’∑∑ In much socially committed poetry the deliberate confluence of words and things, the thematic and formal expression of the activity of writing through mundane activities of subsistence (which took on feminist significance in Mabanglo’s poetry), can be read as practices of class mediumship, toward which many writers were working. Poems such as Jess Santiago’s ‘‘Kung Ang Tula Ay Isa Lamang’’ (If a Poem Were Only) and ‘‘Isang Kurot sa Gunita’’ (A Pinch in the Imagination) broach class di√erence as a di√erence between accessory and necessity, between symbol and use, not through contrast but through a conversion of words into things: the poem into food, the song into a pinch. The conversion makes the di√erence it negotiates the site of a radical re-mediation of one’s relation to the world. We might in fact better describe the work as performing a confluence of media realms—of writing and producing, of the imagination and the body—that politicizes the practice of mediumship. In this way, the di√erence between urban subjects and the people and between their respective pursuits compels not so much a translation or process of identification as a sharing of tools and, through this transfer, a transmutation of one’s self-constituting activities. And what of the masses? To consider the history of popular practices of imagination (rephrasing Chatterjee) as the movement of social and political-economic transformation as well as self-transformation, let me compare what would appear to be two instances of an abiding popular mode of experience across a span of over a hundred years. Arguing for the importance of damay (compassion), as it is evoked in the awit (the traditional Tagalog metrical romance), in the constitution of popular anticolonialist nationalism, Ileto quotes a stanza from the Historia Famosa ni Bernardo Carpio (1860): Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses

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What loob however hard what heart would not be overcome by this and be saddened and struck with pain for the two lovers with a pure loob?∑∏

Ileto cites this passage as expressive of ‘‘the experience of anguish and loss’’ that accompanies the central event of the awit: the separation of the infant from his parents.∑π The evocation of awa (pity) and damay was the principal means by which a patriotic remembrance of a lost past, anger over an oppressive present, and hope for future freedom were aroused and maintained among the people. It was what enabled the personification of national experiences and aspirations and, conversely, what enabled the transposition of personal a√ects to ‘‘a ‘national’ key.’’∑∫ Ileto’s argument is that damay was a significant social experience during the revolutionary and rebellious peasant movements from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth. The argument rests on the popularity within such movements of those poetic and musical genres in which the a√ects of damay and awa for an abiding su√ering act as fundamental emotive themes as well as formal principles.∑Ω Poems from the contemporary revolutionary movement would seem to provide evidence of the persistence of such cultural practices in the present time. Take, for example, ‘‘Magsasaka: Ang Bayaning Di Kilala’’ (Peasants: The Unknown Hero), a poem composed by an ‘‘activist farmer’’ in Kapampangan, the language of the North Central Plains. This poem became very popular among peasant farmers in Pampanga during the first few years of the 1970s and gained even more popularity through its use in mass meetings in di√erent regions after being translated into Pilipino in 1978, and in Ilocano in 1980.∏≠ After a litany of the typical peasant’s experiences of degradation and exploitation, we hear a lament very similar in form and content to the lament in the Historia Famosa: Sino kaya, aking bayan, ang dito’y di maiiyak? Nagpapagal ang siyang wala, limatik ang tumitipak. O kawawang magsasaka, kaysaklap ng kapalaran, Kung hindi sa ‘yo, gubyerno ay hindi maipupundar Hindi talos ng makwartang pag-aaring kinakamal, Dangal at kapangyariha’y sa pawis mo bumubukal. 288

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Ngalan mo’y ikinukubli, di ibig ipakilala, Kapangyarihan mong taglay at papel mo sa historya. [Who, my people, would not be brought to tears by this? The one with nothing took the load, the one who makes a bundle skimmed the cream. Oh poor farmer, what bitter fate, Without you, the government cannot be founded The money-grubbing ownership by grabbing cannot know, Honor and power from your sweat spring. Your name is kept hidden, not desired that it be made known, Nor the power you bear and your role in history.]

Unlike the approach taken in the Historia Famosa, in which pity and compassion are drawn through a human experience of primordial separation, the evocation of awa and damay in this contemporary poem is strikingly borne by a proletarian consciousness of exploitation. Militancy is mixed with tragic complaint, an objective even scientific awareness of class struggle mixed with the involuntary feeling of grief and pathos in the presence of ‘‘bitter fate.’’ Although it takes the same tribute form as the awit of the superhuman hero Bernardo Carpio, which might lead to the expectation of a divine resolution or messianic redemption, in this prayer we hear an appeal to a human power—the power of the people and of the unknown hero who is the farmer.∏∞ These di√erences and admixtures attest to the conversion of peasant farmers through their participation in a process of sharing with petty bourgeois cadres engaged in mass mobilization.∏≤ This comparison of the two laments suggests a historical transformation in the deployment of awa and damay as cultural practices of mediumship. In the contemporary poem, the voice of proletarian consciousness mediates between the realm of the su√ering heroic farmer, who toils under the tyranny of ‘‘the fascists,’’ and the realm of the compassionate people (bayan), who hear the plight of the unknown hero. The passage through grief does not, however, translate into an appeal for mercy from otherworldly spirits, even as the naming of the fascists as ‘‘the Lucifers of the native land’’ acknowledges their malevolent earthly presence. The prayerful evocation of pity does not call forth a preordained time of redemption, a time when an unjust separation finds reparation in the fulfillment of a Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses

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long-promised reconciliatory unity, as between the Christ-child Messiah and the Mother country. Instead, the rite produces the struggle to rewrite destiny: ‘‘Because of this, struggle against the haughty traitors, / Because of this, build a beautiful life. / Therefore, my people, etch with this seething bullet / The name of the farmer, the hero whom no one knows.’’ Interestingly, even as the people are seemingly enjoined to sympathize and struggle with the farmer, both the people and the farmer are respectively addressed in the second person, such that the separation between them seems troubled yet not quite resolved. Although this final summons seems to be addressed only to the people, the cause for struggle it refers to is expressed in the previous stanza as the great sacrifice that ‘‘you,’’ the ‘‘farmer,’’ have been made to bear. In this way, the farmer’s experience of fascist tyranny serves as the causative medium for the people’s transport from weeping at the bitter fate of the farmer to etching his name with the seething bullet. Here the notion of authorship as historical agency conveyed through the notion of writing makes of land the people’s own medium of modern redemptive sovereignty. The historical movement I am trying to trace between the late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century popular revolts and the contemporary revolutionary movement can perhaps best be delineated by the way in which the people have transmogrified from a subject e√ect of an identification with the Christ child, who awaits resurrection, into an agent force of revolution produced out of the very passion of the broad working classes. In today’s revolutionary poetry, just as the sweat of the worker is the very life of the people, so the worker’s su√ering is the vital spiritual medium of the people’s revolutionary uprising. This is no mere instantiation of proletarian class-consciousness. The worker’s alienation is experienced through pity and compassion for a primordial human separation. It is thus that in the present the people are created out of older emotive practices of sharing. The people is the process of parting from the shared experience of su√ering. In this way, the unknown hero that is the worker finds liberation by means of his own parting, as embodied now by the revolutionary people. Rather than a sublation of older practices or an underlying transhistorical indigeneity, we hear in this performance of mediumship the intermediate makings of a new poiesis. In this light, what might be viewed as a mixed form, betokening either the incomplete development of a proper political consciousness or the surfacing within this proper political form of the counterforce of little changed ‘‘popular mentalities,’’ should instead be recognized as 290

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the work of emergent practices of production of reality and possibility. Such poetic form is, as Edel Garcellano puts it, ‘‘the bestiary of the present and the unfolding future.’’∏≥

Cultural Revolution and Historical Poiesis My aim in this chapter has been to argue for a closer consideration of the work of creatively resurgent and newly emerging practices of revolutionary imagination within the movement, both in the zone of literary-cultural struggle and in the zone of armed struggle. These practices and their poetic roles in revolutionary writing and warfare can be seen in a fundamentally continuous and supportive but also tangential relation to the proper cultural revolutionary forms and strategies advocated by the aesthetic and political program of the party. They are, therefore, not outside the movement and its formal logic. Rather, they are themselves partially the consequence of the organizing e√orts of revolutionary cadres and, more broadly, the e√ects of the movement on prevailing social relations in the countryside. Equally important, these experiential practices are also vital, productive forces of the movement. By productive force, I mean ‘‘all and any of the means of the production and reproduction of real life,’’ where production is considered ‘‘already a certain mode of social co-operation and the application and development of a certain body of social knowledge. The production of this specific social co-operation or of this specific social knowledge is itself carried through by productive forces.’’∏∂ Within the overall national democratic revolutionary program of the party, the e√ort ‘‘to transform the dominant colonial, bourgeois and feudal culture into a national, scientific and mass culture’’ through cultural revolution becomes an aspect of the larger revolutionary struggle for national democracy, the political and economic dimensions of which it serves to support.∏∑ The stipulations of ‘‘national, scientific and mass’’ as the defining characteristics of revolutionary culture as well as the broad guidelines for the instrumental role of culture in the revolutionary movement were initially laid down in the document ‘‘Program for a People’s Democratic Revolution’’ and in Philippine Society and Revolution (psr). They were subsequently elaborated and expanded upon by leading cadres in the cultural field, most importantly by the Red poet, writer, and critic Kris Montañez / Gelacio Guillermo.∏∏ As against the imperialist cultural nationalism of the ruling classes, which Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses

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detaches culture from struggle and makes national culture the means for reconciling ‘‘divisions along regional, linguistic, religious, and ethnic lines’’ that this ‘‘compendium of imperialist and feudal thinking and value’’ itself inculcates, Guillermo maintains that national democratic culture represents the interests and furthers the cultural struggle of the oppressed and exploited classes.∏π This revolutionary culture is scientific to the extent that, in upholding ‘‘the correctness of the dialactical-materialist worldview,’’ it encourages a habit of thinking ‘‘which liberates the mind from stifling traditions, myths and superstitions perpetuated by the ruling classes, and which enables the people to realize their capacities for change and to develop themselves and their society toward progress.’’ And finally, it is a mass culture to the extent that it ‘‘embodies the democratic and collective ideals of the people, serves their struggles and depicts them as the decisive force in social change.’’ National democratic literature serves the people in two ways. First, by means of propaganda, as the dissemination of the objectives, methods, forces, and program of the revolution among the people in order to mobilize them on the basis of political demands. And, second, by means of cultural revolution, as the freeing of the people’s thoughts and feelings from the chains of the ruling, reactionary culture and ideology, which impede their movements toward change. The bifurcation of the political and the cultural has important consequences for revolutionary practice in general. For one thing, it allows ‘‘revolutionary consciousness,’’ as the politically awakened ideological state of the mobilized people, to take uneasy precedence over cultural forms of liberation, the latter becoming, as it were, the means of achieving the former, which in turn serves to drive the revolutionary movement as a whole. In Philippine Society and Revolution, Guerrero had already established the analogical and subordinate role of cultural revolutionary work in relation to the revolutionary movement as a whole. To the extent that the central task of the Philippine revolution was to overthrow U.S. imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism, armed struggle, as the primary strategy for carrying out this task, became the defining paradigm for the work of culture. As Guerrerro put it, Cadres in the cultural field should be like commanders waging a cultural revolution with the masses as their cultural battalions. They should continually link up the higher knowledge imparted to them with the general knowledge that they impart to the masses. They should always strive to raise cultural standards and popu292

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larization together by deriving from the experience of the masses typical examples and infusing them with a higher ideological content. The revolutionary workers, peasants and fighters should be the heroes of the new-democratic culture.∏∫

The masses are the raw material for a war of culture. In this cultural war, cadres act as a warrior-workers (guerilla poets) creating a revolutionary product through the infusion of their intellectual labor (the ‘‘higher ideological content’’ imparted to them by ‘‘Maoist-Marxist-Leninist Thought’’) into the raw material of the masses’ experience.∏Ω This revolutionary product is precisely the heroic masses enacting the revolutionary movement of history according to the universal dialectical-materialist laws of class struggle. Within this framework, the task of literary mass criticism becomes one of assessing, with a view to improving, individual works on the basis of ‘‘whether the work impedes or advances the revolutionary struggle.’’ Montañez provides the exemplary demonstration of this kind of criticism, particularly in his influential review of the first novel to come out of the movement, Hulagpos (1980) by Mano de Verdades Posadas. Montañez criticizes Posadas’s failure to give concrete shape to the individual characters and social landscape composing the paradigmatic transformative process of coming into revolutionary consciousness that is thematized by the novel.π≠ Ultimately, Montañez’s critical assessment of the work is determined by ‘‘the practiced assumption’’ (borrowing from Garcellano) of ‘‘the necessary movement of historical forces to achieve national liberation and democracy.’’π∞ This movement forms the basis for evaluating the protagonist’s characterization and development as ‘‘the novel’s unifying spirit, the spirit of breaking away from all forms of prison, from narrow petty bourgeois outlook to the exploitative social system itself.’’π≤ The heroic figure must thus subjectively realize the objective process that Mao, after Marx, describes as the movement of history: ‘‘The history of mankind is one of continuous development from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.’’ The practiced assumption or belief in the objective movement toward freedom expresses a ‘‘prophetic revolutionary optimism,’’ a revolutionary faith that is not simply mechanical or merely ideological, as most interpretations of the Philippine Left’s utopianism would now have it. It should be recalled that the new revolutionary movement found fuel in the critique of what the cpp called the subjectivism of previous leaderships, ‘‘the main petty bourgeois disease’’ which alternately expresses itself in the forms of dogmatism and empiricism.π≥ Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses

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Revolutionary prophecy acts, rather, as the practical antagonistic pole to capitalist futurism. In another context of nonsynchronous modernity, Walter Benjamin writes, ‘‘It is really imperative that we understand, in precisely its polemical bearing, the apotheosis of organization and of rationalism which the Communist party has to promote unceasingly in the face of feudal and hierarchical powers, and that we be clear about the fact that the movement itself comprehends mystical elements as well, although of an entirely di√erent sort. It is even more important, naturally, not to confuse these elements, which pertain to corporeality, with religious elements.’’π∂ Against the religious character of capitalist metropolitanization under the dictatorial regime, which I discussed in the previous chapter, the first generation founders of the new party promoted an apotheosis of history that, through the structure of feeling of an impeded self-making destiny (for which the notion of the unfinished revolution of 1896 was a significant symbolic expression), called people to commit their very lives to its release. More than simply an enlightening text, Guerrero’s psr provided the structure of a new faith. Petronilo Bn Daroy describes its historical impact: It is possible to say that psr lent the popular anger during the First Quarter Storm a sense of direction. It invited us to review the history of the country and the course which Philippine society had taken as a result of the history of colonialism. No single book in the Post-War era had exposed more fully the nature of Philippine feudal conditions, the reinforcement it received from imperialist interest and how the conditions generated by feudalism and imperialism found issue in our behavior, attitudes, morals, and manners. No other book, to my knowledge, provides us the key to the understanding of Philippine society. It was this simple exposition of Philippine reality, with its explicit faith in the capability of the people to change the course of history and, by implication, their individual destinies, that made the psr the guiding spirit of the First Quarter Storm and, if the military is to be believed, of the revolutionary movement as a whole.π∑

psr can be read as the most significant work of revolutionary literature since the reestablishment of the cpp and the founding of the New People’s Army. Its immense role in the recruiting, consolidating, and organizing of students, professionals, workers, peasants, and the poor as forces of the revolutionary move294

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ment in many ways also consolidated new pathways of circulation and communication through which later mass-cultural work as well as logistical and intelligence support of armed struggle would be coursed. I’ve already discussed the ways in which Sison’s speeches and writings in Struggle for Democracy shaped the movement toward dealienation that constituted the crucial practiced di√erence between revolutionary nationalism and its bourgeois counterpart. In psr, Sison/Guerrero provides an additional layer to the structure of feeling of an interrupted destiny for the nation implicit in the earlier work, and this is the experience of peonage. The perception of Marcos as the instrument of the usurious dependency of the Filipino people as a whole broadens the experience of peonage, which appeared to be specific to the rural peasantry, to a national scale. Indeed, much of psr is devoted to characterizing the alienation of Philippine resources, particularly land, and therefore the alienation of Filipino sovereignty, as the consequence of what Gayatri Spivak, following Samir Amin, has called the ‘‘debt-bondage and tribute-system practiced by foreign aid . . . and foreign trade.’’π∏ In persuasively depicting U.S. imperialism as ‘‘the worst usurer in the whole world,’’ to which could be attributed the ‘‘economic enslavement of the Filipino people,’’ππ Guerrero made the everyday tributary relations of the rural peasantry into the framework of experience and structure of feeling for the radicalized youth, a youth that, as we’ve seen, came to experience its own intense form of deracination and dispossession with the declaration of martial law. The raw material of the masses’ experience can thus be said to have shaped the experiential forms of revolutionary consciousness, not simply indirectly by serving as the object of revolutionary sublation, but rather directly by acting as the organizing medium of revolutionary subjectification. Rather than serving merely as the content that was to be organized by revolutionary subjects into the historical unfolding of class struggle, the experience of peonage and its tributary relations on an international as well as national scale become the very subjective condition of revolutionary struggle. It is this very casting of revolution as a disalienation of the people from the original basis of Philippine nationhood, that is, anticolonial struggle, that made the movement so compelling as a practical social endeavor and ideal. In contrast to the assertion of the disappearance of the peasantry, a claim that has undergirded critiques of the continuing validity and relevance of the revolution’s Maoist ideology, I am suggesting that revolutionary struggle de-essentialized, even as it may have also hypostasized, the subjectivity Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses

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of the peasantry as a guiding political mode of experience. In casting Philippine society as a tribute-paying economic formation in the international context of imperialism (upheld by rent-seeking policies of import substitution as well as export-oriented development), Philippine Maoism nationalized the structure of imagination and feeling of the semifeudal peasantry, even as the peasantry’s experience was itself undergoing reinscription by the scientific rational imagination of national democratic revolution. On this view, rather than simply composing the objective social relations of the Philippines, social relations of semifeudalism became a central structure of radical national experience, bearing the practical force of a social fact. In this light, we can read Virgilio Almario’s criticism of the poetry collection Mga Tula ng Rebolusyong Pilipino (Poems of the Filipino Revolution) against the grain of his modernist political-aesthetic valuation. Almario complains about these poems’ lack of stylistic originality, their epidemic homogeneity of expressed experience, and their reliance on stock formulations [‘‘de-kahong pormula ’’] of hardship in the midst of prosperity, which predictably ends in rebellion.π∫ He writes, ‘‘This kind of formula is even more mystical than the archaic faith in the ‘wheel of fortune’ and if it is not a symptom of a shallow grasp of the complexities of revolution, it nevertheless makes one doubt that a power exists that could fulfill this political line.’’ Almario’s criticism of the poems’ ideological and aesthetic limits inadvertently foregrounds those persistent mystical elements that I am arguing support the new revolutionary faith in history. As Benjamin asserts, however, these mystical elements, which pertain to corporeality, are to be distinguished from the apotheosis of organization and rationalism promoted by the party (in its ‘‘practiced assumption’’ of the teleological movement of history) or that vulgar Marxist determinism implied by Almario’s remarks and referred to by Antonio Gramsci as the ‘‘blind faith of historical materialist determinism.’’ In my view, the mystical elements gleaned in revolutionary poetry are not the product of a superficial, mere metaphorical grasp of a profound and more complex material reality that a more rigorous, more refined (less weak, less vulgar) politicalaesthetic consciousness could plumb and give expression to. They are, rather, signs of an active recoding of the mystery of the mode of tributary relations called neocolonialism. Such recoding does not, however, replace the mystical notions of power supporting rural peonage with a scientific or truthful understanding of real relations, as Almario would have it. Instead, practices of signification tied to the 296

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organization of debt-bondage relations are redeployed in the practical revolutionary imagining of new social relations. Thus, for example, with the framing of Philippine alienation through the experience of peonage, the mysterious power that accrues to the despotic regime through tributary or patronage relations is recast in such a way as to support a true revolutionary faith in a cosmic reversal.πΩ Likewise, as I’ve tried to illustrate, practices of class mediumship, through which social relations of tributary power are produced and negotiated, serve as the subjective means of a revolutionary awakening. In the revolutionary enchantment of the land, we see the emergent expression of the concrete, sensuous presence of human agency as a messianic force. By understanding the historical experience of national peonage as a real social force, as opposed to a mere theoretical conceit that might be compared to more objective or scientifically verifiable structural conditions, we are better able to understand the changing resources and potential of revolutionary imagination. I am suggesting another approach to what is called the modes of production debates within the movement, by which is meant the theoretical conflict over what structural conditions obtain in the Philippines—whether semifeudal or properly capitalist—and what, on the basis of these conditions, the corresponding revolutionary strategy should be. Revolutionary literature o√ers another view of the revolutionary movement, this time from the subjective perspective of social imagination and experience, which can also o√er a picture of the Philippine mode of production. Here I refer to Jameson’s proposal for the ultimate object of literary interpretation, that is, ‘‘cultural revolution, that moment in which the coexistence of various modes of production becomes visibly antagonistic, their contradictions moving to the very center of political, social, and historical life.’’∫≠ In Jameson’s account, the notion of cultural revolution, which he takes from the context of the incomplete Chinese experiment, would befit Bloch’s idea of the ‘‘nonsynchronous development’’ of cultural and social life. The notion fulfills, furthermore, Marx’s program for dialectical knowledge ‘‘of rising from the abstract to the concrete,’’ that is, ‘‘the setting in motion of hitherto static and typologizing categories by their reinsertion in a concrete historical situation (in the present context, this is achieved by moving from a classificatory use of the categories of modes of production to a perception of their dynamic and contradictory coexistence in a given cultural moment).’’∫∞ Rather than adhering to the evolutionary storyline of the abstract modes of production narrative, my own analysis has tried to focus on the dynamics of contradictory reRevolutionary Imagination and the Masses

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gimes of signs (and the economic assemblages to which they are tied) that shape revolutionary experience.∫≤ This historical experience reveals the nonsynchronous and contradictory dynamics of cultural praxis of struggle in the concrete situation of Philippine life. Moreover, it points to the continuing yet changing role, within this concrete historical moment, of the tributary mode as a social force of experience. As I show in the next chapter, the subjective technologies and symbolic practices supporting extant tributary social relations are in the course of struggle transformed into important resources of revolutionary imagination. They are not simply old practices resuscitated for new conditions or, in the language of party criticism, traditional forms infused with revolutionary content, practices, and forms that remain essentially unchanged. As Eqbal Ahmad writes, ‘‘One’s relationship to technology, to social customs, to the very symbols of colonialism, of oppression, changes when you enter into struggle.’’∫≥ Through revolutionary praxis, the organizing practices and forms of dominant social relations are not only transformed for the purposes of struggle. They also help transform struggle by creating new modes of social praxis. In this way, the mystical elements that the revolutionary movement comprehends become social and subjective technologies of historical poiesis, where poiesis refers to the process of production of new realities, new selves.

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Chapter Eight

Guerilla Passion and the Unfinished Cultural Revolution If it is true that the revolutionary Filipino people were, as I argued in the previous chapter, the product of practices of class mediumship between the radicalized urban petty bourgeoisie (students, intellectuals) and the radicalized rural peasantry during the early 1970s, it is also the case that by the late 1980s the Filipino people would once again be shorn of their revolutionary mandate and their political-genealogical relation to the heuristic object and historical subject of revolutionary imagination, the masses. As opposition to the dictatorship expanded to the middle classes and oligarchic elites, the people increasingly came to be defined in relation to the liberal nationalist project of the dictatorship’s political opposition, as centrally figured by Senator Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino and, upon his assassination by government agents in 1983, by his widow, Corazon Aquino. With this political opposition eventually taking the hegemonic lead in the People Power Revolt of 1986, which deposed Marcos from authoritarian rule, the liberative potential of the people similarly came under the interpretative apparatuses of the newly consolidated centrist forces of the postauthoritarian state. Instead of the revolutionary messianic temporality opened up by the theistic experience of armed struggle, which interrupted and reversed the catastrophic modern capitalist time of the authoritarian state (see

chapter 4), an emergent global time of capitalist democracy began to obtain, one which cast revolutionary struggle as simply and irredeemably out of joint. In view of this new hegemonic temporality, which gained full sanction in 1989 with the fall of socialist states in Eastern Europe, Marxist revolutions everywhere could only appear to be on the brink of dissolution.

New Politics, Old Practices, Intermediate Forms Indeed, after 1986, with Corazon Aquino’s accession to the presidency, the revolutionary movement as led by the Communist Party of the Philippines (cpp) and the National Democratic Front (ndf) entered a full-blown crisis. The crisis was demonstrated, on the one hand, by the polarization within the leadership of the movement between the so-called rea≈rmists and rejectionists (or revisionists) and, on the other, by the loss of up to 60 percent of its mass base.∞ Two significant errors committed by the cpp leadership and the higher ranks of the New People’s Army (npa) have been emphasized over and over again as exemplary, precipitant determinants of this crisis. These two errors were (1) the decision to boycott the ‘‘snap’’ presidential elections of 1986 in which Corazon Aquino declared her candidacy against Marcos and (2) the conducting in 1985– 86 and 1988 of anti–deep penetration agent (anti-dpa), i.e., antimilitary infiltration, campaigns in Mindanao and Southern Tagalog, which resulted in a massive, ‘‘bloody purging’’ of the revolutionary ranks. A lot of aboveground rethinking and questioning of the ideological and political vision and practice of the revolutionary movement, both as a whole and in its various parts, has taken place since these errors were publicly admitted and lamented by the resumed (rea≈rmist) leadership: the first as a tactical mistake, the second as excesses, even madness, sweeping the ranks. In a lecture and discussion series held in 1987 at the University of the Philippines, the first error, the boycott, was analyzed largely in terms of the Left’s historical-theoretical legacy as a national and an international movement.≤ According to this framework, the historical-theoretical legacy of the movement as a Marxist-Maoist-Leninist-inspired, vanguardist rural armed struggle against a repressive military state significantly shaped, if not determined, the cpp-ndf’s failure to engage in a broad alliance politics with other forces (such as the socalled middle forces) and its refusal to heed or even take seriously the political challenges to the basic principles of the movement issuing from within its ranks. 300

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Proponents of the Forum for Philippine Alternatives (fopa), held in 1993 in the San Francisco Bay Area, understood those challenges within the broader category of what it called New Politics, a style of political intervention developed out of the popular movements leading to Marcos’s ouster. In contrast to the hegemonic politics of the Rectified National Democratic movement (and indeed, as the very representative of what the national democratic movement, to its detriment, opposed), New Politics presented a ‘‘ ‘counter-hegemony’ of an alternative democratic vision and alternative democratic practice among the popular sectors—peasants, workers, women, minorities, the middle strata, and professional classes.’’≥ In the forum, the crisis of the Philippine revolutionary movement was seen as a specific instance of a general worldwide tendency among revolutionary movements: ‘‘Everywhere, new thinking is challenging the old guard.’’∂ What is common to these particular assessments of the crisis of the Philippine Left is the understanding that the national democratic movement exercised a hegemony over all other progressive social movements and that what came to challenge this hegemony were democratizing tendencies. They also seem to concur that the form of this hegemony took after the form of rule of the movement’s main enemy, the authoritarian state, in some kind of mimetic fashion and that it was the inability of the organizational leadership to recognize suddenly changed and changing conditions (e.g., the loosening of the grip of dictatorship, the opening up of political space, and so forth, as sparked by the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, Marcos’s main legal and political opposition, as well as greater urbanization or capitalization of the economy) that contributed to its subsequent loss of moral and political authority in the ‘‘new situation’’ following the ascendancy of Corazon Aquino’s rule. The view which places the postcolonial state and the movement opposing it on the same side—whether of nationalism, developmentalism, statism, or simply some totalizing, grand narrative which is their common structural basis—is now widely held and is often the starting point of many analyses, particularly those emanating from the academic and political North as well as from its outposts in the South. The opposition between old Left and new social movements that has structured stories about political struggles in advanced industrialized nations after 1968 now appears to have taken hold in stories being told about the contemporary political landscape in the Philippines. In place of the world narrative of development, which incorporated the third world within Guerilla Passion and Cultural Revolution

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a temporality of modern progress, a global narrative of democratization subsumes the characteristics of Philippine struggles within a temporality of political immanence. I do not want to contest the hegemonic character of the cpp-ndf with regard to progressive and liberatory movements during the dictatorship, although, at the same time, I believe it to be absolutely crucial not to lose sight of its counterhegemonic role with respect to the dominant social order as well as to the state and to recognize the di√erence between antistate and statist socialisms.∑ Nor do I want to contest the strong centralist tendencies within the party. I do, however, want to contest the reifying and totalizing depiction of the Philippine revolutionary movement as commensurate with the purported logic of its leadership. This depiction allows the revolutionary movement to be counterposed to social movements that, it would seem, emerged out of separate and unequal paths of development.∏ Put another way, the framing of the revolutionary movement in terms of the authoritarian state (as the characteristic form of domination) allows for the recoding of those practices of resistance and freedom suppressed by party theory as democratic claims. Defined as claims for civil liberties and individual human rights, these democratic claims serve as the basis of new identity-based or sectoral social movements.π It is not only so-called revisionists or reformists who are enthralled by these globalizing postsocialist precepts. The party has also deemed it necessary to make some structural adjustments in like code, as evidenced by the shift in tactics professed by Chairman Armando Liwanag at the start of the Second Great Rectification Movement in 1992: ‘‘Our cultural revolution of a new-democratic type is distinct from and yet continuous with the socialist cultural revolution. Like now, we shall continue to combine Party leadership, the mass movement and a strong sense of the rights of the individual within its anti-imperialist and socialist framework’’ (emphasis added).∫ In another closely related assessment, it was the failure to develop this sense of the human rights of individuals within the movement and, more, to establish a rational system of justice or due process that enabled the tragic executions of the anti-dpa campaigns to take place in the ‘‘arbitrary, haphazard, and subjective’’ manner that they did.Ω From within the movement, this irrationality on the part of its own forces (other code words are collective paranoia and mass hysteria) is seen either as a deviation from correct revolutionary practice—in the notion of excesses of militarist adventurism or madness—or as a constitutive aspect of revolutionary van302

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guardism and dogmatism—in the notion of party cultism and Marxist-Maoist theological certainty.∞≠ The first interpretation of such irrationality as deviation from the movement confirms the fundamental rationality of the revolutionary movement and the need to return to its correct theoretical basis in the face of such retrogressive and erroneous behavior. It tends to support the notion that without su≈cient theoretical political enlightenment the revolutionary forces tend to fall prey to backward forms of behavior and belief, such as the atavistic practices of the not fully modern, not yet awakened masses. The second interpretation of irrationality as constitutive of the movement confirms the fundamental limitations of the dominant theory and practice of the revolutionary movement and the need to revise its outmoded strategies of struggle as well as its underlying theoretical framework. It tends to support the idea that Marxistinspired revolutionary nationalist movements are themselves destined to become atavisms of the preglobalization variety. While these interpretations are not mutually exclusive, and in fact can combine in di√erent ways, their deployment of an implied notion of irrationality to account for the causes of the Left’s crisis serves to construct a rational place for the proper progressive subject of historical transformation. It suggests, furthermore, that the crisis of the revolutionary movement is attributable to certain subjective and imaginary practices—in a word, culture—within the movement that somehow either deviate from or internally constrain what is or could be the reasonable behavior of its forces. One particular interpretation, for example, suggests that, as a symptom of the broader crisis of the Left, the experience of the anti-dpa campaigns can be traced to the subculture of the underground movement. This subculture is shaped by core Filipino values of kapwa, or shared identity, that supports conformity and obedience within the movement in general, and an undue reliance on pakiramdam, or feeling, during the campaigns in particular in lieu of ‘‘a more scientific way of confronting the problems [of infiltration].’’∞∞ Although the author of this assessment admirably takes some pains to address the question of culture within the movement in a conversation heavily dominated by rationalist issues of political ideology, organization, and strategy, she nonetheless falls back on rationalist ideals for social struggle precisely as a consequence of her attempt to account for the Left’s failings in terms of its culture. Situated outside of the movement, I do not intend here to adjudicate among the various ideological positions contesting for hegemony over revolutionary Guerilla Passion and Cultural Revolution

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strategy and their respective interpretations of the movement’s faults.∞≤ I am interested rather in the codes through which such contestations occur and, moreover, in the limits these codes set on an alternate understanding of the revolutionary process. The codification of the crisis of the movement in terms of received ideologies, such as I’ve outlined above, drastically restricts an open and generative grasp of the cultural operations, historical significance, and future political potential of the practices comprising the revolutionary movement, which can be culled from the mixed sources I draw on here. It seems to me, for example, that the widely shared presumptions of either the movement’s lack or violation of the concept of individual human rights, and therefore the need for better institutional-juridical mechanisms for guaranteeing an observance of those rights obscures other dimensions of cultural praxis within the movement besides those predicated on the operative notion of the abstract individual subject or other forms of bourgeois civil society. Ironically, the very creativity alluded to in the demand for new thinking and new politics is impeded from political actualization by the very universal terminological currency through which it gains expression. On the one hand, the reliance on postsocialist vocabulary tends to reproduce liberal and social democratic ideas about politics, serving to support, for example, widespread, uninterrogated notions of the Filipino people’s historically shaped, deep-seated avidity for—even entrenchment of— electoral politics as well as other long-standing features of Philippine political life resulting from its colonial inheritance.∞≥ On the other hand, the reliance on orthodox socialist vocabulary tends to further rigidify the entrenched basic principles and rules of struggle that can serve to contain the creative and improvisational experiences of everyday life both in the movement and outside of it. What drops out of this exchange, precisely as the consequence of its basis in a universal hermeneutics of political struggle, is a closer consideration of the inventive organizing force of everyday revolutionary cultural praxis. I would go so far as to say that there has occurred a measure of abandonment of the promises and tasks of the cultural revolution posed at the beginning of the contemporary movement. The measure of that abandonment is indicated by the extent to which culture has been relegated to a matter of lesser political importance than the theory and practice of armed struggle purveyed by Marxist-Maoist-Leninist thought or, for that matter, than the theory and practice of pluralist, civil society struggles purveyed by a combined variety of liberal, popular, and social democratic persuasions. In making this sweeping characterization of the contempo304

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rary field of progressive debate, I am not inattentive to the finer ideological di√erences among particular Left social groups or to the various in-between positions, including those which are committed to the mainstream movement while heeding the lessons of its crisis (if not its critics).∞∂ I am trying, rather, to delineate the limiting ground that is set for progressive imagination by the adoption of dominant codes of political thought. Such codes tend to support the notion that the forging of proper political action lies in a conscious apprehension of a hidden objective system of political logic or rationality defining Philippine society (such as elite democracy, or semifeudal, neocolonial, bureaucrat capitalism), which underwrites the significance and e√ect of particular acts. What escapes this understanding of politics is the significant material role exercised by a whole realm of symbolic and a√ective practices in the very constitution and transformation of what appears to be an objective, even empirical, system of social and economic organization. This dominant coding of politics as a form of rationality that has as its basis a relatively stable order of socioeconomic relations (whether the international order of global capitalism or the order of national patron-client relations) sanctions a nonacknowledgment of the crucially imaginary and dynamic character of this order. And, as I’ve shown above, it also leads to an interpretation of the unexpected turns in events and behavior of actors to which the crisis of the Left is traced as a form of aberrant irrationality, a fault of culture—whether the ideologically caged culture of the party or the subjectivist culture of theoretically underdeveloped, nonscientific forces or nonmodern Filipino culture—and therefore by definition a failure of revolutionary politics. Against this broad interpretative tendency, I would like to view those subjective-cultural practices that appear to be the content and evidence of the movement’s political failure in their aspect as unfinished practices of antiimperialist revolutionary struggle. To do so means to suspend the oppositions— modern modes of rational enlightenment vs. premodern modes of superstitious and nonrational thought, Marxist-Maoist-Leninist revolution vs. democratic social struggles—that place alternative practice, whether rational or not, on one side or another of discrete logics of action or ideologies. In this regard, what is thought to be the old guard of a protracted people’s war against which new politics asserts itself might very well include or at least involve those very practices that new politics claims as elements of its own democratizing motivation. More generally, modern nationalist formations, whether the authoritarian nation-state or its polar antagonist, the national democratic revolution, can be Guerilla Passion and Cultural Revolution

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seen to consist in those very practices that it purportedly attempts to exclude, suppress, or eschew.∞∑ This is a very simple point, but I do think it cannot be overemphasized. Following is an illustration of the practical confusion of apparently distinct ideologies. It is well known that one of the strategies employed by the cia-advised Philippine military during the late 1970s and 1980s was the strategy of low-intensity conflict. What is less well known is that this strategy was developed by the cia in tandem with local intelligence agents in the counterinsurgency war against the Philippine guerilla movement, or Huk Rebellion (Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan), during and after the Japanese occupation in the Second World War. In this strategy, the staging of culturally appropriate ‘‘psy-ops,’’ or psychological operations, was of primary importance over military maneuvers directed toward the winning of battles.∞∏ The cultural work of superstition, rumor, and peasant fears plays a constitutive role in what is often simply referred to as militarism and all too quickly attributed to the statist logic of modern nationalism, to which both the Philippine army and the New People’s Army are said to subscribe.∞π Indeed, part of Marcos’s own authoritarian buildup as the strongman embodiment of the nation consisted of popular rumors of his possession of talismans (anting-anting) that ensured and concentrated indomitable power in his person. In so far as he centralized despotic, tributary relations within the national military-state apparatus he stood for, Marcos himself took on the form of a talisman used by smaller despots to tap into the largesse of capital under his discretionary power.∞∫ It is not only that these belief practices are part of the military regime’s arsenal of psy-op weaponry. It is also that they symbolically express the relations of power and extractive wealth that they materially organize. These irrational belief practices are piece-instantiations of a cultural software that is an intrinsic component of modern militarism and, hence, of the broader social order of capitalist modernity, which militarism secures. The strategic deployment of this cultural software in the course of the present war is evidenced by the code naming of the movement’s internal investigations against military agents in Mindanao as Operasyon Kampanyang Ahos (Operation Campaign Garlic), in accordance with the popular belief in the talismanic powers of garlic (ahos) to ward o√ evil.∞Ω It is also evident in the habit of peasant villagers and guerillas of referring to the military as demonyo (demons or devils) and as aswang (vampires), a habit from which the campaign drew not only its name but perhaps also part of its a√ective logic. These particular coding practices attest to the 306

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fact that the ‘‘enchantment’’ of the land and nature, which in his poem ‘‘The Forest Is Still Enchanted’’ Sison claims have been sublated by a revolutionary enchantment, continues to operate in the structure of exorcism of the anti-dpa campaigns that were conducted by some leading members of the movement on the bodies of its own guerilla forces. While I do not mean to suggest that such cultural coding practices adequately explain these campaigns, I do want to suggest that we might begin to understand their conditions of possibility better if we attend to the experiential media system supporting the order of everyday rural life. This experiential media system or culture is a crucial dimension of the real conditions that the revolutionary movement faced, grew to depend on, and, I will aver, eventually helped to transform. In this view, the confusion between dominant and subordinate logics is more than a matter of use or appropriation and cooptation or accommodation by one or the other, or even hybridization, which are the usual terms shaping current discussions of cultural politics. Rather, the interaction of dominant logics of modernization and subordinate peasant logics is a matter of heterogeneous practices entering into and composing the imaginary production and codification of dominant social conditions of Philippine rural life and development.≤≠ Put another way, practices of imagination coded as superstition are active structural aspects of living and working in an animate, animist world, a world which emerges out of and as the specific form of relations of tributary production obtaining in the rural areas. The reinvention of indigenous sociocultural debtbond relations in the making and securing of hacendero-landlord power during the late nineteenth century—a process ‘‘in which the gift economy overlapped with the world-capitalist economy’’—is a historical example of the role of cultural practices in worldly production.≤∞ As Aguilar finds in his historical genealogy of the sugar landholding class, ‘‘folk-historic categories’’ of spirits, luck, and cosmic power fundamentally shape the neocolonial rise of this emergent native elite class as a social stratum endowed with otherworldly spiritual power. Furthermore, through the institutionalization of gambling, ‘‘a wavering form of wagering on the odds of power’’ that served as an informal cultural means of both soliciting labor and of extracting additional surplus value, these same folkhistoric categories helped to make a newly deproletarianized plantation labor class become socially and territorially bonded to the emergent landlord power.≤≤ As I’ve suggested in previous chapters, gambling congeals sociocultural practices of self-lending and fate playing that are predicated upon a notion of the self as a Guerilla Passion and Cultural Revolution

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penetrable and mutable, socially accessible entity, a membranous form between individual possession and cosmic destiny as well as a notion of power as the bodily concentration of mystical and worldly forces. These practices of imagination both signify and structure the specific social relations of tributary production that persist in shaping not only diasporic and urban formations but also contemporary rural formations. To the extent that they serve as imaginary means for organizing the prevailing social order in the countryside, cultural practices thus become important weapons and tools of both counterinsurgent and revolutionary warfare. Contrary to the aesthetics upheld by the party, the ‘‘thoughts, feelings and behavior of revolutionary forces and the masses’’ cannot be considered as merely the raw material organized by literature for the purposes of advancing an objective struggle.≤≥ As forms of experience supporting daily life, these subjective forms become, in the course of organized revolutionary struggle, ‘‘active forces of material change.’’≤∂

Cult Value and Resurrectionary Power If we regard the literary-cultural tactics fueling and supporting the expansion of the revolutionary movement not only as low-intensity practices of insurgency but also as experiential supports for the daily life of struggle, we begin to approach what I mean by unfinished practices of anti-imperialist, revolutionary imagination. Unlike all the radical movements before it, the contemporary revolutionary movement has thrived on a transformative integration of classes. This process of sharing and class mediumship between the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry gives rise to the contradictory signifying practices of social production, which I argued in the previous chapter constitutes the concrete historical moment of Philippine cultural revolution. The condition of being unfinished thus refers to the ongoing processes of subjective and social imaginary transformation that revolutionary literature sets out to both render and practically realize. As a mobilizing and liberative force, revolutionary literature operates to a significant extent through a√ective appeals or the expression of humor, in the older sense of disposition or mood. Two kinds of a√ect or humor stand out as means of revolutionary inspiration: passion, or pasyon, as su√ering, which includes rage and grief, and enjoyment, which includes elation and the delight of an inside joke. Laughter becomes a means of intimacy as well as exclusion. When directed at revolutionary forces and the masses, it ‘‘lightens and makes more 308

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intimate their regard for one another, while laughter at the behavior of the enemy is one way of measuring the weakness of the latter.’’≤∑ The role of a√ect or humor as organizing principle of literary works is exemplified by the anecdotal sketch, or dagli, which conventionally relates a tactical operation or a close brush with the military in the conveyance of a collective being in on a subversive action, the object of which defines the enemy.≤∏ It is also exemplified by the litanies or plaintive verses depicting the untold hardship of peasant farmers and by the narrative memorials or life portraits of fallen guerillas. The significance of such literary forms to the creation of revolutionary sociality can be understood through a redeployment of Benjamin’s notion of cult value. In his well-known essay ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ Benjamin writes about cult value as a plane of reception and valuation of art that draws from art’s earlier historical function as an instrument of ritual.≤π Opposed to ‘‘exhibition value,’’ which in the age of reproducibility increasingly displaces it, cult value signifies the fundamental uniqueness of presence of the art object, which is inseparable from its embedding in a particular tradition. As Benjamin explains, ‘‘Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value.’’≤∫ Inasmuch as Benjamin’s essay famously argues for the progressive politico-historical significance of film’s exhibition value as against the strains of fascism toward which the ritual values of art are pressed, it would seem inappropriate, even inherently contradictory, to apply cult value to a revolutionary context. And yet it is precisely Benjamin’s discussion of cult value as a residual aesthetic function that is recast in contemporary political practice that allows us to read its active production as a form of revolutionary use value in another sociopolitical context.≤Ω More than his particular assessment of the political potential of film, Benjamin’s important theoretical contribution in this essay as well as in other works was the idea that, as Joel Snyder writes, ‘‘new methods of production engender new means of depiction because they bring about specifiable changes in the perception of the world. Art itself is intimately involved with the expression of perception.’’≥≠ My own interest is precisely in this historical shift in perception Guerilla Passion and Cultural Revolution

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wrought by transformations in collective modalities of life. As Benjamin writes, ‘‘Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized—the medium in which it occurs—is conditioned not only by nature but by history.’’≥∞ Although Benjamin was concerned with the emancipation of the artwork from its basis on ritual (and cult value), his approach to the political potential of emergent modes of perception brought about by changing social relations of production allows us to consider the political implications of perceptual changes brought about by revolutionary transformations in sociality, as these are rendered in the emergent role of revolutionary literature and art. In the movement, poems, songs, and stories serve socioritualistic functions, rallying fighters before a mass action, celebrating successful battles, sharing experiences, and commemorating the dead. These functions are not ceremonial moments independent of the struggle they support. They are vital practices in tandem with other activities composing the everyday life of the movement itself. As Kris Montañez writes, ‘‘The new art and literature do not only perform a valuable role in the struggle of the masses; they have become part of their daily life. Skits, songs and poems firm up the hearts and minds of the peasant masses before launching a mass action, such as Operasyon Sukot in the south, conducted by the peasants to protest against feudal abuses by their landlords; in the north, the cultural minorities celebrate a successful npa ambush on the fascist troops by dancing the tadek to the rhythmic pounding of the gangasa and by singing their salidummays.’’≥≤ Cult value names the form of social reception— and hence the social bases—of the revolutionary literary object in its everyday ritual function for the struggle. Cult value is, in this context, not a product of a ‘‘graduated and hierarchized mediation,’’ as it is in the European religious context Benjamin writes about.≥≥ Although it emerges out of the tributary relations of Philippine society, it has become refurbished as the product and instrument of an a≈liative association—the mode of sociality of mga kasama, or comrades— that, as we shall see, consists of relations of partaking in a common activity as well as relations of accompaniment rather than an established hierarchic social order. The production of cult value by the kasama logic of social cooperation and its operative e√ect for the movement are exemplified in the story ‘‘Sky Rose’’ (1979), written by Felipe Granrojo (the pen name of Macario Tiu). In this

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story, rather than acting as autonomous individual personages, characters serve as points of passage for the movement of remembrance of Rolly, an exceptional guerilla fighter and comrade who dies in the struggle. The plot follows the trek of Rolly’s guerilla unit through towns, fields, and forests, as they make their way to Three-Peaks Circle to hold an important meeting of guerilla squads in the zone under Rolly’s command. After the meeting, as he leads his unit through the forest under the light of a half-moon to escape being detected by encircling government patrols, Rolly is killed in a mistaken encounter between his squad and another guerilla squad that was trying to evade the same enemy patrols. The trek is not itself the object of the story. It is, rather, a means of another movement: the passage of recollection by means of which the portrait of Rolly, as exemplary subject of the revolution, is drawn. While characters have memories of their own, they are here not whole, complete individuals. They are ancillary forms, relays of a movement of actions and a√ects that exceeds them but that has no existence outside of them. As the placeholder of recollection, Rolly is both the product and the causative medium of this collective movement. The narrative begins with Rolly as an objective character but then passes on to the subjective perspectives of other characters by means of a proximate action or a memory association. After the opening scene, in which Rolly and his comrades take leave of the family in whose house they have sought shelter, Rolly leads his fellow guerillas in line formation as they trudge across a grassy field in the evening darkness. A comrade named Betty steps on a sharp-edged rock and must stop, momentarily halting the march. The narrative then passes on to her. Betty awakens to the sound of Rolly chopping firewood. She remembers him as a strikingly attractive, shy, childlike young man, still unacquainted with and not yet inured to the experiences of killing and death that others had grown accustomed to. She remembers the profound e√ect of Rolly’s first killing and then, two years later, his dramatic transformation into a reputable, seasoned guerilla fighter and unit commander. After this passage of recollection, the narrative switches back to the present. The guerillas are on the road again. They reach the communication drop house, where a package of materials and letters awaits them. As they read and share their letters, the narrative passes on to Tonyo, who has just read Rolly’s letter. While he watches Rolly interact with a peasant child, Tonyo contemplates Rolly’s admirably unassuming and sympathetic ways with the people. Reflecting on the dissimulating e√ect of Rolly’s naïve, innocent

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demeanor, Tonyo recalls events demonstrating Rolly’s faith-inspiring authority and competence as a guerilla commander. As Tonyo continues to wonder at Rolly’s beguiling presence, the narrative takes leave of his thoughts and passes on to Rolly’s own subjective contemplation of his surroundings and situation, a contemplation sparked by the same letter from his mother that had sparked Tonyo’s reflections. Rolly recalls the student demonstrations and the sudden change of atmosphere brought about by the new dispensation that causes him to leave his urban life behind. He remembers the long, circuitous, exhilarating journey through new worlds he embarked upon on the way to this place of armed struggle. Delayed for an extra day in order to help a peasant farmer plow his fields, the group finally reaches Three-Peaks Circle. As Rolly gives his uninspiring speech to the gathering of guerillas, Joey, the head of another squad, contemplates the di√erence between this dry, halting speaker before him and the utterly confident, fully alive, and resolutely powerful soldier he remembers in battle. Joey thinks back to an ambush a year ago when Rolly, then under Joey’s command, proved to be more worthy of the command than he by saving the entire unit from a death to which Joey had already resigned himself. At the end of the three-day meeting, the squads disperse. A week later rumors of Rolly’s sudden accidental death at the hands of his own comrades spreads across the guerilla zone. Gathered under a full moon, Joey, Betty, and Tonyo, one by one, mourn their collective loss, each regaining their faith in the revolution, which despite such setbacks, they remind themselves as they wait for dawn, marches on. Rolly’s cult value as a figure of the immortality of the revolution is produced by this movement of memory and observation mediated by his comrades as well as by peasant sympathizers. Each character, including Rolly himself, contributes to the signification of Rolly as a revolutionary persona whose excess symbolic resonance becomes a life force for the movement beyond his own bodily life: ‘‘After his death, all baby boys born within Three-Peaks Circle and many more beyond were named after him, replacing the calendar saints for the honor. They bore many names, for he used many aliases. The people knew it too. Could there be a better measure of one’s worthiness? As a consequence too, many peasant youths clamored to join them.’’ Rolly’s cult value is thus a form of resurrectionary power, the power to continue life after death—indeed, to create life out of death. Such is the ritual function of literary and oral memorials of dead guerillas: to embody and enact the revolution’s power over death for the sake of the living.

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Ideology of Sacrifice and the Remainders of Revolutionary Personality In keeping with the dominant aesthetic and ideological program of the party, Montañez writes of such resurrectionary power in terms of sacrifice: ‘‘To sacrifice oneself for the wide interests of the struggle is a demonstration of love for the people, confirmed in poem after poem about revolutionary martyrs. . . . Such deaths become emblems of triumph over the enemy, who can only destroy the body but never the spirit of a people’s warrior, whose loss does not end in grief but in the birth of a hundred revolutionary warriors.’’≥∂ The emphasis on sacrifice as the meaning of such deaths posits the people as divine cause of revolutionary struggle. Like Christ, revolutionary martyrs sacrifice themselves on behalf of this divine cause. The symbolic value of their deaths accumulates and becomes deposited in the immortal power of the people, the ideal image of the revolution. To be sure, the monumentalizing of the people and the revolution to which the notion of sacrifice is applied is a practice engaged in by guerillas themselves as part of the process of their revolutionary subjectification and can in no way be considered a mere overlay of party literary criticism. Staying the drive to suicide, Joey regains faith precisely by means of this monumentalizing invocation: ‘‘Torn between guilt and common sense he clung to the cause desperately. That was what carried him through the most critical period of his life. The cause. Rolly’s cause. His cause. . . . There was the future to worry about. The revolution. That was what mattered most now. Presently, he stood up, feeling refreshed and revived.’’ As the object of sacrifice, Rolly serves as the point of subjectification for the revolutionary forces who wage armed struggle on behalf of the people, whose image Rolly has become. Rolly is constituted as the exemplary revolutionary subject, in identification with whom struggling guerillas find the courage to go on, and nascent guerillas are born. He is constituted as this ideal form from the point of view of the absolute movement of becoming—indeed, the apotheosis—that Revolution, as the death of Capital and its resurrection in The People, represents. What perhaps escapes the political aesthetics of sacrifice, however, is another mode of subjectification that the emblematic function of revolutionary literature serves to mediate. No doubt, Rolly is a fetish. Throughout the story, characters lovingly dwell on Rolly’s ‘‘extremely attractive’’ physical features and the aura

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of his contradictory persona. Betty, Tonyo, and Joey all watch him in fascination, contemplating ‘‘his extreme physical beauty,’’ his ‘‘large, mournful eyes that stared at you with unobtrusive intensity, locking you in a gaze that caressed and seduced,’’ and his embodiment of a mysterious and unearthly life force that could only be likened to the spirit of a man-child: Rolly let the sun punish him so, but acquiring a bronze skin only succeeded in heightening his good looks. . . . The Tisoy, the handsome one, the people referred to him everywhere, rendering his presence strongly felt. No matter how he kept himself unobtrusive, regardless of his innate shyness, he exuded pure sensuality that was all fire, a seething rage for life. That, he thought, explained the childlike quality in him, the way he delighted over many things Tonyo considered pedestrian. He was interested in wild flowers, shiny stones, colorful insects. He would gaze out long, seemingly in deep thought and would suddenly say something about the flight of the hawk being the most graceful of all movements. It was in these moments, while the magic lasted, that Rolly’s face took on a glow that triumphed over the sad look in his eyes. (49)

In this register, the value that Rolly embodies resembles the value of the spectacle form. The aura of whiteness purveyed by his bronzed mestizo skin and the seductive presence of ‘‘pure sensuality’’ he exudes suggest the racial and gendered lineaments of the superstar image commodity produced by the entertainment industry. The collective fetishization of Rolly reflects the personality cult said to rule Philippine mass culture and patronage politics since the early 1960s. Rolly is in this aspect a revolutionary personality created out of the same combined practices of spectacular and tributary alienation that produced the dictator Marcos and the film actress/singer Nora Aunor as exemplary hegemonic masculine and feminine icons—respectively, ‘‘action star’’ and ‘‘superstar’’—of the emerging social order of the New Society.≥∑ Like Ka Dante and Victor Corpuz, early heroes of the armed struggle who were extolled in protest literature as countercultural idols against the iconic figures of Marcos and Nora Aunor, Rolly is an action star rivaling hegemonic mythic personalities and superstars and the sociosymbolic regime of spectacularized patronage value production they aesthetically serve to support.≥∏ He serves as a counterhegemonic image produced by and for the people. Like Nora Aunor but in rivalry with her spectacular power as

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an image commodity, he emerges out of people’s desires, an ideal member of the revolutionary community, metonymically representing them to themselves, enjoining others to be like him. In contrast to dominant personalities, which incarnate the specific conditions of capitalist accumulation that Philippine masses confront as the objective conditions of their labor (Marcos as potentate, Nora Aunor as martyr—two sides of the same tributary, national coin), Rolly serves as a personality of the specific conditions of revolutionary transformation of these dominant relations of capitalist production.≥π In his function as a revolutionary personality, Rolly does not, however, simply reflect the mystical form of Christlike sacrificial value, the apotheosis of The People as the other side of Capital; he also expresses and mediates the longings and desires for change that imbue him with the aura of revolutionary enchantment. The legendary, even mythical quality of the stories woven about him, in particular the story of his experience living with ‘‘the fierce minority tribe’’ of the B’laan for six months, reflects the aura, which the stories themselves help to create, of his proximity to untamed nature, a primitive world that, while initially forbidding and arduous, becomes transformed into a new world of freedom: ‘‘The earthly language of the peasants, the secret treasures of the forests, the rituals of the B’laan. He was free, wildly free!’’ (51) In Rolly’s enactment of the superlative role that Nora Aunor, the superstar, paradigmatically represents with respect to the masses, however, can be gleaned other practices and relations that are not fully encapsulated by his operation as a mere alternative or counter personality. As I suggested in earlier chapters, the following that constitutes the spectacular power of ideal figures like Nora Aunor consists of something more and something other than either the relations of identification and fetishism supporting capitalist image-commodity culture or the commodified relations of tributary alienation supporting semifeudal, neocolonial culture.≥∫ If we return to the scenes of production of Rolly as a revolutionary personality we begin to see the mixed streams of memory production and subjective processing that contribute to the making of the collective portrait. Ancillary characters do not serve as mere means of representation for the collective symbolic making of a revolutionary icon. As nodal points of a social experience, they actively create and mediate the passage of memories, desires, thoughts, and a√ects that come to be embodied in the representational object.

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‘‘A Longing that Had No Shape’’ Betty’s turn in the narrative movement of recollecting Rolly as the object of an ideal revolutionary representation is introduced by two transitional interruptions: a rock, which breaks her step, and ‘‘the rhythmic sound of axe hitting wood,’’ which, combined with the intense heat of noon, breaks her sleep. Betty looks at Rolly: ‘‘Sweat glistened on his well-formed body. How he had changed, she thought. Well, everybody had changed. If her friends from the convent school could only see her now! A gamut of emotions swept over her. She felt like crying over nothing’’ (43). While Rolly will take up the greater space of Betty’s reflections, that space which is filled by her representational memory to flesh out Rolly’s persona also serves as the medium for grasping a certain ‘‘nothing’’ or unrepresentable ‘‘something’’ that the sight of Rolly triggers. Groping for a reason for her sudden sadness, she thinks to herself: In her new world she had found fulfillment. It was a life that was basic and so exciting. She had experienced the widest range of emotions, from love to hatred, from gentleness to violence, contradictory passions of the kind that could only be aroused when one was confronted with a life-and-death struggle. Being a rebel, a real guerilla fighter, gave purpose and meaning to her convictions, to her existence itself. And yet something tugged at her. She recognized it vaguely as a sense of nostalgia, a longing that had no shape, like a pain that was there but had no specific tender spot. Perhaps it was just that changes had taken place so fast that a little reflection could be jolting. Just now as she looked at Rolly . . .’’ (43, emphasis added)

From here on, Rolly becomes the object of Betty’s memory. The symbolic tribute she pays to him, which accrues to his persona, however, is all the while spurred by this ‘‘longing that had no shape.’’ This a√ective pull against the purpose and meaning of the revolution might easily be read as the lure of the urban bourgeois life she left behind. Rolly himself finds his own previous life tugging at him. The letter from his mother pleading for him to return transports him to a definable segment of his past: ‘‘It is Christmas time. He is in his house with some friends listening to Simon and Garfunkel. His mother ruΔes his hair the second time upon passing him from the kitchen back to the bedroom. He flushes with embarrassment. His mother treats him like a child and he is already 316

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sixteen years old’’ (50). Rolly contrasts this fond memory with his chipped nails and calloused hands, with his splayed toes and the thickened, cracked soles of his feet, and it is clear that this contrast is the measure of the contradictory distance between two known lives. For Rolly, whatever outpouring of emotions that might issue from this distance, such as the remorse he feels for hurting his mother with his inconsideration and negligence, is a matter to be resolved: ‘‘Oh, Mama! Mama! he heard a sob inside him. How will you understand? He resolved to write her anyway, tell her he was all right, and not to worry about him. That would su≈ce. He would write just that’’ (52). Unlike Rolly, however, Betty cannot represent this ‘‘pain that was there but had no specific spot.’’ When Betty returns to the present from her contributive remembering, she is once again confronted with that unlocatable pain that Rolly stirs in her. And yet, just as quickly as she turned to remembering Rolly when she initially feels the tug of this shapeless longing, she hastens to a≈rm a meaning that was a certainty for all: Now, as she looked at him chopping firewood she wondered how much she herself had changed. She had not given it much thought. Neither had the others spoken of it to her, not even Tonyo, her husband of three years. In their organizational life they talked of development in terms of their work. That was the main concern. Improve in all fields in order to survive. That meant undergoing personal changes too. But in what way she had changed she couldn’t define now. There was only one thing she was sure of—she had changed and it was for the better, for herself and for the people she had chosen to be with, toward that ultimate change of all: the revolution.(45, emphasis added)

Like her ‘‘crying over nothing’’ triggered by the contemplation of changes she has undergone, Betty’s inability to define in what way and how much she has changed points to a realm of self-transformation beyond measure, beyond the political compass that can guarantee that it is change ‘‘for the better.’’ Betty’s experience of sensuous-concrete transformation, which is initially sensed as a form of pain and longing, can be seen to be part of the subjective labor that produces the revolutionary movement, of which Rolly serves as an ideal embodiment. And yet, as in Marx’s account of the inversion characteristic of mystical expression of value, ‘‘whereby the sensuous-concrete counts only as a phenomenal form of the abstract-general,’’ Betty’s sensuous-concrete changes come to Guerilla Passion and Cultural Revolution

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merely express the abstract-general concept of revolutionary change.≥Ω All the experiential labor of change and of pained desire that exceeds this ideal expression thus remains undefinable, beyond measure, expressible only as ‘‘a longing that had no shape.’’ Even as Betty interprets the proper meaning that Rolly, as the aim of her reminiscence, represents for the revolution, her enactment of the very process of writing ‘‘Rolly’’ into symbolic being also performatively realizes the losses and excesses that this process entails and yet cannot entirely contain. Betty’s remembrance of Rolly’s transformation produces him as the embodiment of the spirit of the revolution and in this way constitutes him as the proper object of her own subjectification, the symbolic key with which she can interpret her own experience of radical life transformation. Rolly is in some sense produced as the value and symptom of her formless longing, a commemorative object to supplant that loss for which she feels nostalgic. And yet, at the same time, he is the very trigger of Betty’s vague pain. While he serves as a means for locating and interpreting her pain, making the nothing over which she feels like crying into something, the meaning he o√ers cannot fully satisfy this persistent longing to the extent that he represents precisely its origin. Rolly is the symbolic answer that calls Betty into question—the question of her life expressed as ‘‘how much she herself had changed’’ which he, as meaningful answer, cannot exhaust. He is a body of signs of longed-for changes that have not yet fully arrived, of a future still in the process of making. But this is, in some ways, a rehearsal or reenactment of the very event, the calling, that founds Betty’s present life. Revolution was the answer for which countless radicalized youth saw their lives as questions. As a struggle consisting of constant movement, uncertainty, and transformation, however, it was an answer that did not completely resolve those questions but in fact continually generated them. The experience of being ‘‘free, wildly free’’ also created new desires and new needs, demanding new social attachments and limits as both the predicates and objectives of revolutionary transformation and the vision of a radically di√erent social order. The paradox of this exhilarating historical experience of freedom opened by the movement is that the transformations required to fulfill the revolutionary desires of the young guerillas can also alter the very conditions and objects of those desires, indeed, the very bases and measure by which change and fulfillment might be realized. Even as o≈cial imperatives attempted to configure a proper revolutionary subject adequate to the lives comprising the movement, to provide a form that 318

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‘‘gave purpose and meaning’’ to their experience and existence, the struggle produces ever-changing conditions for the maintenance of this form. It consists precisely of a constant movement of call and response between revolutionary ideals and the guerillas and people who constitute the revolution’s social content. The conditions of struggle demand the continual production of its social basis. In the process of this production, which is also the praxis of writing the subject of revolution, losses are incurred, surplus e√ects are realized, as supplementary experiences of struggle. Betty’s unlocatable pain might be seen as this very supplement to revolutionary subjectification. It could be said to issue from both her failure to fully integrate with the people and her failure to completely transcend the bodily experience of guerilla life that she actually leads. Falling short of these revolutionary cultural imperatives to live as one of the masses and at the same time to transcend the everyday corporeal habitus of struggle in order to act in and as the spirit of the revolution, Betty senses the a√ective remainders of revolutionary subjectification. These remainders are comprised of experiences that are left over from, in excess of, unassimilable to the ideal revolutionary subject they have vitally helped to produce. Despite the attempts in revolutionary literature to make material needs and concerns of the soul one and the same, such as in works that sought to materialize poetry and to make needs the basis of a new revolutionary soul, the needs and souls produced out of the movement exceed the revolutionary subject in whom they are to reside.∂≠ Hence when Rolly dies, Betty is ‘‘overwhelmed by an inexplicable sense of loss’’ (59), a loss in excess of the object of loss that Rolly embodied. In the face of her inordinate, panicky grief, Tonyo thinks, ‘‘Her weakness was that she developed too strong an attachment to things, places and persons’’ (59). These passionate attachments are what either impede or create a drag on the trajectory of transformation ‘‘toward that ultimate change of all: the revolution.’’ Like the habits, desires, and subjective and bodily frailty of the petty bourgeois souls that Levy Balgos de la Cruz portrays as forms of cumbersome weight ( pabigat) that need to be cast o√ on the road to revolutionary triumph, these attachments weigh down the flight to freedom. And yet, these same passionate attachments are what inspirit and animate the revolutionary corps as producers and consumers of revolutionary cult value, that is, as the source and destination of the resurrectionary power of struggle. They comprise the subjective conditions for the production of the very life of the movement.∂∞ Guerilla Passion and Cultural Revolution

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Inordinate Attachments and Revolutionary Drag Now they upon the rock are they who, when they hear, receive the word with joy; and these have no roots: for they believe for a while and in time of temptation they fall away.—luke 8:13

We can read ‘‘Sky Rose’’ as a reenactment not of the passion of Rolly (as in the life and death of a Christ-hero), who acts as a mirror of the revolutionary movement as a whole, but of the wayward processes of production of life of the movement, including the production of life out of the losses it incurs. On this view, the a√ective, subjective side of the political trek of armed struggle comes to the fore. It is this side that, while being absolutely vital to the movement, remains undervalued or simply unvalorized. As a reenactment of revolutionary passion, ‘‘Sky Rose’’ performs the collective experiential labor process that goes into the production of revolutionary cult value. It also reenacts, therefore, the remainders of this process, which are to be understood as the by-product of revolutionary transformation, the counterimage or negative of an infinitely open or insurgent future. These remainders of revolutionary meaning are the untapped subjective potentials that subsist in the present, in the everywhere surroundings of land and nature, which they animate. Erupting as forms of contrapuntal time, they are what interrupt the objective forward march of the revolution like the rock that breaks Betty’s step and the sound of the axe that sets o√ the rush of emotions sweeping over her, the very well of feeling from which she draws to contribute to the memorial portrait of Rolly. After the memory work, another rock breaks Betty’s step and interrupts the steady march of the guerillas. This time it is at the bottom of the river, which proves deeper than Betty thinks and causes her to lose her balance and fall in. Pulled out by her comrades, she quickly goes into the bushes to change. ‘‘She peeled o√ her clothes. She shivered as the breeze briefly played with her wet body.’’ When the march resumes, Betty begins to giggle uncontrollably at the hilarity of the situation. Little by little, the entire unit picks up the hikhik of her suppressed laughter: ‘‘A staccato of suppressed giggles went up and down the line like a ping-pong ball. The infection had set in and no matter how one tried a hikhik always managed to escape. Now alone, the next a duet; a sudden burst, complete silence, and it started all over again’’ (46). Rolly, their commander, 320

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orders them to stop giggling. They see a hut ahead in the middle of the trail, and they fall silent as they carefully skirt the house through a sloping cornfield. When they return to the trail, now far from the house, the group erupts in a burst of released laughter: Loud gu√aws were breaking out now. Betty was definitely hysterical. ‘‘Run!’’ Rolly shouted, and they ran. Rolly led them through the cogon grass, the tall talahib reeds, deep into the fallowed fields till he stumbled, and they stumbled piling on top of each other. They laughed, slapping each other, pressing their aching sides, wiping their tears—the commander not exempted. Betty laughed the loudest. She was no longer laughing at herself but at her companions laughing there like mad. She laughed at the eerie sight of them laughing there, doubled over, deep in the mountains of Davao, in the wee hours of a late April. They laughed and laughed, she didn’t know for how long, till they were exhausted. And they lay there on their backs totally spent, then smoked cigarettes lazily. (46)

The libidinal enjoyment in this interlude is unmistakable. It issues from the collective release from the dutiful and serious trek that Betty instigates. In some ways, it is produced out of the same yearning from which Betty’s labor of remembering Rolly originates. Here, it is an excess of content that provides a supplementary, liberative, joyous significance to her earlier melancholic expression of that yearning, ‘‘If her friends from the convent school could only see her now!’’ This pleasure of digression from the commanding plot, which Rolly oversees, is very much a path of realization of Betty’s own subjective potential, a freeing of sensual energy that is otherwise subsumed by the collective subject of the revolution. Even as he serves on one side as the symbolic instantiation of the objective law of the movement, Rolly also serves on the other side as the imaginary medium of release of subjective potentials on the tangent of the proper trajectory of revolutionary movement. ‘‘ ‘There’s a moving star,’ Rolly said to nobody in particular. Betty looked up. A galaxy of diamonds and he would notice a satellite. He was a strange creature. For one quick instant she felt like hugging him, this lovable man-child’’ (46–47). The emotive flows that constitute Rolly’s cult value, as the product of collective tribute, consist of such a surplus of experience as the laughter breaking the squad’s formation—an excess of libidinal energy that the guardians of the proper meaning of Rolly’s death (as well as of other events claimed for the movement) Guerilla Passion and Cultural Revolution

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try to contain with the notion of inordinate attachments. These inordinate attachments are coded as feminine as well as petty bourgeois and semifeudal to the extent that they are seen, from what will in the late 1980s increasingly become a militarist, masculinist, and monadic interpretation of the revolutionary movement, as burdened by delicate sentiment, soft pleasures, and superstitious belief. Rolly is thus also the means and consequence of other subjective becomings not merely in the moment of reception after his objectification (after his death) but significantly in the very living process of his making. His function for his fellow comrades exceeds his representational role as ideal revolutionary, that is, as an object of fetishism and identification. He might be viewed, in this living dimension, as a spirit medium for the continual symbolic and practical renegotiation of one’s place in a radically changing world. This role as spirit medium is one shaped by older, persistent belief practices, as performed by Rolly himself in his adopted world of the tribal community of the B’laan, ‘‘his world of constant search for food—hunting, fishing, trapping, and the accompanying sacrifices to the woodland spirits’’ (51). It is also a role created out of the emergent meanings of those belief practices in a contemporary world composed of both indigenous peasant farmers and sojourning guerilla fighters. When Rolly’s unit prepares to leave a peasant farmer’s house where the guerillas have rested for the day, they are confronted by the plea and accusation of a woman’s cursed cry: ‘‘The woman was curled up in a corner. ‘Busaw! ’ she shrieked at the sight of Betty. Her eyes were aflame and her mouth foamed . . . ‘Busaw! Busaw! ’ she shouted again in the Manobo tongue. Evil spirit! The others entered the room that was lighted by a low all-night lamp. ‘Mga utaw to kadikloman! Panaw nu! Panaw nu! ’ Dark spirits! Go away! Go away! She cried. Then she laughed’’ (52). Iyo Inteng, her husband, explains this mad fear as the product of a hard life on the farm, which yields endless worry instead of food, a life which their son has tired of and abandoned, leaving the fear to return. ‘‘They looked at Rolly, and Rolly looked back at them, brows knitted in uncertainty. The southwest monsoon was coming; he had noticed that the field remained untilled. If the peasant did not plow and plant soon . . . But if they tarried a single day they would be late. First things first. His mind said go; his heart wept’’ (52– 53). Tonyo reads Rolly’s heart, the faculty that weeps for others in pity (awa), and the unit stays an extra day to sow the untilled earth. In doing so, they respond to the bewitched appeal made by the woman to them—a call of unrelinquished social attachment—sharing their labor to exorcise the land of an evil 322

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with which they, as insurgent forces contesting the powers of absentee landlords involved in a deracinating war, are associated. The delay in the trek, which is also another detour in the narrative, enacts the wayward processes of production of life in the movement and the importance of undercoded cultural-experiential practices as the media of these processes. As a revolutionary spirit medium, Rolly is both a force of interruption of the everyday praxis of struggle and a force of release of immanent creative life powers. Rolly’s attributes are themselves the expression of the subjective potentials he serves as a means for others to realize in themselves. Each of the characters is an aperture through which Rolly can be seen, just as Rolly is an aperture through which they can see themselves. Unlike the system of representation upholding a tributary, capitalist social order, this sociosymbolic regime creates open personalities. Characters are points of passage for others’ subjective processing. They are both producers and products of a collective experiential labor. In this way, persons can lend themselves to others without fully alienating their experiential labor. Each and every one becomes a product of the others’ experiences no less but also no more than of her own. When Tonyo reads Rolly’s letter, he becomes subject to the interpellation meant for Rolly. In this moment, his own subjectivity is entwined with the subject addressed as Dodong, Rolly’s identity for his mother. By means of this sharing, Tonyo enters into a recollection of Rolly that is, however, inextricable from a testing out of his own self. As practices of production of revolutionary cult value, these experiential practices of sharing on the part of individual characters/producers allow the release of subjective potentials that are in no way commensurate with one another, even if they find a common point of release in the symbolic recollection of a revolutionary personality. In this utopian rendering, such experiential practices constitute the subjective media of revolutionary sociality. These experiential practices involved in the collective passage of recollection comprise an emergent economy of representation that, as the symbolic means by which revolutionary forces continuously reconstructed their relations to a world of struggle, exerted a determining force in the broad reorganization of dominant social relations of power.∂≤ In other words, made available to others through the everyday rites of revolutionary literature and art as well as through the everyday rites of social communion and praxis of armed struggle, these experiential practices begin to operate as a√ective technologies for the maintenance and expansion of the social bases of the movement. And yet they are practices that fall from Guerilla Passion and Cultural Revolution

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the o≈cial purview of this zone of transformed social experience and its valorized political subject. This proper political subject is the bearer of a revolutionary consciousness that is not weighed down by inordinate passionate attachments and the particular physical, earthly, and social bodyscapes on which these attachments are formed. Subsumed under ‘‘that ultimate change of all: revolution’’ and eschewed as prerevolutionary baggage, the di√erences (personal, gender, sexual, ethnic, religious) one negotiates as a consequence of participating in the movement can surface only as interruptions. Like the Manobo woman’s cry of busaw! (evil spirit) that detains the guerilla squad, such di√erences are symptomatic appeals to recessive orders incapable of addressing the crises that trigger them. Or, like the rock that breaks Betty’s step, they are unyielding residual stumps on the terrain of struggle on which the weak are likely to stumble. As the exemplification of proper revolutionary subjectivity, Tonyo provides the final interpretation of Rolly’s death as ‘‘a bitter lesson to make necessary improvements in their methods of work. He did not dwell too much on it’’ (60). It is, however, precisely the e√ort not to dwell on the wayward and interruptive incidents and accidents of everyday praxis, the very heart and life-detail of the struggle, the e√ort to overcome their nonmeaning or excess signification in order to uphold the horizon of meaning that the revolution guarantees—it is this heroic e√ort that diminishes the vital subjective work of seemingly peripheral experiences of change and di√erence, of enjoyment and freedom, of loss and longing, and their role in the transformation of the ruling order of everyday life.

Unfinished Communist Praxis They [leftist intellectuals] have ceded to the fascists all moments of poetry, mysticism and the religious and the mysterious in the construction of political sentiments and communities (however transient or inoperative). —dipesh chakrabarty, ‘‘Radical Histories and Question of Enlightenment Rationalism . . .’’

It is certainly true that, as in other national liberation movements in the postcolonial world, there was within the national democratic revolution in the Philippines a tendency to ‘‘over-read’’ revolutionary practice as ‘‘the objective correlative of a revolutionary philosophy.’’∂≥ Much ink has been spilled to explain 324

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how the failure of such liberation movements stemmed from national elites’ complicitous adherence to the philosophic ideals and imagination of their former colonial powers. More than a matter of subaltern inadequation with revolutionary leadership, however, it is perhaps also the case that revolutionary hegemony ignored the inventions among its own ranks. These inventions, I would aver, were in some ways the unforeseen consequence of extant cultural practices working themselves through and altering (tugging at and shaping) the experiential practices and signifying media of the revolutionary forces. Revolutionary forces and the infrasocial logics of their movement are products of these tangential processes as well as of the practical philosophy of the struggle (just as Rolly is also the product of his tenure with the B’laan). The revolutionary movement, I suggest, was central to the long social process by which the new politics came about. In the ramification of its radical challenges to the national order beyond the orbit of its own ideological program, the movement helped to produce those very unlocatable pains that, experienced as di√erence, served as sites of new claims (e.g., women, tribal minorities), which appear to have been simply produced by democratization and repressed by it. While the apotheosizing tendencies and scientific rationalism it espoused subsumed such di√erences in the biggest change of all, the revolutionary opening up of sites of social freedom—the unmooring of life trajectories—was also the enabling condition for these claims. At once fueled by, and making possible the recognition of, desires for freedom from gendered, minoritized social relations, the counterhegemonic project of revolutionary nationalism was and continues to be a key productive force in the unfinished cultural revolution out of which new politics can be said to emerge.∂∂ A Chinese Filipino political activist and writer imprisoned for his participation in the movement, Macario Tiu sensitively portrays the ine√able desires, longings, and painful lives of women and members of tribal and ethnic minorities subtly trapped in the social mores of their communities; in other stories he suggests the importance of such experiences in the genesis and generation of the very movement that would appear to relegate them to minor politics. What I have tried to highlight in this chapter is the wayward life practices animating what comes to be totalized in dominant historicist narratives as the revolutionary movement. Beyond such unities of agency, meaning, and e√ect that current global historicist accounts of national revolutions posit and depend upon, these wayward life practices participate in the production of contradictory Guerilla Passion and Cultural Revolution

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subjects in multiple, heterogeneous times.∂∑ As portrayed in the stories of the guerrilla writer Zelda Soriano, which attend to the changing everyday social and sexual relations within the movement, awash with laughter and poignant, mixed humor, the heterogeneity of subjective-cultural e√ects and life practices of social struggle are themselves part of the mode of production of the movement, indeed, its very mode of life.∂∏ Even as these subjective-cultural e√ects and life practices might disappear from prevailing narratives of democratizing nations, they continue to animate the present, just as they shape other possible living pasts and futures, against the presumption of historical closure everywhere pronounced. Only by attending to precisely these life practices in the historical experiences articulated in revolutionary literature and culture are we able to recognize, as Neil Lazarus argues more generally of third world national liberation struggles, ‘‘that the concrete achievements of this struggle are still intact and continue to provide a vital resource for present-day social and cultural practice.’’∂π In this regard, I want to suggest that the cultural-subjective practices of production of cult value, which are invented in the course of the movement, were fundamental to the rise of the middle forces as a major political class and, furthermore, to the so-called spiritual revolution that led to the ouster of Marcos and the ascendancy of New Politics and its subject, civil society. They are unfinished practices of antiimperialist, revolutionary imagination to the extent that their communist potential for transforming capitalist modes of individual and collective being has been neglected, allowed to slip away from progressive movements that are themselves in danger of being co-opted by the modes of liberal democracy. On the one hand, the practices of production of cult value are part and parcel of the Messianic power I have described as the exhilarating experiential force of the revolutionary movement. The practices of mourning revolutionary martyrs, the politicized cult of remembrance brought to bear in rallies, where a genealogy of martyrdom from José Rizal to Ninoy Aquino obtains as the very legacy of revolutionary struggle, might be viewed by some as an eruption of submerged but persistent and unchanging cultural-a√ective technologies. Ileto suggests as much when he reads the operation of grief in the political crisis sparked by the assassination of Ninoy Aquino in terms of an immanent ‘‘other politics’’ that haunts the modern colonial and national politics dominating both state and antistate movements.∂∫ For Ileto, the historical change from past eruptions lies in the conjoining of this ‘‘marginalized, almost forgotten radicalism that centered on the veneration of the dead’’ with the elite political radicalism of the 326

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revolutionary movement. This conjoining, however, did not occur only at the moment of Aquino’s death but rather throughout the course of the movement. That is to say, the movement both depended on and transformed older experiential forms, such as forms relating to death, in order to develop the cultural media necessary for its everyday praxis. Deployed for the subjective sustenance of the revolutionary forces as well as for the regeneration of the social bases of the struggle, such cultural media became important conditions for and determinate forces in the mobilization of broad social forces culminating in the People Power uprising against the dictatorial regime. The constructions of Ninoy Aquino as a martyr of the people’s struggle, of Marcos as illegitimate king, and of Corazon Aquino as Mother Redeemer of the true nation, the outpouring of grief and performance of mourning at mass rallies but also at the same time the exhilarating, epic experience of a chosen destiny of freedom, the opening up of an immanent future, and the practices of love, spiritual care, fate making, and mystical power that comprised these discursive and performative structures—all these characteristics of the aboveground social movements against the regime, and especially of the popular revolt ousting the Marcos family to which those movements led, are to a great extent the consequences of the deployment of subjective and a√ective technologies emerging out of the revolutionary movement. The broad di√usion and generalization of these cultural media through the circulation of people, images, stories, slogans, music, etc. between the rural underground and the urban public sphere—through the surfacing of revolutionary forces and means of struggle in various sites of the dominant social order, such as schools and universities, commercial cinema, and urban spaces∂Ω —considerably shaped popular imaginations as the ground for the emergence of a new political class among the middle forces. These middle forces would figure centrally as the main social actor in the nationalist narrative of the People Power movement and as a national actor in the subsequent post– cold war narrative of global democratization, which would be the prevailing historical narrative at the close of the twentieth century. On the other hand, the same practices of production of cult value can be seen to inform and take part in the hysteria of the anti-dpa campaigns, the zealous occult behavior of paramilitary vigilante groups, and the cult of personality politics that increasingly dominates the electoral sphere as well as some parts of the movement itself. Written after the miracle of the People Power revolt, Levy Balgos de la Cruz’s story ‘‘Ang Kulto ng Isang Demagogo ’’ [The Cult of a DemaGuerilla Passion and Cultural Revolution

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gogue] depicts the cult following of the charismatic figure Ka Deo—who, as a little-disguised characterization of the famous former priest and npa guerilla Father Balweg, is described as the ‘‘Nora Aunor of the Cordilleras’’—as being intimately linked to the Christlike behavior of the people on the scene of national politics, the product of ideological mystification, superstition, and commodity fetishism.∑≠ On this view, cult value also consists of residual practices of idolatry and fetishism that imbue revolutionary objects and persons with a theistic power of command over people and their lives, not unlike what Benjamin associated with fascism. These signifying practices in the production of cult value, which in this aspect can be linked to the mystical inversion characteristic of the expression of value (in relegating the sensuous-concrete as mere phenomenal signs of alienated human labor), appear in other forms both in the movement and in the various militias that develop both out of and in opposition to it. As I discuss further in the next chapter, the semiotics of underground intelligence that develops out of and supports the people’s war also serves as the interpretative apparatus used for conducting the movement’s campaigns against its internal enemies. In the case of the internal purge, we see the defensive hypostasization of the people against the immanent invasive threat of the enemy everywhere issuing from the suspected petty bourgeois individual whose presumed guilt as a deep penetration agent could be detected in signifying remainders of an unfinished, that is, failed revolutionary subjectification. Such failure was disclosed precisely by signs of frivolity or excess enjoyment and inordinate attachments, which evidenced petty bourgeois weakness and therefore susceptibility to cooptation and betrayal. In the cases of rebel groups that broke away from the revolution and allied political movements to become paramilitary units or autonomous bands of terrorist insurgency (such as the kidnap-for-ransom group Abu Sayaaf), symbolic practices of tributary production within the movement are converted into fetishisms of a new sort, with the rebel-hero turned into an entrepreneur and kidnapped bodies into general equivalents for the brisk exchange of arms, power, and money. Here it might be apt to consider these new fetishisms within the category of what Jean and John Comaro√ call ‘‘an expanded array of enchanted, often unnervingly visceral, modes of producing value’’ making up the ‘‘occult economies’’ that emerge out of the contradictory conditions of the postcolony in the age of millennial capitalism.∑∞ Against the notion that what was lacking in revolutionary practice was a sense 328

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of the individual and his or her rights, I would suggest that what was e√aced and subordinated was precisely the opposite: a sense of shared subjectivity that was not predicated on a fearful preoccupation with the individual as its constitutive other. The tendency to construct the collectivism of the movement in opposition to the individualism of the enemy culture is abundantly evidenced in o≈cial expressions of revolutionary cultural ideals. For example, in Liberation, the o≈cial newsletter of the National Democratic Front, a review from 1989 extols an example of revolutionary art in the following way: ‘‘Working as one, the artists transcend individualism—an artist’s nom de gue[r]re or pseudonym or even anonymity becomes a testimony of selflessness in the midst of a communal creative activity.’’∑≤ Between these two polar ideals, the full emancipation of the individual subject from his or her social terrain and the full absorption of the individual in the communal subject, lie forgotten practices of selfhood and sociality in an unfinished process of transformation.

Although I have described the unfinished quality of these practices in terms of incompletion, I do not mean to suggest that there would or could be a moment of completeness, or even that this moment should serve as a utopian goal. On the contrary, it seems to me that the expectation of and directionality toward completeness to some extent infused the tragic zealousness of the anti-dpa campaigns, which sought to eradicate any potential threat to the sovereign power of a hypostatized people. By ‘‘unfinished’’ I do not mean to imply an imperative that can slide into a totalitarian tendency. I do, however, use the word to connote the rough and raw texture that applies to these living cultural practices and that, moreover, guarantees an open-ended horizon for their operation. Counterposed against the finished forms of sovereign subjectivity carried by notions of consciousness, belief, and individual will, ‘‘unfinished’’ maintains a sense of the indefinite limits to dynamic cultural praxis, a sense that extends the political struggle to the arena of experiential forms and conveys the surplus of being and activity produced out of the project of radical transformation. As in its spirit of usage with regard to the Philippine revolution of 1896, ‘‘unfinished’’ also underscores a continuing endeavor, here to find theoretical expression and political agency for the forms of subjective and social production created within and out of the revolutionary process. Regrettably, while serving Guerilla Passion and Cultural Revolution

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as an indispensable force of mobilizing power for the national democratic revolution as well as for the social movements that appear to supersede it, the sociosubjective forms I have tried to articulate as practices of production of cult value have been eschewed by both. As a consequence, they have been left to be captured by the quasi-fascist democracy succeeding the Marcos regime as well as by its various spectacular social technologies: Marianism, civil spirit societies, paramilitary vigilante groups, action heroes in politics and the military, and entertainment politics. In the terms of a serious and committed consideration of the errors of the Left, I would venture that the party leadership’s mistake consisted in its underestimation and diminishment of the creative powers of its own forces and, concomitantly, in its own retraction in the face of liberal and fascist codings threatening to overtake the movement. Those creative powers can be viewed as extending beyond the boundaries of a reified revolution and producing the permutations that have subsequently become subsumed under the agencies of various other independent social movements, in which, it is claimed, revolutionary practices have had no part. It seems to me to be important to allow for the fact and continuing possibility that many diverse vital and transformative practices constituted the very substance and force of the movement’s identity as the Philippine revolution. If, as I have argued, these practices are crucial means of life production invented and possessed by people themselves, then one of the most perniciously e√ective ways of dispossessing people of these means and the stilluntapped political potential they bear has proven to be the process of their codification in the dominant historicist vocabularies of liberal democracy as well as of proletarian socialism. This process of dispossession through dominant codification can be understood as the operation of extant forces of primitive accumulation in the sphere of culture. By ‘‘primitive accumulation’’ I refer not to a past phase in capitalist accumulation but rather to the continual process of separation of people from their means of production, including the subjective and social technologies they make use of as a means of collective struggle. Such a violent separation is an ongoing and abiding process that secures the conditions of capitalist exchange in more and more spheres of human life. It is a process that is carried out not only through the physical destruction of peoples’ modes of life, but also through the appropriation of their means of struggle by codification in the universal humanist terms

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either of collective proletarian consciousness or of individual aspirations for democratic rights and economic betterment. Gayatri Spivak writes of the way in which the heterogeneous cultural possibilities of value coding that constitute social production become, under the dominant tributary mode of imperialism, subject to the general form of exchange value or the economic, as the most abstract and rational instance of value.∑≥ Reinterpreting the notion of ‘‘the total or expanded form of value’’ to include cognitive, cultural, political, and a√ective value production, Spivak suggests that, much as bourgeois economics subjects all economic phenomena to the money form, universalist cultural theoretical discourses (in her discussion, psychoanalysis and structural anthropology) participate in the subjection of heterogeneous non-Western cultural practices to a system of general equivalence of a√ective/cognitive coding. In this way, these theoretical discourses assess heterogeneous cultural practices in terms of their analytical value in the tributary system of imperial practice. Correspondingly, I have been arguing that the coding of revolutionary cultural practices in the normative terms of a global field of political equivalence not only misrecognizes the socially productive value of such practices: such hegemonic coding also actively alienates the revolutionary movement from its own sources of life production, dispossessing people of their politically unvalorized, seemingly tangential and meaningless, yet vital subjective technologies and cultural modes of producing collective freedom and change.

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Chapter Nine

The Sorrows of People The dogs howl sadly out there on the street, and the superstitious who listen are convinced that the animals see the spirits and the shadows. But neither the dogs nor the insects see the sorrows of people and yet, how many exist! —josé rizal, Noli Me Tangere

To talk about revolution today may seem rather nostalgic, if it is to be believed that the historical moment of revolutionary liberation movements has clearly passed. As Michael Denning has argued, ‘‘The liberation movements were movements of a particular historical moment, the age of the three worlds, a period dominated by a sense that the world was divided in three: the capitalist First World, the Communist Second World, and the decolonizing Third World. It is a moment that seems to have evaporated after 1989; the one thing globalization clearly means is that everyone thinks there is now one world.’’∞ ‘‘To speak of the word ‘globalization,’ ’’ Denning asserts, ‘‘is to say that these worlds and their ideals have not only failed, but are gone, over.’’≤ The task, then, is to account for their demise. While the project of a critical and emancipatory transnational cultural studies that Denning advocates is intended as a countervailing force against more celebratory accounts of the new world historical moment of globalization, its expressed sentiment that the age of liberation movements and their

ideals ‘‘have not only failed, but are gone, over’’ is one he shares with his opponents across their presumed ideological divide.

Global Feeling Since the collapse of the Nicaraguan revolution in 1990, following the disintegration of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and the ending of the cold war, a growing certainty about the intrinsically doomed fate of national revolutionary movements has quickly matched the unbridled belief in the inescapability, if not triumph, of global capitalism. In Jose Dalisay’s novel Killing Time in a Warm Place (1992) revolution’s passing is mourned as the inexorable passing of the fervent dreams of youth.≥ An aesthetics of resignation imbues this postnationalist novel’s portrayal of the failure and powerlessness of the Philippine revolution as an anticipated defeat, with every future compromise, betrayal, and helplessness augured by the relentless humidity and warmth of a country in which time and youthful rebellion are slowly put out, in which political will and the desire for change are worn down, worn away, until freedom becomes a frightening thing and prison ‘‘a warm and restful place.’’∂ The futility of progressive e√ort finds absolution in the failure of revolutions everywhere, ‘‘from Belfast to Beirut to Soweto to Buenos Aires to Diliman,’’ and that futility, the very loss of the possibility of revolution, becomes the object of redemptive representation for a global audience, a representation that will attest to one’s participation in a community of universal loss. I do not wish to contest the great changes the world has undergone in the past few decades, changes that support the claim of a new era. Neither do I wish to dispute some of the tragic outcomes of liberation movements in the last half of the twentieth century. The very real and oppressive social exclusions and inequities motivating feminist, postcolonial, and queer critiques of nationalism; the devastating racist consequences of ethnonationalisms; the tyranny, corruption, and internal colonialisms of postcolonial nation-states—all give compelling and just cause to the widespread feeling of liberatory nationalism’s historic failure to live up to its promises of freedom and true democracy. Rather than disputing the facts of the matter, I want to call attention to this feeling of a certain disastrous historical conclusion about national liberation movements having been reached and, more, to suggest that this general feeling helps to shape the very world it is ostensibly only about. 334

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The feeling of the failure and closure of an era is widely shared, and, I believe, it is especially keen when it comes to thinking about Marxist revolutionary movements. A vague premonition of their eventual world-historical defeat and an irrevocably changed world makes for the underlying poignancy of contemporary representations of these movements.∑ Beyond nostalgia or regret, the feeling I am remarking upon is a sense that the signs of failure and closure were in some ways there from the start. This sense of the untoward fate already scripted from the beginning as the necessary or logical outcome of an intrinsic fault—this sense of, in a word, tragedy—moves through and connects recent critical, sympathetic scholarly accounts of the failure of contemporary Marxist liberation movements from Nicaragua to the Philippines. In her compelling book on revolutionary imagination in the Americas, for example, Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo sees the fault lines leading to the Sandinistas’ failure to represent the subaltern interests of the peasantry in their agricultural policy, and consequently to the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat in February 1990, as lying in what she calls the developmentalist regime of revolutionary subjection.∏ Succumbing to the irresistible seductive power of the developmentalist vision that has plagued Latin American revolutionary movements, the Sandinistas misunderstood peasant desires in their attempts to institute agrarian reform because of their unshakable ‘‘faith in a Marxist-Leninist teleology of progress, in a developmentalist model of history’’ that was predicated on the transcendence of peasant specificity.π Saldaña-Portillo argues that this ‘‘meliorist theory of subjectivity, transformation, and agency’’ predicated on the transcendence of a feminized, premodern ethnos, to which the failure of decolonization struggles in the Americas is to be partially attributed, can be found in the models of revolutionary subjectivity articulated in the autobiographical writings of Che Guevara and Mario Payeras, works of literary subjection that hence must also be understood to be complicit with this failure. It is the disturbing resemblance and indeed collusion between revolutionary imagination and liberal discourses of development—a collusion traceable to a common origin in imperial reason and the racialized and gendered discourses animating colonialist desire—that can be made to account for the tragic demise of the decolonizing struggles that Guevara and Payeras participated in and represented. As she writes, ‘‘Acting out of their own sense of compromised masculinity, these revolutionary icons often feminized and primitivized the peasant or indigenous subaltern in their representation of the requirements for transformation, consciousness, and agency. ToThe Sorrows of People

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gether in their political and literary e√orts to represent subaltern subjects, these post–World War II revolutionaries paradoxically adhered to the developmentalist model of normative subjectivity and national sovereignty put forth by institutions such as the World Bank, the imf and usaid in the service of the Cold War.’’∫ Although very di√erent in its approach and political sympathies from SaldañaPortillo’s subalternist critique of Latin American revolutionary movements, Kathleen Weekley makes a similar critique of the ‘‘theoretical inadequacies’’ of the Communist Party of the Philippines (cpp) and the devastating consequences that such inadequacies bore for the contemporary revolutionary movement that it led. Weekley’s account is part of the recent spate of works in Philippine studies that have sought to understand how the most enduring revolutionary movement in the third world, which at the peak of its growth in 1986 had posed the biggest threat to the thirteen-year-old authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos, was in the same year tragically marginalized by the urban popular revolt that deposed the dictator.Ω In the aftermath of this marginalization, ostensibly set o√ by the party’s decision to boycott the snap presidential elections of 1986, which led to mass protest and urban revolt and ultimately legitimated the subsequent change in regime, party leadership fell into vigorous and acrimonious political debates over issues of strategy and vision. By 1993 these debates had fractured the party, until a unified rea≈rmist camp regained control over the movement, expelling the splintered factions of rejectionists, who remain vociferous critics of the new revolutionary dispensation. Weekley argues that the dogmatic adherence to an orthodox party line, which was from the beginning deeply flawed in its conception—from its Maoist strategic emphasis on armed struggle in the countryside to its teleological understanding of the three stages of protracted war, from its borrowed analysis of U.S. imperialism and Philippine class relations to its ‘‘overdrawn distinction between reform and revolution’’—led the party leadership to its fatal misreading of popular sentiment and to its subsequent political marginalization by other antidictatorship forces. Proving incapable of adjusting to changing political, economic, and social conditions—and in combination with the grave damage caused by internal purges conducted by the New People’s Army in 1985 and 1988—the revolutionary movement had, by the end of the decade, lost a sizable part of its once-phenomenal national mass base.∞≠ Despite their ostensible di√erences, Saldaña-Portillo’s account of revolution in the Americas and Weekley’s account of revolution in the Philippines share a 336

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transnational framework within which the failures and shortcomings of particular national revolutionary movements can be understood as part of a broader phenomenon, one that yokes the demise of master narratives and the closure of an era in a single image-event—that is, the global crisis of the Left. The analyses that both o√er depend on an idea of revolution as hegemony, articulated as epistemic or discursive regime, now failed as well as past and therefore closed. Hence the tragic feeling. For Saldaña-Portillo, the crisis of revolutionary movements in the Americas stems from their subscription to the ruling discursive premises of their time, the hemispheric age of development. For Weekley, as for many other critics of the Philippine revolutionary movement, the crisis stems from the inherent inadequacies of the ruling orthodoxies of international Marxist thought itself. Both, finally, are critiques of a hegemonic imagination of revolution whose time has passed. In my own study of the literature of the Philippine revolutionary movement, I find much that resonates with the portrait of a hegemonic revolutionary imagination, especially the regime of revolutionary subjection, that Saldaña-Portillo provides. In chapter 7, I discussed the literary constructions of a proper, heroic revolutionary subject whose heteromasculinity is defined by the feminized identification of the land and the masses as the terrain of struggle, over which the revolutionary subject develops mastery and on which he performs the desiring action of tilling and inseminating with the blood and tears of revolutionary sacrifice. And I discuss the Christian monotheism of the revolutionary movement, which underwrites the image of the awakened masses as the Messiah and the experience of the movement as Holy Communion. These are some of the characteristics of the Philippine revolution’s own regime of subjection, a regime that bears similar socially marginalizing consequences for the peasantry, for women, and for ethnic minorities, which Saldaña-Portillo describes in the Nicaraguan context. But beyond articulating the revolution’s hegemonic imagination, I have also attempted, in chapters 7 and 8, to demonstrate the crucial work performed by devalued, supplementary modes of experience, which are eschewed by the very proper revolutionary subject they help to make; these include the work of persistent animist belief practices operating within monotheistic struggle and the work of inordinate emotive attachments, viewed as recessive, prerevolutionary baggage creating a drag on the proper revolutionary subject of full consciousness on his progressive march toward victory. My argument thus far has been that, although they are considered by party criticism as The Sorrows of People

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remainders of proper revolutionary subjectification, these supplementary modes of experience are crucial, constitutive supports of revolutionary cultural praxis. Indeed, as Raymond Williams argues, ‘‘A lived hegemony is always a process. It is not, except analytically, a system or a structure. It is a realized complex of experiences, relationships, and activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits. . . . Moreover . . . it does not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own.’’∞∞ Williams suggests that this cultural process must always include ‘‘political and cultural initiatives and contributions’’ that cannot be reduced to the terms of hegemony, even as ‘‘the decisive hegemonic function is to control or transform or even incorporate them.’’∞≤ In this final chapter, I pursue a line of inquiry that might serve as a counterpoint to this tragic strand of postcolonial/subalternist studies in Latin America and post-Marxist studies in Southeast Asia, with their overestimation of the determinate power of hegemonic theoretical-political imaginations over the realities they are intended to comprehend and change and, consequently, with its foreclosure of what Williams calls ‘‘the finite but significant openness of many actual initiatives and contributions’’ within a hegemonic formation. These contributions can be found in the forms of social experience that comprise the emergent formation of revolutionary culture. In contrast to Weekley’s emphasis on the theoretical practices of the cpp and their consequences for the strategic actions and social relations of its leadership, I focus on the a√ective practices that help to organize the social experience of armed struggle. By looking at the role of a√ect in the making of the social world and social body of those engaged in the people’s war, we might also glean its role in people’s negotiation with questions of di√erence, of nationalism or the limits and potentials of the people, of life and sovereignty, and of the quest for freedom. It is a way to explore radical political practices that do not present themselves in the forms of either an existing local subaltern subject (the peasantry) or an immanent democratic political subject (civil society), which the above accounts implicitly valorize. If these given political subjects end up being privileged in such accounts, it would seem to be the e√ect of the latter’s general adoption of the subalternist critique of elite metanarratives (here, orthodox revolutionary consciousness) as being ‘‘constituted by cognitive failures.’’ Such an emphasis on the role of cognition and theoretical consciousness in revolutionary struggle, particularly in Weekley’s account, oc338

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cludes what Spivak argues the subaltern studies collective itself accomplishes yet misrecognizes, which is precisely the work of ‘‘making the distinction between success and failure indeterminate.’’∞≥ Nowhere is this indeterminacy better illuminated than in the practical realm of revolutionary feeling and experience.

A Chronicle of People’s War: Imagining Revolutionary Community In order to examine the ‘‘actual initiatives and contributions’’ of the revolutionary movement in terms of social experience, I turn to the guerilla novel, Gera [War] (1991), by Ruth Firmeza, as a concrete historical artifact of revolutionary experience. Firmeza, a cadre in the New People’s Army, worked in the cultural section of the Regional Operation Command in the northeastern provinces of Luzon from 1971 to 1977 and, at least until the novel’s publication in 1991, was still active as a member of the npa and the regional committee in the same area. Written from 1985 to 1987 in the field of military conflict, Gera is the fictionalized blow-by-blow, ‘‘true’’ account of the ‘‘life and death struggle’’ of guerilla forces fighting against the counterinsurgent Philippine military forces in the mountain regions of northeastern Luzon from 1975 to 1979.∞∂ Shaped by the haphazard conditions of writing in the course of guerilla warfare, the novel is a loose episodic narrative, consisting of eighty-eight characters and a mosaic of disparate scenes, chronicling the succession of battles, ambushes, betrayals, captures, killings, tortures as well as friendships, loves, lives, and losses experienced by several guerilla companies scattered across the provinces of Isabela and Cagayan as they struggle against relentless, mounting military campaigns to gain arms and expand mass involvement in the movement. As the military term for clashes between the military and the guerillas, the encounter is also the formal unit of the novel’s disjointed plot. Each brief narrative fragment within larger chapters is an encounter with various social elements in the ongoing revolution, a place for major battles and events as well as minor incidents of everyday camp life, an occasion for o≈cial exchanges, tactical discussions and accounting, or a moment for kwentuhan (storytelling) and personal reminiscences. In this way, narrative time in Gera is episodic, a temporality that corresponds to the scattered spatiality of its action. We might say that its chronotope, a term which Mikhail Bakhtin uses to designate ‘‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature,’’ is mosaic in character, consisting of di√erent pieces of narrative action in The Sorrows of People

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di√erent places at di√erent times.∞∑ Although a few characters are foregrounded, they cannot be said to be central to the narrative, as in the realist novel: for example, Ka Arman, the leader of the squad who figures prominently at the beginning of the novel, dies, his narrative place taken toward the end of the novel by Ka Ernie. They are, rather, repeating and returning characters, amidst a plethora of intermittent characters, described by Edel Garcellano as ‘‘always in kinesis, never in stasis,’’ moving on and o√ the narrative stage in what appears to be a mere ‘‘chronicle of deeds,’’ a ‘‘mere structural coding of losses and victories, expansion and constriction, recovery and retreat which are acted out by cadres/ guerillas in their passage from Cagayan to Abra,’’ not only as a consequence of the fact that, in the early years of the revolution, ‘‘forces were in disarray and in consolidation,’’ but also as a testament to the constant fluctuations of mode and composition characteristic of a guerilla movement.∞∏ Firmeza threads the various pieces of this movement loosely, creating multiple series of events and encounters whose relative cohesion depends on the particular links among the very social elements of the series itself (guerillas, masses, military); the sheer fact of armed struggle, rather than any overarching thematic meaning, serves as the novel’s narrative ‘‘principle of unity.’’∞π With its roving but always embedded narrative perspective, which provides limited access to the thoughts and hidden actions of both the guerillas and their enemies but is neither locatable in any single character nor omniscient (insofar as every narrative encounter summons a host of what in film are called o√-screen spaces, which remain closed or unknown to the narrator), Gera might be understood in terms of what Theodor Adorno called the negative epic. As Adorno writes, ‘‘The contemporary novels that count, those in which an unleashed subjectivity turns into its opposite through its own momentum, are negative epics. They are testimonials to a state of a√airs in which the individual liquidates himself, a state of a√airs which converges with the pre-individual situation that once seemed to guarantee a world replete with meaning.’’∞∫ In Gera, this unleashed subjectivity is the collective experience of revolution. As a negative epic, the revolutionary novel takes the form of a chronicle of the plurality of events and acts comprising this collective experience, an uno≈cial history whose fullness of meaning is, however, not yet achieved (hence the lack of closure attendant to the chronicle form), but rather projected in the future realization of the revolution’s triumph.∞Ω In a style that can be likened to the literary stratagem of exteriorismo practiced 340

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by the Nicaraguan guerilla-poet Ernesto Cardenal, a style that breaks with the interiority of consciousness of the individual bourgeois subject, Firmeza writes about the day-to-day activities of war in a documentary recording of realities that elude state history and popular consciousness.≤≠ Firmeza depicts with empirical objectivity the conditions of the people and the guerilla forces, the military atrocities committed against them, the physical su√ering and hardship of the red fighters (torture, illnesses, combat injuries), the scarcity of food and supplies for the npa camps, the destruction of resources by corporations and the government, the exploitative land rents and feudal relations of power dominating rural villages, and the betrayals and surrenders from within the guerilla ranks. In inscribing these events and conditions, Firmeza pays attention to concrete details of action, speech, things, figures, and names while showing little concern for psychological depth and character development. Such detailing is not unlike the data culled by cadres in their social investigation of rural life and the written and oral reports read and heard by them, excerpts of which he reproduces verbatim in the novel. In the same way he records the seemingly trivial facts of dates, locations, and logistics of battles, weapons used, and proper names in count o√s, details used to express the continuity, fluctuations, and development of the movement, Firmeza portrays the deaths, feelings, and memories of the guerillas as objective, factual events.≤∞ Ka Arman’s death, for example, is reported in a few declarative sentences: ‘‘Arman didn’t answer. Mario noticed that the comrade was not breathing. Arman had met the bullets and he was dead already when he fell to the ground. . . . In the spacious yard, bullets from m16s, m79s and m14s were flying’’ (297). The guerrillas retreat. When they are safe, they count o√. Each of their names is identified as they shout their numbers. ‘‘Arman, their co, was killed in that siege. Mario wiped the sweat and tears from his face’’ (298). Emotional pain and physical exertion mix in one corporeal act, the wiping of sweat and tears. Physical hardship and emotional su√ering are expressed on one plane; human events and states—death and grief—are reported as part of multiple series of actions and passions comprising revolutionary struggle. Garcellano contends that although this undi√erentiated chronicling of actions and events makes for tedious reading for the urban reader (to whom the thinly rendered, depthless characters appear like empty signifiers), the bare, denotative language of the novel nevertheless evokes a full world of meaningful reference for the guerillas and participating masses who are its intended audience. This language not only approximates the everyday language of the masses, which to The Sorrows of People

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the educated urban listener can seem ‘‘overly detailed’’ and ‘‘circuitous’’ (at once overly empirical and overly wordy), but also evokes a shared and recognizable collective experience, o√ering a storehouse of characters, scenarios, episodes, and stories through which revolutionary reader-participants can situate and understand their own experiences as part of an experiential commons.≤≤ In the same mode of sharing in which the guerillas tell each other numerous stories of their own and others’ experiences in the camps between battles, Firmeza recounts the lives, personalities, and experiences of comrades as examples of revolutionary struggle to others in the movement.≤≥ As I’ve suggested, these examples are presented not as integral, whole subjects but rather as character aspects and life instances related to struggle. What is remembered of dead comrades is only a few details: a wish, a habit, an incident, a place. Very similar to the narrative logic I show to be at work in the story ‘‘Sky Rose’’ (see chapter 8), individual comrades appear as elements of trains of associations and of a≈liative flows rather than as full, rounded characters. One chapter, for instance, begins with Ka Arman remembering Ka Banong, ‘‘small, large-bellied, bald but handsome and full of jokes’’ (95), whose parents had him captured by the military. Ka Arman and Ka Banong are walking in Naguilian, and Ka Greg, their instructor, asks them if the highway is far from where they are. ‘‘He [Ka Greg] would often tell stories about his child whom he saw only at the hospital, a glass window between them’’ (95). That night Ka Arman recalls how Ka Manuel, their former political leader, simply left their unit by taking a bus to Manila. The next morning, Ka Banong tells him that he brought Ka Greg to the highway, but Ka Greg changed his mind and decided not to go home to the provinces. A brief history of Ka Greg’s involvement in the npa is given, from the time he first starts as political leader of the platoon to the time he is killed in a siege on San Mariano mountain, together with a list of people he was close to: ‘‘Ka Luis, the co of the company, a Kalinga fighter who was able to study in Baguio . . . Nilo, from Panay, Angel from Pampanga, Emy from Manila’’ (95). Ka Arman recalls the way Ka Greg would always be listening to the transistor radio, waiting for his favorite song to be played: ‘‘He would keep some small batteries as if they were bullets in a personal struggle, the way he kept a picture of his wife, Mila, next to his chest’’ (97). Then Ka Arman remembers Ka Elmo, who was killed in the same siege that killed Ka Greg. He recalls Ka Elmo telling the funny story of his courting of his wife. He also recalls the failed ambush they were both part of and Ka Elmo’s exasperation at their retreat—‘‘He 342

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saw him sitting with his pants down, continuing to fire at the enemy. ‘Go ahead! I’m so angry I could shit! In fact, I could shit right now!’’ Ka Arman laughs at this memory and reflects on the courage Ka Elmo showed throughout until his death. As demonstrated by the chapter described above, contingencies of meeting and memory determine the presences of characters, while the flow of narrative follows the course of mnemonic associations that are themselves connected to contingent and changing social a≈liations. Such episodic surfacing and disappearing of character-fragments, memories, emotions, and events make for the novel’s permeable plot structure—its openness to unlimited additions, variations, and extensions of other experiences. This formal structure of ‘‘unbound seriality’’ allows revolutionary readers to create their own lines of association and a≈liation with the moments presented and in this way to view their experiences within the broader social narrative of armed struggle, which the novel aims to represent. Although by ‘‘unbound seriality’’ I invoke Benedict Anderson’s notion of the formal principles on which nationalist imagination depends, I would argue that the narrative techniques of Gera adumbrate a more heterogeneous cultural logic than his account of the generic features of the novel and its expressive and enabling relation to the nation contends.≤∂ While, undoubtedly, the imagination of the social space of revolutionary struggle importantly rests on a conception of simultaneity, as Anderson argues, such simultaneity does not consist solely or principally of the ‘‘empty, homogeneous time’’ of ‘‘print-capitalism.’’ It also consists of the specific social time of accompaniment signified by the notion of kasama (companion or comrade), from which the a≈liating title attached to guerillas’ names, Ka, derives. Also the historical term for sharecropper or tenant farmer since the Spanish colonial period, kasama more generally denotes a relation of companionship, of taking part in an experience, process, or condition. Formed from the root word sama, meaning accompaniment and inclusion (isama, to take along, to include; samahan, to accompany, to go along with; pagsama, to join, combine, integrate) and the prefix ka, meaning mutual or reciprocal, common or simultaneous (roughly equivalent to the English prefix ‘‘co-’’ or ‘‘fellow . . .’’), kasama invokes a≈liating relations of shared time, a time that is neither empty nor homogeneous but rather socially filled, shot through with the variegated experiences of its partakers.≤∑ Organized around the specific process and event of revolutionary struggle, the shared time of kasama can be underThe Sorrows of People

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stood in terms of a cultural logic of social accompaniment, abidance, and attachment, which shape those formal features of Gera I describe above—its mosaic chronotope, documentary language, open and mnemonic narrative syntax, proliferating characters, and roaming but finite perspective. Like Walter Benjamin, who saw in remembrance the immanent possibility of Messianic time, I see a revolutionary political significance in this other experience of shared time, to which I will return.≤∏ For now I want to make the point that the synchronicity that subtends the imagination of revolutionary community undoubtedly rests on the abstract temporality of capitalism, which arguably underwrites the party’s own developmentalist notions of the struggle’s progression. Yet it also draws on a cultural logic of accompaniment, abidance, and attachment, which allow for the coordination of a plurality of discontinuous times. Such a cultural logic can be seen to inform those subaltern modalities of experience of syncretic sociability (kapwa), experiential passage ( pinagdaanan) or passion, fate playing ( pakikipagsapalaran), faith in disposable detail (kiyeme), and revolutionary faith— constituting and underlying the times of su√ering, of small-time happenings, of resurrection—that I discuss in other chapters. While subsisting within (neither outside of nor excluded from) capitalist time, the cultural logic shaping Gera ’s style of imagining revolutionary sociality does not remain confined to or exhausted by it. What I have tried to suggest by dwelling on the formal features of this specific novel is that this style of imagining limns the practical conditions of revolutionary nationalism in the age of the established, postindependent nation.≤π Those practical conditions include the specific characteristics of Philippine guerilla warfare (see chapter 7) and the actual social praxis enabling this people’s war and comprising the broader revolutionary movement.≤∫ More than an analogue of the form of social relations of revolution, the novel here is a means of extending those practices of experience (of relating through mnemonic association and social a≈liation, of accompaniment in struggle), which it represents, to its reader-participants, and thereby of creating in reality this shared time, which comes into being only in the subversion of the dominant shared time of the established nation. Indeed, if, in its style of imagining, Gera performs that abolition of aesthetic distance that Adorno argued was demanded of the modern European novel in the disenchanted, alienated world of advanced capitalism, the reality to whose authority this negative epic defers (i.e., the content of what Fredric Jameson would call its realism) is not simply given in the external world of a√airs, only 344

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waiting to be transformed.≤Ω That reality—a revolution—is precisely what has to be established, through acts of war and writing. As a work of the alternative cultural media system of the party, which aims to produce a community-ininsurgency (an immanent but not yet realized insurgent nation), Gera chronicles mundane experiences of guerilla warfare and guerilla life precisely to bring into representational being a tenuous, territorially shifting, and socially fluid world whose subversive reality holds no stable guarantees outside of the fleeting acts, events, and lives comprising it. The world of people’s war is portrayed in the novel itself as barely existing for the nation aboveground. Cadres repeatedly comment on the erroneousness and scarcity of mainstream media reports and military propaganda about this war, even as they rely on those reports for keeping abreast of arrests and killings of their forces as well as of developments in communist struggles in other parts of the world such as Vietnam and Nicaragua. Their conversations as well as their own internal reportage and stories evidently counter both the lack of representation and the ideology of dominant representations of the people’s war. Through these depictions and performances of battling reports, the novel thematizes its own status and role as a revolutionary force in the war of representations subtending the military conflict. People’s war, the political unconscious of the postindependent nation, thus comes to define not only the external condition of possibility of Gera but also its internal constitution. In other words, both the novel and the nation, which it struggles to bring into being, are constituted not simply out of some placid conception of capitalist simultaneity, but rather out of social relations riven with conflict, antagonism, and war.≥≠ Of the ambiguous structure of address that Anderson observes in his paradigmatic example of the nation-imagining novel, Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere (‘‘O you who read me, friend or enemy’’), Jonathan Culler remarks that ‘‘in o√ering the insider’s view to those who might have been deemed outsiders’’ through this open structure of address, the novel creates the possibility of the distinction between friend and enemy, between insider and outsider, on which the politics of the nation depends.≥∞ As we shall see, the distinction between friend and enemy is undoubtedly central to both the form and content of Gera. Operating to constitute a new nation from within an established nation-state through revolutionary war, the distinction in this case is one that is internal to the nation and articulated as being between kasama and kaaway (enemy or fellow-inconflict). This specificity is important not because it demonstrates a later postcoThe Sorrows of People

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lonial development in the politics of the nation (i.e., revolutionary nationalism) but because it allows us to see a more heterogeneous and conflictual politics than a discussion of the generic politics of the nation (as an example of politics more generally) would lead us to believe, even in the founding moment of that original anticolonial nationalism exemplified by Rizal’s novel.≥≤ Rizal’s imagination of community and the legacy of anticolonial Philippine nationalism it would bequeath are not only predicated on those structures of temporal simultaneity and spatial extension underlying what Anderson calls ‘‘the spectre of comparisons.’’ As I suggest in the introduction, beyond the distinct rationality of this comparative imagination, which defines the protonationalist subjectivity of the Filipino ilustrado (enlightened) figured by Ibarra, the protagonist of Noli Me Tangere, as well as the consequent politics of antagonism that founds the Philippine nation, another specter haunts the experience of community for the rest of the indios, or natives. In the chapter, ‘‘Sisa,’’ Rizal’s quintessential figure of the loving, weeping native mother (land), this other specter appears as ‘‘the spirits and shadows’’ that the superstitious, in hearing the ‘‘eternal and continuous’’ droning sound of insects and the howling of the dogs, are convinced that the animals see. Rizal associates these ghostly forms haunting the landscape with ‘‘the sorrows of people.’’ What I am trying to indicate is the palpable force of this other politics, which Rizal alludes to in writing about the indigent man who prays ‘‘in the language of his misery,’’ his soul weeping for himself and for the dead, his mind crying out accusing laments.≥≥ Figured in the character of Sisa and her capacity to induce uncontrollable tears and pain in others by singing the kundiman, a melancholic form of love song, this other politics of feeling (of sorrow and lament) does not operate outside of the politics of antagonism of proper nationalism. Emerging from within a realm of experience that sets the poor native apart from the neighbors and families who sleep in peaceful slumber, this other politics of the nation moves and is given voice by the rebel-martyr Elías (Ibarra’s alter ego) as an otherworldly, divine force issuing out of and heeding the call of misfortune. It is what spurs the proper ilustrado nationalism of Ibarra, and yet what the latter in his commitment to reason cannot finally accept.≥∂ As Reynaldo Ileto’s work on the Pasyon persuasively demonstrates, the politics of empathetic feeling (damay) fundamentally shaped the popular peasant struggles that were at once tangential and vital to Philippine nationalisms during the revolution against Spain and during anticolonial movements against the United States in the late nineteenth century and early 346

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twentieth.≥∑ And yet, it is a politics that is sublated into a proper nationalist politics of sovereignty, which the distinction between friend and enemy serves to constitute. I will discuss the politics of sorrow within the contemporary revolutionary movement in more detail later. What I want to argue here is that the distinction between kasama and kaaway, which is understood to constitute the generic politics of the nation, bears within it another distinction that can be drawn between ultimately contradictory cultural logics of conjuring collectivity, which can be said to characterize the workings of contemporary radical Philippine nationalism (as possibly a variety of radical postcolonial nationalism more generally). I have dwelt on the specific formal features of Gera ’s style of imagining revolutionary sociality precisely to depict a mode of social relational practice that draws on a logic of shared yet variegated movement and experience of social simultaneity in contradistinction to one that draws on a logic of equivalences of space and time and social identity. The first logic, social simultaneity, I associate with kasama relations, which historically derive from colonial tenant-labor structures as well as from what I discuss in chapter 1 as an increasingly obsolescent and yet also revitalized, newly gendered subjective form of ‘‘syncretic sociability’’ realized in the practical concept of kapwa, or co-being, which implies a coextensivity of being between self and other.≥∏ The second logic, social identity, I associate with the dyad friend-enemy rather than simply with the opposing concept of kaaway, which shares with kasama the notion of mutuality, reciprocity, and co-being with the other (also deriving from the core concept kapwa), although kaaway is organized around conflict (away) in contrast to kasama, which is organized around accompaniment, abidance, and attachment (sama), both bearing and shaped by another form of temporality than the ‘‘empty, homogeneous time’’ of nations. While significantly shaping Gera ’s style of imagining revolutionary sociality, the cultural logic and mode of social practice I associate with kasama relations— which I should now suggest provides the collective subjective means or techné for the operation of that other politics of feeling and sorrow—is subordinated to the more dominant cultural logic and mode of social practice supporting the politics of antagonism characterizing the formation of nations.≥π As we will see, insofar as the very conditions of revolutionary war out of which the kasama mode of social practice emerges become constitutively engaged with the dominant politics of the nation-state against which it is waged, the politics of social The Sorrows of People

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feeling enabled by kasama relationality can only serve as a contrapuntal line of revolutionary praxis with respect to the proper political line of the movement. It is this contrapuntal political potential that might enable a di√erent understanding of and approach to revolutionary politics than the dominant notion of politics on which I should now suggest prevailing interpretations of revolutionary success and failure depend. Far from emerging from a locus of subalternity outside of it, however, this contrapuntal political potential is paradoxically to be found within the very dominant politics of antagonism between friend and enemy constituting revolutionary war.

Revolutionary Intelligence: Sorting Companion (Kasama) and Enemy (Kaaway) If, as I have been arguing, Gera is not merely a representation or formal condition of possibility of imagining revolutionary community but also very importantly a practical means of revolutionary struggle, it is its pedagogical role that clearly rises to the fore. Over and above its representational enactment of the dynamics of revolutionary social experience as a means of realizing and furthering the movement, what ultimately gains paramountcy in this novel is its practical role with respect to revolutionary intelligence and strategy. Gelacio Guillermo argues that, as an example of party literature, Gera is to be viewed as a ‘‘concrete revolutionary practice’’ by which revolutionary writers engage in ‘‘a retrospective view of policy as party and mass experience.’’≥∫ Two party decisions that would have important consequences for revolutionary work not only in northern Luzon but also in the entire country are thus understood by Guillermo to provide the novel with its politico-historical importance as well as its narrative framework. These, are (1) the decision in 1976 to withdraw red forces from their territorial enclave in the forest region of Isabela, where, strangulated by a military cordon and heavily bombarded, they su√ered near total devastation, a decision leading to the party’s placing greater emphasis on the mobility of npa forces and its strengthened reliance on ‘‘politically [rather than territorially] stable’’ mass bases, strategies which saw to the significant expansion of the movement; and (2) the decision in 1979 to regularize guerilla units, that is, focus them on military operations and release them from mass work, a decision that would later be deemed a deviation from the correct party line, a decision to which would be attributed the adventurist ‘‘errors’’ and ‘‘bloody purging’’ leading to the crisis of 348

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the movement in the late 1980s.≥Ω The characters’ many discussions about the two policies as well as their commentaries on di√erent situations exemplify the novel’s practical pedagogical value for armed struggle.∂≠ In providing useful lessons from the past as a basis for reevaluating the e√ectiveness of revolutionary strategies as these are tested in the field of action, the novel serves as a constitutive space of reflection for a subject of revolutionary intelligence. Guerillas who survive the destruction of the Isabela bases, for example, recount their experience of entrapment in the forest region to the new cadres, pointing out the foolhardiness of those who insisted on remaining without the protection of the masses. The correctness of the subsequent shift in policy toward greater guerilla mobility and consolidated mass work is in turn acknowledged by the military characters, who comment on the e√ectiveness of the npa forces in eluding them. In this way, the novel serves in a capacity similar to that of the documents that the guerillas reference in their discussions—that is, as an ideological and political guide for action. Through its concrete rendering and reflection on the implementation of party policy and strategy, the novel thus acts as part of the ultimately rational, purposive process that Guillermo views as definitive of ‘‘revolutionary work.’’∂∞ At the same time, as a cultural means of mobilizing, strengthening, and expanding revolutionary commitment, the novel also endeavors to a√ectively involve the reader in the dynamic action of armed struggle, to evoke the intensity and urgency of people’s war, and to humanize, draw sympathy for, and convey the moral ascendancy of the npa, the people’s army, over the afp, the army of the Philippine state. In his attempts to di√erentiate the two fighting forces, however, Firmeza also manifests their lines of a≈nity and similarity. The military and the revolutionaries share the same guns, sometimes the same clothes—for the guerillas militarily survive by confiscating army weapons and supplies—and, in the case of spies and informers, the same people. As the betrayals and reversals of loyalty evident in the tra≈c of traitors and defectors between army and npa prove, there is no essential revolutionary social body. The immanent interchangeability of and e√ective sharing between state and revolutionary forces is in fact a significant preoccupation of the guerillas and military themselves, thematized as realities of betrayal, desertion, and surrender characteristic of war. Beyond narrative content, this contamination of the revolution by the military state also serves as a dominant organizing anxiety of the novel. The need to di√erentiate the army from the npa is formally addressed by Firmeza’s adoption The Sorrows of People

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of the filmic technique of shot and countershot montage to stage parallel scenes within the respective bases of the army and npa. Informed by the narrative conventions of popular Hollywood and local cinema as well as of comic books, Gera represents the undulating line between antagonists in a structure not unlike that of the action film.∂≤ We might say even, insofar as the novel’s action involves events of information and communication as much as actual battles, it anticipates the contemporary global filmic genre of the intelligence thriller, arguably a form that speaks to our own global moment of security regimes (about which I will say more later).∂≥ Recurring motifs of espionage, intelligence, and counterintelligence activities thus play out in a montage of contrastive scenes that attempt to characterize and enact the conflict between revolutionary intelligence and the enemy mind in a manner not unlike that of Gillo Pontecorvo’s film about the Algerian revolution, The Battle of Algiers (1966), which is similarly organized around military, sociocultural, and racial intelligence and insurgency. Like Pontecorvo’s film, Gera depicts the military state’s overriding concern with mapping out and representing the clandestine, mobile, and spatially scattered movements of the npa forces as precondition of their annihilation. For Koronel Carlos of the Philippine army, counterinsurgency is ‘‘a slow game,’’ ‘‘like a jigsaw puzzle taking shape in his mind,’’ always one missing element away from completion. ‘‘But each time the plan was near to being complete, there was always one element that was missing and whose whereabouts one needed to grope for.’’ Intelligence and psychological warfare, not merely superior military strength, become primary strategies of counterinsurgency, the aim of which is an order of totalizing control. The military are shown to be preoccupied not only with the fielding of informers and the interception of the guerilla’s communiqués, but also with terrorizing people in places suspected of serving as the npa’s mass bases. The military are also shown to routinely engage in murder, torture, and the flagrant display of the brutalized, mutilated dead bodies of guerillas as part of their intelligence and psychological operations strategies, scenes of military atrocities that are themselves the subject of the masses’ reports to the guerillas. In his study of the Philippine military, Alfred McCoy argues that torture became an instrument of state power in the Philippines only under Marcos’s martial law regime, which ‘‘used the spectacle of violence for civil control, becoming a theater state of terror.’’∂∂ Linking Philippine torture techniques to the methods of psychological torture and coercion researched and developed by the 350

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cia and detailed in its thousand-page torture manual distributed to Latin American armies, McCoy shows the way torture was a play within the larger theater of terror of the Marcos regime, in which o≈cers ‘‘were actors who personified the violent capacities of the state.’’∂∑ McCoy’s interview subjects were the very o≈cers charged with the counterinsurgency campaign against the movement. ‘‘Invested with the power of pain and su√ering, life and death,’’ McCoy writes, they came to feel themselves as ‘‘protean creator[s] and destroyer[s],’’ playing ‘‘the lead in countless dramas of their own empowerment, rehearsing for a later moment on the national stage’’ when, in the aftermath of the fiasco of the presidential snap elections of 1986, their failed attempt at a coup d’état would trigger the popular revolt that would depose Marcos and successfully launch their own ambitious political careers. In Firmeza’s portrayal, the state’s military forces, unlike the npa, are determined by a vertical trajectory of patriarchal, egotistical empowerment and personalist, patronage politics. Military o≈cers are portrayed as being driven solely by selfish ambition to ascend the hierarchy that culminates in the presidentdictator, who, as commander in chief, is at once the embodiment of totalitarian, sovereign power and the supreme, individual realization of this system. While the o≈cers desire personal glory, the foot soldiers lust for and exercise crude power, inclined toward the thrill of raping women, decapitating and mutilating men, stealing and consuming the animals and food of the people, and destroying their homes. Associated with heteromasculinist capitalist activities such as cockfighting, gambling, drinking, and womanizing, the lust of soliders is continuous with the ambition and competitive drive of their superiors.∂∏ Deemed by his colleagues to be lacking in this necessary quality, Koronel Carlos cynically reflects, ‘‘What drive did they want? Drive meaning in tennis or in the stealing of a Mercedes Benz?’’ (121). Koronel Carlos’s sarcastic remark suggests an infinitely displaceable, instinctive competitive force fueling capitalist power that lies at the heart of military masculinity, the ultimate significance of which is clarified by another koronel when he presses for the total annihilation of the insurgency: ‘‘We still have two months before we start with this final drive and I want this to be a final drive, understand?’’ (125). In Gera, military desire is always finally bound up with a death drive.∂π But the military believe themselves to be no di√erent from the guerillas. ‘‘Those communists are hypocritical. They are the same as the military soldiers, who thirst for flesh,’’ (70) Captain Alvaro thinks to himself when he learns about The Sorrows of People

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Roger, a guerilla suspected of the crime of womanizing. When Roger kills a female comrade to hide his crime and is discovered to have had plans to surrender to the army, as if this were the culmination of his prior surrender to murderous sexual desire, Alvaro’s perception of this sameness appears to be confirmed. Roger behaves like a soldier to the extent that soldiers are shown to be driven by a lust or greed (kasakimán) for power and possession and the extraction of private profit and pleasure, a capitalist relation and construction of selfhood that accounts for such military tendencies within the revolution’s own ranks. Certainly, the strains of the army within the npa are evidenced by Tomas, the former soldier turned npa cadre who deserts the movement and rapes a female comrade. In his last letter to his comrades Tomas reveals a need to territorialize, to sequester property over which he could have secure and durable power, a need to possess that is vaguely linked to the toll of a seemingly endless movement of struggle, with its fluidity and indefinite becoming, in which guerillas are constantly mobile, constantly changing settlement, identity, belongings: ‘‘I no longer like your way of doing things. My watch, you never returned, even my girlfriend was taken by another. . . . You better keep away from this place because I am for sure heading towards the enemy’’ (177). That supplementary revolutionary experience of unlocatable longing, which I discussed in the previous chapter as emerging out of the very conditions of revolutionary possibility, here finds expression and resolution through dominant relations of selfhood and social command. As an objectifying exertion of heteromasculinist power over feminized bodily property, rape at once embodies and enacts the relations of state military and political-economic elite rule. Soldiers, landlords, and mayors are all shown to exercise this institutionalized, destructive, territorializing power over people’s disposable corporeal existence, motivated by lust and greed. ‘‘Really Lumpen!’’ the guerilla leader Arman angrily pronounces after reading Tomas’s letter, thus identifying Tomas’s personal faults with the ideological weakness of his class. Despite his attempt to account for Tomas’s reversal as a matter of ideological weakness, Firmeza depicts the conditions of revolutionary culture that support the counterrevolutionary heterosexist masculinity that Tomas represents. Tomas’s surrender and longing for militarist action (‘‘Again his fingers were itching to pull the trigger of an M16’’ [67]) are shaped by the guerillas’ valorization of military prowess and valor and the devaluation of the secondary tasks of 352

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maintaining the guerillas’ bases, such as cooking, to which he, along with female cadres, is relegated. ‘‘This is all I can do now to help speed up the revolution: cook,’’ he disparagingly thinks to himself as he longs for the virile excitement of past adventures. Despite the critical portrait of Tomas’s impatient virile masculinity, his valor and skills as an npa commander are observed to have been compromised by the ‘‘weakness’’ brought on by unfulfilled sexual desire. This naturalized, gendered weakness is established in an earlier discussion sparked among the cadres about ‘‘the problems of relationships’’ that party policy regulating sexual conduct was thought to prevent. The peculiar order of this narrative episode suggests a correspondence between the ‘‘weakness’’ brought on by unregulated desire in the movement and the ‘‘softness’’ of base maintenance work and mass work. In contrast, ‘‘hard’’ work is military work. In a debate the guerillas have much later about the policy of separating mass work from military work, Jim articulates the reproductive heteromasculinist sexual value that military work has acquired: ‘‘We’re just going to become impotent [baog, sterile] doing mass work if this is all we are going to do and we don’t engage in o√ensives’’ (243). While Gera ’s distinction between guerillas and military thus depends on the opposition between the horizontality of collective kasama feeling based on a love of the people, on the one hand, and the verticality of the enemy’s egocentric ambition and avaricious desire, on the other, that opposition is reproduced within the movement as a gendered, sexual di√erence between revolutionary roles. Masculinist admiration and camaraderie built on military prowess circumscribe kasama relations as a structure of male homosocial bonds, which entail the heteronormative identificatory construction of female cadres as objects of proper revolutionary love (as opposed to reactionary capitalist and feudal lust and greed) and as mere adjuncts of the primary revolutionary work of military action.∂∫ While Pat Arinto shows that, in their own writing, female cadres demonstrate that they do redefine and subvert conventional familial relationships and roles (of mother, daughter, wife) through the concept of kasama, it is clear that the a≈liative praxis of kasama relations within the movement predominantly takes on homosocial masculinist forms in no small part as a result of the revolutionary forces’ dialectical opposition to the Philippine military and the sovereign power of the state.∂Ω Subsumed within the dyad friend-enemy of nationalist sovereignty, the revolutionary social practice of kasama is thus cleft into two aspects: one is defined by relations of accompaniment and abidance and The Sorrows of People

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a politics of coextensive, coeval subjectivity, the other by relations of antagonism and a politics of identity, the subordination of the first to the second being mediated and articulated through the hierarchy of sexual di√erence.

The Paradox of Revolutionary Sovereignty: Grief and Rage This gendered, sexual contradiction within revolutionary sociality expresses a central problem of the novel as well as of the revolution as a whole: that is, the problem of forging a revolutionary subject that is simultaneously superior to and radically di√erent from the subject of the existing sovereign state; or, put another way, the problem of transforming the very terms of politics, while contesting the state on the e√ective, legible terms of its power. Articulated through party policy, one tendency is toward an emphasis on the transformation of everyday life and a dismantling of the prevailing culture and social relations that support it (the broader goals underlying mass work), and the other is toward an emphasis on military goals (undergirding the separation of regularized guerilla work from mass work) geared ultimately toward the seizure of state power. Pulled toward the latter tendency in his portrayal of the culture of armed struggle, Firmeza evokes the libidinal excitement of military operations through depictions of reversed loyalties, of enemies appearing among comrades, of the perpetual danger of betrayal, double agents and mass informers, whose hidden presences within the movement he recurrently observes, often at the end of a scene, in a bid to heighten the suspense of succeeding actions. Such narrative themes of revolutionary contamination or infiltration only stoke the abiding anxiety over di√erences between the enemy and the revolutionaries, which the conditions of a civil war between opposing nationalisms (state vs. revolution) cultivated. One of the most devastating consequences of this abiding anxiety for the revolution, which set the stage for the most traumatic episode of the movement’s history, was the launching of several internally conducted campaigns to weed out government agents (called deep penetration agents) suspected of having successfully infiltrated the movement. I mention this here because it was the exceptional circumstance in which the npa resorted to the torture tactics of its enemy, tactics generated precisely out of the generalization of this abiding anxiety and a corresponding socialization of the tasks of revolutionary intelligence. The resulting obsessive search for di√erence, evident signs of otherness, became directed no longer against the enemy but rather against the movement itself, creating 354

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extremely violent processes of political cleansing that call to mind exemplary instances of revolutionary terror and ethnonationalist social cleansing in other historical, national contexts. By organizing the narrative in the shot and countershot form, Firmeza in fact symbolically reproduces the common identificatory structure of war that constitutes the revolutionary forces’ contaminating proximity to and a≈nity with their antagonists. This centralization and internalization of war as the principle of constitution of the revolutionary body brings to the fore the death function of sovereign power, the task of dispensing of which, as Michel Foucault argues, necessitates the conscription of a racializing, and I would add policing, intelligence that would identify, in order to eliminate, the contaminating forces within the movement.∑≠ Following the biopolitical logic of the modern state, whose structures the party partially assumed in governing the zones under its control (e.g., through taxation and capital punishment) and fostered by a growing militarist tendency within its ranks, the terrible tactics used in the anti-infiltration campaigns were conducted purportedly to save the movement, to ‘‘save the center’’—indeed, to ensure the movement’s very survival. This hypostatization of the life of the movement under a state of emergency (that is, a state of emergency internal to the revolution rather than the revolution as the threat causing a state of emergency in the nation-state) allowed revolutionary forces to assume and exercise the sovereign power of the people against suspect persons within its own ranks, that is, to eliminate lives within the movement in order to save the life of the movement as a whole.∑∞ In an atmosphere marked by gravity and suspicious fear, an overriding concern with security, and an absolute belief in its own necessity and inexorability, the mission was conducted through a semiotics of police intelligence that trained its sights on traces of failed revolutionary subjectification among the cadres. Such traces could be found in excesses of behavior and personality, such as superficial humor and enjoyment, and superfluous personal accoutrements, which could be interpreted as signs of ideological lack or weakness (just as inordinate attachments signify feminine weakness that creates a drag on the militant movement, superfluous behavior and belongings signify politically recidivist petty bourgeois tendencies [see chapter 8]) and therefore evidence of susceptibility to cooptation by the enemy.∑≤ Contrary to some accounts of this event as the product of mass hysteria, I understand it to be the realization of a hyperrationality compelled by both the juridical power and logic of state sovereignty The Sorrows of People

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and the objectivist, scientific beliefs of local revolutionary leadership. Mounted in paranoid defense against the (certainly real) vulnerability of the movement to deep penetration by the military, such hyperrationality could be said to develop out of the very form of intelligence mobilized by revolutionary sovereignty in war against state sovereignty.∑≥ It is, however, within the scenes on the margins of war proper that we see other a√ective practices and cultural technologies, which appear tangential to the rational, purposive work of political strategy, shaping and helping to define revolutionary subjectivity and its social body. In these scenes of noncombat, Firmeza depicts the guerillas as inspired by a love expressed through sacrifice, su√ering, loss, and sorrow. As the guerillas su√er many, many losses of life in the course of this war, they are shown again and again in tears, on the field after an ambush or attack and in the moveable camps, as they rest, gather their strength, and renew their courage and commitment. This a√ective renewal is accomplished primarily through the revival of memories of others who sacrificed their lives for the movement and through the ritual of collective singing, the two often being intertwined. Firmeza writes out the lyrics of many of the songs the guerillas sang and listened to, apparently to evoke the atmosphere of guerilla life and the emotional states of the cadres, much in the same way he writes out, in comic book fashion, the sounds of gunfire (praaaak! boom! pak! pak!) in order to evoke the intensity of battle. Written in this notational mode, which suggests the performative dimensions of the novel, the songs are like dramatic choruses providing ideological guidance and encouragement, and serving as emotion-cuing accompaniment to memories of the fallen. In one scene of a√ective renewal, for example, Ariston reads the party message to the cadres and peasant supporters in the camp, extolling the heroic struggle of the masses and the Red forces and the sacrifices of revolutionary martyrs: ‘‘Not a few of those listening wept. They had siblings, spouses, relatives, townmates or loved ones who lost their lives during the struggle since the npa arrived in this place in November 1972’’ (39). The guerillas begin to sing, reviving Andro’s memories of Ka Fabie. The words of the songs and Andro’s memories thematically converge, each extolling ‘‘the value of sacrifice to the struggle’’ and the heroism of the martyrs: ‘‘The pouring of blood for the people/is a heroism that will never be forgotten.’’ In place of the masculinities presented by Roger and Tomas, the renegade guerillas, Andro presents a revolu-

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tionary masculinity tempered by the sorrow of sacrifice and by the sublimated love for the people from which such sorrow springs. Undoubtedly, such evocation of sorrow is a means of firming the guerilla’s resolve and of renewing belief in and commitment to armed struggle as the path to freedom. Just as a feminine love and empathy for the people is folded into the valorous masculinity of the revolutionary subject (in the form of what SaldañaPortillo calls ‘‘revolutionary tendresse’’), sorrow that might otherwise allow the release of feeling beyond the regulated ideals of revolutionary love (overcoming the proper revolutionary subject’s fetishistic, heteromasculinist love for the masses) is quickly absorbed into the militant path of sovereign power, the dominant trajectory of people’s war. It must be transcended. As the song above counsels, ‘‘Erase the su√ering of extreme sorrow. . . . Let us go through the red path / Avenge the martyrs who were felled.’’ Hence the stoic expressions of guerilla sorrow everywhere described in the novel, a sorrow marked simply by the reddening of the eyes and the wiping away of one’s tears. Such restrained sorrow appears in other forms in the novel. It appears in the form of the notes of the guerillas, which detail the woes and hardships of the people, and it appears in the people’s litanies of military abuses. The sorrows of people issue out of the experiences of oppression, su√ering, violation, and torture at the hands of the ruling classes, which are thematized in hundreds of revolutionary poems. This is the ideal sorrow honed by cultural workers in the movement. Repudiating the ‘‘tradition of weeping’’ that has accompanied the history of popular uprisings and millenarian peasant movements in the Philippines because it produces inaction, melancholia, and Messianism, revolutionary cultural critics have, since the early 1970s, encouraged cultural workers to make sorrow the vehicle of more militant ends.∑∂ Complying with this ideal, the narrative movement of the novel culminates in the conversion of the people’s sorrows into an intensifying and fearless mass protest, a militancy whose leading agency and representative subject are expressed in the slogans that appear on banners at the end of the novel: ‘‘Long Live the npa!’’ ‘‘Forward the People’s War!’’ One hears in the quickening, marching tempo and increasing force and volume of many revolutionary songs the trajectory of militancy into which initial musical strains of sorrow feed. Militant endings signal the anticipated triumphal emergence of the revolutionary subject as sovereign power. As a dominant theme and paradigmatic plot of revolutionary literature, revolutionary

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mobilization depends, however, on a transformative structure of feeling and sentiment which, prior to the moment of consciousness and call to armed struggle—indeed, as a condition of both—enables the dissolution of the self and its di√erence from the other. Such dissolution takes the form of an unbinding of the self from a closed, finished reality and the opening up, often by death and profound loss, of a boundless realm of actions and events that surpass the finitudes of given social, human forms (though not finitude altogether). This transformative action event is often expressed as a thunderous storm of passion composed of grief and rage, a liberative force overflowing and breaking down the enclosing walls of social oppression. Kris Montañez’s short story ‘‘Marami Bang Nakipaglibing?’’ (Were There Many Who Joined in the Burial?) o√ers a rendering of this revolutionary passion in the image of the collective emotion of a long line of mourners at the burial of the wife and three children of Ka Julian, an activist, who were murdered by Philippine Constabulary soldiers and members of a paramilitary vigilante group: ‘‘Everyone was grief-stricken, but impressed on their faces was a more intense emotion: rage, rage like a long whip of fire that strikes a parched field on both sides of a crooked road. In the final warmth of dusk, the bright sky was glowing red with heat.’’∑∑ This line of rage extending from people’s faces to their fields and to the sky is the path of revolutionary passion, traced by the wailing cry of the old man who reports the murders to the npa: ‘‘ ‘They are killing us already!’ His cry was like a long list of the destitute farmers who were tortured, robbed, abducted, imprisoned or killed.’’ Via this path, the profound grief, fear, and despair that people experience in a situation of daily terrorism become channeled into a revolutionary current. Unleashed, revolutionary passion exceeds the individual persons out of which it flows, manifesting itself on connected planes of a socialized nature—the inflamed, parched field, the burning red sky—and acting as a collective force that forges a revolutionary subject. As Ka Julian learns of the masses overcoming their fear to publicly commiserate with his loss and confront his family’s murderers, he resolves to fight back: ‘‘It was true that Ka Julian had no more family, house or farm to return home to, but an entire guerilla zone was waiting for him.’’ Scattered throughout Gera ’s narrative, the understated, even laconic expressions of sorrow at the deaths of comrades and the mournful singing of songs to replenish depleted spirits perform a less dramatic but equally powerful a√ective role. The words and songs serve as a means of renewing revolutionary commit358

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ment by revivifying the a√ective bonds that have sustained the comrades who remain. Deemed a necessary part of social mobilization but also a threat to revolutionary action, sorrow can, however, serve only as an initial emotional call that must finally be replaced by feelings more conducive to the militant aims of the movement. And yet, as passion, such grief is not easily contained in the projects into which it is channeled. Even in the songs that end militantly, the strains of sorrow linger, against the words of a song sung near the end of the novel: ‘‘Bravery replaces all our grief.’’ We can hear those lingering strains of sorrow in the dirgelike revolutionary song ‘‘Luksampati’’ (Song of Grief). Though the tempo quickens into a vigorous march in the second half of the song, the opening doleful refrain melodically continues unchanged, its grievous tones now latent but audible still, exerting a faint mnemonic tug against militancy in the direction of lament. Sorrow is the condition of possibility but also the counterpoint to revolutionary triumph. Although the revolutionary community is supposed to transcend older relations of family and kin to become a site of a greater, fulfilling wholeness and love, paradoxically, it is also the site and source of dispossession and loss—of one’s old life, of other previous relations, of other competing communitarianisms, of old as well as new hopes (‘‘longings that have no shape’’)—and consequently the site and source of an abiding sadness. Intensified by recurring losses in struggle, including separation from loved ones and the murders and disappearances of comrades and friends, this sadness, as much as militancy, triumphalism, and the exhilaration of radical transformation, is also the very content of revolutionary life. It is therefore less a contradiction and more an instance of the paradox internal to the revolution that almost all of the songs urge the replacement of sorrow by courage, indeed, urge the people to wipe away their tears, to cease their weeping, and to end their grief—‘‘O mutyang Inang bayan, luha mo ay pahiran . . . di dapat na malumbay . . . Tumigil na ang panangis’’ (‘‘O dear Motherland, wipe away your tears . . . no longer should one be mournful . . . let the wailing cease’’), even while often the music itself remains mournful and grieving. The paradox, which Gera enacts in the contradiction in policy as narrative content and in the tension between intelligence thriller and social chronicle as narrative form, is that the feminized a√ects produced out of the social crisis of revolution, including loss, su√ering, unregulated practices, feelings and relations of libidinal excess, act as an impediment to the revolution itself. Revolutionary action generThe Sorrows of People

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ates the very sorrow that threatens it and that it needs to transcend in order for such action to take place. Sorrow cannot then be a mere instrumental vehicle for the militant content of armed struggle. Rather, as the rhythmic progression from mournful dirge to militant march of the same melodic line in the song ‘‘Luksampati’’ demonstrates, sorrow is the very passional source and matter of revolutionary rage ( poot). Thus, in many revolutionary poems and songs, images of extreme grief and vengeful rage are closely intertwined, often in the same figure, such as the stormy sky. We cannot begin to explore how sorrow and the infrasocial experiential dynamics of pakikidalamhati and pakikidamay, specific a√ective modes of sharing grief that are cultivated within the movement, contributed to the expansion of revolutionary struggle if we assume that its channeling into the military aims of people’s war is the end of the story. Such is the way that the paradox of people’s war is resolved by Gera—that is, by subordinating the grief of dispossession and loss and all the soft work of struggle, understood as revolutionary potentiality, to the seizure of the state and the attainment of sovereign agency, understood as revolutionary action or actualization. This solution not only leaves a remainder that cannot be fully subsumed within the proper subject of revolution and its prescribed experience, but also sets o√ a tangential directionality for that remainder of social experience, which even as it issues out of and is indispensable to the revolutionary movement, itself moves in ways tangential to the foreseeable aims of the revolution. To think about the revolutionary potential of sorrow before and beyond its actualization as sovereign power, it is important to stay with the contrapuntal strains of a√ect in the novel and to recognize that, even as they may be incorporated into and sublated by more dominant strains of revolutionary a√ect, serving as mere secondary supports of proper revolutionary subjectivity, they also di√erently enable revolutionary praxis. For the revolutionary readers of Gera for whom they function as notational signs, the written-out songs create an extratextual a√ective soundscape that, as in film, provides crucial orientation toward and emotional intelligence about the world depicted. We might say, this a√ective soundscape works beneath the operating level of narrative ideology and subjectification, where military-political intelligence and strategy constitute revolutionary subjectivity, to transform the structures of feeling supporting the ruling social order by evoking interpretive performances of the accompanying a√ects of struggle.∑∏ In this soundscape, 360

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scored by the novel, we glean a kind of sorrow that is itself a practice of revolution, that realizes, not just motivates, the transformation of social relations in revolutionary struggle; what is more, that is an enactment of, not just a path to, freedom. Contrary to the opposition between emotion and action posited by revolutionary cultural policy—which critiques the romantic musical tradition of struggle as simply mitigating the pain of clenched emotions, rather than abolishing the sickness: ‘‘The freeing of emotions becomes the end, with no actions aimed at’’—revolutionary passion is, as I have suggested, an event that is inextricable from the transformative process of social struggle and whose meanings and consequences have been neither fully disclosed nor exhausted. Current scholarly accounts of the power of a√ect have been compelled by recent events in U.S. history to remark upon the inherently contradictory or political indeterminacy of public feeling. As one account cautions, ‘‘The ‘same’ emotion—mourning, for example—may be mobilized to democratic and antidemocratic ends.’’∑π My feeling is that the poverty of our analytical language should not be mistaken for the simple identity of our objects. It should not lead us to conclude that all sorrow is the same and that di√erence lies only in the ends to which it is put, or to view emotion as mere raw material of political mobilization and strategy. On the contrary, to hold in abeyance the fate of sorrow within the revolution allows us to consider the open and unreckoned potential of its revolutionary work.

Divine Sorrow: Insurgent Economies of Life and Death With this aim in mind, I want to suggest a di√erence between two kinds of sorrow, a di√erence that follows upon the distinction Benjamin makes between mythical violence and divine violence. For Benjamin, who critiques the characterization and valuation of violence by its ends, the distinction between the two kinds of violence rests on their respective relation to law and life. As he writes, ‘‘If mythical violence is law-making, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates. . . . Mythical violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake, divine violence pure power over all life for the sake of living.’’∑∫ Like the violence it is often used to support, mythical sorrow is a means of making glorious (even if insurgent) power out of su√ering. It is an emotional passage for the making of a prior subject, experienced in behalf The Sorrows of People

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and placed in service of an existing rule of law and of the given, unyielding political institutions and scientific truth of a teleological revolutionary struggle. Evidenced in the quick conversion of death to revolutionary necessity in the dispensation of capital punishment authorized by the people’s court, mythical sorrow shores up the sovereign power of the party. Divine sorrow, on the other hand, as impetus and expression of boundary-destroying revolutionary violence, is a movement of radical undoing, an undoing of the seeming permanence of one’s identity and the everyday reality and everyday fears that undergird it, an undoing that can bring one to a place very close to death itself.∑Ω But the death that divine sorrow draws near is not the death of the death drive, conceived as irreversible existential terminus, absolute human finitude, and final defeat, over which the fascist state and militarist party cadres, acting as their own state in the anti-infiltration campaigns, exercised their command—the end of that annihilating drive, which Terry Eagleton associates with the imperial Western will.∏≠ In his critique of the organismic vitalism of German idealism that he claims is the philosophical inheritance of decolonizing nationalist movements, Pheng Cheah describes the central role played in modern nationalisms by the ontological notion of death as finitude, the transcendence of which serves as the defining condition of the realization of freedom. As the analogue of freedom and the paradigmatic metaphor for social organization and political life in the modern world, the living organism depends on ‘‘the strict ontological division within nature between living and non-living beings’’ that death maintains.∏∞ For Foucault, from whom Cheah takes his account of the evolution of this ontological division between the living and the nonliving, until the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, death was a spectacular, ritualized event, marking a moment of transition from earthly sovereign power to eternal divine sovereign power as well as a moment of transmission of the power of the dying to the living. Under the regime of biopolitics, in which power increasingly takes the form of ‘‘the right to make live and to let die,’’ death is transformed into a private, negligible event marking the very limit of modern biopower: ‘‘Death becomes, insofar as it is the end of life, the term, the limit, or the end of power too.’’∏≤ It is its dual status as, on the one hand, the negation of life and therefore the limit to biopower and, on the other, the means of exercise and a≈rmation of sovereign power that illuminates the state’s ambivalent relation to death and, further, accounts for the importance of death in contemporary struggles over power. If we look at the exercise of power in third world contexts, which since 362

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colonial times have served as laboratories for the development and exercise of the sovereign power of imperial will, we see that practices of torture entail the enforcing of that threshold between life and death by keeping the prisoner alive but always at the edge of death. As one Argentinian torturer is quoted saying to his victim, ‘‘You are not going to be able to die, little girl, until we want you to. We are God here.’’∏≥ Torture is the intensified, distilled practice of producing what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘‘bare life’’ as ‘‘life exposed to death,’’ which he argues founds the logic of sovereign power of the modern state.∏∂ Claiming their importance to the theory and practice of Western politics, the framework within which Agamben confines his historical and philosophical genealogy of the state of exception as a normative paradigm of government, Achille Mbembe argues that the plantation and the colony were original sites where sovereignty consisted of the exercise of a power and a right to kill that obtained outside the rule of law.∏∑ Predicated on the conception of slaves and colonized savages as living beyond the pale of humanity, this permanent state of exception, which is exemplarily realized in the plantation and the colony as well as in their political institutional aftermath, comes to shape contemporary forms of colonial sovereignty and warfare. Mbembe notes, for example, the way slaves were kept in a state of injury, a form of death-in-life that can be said to characterize contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death or what he calls necropolitics, confers on entire populations the status of the living dead. What I find important in this extended discussion of the politicization of death under contemporary late modern colonial and imperial regimes is the particular cultural meaning and logic of death as absolute negation of life that evolve to underwrite dominant forms of political power, and consequently the extreme political threat and antagonism posed by other contrary inhabitations and deployments of death. Mbembe argues that confrontation with death as absolute limit, death ‘‘understood as the violence of negativity,’’ establishes not only the subject of sovereign power, but also the subject of modernity.∏∏ Elaborated through the formations and institutions of terror e√ected in early modern and late modern colonial spaces, death becomes central both to power as annihilation and negation of freedom and to resistance as survival and realization of freedom. Drawing on accounts of Palestinian suicide bombers as well as slave suicides, Mbembe asserts, ‘‘Death in the present is the mediator of redemption. Far from being an encounter with a limit, boundary, or barrier, it is experienced as ‘a release from terror and bondage.’ . . . death, in this case, can be represented The Sorrows of People

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as agency. For death is precisely that from and over which I have power. But it is also that space where freedom and negation operate.’’∏π How does the notion of divine sorrow in the context of the Philippine revolution contribute to this understanding of the political, in which death plays such a central role? Put di√erently, how does viewing the historical experiences of and with death in the contexts of anticolonial and postindependent revolutionary struggles—contexts that continue to be forcibly kept outside ‘‘the history of Western politics,’’ where the nature of the political is investigated—help us differently answer the question, ‘‘What does it mean to act politically?’’∏∫ In contrast to Mbembe’s view of the counterdeployment of death through suicide, which shares with the death of sovereign power that it counters the meaning and act of negation (and therefore, in this aspect as exposure and opposition of a dominant logic, exemplifies a proper, antagonistic resistance to necropower), my understanding of revolutionary historical experiences of and with death is not from the side of its serviceability for a subversive power, that is, not from the point of view of its ultimate end. While the messianism and resurrectionary politics of the revolution (see chapter 8) might suggest a similar experience of death to that in Mbembe’s interpretation, that is, as a mediator of redemption, I would argue that the cult politics of Philippine struggles bears a strong strain of another cultural logic of death, subtending the dominant revolutionary mythos of sacrifice. In contrast to death as unsurpassable limit and absolute negation of life, an ontological opposition which anticolonial revolutionary thinkers have largely held (including Frantz Fanon, who based his distinction between revolutionaries and terrorists on it), this strain of revolutionary experience of the death of others shows the division between life and death to be more ambiguous and permeable.∏Ω The power to continue and create life out of death embodied by cult value can certainly be viewed in terms of the sacralization of ‘‘bare life,’’ which as ‘‘life that can be killed but not sacrificed’’ is produced out of military practices of displaying brutalized, mutilated, sometimes decapitated, bodies of murdered guerillas and peasants and out of the spectacular enactment of power through torture. In this aspect of resurrectionary power (cult politics), the death of one in struggle becomes an o√ering (alay) that furthers the life of the revolution, a necessary and venerable sacrifice for a greater cause. In the imagery of revolutionary stories and songs, the death of revolutionary forces sows the seeds of many more lives of the revolution—fighting lives summoned out of the radicalized cultural rituals 364

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of collective bereavement. An economy of life and death obtains in which loss of life results in life’s returns. At the end of Levy Balgos de la Cruz’s story ‘‘Nanay Lagrimas’’ (Mother Tears), about a mother who searches for and finds her missing activist son murdered by the police, the rituals of radicalized mourning conducted by activists, through a series of sung laments converting loss to sacrifice, grief to militancy, produce a final reckoning: ‘‘With the departing of her Ariel, it wasn’t after all true that she was diminished; on the contrary she was added to many, many times.’’π≠ This economy of life and death is gendered, as its losses and gains are registered through a distribution of feelings and subjects. Personal losses are feminized in their conversion to necessary sacrifices— registered in the grief of the feminine figure of the people, Mother Tears— fueling the resolve of a militant power, figured in the masculine figures of the mother’s two other revolutionary sons, who are fighting in the hills. As in Montañez’s story ‘‘Were There Many Who Joined in the Burial?’’ in this story as well as in another of de la Cruz’s stories, ‘‘Ang Mga Alaala’y Parang Mga Alitaptap’’ (Memories Are Like Fireflies), personal sorrows and love revolving around the loss of domestic, familial life are transubstantiated into a greater sorrow and love, embodied in the life of the revolutionary warrior, just as the grief of revolutionary laments inevitably gives way to militant ends.π∞ I associate this gendered distribution of life and death, grief and militancy, precisely with the operation of mythical sorrow, to the extent that death and grief become separated from and opposed to life and militancy by means of a gendered di√erence, with death and grief as loss becoming the mere means by which life and militancy as sovereign power are invigorated. As ‘‘that from and over which I have power,’’ death becomes the occasion of mythical sorrow. And yet, death and grief cannot be so easily controlled or contained, like the memories of lost lives, which, like fireflies, ‘‘arrive all linked together. A chain of reminiscences. They rush in pell-mell, especially in a season of keen loneliness and sadness. No matter if one tries to drive them away, they obtrude; even if one forcefully banishes them, still they push themselves into the segments of one’s consciousness.’’π≤ Immanent in the cult politics of revolution is another a√ective economy where the dividing line between life and death and its gendered regulation are trespassed or rendered mutable. As opposed to the death upheld and wielded by sovereign power, the death that divine sorrow draws near creates a breach in the material finitude of the living, enabling a surpassing of the limits of a merely human world in order to The Sorrows of People

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serve as the means of renewal of the very life that has been lost. Unlike mourning practices of ‘‘people with nothing’’ in moments of peace, as the anthropologist Fenella Cannell describes them, the living do not ask for a cancellation of the unmet debts and obligations that pull them toward the dead.π≥ As Cannell describes the cultural premise of everyday bereavement practices of lowland Christian Filipinos, which suggests the ontological permeability rather than rigidity of the boundary between the living and the nonliving, ‘‘the dead pull the living towards them, and the living must resist.’’π∂ The ‘‘process of exchange and separation between the living and the dead’’ that ensues in mourning is negotiated through the currency of emotional pleas of forgiveness (tawad, to ask for mercy, discount, abatement), which release the living from the dead. In contrast to such practices during times of quiescence, in the revolutionary rituals of collective bereavement mediated by songs of sorrow, the living are enjoined through pity (awa) and rage (poot) to fulfill those debts of untoward deaths through struggle (‘‘Even if they kill a thousand comrades / The volcanic rage of the people will boil over / This is what will be exacted of ten thousand debts / To crush each fascist enemy’’). Multiplied tenfold, the deaths of comrades appear as blood debts to be collected (sisingil), and in many other songs and poems, as violent taxes (buwis, forced tribute, also crop share) and life shares to be redeemed (tinubos). As it breaches the material finitude of the living, radical bereavement opens the living to the material claims of the equally finite world of the dead. Dead comrades and martyrs of the revolution remain present and intimately tied to the living, in a radically alternative economy of exchange of a√ects and actions that cuts across the mortal divide. What is more, through the expiating act of collective struggle, which Benjamin links to divine violence (and which, as we’ve seen, takes the form of revolutionary messianism), their revolutionary spirit is intensified and multiplied. This cultural logic of cult politics undoubtedly draws from the resurrectionary modes of experiencing struggle that have historically shaped Philippine revolts since Spanish colonialism, attesting to the extant vocabulary of social relations and currency of feeling bequeathed by the close articulation of political and economic power with religious doctrine in the realm of everyday life. As we saw in the poetry of Mabanglo, however, the motif of resurrectionary passion that continues to shape contemporary historical experiences of Filipino and Filipina struggles no longer leads to the resurrection of one Body or one Life (the people 366

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as Christ, the masses as Messiah), but rather to a multiplicity of lives or life parts. These life parts are often expressed in stock images of the instruments and symbols of people’s war, like the battalions of modern militaries, as in Luna Luz’s poem ‘‘Panambitan’’ (Supplication to the Dead): ‘‘thousand torches / thousand flags / thousand guns / multitude of bodies / passing along the edge of the mountain slope!’’π∑ At the same time, the common image of human forces fusing with the landscape suggests a political ontology that extends beyond the mass subject of the biopolitical state (the population) and beyond the industrial, machinic notions of mass life that characterized utopian socialist visions of the early twentieth century.π∏ This emergent political ontology can arguably be said to be the political ontology of Filipino communism. In the experience of revolutionary passion, sorrow is unleashed from its containment in the individual, even collective mass, subject. In the rituals of remembrance occasioned by sorrow, as exemplified in ‘‘Sky Rose’’ as well as in Gera, characters pass into each other’s subjective space. What obtains in these narratives of memory are fleeting presences intimately linked to one another rather than full, autonomous subjects.ππ These resurrected and resurrecting life parts are tangible, corporeal presences that pervade the natural landscape and imbue it with the subjective force of the living and the dead. They move in this world as palpable memories of dead comrades, which arrive in the form of ‘‘a light touch of fragrance mixed with the wind . . . fragrance of hair, breath, body. Smell of earth, wound, medicine, corpse. Smell of earth,’’ like fireflies illuminating the darkness, ‘‘homecoming gift for the bursting of the light of dawn, where the sun will smile on the other side of its bruised and bloody face.’’π∫ Indeed, the resurrectionary power that is for the sake of the living as well as for the dead regenerates and transforms the very world of life and death over which sovereign power is exercised. This world is not merely the world of human life, and yet it is not transcendent of merely human life, which is now fused with the natural world. The life of this world, moreover, is generated in communion with the other earthly, physical, and subjective presence of the dead, whose claims and losses are continuous with the claims and losses of the living. Expansive, divine sorrow embraces all of nature. In poems by Firmeza, nature expresses the grief of guerillas combined with otherworldly agencies, evident in persistent traces of animist belief in revolutionary poetry and song. In accord with such folk beliefs, the deaths of comrades are followed by pouring rain, ‘‘the mountains are disturbed by angry rivers,’’ the sun turns red with the people’s The Sorrows of People

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rage.πΩ The recurring figure of a wail issuing out of the sorrows of the people, ‘‘the moan of extreme sorrow [dalamhati], the howl / of uprising / reach[ing] up to the sky,’’ like the rage in Montañez’s story, enacts the boundary-breaking divine violence figured in the thunder peal of revolution.∫≠ At the same time, the expression of divine sorrow draws on a modern mythopoiesis of nature as the object of human labor and in particular on a Marxist notion of nature as the means of life of humans (‘‘man’s inorganic body’’), the material, object, and instrument of human life activity, and hence the objectification of human species life, which defines man’s freedom.∫∞ Tears, sweat, and blood are hence recurring tropes of the e√orts and energy expended by revolutionaries and sown into the land of struggle. The production of social life no longer depends on a world enchanted by animist spirits and inexplicable and contingent alien powers immanent in the landscape and ruled by the tributary gods of human sovereignty, but rather on a natural world inscribed with the spirit of social striving. As the medium and surface of revolutionary grieving and struggle, nature conveys an understanding of the human forces involved in both the sowing of su√ering and the cultivation of a di√erent life of hope. I am suggesting that, drawing on a history of mixed cultural sources, the experience of divine sorrow opens up an emergent political ontology and economy of human life and death and of nature that departs from the ontological foundations of the hegemonic cultural-political logics of both state power and revolution. What is ‘‘divine’’ is not a transcendent agency, fate or destiny, but a more mundane, singular advent that releases one from the eschatological lineaments of capitalism and modern sovereignty.∫≤ Under capitalist sovereignty, nature and mere bodily life are what one needs to exploit and ultimately to be emancipated from in order to produce value. As we saw in chapter 6, in its appearance as a self-moving substance endowed with the capacity to beget itself (value in process, ‘‘money which begets money,’’ i.e., capital), value takes the agential form of God and serves as the measure of human worth, indeed, as the very sign and property of humanity and its trajectory of progress.∫≥ As consumable life, the consumption of which invigorates the economic and civilizational order of the biopolitical state (figuring as ‘‘life itself ’’), nature and mere bodily life are therefore at once what fuels one’s power and something over which one has power—in the conjoined terms of biopolitics and necropolitics, socially dead life (nonvalue)—something that is to be siphoned o√, expended, and

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overcome, consigned to their paradoxically life-giving and therefore mortally fated and fatal end. Among numerous feminists who have critiqued this conception of nature and mere bodily life, which has historically applied to slaves, women, and colonized peoples, Claudia von Werlhof makes the point that ‘‘capital begins to ‘live’ only through a relation, the capital relation, in which it is brought into contact with human life, living people.’’∫∂ Noting the vampire motif in literature and horror films (a motif of Marx himself that also features prominently in local Philippine popular culture and, as I mentioned in chapter 8, works its way into the vocabulary of the guerillas), von Werlhof goes on to observe, following Ernst Bloch, ‘‘the necrophilia of a society whose highest expression—capital—comprises ‘dead’ labour extracted in the past from the living.’’∫∑ While this Marxist vitalist critique undoubtedly reproduces the ontological opposition between life and death and the biopolitical economy of capital, it importantly casts the conception of nature, on which this political ontology and economy depend, as a violent social relation of dispossession. Capital’s dependence on the reproductive capacities embodied in such nature and mere bodily life necessitates a violent monopoly over their control, which in turn entails dispossessing and divesting the very people who appear as disposable nature and life of control over these capacities, often by dispossessing them of land.∫∏ Such dispossession of nature, which feminists have long recognized as the unabated practice of primitive accumulation in the appropriation of human bodies and their life-producing living labor, can be seen in part to account for the haunted quality of the rural landscape, which in the tradition of anticolonial struggle, is infused with the sorrows of people, including the sorrows of the violated spirits of their dead.∫π Unlike revolutionary messianism’s reversal of the eschatology of capital with the people, as the subject of history, now performing the deified, sovereign role of capital—a reversal that, like the Marxist vitalism that shapes it, also depends on the split between nature and culture, flesh and spirit, body and consciousness, animal and human, that undergirds hegemonic Western rationalism∫∫ —divine sorrow does not portend the transcendence or overcoming of the sensuous and somatic forms of experiencing the claims of the yet-present dead. In Ma. Virginia River’s short story ‘‘Ilang Buhay Man ay Iaalay’’ (However Many Lives Shall Be O√ered), as in countless other revolutionary works, sorrow acts as a political faculty, giving what Deleuze and Guattari call faciality to social su√ering

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(the face of a people), opening one to a greater feeling for and self-recognition in others’ plight, and in this way serving as a means of achieving revolutionary class consciousness.∫Ω However, before the instrumental use of feeling and bodily su√ering for proper political ends, divine sorrow is an experience of sentient communion that suspends the rule of human sovereignty and rationalism on which the dominant social and economic order depends. In this story, the work of culture as song joins elements of nature (rice, the wind) to convey the palpable presence of a dead comrade: ‘‘He felt the merging of the voice of Ka Lerma with the smell of bound rice stalks brought by the wind. But such a di√erent feeling it o√ered to him. Borne by the song’s lyrics, a stinging recollection [makirot na gunita] was pricking his senses and piercing through to his interiority [kalooban]’’; it seemed an unexpected visitor had suddenly arrived.Ω≠ Borne by the intertwined sounds and smells of bodies and earth that are traces of the material presence of the dead in the world of the living, lives o√ered up in struggle enter into the bodily souls of the living, pressing them with the indelible force of memory, as in Luz’s ‘‘Panambitan’’: ‘‘You returned then, / you laid your palm / on my shoulder / you embraced me / you gently stroked my hair, / and you whispered: / ‘Now, now, cry for as long you want.’ / You squeezed—how tightly!—the palms of my hands. / You pushed into the chest of my memories, / imprinting your images.’’ As opposed to a symbolic identification with and sublime experience of the people, which is said to characterize the aesthetics of the subject of history exemplified in the Chinese revolutionary context (and which is also at work in revolutionary messianism), the experience of sentient communion with the dead, which I associate with divine sorrow, remains indissolubly attached to the body.Ω∞ Drawing on a tradition of faith and spiritual intimacy expressed through touch, the sentience of such sorrow keeps earthly, living, and intimate communion with the spirits of revolutionary martyrs and their claims on the present and future as a source of continuing struggle.Ω≤ As expansive as its movement might be, divine sorrow always builds on and remains tied to a relation of intimacy—a friend, a loved one, a people whose fate one shares, whose su√ering spells one’s own. The women in the towns wail for the cadre Lorna when they see her body riddled with bullets, hung on a pole like a pig. They do not wail for the unknown Red soldier. When the guerillas and the masses grieve for their people, they do so out of feeling not for an abstract people whose bounds are commensurate with the territorial boundaries of their state or with a hypostatized revolutionary 370

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body, but for concrete living and dead persons struggling on the land in which they place their hope. This is a notion of an insurgent people that is finite but also significantly open, open beyond the internal and external borders of state nationalism or the ossified divisions of friend and enemy in a militarist war. In the imagery of the living, palpable presences of the dead fused with the nonhuman forces of nature—spirits of the dead as fireflies lining the mountainsides, the su√ering and torture of guerillas reflected in the bruised and bloody face of the sun—we encounter a politics in which the claims of the living are not only continuous with the claims of the dead (with death no longer that over which life must have power as the condition of human freedom), but also embedded in a natural world in which humans are part, not sole, agency of transformation. Against the hegemonic rationalist conception of nature that undergirds capitalist forms of human sovereignty and of accumulation by dispossession, Lucia Makabayan’s poem ‘‘Sagada’’ portrays the guerillas in synchronic communion with their surroundings: ‘‘And we, awestruck, are embraced by the wind / Caressed into stillness by the dew / Silenced all / Comrade, mountain, tree, stone / As if listening to each other’s breathing.’’Ω≥ In this portrait, actor and terrain are inseparable constituents of revolutionary struggle, blurring divisions between subject and object, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman. It is a reimagining of ‘‘our relationship to the non-human as collaborative co-agent rather than as denied or backgrounded Other.’’Ω∂ ‘‘Comrade, mountain, tree, stone’’ summons a revolutionary community subject as an unbounded seriality organized by kasama relations, relations of co-being (kapwa) and accompaniment (sama) in a located land of struggle, where nature signifies for a revolutionary intelligence and is also a sentient force in the silent stillness of anticipatory time.

Revolutionary Time: Time without Measure Alongside its relation to death, the experience of divine sorrow can be distinguished from that of mythical sorrow by its relation to time. In the novel The Sorrow of War, written by a former North Vietnamese soldier Bao Ninh in the aftermath of a long, devastating war that ended in communist victory, time is permanently fragmented, violently broken into pieces that can never be put together again.Ω∑ I consider such permanently melancholic, asocial time the verso of the progressive, triumphant patriarchal time of the testimonio of the The Sorrows of People

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Sandinista Omar Cabezas, La Montaña es Algo Más que Una Inmensa Estepa Verde, written after the success of the Nicaraguan revolution.Ω∏ In The Sorrow of War, the future is closed and the past seems irretrievably beautiful. Sorrow is the human condition resulting from the very catastrophe of war that has permanently sundered time.Ωπ In contrast to both of these models of temporality, the sorrows of people that many songs of the unfinished Philippine revolution begin with bear the rhythm of protracted, expressive time, akin to what in Western classical music is coded as tempo rubato (stolen time), an expressive nuance in tempo that Je√rey Kallberg has linked to the nineteenth-century European musical expression of a messianic minor nationalism.Ω∫ This protracted, expressive time, which I hear at the beginning of sorrowful songs like ‘‘Luksampati,’’ is a time without measure or accents, a tempo which revolutionary cultural critics have disapprovingly described as malumanay, meaning slow and soft, said of a manner of speech that bears no stresses in pronunciation. It is a kind of time that can be experienced in the masses’ observed habit of altering and slowing down the march tempo of revolutionary songs (‘‘a song in 2/2 beat becomes 3/4 when sung by the masses’’).ΩΩ Undoubtedly criticizing this tendency, one cadre exclaims, ‘‘The singing should be fast, militant. Otherwise, it ends up sounding like the pasyon.’’∞≠≠ We might understand this stolen musical time in light of the absence of a fixed or measured meter in the psalmodic chanting of the pasyon, or Passion of Christ, the paradigmatic form of mourning in Filipino culture. Harking back to both an older time of idyllic freedom and a time of unrealized future possibility, the recitative laments of the pasyon are characterized by a monophonic melody and expressive rhythmic freedom conducive to the vocalization of grief and pity at the pain and su√ering of Christ, through which people mourned their own losses. The freedom from fixed meter and the absence of stresses in this musical genre, which exhibits extant strains of precolonial musical forms, conveys a kind of unlimited time, time beyond human measure, the time of divine judgment.∞≠∞ I am suggesting that the staying tendency in the masses’ singing, which I associate with tempo rubato, is not so much a performance of the pasyon as much as it is a movement toward this cosmic, epic time of divine sorrow when pity or mercy for the downtrodden will prevail. In this contrapuntal staying action with respect to the steadily progressive march of national transformation, a practice of dilating rationally regulated musical time, we witness a reaching for and enactment of that time beyond human measure, which is also instantiated in the pure 372

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language of the revolutionary wail and in the stillness of anticipation of immanent transformation. I hear in this musical duration and in the features of traditional laments pervasive in revolutionary songs the immeasurable time of want—a time of longing and hoping. This is also a feature of the kundiman, the musical genre of anticolonial Philippine revolutionary struggles in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, whose emotive themes and structures Teresita Maceda similarly traces to the influence of the pasyon.∞≠≤ This is not the time of triumphalist expectation of a quick and sudden victory that many of the added militant endings produce with the sudden upbeat, the aggressive rhythm of seizure of state power and military triumph. Rather it is a time close to the duration of ‘‘a long e√ort . . . O so slow, so slow it seems, / But not really as slow / As it takes a new sapling / To grow into a towering giant, / Or a mountain / To flatten, / Or a great sea / To narrow or widen / Or the comet / To traverse its full course, / Or the strength of the kingly sun / To finally grow dark.’’∞≠≥ What appears to create a drag on normative revolutionary time, which Susan Buck-Morss characterizes as one of continual overcoming and sacrifice of the present for the sake of a fully envisioned future, can be understood, on the contrary, as another kind of revolutionary time, one expressive of pure possibility, of a potentiality sundered from and sundering all existent and promised actuality.∞≠∂ Revolutionary time is the season of an otherworldly and human cultivation, the time of pure potentiality, the time of freedom. All time, including the past and the time of the dead, the place of an unforeseen future. Whence the immanence of change even in the moment when change would seem to be impossible: ‘‘Hope abides in hopelessness, / flowers grow among the graves; / failure holds the promise of victory.’’∞≠∑

I view the sorrows of people as part of the a√ective experiential labor of people’s survival and, more, of their living labor of hope in social struggle. By speaking in such terms, I mean to foreground the creative force that social experience plays in the production and reproduction of human life—its role in the work and calling of human survival that is also, on the other side, the exhilaration of human creativity and living beyond the ‘‘mere life’’ of survival. As we saw in chapter 8, laughter as a process of freeing sensual subjectivity is the other side of the dutiful The Sorrows of People

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trek toward freedom. The ‘‘people with nothing’’ therefore produce their lives not only with the raw materials of nature such as land and water—their means of life, which they are continually dispossessed of through war and capitalist development and which they struggle to reclaim—but also with the cultivated resources of their social practices of experiential and, in particular, a√ective labor. Abundant revolutionary imagery of tears mixed with sweat and blood watering the land, which the people do not own but labor over and harvest for others, evinces that this notion of a√ective labor is held by people themselves and, what is more, highlights its importance for revolutionary struggle. As a√ective labor, such sorrows are not merely part of the immaterial labor directly producing the new service-oriented industries of the global economy, including care industries, domestic work, and urban services. They are, in my view, also the first part of the production of life of a surplus people, the pool of human reserves who are the very condition of possibility of the formal labor in such industries. As feminists have argued about domestic work and other forms of feminized work, including the a√ective work of domestic care, sexual companionship, and ‘‘natural’’ mothering, such supplementary work is invisible labor that indirectly produces both surplus value and surplus power by creating the social conditions and life means (the laborer, bare life) for the realization of both. More than ‘‘a biopower from below,’’ the a√ective labor of sorrows contributes to the making of life beyond mere life, that is, life beyond the measure of biological existence, also known as spirit, that nothing tugging at one, which makes one pull toward the living, in the form of yearning.∞≠∏ Very importantly, then, such sorrows are also part of the production of the unfinished revolutionary movement, which, coded by the state as terrorist insurgency, provides immense human potential consumed by the global security industrial complex. Since 2001 that complex has increasingly proven its capacity to capitalize upon the political logic of sovereignty and by this means has sought to take control and gain dominance over, indeed, supersede, the postmodern global economy.∞≠π While the sorrows of people designate the everyday labor of su√ering of disposable people, which is a vital part of the work of their survival, divine sorrow designates the radical potential of such su√ering. Not unlike the otherworldly passion of diasporic labor, divine sorrow acts as an enlarged frame of experience for the living labor of sorrows of surplus people. Against a capitalist eschatology of reward and punishment, in which the promise of a better future galvanizes productive activity, the experience of divine sorrow calls into being 374

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another mode of credit, here in the form of debts to the dead, whose fulfillment is a matter of an order of justice that goes beyond rational materialist reward and punishment.∞≠∫ As a form of radical bereavement that suspends the law of merely human sovereignty, divine sorrow stays the hand of the destructive, mythical violence of terrorist, militarist power, for it dissolves the human social boundaries on which such power depends.∞≠Ω It is, I believe, what may have prevented the hyperrationality of the anti-infiltration campaigns from prevailing in all the other revolutionary zones, a fact eclipsed by the fast and easy equation of the anti-dpa campaigns with the terrible experiences of purging in other contexts, lumped together in the universal category of revolutionary terror. Indeed, if there is something to be noted about the Philippine revolutionary movement within the general history of leftist, liberation movements, it is the relative paucity of instances of this form of violence, which is held to be endemic to all revolutions. I attribute this less to the failure of the movement to seize state power and to the discipline of its forces than to the operation of the politics of divine sorrow. Gary Hawes poses a question that most theories of revolution, including his own, fail to answer: What enables peasants to risk life and all to wage a revolution?∞∞≠ While I do not pretend to o√er an adequate answer to this question, I believe that the relation to death opened up by divine sorrow and the ontological freedom it brings is one dimension of the radical historical experience that is the condition of possibility of revolution. It is indeed arguable that what is most threatening to the security state and may be considered the kernel of antagonism over which the state of exception is founded as a global rule is such radicalized relations to death that the biopolitical state has no power over and that therefore undermine its claims to sovereignty.∞∞∞ The threat of divine sorrow to state sovereignty can be gleaned from the function of torture, not only as a means of intelligence and a law-making display of mythical violence, but first and foremost as the process of severing the tortured from the larger context and community within which his or her su√ering might be understood or bear meaning, that is, from the broader su√ering and sorrow of people. Torture is not simply about the destruction of the personhood of a speaking subject; it is, more importantly, the practice of enforcing a zone of indistinction between life and death, which a≈rms sovereign power. To the extent that divine sorrow places the su√ering of the tortured within a zone of experience beyond the exercise of sovereign power, that is, in a context of su√erThe Sorrows of People

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ing that extends beyond the sovereign power’s political ontology, it is also what torture must sever the tortured from to secure the mythical power that is its ultimate end. If, as Elaine Scarry shows, torture converts everyday domestic objects into instruments of mythical violence, revolutionary struggle converts instances of everyday su√ering of this terror into divine sorrow.∞∞≤ If this su√ering is a mundane, ordinary experience, divine sorrow enjoins us to find insurgent communion and rage in that ordinariness. As the experience of resurrectionary potential, divine sorrow is the enabling frame for the enactment and creation of life beyond the beaten, private, individual bodily existence stripped of all human worth that it is the torturer’s aim to reduce his prisoner to, beyond, that is, the production of bare life—the condition of permanent expulsion from a polity, which is social death. If we see that bare life is also that to which capitalist exploitation tends to reduce labor, that is, a condition of absolute impoverishment, utter depletion, and nonvalue, a condition near death, then we may also be able to see that, as the experiential practice of creating surplus living life out of death and bare life, divine sorrow is a form of creative, revolutionary potential, a constituting power of freedom that is not exhausted by the forms of its actualization. Viewed from the side of reproduction, the very sphere of social life from which Agamben’s category of ‘‘bare life’’ (zoe) derives, we see the exercise of multiple forms of lifeproducing a√ective labor, diverse social-cultural capacities for generating life beyond mere life, indeed, in excess of the ‘‘merely reproductive life’’ the inclusive exclusion of which founds both sovereign power and capitalist value.∞∞≥ From this point of view, we might therefore also understand divine sorrow as a theoretical-political conceit for recognizing destroyed or denied immanent ontologies of personhood and sociality, that is, cultural forms of being and acting that produce the living who come to stand as bare life, even as in our time this cultural praxis disappears from prevailing ideas of politics.

The Sorrows of Peoples vs. Global Tragedy There is hope in the absence of hope —wilfredo gacosta

The conflation of closure and failure in the current global structure of feeling, which I spoke about earlier in terms of world tragedy, bars us from recogniz376

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ing that these a√ective practices and the cultures of sentiment they create have helped to produce our current conditions and, moreover, continue to exert their influence in the present in politically transmogrified forms. Elsewhere I have demonstrated how the structures of feeling fostered by revolutionary songs and literature in the form of the lament surfaced in street demonstrations as well as in informal and commercial circuits of urban culture like music, art, and film to generate and shape the popular energies animating the People Power revolt of 1986, the very revolt that ended up marginalizing the revolutionary movement.∞∞∂ Converted to mythical ends, the sorrows of people tragically came to the aid of the ‘‘insurgent masculine’’ sovereignty of the very military o≈cers who were the people’s torturers.∞∞∑ Depicted in action films made in the 1990s about the o≈cers who rose to national prominence as state ‘‘rebels’’ on the crest of popular feeling, such insurgent masculinity is the binary opposite of the pitiful femininity of the people, whose Christlike su√ering was the subject of numerous drama films made about martyred overseas Filipina workers during the same period. These figures took on leading roles in the political mourning play following the supposed restoration of democracy, an important contribution to the repertory of global political theater at century’s end. If, as Hayden White argues, ‘‘narrativity . . . is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality that we can imagine,’’ we can view the tragic world historical narrative at the end of the twentieth century as being founded on the belief in the triumph of global capitalism in the wake of the putative failure of revolutions everywhere.∞∞∏ In contrast, part of my purpose in this final chapter has been to try to keep open the meaning of ‘‘our age’’ by showing how an attention to a√ective practice in the Philippine revolutionary movement allows us to glean other makings of the conditions of our global present. In attending to the labor of sorrow, we are also able to consider a radical potentiality neither confined to nor exhausted by the ostensible political outcome of the revolution from which it emerged. As this unexhausted radical potentiality, divine sorrow serves as a counterpoint to the narrative law of global history, which mandates that the past should always meet closure at the point of its moral meaning for the present. Through the frame of divine sorrow we are able to view a form of practice and activity not entirely governed by the rational humanist logic and theologico-political ontology of dominant political formations and social movements. If the sorrows of people o√er a di√erent glimpse of The Sorrows of People

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reproductive labor more generally, divine sorrow o√ers an opening beyond the division between reproductive and productive activity, between disposable life and valuable life, between the human and the inhuman, and between life and death, on which all realist power and political possibility now depend. Divine sorrow is, in my thinking, a placeholder—a prayer, perhaps—for forms of political agency and notions of community beyond what our prevailing notions of politics, including the dominant politics of revolution, might allow us to recognize. Rather than a metaphysical state, it can be viewed as an embodied movement that can be linked to, though not equated with, Fanon’s notion of revolutionary violence, to the extent that it is an act of freedom from the longstanding humanist order bequeathed by colonialism, an act that is fully somatic as well as psychic and a√ective.∞∞π Perceiving divine sorrow as the constituting potentiality of freedom of the living labor of sorrows of people, we are able to consider the possibility that the era of revolutionary movements has not fully passed and that we are living with the inventions of this time, undercurrents of social experience and feeling that have continued to move beyond the dates of a widely assumed historical closure. If we were to consider this possibility, we might better understand what can appear, from the vantage point of an already changed world, only as the grueling and grotesque anachronisms of our time. Perhaps we might also discover cultural resources of the living past that continue to bear radical political potentials for unfinished imaginations of revolution in the present.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Achebe writes of this sense of anarchy in terms of the Igbo cultural world, ‘‘a world of continual struggle, motion and change.’’ Achebe, Home and Exile, 18. Reflecting on his first novel, he suggests that ‘‘the cosmological fear of anarchy that burdened the characters in my novel, and which W. B. Yeats somehow knew intuitively’’ was ‘‘the resonance of an immemorial anxiety’’ (19). While Achebe’s purpose is to restore this precolonial world of the Igbo people, the very intuitive connection he finds in Yeats is, I would argue, a universalizing, third worldist modern gesture. 2. Comaro√ and Comaro√, ‘‘Millennial Capitalism,’’ 292. 3. Feria, ‘‘The Third World.’’ 4. San Juan, The Philippine Temptation, 22. 5. Jameson, Postmodernism, 62. 6. Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, 159. 7. Althusser, ‘‘Ideological and Repressive State Appratuses.’’ 8. Dalla Costa and James, ‘‘Women and the Subversion of Community’’; Delphy, Close to Home; Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction; Kuhn and Wolpe, eds., Feminism and Materialism; Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. 9. Negri, ‘‘Twenty Theses on Marx,’’ 140. 10. See note 8 of this chapter. Also see Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism; Constantino, Neocolonialism and Counter-Consciousness; Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders; Nandy, The Intimate Enemy; and Robinson, Black Marxism. For recent Marxist revisions of Marx’s theory of value along these lines, see Negri, The Time of Revolution, and Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude. 11. Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital; Ferguson, ‘‘On Conceiving Motherhood

and Sexuality’’; and Spivak, ‘‘Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value.’’ Also see the authors and works in note 8 of this chapter. 12. Shiva, Earth Democracy. 13. Harding, ed., Feminist Standpoint Theory. 14. Shiva, Earth Democracy, 91. 15. See Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. 16. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 97. 17. Greenblatt, ‘‘The Touch of the Real.’’ 18. See Anjali Arondekar for another perspective on this interdisciplinary tra≈cking in archives. 19. Deleuze, ‘‘Literature and Life,’’ 225. 20. My intention is not to strive for the ‘‘ethnographic realism’’ aimed at by the new historicists, with its objective of being adequate to some ‘‘lived life, at once raw and subtle, coarse and complex.’’ Greenblatt, ‘‘The Touch of the Real.’’ Although I do attempt to conjure social contexts that are in some measure real or out there in the world beyond the text, I also participate in a political fabulation that does not have the adequation of a lived reality as its objectivity, but rather the interpretation of possible becomings—immanent futures—in both past and present contexts. 21. Sylvia Wynter in Scott, ‘‘The Re-Enchantment of Humanism,’’ 207. 22. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 13. 23. Quoted in Scott, ‘‘The Re-Enchantment of Humanism,’’ 160. 24. Ibid. 25. Lubiano, ‘‘What’s Pomo Got to Do With It?’’ 26.

Dussel, Ethics and Community, 202.

27. Quoted in O’Hanloe, ‘‘Recovering the Subject,’’ 111. Chapter One Prostituted Filipinas and the Crisis of Philippine Culture 1. Sturdevant and Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll, 326. 2. Sexual Economies in the Asia-Pacific,’’ in Dirlik, ed., What’s in a Rim?, and my FantasyProduction. There is no room here to discuss the misogynist, homophobic, and racist construction of ‘‘female’’ sex as ‘‘Little Brown Fucking Machines’’ and the infanticidal eroticism inherent in the logic of this fantasy. For a discussion of the sexual fantasies produced by and impelling sex tourism, see Bishop and Robinson, Night Market. 3. The joke puts a piece of sarcasm into circulation, which, through the work of selfdeprecation, realizes a rival masculine subject. 4. Heng and Devan, ‘‘State Fatherhood,’’ in Nationalisms and Sexualities, 343. Moreover, ‘‘the figure of threat, auguring economic and social disintegration, dismantling the foundations of culture, undermining, indeed, the very possibility of a recognizable future, is always, and unerringly, feminine’’ (356).

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5. Constantino, Insight and Foresight, 113. 6. See my ‘‘Domestic Bodies of the Philippines,’’ and also chapter 3 in my FantasyProduction. 7. See Atkinson and Errington, eds., Power and Di√erence. 8. For a history of the collaboration of these international multilateral agencies, specifically the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and local transnationalist classes in the economic restructuring of the Philippines through development policies, see Broad, Unequal Alliance. 9. Cynthia Enloe notes, for example, how the entire military-patronized prostitution industry can function only ‘‘if thousands of Asian women are willing and able to learn what American military men rely on to bolster their sense of masculinity . . . [and] to be alert to the di√erences among masculinities.’’ ‘‘It Takes Two.’’ 10. For an account of Japan’s economic supremacy, see ‘‘The Japanese Ascendancy,’’ part 2 in Bello, People and Power in the Pacific, 83–111. Aside from bolstering tourism and tourism-related industries, including the international civil and military aviation industrial complex, the prostitution industry fueled by Filipinas services the ‘‘domestic needs’’ of the internationally rotated managerial sta√ of multinational finance and industrial capital. ‘‘For corporations employing a highly mobile male work force, the availability of sexual and household-related services helps reduce the costs of maintenance of needed labour power traditionally provided through family relations.’’ Truong, Sex, Money and Morality, 128. 11. Personal testimonies of prostituted Filipinas reveal many of these personal strategies as well as the e√orts made to adopt the required technologies of sexual services. Among the coping strategies, drinking and drug use are very common, as is the sense of providing for children whose future lives are viewed as redemptive ends to what many painfully experience as a sinful life. See, for example, Sturdevant and Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll. 12. Surin, ‘‘ ‘The Continued Relevance of Marxism,’ ’’ 42–47. 13. Ibid., 46. 14. As well as fitting easily into the categories of nontraditional commodities and semiprocessed products whose processing is completed at the capital-intensive end of the global commodity chain. This explanatory account is suggested in the term used to refer to the tra≈c in Filipinas as sex workers, sex slaves, domestic helpers, mail-order brides: ‘‘warm-body export.’’ 15. Sometimes patriarchal practices take on the universal, totalized appearance of capitalism itself. E.g., ‘‘Capitalism uses patriarchy, and patriarchy is defined by the needs of capital.’’ Zillah Eisenstein quoted in Truong, Sex, Money and Morality, 59. 16. Eviota, The Political Economy of Gender. Dolores Stephens Feria, on the other hand, discusses the way in which colonial power is dependent on an already entrenched gender system: ‘‘A colonial invasion . . . must be an impregnable realm of men’s space in

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order to perpetuate itself.’’ The Long Stag Party, 3. These two positions might be said to characterize two major feminist strains in the Philippines: the first views the oppression of women as the result of the capitalization of traditional gender processes; the second views the oppression of women as the product of patriarchal ideology which is completely independent from capitalism even if it might collaborate with it. 17. Eviota, The Political Economy of Gender, 116. Some of the reservations I have already expressed in regard to analysis such as Eviota apply as well to the concept of ‘‘the sexual division of labor,’’ which combines the categories of gender and labor without transforming either in any substantial way and which in fact assimilates gender as a variable of the division of labor. See Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism; Mies, Patriarchy and Capitalist Accumulation; and Mies et al., Women. 18. What Jean-Jacques Goux elaborates as the isomorphism of the subject and the commodity form and their respective logics and narratives of development seems to me to be a fantasy construction e√ect of shared and interrelated, rather than identical, symbolic processes. The perfect homology drawn by Goux not only realizes the universal mode of symbolizing (the logic of general equivalence, in representation) to which he attributes this isomorphism by ignoring the specific use values of the concepts and structures of these theories (of the subject, of value) which he yokes in almost violent fashion (with his writing as the vanishing mediator), but he thereby disables an investigation of the relations between their elements and operations. Spivak expresses similar reservations about Goux’s analysis: ‘‘No doubt there are general morphological similarities between centralized sign-formations. But in order to see in those similarities the structural essence of the formations thus analogized, it is necessary to exclude the fields of force that make them heterogeneous, indeed discontinuous. . . . It is to exclude those relationships between the ego/phallus and money that are attributive and supportive and not analogical.’’ In Other Worlds, 156. I might add that while both forms are posited to be commanded by the same process, it is the genesis of the money form that prevails as the paradigm for this process: ‘‘The type of historical structuration illustrated in the genesis of the money form is not simply one type among many; it is the trajectory of historical structuration itself—in other words, history itself.’’ Goux, Symbolic Economies, 41. Perhaps the morphological similarities between the subject and the commodity should indicate the intercourse of their constitutive structures and operations rather than the identity of an originary symbolizing logic, which takes on an ontological status. 19. Irigaray, ‘‘Women on the Market,’’ 170–91. 20. Ibid., 173. 21. ‘‘The economy of exchange—of desire—is man’s business.’’ Ibid., 177. In making this argument, Irigaray maintains a stable analogy between women and commodities, rather than demonstrating a more mobile operation of the categories of femininity and the feminine (categories which are not fully circumscribed by ‘‘women’’). The analogy

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is carefully and consistently pursued to the point that the absolute dichotomy of gender di√erence makes for a categorically polar distinction between labor and commodity. Impelled by this analogizing imperative, Irigaray can regard labor as only the activity of men, the producer subjects, and commodities as women, the product of that masculine activity—‘‘commodity-objects that ensured the circulation of exchange without participating in it as subjects’’ (174). 22. Marx, ‘‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1857–58.’’ 23. Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, quoted in Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 121. 24. Quoted in Truong, Sex, Money and Morality, 31. 25. Marx, ‘‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 1857–58,’’ 382. 26. In this heterosexist masculinist formulation, to be ‘‘used’’ by a masculine agency is to be emasculated to the extent that masculinity is defined as agency over ‘‘natural’’ feminine objects. 27. Ibid., 202. 28. Ibid., 222–23. 29. Labor ‘‘posits itself as an insubstantial, merely necessitous labour capacity in face of this reality alienated from it, a reality not belonging to it but to others.’’ Ibid., 382. 30. Ibid., 381. This detachment of value takes the form of the (in)di√erence of the phallus, the symbol of the exchange value of women, the mediator of their exchange. The phallic standard shows its tendency toward absolute proximity to money: ‘‘In order to realise the commodity at a stroke as exchange value and to give it the general e√ect of exchange value . . . It must be exchanged for a third thing which is not itself a particular commodity but the symbol of the commodity as commodity, of the commodity’s exchange value itself. . . . (Such a symbol presupposes general recognition; it can only be a social symbol; in fact, it only expresses a social relationship.) . . . This symbol, this material sign of exchange value, is a product of exchange itself, not the execution of a preconceived idea. (In fact, the commodity which serves as the mediator of exchange is only transformed into money; into a symbol gradually. As soon as that has happened, a symbol of the mediating commodity can in turn replace the commodity itself. It now becomes the conscious token of exchange value.)’’ Ibid., 82. The phallus becomes this conscious token in the early twentieth century through psychoanalysis, but it was a symbol that came to coincide with money inasmuch as both labor and capital were dominated by men and moreover, as capital expanded through military means. 31. Ibid., 383. 32. Ibid., 381. 33. The imperative to distance it from allegedly nonproductive activities is shaped by gendered and sexual systems of value. We can see the imperative to disavow nonproductive activities as the result of male workers’ revolts against their perceived emascu-

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lation—that is, what they experience as their feminization, their being-for-someone. In e√ect, masculine privilege is conceded by capital as a measure of containment of the male working classes. In this way, the feminine dimension of labor as a mere (corporeal) being for capital is increasingly displaced onto and exacted from female and (feminized) child workers. See Andrew Parker for a discussion of Marx’s repulsion for theater as the paradigm of nonproductive acts. 34. Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction. See also Mies, Patriarchy and the Accumulation on a World Scale, and Dalla Costa and James, ‘‘Women and the Subversion of Community.’’ 35. Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction, 9. 36. Ibid., 55. As Fortunati correctly observes, economists are mistaken in their assumption that the only commodity circulating in the labor market is labor power as capacity for production. 37. Marx, ‘‘Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58,’’ 202. 38. Rubin, ‘‘The Tra≈c in Women,’’ 175. 39. Marx, ‘‘Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58,’’ 84. 40. Ryan, ‘‘Epilogue,’’ 191. 41. ‘‘The only thing distinct from objectified labour is non-objectified labour, labour still objectifying itself, labour as subjectivity.’’ Marx, ‘‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1857–58,’’ 202. Cf. ‘‘[labor] is converted from the form of activity and fixed, materialised, into that of object, of rest; as change of object, it changes its own form and from activity becomes being’’ (226). 42. This notion of historical experience can be likened to the Deleuzian notion of sense: ‘‘It does not exist outside the proposition which expresses it; what is expressed does not exist outside its expression.’’ Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 21. Experience is, in this sense, an event—‘‘the boundary between propositions and things’’ (22). 43. Garcia, ‘‘Pina, Pina, Saan Ka Pupunta?’’ 107–23. References to this text are my translation. 44. The home is invoked for the worker as the space of being oneself, that is, where the worker is not estranged from his body. Sexual intercourse thus assumes the role of a spontaneous activity, an activity in which the worker regains his self, the loss of which becomes embodied in the woman who occupies the domestic sphere, from which he is as labor separated. In heterosexist-configured production (with what Irigaray calls hom(m)o-sexuality as the regime of relations of production, wherein capital is the sublimation of male labor), male sexuality is alienated as a female object. The relation of labor to the act of production within the labor process is ‘‘the relation of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as su√ering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the worker’s own physical and mental energy, his personal life or what is life other than activity—as an activity which is turned against him, neither depends on nor belongs to him.’’ Karl Marx, ‘‘Eco-

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nomic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,’’ 74–75. Opposed to labor, ‘‘recreation’’ (for example, in military R&R) turns sexual activity into aggression: ‘‘begetting’’ is virilescent, masculinizing. Since work is an emasculating activity turned against the male worker, configured as that which does not belong to him, activities defined against work, such as private sexual pleasures, become avenues of aggression. The violence against women has to be viewed in light of this. As domestic skills are feminized, women are feminized through domestic skills. In other words, as the household becomes the sphere in and against which masculinist labor is produced (the spheres of capital), the activities that pertain to it are made to pertain to women. It is these activities that help to make the category of the feminine. Femininity is itself produced through these practices of feminization, a process defined as much by its product as by its presupposition. Such practices make women into domestic machines, apparatuses serving only auxiliary functions in production. Women are produced as auxiliary bodies, with auxiliary skills, trained by other women for piecework and light, delicate tasks involving food, clothing, shelter. In producing the home, they produce themselves and each other. It is these subsistence practices which women engage in to produce the home that constitute the Filipina—it is this activity that constitutes her being. As the objectification of her domestic activity, the Filipina body resembles the character of her home, which can be subcontracted by foreign clients when extended to the public sector. See Sobritchea, ‘‘The Ideology of Female Domesticity,’’ 26–41. 45. Spivak, In Other Worlds, 343. 46. Stolzfus and Sturdevant, Let The Good Times Roll, 314. See also Truong, Sex, Money and Morality, for a comprehensive history of this development. 47. Marx, ‘‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 1857–58,’’ 104. See also Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production. 48. A number of works deal with the concept of loob. Leonardo N. Mercado has written a philosophy of Filipino being in which this concept is fundamental, arguing that loob is an aspect of self as well as a source and means of power. See The Filipino Mind and Elements of Filipino Philosophy. For the use of ‘‘loob’’ in historical analyses, see Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, and Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution. 49. ‘‘Syncretism here is the indistinction between me and the other, a confusion at the core of a situation that is common to us both. After that the objectification of the body intervenes to establish a sort of wall between me and the other: a partition.’’ MerleauPonty, ‘‘The Child’s Relations with Others,’’ in The Primacy of Perception, 120. This latter process can be seen in the making of Pina as the part(ing) of Looban. 50. It is on this view that in adults, syncretism is pathological. Disorders in cenesthesia, for example, can be understood as ‘‘a sort of ‘syncretism’ that intervenes in [the subject’s] relations with others and causes alien voices to inhabit his own body. . . . The patient, says Wallon, has the impression of being ‘without boundaries’ in relation to the other,

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and this is what makes his acts, his speech, and his thoughts appear to him to belong to others or to be imposed by others.’’ Ibid., 134. 51. Enriquez, From Colonial to Liberation Psychology, 44. While Enriquez mentions the exogamous orientation of Filipino subjectivity and in doing so alludes to the centuries of colonialism which cultivated this ‘‘xenocentrism,’’ he discusses neither the historical nor the gendered di√erentiation in the operation of kapwa, but instead discusses it as the core value of Filipino being. However, his expostulation of the Filipino subjective apparatus in contradistinction to the Western subject points to the resistance of the former to processes of Western modernization. Rather than viewing this subjective infrastructure founded on kapwa as underdeveloped or incompletely developed in relation to the Western modern subject, we might instead view it as the creative persistence of and reinvention of psychic structures which were replaced or destroyed by the modern subjectification processes carried out in colonial and capitalist spheres of production. See Enriquez, Herrera, and Tubayan, Ang Sikolohiyang Malaya sa Panahon ng Krisis; Enriquez and Protacio-Marcelino, Neo-Colonial Politics and Language Struggle in the Philippines; Enriquez, Filipino Psychology in the Third World. 52. The development of this syncretic sociability of kapwa in, by, and among women through emulation is fundamental to this new mode of production. ‘‘Females emulate each other, which reinforces the value [of feminine skills], and contributes much to the maintenance of the female child labor supply in the market.’’ Rosario, ‘‘The Urgent Need for a Gender Analysis of Child Labor,’’ 10. This system of production of females in turn shapes the constitution of labor power in flexible production: ‘‘With subcontracting, many more girls than boys are immediately drawn into the world of work right there in their homes, or in small-garments workplaces where, most likely, their mothers and other female kin are also working’’ (11). The concept of emulation doesn’t, however, recognize the fact of women desiring, not just desiring to be like, other women. 53. It is on this account that the men in Looban put themselves at the lower end of a continuum with Sammy, resentfully understanding that they were passed over by Pina because her ambitions were set ‘‘so much higher.’’ They identify, in other words, with capital and must therefore see themselves in a position of lack. 54. Lumbera, ‘‘The Nationalist Struggle and the Filipino Writer,’’ and Rafael, White Love. 55. This conversion is made according to the logic of surrogacy and filiation, the Oedipal logic, the logic of imperialism, which is played out in the structures of spectacularity, the structures of capital, and which hence reaches into individual relations. 56. Nora Aunor is known for her portrayal of maids and poor women. Her stardom is produced therefore not only by the loving gaze of these women but also by their very lives. In fact, Nora Aunor’s flagging career recently received a boost when she portrayed Flor Contemplacion, the overseas domestic worker whose execution by hang-

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ing by the Singaporean government in March 1995 led to massive nationwide rallies of indignation and protest. For a discussion of Nora Aunor’s star power and its relation to globalization, see chapter 6 of my Fantasy-Production. 57. ‘‘Mula Sa Awtor’’ (From the Author), in Garcia, Sandaang Damit at Iba Pang Maikling Kuwento, xiii. 58. Ibid. 59. This attempt to get closer to other women and their lives is a recurrent theme in Garcia’s work. In ‘‘Alamat ng Sapang Bato,’’ a social worker tries to bridge a class and age gap by befriending an old woman squatter, and in ‘‘Arrivederci,’’ the main character tries to befriend a domestic helper. In both of these stories, the attempts to close the gaps between women fail. 60. This distancing of lesbian desire demonstrated in the submerging of other sexual desires (in the figure of Carmen) is evident also in Garcia’s story ‘‘Arrivederci,’’ in which the possibility of an emotional, desiring relation between the two female characters which goes beyond the avowed emulating relation emerges only as a teasing remark. Here the distancing of lesbian desire is realized through its presencing and containment elsewhere, that is, in the ‘‘married couple’’ (mag-asawa), the lesbian couple who circulate and hover about in the story but who play no active role in propelling the plot. 61. For a discussion of the gendered dynamics of this revolt, see chapter 5 in my FantasyProduction. 62. In a country dominated by the Catholic Church, where women have few legal reproductive rights (abortion is criminalized), where divorce is illegal while concubinage is legitimate, this act can be considered subversive. For an overview of the status of women’s reproductive rights, see Macagba-Tadiar, ‘‘Population and Reproductive Rights,’’ 114–26. 63. See Scott, ‘‘The Evidence of Experience.’’ 64. While the theoretical perspective it o√ers is likely to find concurring support in testimonies of working prostitutes and prostituted women (I will give one example below), it certainly does not represent their particular viewpoints. I want to underscore that I am arguing for a view of the experiential activity which constitutes Philippine prostitution, which to me means cultural, subjective practices of prostituted Filipinas, including but not exclusively confined to the practices of professional sex workers. In this way I am writing against an essentialist understanding of prostitution as the activity and business of sex workers or as the sex work practices that take place in the relation of economic exchange between sex worker and client. 65. Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, 31, 40. 66. ‘‘Sex Workers Now a Silent Economic Force—ilo,’’ Philippine Daily Inquirer, 19 August 1998, 1. As Aida Santos points out, ‘‘The ones who least benefit economically

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from prostitution are the women and children themselves,’’ Letter to the Editor, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 27 August 1998. 67. Linda, a sex worker, narrates how she tried to kill her philandering, money-squandering husband. After kicking him out of her household she became very ill but, with her mother’s encouragement, willed herself back to health. ‘‘I thought about becoming strong. My money went for medicine. I ate bananas and drank lots of milk. I imagined having a beautiful life—that I was rich. I thought about going to a di√erent place that was happy.’’ Upon recovering her health, Linda entered the industry through waitressing, and in this way supported her five children on her own. Quoted in Sturdevant and Stolzfus, Let the Good Times Roll, 146 n. 1. My point here is not to refute the violent conditions of coercion that sex workers experience which have led Filipina feminists to call them prostituted women rather than prostitutes, to emphasize the forcedness of their choices. It is, rather, to break with the opposition between forced versus chosen prostitution, which divides third world and first world approaches to sex work. As we will see in the next two chapters, by ‘‘will’’ and ‘‘desire’’ I mean to indicate subjective acts that exceed the volitional notion implied in sovereign subjectivity. 68. Quoted in Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, 69. Chapter Two Women Alone Chapter epigraph: Joaquin, ‘‘Foreword,’’ women, Filipina 1. 1. Barrios, Ang Pagiging Babae ay Pamumuhay sa Panahon ng Digma (To Be a Woman Is to Live in a Time of War). Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations of Barrios’s poems are from this work. 2. Cuyugan, Forbidden Fruit, ed. Tina Cuyugan. Originally published in Diyaryo Filipino (1991). 3. Werholf in Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen, and Werlhof, Women. Although this characteristic of feminine being is understood to have become generalized under conditions of postindustrial capitalism, such that ‘‘time becomes the fabric of the whole of being, because all of being is implicated in the web of the relations of production: being is equal to product of labour: temporal being ’’ (Negri, Time for Revolution, 34), I will argue in the next chapter that this generalization obeys what I analyzed in the previous chapter as the operation of sexual indi√erence (and, as I will argue further, of racial dispossession) constitutive of the category of global labor as viewed from the side of capital. 4. Dayrit, ‘‘Unfinished Story,’’ 75. Originally published in Focus Philippines (1979). 5. As labor commodities, women’s bodies are indeed the realization of a specific amount of labor time. The proximity of time and body can be seen in the specific age group of preferred female labor (eighteen to twenty-five years old) in the manufacturing industries as well as in other sectors. See Eviota, The Political Economy of Gender, 120. As

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commodities, women have expiration dates, determined by the decrease in their attractiveness and productivity (often this is dictated by bodily capacity, such as when garment workers go blind or lose the agility of their fingers). 6. Irigaray, ‘‘Women on the Market,’’ 191. 7. In Tagalog, the third person pronoun is ungendered, as are all pronouns, along with many other words whose equivalents in English are gendered. This is what enables the indeterminacy of Sandali’s gender. 8. Cuyugan, Forbidden Fruit. See my review, Tadiar, ‘‘The Quest for the Erotic.’’ 9. I use ‘‘being’’ here in the sense that Salazar uses ginhawa, which he defines as both life and the base of one’s a√ective and sense relations with others, having to do with notions of ‘‘ ‘rest,’ ‘breath,’ ‘stomach,’ ‘heart,’ even ‘food’ which is necessary for life.’’ Salazar, ‘‘Ang Kamalayan at Kaluluwa,’’ 90. 10. Bachelard describes the modern subject’s psyche in terms of the structure of the house, with the attic and the cellar symbolizing the respective rooms of ‘‘consciousness’’ and ‘‘the unconscious.’’ Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. 11. See ‘‘ ‘People Power’: Miraculous Revolt,’’ in my Fantasy-Production. 12. Maranan, ‘‘Do Women Really Hold up Half the Sky?’’ See also de Dios, ‘‘Participation of Women’s Groups in the Anti-Dictatorship Struggle.’’ 13. Santiago, Sa Ngalan ng Ina, 185. 14. In her keynote address at the National Women’s Congress in 1980, sponsored by the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women, Imelda Marcos declared, ‘‘At no time in our nation’s history has there been a more critical need to harness the creative potentials of over half of the total Philippine population in the development process.’’ Proceedings of the National Women’s Congress, Sponsored by the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women, Philippine International Convention Center, 4–5 January 1980. This movement was shaped by presidential decrees and provisions for the encouragement of women’s greater participation in the labor market, such as Letter of Instructions No. 1066: ‘‘Targets and Strategies for the Full Participation of Women in Socio-Economic Development (1980–1985)’’ and ‘‘Update Philippine Development Plan, 1984–1987,’’ in The Women’s Decade in the Philippines, 54. 15. See my ‘‘The Heretical Power of Nora Aunor’s Himala [Miracle],’’ in FantasyProduction. 16. Imelda Marcos notes, in the same speech cited above, women’s ‘‘prior leadership in the family,’’ which is ‘‘full of di≈culties for it is often obstructed, harassed and cramped by tradition’’ (61–62). 17. See McCallus, ‘‘The Myths of the New Filipino.’’ 18. Maranan, ‘‘Do Women Really Hold Up Half the Sky?’’ makibaka identified the authorities oppressing women as political, clan, religious, and male (50). See de Dios, ‘‘Participation of Women’s Groups in the Anti-Dictatorship Struggle’’; Lanot, ‘‘The

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Women’s Movement Perennially Caught in the Pangs of Birth,’’ 44–47; Angeles, ‘‘Women’s Roles and Status in the Philippines.’’ 19. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism. 20. Virgilio Almario observes that the Tagalog word for freedom, kalayaan, first emerged out of the Propagandists’ attempts to translate the Spanish libertad. It also emerged in translated versions of the ‘‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,’’ which came out in 1891–92, demonstrating the well-known influence of the ideals of the French Revolution on the anticolonial Filipino Revolution against Spain in 1896. Tradisyon at Wikang Filipino, 22–24. 21. Santiago, ‘‘The Filipina as Metaphor for Crisis.’’ 22. In Filipino, there is no distinction between ‘‘female’’ and ‘‘woman’’ or ‘‘girl.’’ Babae stands for female sex of any species as well as for female-gendered persons of any age. Like ‘‘female,’’ it is at once an adjective and a substantive. 23. Barrios, Ang Pagiging Babae ay Pamumuhay sa Panahon ng Digma. 24. Much of the discourse of women and development talks about expanding women’s roles or women venturing outside of traditional roles, etc. Marcos’s program for a New Society (Bagong Lipunan) promoted a sociological notion of society as a gathering (lipunan) of citizens. While many feminists used bayan (community, nation) to frame the relations of individuals to each other, they also subscribed to the ideal of civil society composed of egalitarian subjects. 25. The poet Marra PL. Lanot recalls that one of the motivations for founding Women Writers in Media Now (women) in 1981, which published the first anthology of women’s writing, was ‘‘to help liberate women through conscienticizing the readers (both women and men) on women issues which could be connected to other political or national concerns.’’ Quoted in Quesada, ‘‘Women Artists No More in Whispers,’’ 31–32. 26. See, for example, Angeles, ‘‘Women’s Roles and Status in the Philippines.’’ 27. Mabanglo, Mga Liham ni Pinay, 25. Unless otherwise indicated, all English translations of poems from this text are mine. Santiago identifies thes poem as Mabanglo’s feminist turn. 28. Lanot, ‘‘Babae Kami,’’ in women, Filipina 1, 12. My translation. This was the first women’s anthology to come out in print. The editors, including Lanot, were founders of Women Writers in Media Now. 29. Zapanta-Manlapaz, Filipino Women Writers in English, 120–24. 30. Santos, ‘‘Ang Panitikan ng Kababaihan at Ang Rebisyon ng Pambansang Panitikan,’’ 459–60. My translation. 31. By the mid-1980s, a great number of women’s and feminist groups emerged on the political scene, responding to a wide range of issues through the interpretative construct of babae. Lanot, ‘‘Babae Kami.’’

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32. Cf. Gramsci’s notion of moment, which is ‘‘used in a sense that combines the temporal ‘moment of time’ with the ideas of ‘aspect’ or ‘feature,’ and of ‘motive force.’ ’’ Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 388. 33. De Dios, ‘‘Participation of Women’s Groups in the Anti-Dictatorship Struggle.’’ De Dios sees this as occurring between 1978 and 1983 and names this period ‘‘Worsening Economic Conditions, Increasing Degradation of the Filipina’’ (156). See also Maranan, ‘‘Woman’s Fate in the Last Year of the Decade of Women,’’ 41–44. 34. Women’s refusal to be ‘‘defined’’ as babae through the sexualized conditions of their work is manifest in the numerous strikes waged by workers in the female-laborintensive export processing zones implemented by the Marcos regime. The systemic violence (murder, imprisonment) meeting women’s liberative e√orts against the exploitation of their pagkababae in practices of sexual violation and harassment institutionalized in ‘‘lay down or get laid o√ ’’ and ‘‘virginity test’’ policies demonstrates that the process of alienation undergone by women was not a naturally unfolding stage in the developmental process. 35. Santos, ‘‘Ang Panitikan ng Kababaihan at Ang Rebisyon ng Pambansang Panitikan.’’ 36. In a recently published Greek dictionary, the Greek word for ‘‘Filipina,’’ ‘‘Filipineza,’’ ‘‘a woman,’’ is defined as ‘‘a woman from the Philippines, but also a domestic worker from the Philippines; or a person who performs nonessential auxiliary tasks.’’ Quoted in de Guzman, ‘‘Testimonial Narratives.’’ 37. Marx, ‘‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,’’ 81. Let me clarify the way in which I understand the ‘‘theoretical’’ character of literary works with respect to the ‘‘everyday life’’ it takes as its subject. Far from the construal that literary works are, in this project, standing in for real poeple—that is, symbolically and politically representing real women—literary works instantiate socially shared forms of mediation (ways of experience) in their attempt to a√ect and e√ect, that is, call into activity and being, their subject. Writing, as Gilles Deleuze claims, ‘‘is the task of the fabulating function to invent a people.’’ The experience these works present as their contents are the objectifications of processes of mediation culled (abstracted) from life modes at work in the world. In this way, literary works produce the subjects for whom such objectified products become livable, if not lived, experiences. As Marx writes, ‘‘Production therefore produces not only an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.’’ Collected Works, 28:30. 38. I use ‘‘curdling’’ in the sense elaborated by Lugones, ‘‘Purity, Impurity, and Separation,’’ 458–79. 39. The ‘‘husband-wife’’ couple in the group thus serves as the hovering reference point for understanding the test-limit of what Vicky might want from Nelly. The insinuation of a lesbian relationship comes at the end of and as alternative to equally plausible possibilities of their relationship (mother-child, sisters, cousins . . . or . . . ). While Garcia

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chooses to narratively follow Nelly’s trajectory, she does so in an ironic way, highlighting Nelly’s self-importance and self-centeredness. She also sets up the ‘‘husband-wife’’ couple, Berna and Didith, as a desirable possibility by showing the collective acceptance and celebration of their relationship as they are selected to win the ultimate award of Most Romantic Couple in the popularity contest held during the excursion. 40. ‘‘The magical moment of fetish formation in this process is the transition of the general form into a universal form, its modal shift from existence and possiblility to necessity— the mysterious transubstantiation of common social practices into custom or law sanctioned by the community as a whole. . . . Arising as the real representation of material social relations, these exist as material objects; they are fetishes insofar as they have become necessary functional parts that are privileged command-control points of a working system of social reproduction. This process is not only material but dialectical: these causally e√ective representational forms are ‘universals’ that incorporate (i.e., that become the practical substance—the unity—of) the particular social processes that produce them and which they thereby alter.’’ Pietz, ‘‘Fetishism and Materialism,’’ 147. Babae is such a causally e√ective representational form and material object. 41. Dussel, Ethics and Community, 83. 42. ‘‘Capital usurps not only free time, but also that part of necessary reproduction work time that appears as non-work time.’’ Fortunati shows how within the process of reproduction, one part ‘‘that related to the production and consumption of nonmaterial use-values—seems to disappear.’’ This ‘‘underdevelopment of reproduction’’ is the way in which capital seeks to increase surplus labor time without lengthening the workday. Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction, 159–62. Needless to say, Fortunati is writing about tendencies within advanced capitalist societies, as many feminists involved in the ‘‘domestic debates’’ in the 1970s were. See, for example, Dalla Costa and James, ‘‘Women and the Subversion of Community.’’ In postcolonial societies such as the Philippines, where industrialization never took hold on the same scale, women’s work and continuing older forms of colonial and deproletarianized labor were very much intertwined with, rather than separated from, waged labor. 43. Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction, 161. Time is the general nonmaterial use value produced by waged domestic work. Its specific, concrete forms include bodily and a√ective care, domestic comfort and (sometimes sexual) pleasure, and companionship. 44. For an account of the time-discipline regimes of the home workplace, see Constable, ‘‘Filipina Workers in Hong Kong Homes.’’ 45. See Medina Jr., ‘‘Literary Tradition and Social Change’’; Almario, Balagtasismo Versus Modernismo; and Lumbera, Revaluations. 46. This masculinist subjectivity is itself the product of colonial mimicry. See Bhabha, ‘‘Of Mimicry and Man.’’ Abadilla is credited with ‘‘thrusting Tagalog poetry into the main-

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stream of contemporary world poetry by employing themes usually found in industrialized societies (loneliness, alienation, the salvific function of art in contemporary society, etc.) in free verse that he was the first to borrow from the West.’’ Lumbera, Revaluations, 62. This masculinist subjectivity is itself produced out of rebellion against what, in the face of the virility of the modern, industrialized cultures of the imperialist powers, appeared to be an emasculated and emasculating ‘‘tradition’’ of romantic verses (defined as ‘‘Balagtasismo’’). Created during the period of Spanish colonialism and revived in the early part of U.S. colonialism, this romantic style is seen to survive in vernacular literature. As a residual, even recidivist, strain, it is viewed by some as an obstacle to both literary progress and political progressivism. ‘‘Napakalalim ng ugat ng tradisyong romantiko sa puso at kaluluwa ng Ilokano. Ito marahil ang dahilan kung bakit hanggang sa kasalukuyan ay tila nahuhuli sa pag-unlad ang panulang Ilokano. Kaya hindi lubos na nakaimpluwensiya ang modernismo sa tulang Ilokano.’’ Beltran, ‘‘Ang Tulang Iloko sa Panahon ng Sigwa,’’ 221. 47. ‘‘Sa ganito nagtutunggali ang paningin at estratehiya sa pagtula at nangyayari na ngayon ito dahil aktibo nang nakalalahok ang kababaihan sa paghubog ng mga kahulugan.’’ Santiago, Sa ‘Ngalan ng Ina, 64. 48. Santiago, Sa ‘Ngalan ng Ina, 144. Barrios’s own reflections on poetry support this view. ‘‘Ang husay ng sino mang manunulat ay nasusukat sa pamamagitan ng kanyang kakanyahang umangkop sa pangangailangang ng kanyang lipunan at umigpaw sa mga limitasyon ng kanyang panahon.’’ Barrios, ‘‘May Himagsik sa Halakhak,’’ 369. 49. The gendering of maybahay as babae demonstrates the equivalence between woman and house, and its opposition to tao, gendered as male. ‘‘Lumilitaw na ang maybahay na may-ari at tagapangasiwa ng bahay ay wala pang kaganapan ng personalidad para maituring na ‘tao’ . . . Sa tao (lalaki) nakaukol ang tanging karapatang [magpasya kung ano ang maari at hindi maari sa isang bahay]. At hindi man sabihin, ang babae ay maybahay sa katuringang siya ang ‘tumatao ’ at may kinalaman sa pagtunkol ng nasabing gawain, hindi sa pagpapasya.’’ Mabanglo, ‘‘Ang Babae sa Wikang Pilipino,’’ 61. 50. Cf. ‘‘Ang kababaihan ay puwersang pulitikal kaugnay ng kanilang kalagayan sa mga istruktura ng kapangyarihan sa lipunan.’’ Santiago, Sa ‘Ngalan ng Ina, 12. 51. Barrios, ‘‘Kung Bakit Lagi Kong Pinapanood ang Mga Pelikula ni Sharon Cenueta.’’ Sharon Cuneta is arguably the most popular female movie star in the Philippines today. Her megastar title, the size of her female fan base, her typical film role as babaeng martir (female martyr), and the singing career that launched her into fame can be read as evidence that she has inherited the mantle of the superstar Nora Aunor. 52. It is abroad where they might become their own superstars. In ‘‘Pina, Pina Saan Ka Pupunta?’’ Fanny Garcia portrays the importance of Nora Aunor as a model of desire (see chapter 1), while in ‘‘Arrivederci,’’ she depicts the importance of overseas Filipinas as huwaran [model] for Filipinas at home, and the agency of the former in creating the

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representations motivating more Filipinas to go abroad. Dreams of class mobility translate into migration abroad because, in the neocolonial imaginary topography, class hierarchy is an international geopolitcal order. 53. ‘‘Ang paglilihis sa pormula ay pagsugal ng dapat sana’y siguradong kita.’’ ‘‘Kung Bakit Lagi Kong Pinapanood ang Mga Pelikula ni Sharon Cenueta.’’ Paradoxically, it is the certainty of happy examples in everyday life, whether in the movies or in real life, that induces Filipinas to adopt the initial formula and take a gamble with the ending. 54. Mail-order brides describe themselves in their advertisements through such characters. Tolentino, ‘‘Bodies, Letters, Catalogs,’’ 66–67. 55. The bold capacities that Filipina women exercise (and have historically exercised) can be said to be not so much based on a belief in one’s autonomous will and agency as upheld by conventions of selfhood undergirding women’s auxiliary functions and roles outside the home to ensure collective subsistence. 56. ‘‘Liham Kay Inay,’’ 47. 57. In some ways, the notion of self as extensive, permeable, and divisible is what defines premodern Filipina women, and what it appears contemporary Filipinas would be freeing themselves from, particularly as their feminine-being-for-others is instrumental to their marketing. And yet, it is a notion of self that is resuscitated in new contexts, not only in relation to new communities but also in relation to older ones, including families now stretched across oceans. Chapter Three Poetics of Filipina Export 1. Aguilar and Lacsamana, eds., Women and Globalization. 2. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production. 3. At least those narratives that assume the historical and theoretical priority of the abstract field of the global economy. 4. Other contexts of modernity demonstrate this abiding tie. See Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem, Between Woman and Nation, and Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation. 5. women, Filipina 1. 6. Cli√ord, Routes. 7. Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese, 17. 8. Spillers, ‘‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,’’ in Black, White, and in Color; Henderson, ‘‘Speaking in Tongues.’’ 9. Eng and Han, ‘‘A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia.’’ 10. Agathangelou, The Global Political Economy of Sex, and ‘‘Gender, Race, Militarization.’’ 11. Anderson, Spectres of Comparison. 12. Laplanche and Pontalis define ‘‘identification’’ as ‘‘Psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model the other provides. It is by means of a series of

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identifications that the personality is constituted and specified.’’ The Language of Psychoanalysis, 205. 13. ‘‘Regla sa Buwan ng Hunyo,’’ in Mga Liham ni Pinay, 26. 14. Mabanglo, ‘‘Ang Babae sa Loob ng Bote,’’ 40. 15. Ibid. 16. Quoted in Almario, ‘‘Tawag ng Pag-ibig.’’ 17. Almario, ‘‘Tawag ng Pag-ibig.’’ 18. Almario’s notion of the role of the poet ‘‘in the age of the machine’’ was forged against those poets impotently caught in the romantic tradition of Balagtas, poets who ‘‘can do nothing but weep in the face of surroundings which emasculate [bumabakla] their burnt-out verses—the jungle of the city, machines, machines and more machines.’’ Ang Makata Sa Panahon ng Makina (The Poet in the Age of the Machine), 2. 19. Santiago, Sa Ngalan ng Ina: 100 Taon ng, and Cruz, ‘‘Marginality and Subversion.’’ 20. Garcellano, ‘‘Speaking from the Margin of the Margins,’’ in Interventions. 21. Ibid., 55. 22. Cruz, ‘‘Marginality and Subversion.’’ 23. Mabanglo, ‘‘Metaphors of Protest,’’ 24–39. 24. Ibid., 37. 25. ‘‘Tipan Kay Balagtas’’ (Covenant with Balagtas), Mga Liham ni Pinay, 76–78. 26. Mabanglo, ‘‘Ang Babae sa Loob ng Bote.’’ 27. ‘‘The relation of labour to the act of production within the labour process. This relation is the relation of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as su√ering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the worker’s own physical and mental energy, his personal life or what is life other than an activity— as an activity which is turned against him, neither depends on nor belongs to him.’’ Marx, ‘‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,’’ 74. 28. ‘‘As an instrument of labor, the slave has a price. As a property, he or she has a value. His or her labor is needed and used. The slave is therefore kept alive but in a state of injury, in a phantom-like world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity.’’ Mbembe, ‘‘Necropolitics,’’ 21. 29. As one taught how to recite the pasyon by her mother and an avid reader of awits and coridos, Mabanglo claims that these forms were the foundation of her use of language. In Torres-Yu, ed., Sarilaysay, 191. 30. Kumar, Passport Photos, 17. 31. ‘‘Papel’’ refers not only to the passport, which serves as a guarantor of national identity, but also to the social role or function for which one is destined by that identity. 32. The continued use and power of the passport goes against Dieter Ho√mann-Axthelm’s observation of the decline of the figure of the immigration o≈cer of real existing states and the dissolution of identity in favor of ‘‘free subjectivity’’ in alliance with capital. ‘‘Identity and Reality,’’ 201.

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33. Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution, 136. 34. This important point distinguishes Mabanglo’s poetics from the logic of dominant nationalist narratives of Filipina export: no single Christ figure represents the overseas contract workers who embark on this passage/passion, no predetermined people exists in whose behalf such a diasporic figure is sacrificed; the ‘‘I’’ who moves through the poem goes in and out, is already culled ‘‘from various diaries,’’ made with pieces of di√erent voices. 35. For a discussion of the economics (i.e., value production) of this capacity to take in and bear on one’s body the costs of reproducing dominant relations of production, see my ‘‘Domestic Bodies,’’ in Fantasy-Production. 36. See Rafael, ‘‘Your Grief Is Our Gossip,’’ in White Love. 37. Cf. ‘‘Nagmamadali kasi ako sa pagyaman, / Buntis ako ngayon, walang matuluyan’’ (Because I hurried to become wealthy / Now I am pregnant, with no place to go) (‘‘ . . . Mula sa Hongkong’’) and ‘‘Sino’ng sisisihin sa kapalrang sinapit? / Gamu-gamo akong sa apoy lumigid’’ (Who is to blame for my fate? / I am a firefly circling the fire) (‘‘ . . . Mula sa Japan’’). The penance is, of course, individual responsibility, as evidenced in B. S. Medina’s interpretation: ‘‘The woman acts with full knowledge of self-autonomy and also knows that she alone is responsible for her decision,’’ ‘‘the emancipated/emancipating woman can fault no other but herself.’’ Medina, ‘‘Pagbabago! The Conscious Commitment,’’ 65. 38. Quoted by Doane, ‘‘The Economy of Desire.’’ Benjamin famously finds in the prostitute the figure of the commodity. 39. In ‘‘Ruth Elynia Mabanglo,’’ in Torres-Yu, ed., Sarilaysay, 200. 40. Lyotard, quoted in Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 32. 41. Johnson, ‘‘At Home and Abroad.’’ 42. Hence ‘‘it is often only through personal consumption that individuals are able to overcome, if only ever partially and incompletely, the reifications of social relationships premised on inalienability, and be or become something or someone else . . . personal consumption presupposes and allows for relationships with objects, as with other subjects, that are ‘always potentially alienable’ and therefore mutable.’’ Ibid., 233–34. 43. Ibid., 230. 44. In assuming that consumption is the condition of possibility for the expression of freedom (or, more generally, that capitalist structures are what open new spaces of possibility, which people seize but do not themselves create), accounts such as Johnson’s contribute to this ‘‘work of consumption.’’ 45. See my critique of the political-epistemic framework of orthodox cultural studies critique in ‘‘Himala’’ (Miracle). 46. The model of consumptive mimicry can be found in Bhabha, ‘‘Of Mimicry and Man.’’ On the social role of the babaylan (priestess) which women and male transvestites occupied in precolonial times up to the early part of the period of Spanish colonialism,

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see Jocano, ‘‘Ang Mga Babaylan at Katalonan’’; McCoy, ‘‘Baylan’’; and Salazar, ‘‘Faith Healing in the Philippines.’’ 47. Cannell, Power and Intimacy, 225. Cannell is referring here to beauty contests in which ‘‘what they are mediating is an American-derived notion of glamour which suggests the power and elite cultural codes of the Philippines’ colonisers.’’ 48. Uchiyamada, ‘‘Industrial Sewing Machines,’’ 253. 49. Ibid. 50. Cannell, Power and Intimacy, 225. 51. Rafael writes of the vernacular as ‘‘as the uncanny crossroads formed by and formative of the intersection of the local with the global,’’ which while serving to impose the colonial order also provincialized it, thereby opening up ‘‘a space for the emergence of the ‘popular’ that would . . . furnish a touchstone for di√erent kinds of conversions and translations tangential to the colonial and, by the late nineteenth century, national order of things.’’ Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, xv. 52. Margold, unpublished, 16. 53. Margold, unpublished, 14. ‘‘The contestants recompose their selves as reaching into those public domains where they have been banned or pushed aside. . . . what is exposed is the ease with which the women can command these spheres.’’ 54. Datuin, Home, Body, Memory, 158. 55. Parreñas, Servants of Globalization. 56. Ibid., 215. 57. Ibid., 242. 58. As Marx writes of the conversion of the useful product of human labor, which exists as ‘‘an ordinary, sensuous thing,’’ into a commodity through abstraction: ‘‘But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness.’’ Marx, Capital, 1:163. Chakrabarty comments, ‘‘Abstract labor is what Marx decodes to be a key to the hermeneutic grid through which capital requires us to read the world.’’ ‘‘Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capital,’’ 660. While abstraction is also the condition for proletarian consciousness, that is, proper resistance, I am arguing that it is a process from which other potential cultural resources for transformative action tend to be lost. 59. Atkinson and Errington, eds., Power and Di√erence. In this volume see in particular Blanc-Szanton, ‘‘Collision of Cultures: Historical Reformulations of Gender in the Lowland Visayas, Philippines,’’ 345–83. Reading late nineteenth-century and early twentieth written descriptive accounts of Philippine society, Blanc-Szanton suggests that the tendency to be active in business was characteristic of a persistent native gender system, in contrast with the imperatives of Spanish femininity. Married women were seen to demonstrate an ‘‘enterprising aggressiveness’’ and business capacity superior to that of men. See also Eviota, The Political Economy of Gender, for an account of changes in the sex-gender system under Spanish and American colonialism.

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60. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 196. 61. Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, 55–60. 62. Capital, 1:176–77. 63. ‘‘Female narratives of diaspora and return may be parables of subversive energies attempting to transform the market and the commodity form into signs of the triumph of use-value per se, commodities valorized as aesthetic objects and as instruments to negate their exchange value.’’ San Juan, Beyond Post-Colonial Theory, 223. 64. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 179. 65. Arjun Appadurai writes of the persistence of the concrete, sensuous reality of money as cash in contemporary Bombay. ‘‘Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing,’’ 633. 66. Marx alludes to the persistence of older social practices within the realm of capitalist exchange: ‘‘The less social power the means of exchange possesses, the more closely it is still connected with the nature of the immediate product of labour and the immediate needs of the exchangers, the greater must that power of the community still be which binds together the individuals, the patriarchal relationship, the community of antiquity, feudalism and the guild system.’’ Collected Works, 28:94–95. In the context of migrant work, the community is one that is in the process of being reconstituted, not simply reproduced. 67. Lotringer, ‘‘Foreword,’’ 11. 68. Ibid., 16. 69. Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, 113. 70. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 68. 71. Ibid., 104. 72. Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital. 73. For example, the gendered, national, and racial logics of cultural confinement, territorialization of bodily life, and the violence of physical and subjective dispossession constitutive of the historical experience of immigrant labor figure little in Hardt’s and Negri’s account. And yet, in the wake of the war on terrorism, these logics, which have continued unabated in the homeland, impelling the very social movements that have forced the global transformations they apprehend, these logics now loom large in more recent theoretical accounts of the new U.S. imperialism as ‘‘primitive accumulation’’ and ‘‘the territorial logic of accumulation by dispossession.’’ 74. Cooperative networks of marginalized, isolated workers, outside of their o≈cial workplaces and homes, serve as spaces of minoritarian communication that innovates relations to work as well as to broader conditions of labor, and subjectivities and social cooperation that will fall under the command of capital-intensive enterprises. On this view, the domestic worker prefigures the self-employed entrepreneur-worker who is the paradigm of post-Fordist labor. ‘‘A polymorphous self-employed autonomous work has emerged as the dominant form [of contractual relationship between capital and labor], a kind of ‘intellectual worker’ who is him or herself an entrepreneur, in-

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serted within a market that is constantly shifting and within networks that are changeable in time and space.’’ Lazzarato, ‘‘Immaterial Labour,’’139. 75. Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders. 76. Lionnet, ‘‘Transcolonial Translations’’; Shih ‘‘Toward an Ethics of Transnational Encounters’’; Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason; and Tsing, Friction. 77. Spivak, ‘‘Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value.’’ 78. The general intellect is the human faculty of thinking in general, which acts as an attribute of living labor. ‘‘The general intellect manifests itself today, above all, as the communication, abstraction, self-reflection of living subjects. . . . public intellect is one and the same as cooperation, the acting in concert of human labor, the communicative competence of individuals.’’ Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 65. 79. I understand poiesis as a process of taking forms from nature (here we would say from social imaginations inhering in human practice and the social worlds and structures that human practices create) and reshaping them for the purposes of communicative praxis. My usage draws on Aristotle’s notion of poetry as expressive of the universal (‘‘By universal I mean how a person of a certain type will on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity’’) as well as on Enrique Dussel’s notion of poiesis as a form of labor. For Virno, poiesis as labor in the contemporary moment has taken on numerous aspects of political action or praxis, by which he means the relationship of ‘‘being in the presence of others.’’ 80. Tsing, ‘‘Subcontracting et al.’’ There is of course an important di√erence between Mabanglo’s poetics and the scholarship of anthropology and sociology that I put her in dialogue with. The former has a practical project whose imperatives are perhaps at odds with the imperatives of the projects of most anthropological and sociological scholarship. The latter seeks to make cultures comprehensible within theoretical terms that are institutionally sanctioned, addressing a presumably cosmopolitan audience of intellectuals (coworkers in the academic branch of knowledge-production industries). The former is a communicative practice that heeds and instantiates the rules of a localcultural repertoire, addressing an audience that is parochialized as a minor ‘‘linguisticethnic’’ community. 81. New financial, information, and service industries depend not only on immigrant domestic workers to reduce the cost of reproduction of its first world workers (as reproductive labor), but also on domesticized, virtual immigrant workers in the third world (through telecommunicative and Internet technologies) as formal, productive labor. On the dependency of first world families on immigrant domestic labor, see Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman. On third world a√ective labor in the global customer service and it industries, see Vora, ‘‘Life, Global Capital.’’ 82. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 188. 83. Abu-Lughod, ‘‘Do Muslim Women Need Saving?’’ See also Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women; Grewel, Transnational America; and Hatem, ‘‘In the Eye of the Storm.’’

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84. As Flaudette May Datuin writes, Fajardo’s indigenized tarot cards ‘‘inject predictions and premonitions with the urgencies of personal as well as social problems. Far from charting a static past and present, she prefigures the possibility of change, even within the parameters of chance, fate, and predestination. Women in Fajardo’s works are simultaneously free and powerless, unchanging and limitless.’’ Datuin, Home, Body, Memory, 102. 85. ‘‘Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capital.’’ See also Provincializing Europe. 86. ‘‘Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capital,’’ 670. Chapter Four Modern Refuse in the ‘‘City of Man’’ 1

‘‘In His Mind’s Eye,’’ Condé Nast Traveler (November 1993), 138.

2. The closure or subordination of hearing must be seen as the condition of possibility of the domination of vision over other sensory functions in the determination of modern subjectivity. The ocularcentrism of the modern subject as well as of discourses of modernity is discussed widely. See, for example, Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. For an analysis of the repression of hearing as a condition of possibility of this form of consciousness and, more broadly, Western metaphysical reflection, see Levin, The Listening Self. 3. Rama, ‘‘Manila, Manila,’’ 4. 4. Attali, Noise, 26. 5. Ibid., 27. 6. There is another response besides that of this repulsed, contemplative self, typical of those passing through (or, for that matter, passing over) Manila. It is a response, however, not of a modern self, to the extent that this self exists defined against a world of objects and in a debasing relation to corporeality, but rather, of a self (perhaps postmodern) which seeks the dissolution of this distinction between subject and object through its own dissolution (and, correspondingly, through the annihilation of meaning). In this case, the response is jouissance; the sublime experience of losing one’s self in the dumb refuse of one’s own self-constitution, the jouissance of enjoying one’s symptom, or of what Gayatri Spivak has in another context described as ‘‘the excess of being that escapes the circle of the reproduction of the subject’’ (Spivak, In Other Worlds, 259). Spivak shows that woman’s jouissance in the general sense is ‘‘the place where an unexchangeable excess can be imagined and figured forth’’ and where this excess is ‘‘tamed into exchange, where ‘what is this’ slides into ‘what is this worth’ slides into ‘what does this mean?’ ’’ (259). It is clear then that the locus for the extraction of value, where the conversion of the material excess into exchange value and signification takes place, is a male-gendered subject. This typical response to the generally understood third world quality of a city like Manila can be gleaned from the concluding sentence of a long article pondering the therapeutic e√ects of the latest antidepressive.

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At the end of an extended verbal and actual testing of the drug, the author decides to skip it (and skip town) and take another trip: ‘‘Maybe,’’ he concludes, ‘‘Bangkok is Prozac spelled backwards.’’ The change from one metropolitan cure to the other is hardly a stretch. Both bear the narcotic e√ect of release from one’s confines: ‘‘Drugs eliminate forms and persons’’ (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 283). From Prozac to Bangkok is a simple reversal: one’s ingestion of foreign substances turns into the ingestion of one’s self by foreign substances. A den of overwhelming excess, noise, waste, and pollution, not to mention exoticism and otherness, Bangkok serves as a catalyst of this line of flight. The narcotic e√ect of the Southeast Asian city lies in its material embodiment of the unconscious of Western modernization, not only in its function as literally the receptacle of toxic waste from the developed world’s industries, but more generally in its historical function as the locus for the displacement of the contradictions of capitalist developments in modern, industrialized countries (including the development of the Freudian subject). As Deleuze and Guattari maintain, ‘‘Drugs give the unconscious the immanence and plane that psychoanalysis has consistently botched’’ (ibid.). Apart from being on Spalding’s list of generically dreadful cities that can serve as conceptual ingredients of Manila, Bangkok is also Manila’s sister city, more specifically, sister sin city. The two have won this reputation through their extensive prostitution and other sex industries—sin (as well as sister) referring to the immersion of the metropolitan economy in flesh, or pure corporeality. To the extent that this corporeality is the debased ground of modern subjectivity (the excess of conscious being), it can serve as the locus for the dissolution or annihilation of that subjectivity and thus for the experience of a postmodern sublime. This is not unlike the kind of aesthetic jouissance a√orded by those images of destitution and devastation used in cutting-edge advertising campaigns. It is the immersion in what one has eliminated precisely in order to produce oneself, the wallowing in the wasteland of one’s by-products, that makes for this particular sublimity. 7. Ortega, ‘‘Aray ng Manila,’’ 12. The cinematic language used to describe the metropolitan e√ect manifests the spectatorial (and economic) conditions of this o√ended subjectivity. 8. These government clean-up drives were revitalized by the Ramos administration (1992–98) in its own bid to attract Asian-Pacific Economic Community (apec) investors. 9. De Dios, ‘‘Rebuilding from the Ruins or Ruining the Rebuilding,’’ 29. 10. Mbembe, On the Postcolony. 11. Marcos, Notes on the New Society of the Philippines, 114. 12. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 171. 13. Ibid., 134. 14. Cruz-Reyes, Tutubi, Tutubi, ‘Wag Kang Magpahuli Kay Mamang Salbahe, 133.

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15. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. 16. What this dissimulation or confusion of origins might seem to prove is precisely what I want to write against: Berman’s thesis that ‘‘modernity can be said to unite all mankind’’ (ibid., 15). Implicit in this idea is the view that what is called modernization is a world-historic process that starts o√ in western Europe and begins to spread at varying speeds in the rest of the globe, even as he locates a polar process in Russia, which he calls ‘‘the Russian mode of modernization,’’ to which he attributes the original ‘‘modernism of underdevelopment’’ that can be later found in the third world. (See also Giddens, ‘‘Globalizing Modernity,’’ in The Consequences of Modernity.) 17. All translations of this work are mine. 18. The term ‘‘protest’’ has been used since the 1970s to designate antidictatorship, antiimperialist, and antifeudal cultural practices. What the suspension enables is a politics of exposure, which Alice Guillermo argues defines protest in the realm of art. Protest/ Revolutionary Art in the Marcos Regime, 5. 19. Anderson, ‘‘Modernity and Revolution,’’ 329. Anderson’s proposed conjunctural approach, involving an intersection of multiple temporalities, is made in a critique of Berman’s paradigm of modernization. 20. Gaonkar, ‘‘On Alternative Modernities.’’ 21. The failure of the Marcos regime to follow this model will later drive the economic strategies of post-Marcos governments, this time without the authoritarian component. 22. Mitchell, ‘‘The Stage of Modernity,’’ 17. 23. I have discussed this arena as the realm of fantasy-production in my Fantasy-Production. See also Escobar, Encountering Development. 24. Stau√er, The Philippines Under Marcos, 137–38. 25. Ibid., 138. 26. Berman makes a distinction between the modernism of advanced nations and the modernism characteristic first of Russia and later of the third world. While the former builds ‘‘directly on the materials of economic and political modernization and drawing vision and energy from a modernized reality,’’ the latter builds on unreal dreams: ‘‘The modernism of underdevelopment is forced to build on fantasies and dreams of modernity, to nourish itself on an intimacy and a struggle with mirages and ghosts’’ (All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, 232). Such a distinction makes for the pathetic representation of third world histories and the derealization of the violent forces involved in shaping them. It also occludes the collusion of such ‘‘Faustian developers’’ as Robert McNamara, head of the World Bank, and ‘‘pseudo-Faustain developers’’ like Ferdinand Marcos. Both are carried away by their respective dreams of modernity, backed up by the diabolic ghost that is the global order, and driven by the material energy of global capital, itself the powerful spirit of stolen dead labor. 27. Gary Hawes, ‘‘Marcus, His Cronies, and The Philippines’ Failure to Develop.’’ 28. As we shall see, the disastrous consequences of this particularistic catch-up would later

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become the basis for the succeeding regimes’ e√orts to generalize the synchronization with global time through strategies of liberalization as well as the calls to reform social and political institutions in accordance with more rational standards. 29. Kris Montañez shows how the Marcos regime attempted this through its patronage of the arts. Aside from promoting reified folk art and native culture and Western avantgardism (as Imelda is quoted, extolling such artists: ‘‘Although they live in our time, they belong to the future’’), the regime awarded a monument of the Revolution of 1896, which rendered its defeat. As Montañez comments, ‘‘Thus is a people’s armed revolution conveyed as ‘finished,’ catastrophic, and outmoded by the standards of Marcos’ ‘democratic revolution.’ ’’ The New Mass Art and Literature, 61. 30. Benjamin, ‘‘Central Park,’’ 50. 31. Feria, Red Pencil, Blue Pencil, 173. 32. In Stau√er, The Philippines Under Marcos, 225. 33. Quoted in Bello, Kinley, and Elinson, The Development Debacle, 103. Bello, Kinley, and Elinson show how the World Bank pushed for the creation of a metropolitan administrative body as part of its objectives for technocratic centralization. The development of a centralized metropolitan government in the hands of Imelda Marcos is documented in Ruland, ‘‘Metropolitan Government Under Martial Law.’’ 34. Several presidential decrees declared during martial law made squatting illegal. Van Naerssen, ‘‘Continuity and Change in the Urban Poor Movement.’’ For the corporatist transformation of the New Society under martial law, see Stau√er, The Philippines Under Marcos (especially chaps. 3 and 5). 35. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel. 36. Bahktin, The Dialogic Imagination, 128. 37. See University of the Philippines Student Council, ‘‘Resolution Commending the Revolutionary Courage of the Heroic Defenders of the Diliman Commune Against the Fascist State and Its Campus Collaborators,’’ February 12, 1971, in de Dios, Daroy, and Kalaw-Tirol, Dictatorship and Revolution. 38. Harvey, New Imperialism, 101. 39. Here one can see the configuration of the metropolitan body as the sex worker’s body, serving both as raw material and labor for the creation of surplus value. By subcontracting infrastructures and space, the metropolitan body provides services for multinational capital at lower costs than would be available in first world countries. It is, therefore, in economic terms, disguised wage labor. The comprehension of the sex worker as a petty commodity producer has ambivalent significance, for sex work can be viewed as self-employment or disguised wage labor. This ambivalence can be seen in terms of the city as well, which, depending on the types of production it receives its revenues from, could tilt either way. Working on behalf of the state, it is disguised wage labor; working on behalf of the majority of its producers, it is self-employed. 40. Lopez, ‘‘Proletarian Literature.’’

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41. Rather than o√ering an object of counterconsciousness, as was deemed the task of literary partisanship with the revolutionary cause, Reyes’s novel pedagogically performs the process of coming into counterconsciousness. Melendrez-Cruz, ‘‘The Modern Pilipino Short Story.’’ See also Melendrez-Cruz, Filipinong Pananaw sa Wika, Panitikan at Kultura. 42. Abad, ‘‘Squatting and Scavenging in Smokey Mountain,’’ 264. Abad identifies these forces as the concentration of urban landownership in the hands of a few families and the concentration of resources in Manila and the underdevelopment of the agricultural sector, which results in vast unemployment. 43. Bromley, ‘‘Working in the Streets,’’ 161. 44. Abad, ‘‘Squatting and Scavenging in Smokey Mountain,’’ 284. Bromley, ‘‘Working in the Streets,’’ 171. See also Davies, ‘‘Informal Sector or Subordinate Mode of Production?’’; Gerry and Berbeck, ‘‘The Petty Commodity Producer’’; and Gilbert and Gugler, Cities, Poverty and Development. 45. The unregulated temporality of these sectors of society makes for the importance of the instant, in which everything can be overturned at once. The tenuousness of the status of squatters, for example. One slum dweller remarks, ‘‘There’s no point in constructing a better house if you can be ejected anytime’’ (quoted in Abad, ‘‘Squatting and Scavenging in Smokey Mountain,’’ 275). The ‘‘adaptability to resource fluctuations’’ is a capacity that can be tapped by protest, itself a hidden resource for revolutionary action. 46. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 145. 47. We could say that this technique is characteristic of aboveground socially oriented literature during the martial law period, which Bienvenido Lumbera describes as a ‘‘literature of circumvention.’’ 48. Amin, Eurocentrism. 49. Quoted in ‘‘Paggamit ng Wikang Pilipino: Muling Pagsasalamin ng Kaisipang Pinoy,’’ Kasarinlan 6, nos. 1–2 (1990): 160. 50. The colloquialization of literary Pilipino was an important aspect of second-wave modernism. See Almario, Balagtasismo Versus Modernismo. Reyes’s precedent was Norma Miraflor, whose story, ‘‘Sulat Mula sa Pritil’’ first employed the street slang favored in Tutubi, Tutubi. 51. The critique of the educational system and the belief in it as the means of social liberation and progress implicit in social realist literature was an important aspect of socialist literary criticism. See Melendrez-Cruz, ‘‘The Modern Pilipino Shore Story.’’ 52. The strange self-centeredness that pervades the narrative is made more striking in Pilipino because of the tendency for the Pilipino language to express eventual rather than egological agency. In Pilipino, actions are constructed as happenings in which one participates but is not the sole actor. It is this eventuality that gives Tagalog constructions the semblance of the passive voice. Jo’s speech transforms this voice into a predominantly agent-oriented one. Deprived of agency by martial law, but also severed

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from older forms of belongingness and collective agency through modernization, he finds his own center of agency in the subjective narrative. 53. As a second reality (Schafer, Narrative Actions in Psychoanalysis, 16), the unconscious might be seen to pertain to the disenfranchised side of what Virgilio Enriquez calls the Great Cultural Divide in the Philippines between the proforeign (alienated) elitist culture and the indigenous national culture (Enriquez, Herrera, and Tubayan, Ang Sikolohiyang Malaya sa Panahon ng Krisis). The constant interaction of these two realities (and their respective ordering principles) socially and within the individual makes for the complexity confronting a psychoanalytic investigation of Filipino psychic processes. Philippine psychology (Sikolohiyang Pilipino) takes as its domain the second reality, which cuts across the entire Filipino population but is present in varying degrees, depending on the degree of alienation. For Enriquez, the cultural divide pertains to a class division. However, it might very well be a class division within the psyche carried through language. 54. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, ‘‘The various forms of education or ‘normalization’ imposed upon an individual consist in making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving toward a higher, nobler one in conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a mental reality determined by that point. Then from the subject of enunciation issues a subject of that statement, in other words, a subject bound to statements in conformity with a dominant reality (of which the mental reality just mentioned is a part, even when it seems to oppose it). . . . There is always an appeal to a dominant reality that functions from within (already in the Old Testament, and during the Reformation, with trade and capitalism). There is no longer even a need for a transcendent center of power; power is instead immanent and melds with the ‘real,’ operating through normalization. A strange invention: as if in one form the doubled subject were the cause of the statements of which, in its other form, it itself is a part. This is the paradox of the legislator-subject replacing the signifying despot: the more you obey the statements of dominant reality, the more in command you are as a subject of enunciation mental reality, for in the end you are only obeying yourself!’’ Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 129–30. 55. As the regime persisted, such structures began to deteriorate, and Marcos’s hidden machinations and wealth increasingly became an open secret. It took the revolt of 1986, however, to finally shatter the structure of masking and confinement, even as this shattering ushered in the new mode of political regulation and control embodied by the flyovers. 56. Guillermo, ‘‘The Temper of the Times,’’ 8. 57. Felman, ‘‘Education and Crisis,’’ 43. 58. In a short story by Jun Cruz Reyes, a friend advises the narrator, ‘‘What’s needed, man, is for you to smash your ego. Don’t try to be heroic. . . . You’ll see, you’ll become sterile

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in the movement. Let your collective help you.’’ The sacrifice of the individual ego for the sake of the collective ego is predicated upon the egological constitution of agency. The personal category is in fact produced as the opposite end of a polarity whose other end is the centralization of political forces. Maintaining the personal ego within the collective makes one sterile—that is, it is castrating—inasmuch as both are constructed as masculine entities, which are by definition rivalrous. Indeed, the masculine ego is the prevailing paradigm of power and historical agency. On the equation of liberation with the liberation of consciousness from which this pedagogical strategy stems, see Hau, Necessary Fictions; Lumbera, ‘‘The Nationalist Struggle and the Filipino Writer’’; and San Juan, The Radical Tradition in Philippine Literature. 59. Lourdes Lapuz notes the relation between modernization and masculinity: ‘‘When a society becomes industrialized and manliness is measured in pesos and centavos, aggression is also usually sublimated into ‘anal’ activites (building, achieving, preserving, accumulating wealth)’’ and further, industrialization brings on a shift ‘‘in the cultural ideal of virility, from that of one with the qualities of a stallion to one who can build the biggest pile.’’ Lapuz, A Study of Psycopathology, 234. 60. Reyes demonstrates the same valorization of solidity critiqued by Mabanglo as being at the basis of a masculinist poetics, which defends against the anxiety of impotence through, as Mabanglo describes, ‘‘words and phrases trampling on women, diminishing emotions and mocking love’’ (‘‘Ang Babae sa Loob ng Bote’’) by creating a female love-interest (Tess) whom Jo repudiates, along with his ‘‘corny’’ emotions and ‘‘sentimental’’ behavior, which this brief (and past) interlude brings. In e√ect, Jo’s development as a man depends on the renouncement of such flaccid and mushy emotions and behavior. Luce Irigaray also writes on the equations between solidity and masculinity in ‘‘Volume-Fluidity,’’ 227–40. Rather than exemplifying some transhistorical patriarchal logic, the congruence between masculinist solidity and the bourgeois state is predicated upon imperialist cultural logic of modern nation-states. 61. Guerrero, Philippine Society and Revolution, 266–67. This is, of course, a pronouncement directly derived from Marx. 62. Peter Osborne, ‘‘Small-scale Victories, Large-Scale Defeats.’’ Chapter Five Petty Adventures in (the Nation’s) Capital 1. Marcos, Notes on the New Society, 63–65. 2. Daroy, ‘‘On the Eve of Dictatorship and Revolution,’’ 17. Benedict Anderson describes Marcos as ‘‘an original’’ in the well-established rule of ‘‘cacique democracy,’’ ‘‘partly because he was highly intelligent, partly because, like his grotesque wife, he came from the lower fringes of the oligarchy. In any case, he was the first elite Filipino politician who saw the possibilities of reversing the traditional flow of power.’’ Anderson, ‘‘Cacique Democracy,’’ in Spectre of Comparisons, 213.

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3. These social forces compelled the adoption of developmentalist strategies on the part of Marcos, which aligned multilateral lending institutions, including the U.S. government, with his regime. These external political and economic powers can, in this regard, be understood as the patrons claimed by Marcos’s own clientelist behavior. 4. Sison, The Philippine Revolution, 43. 5. Mbembe, On the Postcolony. 6. Shorrock, ‘‘Crony Capitalism Goes Global.’’ 7. Sison, Struggle for National Democracy, 39. 8. Abinales and Amoroso, State and Society in the Philippines. Scripes, ‘‘Global Economic Crisis.’’ 9. Lacaba, Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage, 11. 10. Ibid., 12. 11. See Santiago, ‘‘Pilipino Poetry of Protest in the Seventies.’’ 12. Lacaba, Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage, 19. 13. Quijano de Manila remarks on the prose style of Lacaba as that of ‘‘the involved journalist [who] is both recorder and agent, both passenger and driver.’’ 14. Lacaba, Mga Kagila-gilalas na Pakikipagsapalaran. All translations are by Lacaba unless otherwise indicated; I have modified some of these. 15. Lacaba, Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage, 97. 16. ‘‘The Summer of Our Discontent,’’ in Ordoñez, Nationalist Literature, 311. 17. Lacaba, in Sarilaysay, 189–90. 18. Lacaba was among the poets included in the first publication of what the second-wave Tagalog modernist poets from Ateneo called tulang-bagay (thing-poetry). In an unpublished manifesto, this kind of poetry is described as ‘‘nakikibagay sa bagay,’’ a process of adapting to or acting like things, which yields a new understanding of things. The poetry is also described as realist in approach, using contemporary Tagalog (pananagalog sa ating panahon) and concrete description. Almario, Balagtasismo versus Modernismo, 204–5. 19. Morris, In the Place of Origins, 58. 20. Antonio, quoted in Santiago, ‘‘Pilipino Poetry of Protest,’’ 280. 21. The kagilagilalas, or ‘‘shock,’’ of urban experience, which is produced by social contradictions, is also borne by the individual body, thereby placing the protagonist of Lacaba’s poems in intolerable states of immobility and petrification. See, for example, the poem ‘‘Bangungot’’ (Nightmare): ‘‘my entire body is sti√ening / I need to move / my arm / my hand even if / only my finger / it is necessary / that my breath become sound / become / a scream!’’ 22. The year in which this poem was written (1962) marks the crisis of the failure of import-substitution strategies leading to the adoption by the Marcos government of total decontrol and devaluation strategies that, against mounting calls for protectionist strategies, opened the economy to the imf and foreign investment.

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23. In the tradition of Left analyses of existing conditions of the Philippine political economy, Ricardo D. Ferrer attributes Philippine underdevelopment to feudalism, bureaucrat capitalism, and imperialism: ‘‘There is a bureaucrat capitalism insofar as state instruments are used for the creation and reproduction of feudal private property especially in the industrial sector. Crony capitalism is bureaucrat capitalism’s more advanced variant. There is imperialism insofar as foreign monopoly capital is the condition of existence and expansion of feudal private property in the dominant sectors of the society.’’ Santiago, Synthesis, 13. On the ‘‘rent-seeking’’ behavior of crony connections, see Lim, ‘‘Our Economic Crisis.’’ 24. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization. de Dios: ‘‘Politics . . . is itself a major form of organization for the economy. Political violence may be viewed simply as one form of investment, and corruption as a form of return ’’ (quoted in Hutchcroft, Booty Capitalism, 37). 25. Anthony Giddens calls this confidence ‘‘trust.’’ See The Consequences of Modernity. 26. ‘‘Substantially, as is made clear in the detailed exposition by Arrighi (1994), a central aspect of East Asia’s post-war development experience was its flexibility in responding to the world market, which stood in sharp contrast to the rigidity of American capitalism. It is this flexibility which has enabled East Asia continuously to expand its cheap manufactured exports to the US market. More broadly, flexibility is one of the key elements that enabled East Asia to become the ‘world factory’ in the 1960–70s, which in turn accounted for the region’s rapid and sustained economic growth during this period.’’ Lo, ‘‘The East Asian Phenomenon,’’ 8. Lo identifies this as one strand of explanation that needs to be combined with the other strand, which attributes the miracle to the ‘‘rigidity-infused, long-term-oriented political-economic institutions’’ of crony capitalism. The combination of rigidity and flexibility enables the continuous innovation and industrial upgrading that allow maximum productivity growth and account for the specific competitive advantage of the regional regime of accumulation for East Asia. 27. ‘‘Routine’’ here echoes the notion of the predefined scripts acted out in corruption schemes, sometimes called sop (standard operating procedure). See Chua, Robbed. We can define it as a behavioral form of shared knowledge about the rules of extraction. I prefer this concept to that of a system, inasmuch as ‘‘routine’’ refers to a configuration of acts that are not quite institutions and entail much more active mechanisms for selfreproduction. 28. Lacaba admits that his poetry collection contains many instances of ‘‘sadyang pagsuway sa mga batas ng panulaang Tagalog at sadyang pang-iinis sa mga tradisyonalista ng nilalaman at anyo’’ (purposeful disobedience of the laws of Tagalog poetry and intended irritation of traditionalists of content and form). Mga Kagila-gilalas na Pakikipagsapalaran, 11. 29. Hutchcroft shows how there is, therefore, a complementarity rather than an irresolv-

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able contradiction between reform and plunder in the banking system. I have elsewhere discussed this ‘‘bulimic’’ behavior of the state in the post-Marcos era. See my ‘‘Metropolitan Dreams,’’ in Fantasy-Production. See also Joel Rocamora, and Phongparchit and Piriyarangsan, who draw attention to the manipulation of the boundaries between licit and illicit as the condition of possibility of corruption, as well as the reliance on social networks as a system of exchange. 30. The Prison Notebooks, 438. Also cf. ‘‘Possibility is not reality: but it is in itself a reality’’ (360). It is the e√ective use of this reality through the application of ‘‘abstract will or vital impulse’’ that prediction exerts a material force (‘‘a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force’’ [377]). Ultimately, Gramsci claims, the kind of prediction exhibited by the subaltern classes is to be distinguished from the prediction of a revolutionary movement. The former is finally a reactionary, fatalistic form of ‘‘spontaneous’’ action engaged in by political adventurers, while the latter is a rational philosophy of praxis put into action. Only in being linked to a program does prediction acquire an objective political character: ‘‘Anybody who makes a prediction has in fact a ‘programme’ for whose victory he is working, and his prediction is precisely an element contributing to that victory’’ (171). Determinism (as vulgar Marxism) itself becomes a feature of subaltern spontaneity: ‘‘Real will takes on the garments of an act of faith in a certain rationality of history and in a primitive and empirical form of impassioned finalism which appears in the role of a substitute for the Predestination or Providence of confessional religions.’’ Quoted in Beverly, Subalternity and Representation, 136. Also cf. Gramsci’s discussions of the subversive stratum of the lumpen proletariat, called the morti di fame (literally, ‘‘starveling’’) and its spontaneity. 31. See Jocano, Slum as Way of Life. 32. ‘‘All labour is a detour; all jouissance is a short-cut.’’ Goux, Symbolic Economies, 59. Lacaba’s words do not produce meaning in the way that Reyes attempts to produce meaning out of the objects he represents. Signs, for Lacaba, are things to be manipulated not in order to produce meaning (the product of formal symbolic labor) but to partake in pleasure. 33. See Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. 34. See Portes, Castells, and Benton, The Informal Economy. 35. Lopez, ‘‘Post-work Society.’’ 36. Mbembe, On the Postcolony. 37. Ibid., 128. 38. Lacaba, ‘‘Notes on Bakya.’’ 39. Virno, Grammar of the Multitude, 85. 40. These arguments are not merely ‘‘racist nonsense,’’ as Senator Jose Diokno exclaimed (quoted by Brillantes, Dictatorship and Martial Law, 80); they are a form of colonial rationality that continues to shape prevailing forms of political and social governance.

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41. The earliest use of the term can be traced to Time magazine for August 24, 1981, in an article on Marcos’s financial predations. Safire, ‘‘On Language: Crony Capitalism.’’ 42. Lo includes the Philippines as well as other asean countries in the term ‘‘East Asia’’ and uses the term ‘‘crony capitalism’’ as shorthand for such institutions, which not so long ago were touted as being Confucian to explain the success of newly industrializing countries (nics); ‘‘crony capitalism,’’ meanwhile, was being used to explain the crisis of the Philippines and its failure to follow the example of the nics. 43. In a seminar held at the University of California, Santa Cruz (October 15, 1999), David Harvey alluded to all capitalism as being crony capitalism. From a similar political position, Patnaik declares, ‘‘All capitalism is crony capitalism.’’ While I am sympathetic with what I believe is the intended import of such a pronouncement, such as the ‘‘deculturalization’’ of economic exploitation and certainly the indictment of capitalism in general, we might do better to emphasize that all crony capitalism is capitalism, as a way of drawing the larger context of global capitalism for understanding the particularistic behavior of crony capitalist regimes. In this way, the latter can be seen to provide the impetus for international financial liberalization by helping to create the demand for foreign capital inflows and, subsequently, for the liberalization of those flows. 44. Castells, End of Millennium, 246. 45. As analyzed by Rosa Luxemburg, imperialism refurbishes persistent forms of ‘‘primitive accumulation’’ as part of the global expansion of capitalism. Some of these borrowed political and economic principles are evidenced in Marcos’s Masagana 99 program, in which huge amounts of capital were invested in the conversion and integration into the world economy of agricultural production (modernizing a largely feudal industry into agribusiness) as well as in the use of techniques of military repression and coercion to enable this conversion process. 46. This is what would make corruption continuous with cultural practices and accounts for the absence of strong social and moral institutions that would inhibit corruption and, in the interests of global capital, the creation of a neutral and level playing field. 47. Tripp, Changing the Rules. 48. Hence the great violence with which urban poor and squatter organizations and their leaders have been treated by local and national government. The demolition projects undertaken as part of urban beautification enterprises were only the other face of the government assassination of urban poor leaders and organizers. See Pinches, ‘‘The ‘Urban Poor.’ ’’ 49. The barkada-subject (gang-subject) constructed by Jun Cruz Reyes can be viewed as a kind of street-level counterorganization against the military-landlord fraternity represented by all the king’s men. With the declaration of martial law, however, it is clear from Cruz Reyes’s narrative that this barkada-subject is itself broken down, dispersed, and disappeared by military forces.

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50. Interestingly, the present regime under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is seriously considering undertaking the project to solidify this liquidity and thereby tap into the potential capital of the urban poor, a project propagated by the economist Hernando de Soto. Since Arroyo’s term as vice-president under the Ramos administration, de Soto has served as a consultant to the Philippine government. Soto’s project consists of major legal-juridical reforms in the areas of property rights, reforms that would e√ectively fully assimilate the urban poor into the capitalist system by enabling them to become formal entrepreneurs. 51. Lacaba, Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage, 48. 52. See Kesian Tejapira for a discussion of the resistance of Thai crony capitalists to globalization and good governance. Acknowledgment of the impossibility of fair exchange can easily tip over into a capitulation to the necessary unfairness of the way the game can be played. 53. Sidel, Capital, Coercion, and Crime, 146. 54. Sidel acknowledges that this frame is an adoption of the analytical frames trained on the U.S. context: ‘‘Finally, in both its underlying methodology and its overarching conclusions, this book reveals the utility of the empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated scholarly work on political machines and county courthouse cliques in the United States for understanding local politics in the Philippines and elsewhere in the world’’ (4). Sidel’s revelation of the ‘‘American colonial lineage’’ of the patterns of coercion found in the Philippines (i.e., identifying the United States as part of the problem) here slides into a near-imperialist comprehension of the same through the very adoption of that lineage as analytical lens (i.e., the United States as part of the resolution). 55. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, 40. Chapter Six Metropolitan Debris 1. See my essay, ‘‘Manila’s New Metropolitan Form,’’ 154–78. 2. Sassen, ‘‘Whose City Is It?’’ 180. 3. Ibid. 4. The pedestrian overpasses were built before construction of the flyovers as a means of getting people out of the way of private vehicles (vehicles of modern privacy). The flyovers are an extension of the same e√ort—except they attempt to bring the upper strata into relief, liberating them from confrontation with the contradictions of their upward mobility—and as such continue the modernist project of the Marcos regime. However, flyovers no longer attempt to mask the lower strata (as Imelda did), but rather to secure domination through bypasses and overpasses rather than through enclosure and censorship. 5. Like the economies in which they operate, ‘‘developing’’ subjects are structurally en-

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joined to catch up with their developed counterparts and yet structurally impeded from doing so. In this way, developed subjects serve as limiting forms that simultaneously spur and block the developing process of subaltern subjects. This is the contradiction of what Samir Amin, in Eurocentrism, calls the impasse that peripheral subjects experience as an internal limit that then becomes displaced on others. 6. Sassen, ‘‘Whose City Is It?’’ 7. Ibid., 181. 8. Ibid., 189. 9. Perez, Cubao 1980 at Iba Pang Mga Katha. The story was written in 1981. All translations are mine. Page references for all citations are indicated in the main text. 10. See Rafael, ‘‘The Cell Phone and the Crowd.’’ 11. Interestingly, Perez finds a≈nity with the work of Filipina women writers and in particular with Luna Sicat’s work, claiming, ‘‘I love Ruth Elynia Mabanglo. I love Luna Sicat.’’ 12. Here we can register the continuities and di√erences between the historical experiences of subjective interiority within Western modernity and within the conditions of third world modernization. Of the former, Stefan Jonsson writes, ‘‘The intérieur is thus a compensatory realm, where ‘man,’ estranged from the world of commodities which he has produced, and which now begin to produce him, can preserve an authentic relationship to the world. Inside the home, things are still use-values, and personal qualities that are rendered superfluous by the instrumental logic of capitalism can still contribute to the completion of one’s well-rounded humanity.’’ Subject Without Nation, 49. Jonsson writes about the domestic interior as the material image of subjective interiority. 13. Lumbera, Revaluation 1997. Calling it ‘‘a revolution in Tagalog playwriting,’’ Lumbera links Perez’s first major play, Anak ng Araw (Son of the Sun), to Chekov not only in technique but also in the elaboration of its principal themes of bereavement, loneliness, and isolation. 14. Chow, Ethics After Idealism, 177. 15. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 87. 16. Kang, ‘‘Popular Culture and the Culture of the Masses,’’ 140. 17. Bauman, Globalization, 5. 18. Perez, Cubao 1980 At Iba Pang Mga Katha. 19. Dyer, White, 14. 20. ‘‘Ang May-Katha’’ in Cubao Midnight Express, 255. 21. Fernandez, Palabas; Lumbera, ‘‘Philippine Theater 1972–79.’’ 22. Perez has written disparagingly of nationalism, calling it ‘‘an adolescent obsession’’ that is the arena of the journalist rather than that of the creative writer. 23. Constantino, ‘‘The Miseducation of the Filipino.’’

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24. San Juan, The Philippine Temptation. 25. ‘‘Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them.’’ Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?164. 26. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism. 27. For Marx, ‘‘Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, i.e., in Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religions’’ for a society of commodity producers. Capital, 172. Marx’s extensive religious references in his analysis of capital are not idle analogies; they compose a systemic critique of the speculative idealism inhering in the bourgeois conception of value, the mystifying ‘‘religion of everyday life’’ which he credits Hegel as ‘‘the first to present [in] its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner.’’ In ‘‘Postface to the Second Edition,’’ Capital, 1:102–3. 28. Marx, Capital, 256. 29. Taylor, About Religion. ˇ zek, ‘‘Spectre of Ideology.’’ 30. Ziˇ 31. Marx, Capital, 143. 32. For the di√erential, but intrinsically related use of race for the severance of Native American and Hawaiian traditional relations and prior claims to their land in order to justify and facilitate the systematic appropriation of that land and its resources by the U.S. government and U.S. corporations, see Kehaulani Kauanui, ‘‘Rehabilitating the Native.’’ 33. ‘‘The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labor become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible or social.’’ Capital, 165. While Marx reads the ‘‘suprasensible or social’’ character of the commodity as quantitative labor (which is properly the capitalist reading of the labor contained in the commodity-form), he also suggests that the mysterious character of the commodityform is the expression of the qualitative alienation of labor and of the qualitative experience of labor as an abstract amount in relation to a total sum. 34. This is not to say that such subjectivity is not filled with all kinds of content—recurring narrative themes, feelings, attitudes—which critical scholars have insisted upon coding as the ethnicity of whiteness. I am merely pointing out the formal lynchpin of such content. 35. Dussel, Ethics and Community, 128. 36. Dyer, White, 15.

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37. Aguilar, Clash of Spirits. While there is certainly a bodily significance attached to these racial castes, the hierarchy was also implemented by means of dress codes, rules of comportment, place of birth, and divisions of work. 38. This challenge also stemmed from the liberal education that this class managed to achieve for itself and through which it encountered the ideals of the French and German Enlightenment. At the same time, this class used the very revolution against Spain it had participated in to the ends of securing their new hegemony over the nation, which it would carry over to the period of U.S. colonial rule and beyond, to the period of postindependence. 39. Aguilar, Clash of Spirits, 106. 40. Ibid., 99. 41. Ibid., 31. 42. Rafael, White Love, 23. 43. Ibid., 26. See also Constantino, Veneration without Understanding, as well as A Past Revisited. 44. Aguilar, Clash of Spirits, 191. 45. Some of the features of the nationalization of imperialism are evident in the notion of the feudalization of industry, which refers to the continued rent-seeking activity on the part of the newly industrializing elite as well as to the monopolization of privileges in trading, financing, and manufacturing that were secured by Marcos’s cronies. See Rivera, Landlords and Capitalists, 15–16. 46. The term is from de Dios, ‘‘The Erosion of the Dictatorship.’’ See also Angeles, ‘‘Why the Philippines Did Not Become a Newly Industrializing Country,’’ 107–8. 47. See Imelda Marcos’s address, ‘‘Earth: the City of Humanity.’’ 48. Tadiar, ‘‘Kolboy,’’ 83–84. Much of my discussion of this novel’s exposition of whiteness as value is indebted to Carlo Tadiar’s reading and to his brilliant illumination of this reading through ethnographic work. 49. The translation of bakla is a politically fraught issue. In the context of this novel, I have chosen to translate it initially into the derogatory ‘‘fag’’ or ‘‘faggot’’ to the extent that such words convey the generally derogatory tenor in which they are deployed here, even though they do not necessarily connote the ‘‘berdache,’’ or gender-crossing, qualities adhering to the notion of bakla. For the complexities of the social construction of the bakla, see Manansalan, ‘‘Speaking of aids.’’ For a history of the bakla figure and Philippine gay culture, see Garcia, Philippine Gay Culture. 50. Garcia, Philippine Gay Culture, 153. In ‘‘Kolboy,’’ Tadiar provides a striking psychoanalytic analysis of the lure as a crucial part of the economy of desires underwriting the male sex market. 51. Weeks, ‘‘Preface to Homosexual Desire,’’ 30. Weeks writes, ‘‘And as the money is the fetish, the true universal reference-point for capitalism, so the Phallus is the referencepoint for heterosexism. . . . The Phallus determines—whether by absence or presence

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—the girl’s penis envy, the boy’s castration anxiety; it draws on libidinal energy in the same way as money draws on labour’’ (38). 52. ‘‘Some form of material benefit—in cash or in kind—is ‘required’, and becomes important markers [sic] for the ‘real male’ to ‘retain’ his masculinity. This applies even to a casual fling, which often takes place after a session of drinking paid for by the bakla. The beer, and the ‘real man’s’ becoming lasing (drunk) can be described as a way of distancing. It is not important whether the male was drunk or not; invoking the beer, paid for by the bakla, ‘legitimizes’ the sexual encounter, as will other gifts and benefits if a relationship is pursued’’ (Michael Tan, quoted in Tadiar, ‘‘Kolboy,’’ 119). 53. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, 96. 54. In contrast to the prohibitive God invoked by Tom’s older brother, the stern, pious father-substitute whose authority, like that of the Catholic priest, symbolically derives from the Christ the King figure hanging over his bed (significantly, the figure is on an outdated calendar). 55. Kant: ‘‘Now, I say, man, and in general, every rational being exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will. . . . All objects of inclination have only a conditional worth. . . . Therefore the worth of any objects to be obtained by our actions is at all times only conditional. Beings whose existence does not depend on our will but on nature, if they are not rational beings, have only a relative worth as means and are therefore called ‘things’; on the other hand, rational beings are designated ‘persons’ because their nature indicates that they are ends in themselves.’’ Quoted in Cheah, ‘‘Posit(ion)ing Human Rights,’’ 18. Kant calls the substance that guarantees the condition under which persons can be ends in themselves dignity: ‘‘That which is related to general human inclinations and needs has a market price. . . . But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., a price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., dignity.’’ Quoted in ibid., 19. 56. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 229. 57. Manansalan discusses bakla as ‘‘an enduring social category’’ with a social dynamics inadequately captured by terms such as ‘‘homosexual,’’ ‘‘queer,’’ and ‘‘gay,’’ which some scholars and writers have translated it into. Garcia argues that bakla has a longer history than ‘‘homosexual,’’ which he attempts to substantiate by tracing its genealogy to precolonial practices. 58. Hau, ‘‘Who Will Save Us from the ‘Law’?’’ 59. Hau, ‘‘Alien Nation,’’ in Necessary Fictions. 60. Hau, Necessary Fictions, 165. 61. There is more to this than mere analogy. Perez himself deploys this figure in his play Anak ng Araw (1970), which is about the intimate lives of residents in a Manila boardinghouse. Bienvenido Lumbera notes that the unseen Chinese figure in the play ‘‘seems to embody the forces of economics on which the fortunes of the boarders

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depend.’’ Revaluations, 240. It is he who controls ‘‘the economy of the world of the play,’’ an economy of missed encounters, aborted relations, and failed desires for intimacy and love, an economy characterized by deep uncertainty and unfreedom. As the forces of economics, the figure of the Chinese is what prevents the self-realization and self-determination of the individual characters. His personification allows the translation of bare economic subsistence into emotional subsistence and deprivation. 62. Hau, Necessary Fictions, 138. 63. Unlike the metaphorical prostitution of the laborer invoked by Marx. See chapter 1. Also unlike his metonymical prostitution via the prostitution of his lover, the body which belongs to him, as in the case of Madiaga. Interestingly, in the film of this novel directed by Lino Brocka (1987) and written as a screenplay by José Lacaba, Madiaga is himself led into prostitution, which becomes a key moment in his path to revenge. 64. Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism, Power, and Ideology, 53. 65. Perez, A Filipino Werewolf in Quezon City, 78. 66. Santos, ‘‘Pasakalye,’’ in Perez, Cubao Midnight Express, xxii. My translation. 67. ‘‘Walang bakla sa langit pagkat wala ring lalaki at wala ring babae—mga kaluluwa ng tao lamang, na nagmamahal sa Diyos, at minamahal ng Diyos’’ (165). Manalansan, Global Divas; Garcia, Philippine Gay Culture. 68. In his letter to Y, Perez praises Y’s relation to his Western lover, Wayne, for being ‘‘a relation of two persons who are equal’’ (relasyon ng dalawang taong magkapantay). For what characterizes the bakla-relation (relasyong-bakla) in its ‘‘cleanest and finest form’’ (pinamalinis at pinakamagara niyang anyo) is true, good friendship, a relationship that is ‘‘ pure’’ or ‘‘unalloyed’’ (lantay). The use of the word ‘‘lantay’’ here counterposes this relationship to the prevalent heteronormative relationship between baklalalaki, the fiasco of which (in the case of the lalaki ‘‘actually’’ being bakla) is horrifyingly conveyed by means of the notion of tanso (counterfeit). For a discussion of this discourse of counterfeit and authentic currency in bakla-lalaki relations, see Tadiar, ‘‘Kolboy.’’ While the bakla-relation consists of equals, it does not, however, consist of sameness. As he writes, ‘‘walang dalawang taong magkatulad, kayat wala ring dalawang baklang magkatulad’’ (150). It is important to note that Perez makes this point in the context of the issue of coming out, a decision that he sees as personal. The demarcation of a personal realm as both a source of life and a potential source of pain (‘‘ang tubig na kinabubuhay ay nakapagdudulot din ng sakit, kundi nakalulunod’’ [150]) betokens an emerging secularism. 69. Perez suggests that the prevailing aspiration to heteronormative relations of love among baklas bears with it all the burdens and ties of private property and possessiveness that mar bakla ways of loving and prevent them from attaining relations of friendship that are pure and free (158). 70. Manansalan, ‘‘Speaking of aids,’’ 195. With this proviso, Manansalan uses the term to

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describe Filipino gay immigrants in the United States, ostensibly the place where such a hegemony holds sway. See also D’Emilio, ‘‘Capitalism and Gay Identity.’’ 71. Hau, ‘‘The Criminal State and the Chinese,’’ 230–31. Hau reads the minority figure of Ah Tek as well as Chinatown, ‘‘the city within the city,’’ as synecdoches of Manila, synecdoches that cast into relief ‘‘the deforming and dehumanizing violence, the rapacity and alienation that characterizes [sic] the city itself ’’ (217). 72. Garcia, Philippine Gay Culture. Garcia also notes the enduring resistance against this hegemony, as when he mentions the great animosity provoked by his public pronouncement of the objective reality that ‘‘all bakla are homosexual, but not all homosexual are bakla ’’ (53). 73. Garcia, Philippine Gay Culture, 20–21. 74. See Imelda Marcos’s speech, ‘‘Humanism: The Ideology,’’ in The Ideas of Imelda Romualdez Marcos. 75. The Ideas of Imelda Romualdez Marcos, 80, 86. 76. ‘‘Spiritual and Mental Pollution,’’ in The Ideas of Imelda Romualdez Marcos, 162. 77. Imelda Marcos fashioned herself as the figure of this courting, becoming the ambassador of Filipino humanity abroad whose main task was to attract the good favor and capital trust of the international community. See, for example, her appeal, made at the International Monetary Fund–World Bank Joint Annual Meeting in 1976, held in Metro Manila, in which she invites first world nations to bring about, ‘‘through their wise use of capital and technology, a new world order fit for man.’’ The Ideas of Imelda Marcos, 62. 78. All the malls and franchises that Tom and Butch hang out in and yet feel excluded from were established during this period. Ali Mall, specifically, was built in conjunction with one of Marcos’s events staged to attract international attention: the world heavyweight boxing championship fight (‘‘Thrilla in Manila’’) between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. The owners of the commercial center of Cubao were cronies of the Marcoses. 79. Connolly, ‘‘Refashioning the Secular,’’ 157. 80. ‘‘The City of Man Is Founded on the City of God,’’ delivered at the opening of the Metro Manila Billy Graham Crusade in 1977, in The Ideas of Imelda Marcos, 69–70. 81. The Ideas of Imelda Marcos, 70. 82. Tiongson, Doronila, Guillermo, and Mangahas, ‘‘The Ideology and Culture of the New Society,’’ in Santiago, Synthesis. 83. For an analysis of the work of disgust as a disavowal of pleasure in this novel and in the male sex market, see Carlo Tadiar. 84. Perez’s poem ‘‘Manipesto,’’ included in the same volume, blatantly decries these same forms of excessive behavior using the refrain of protest movements (ibagsak). ‘‘ibagsak ang kunday / ibagsak ang kendeng / ibagsak ang kiyeme . . . ibagsak ang etsingan / ibagsak ang ahasan / ibagsak ang ek-ekan . . . ibagsak ang baluktot na

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pananalita / ibagsak ang balikukong isipan / ibagsak ang baligtarang katauhan’’ (101–3). 85. For the importance of swardspeak for coping with and addressing aids, see Manansalan, ‘‘Speaking of aids.’’ The vital significance of these practices of swardspeak and kiyeme in sustaining one’s life and living is depicted in the short story ‘‘Lucy’’ by Miguel Castro, in Ladlad. 86. Silverman, Historical Trauma, 115. 87. Taguiwalo, ‘‘The Pursuit of Happiness at Coco Banana,’’ quoted in Garcia, Philippine Gay Culture, 78. 88. Butler, ‘‘Restaging the Universal,’’ 40–41. 89. For Jameson, image fragments in Western work are products of the practice of the symptom, which operates ‘‘to confront us with the structurally incomplete, which, however, dialectically a≈rms its constitutive relationship with an absence, with something else that is not given and perhaps never can be.’’ The Cultural Turn, 158–59. 90. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 150. 91. Guillermo, Protest/Revolutionary Art, 155. 92. A Filipino Werewolf in Quezon City, 68. 93. Perez himself remarks that the vocation of a Spirit Questor was not of his choosing. Beings, 65–66. 94. See Perez, The Calling, and Beings. Perez’s role in the collective project of the Spirit Questors is as urban shaman. Perez regularly published the spirit quest narratives in The Philippine Star, a fairly Catholic newspaper, which increased the number of his ‘‘clients’’ all over the Philippines. Chapter Seven Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses 1. Sison, Struggle for National Democracy, 33. 2. Ibid., 26. 3. Ibid., 27. 4. Ibid., 128–29. 5. Sison, ‘‘Mga Tungkulin ng Mga Kadres sa Larangan ng Kultura.’’ 6. Beverley, Subalternity and Representation. 7. Hau, Necessary Fictions, 125. 8. Daroy, Against the National Grain, 35. 9. Hence the criticism against the naturalist focus on ‘‘the more brutish and sordid aspects of social life’’ as ‘‘defeatist’’ for its inability to formulate a course of action beyond ‘‘individualistic and anarchistic actions.’’ As Patricia Melendrez-Cruz, puts it, ‘‘At this stage of our history, the social consciousness of the writers is no longer deemed su≈cient. It has to evolve into class-consciousness. It is pointed out that it is not enough for the writers to just expose and criticize. As partisan to the revolutionary cause of the

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Filipino masses, they must suggest courses of action in relation to the class struggle for a free, peaceful, and prosperous society.’’ ‘‘The Modern Pilipino Short Story,’’ 171–72. 10. Hence Sison’s criticism of the collection as largely failing to achieve the criteria of revolutionary literature, which he has just elaborated in his address of 1971, ‘‘Mga Tungkulin ng Mga Kadre sa Larangan ng Kultura.’’ 11. The publication of William Pomeroy’s novel The Forest (1963) is seen by Armando Malay Jr. to coincide with the pkp’s ‘‘intensified drive . . . to project peaceful struggle as a legitimate Marxist-Leninist option in the Philippines.’’ ‘‘The Dialectics of Kaluwagan,’’ 4–5. Guerrero, ‘‘Pomeroy’s Forest Nightmare.’’ 12. On the links between the principles of rectification and guerilla warfare, see Hau, Necessary Fictions. 13. Quoted in de la Torre, Theological and Political Reflections, 65. 14. Guerrero, ‘‘Specific Characteristics of People’s War.’’ 15. Firmeza, ‘‘Pitso Manok,’’ 17, 18. English translation by Juan Mil Anos. 16. Cf. ‘‘Represented as the recipient of personal bodily substances, the land is both an object of social activity and its symbol. Embodied in the land—blood, as shed in fighting and as inherited from ancestors—and sweat, as shed in work—are signs of the self, of the continuity of family and community and of the human activity which has domesticated a wild nature. Notice that there is an analogy here between production and reproduction. With their bodily substances, men irrigate and fecundate both the land and women.’’ Alonso, ‘‘Gender, Power, and Historical Memory,’’ 411. 17. Balgos de la Cruz, Bukal ng Tubig at Apoy. Subsequent references to this book are my translation. 18. mainstream, str, 124. 19. Guillermo, ‘‘Poetry of a People’s Statesman.’’ 20. ‘‘Beyond Transcendence, Toward Incarnation,’’ in Sison, Prison and Beyond, 19. As San Juan further suggests, the harmony is the fulfillment of a long-expected reunion with the wife and children from whom the revolutionary hero has been sundered. The masses are, in this light, the revolutionary hero’s own, people who have been taken away from him and whom he now summons as inner strength. 21. Lacaba, ‘‘Open Letters to Filipino Artists,’’ in mainstream, str, 102. In his poem ‘‘Rain,’’ Lacaba constructs a complicity between revolutionary forces and the very same rain that Pomeroy represented as a relentlessly assaulting enemy, heeding Amado Guerrero’s injunction to embrace the di≈cult Philippine geography and climate as enabling conditions of revolutionary warfare: ‘‘But the enemy is daunted by the climb into our fastnesses when the rain is heavy./And we have to mind the slippery stones in the streams. . . . And the cold, the cold, but we’re only the people’s army smiling in our song,/Because we are the eye of the typhoon, full of light of the great Revolution.’’ mainstream, str, 90. 22. See Essays: First Person, Plural, and Interventions.

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23. The e√orts to implement agrarian reform in Samar are briefly discussed by Ka Dante in the interview ‘‘Reaping the Grains of Success,’’ in Muog. See also the interviews in Collins, Fire Under the Rim. 24. San Juan, ‘‘Beyond Transcendence, Toward Incarnation,’’ 15. 25. The Second Propaganda Movement, as it was called, issued many such thematizations of the poet-warrior, no doubt inspired by the examples of Mao Tse-Tung and Ho Chi Minh; Ho is extolled by Sison as his inspiration in ‘‘Nothing More Beautiful’’ as well as quoted in an epigraph to Lacaba’s poem. This thematization should also be read as an attempt to close the gap between intellectual and manual labor, symbolic and material reality—a gap seen as the very product of alienation that the propagandists sought to overcome. 26. Magsasaka. 27. Pre-Capitalist Formations. Marx’s invocation of humanity should be viewed in relation to the less humanist notion of Species-Life, ‘‘where nature is the human being’s ‘great body without organs.’ ’’ Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 76. Spivak describes ‘‘Species-Life’’ alternately as the realm of freedom, gestation, as distinguished from and in contradiction with ‘‘Species-Being,’’ which she describes as the realm of necessity, law. 28. See, for example, de la Torre, Touching Root, Touching Ground. 29. Mojares in Salanga et al., Kamao. 30. ‘‘Repression not only bred resistance; in the heady pre-martial law period, it enhanced the challenge of revolutionary idealism and nourished the revolutionary myth. To be revolutionary was to invite reprisal, from this point of view; and to be tolerated by the State constituted proof of harmlessness, if not of collaborationism.’’ Malay, ‘‘The Dialectics of Kaluwagan,’’ 4. 31. Jameson, Marxism and Form, 157. 32. In ‘‘From Literature to Revolution,’’ Petronilo Bn Daroy comments, ‘‘A critic once observed that the poetry of Teresa of Avila is su√used with God. In an analogous way, the poetry of Sison is su√used with the idea of revolution.’’ The God function taken by the revolution in a later moment of the struggle will prove to be disastrous during the anti–deep penetration agent campaigns. 33. Sison sees himself as having been influenced by four nodes of thought, in a course of personal development paralleling the history of thought in the West and in the Philippines. These nodes, which he also describes as phases, are animism, Catholic religion, liberalism, and Marxism. Sison, The Philippine Revolution, 17. 34. Mga Tula ng Rebolusyong Pilipino, 68–69. 35. Garcellano, Interventions, 62–63. 36. As Mario Bolasco contends, not unlikely about this very poem included in this collection (inasmuch as this anthology of revolutionary poetry had just come out the year

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before), ‘‘The poetry I have read from Samar does not seem to contain any creative confrontation with popular folk perception. . . . I have yet to see poems from peasants come into [sic] terms with previous philosophical consciousness as Marx stated in his ‘Introduction to the German Ideology.’ Constantino in his Past Revisited cited the way in which superstition was used against the Huks. It could be used against them because superstition was not combated. The way to combat this has to be through the new consciousness introduced into the minds of the people, which can be expressed in their poems. . . . I would expect peasants to be confronting their previously closed world outlook and bursting it via poems. As of now, I don’t see any evidence of that yet.’’ ‘‘Open Forum,’’ 144. In the same volume, Francisco Nemenzo contends that the millenarian-populist worldview that mobilized and dominated the peasant movement led by the pkp also determined its easy demise: ‘‘pkp derived its strength from the fact that it was integrated in the indigenous revolutionary tradition but its chief weakness lay in the failure to transcend that tradition, to set the movement on a genuine Marxist footing.’’ ‘‘The Millenarian-Populist Aspects of Filipino Marxism,’’ 9. 37. Sison, The Philippine Revolution, Malay, ‘‘Some Random Reflections on Marxism’’ as well as the ‘‘Special Issue on the Crisis of the Left,’’ Kasarinlan. 38. ‘‘Ang estilo at nilalaman ng tula ay waring sinulat lamang ng isang matangdang Balagtasista na naglalaro sa vers libre.’’ Almario, Balagtasismo Versus Modernismo, 314. Hence Edel Garcellano’s criticism of the limits of Almario’s binary framework for viewing the movements of Tagalog poetry. 39. Filomeno Aguilar Jr. discusses the transformation of the figure of the buaya (crocodile) from an indigenous spirit entity to an ally of friar power, as a sign of the changing and yet continuous sway of native cosmology. Clash of Spirits, 43. 40. See Rebolusyonaryong Panunuring Masa. 41. Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution. 42. Cannell, Power and Intimacy, 199–200. 43. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 130. 44. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 164. 45. See also Hau’s discussion in Necessary Fictions. 46. Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution. 47. This half is the experiential movement of a liberative negation of ‘‘the numerous vacillations and hesitations and fears that the petty bourgeois is heir to.’’ Moreover, it is the will to a destined death—in this way it is an emulation of Christ accepting the fatal will of God as his own. ‘‘This liberating su√ering is not the end. There is still some dying to be done. The petty bourgeois is called the transition class. Although it has a distinctive role, it is limited and temporary. As contradictions heighten between capitalists and proletariat it is bound to die. Does it have no choice, then? It can o√er its life voluntarily. It can defect from the establishment it objectively served and ‘o√er the

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capital it has stolen from the colonial schools and institutions to the revolutionary potential of the people’ (Fanon), à la Victor Corpus’’ (Corpus is the afp lieutenant who famously defected to the npa in 1970). Touching Ground, Taking Root, 94–95. 48. As Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘‘Subjectification as a regime of signs or a form of expression is tied to an assemblage, in other words, an organization of power that is already fully functioning in the economy, rather than superposing itself upon contents or relations between contents determined as real in the last instance. Capital is a point of subjectification par excellence.’’ A Thousand Plateaus, 130. 49. In Wilfredo Gacosta’s ‘‘Mga Alaala ng Unang Araw Bilang Kadre sa Nayong Tinubuan’’ (Memories of My First Day as a Cadre in My Hometown), the revolutionary cadre who returns to the place of his old life hence suddenly encounters himself as a stranger: ‘‘i find myself now / before familiar faces . . . / but now they throw me / unfamiliar stares . . . / am i a foreigner that must be shunned?’’ mainstream, str, 41– 43. Translation modified. 50. Ileto discusses anting-anting as sign-objects that served as mediums for the absorption (through proximity) and concentration of this animist notion of power as the ‘‘creative energy’’ of the universe in one’s inner self (loob): ‘‘The proximity of these objects and persons enabled the rule to absorb some of their power. . . . For the power that is concentrated in an amulet to be absorbed by its wearer, the latter’s loob must be properly cultivated through ascetic practices, prayer, controlled bodily movements and other forms of self-discipline’’ Pasyon and Revolution, 32. 51. Camilo Torres writes of poverty and persecution as the logical consequences of and therefore signs of this ‘‘battle to the end against existing structures.’’ Quoted in de la Torre, Touching Ground, Taking Root, 95. De la Torre reads this situation as the dying that the petty-bourgeois Christian has to accept as part of his commitment to the holy historic destiny of his class. 52. Salazar, ‘‘Ethnic Psychology and History.’’ 53. For the idealist rendition of the practice of sharing, see Jun Cruz Reyes’s poem, ‘‘Syering,’’ in which the analogy between uban and rural struggles, which enables radical identification, only serves to preserve their essential split. Much of the later crisis of the movement would depend on this urban-rural split. 54. Gacosta, ‘‘Ang Mga Kaibigan’’ (1971), mainstream, str, 37. Translation modified. 55. Sison, ‘‘The Bladed Poem,’’ in Prison and Beyond. 56. ‘‘Alin cayang loob na sakdal nang tigas / alin naming puso ang hindi mabagbag, / na di malumusan at magdalang sindac / sa dalawang sintang ang loob ay tapat?’’ 57. Filipinos and Their Revolution, 4–5. 58. Ibid., 22–26. 59. The reading of Tagalog literature as the expression of the story of the nation through the experience of ‘‘romantic agony’’: ‘‘The Tagalog poetic tradition, as established by the folk poet, has carved two strains—one is keenly emotional and the other, subtly

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didactic. Thus, thematically, the tradition is one of romantic agony. . . . The story of Tagalog literature finds a parallel in the story of Tagalog freedom. The early Tagalog, a su√ering man, looked towards the future with the fondest hopes of survival. The Christian Tagalog was also a su√ering man, but his hope had taken on various meanings and various designs, until finally it took on a well-defined and purposefully-directed shape. The contemporary Tagalog, still a su√ering man, is one of the many men in the nation today working to transcend his pain.’’ Medina, The Primal Passion, xii. 60. ‘‘Magsasaka,’’ 64–65. My translation. 61. Ileto notes that the Historia Famosa ’s narrative account of Bernardo Carpio’s last journey is derived from indigenous myths of the underworld and its spirits, and that Bernardo Carpio himself becomes the figure of the indigenous king of the Tagalogs, who is trapped inside a mountain. Upon his death, Rizal is said to have joined Bernardo Carpio, and thereby to have acquired some of Carpio’s power. Combined with the pasyon, the myths express the masses’ expectation of liberation with the awakening of their buried king. 62. For an account of activists’ work in reframing hacienda workers’ grievances and hopes through Marxist and nationalist notions of systemic oppression and class unity and action, see Rutten, ‘‘Popular Support for the Revolutionary Movement cpp-npa,’’ in Abinales, The Revolution Falters, 110–53. 63. Garcellano, First Person, Plural, 67–68. 64. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 91. 65. While some guidelines for cultural struggle are articulated in the respective programs of the cpp and the ndf, it is clear from the conflicts and debates over strategy and vision within and between these organizations, and the consequent changes in the programs themselves from the late 1960s to the 1990s, that these guidelines have not had the kind of rigid, consistent, and clear force of power that one might assume of a political organizational policy. Indeed, the unevenness of literary production and circulation admitted by Artista at Manunulat ng Sambayanan (armas) (People’s Artists and Writers) in 1991 is explained as the consequence of ‘‘the lack of a comprehensive literary program in the guerilla zones that would aid those in the urban areas trying to fulfill creative tasks, to realize and improve the literary works of the national democratic movement.’’ ‘‘Ang Panitikang Testimonyal: Panitikang Saksi sa Kasaysayan, Panitikan ng Pakikibaka,’’ in Ulos (1991), 14–15. The relatively late establishment of armas in 1987 in Bicol and its advancement of rkmsp (rebolusyonaryong kilusang masa sa sining at panitikan), following the flourishing of other cultural organizations during the Aquino regime (1986–92) such as panulat (Pambansang Unyon ng mga Manunulat), linang (Kilusan sa Paglilinang ng Rebolusyonaryong Sining at Panitikan sa Kanayunan) and bugkos (Coordinating Center for People’s Culture) as well as Gapas Foundation, all responsible for much of the aboveground publication and circulation

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of revolutionary literature—this late institutional development of cultural struggle demonstrates the relative autonomy of the realm of cultural practice. 66. (ppdr, 1968). Critics aboveground also contributed significantly to national democratic literary criticism and aesthetics, among them Guillermo, The Covert Image; Melendrez-Cruz, Filipinong Pananaw sa Wika, Panitikan at Lipunan; Ordoñez, The Other Literature, and Nationalist Literature; Torres-Yu, Sa Pagsibol ng Talinghagang Anakpawis sa hanay ng Manggagawa; and E. San Juan Jr. 67. Ang Panitikan ng Pambansang Demokrasya, 65–67. 68. Philippine Society and Revolution, 292–93. 69. Cf. ‘‘inoorganisa ng panitikang ito ang isyu at damdamin ng masa para sa mga praktikal na pakilos sa nakatuon sa pag-agaw sa kapangyarihan pulitikal’’ (this literature organizes the issues and feelings of the masses for the practical actions directed toward the seizing of political power). Guillermo, ‘‘Ang Panitikan ng Larangan Gerilya,’’ 237. 70. Montañez, The New Mass Art and Literature. 71. Ibid., 18. 72. ‘‘The New Mass Art and Literature,’’ in Nationalist Literature, 370. 73. ‘‘Rectify the Errors and Rebuild the Party,’’ Central Committee, Communist Party of the Philippines (1968). 74. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 698–99. 75. Daroy, ‘‘From Literature to Revolution,’’ in Ordoñez, Nationalist Literature, 239–40. Sison himself described the times in terms of the whole country becoming ‘‘one gigantic classroom’’ whose overwhelming need for an educational tool to channel the tremendous energy of radical youth activism is proposed to have been met by psr. ‘‘Preface’’ to the third edition of Guerrero, Philippine Society and Revolution, ix. 76. Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 101. 77. Quotations on 145. Guerrero also consistently depicted past Philippine presidents as landlords and landgrabbers. 78. Almario, Balagtasismo Versus Modernismo, 313–14. 79. Ileto’s work shows this reversal as having been a crucial part of popular peasant movements’ imagination in the early part of the twentieth century. It is evident that much of the appeal of the radical solution to the social crisis of the 1960s lay less in Left Utopianism than in this immanence of reversal that is heightened by Guerrero/Sison’s Maoist optimism. Guerrero portrays U.S. imperialism, for example, as ‘‘rapidly heading for total collapse’’ as socialism and people’s wars all over the world march toward world victory: ‘‘Though it appears to be a huge monster, U.S. imperialism is in essence a paper tiger in the throes of its death-bed struggle’’ (Philippine Society and Revolution, 158). Also, in portraying all agencies of the government, from chiefs of barangays to the president, as ‘‘running dogs’’ of U.S. imperialism, Guerrero showed them to be traitors of the true revolutionary faith: ‘‘tribute collectors, enforcers of corvee labor and principal devotees of the alien faith’’ (163).

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80. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 95. 81. Ibid., 98. 82. See Gayatri Spivak’s important critique of the modes of production narrative in Critique of Postcolonial Reason. 83. Ahmad, Confronting Empire, 24. Chapter Eight Guerilla Passion and the Unfinished Cultural Revolution 1. ‘‘You cannot call it anything less than a crisis when the leadership of the underground says that in the last three years or four years, 60 per cent of the mass base of the underground has been lost.’’ Rocamora, ‘‘Crisis and Opportunity,’’ 30. For another account, see Abinales, ed., The Revolution Falters. 2. Third World Study Center, Marxism in the Philippines, Second Series. 3. Walden Bello for fopa Crisis of Socialism Cluster Group, ‘‘The Dual Crisis of the Philippine Progressive Movement’’ in Bello and Gershman, Reexamining and Renewing the Philippine Progressive Vision, 22. 4. Sara Miles, ‘‘The Struggle for Internal Democracy,’’ in Bello and Gershman, Reexamining and Renewing the Philippine Progressive Vision, 42. 5. Lloyd, ‘‘Anti-State Nationalisms.’’ See also ‘‘Nationalism against the State,’’ in Bello and Gershman, Reexamining and Renewing the Philippine Progressive Vision. 6. This, despite the well-known fact that many of the activists who are part of these social movements consisting of people’s organizations and nongovernmental organizations either came directly from or had closely worked with the national democratic revolutionary movement. 7. The implication that antiregime forces were inherently democratizing can be seen in Thompson, The Anti-Marcos Struggle. 8. ‘‘Stand for Socialism Against Modern Revisionism,’’ 1992 (quoted in Guillermo, ‘‘Tungkol sa Panitikan ng Bagong-Demokratikong Rebolusyon,’’ Notes for Discussion, 13 August 1999). Guillermo contrasts this to the statements in the ‘‘Program for the People’s Democratic Revolution’’ (1968), which mentions ‘‘the interests of the people’’ but does not specify individual rights. The new democratic aspect as framed through a strong sense of the rights of the individual subsumes under liberal terms what could also be framed as the validity and importance of sociocultural practices of life that individuals engage in to sustain their own living as well as the social life of the revolution and its metamorphosis. The absence of adequate categories for the sustained realization and organized production of these practices is, however, precisely what allows their subsumption under ‘‘individual rights.’’ 9. Nacpil-Alejandro, ‘‘Reflections on the Anti-dpa Campaign,’’ in Gershman and Bello, Reexamining and Renewing the Philippine Progressive Vision, 201. Nacpil-Alejandro’s assessment is based on a study of ccp documents on the anti-infiltration campaigns,

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which implied that the campaigns were violations of individual rights and due process. Nacpil-Alejandro argues that in contrast to its articulation of human rights in the public sphere, the movement had no concept of human rights as practiced within its own organization until after the purge took place. 10. For exemplary, if not definitive, expressions of these positions, see Armando Liwanag, ‘‘Rea≈rm Our Basic Principles and Rectify Errors,’’ and Ka Barry, ‘‘Resist Authoritarian Tendencies Within the Party! Let a Thousand Schools of Thought Contend,’’ in Kasarinlan, 82–133, 134–41. See also the Left positions articulated in response and relation to the dominant polarity between rea≈rmists and rejectionists in ‘‘A Special Issue on Philippine Left Alternatives,’’ Kasarinlan. 11. Marcelino, ‘‘The Human Side of Human Rights,’’ in Gershman and Bello, Reexamining and Renewing the Philippine Progressive Vision. 12. Most of the scholarship on the crisis of the Left focuses on the conflicts and debates within the leadership. In this regard, Lidy Nacpil-Alejandro’s admonition and appeal are worth keeping in mind: ‘‘The debate and the current upheaval going on is [sic] actually a very complex process and no matter how tempting or convenient, it cannot really be reduced to rea≈rm or reject. It covers a whole range of and vision of socialism, democracy within the organization, and so on. It also involves di√erent dynamics in di√erent parts of the movement and the organization in di√erent parts of the country and even of the world. I do not say this to obscure the issues or dynamics of the debate or to discourage or derail anyone from seeking to understand it or seeking to present the issues sharply. Rather, I say this as a reminder and as an appeal to all of us, we here in this room and all of us who are participants to the debate not to caricature or reduce this to black and white, good and evil, lest we do ourselves in this movement a disservice, lest we commit the error of presuming that we have a monopoly of truth, absolute truth at that, or commit the error of being selective in whom to listen to or to dialogue with or even in our own emotions, fail to see the truth that both or all sides are trying to say.’’ ‘‘The Need for Principled Struggle,’’ in Gershman and Bello, Reexamining and Renewing the Philippine Progressive Vision, 32. 13. See Eva-Lotta E. Hedman in Abinales, The Revolution Falters, and Mark Thompson, who both suggest that the ‘‘entrenchment of electoralism’’ is a continuing legacy of U.S. colonialism. Walden Bello argues that ‘‘the reformulation of democracy should no longer be a ‘people’s democracy,’ but a deepening and a creation of substantive democracy from the very formal democracy that now exists’’; he thus pushes for participation in the parliamentary framework. ‘‘Elite Politics and the Philippine Left,’’ in Flamiano and Goertzen, Critical Decade, 30–35. 14. See, for example, the positions of various Left groups in the ‘‘Special Issue on Philippine Left Alternatives,’’ Kasarinlan. 15. The critiques of nationalist liberation movements are too well known to be rehearsed here. They include, for example, critiques by women and indigenous peoples that their

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specific experience of oppression is relegated to a secondary importance and their di√erences are subsumed within a putative national identity of ‘‘the people.’’ 16. Constantino, A Past Revisited. McCoy, ‘‘Low Intensity Conflict in the Philippines.’’ 17. On the part of the state, it is ‘‘technocratic militarism.’’ Bello, Kinley, and Elinson, Development Debacle. For the statist logic of nationalism, see Lloyd, ‘‘Anti-State Nationalisms.’’ 18. McCoy, ‘‘Babaylan.’’ 19. Abinales, ‘‘When a Revolution Devours Its Children before Victory,’’ in The Revolution Falters. 20. If development was counterinsurgency, it was carried out precisely through the psyops of low-intensity conflict. 21. Filomeno Aguilar Jr. writes about the ‘‘planters’ adroit manipulation of indigenous culture as a brilliant stratagem of class power,’’ a manipulation that did not preclude their own participatory belief in that culture. Clash of Spirits, 186. 22. Gambling allowed what would have been perceived as a ‘‘clash of powers’’ between the Spanish and U.S. colonizers to be reenacted over and over again, allowing for inversions of hierarchy in colonial society (Clash of Spirits, 47). ‘‘As a system to stratify the ranks of sugar planters, gambling gave the ancient Visayan notion of interpersonal dungan [penetrable souls] rivalries a modern expression as hacenderos engaged in their contests of acumen and grit, skill and otherworldly favor, strength and superiority’’ (110). 23. As Gelacio Guillermo puts it, ‘‘inoorganisa ng mga sulatin ang pag-iisip, damdamin at pagkilos ng mga rebolusyonaryong puwersa at masa para sa mga kagyat at matagalang layunin ng digmang bayan at / o iba pang larangan ng gawaing kasangkot sa pagsusulong ng bagong-demokratikong rebolusyon.’’ ‘‘Introduksyon,’’ Muog, xxiv. 24. Isa sa mga tungkulin ng rebolusyonaryong panitikan ay ‘‘paunlarin ang mga bagong pagpapahalagang nagsisilbing aktibang pwersa sa materyal na pagbabago ng lipunan at mamamayan.’’ Ibid., xxxv. 25. Ibid., xliii. 26. See, for example, the vignettes ‘‘Baboy Lang ‘Yan,’’ ‘‘Ambus,’’ and ‘‘Ang kagilagilalalas na Pakikpagsapalaran ni Ka Goying’’ in Ulós, no. 1 (1991). 27. Benjamin, Illuminations, 224–25. 28. Ibid., 223–24. 29. See my ‘‘Walter Benjamin and Emergent Literature.’’ 30. Snyder, ‘‘Benjamin on Reproducibility and Aura,’’ 159. 31. Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art,’’ 104. 32. Montañez, The New Mass Art and Literature, 12. 33. Illuminations, 235. 34. The New Mass Art and Literature, 15–16. 35. See Rafael, ‘‘Patronage, Pornography, and Youth,’’ in Rafael, White Love.

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36. See the protest poem pitting Ka Dante as the polar image-function of Nora Aunor. The so-called Second Golden Age of Philippine Cinema comprised the socially conscious films of Brocka, Bernal, Romero, de Leon, etc., which attempted to recast the stars of commercial cinema into progressive consciousness-raising films. See Lumbera, ‘‘Brocka, Bernal and Co.: The Arrival of New Filipino Cinema,’’ in Writing the Nation: Pag-akda ng Bansa. At the same time, as these filmic interventions remained within the orbit of the dominant film industry, they did not eschew but rather di√erently engaged the protocols, imperatives, and appeals of commercial cinema. See Jonathan Beller, Acquiring Eyes, for incisive analyses of the important political remediation of Philippine society accomplished by the films of Brocka, Bernal, and de Leon. 37. Marx writes of the ‘‘personality’’ of capital as ‘‘the reification of a subjectivity opposed to the labourer’’: ‘‘The concept of capital implies that the objective conditions of labour—and these are its own product—acquire a personality as against labour, or what amounts to the same thing, that they are established as the property of a personality other than the worker’s. The concept of capital implies the capitalist.’’ Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, 118. 38. See chapters 1 and 2. Also see my article ‘‘Himala (Miracle): The Heretical Potential of Nora Aunor’s Star Power,’’ and chapter 6 in my Fantasy-Production. 39. Marx, quoted in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 658. 40. We might liken them to the ‘‘outlawed needs’’ theorized by Rosemary Hennessy. 41. To view the revolutionary movement as a mode of production is to see it as ‘‘a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expression their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.’’ Marx and Engels, German Ideology, Part I, quoted in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, 121. 42. Claude Lefort writes, ‘‘In my view the phenomenon of power lies at the centre of political analysis, but this is not because the power relationship is autonomous (reduced to its simplest expression, as the domination of a single individual or group over a collectivity, this relationship tells us nothing); it is because the existence of a power capable of obtaining generalized obedience and allegiance implies a certain type of social division and articulation, as well as a certain type of representation, to some extent explicit, to a larger extent implicitly, concerning the legitimacy of the social order.’’ The Political Forms of Modern Society, 281–82. 43. Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World, 96. 44. In global terms, we can think about the failure of the world contradiction between communism and capitalism to be the result, not of preexisting contradictions of identity, but rather of the very excess and void opened up by this dominant social contradiction of class struggle. That is to say, as they take on dominant form and weight, social

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contradictions generate a plane on which seemingly peripheral concerns, tangential to the center’s aims, become acutely out of place, even as they have significantly propelled, maintained, and supplemented the central antagonisms of our time. 45. Mbembe, ‘‘African Modes of Self-Writing.’’ 46. Arinto, ‘‘Women and Revolution’’ and ‘‘Ang Nakakatawa/Nakakatuwa Sa Rebolusyon,’’ and Hau, On the Subject of the Nation, 168–88. 47. Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World, 120 48. Ileto argues that awa (pity) and damay (empathy) ‘‘provide one explanation for the uprisings and rallies that are a constant feature of Philippine history.’’ These cultural practices constitute what he calls the ‘‘other politics.’’ On this view, the public outpouring of grief for Aquino can be considered ‘‘a public display of ‘the other politics,’ the one which has occasionally asserted itself in the past but which more often has remained the minor partner of a politics defined as colonial, national, central, and elite.’’ Filipinos and their Revolution, 175, 176. 49. Released political detainees and ‘‘surfaced’’ revolutionary elements became teachers at high schools and universities, the films of Lino Brocka, Mike de Leon, Ishmael Bernal, represented social struggles, demonstrations, strikes, and gra≈ti marked the presence of insurgent forces in urban spaces, 50. In Balgos de la Cruz, Bukal ng Tubig at Apoy. 51. Comaro√ and Comaro√, ‘‘Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction,’’ 278. 52. Liberation (September 1989). 53. Spivak, The Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 101–8. Chapter Nine The Sorrows of People 1. Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 42. For a critique of Michael Denning’s deemphasis of the global character of 1960s social movements, see Christopher Connery, ‘‘The World Sixties.’’ 2. Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 27. 3. Dalisay, Killing Time in a Warm Place. 4. Ibid., 104. Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, ‘‘The Fantasy-Secret of Killing Time in a Warm Place,’’ Diliman Review 43, 2 (1995): 32–39, 36. 5. See, for example, the romantic portrayal of the early stirrings of a revolutionary dream in the young Che Guevara in the film version of The Motorcycle Diaries, despite the film’s countercontext of address. 6. Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas. 7. Ibid., 111. 8. Ibid., 152. 9. In 1985, Francisco Nemenzo estimated, ‘‘Today the npa has at least 12,000 full-time guerillas and 35,000 part-time militias. It is operating in 56 out of 72 provinces, and in

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400 out of 1,500 municipalities. Lieutenant-General Fidel Ramos, the pc chief, admitted that at least 20 per cent of the barangays are controlled or infiltrated by the npa. . . . The number of villages under e√ective npa control at night time or what the npa calls ‘guerilla fronts’ is a more meaningful index of rebel strength. As of the end of 1983, thirty-six of these were located in all the major islands. Each covers several adjacent towns where mass support is so broad and stable that npa units can move freely and strike with impunity.’’ ‘‘The Left and the Traditional Opposition,’’ 57. 10. In 1991, the party estimated that the loss was at 40 percent from 1986 levels. In 1991, it estimated the loss to be ‘‘around 60 percent overall, up to 85 percent in some regions and in one area, as high as 97 percent.’’ Armando Liwanag, ‘‘Rea≈rm Our Basic Principles and Rectify Errors,’’ cited in Weekley, The Communist Party of the Philippines, 20. 11. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 112. 12. Ibid., 113. 13. Spivak, ‘‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’’ in In Other Worlds, 274– 75. 14. Firmeza wrote a first draft of the novel from 1981 to 1983, when, during intense military campaigns against his guerilla bases, he entrusted the manuscript to one of the masses. Assigned thereafter to a new location, he was never able to retrieve the original. 15. Bahktin, The Dialogic Imagination, 84. 16. Garcellano, Interventions, 38, 40. 17. In ‘‘Mga Tungkulin ng mga Kadre sa Larangan ng Kultura’’ (Responsibilities of Cadres in the Sphere of Culture), Jose Ma. Sison advises, ‘‘Ang dapat maging buod ng organikong kaisahan sa isang obrang pampanitikan o pansining ay ang rebolusyonaryong pakikibaka’’ (What should constitute the essence of organic unity of a literary or artistic work is the revolutionary struggle). 18. Adorno, Notes to Literature, 1:35. 19. Hayden White describes the chronicle as promising but lacking closure, ‘‘that summing up of the ‘meaning’ of the chain of events with which it deals that we normally expect from the well-made story.’’ In contrast to the chronicle, which fails to attain full narrativity of the events it reports, the historical narrative ‘‘reveals to us a world that is putatively ‘finished,’ ’’ possessing an order of meaning subsequently ‘‘found’’ in its events. The Content of the Form, 16, 21. 20. This stratagem propagates ‘‘a documentary account of the daily historical and historic details, events, and actors of revolutionary struggle.’’ Harlow, Resistance Literature, 73. In Cardenal’s words, ‘‘Exteriorismo is an objective poetry, narrative and anecdotal, composed of the elements of real life and with concrete things, with proper names and precise details and accurate data and figures and facts and popular sayings.’’ Quoted in Gonzalez and Treece, The Gathering of Voices, 289. 21. The narrative preoccupation with weapons and ammunition demonstrates their sig-

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nificance to the npa’s tactical operatives—the gathering of firearms is a principal activity of guerilla warfare—and points to the importance of such chronicles to the movement’s sense of its own continuity and development. The number of arms becomes an expression of strength as well as a configuration of revolutionary desire, as manifested in the remarks of one cadre: ‘‘Having 25,000 rifles is no longer a dream. It is within reach. At this prospective strength, the majority of the 1,500 towns and provincial capitals in the country would already be within the scope of npa o√ensive capability.’’ Liberation (March 1984), 24, quoted in San Juan, Crisis in the Philippines, 135. Correspondingly, San Juan’s own history of the npa is depicted in such terms: ‘‘Founded on 19 March 1969, the npa started with only sixty men and thirty-five rifles, confined to a single district of Tarlac, one town in Pampanga and another in Zambales. In 1972, contrary to Marcos’ claim that the npa had 100,000 regulars, the npa counted only 350 guerillas (versus 100,000 afp regular personnel; ratio 1:285) confined to a few provinces in northern and central Luzon. Subsequently the npa experienced a rapid if tortuous growth. In 1977, npa rifles reached 1,500 (versus 150,000 afp personnel; ratio 1:100) deployed in all nine territorial regions, in more than forty provinces with guerilla zones and fronts. By 1982, the npa rifle strength reached the critical mass of 10,000 (as against 164,000 afp personnel; ratio 1:16), with thirty-six fronts in more than sixty provinces, capable of launching wide and frequent tactical o√ensives’’ (131). 22. As one urban-based writer on a trip to the countryside to familiarize people with the conditions there, including conditions of struggle, writes in his notebook: ‘‘Paraan ng pag-iisip ng masa: paligoy-ligoy, madetalye’’ (Way of thinking of the masses: circuitous, overly detailed). ‘‘Somewhere in the Country(side),’’ in Guillermo, Ang Panitikan ng Pambansang Demokrasya, 72. 23. This is an important conceit within the movement, one which shapes the genres of revolutionary literature. The novel alludes to this conceit numerous times, as comrades are shown to exchange such stories, express admiration for each other, and discuss the importance of guerillas serving as examples for their comrades. As one character says, ‘‘Comrades need examples, but in my view, they need living examples even more’’ (232). 24. Anderson, Imagined Communities and The Spectre of Comparisons. 25. In his philosophical-anthropological study, Dionisio Miranda notes that the relationship indicated by ka ‘‘involves a sharing in something or of something’’ which may either be objective or subjective, interpersonal or pluripersonal, and which generally implies equality and mutuality in that which is shared. Miranda, Loob, 53–54. For the revolutionary forces, Ka is a signifier of shared struggle and thus of shared possibilities and impossibilities, shared conditions and structures, and consequently shared orientation of actions. While it invokes an a≈liation ‘‘in something or of something,’’ it does not necessarily invoke a unified subject or a fused collective identity. However, the shared aspect on which the a≈nity of mga kasama is based—the experience of revolu-

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tionary struggle (sama referring to their involved presence in the same spatiotemporal event or world)—does imply an alteration of their individual subjective forms. In fact, it gives rise to a plurisubjectivity, by which I mean a constellation of part-subjects whose subjective practices constitutively bear on each other. They are part-subjects inasmuch as they are not configured as completely autonomous, self-contained beings (egological forms), which then come into relation with each other. Neither, however, are they mere parts of one unified subjectivity, of which they are individual instantiations (the structure of fascism). They are, rather, part-subjects because the experiential practices they engage in that constitute their selves are inextricably linked to and shaped by the experiential practices of others. This plurisubjectivity does not determine the relations among its part-subjects (that is, their content) but only creates the communion structure, which makes these constitutive intersubjective, interexperiential relations viable. It is this revolutionary plurisubjectivity, composed of many bodies, voices, minds, and wills, which actuates the narrative movement. 26. Benjamin, ‘‘On the Concept of History.’’ 27. Cf. Lloyd, ‘‘Nationalisms Against the State,’’ 173–97. 28. The mobility of guerilla warfare is made manifest in the jumps and leaps in the narrative, the sudden shifts in space and time. Chapters are asymmetrical, starting somewhere and ending somewhere else, and often composed of di√erent narrative units, with no attempt to reconcile the gaps between these units. As I discuss later, formally this disjointed narrative style is modeled after serial comic books and film, forms of popular consciousness that meld with broader lower-class everyday life. 29. Jameson, ‘‘Afterword,’’ Aesthetics and Politics. 30. Benjamin’s own conception of ‘‘empty, homogeneous time’’ situates it as the time of the victor, in the catastrophic chain of events called progress. It is a time associated with fascism and oppression that revolution explodes. In contrast to the continuum presented by the historicism of civilization, historical materialist ‘‘establishes a conception of the present as now-time shot through with splinters of messianic time.’’ ‘‘On the Concept of History,’’ 397. Marc Redfield has similarly commented on Anderson’s elision of Benjamin’s account of the more dislocating features of ‘‘the age of mechanical reproduction’’: ‘‘For surely ‘homogeneous, empty time’ is always also fracture and rupture; it is capitalism’s inhuman accumulative rhythms; modernity’s unnerving acceleration.’’ ‘‘Imagi-Nation,’’ 81. Redfield also remarks on the importance to nationalism’s work of mourning of the specific deaths entailed by war. 31. Culler, ‘‘Anderson and the Novel,’’ in Grounds of Comparison, 49–50. 32. By ‘‘politics’’ more generally, I refer to Carl Schmitt’s conception, which importantly informs the accounts of Benjamin and Agamben, both of whose philosophical approaches to violence I discuss later. Anderson famously locates the origins of nationalism in the creole nationalisms of Latin America and belatedly in the anticolonial nationalisms of Southeast Asia.

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33. Rizal, Noli Me Tangere, 88. 34. It is this politics that finally sets Ibarra and Elías apart (with Elías sacrificed at the end of the novel). To Ibarra’s declaration that he loves his country because he owes her and will owe her his happiness, Elías murmurs, ‘‘And I because I owe her my misfortune’’ (Noli Me Tangere, 331). For Elías, misfortune calls forth divine justice, the cause of the people becomes the cause of God: ‘‘I hear God’s voice. Woe unto those who want to resist Him. History has not been written for them. . . . Do you not see how everything awakens? The sleep lasted for centuries, but one day lightning struck, and the lightning, in destroying, brought forth life. Since then new aspirations work the spirits and these aspirations, today separate, will one day unite, guided by God. God has not failed the other peoples, neither will he fail ours; his cause is the cause of freedom’’ (Noli Me Tangere, 337). Ibarra meets Elías’s speech with silence. 35. Ileto. For the role of kundiman in the revolution against Spain, see Teresita Maceda, Imaging the Nation. 36. ‘‘Kapwa is a concept that embraces both categories (iba at hindi iba) [other and not other] . . . Filipino dictionaries render kapwa with ‘both’ or ‘fellow-being,’ underlining an understanding of shared identity that the word and concept ‘other’ as used in the West practically excludes, inasmuch as it stresses separateness of identity. Kapwa is thus a concept that embraces both myself as well as the other.’’ Miranda, Loob, 50. See also Enriquez, ‘‘Kapwa: A Core Concept.’’ As I’ve argued in previous chapters, this practical notion of kapwa implies an extensive self whose being is continuous with the being of others. In a society tending toward the production of humans as either individualist subjects or undi√erentiated objects, kapwa increasingly becomes obsolescent as a vital term of social interaction. In this context, pakikipagkapwa, the process and practice of interrelating on the basis of kapwa, can thus be viewed as a revolutionary praxis of going-along-with, which while deemed the basis of the reactionary tendencies of adventurism can act to destroy capitalist forms of subjectivity as well as forge a collective force capable of bringing about radical change. Far from being a traditional or indigenous mode of collective formation displaced by a more modern politics of nationalism, the politics of kasama operates within and in subversive engagement with the conditions of the nation. 37. Ernesto Laclau most vigorously expresses the importance of this politics of constructing community, which is predicated on the establishment of an antagonistic limit: ‘‘The political construction of all social identity . . . is only possible if equivalential relations between heterogeneous elements are established and if the hegemonic dimension of naming is highlighted.’’ Laclau, ‘‘Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics,’’ 677. As my discussion should make clear, the politics of kasama relations is less a politics of constructing social identity than a politics of realizing coextensity of being on the basis of shared movement (going-with). 38. Guillermo, ‘‘Party Policy in Revolutionary Literature,’’ 24, 11.

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39. Ibid., 11. ‘‘Regulation’’ was understood to be part of the ‘‘erroneous current of thought and action’’ of militarism and adventurism detected among proponents of urban insurrection that led to grave losses of both guerilla forces and the mass base: ‘‘This erroneous current of thought and action has brought about the gravest setbacks and destruction to the Party and the revolutionary movement, first in one major island and subsequently on a nationwide scale. It has brought about the lopsided distribution of cadres and resources, the costly building of urban-based sta√ organs and top-heavy military sta√ (which are vulnerable to the enemy), gross reductions of the mass base, the eventual isolation and passivity of the prematurely enlarged and unsustainable armed units, defeats and demoralization in a purely military situation and finally a wild surge of panic like the anti-informer hysteria.’’ ‘‘Rea≈rm Our Basic Principles and Carry the Revolution Forward,’’ cpp Central Committee, December 26, 1991. 40. This practical value is most explicitly illustrated by Firmeza’s reproduction of the guerilla’s social analyses, in the form of written data or oral reports, and his weak narrative treatment of the cadres’ task of ‘‘social investigation,’’ a form of politicaleconomic reconnaissance, which I show also informs Jun Cruz Reyes’s urban activist novel Tutubi, Tutubi, Huwag kang Magpahuli Kay Mamang Salbahe (see chapter 4). 41. ‘‘What is called ‘revolutionary work’ is the product of the conjunction of the implementation of policy in its concrete, tactical form by the revolutionary forces (party cadres and members, members of the New People’s Army, National Democratic Front and mass organizations) and circumstances comprised by factors both internal (the ideological, political, even psychological disposition of the revolutionary forces) and external (enemy action, public opinion, national and international situations with bearings on the local revolutionary movement). Or the interaction of elements, both the spontaneous and the conscious, and environment, as Lenin says.’’ Guillermo, ‘‘Party Policy in Revolutionary Literature,’’ 2. 42. The devices of cinematic montage and the installment method of illustrated novels in comic books are also to be found in the first novel of the underground press, Hulagpos, by Mano de Verdades Posadas, a novel which inspired Firmeza to write his. Gera depicts the way cadres from the urban areas brought commercial popular culture with them to the hills and displayed it to while away the time, such as when Ka George tells his comrades about a movie (‘‘Fiddler on the Roof ’’) he remembers watching before he went underground. 43. See the film ‘‘Internal A√airs,’’ made in Hong Kong, and its Hollywood remake, ‘‘The Departed’’ (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2006) for paradigmatic works. 44. McCoy, Closer Than Brothers, 204–5. 45. Ibid., 206. 46. For the cpp/npa, ‘‘womanizing ‘‘ is a form of sexual violence that stems from both feudal and capitalist ideological structures: ‘‘cpp/npa policy deconstructed feudal and bourgeois sexual discourses both of which were considered inadequate for Party soli-

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darity. The former was considered to embody the submission of women to economic power and to the will of men, whereas the latter was perceived not only as male oriented but as dehumanizing, competitive, exploitative, individualistic and decadent (Communist Party of the Philippines, Women’s Bureau, 1974): private property was considered the linchpin of the domination of women.’’ Hilsdon, Madonnas and Martyrs, 73. 47. ‘‘The death drive is a psychic force whose work is the unbinding of psychical energies, detaching them both from the ego and from objects (others), and pressing toward the discharge of all tension to a zero level or inert state. When it is directed outwards, toward objects/others, the destructive drive is thus a secondary manifestation of a primary, self-destructive death drive.’’ De Lauretis, ‘‘Becoming Inorganic,’’ 554. 48. This masculinist camaraderie is demonstrated in the guerillas’ stories of past military exploits told to inspire their comrades and in the collective humor that binds the male cadres at the expense of their female comrades. The configuring of the communist practice of pakikipagkapwa as masculine kasama relations accounts for the marginalized representation of female cadres in the novel, which May Datuin critiques as the product of a more generalized patriarchal discourse. Datuin, ‘‘Ang Diskursong Patriarkal sa Ilang Piling Naratibong Nakalimbag ng Panitikan ng Kilusang PambansangDemokratiko, 1970–1991.’’ Datuin notes how female comrades function as objects of desire, causing personal tensions among male comrades, or as mere adjuncts to the latter, confined to traditional female tasks such as cooking and healing. 49. Arinto, ‘‘Women and Revolution,’’ 70. As Arinto writes, ‘‘To be a kasama is to be an ally, a friend, a comrade. . . . For a woman to be a kasama is for her to assume a role not limited to the private, domestic sphere. But neither is it a denial of those other roles in society which women necessarily fill at one time or another. Instead it is a redefinitiion of these roles such that they are imbued with a larger social significance’’ (88–89). 50. ‘‘I think that, broadly speaking, racism justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality. . . . So racism is bound up with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power. The juxtaposition of—or the way biopower functions through—the old sovereign power of life and death implies the workings, the introduction and activation, of racism.’’ Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 258. 51. Susan Buck-Morss argues, in the context of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, that eliminating the enemies of the revolution became ‘‘synonymous with saving the Revolution, it became the act of sovereign legitimation.’’ This logic of revolutionary sovereignty entailed the complete identification of Robespierre, as the figure of Jacobinism, with the fictive unity of ‘‘the people.’’ Dreamworld and Catastrophe, 10–12. 52. Garcia, To Su√er Thy Comrades.

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53. Shaped by the homosocial, masculinist organization of libidinal desire within the movement, this paranoiac intelligence can be construed as a homophobic structure of defense to the extent that what is being defended against is an invisible betrayal (of one who is not as he or she seems) or enemy within. As the ‘‘exclusive inclusion’’ which founds revolutionary homosociality, the socially prohibited status of homosexuality (as an instance of the category of ‘‘bare life’’) thus comes to characterize the identity of the suspected ‘‘deep penetration agent’’ as internal other, the presence of whom threatens to destroy the movement and therefore introduces a state of exception, which legitimates the extraordinary use of torture within the movement. Under the condition of emergency, dominant revolutionary sexuality, as the organization of libidinal energy within the movement, colludes with the racializing intelligence of sovereign power. 54. Of this ‘‘romantic tradition’’ within the history of revolutionary struggle, the collective called paksa (Panulat para sa Kaunlaran ng Sambayanan) (Writing for the Development of the People) wrote, ‘‘Ito’y parang pansamantalang lunas na nagpapatighaw (to mitigate) sa kirot ng mga damdaming kinikimkim, subalit hindi tunay na pumapawi sa sakit. Ang pagpapalaya ng damdamin ay nagiging hanggahan, at walang aksiyong tinutukoy. Umiiral ang paniniwala sa pagdating ng isang ‘dakling mesiyas’ na magliligtas sa bayan, isang bulag na paniniwalang mula sa Bibliya: wika nga ng mga kampon ng relihiyon sa mga bulag na tagasunod, magdusa ka nang magdusa, hamo’t balang araw ay tutubusin ka naman ng Dakilang Manunubos.’’ Rebolusyonaryong Panunuring Masa sa Sining at Panitikan, 42. 55. Montañez, ‘‘Marami Bang Nakipaglibing?’’ Translations are mine. 56. As Adorno writes of reading music, ‘‘In order to read notation at all, so that music results from it, an interpretive act is always necessary—that is to say, an analytical act, which asks what it is the notation really signifies.’’ Essays in Music, 163. 57. Cvetkovich and Pellegrini, ‘‘Introduction.’’ 58. Benjamin, ‘‘Critique of Violence,’’ 297. Derrida comments that Benjamin’s critique is one of vitalism or biologism, insofar as it puts forth a notion of sacred life as the potential of justice: ‘‘In other words, what makes for the worth of man, of his Dasein and his life, is that he contains the potential, the possibility of justice, the yet-tocome . . . of justice, the yet-to-come of his being-just, of his having-to-be just. What is sacred in his life is not his life but the justice of his life. Even if beasts and plants were sacred, they would not be so simply for their life, says Benjamin’’ (quoted in Kaufman, ‘‘ ‘To Cut Too Deeply and Not Enough,’ ’’ 13). Eleanor Kaufman argues that both Benjamin and Derrida writing on Benjamin ‘‘arrive at the same set of uneasy ontological possibilities: the non-human may be intrinsically non-violent, the non-violent may be pure violence, and pure violence may be both a human and a non-human attribute’’ (ibid., 17). Kaufman’s point is to draw out the continuity between the violent and the nonviolent and ‘‘the eventfulness of [violence’s] incorporeality.’’ As she reflects, ‘‘What might it mean to envision not only a divine (and in some sense non-violent) violence

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as distinct from a mythical violence, but beyond that to perceive even at the center (the ground-zero) of the most vulgar and mythical violence (the act of terrorism), the simultaneous existence of another level, that of incorporeal e√ects?’’ (ibid., 21). 59. Benjamin exemplifies his theory of violence with the myth of Niobe. From this same myth we can view Niobe’s sorrow at the death of her children as an example of mythical sorrow. Divine sorrow, on the other hand, is exemplified by the gods’ pity for her. Niobe is turned to stone (a place close to death without being death itself) by the act of divine violence, ‘‘a retribution that ‘expiates’ the guilt of mere life—and doubtless also purifies the guilty, not of guilt, however, but of the law’’ (‘‘Critique of Violence,’’ 297). 60. Eagleton, ‘‘Tragedy and Revolution,’’ 21. 61. This ontological division evolves in the eighteenth century, when, as Foucault argues, ‘‘the organic becomes the living[,] . . . that which produces, grows, and reproduces; the inorganic is the non-living, that which neither develops nor reproduces; it lies at the frontiers of life, the inert, the unfruitful—death. And although it is intermingled with life, it is so as that element within it that destroys and kills it’’ (quoted in Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 55–56). Drawing on Foucault, Cheah argues, ‘‘The ontological distinction between self-organized/organic being as life and nonorganic being as death accords to the organism the same finitude-transcending powers attributed to culture’’ (ibid., 56). 62. ‘‘Death is outside the power relationship. Death is beyond the reach of power, and power has a grip on it only in general, overall, or statistical terms. Power has no control over death, but it can control mortality. And to that extent, it is only natural that death should now be privatized, and should become the most private thing of all. In the right of sovereignty, death was the moment of the most obvious and most spectacular manifestation of the absolute power of the sovereign; death now becomes, in contrast, the moment when the individual escapes all power, falls back on himself and retreats, so to speak, into his own privacy. Power no longer recognizes death. Power literally ignores death.’’ Foucault, ‘‘Society Must Be Defended,’’ 248. 63. Sgt. Elpidio Rosario Tejada, known as El Tejano, studied in Houston and at the U.S. Army School of the Americas, an institution that Alfred McCoy connects to the cia schooling of Philippine military o≈cers in torture techniques. Quoted in Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror. 64. Giorgio Agamben argues that ‘‘bare life’’ ‘‘constitutes the first paradigm of the political realm of the West . . . the realm of bare life—which is originally situated at the margins of the political order—gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. At once excluding bare life from and capturing it within the political order, the state of exception actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested.’’ Homo Sacer, 9. 65. Agamben, State of Exception.

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66. Achille Mbembe describes the politics of sovereignty in Hegel: ‘‘The human being truly becomes a subject—that is, separated from the animal—in the struggle and the work through which he or she confronts death (understood as the violence of negativity). It is through this confrontation with death that he or she is cast into the incessant movement of history. Becoming subject therefore supposes upholding the work of death.’’ ‘‘Necropolitics,’’ 14. 67. Ibid., 39. 68. Agamben argues that this ‘‘question that never ceases to reverberate in the history of Western politics’’ can be answered only through an investigation of the indeterminate zone between juridical law and living being. Investigating the state of exception through studies of the institutions of law from Roman times to Nazism, and the present global moment (exemplified by the U.S. government), Agamben bypasses entirely the institutions of colonialism and slavery as a site for the historical conditions for the emergence of the state of exception as a normative paradigm of government. My own approach to this question is to view it from the side of living being or, rather, living experience. 69. Fanon writes, ‘‘The ‘terrorist,’ from the moment he undertakes an assignment, allows death to enter into his soul. He has a rendezvous with death. The fidaï, on the other hand, has a rendezvous with the life of the Revolution, and with his own life. The fidaï is not one of the sacrificed. To be sure, he does not shrink before the possibility of losing his life or the independence of his country, but at no moment does he claim death.’’ Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 57–58. 70. Balgos de la Cruz, ‘‘Nanay Lagrimas,’’ in his Bukal Ng Tubig At Apoy, 40. 71. As their cultural producers sum up the work of revolutionary songs: ‘‘Deep grief is replaced by doubled endurance, courage and diligence in struggle.’’ Introduksyon sa Mga Kanta ng Rebolusyong Pilipino. 72. Balgos de la Cruz, ‘‘Ang Mga Alaala’y Parang Mga Alitaptap,’’ in Bukal Ng Tubig at Apoy, 5. 73. Cannell, Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines. 74. Ibid., 163. It is not only that the boundary between life and death is permeable, but that the condition of death itself is fungible: ‘‘Death is often described as a reversible process; the moment of death itself can be uncertain and deceptive’’ (ibid., 153). 75. Luna Luz, ‘‘Panambitan,’’ in Ulos (Pilipinas: Artista at Manunulat ng Sambyanan [armas], 1996), 101. ‘‘Panambitan’’ is a song for the dead, usually sung during wakes. 76. Buck-Morss discusses Soviet cinema’s creation of ‘‘a prosthetic experience of collective power’’—indeed, of the revolutionary mass—that hinged on forms of the assembly line in industrial production in Dream World and Catastrophe, 148. 77. Indeed, I would suggest that although the novel as a whole, in its construction as a narrative of war, does not exemplify the work of radical bereavement that I discuss here, the formal features of its style of imagining revolutionary kasama sociality articu-

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late the experiential media of memory through which this notion of revolutionary sorrow operates. In Levy Balgos de la Cruz’s story ‘‘Ang Mga Alaala’y Parang Mga Alitaptap,’’ memory after memory of dead comrades ‘‘rush in pell-mell’’ to take over the narrator’s own story and experience of familial loss. 78. Ibid., 21. 79. ‘‘After the Storm.’’ In ‘‘Why Is the Face of the Sun Red?’’ Firmeza writes, ‘‘Deep red is the face of the sun / when the night and the light struggle against each other / when the twilight mourns / . . . Comrade Enyong, shall I believe the old folks? / Why, when the sun turned red, the war took away / your life when you could have saved / the life of Comrade Greg who died because / you were not here to serve as our doctor? / . . . Red is the face of the sun because there is war / red it is because the people are raging’’ (mainstream, str, 22, 29–30). 80. ‘‘Bakir,’’ in Magsasaka: Ang Bayaning Di Kilalala, 18. In this and other poems, the force of revolution is figured as sound, song, storm. In the poem ‘‘Ihayag Mo Ang Iyong Poot, Anakpawis’’ (Worker, Reveal Your Rage), the force of revolution is summoned as a long-awaited thunderpeal, liberating the peasant farmer from the mud in which he has been mired for many years, the mud in which he fruitlessly sowed his hopes, sinking deeper in ‘‘pure dreams.’’ From this psychical crypt immobilizing the worker, a crypt located in the work field that has claimed this body, the worker is drawn to move through the sound of the revolution. This sound is the rumbling thunder of rage that bursts forth, moving bodies sunk in the dream ground, which they till for others. Revolutionary passion takes the form of sound, for sound belongs to no body but rather passes through bodies. It is hence this audible passion that not only moves bodies rendered immobile by feudal bonds to the land but also draws them into the movement of armed struggle. 81. ‘‘Man makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life-activity. . . . It is just because of this that he is a species being. Or it is only because he is a species being that he is a Conscious Being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity . . . It is just in the working-up of the objective world, therefore, that man first really proves himself to be a species being. This production is his active species life. Through and because of this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species-life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.’’ Marx, ‘‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ‘‘ 76–77. 82. Goodchild argues that the eschatological logic of capital rests on the metaphysics of

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money, ‘‘the nonhuman power expressed in the politics of money,’’ whereby an anticipation of a better future, the promise of a future reward, galvanizes productive activity. This is an eschatology of reward and punishment, promise and threat, guaranteed by the measure of money. ‘‘Capital and Kingdom,’’ 139. 83. ‘‘But now, in the circulation m-c-m, value suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own, and for which commodities and money are both mere forms. But there is more to come: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it now enters into a relationship with itself, as it were. It di√erentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value, just as God the Father di√erentiates himself from himself as God the Son, although both are the same age and form, in fact one single person: for only by the surplus-value of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital, and as soon as this has happened, as soon as the son has been created and, through the son, the father, their di√erence vanishes again, and both become one, £110.’’ Marx, Capital, 256. What Marx omits is the realization of this process of identity-in-di√erence through sacrifice. I would suggest that it is this sublative notion of sacrifice that undergirds the operation of mythical sorrow. 84. Von Werlhof, ‘‘On the Concept of Nature and Society in Capitalism,’’ 100. 85. Ibid., 107. This is an abiding vitalist Marxist motif. Cf. ‘‘Money also represents human life. . . . To accumulate money is to accumulate human life.’’ Dussel, Ethics and Community, 120. 86. See Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen, and Von Werlhof, Women: The Last Colony, and Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital. On the appropriation of the ‘‘procreative’’ function and general control of social reproduction by ruling groups in slave-owning societies, see Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery, and Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: This appropriation depends on social technologies of dispossession, such as is accomplished through natal alienation or what Patterson refers to as ‘‘secular excommunication.’’ 87. Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation, and Shiva, Earth Democracy. Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital. For an insightful account of the role of early political economists (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Steuart, etc.) in aiding the origins of capital located in the process of separating the rural peasantry from their access to the land, see Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism. As I suggest in previous chapters, neoliberal economists continue to call for and foster this practice of primitive accumulation, or ‘‘accumulation by dispossession’’ (Harvey), in the present day, finding unexpected allies in the current neoconservative dispensation waging new imperialist wars. Harvey, New Imperialism. 88. Plumwood, ‘‘The Crisis of Reason.’’ 89. ‘‘It became clear to him why the people he met and encountered in the countryside and in the cities seemed to have one face, and how the problems of the rural folk and the urban dwellers were not separate, even better, how only one face was held out by the

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abuses created by imperialist Americans, landlords and bureaucrat-capitalists.’’ ‘‘He felt all the more the hardship of the class he belonged to when he accompanied Ka Anna and the others in going and talking with citizens of the poor neighborhoods in Manila.’’ Rivera, ‘‘Ilang Buhay Man ay Iaalay,’’ 75–76. 90. Ibid., 72. 91. Wang, The Sublime Figure of History. The inhabiting of bodily experience is evident in the writings of other revolutionary women writers, such as Zelda Soriano, whose expressions of bodily humor and laughter, I would argue, articulate the other side of divine sorrow. On Zelda Soriano, see Pat Arinto, ‘‘Women and Revolution’’ and ‘‘Ang Nakakatawa/Nakakatuwa Sa Rebolusyon,’’ and Hau, On the Subject of the Nation. 92. Of popular devotional practices, Bulatao remarks, ‘‘The sense of touch seeking a sense of nearness to a Person, even if only symbolically through a wooden statue, is prominent in these devotions. The touch is the external experience and surface expression of a deeper intimacy becoming almost sacramental in its e√ect.’’ Such intimacy can be passed on, for example, through a handkerchief: ‘‘That the experience of divinity may at times be carried by a handkerchief is not surprising in a culture that lays much importance in kinesthetics and the sense of touch (as may be verified by the richness of vocabulary in this area).’’ Bulatao, Phenomena and Their Interpretation, 74. 93. Lucia Makabayan, ‘‘Sagada,’’ in mainstream, str, 112. 94. Plumwood, ‘‘The Crisis of Reason,’’ 62. 95. Ninh, The Sorrow of War. 96. Cabezas, La Montaña Es Algo Más Que Una Inmensa Estepa Verde. 97. Ninh, The Sorrow of War, 192. 98. Je√rey Kallberg has linked the use of rubato in Chopin’s Nocturnes (and in particular his Nocturne in G Minor) to nineteenth-century messianic Polish nationalism through its performative associations with the mazurka. Chopin at the Boundaries. My own interpretation of tempo rubato here depends less on its indication of any specific genre or departure from genre than on its performative suggestion of the dirge form of the pasyon in the Philippine context. 99. Guillermo, ‘‘Somewhere in the Countryside,’’ 70 100. Ibid., 90. 101. ‘‘In much of music in rural sea, there is a free meter, rather than a measured meter, many scales in lieu of one or two scales. . . . Related to an accommodation with nature is a concept of time, and how time is used in music. In many parts of Southeast Asia, the time of day is not measured in hours, and solar years, though known, are not added one after another. Apart from the movement of planets and the stars, time is measured through natural events, such as the migration of birds, flowering of plants or the murmuring of insects in the dry season. These measures of time are independent of each other and do not rely on one common clock. Time is regarded in separate entities related to man’s work and seasonal activities. It is as if time is considered immaterial

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and infinite, one which may be divided only for temporal convenience and not as a record of man’s achievements.’’ Maceda, ‘‘Sources of Musical Thought in Southeast Asia,’’ 170. An anthropological study of Philippine music in the early twentieth century also points to the seeming lack of rhythm in Philippine songs of love and grief, describing this lack in terms of the immeasurable rhythm of the expression of living thought: ‘‘It is a vibration which we feel but cannot analyze. We seem to realize that its unit is too large for us to grasp. Such was the rhythm of the Moro love songs and the Negrito dirge.’’ Densmore, ‘‘The Music of Filipinos,’’ 612. My argument is not about native cultural survival but the experience of the eternal ‘‘now’’ time of what Benjamin called ‘‘a real state of emergency,’’ as opposed to the state of emergency that for the oppressed is the rule. 102. Maceda, ‘‘Imagining the Nation as Inang Bayan,’’ 350. 103. Maylayon, ‘‘Wari’y Kaytagal!’’ in mainstream, str, 152. Translation modified. 104. Under Stalin, Buck-Morss observes, ‘‘the discourse of time was a field for the exercise of sovereign power.’’ Dreamworld and Catastrophe, 37, 38. In this context, the party submitted to a cosmology of history, a science of the future, which could be known in advance, as history could be known in its totality. 105. Gacosta, ‘‘Ang Kabiguan ay may Pangakong Tagumpay,’’ in mainstream, str, 70. 106. On the heels of materialist and ecofeminist work on women’s life-producing work, Michael Hardt argues, ‘‘Staying alive: Politics has become a matter of life itself, and the struggle has taken the form of a biopower above against a biopower from below.’’ Hardt, ‘‘A√ective Labor,’’ 99. 107. As the work of prison abolitionists and scholars suggests, the ‘‘warehousing’’ of surplus peoples in prisons constitutes one of the most rapidly expanding forms of consumption of human potential. Sudbury, Global Lockdown; Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? 108. Goodchild, ‘‘Capital and Kingdom.’’ 109. It is neither a form of mourning nor a form of melancholia as understood in their Freudian senses, for both depend on strong subject-object distinction, even when this distinction is transgressed (as in melancholia). Before becoming a means to an end (armed struggle), divine sorrow is ‘‘pure means’’ (Benjamin) or ‘‘pure doing’’ (Adorno). Its duration is a rhythm without the directionality or purposefulness of militant marches, which have the destination of victory as their end. For Freud, mourning consists of ‘‘killing death’’ through a detachment of libido from the object. ‘‘In pathological mourning, the conflict of ambivalence comes to the fore; with melancholia, a further step has been taken: the ego identifies with the lost object.’’ Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 486. To identify with the lost object is to live the experience of death, of self-loss. There is some of this identification in the instances of identification with the dead Christ, as Cannell shows ethnographically. In the wail that beseeches divine sorrow, the self is not so much identified with the lost

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object as it is lost as a self, its status as subject dissolved in the landscape of sorrows inhabited by both the living and the dead. 110. Hawes, ‘‘Theories of Peasant Revolution.’’ Hawes finally argues for a broad, contextualized explanation of the emergence of revolution that includes national and international political economy as well as village and class structure and rational choice but leaves the question of the particular ‘‘ ‘world of meaning’ for the average Filipino’’ largely unanswered. 111. If the guerilla character of peoples’ wars in the second half of the twentieth century can be said to have shaped the development of technologies of terrorism and the generalization of militarism to the point of becoming a paradigm of government at this present moment of the global police state, then it is perhaps the case that the structure of historical experience that I am calling divine sorrow has never been more relevant and needed. 112. Scarry, The Body in Pain. 113. Agamben takes the category of zoe, in opposition to bios, from Aristotle’s distinction between those ‘‘concerned with the reproduction and the subsistence of life,’’ the sphere of the oikos, and those concerned with politically qualified life, or the sphere of the polis. Homo Sacer, 2. 114. Tadiar, ‘‘Popular Laments.’’ 115. McCoy, ‘‘ram Films.’’ 116. White, The Content of the Form, 14. 117. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth. The gendered, sexual di√erences between Fanon’s notion of revolutionary violence and my notion of divine sorrow should be evident from my discussion. Fanon was committed to humanist sovereignty, which was clearly modeled as a kind of masculinist agency. For Benjamin, too, ‘‘Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred execution, may be called sovereign violence’’ (300).

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467

Index

Abad, Ricardo G., 404 n. 42 Abadilla, Alejandro G., 93, 392 n. 46

Aguilar, Filomeno V., Jr., 234–36, 307, 421 n. 39, 427 n. 21

Abueng, Efren, 225

Ahmad, Eqbal, 298

Abu-Lughod, Lila, 137

‘‘Ako, babae, ibang daigdig’’ (I, woman,

Abu Sayaaf, 328 accumulation, 147, 165, 371; capitalist, 12–

another world) (Barrios), 93–96 ‘‘Ako ay Ikaw’’ (I Am You) (Lanot), 97

13, 35, 154, 163, 186, 199, 201, 213, 237,

‘‘Alamat ng Sapang Bato’’ (Garcia), 387 n. 59

261, 315; by dispossession, 371, 440 n. 87;

Alfon, Estrella, 169

Marcos regime of, 203–5, 208–10, 217;

Ali, Muhammad, 417 n. 78

postcolonial, 282; primitive, 12, 133, 206,

alienation, 45, 128–29, 179, 230, 249, 278,

330, 398 n. 73, 440 n. 87; strategies of, 30,

295; bourgeois, 266–69; identification

156, 260; of value, 235

and, 106–12; of labor, 116–17, 276–79,

Achebe, Chinua, 1, 4, 379 n. 1 Adorno, Theodor, 213–14, 340, 436 n. 56, 442 n. 109 adventurism, 13, 20, 185, 186, 188, 198–208. See also gambling aesthetics, 125, 308, 370; metropolitan, 160,

290, 413 n. 33; racialized, 234, 236, 253– 54; tributary, 314–15, 399 n. 34; urban, 223, 248; of women, 76, 82–87, 93 All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (Berman), 151 Almario, Virgilio, 105, 113, 114, 296, 390 n. 20, 395 n. 18, 421 n. 28

218; postmodern, 401 n.6; of resignation,

Alonso, Ana María, 419 n. 16

334; of sacrifice, 313; of vulgarity, 207

Althusser, Louis, 10

Agamben, Giorgio, 363, 376, 432 n. 32, 437 n. 64, 438 n. 68, 443 n. 113 agency, sovereign, 93–94, 123, 134, 136, 360, 443 n. 117

American colonialism, 31–32, 185, 240–41, 393 n. 46, 411 n. 54, 414 n. 38, 426 n. 13, 427 n. 22; movements against, 7, 346–47; racial valuation and, 41

Amin, Samir, 295, 412 n. 5

Arrighi, Giovanni, 408 n. 26

Anak ng Araw (Son of the Sun) (Perez),

‘‘Arrivederci’’ (Garcia), 83–92, 387 n. 59,

412 n. 13, 415 n. 61 Anderson, Benedict, 109, 343, 346, 406 n. 2, 432 n. 30, 432 n. 32 Anderson, Perry, 153, 402 n. 19

Artista at Manunulat ng Sambayanan (armas), 423n. 65

Ang, Ien, 106–7

Asian Americans, 108

‘‘Ang Asawa Ko’y DH’’ (My Wife is a

Asian Pacific Economic Community

Domestic Helper) (Cajipe-Endaya), 82 ‘‘Ang Kulto ng Isang Demagogo’’ (The Cult of a Demagogue) (Balgos de la Cruz), 327–28 ‘‘Ang Lohika ng mga Bula ng Sabon’’ (The Logic of Soap Bubbles) (Sicat), 60–72, 86, 88, 92, 100, 101, 222 ‘‘Ang Maging Babae ’’ (To Be a Woman) (Mabanglo), 78–79, 112 ‘‘Ang Mga Alaala’y Parang Mga Alitaptap’’ (Memories Are Like Fireflies) (Balgos de la Cruz), 272, 365, 439 n. 77 ‘‘Ang mga kagila-gilalas na pakikipagsapalaran ni Juan de la Cruz’’ (The Amazing Adventures of Juan de la Cruz) (Lacaba), 193–94, 197, 206 ‘‘Ang Pagiging Babae Ay Pamumuhay Sa Panahon ng Digma’’ (To Be a Woman Is to Live in a Time of War) (Barrios), 100–101 ‘‘Ang Simula ay Simulain’’ (We Being with Principles) (Barrios), 101 ‘‘Anyaya ng Imperyalista’’ (Invitation of an Imperialist) (Mabanglo), 121 Appadurai, Arjun, 398 n. 65 Aquino, Benigno (Ninoy), 299, 301, 326, 439 n. 48 Aquino, Corazon, 69, 70, 123, 217, 299–301, 327, 423 n. 65 Arellano, Agnes, 82 Argentina, 363 Arinto, Pat, 353, 435 n. 49 Aristotle, 399 n. 79, 443 n. 113

470

387 n. 60, 393 n. 52 Arroyo, Gloria Macapagal, 411 n. 50

index

(apec), 401 n. 8 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (asean), 410 n. 42 Attali, Jacques, 145 Aunor, Nora, 42, 48, 314–15, 386 n. 56, 393 nn. 51–52 awa (mercy/pity), 7, 288, 289, 322, 366, 429 n. 48 ‘‘Babae Akong Namumuhay Nag Mag-Isa’’ (I am a Woman Living Alone) (Barrios), 59–60, 89 ‘‘Babae Kami’’ (Lanot), 77 babae (woman), 60, 100, 390 n. 22; identity of, 77–82, 88, 106, 179, 390 n. 31; objectification of, 83, 392 n. 40 Bachelard, Gaston, 389 n. 10 ‘‘Bagay-bagay’’ (Things) (Lacaba), 202 Bahktin, Mikhail, 161 Balagtasismo, 114, 395 n. 18 Balgos de la Cruz, Levy, 272, 319, 327–28, 365, 439 n. 77 Balikatan 02–1 joint military exercises, 3 Balikatan sa Kaunlaran (Partners in Development) Movement, 74 Balthazar, Francisco, 114 Balweg, Father, 328 Barrios, Joi, 59–60, 75–79, 89, 93–101, 393 n. 48 Barros, Ma. Lorena, 72, 117 Bata, Bata, Paano Ka Ginawa (Child, Child, How Were You Made) (Bautista), 73

Battle of Algiers, The (Pontecorvo), 350

100, 130–32, 135, 369, 413 n. 27, 428 n. 37;

Bauman, Zygmunt, 228, 408 n. 24

Chinese as alien, 243–44; culture and, 28;

Bautista, Lualhati, 73–75

investment of foreign, 177, 228, 250, 417

‘‘Bayan ng Lunggati, Bayan ng Pighati’’

n. 77; labor and, 32–38, 60–61, 146, 383

(Land of Desire, Land of Grief)

n. 30, 384 n. 33, 384 n. 44, 388 n. 3, 392

(Mabanglo), 118–19, 123

n. 42, 398 n. 74; multi- and transnational,

Beller, Jonathan, 12, 13

26, 27, 30, 71, 152, 157, 160, 229–30; ra-

Bello, Walden, 403 n. 33, 426 n. 13

cialization of value and, 233–37; spectacu-

Benjamin, Walter, 1, 166, 328, 344, 432 n. 30, 432 n. 32, 442 n. 101, 442 n. 109; on

lar, 42–43, 48, 386 n. 55. See also capitalism capitalism, 2, 11–13, 21, 124–26, 35; bureau-

commodities, 123; on Communist pro-

cratic, 270, 292, 408 n. 23; Christianity

motion of organization and rationalism,

and, 233, 275, 277; colonial, 46, 235; crisis

294, 296; cult value concept of, 309–10;

and, 55; global, 9, 29, 88, 99, 105, 136–39,

on progress, 158; on violence, 51, 361,

154, 212–15, 218–19, 221, 226, 232, 243,

366, 436 n. 58, 437 n. 59, 443 n. 117

260, 305, 334, 377, 402 n. 26, 410 n. 43,

Bennholdt-Thomsen, Victoria, 12

410 n. 45; millennial, 2, 328; postindus-

Bergson, Henri, 149

trial, 203, 388 n. 3; sovereignty of, 368;

Berman, Marshall, 151, 180, 402 n. 16, 402

state, 177; temporality of, 344. See also

n. 19, 402 n. 26

crony capitalism

Bernal, Ishmael, 428 n. 36, 429 n. 49

Capital (Marx), 122

‘‘Bilang ocw’’ (Mabanglo), 116–17

capital punishment, 355, 362

Blanc-Szanton, Cristina, 397 n. 59

Cardenal, Ernesto, 341, 430 n. 20

Bloch, Ernest, 277, 297, 369

Carpio, Bernardo, 287–89, 423 n. 61

Bolasco, Mario, 420 n. 36

Catholic Church, 31, 70, 71, 126, 240–41,

‘‘Brave Woman’’ (Monte de Ramos), 75 Brillantes, Gregorio, 225, 277 Brocka, Lino, 194, 206, 416 n. 63, 428 n. 36, 429 n. 49 Brothers (Sison), 269 Buck-Morss, Susan, 373, 435 n. 51, 438 n. 76, 442 n. 104

252, 387 n. 62, 415 n. 54, 418 n. 94, 420 n. 33 Central Intelligence Agency (cia), 306, 351, 437 n. 63 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 17, 130, 139, 259, 324, 397 n. 58 Changing the Rules (Tripp), 210

Bulatao, Jaime C., 441 n. 92

Chatterjee, Partha, 283, 287

Butler, Judith, 254–55

Cheah, Pheng, 362, 437 n. 61

Cabezas, Omar, 372 Cajipe-Endaya, Imelda, 82 Cameroon, 20, 207 Cannell, Fenella, 126, 281, 366, 397 n. 47, 438 n. 74, 442 n. 109 capital, 11–13, 19, 26–38, 45, 46, 54–56, 88–

Chekov, Anton, 412 China, 20, 226, 297, 370 Chinese-Filipinos, 3, 242–44, 248, 325 Chopin, Frédéric, 441 n. 98 Chow, Rey, 225–26 Christ, 390, 313, 315, 367, 421 n. 47, Passion of, 122, 127–29, 281, 286, 372, 396 n. 34

Index

471

Christianity, 31, 122, 280, 337, 377, 422 n. 51, 423 n. 59; bereavement practices in, 366, 372; colonialism and conversion of

290–95, 336, 348–49, 426 n. 12 crony capitalism, 4, 8, 13, 22, 199–200, 205–

indigenous peoples to, 232, 233, 255;

6, 208–13, 215, 408 n. 23, 408 n. 26, 410

evangelical, 251; Marx on, 413 n. 27; suf-

n. 42, 410 n. 43; of Marcos regime, 13,

fering and redemption narrative of, 284.

154, 195–86, 209–10, 248, 250, 414 n. 45

See also Catholic Church

Cruz, Johanna Lynn, 113, 114

Christ-time, 130, 133

Cubao 1980 (Perez), 228–31, 238–48, 252–55

co-being. See kapwa

Culler, Jonathan, 345

Cold War, 336

culture, crisis of, 26–28

Comaro√, Jean, 2

cult value, 15, 309–10, 312–15, 326–28, 330,

Comaro√, John, 2, 328 ‘‘Coming of the Rain, The’’ (Sison), 270 commodification, 79–80, 82–83, 89, 97– 101, 109, 127, 246; feminized, 11, 33, 36– 37, 40–44, 50, 52, 54, 68, 104, 117, 177; sexualized, 70, 71, 133, 229, 244 commodity fetishism, 227, 233, 315, 328 commodity-form, 89, 233, 413 n. 33 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 151 Communist Party of the Philippines (cpp), 265, 270, 279, 293–94, 302, 423 n. 65, 430 n. 10; anti-infiltration campaigns of, 300, 302, 425 n. 9; Central Committee of, 178– 79, 434 n. 39; critique of theoretical inadequacies of, 336; peasant insurgency strategy of, 185 Condé Nast Traveler, 144 Constantino, Renato, 27, 421 n. 26 consumption, 12, 124–25, 238, 392 n. 42, 396 n. 42, 396 n. 44 Contemplacion, Flor, 120, 386 n. 56 Coquilla, Daniel ‘‘Dansoy,’’ 226 ‘‘Cornucopia’’ (Arellano), 82 corporeality, 33, 41, 48, 63, 176, 233, 245, 296, 390 n. 6 Corpuz, Victor, 314 crisis, 2–5, 54–55, 144–46, 205, 212, 223, 249, 277; discourses of, 25–28, 32, 52, 57;

472

economic, 187, 209, 407 n. 22; of the Left,

index

364; revolutionary, 319–23 Cuneta, Sharon, 97–98, 393 n. 51 damay (empathic grief), 7, 122, 287–89, 346, 429 n. 48 Dante, Ka, 314 Daroy, Petronilo Bn., 184, 268, 420 n. 32 Datuin, Flaudette May, 400 n. 84, 435 n. 48 Dayrit, Joy, 61 Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage (Lacaba), 189 de Dios, Aurora J., 391 n. 33 ‘‘Defy the Reptile’’ (Sison), 278 Déjà Vu and Other Essays (Lanot), 72 Dekada ’70 (The Decade of the 70’s) (Bautista), 73 de la Torre, Edicio, 284, 422 n. 51 De Lauretis, Teresa, 435 n. 47 de Leon, Mike, 428 n. 36, 429 n. 49 Deleuze, Gilles, 17, 228, 282, 369, 384 n. 42, 391 n. 37, 401 n. 6, 405 n. 54, 422 n. 48 Delotavo, Antipas ‘‘Biboy,’’ 257 Denning, Michael, 333 Densmore, Frances, 442 n. 101 de Rosario, Rosario, 386 n. 52 Derrida, Jacques, 130, 436 n. 58 Devan, Janadas, 26, 380 n. 4 Dilasay, Jose, 334 Diliman Commune, 162

Diokno, Jose, 409 n. 40

Ferguson, Ann, 12

‘‘Dr. Lazarus’’ (Brillantes), 277

Feria, Dolores Stephens, 4, 159, 381 n. 16

Dulaang Sibol theater company, 230

Ferrer, Ricardo D., 408 n. 23

Dussel, Enrique, 6, 21, 90, 399 n. 79, 440

fetishism, 126, 268, 322; commodity, 227,

n. 85

233, 315, 328; religious, 233

Dyer, Richard, 229, 232, 234

Filipino First policy, 187

Dylan, Bob, 172

Firmeza, Ruth, 271, 339–61, 367, 430 n. 14,

Eagleton, Terry, 362 Egypt, 20, 136 Elinson, Elaine, 403 n. 33 Eliot, T. S., 190 Eng, David, 108 Engels, Friedrich, 33 England, 213, 226, 234–35 Enlightenment, 75, 414 n. 38 Enloe, Cynthia, 381 n. 9 Enriquez, Virgilio, 45–46, 386 n. 51, 405 n. 53 Estrada, Joseph, 3 ethnography, postcolonial, 197 Eviota, Elizabeth, 31–32 excess, urban, 13, 145–49, 187, 204, 208, 211, 218, 223, 224, 226, 237 exchange value, 79, 133, 137, 179, 341, 383 n. 30, 398 n. 63 experience; historical, 9–16; of labor, 37–41; literature and, 16–18

434 n. 40, 434 n. 42, 439 n. 79 First Quarter Storm, 184, 189, 294 Forbidden Fruit: Women Write the Erotic (anthology), 64 Forest, The (Pomeroy), 419 n. 11 ‘‘Forest Is Still Enchanted, The’’ (Sison), 270, 278, 307 Fortunati, Leopoldina, 35–36, 384 n. 36, 392 n. 42 Forum for Philippine Alternatives (fopa), 301 Foucault, Michel, 18, 19, 355, 362, 435 n. 50, 437 n. 61–62 ‘‘Fragments of a Nightmare’’ (Sison), 274 France, 234 Frazier, Joe, 417 n. 78 freedom, 94, 105, 114, 116, 136–37, 204, 327, 338, 361–64, 371–76, 396 n. 44, 420 n. 27, 433 n. 34; belief in objective movement toward, 293; collective, 331; of conduct, 214; creative acts of, 212; cultural

Fajardo, Brenda, 138, 400 n. 84

practices of, 137; Euro-American, 251;

Fanon, Frantz, 4, 21, 155, 364, 378, 438

historical experience of, 318; individualist,

n. 69, 443 n. 117

223; labor as, 33, 378; metaphorics of,

fascism, 167, 309, 328, 432 n. 25, 432 n. 30

112; nationalist promises of, 334; per-

femininity, 32, 40, 114, 204, 377, 382 n. 21,

sonal, 54, 74–78, 96, 126; public expres-

385 n. 44; conventional forms of, 61–62,

sions of, 250; social, 325; struggle for, 3,

397 n. 59

15, 357; Tagalog, 390 n. 20, 433 n. 59;

feminization, 54, 104, 385 n. 44; of labor, 2, 18, 28, 30–33, 35, 36, 53, 56, 81, 103, 133, 384 n. 33. See also commodification: feminized Fer, Anna, 81–82

from tradition, 124; will to, 2, 55 Free Movement of New Women (makibaka), 72, 74–75 French Revolution, 390 n. 20, 435 n. 51 Freud, Sigmund, 442 n. 109

Index

473

Gacosta, Wilfredo, 376, 422 n. 49

Guerrero, Amado. See Sison, Jose Ma.

gambling, 99–100, 307, 351 n. 22; cosmic,

Guevara, Che, 335

109–10 Garcellano, Edel, 113–14, 291, 293, 340–42, 421 n. 38 Garcia, Carlos, 187 Garcia, Fanny, 28, 39–56, 83–92, 101, 387 n. 59, 387 n. 60, 391 n. 39, 393 n. 52 Garcia, J. Neil, 247, 415 n. 57, 417 n. 72 Garibay, Emmanuel, 226 gay liberation, 14, 247–59, 253–54 gender, 12, 28, 30–32, 34, 39, 97, 104, 134– 36, 381 n. 16, 382 n. 17, 383 n. 21; in constitution of labor, 33–36, 386 n. 52; experience of, 108, 109. See also identity: gender Gera (Firmeza), 271, 339–61, 367, 434 n. 42 German idealism, 362 Giddens, Anthony, 408 n. 25 Glissant, Édouard, 117, 138 globalization, 12, 20, 21, 27, 28, 103, 128, 333; enabling technologies of, 231; feminized labor in context of, 37; modernization and, 156, 271; neoliberal, 205; politics of, 219–20 global south theory, 20–22 Goodchild, Philip, 439 n. 82 Goux, Jean-Jacques, 382 n. 18, 409 n. 32 Graham, Billy, 251 Grammar of the Multitude, The (Virno), 131 Gramsci, Antonio, 201–2, 296, 391 n. 32, 409 n. 30 Granada, Gary, 171 Granrojo, Felipe, 310–25 Gray, Spalding, 144–45, 148, 401 n. 6 Great Cultural Divide, 267, 283, 405 n. 53 Greenblatt, Stephen, 380 n. 20 grief. See sorrow Guattari, Félix, 137, 282, 369, 401 n. 6, 405 n. 54, 422 n. 48

474

index

Guha, Ranajit, 282–83 Guillaumin, Colette, 245 Guillermo, Alice, 174, 402 n. 18 Guillermo, Gelacio, 274, 291–92, 348–49, 424 n. 69, 425 n. 8, 427 n. 23, 434 n. 41 ‘‘Halaw Kay Su Tung-Po’’ (Acquired from Su Tung-Po) (Lacaba), 202–3 Han, Shinhee, 108 hangad (active desire), 59, 89 Hardt, Michael, 12, 51, 130, 131, 398 n. 73, 442 n. 106 Harlow, Barbara, 430 n. 20 Harvey, David, 410 n. 43, 440 n. 87 Hau, Carol, 242–43, 248, 267, 417 n. 71 Hawes, Gary, 375, 443 n. 110 Hedman, Eva-Lotta E., 426 n. 13 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 233, 413 n. 27, 438 n. 66 Heidegger, Martin, 257 Heng, Geraldine, 26, 380 n. 4 Hisdon, Anne-Marie, 435 n. 46 Historia Famosa ni Bernardo Carpio, 287–89 historical experience, 9–16, 53, 90, 133, 135, 277 Ho Chi Minh, 420 n. 25 Ho√mann-Axthelm, Dieter, 395 n. 32 homelessness, 161–64, 166, 194, 275 homosexuality, 384 n. 44, 417 n. 72, 436 n. 53. See also gay liberation Hong Kong, 126, 225–26 Huk Rebellion, 270, 306 Hulagpos (Posadas), 293, 434 n. 42 humanism, 84, 249–50, 265; bourgeois European, 19; of dispossessed, 4; masculinist, 175; racialized, 232; universal, 73 humanity, 118, 126; of women, 73, 75–78, 82

humanness, whiteness as signifier of, 231 Human Settlements, Ministry of, 166, 250 Hutchcroft, Paul, 408 n. 29 identity, 76–82, 88–90, 117–19, 124–26, 129, 433 n. 36; collective, 17, 46, 71–72, 431 n. 25; cultural, 54; di√erence and, 50, 85–87, 92–94, 96–99, 116–19, 122, 125, 135–36, 440 n. 83; gender, 81, 93, 94, 228, 285; national, 28, 55, 394 n. 31, 427 n. 15;

Irigaray, Luce, 32, 38, 129, 382 n. 21, 406 n. 60 ‘‘Isang Kurot sa Gunita’’ (A Pinch in the Imagination) (Santiago), 287 Islam, 136 ‘‘Itak sa Puso ni Mang Juan’’ (Axed in the Heart of Mang Juan) (Delotavo), 357 Jameson, Fredric, 9–10, 255, 277, 297, 344, 418 n. 89

political, of masses, 294; redemption and

Japan, 30, 107, 108, 111, 269, 270, 306

shift in, 241–49; search for, 122, 124;

Jesus, Corazon de, 195

social, 283, 347, 433 n. 37; Spanish, 7

Joaquin, Nick, 59, 188, 225

identification, 48–49, 125, 237, 258, 394

Johnson, Mark, 396 n. 42

n. 12, 442 n. 109; alienation and, 106–12;

Jonsson, Stefan, 412 n. 12

feminine, 50, 69; fetishism and, 315, 322;

Jungianism, 258

gender, 98–99; with the masses, 268, 272, 274, 286, 287, 290; of nation-state with capitalism, 243, 252; politics of, 127; sexual, 272; symbolic, 370; with universal humanness, 244 Igbo people, 1 Igunihit ng Tadhana: The Ferdinand Marcos Story (film), 158 ‘‘Ilang Buhay Man ay Iaalay’’ (However Many Lives Shall Be O√ered) (River), 369 Ileto, Reynaldo, 7, 122, 283–84, 287–88, 326, 346, 422 n. 50, 423 n. 61, 424 n. 79, 429 n. 48 image-commodity, 42–43, 44, 50, 54, 314– 315 India, 138, 282–83 ‘‘India and Illustrada’’ (Female Indian and Enlightened Class) (Fer), 81–82 individuation, 83, 85, 258 International Labor Organization, 55 International Monetary Fund (imf), 103, 146, 336, 407 n. 22, 417 n. 77 Internet, 221

Kallberg, Je√rey, 372, 441 n. 98 Kang, Liu, 227–28 Kant, Immanuel, 415 n. 55 kapwa (shared subjectivity), 11, 45–46, 50, 53–55, 71, 285–86, 303, 344, 347, 371, 386 n. 51, 386 n. 52, 433 n. 36, 435 n. 48 Karatani, Kojin, 269 ‘‘Kasalo’’ (Dinner Partner) (Barrios), 77–78 Kaufman, Eleanor, 436 n. 58 ‘‘Kay Birheng Maria’’ (For Virgin Mary) (Barrios), 76 ‘‘Kay Maria Clara at Iba Pang Binbini ng Kanyang Panahon’’ (To Maria Clara and Other Women of Her Time) (Barrios), 76 Killing Time in a Warm Place (Dilasay), 334 ‘‘Kina Sinderela, Snow White at Sleeping Beauty’’ (For Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty) (Barrios), 97 Kinley, David, 403 n. 33 kiyeme (frivolous details), faith in, 14, 252–59 Korean War, 41 Kumar, Amitava, 119

Index

475

‘‘Kung Ang Tula Ay Isa Lamang’’ (If a Poem Were Only) (Santiago), 287

Liberation, 329

‘‘Kung Bakit Lagi Kong Pinapanood Ang

literature: experience and, 16–18; political

Mga Sharon Cuneta’’ (Why I Always

community and, 6–9. See also Tagalog

Watch the Movies of Sharon Cuneta) (Barrios), 97–99 labor: alienation of, 116–17, 276–79, 290, 413 n. 33; capital and, 32–38, 60–61, 146, 383 n. 30, 384 n. 33, 384 n. 44, 388 n. 3, 392 n. 42, 398 n. 74; feminized, 2, 18, 28, 30–33, 35, 36, 53, 56, 81, 103, 133, 384 n. 33; informal, 13, 20, 29–30, 127–29, 139, 165, 200–201, 204, 307; international division of, 9, 29–30, 91; living, 37, 105; post-Fordist, 12, 30, 130–38, 208, 398 n. 74; sexual division of, 382 n. 17 Lacaba, Emmanuel, 188, 265, 275, 285, 419 n. 21, 420 n. 25 Lacaba, Jose, 14, 77, 186, 188–209, 211, 214–15, 230, 407 n. 13, 407 n. 18, 407 n. 21, 408 n. 28; adventurism of, 198–208; colloquialized poetic speech of, 195–96; dialectic structure of, 194–95; journalistic

literature Liwanag, Armando, 302 Lo, Dic, 408 n. 26, 410 n. 42 loob (medium of subjective states), 43, 45, 50, 52, 66–67, 122, 288, 385 n. 48, 422 n. 50 López, María Milagros, 207 Lotringer, Sylvère, 131 Lukács, Georg, 161 Luke, Gospel According to, 320 ‘‘Luksampati’’ (Song of Grief), 359, 360, 372 Lumbera, Bienvenido, 393 n. 46, 404 n. 47, 412 n. 13, 415 n. 61 ‘‘Lupang Tigang’’ (Wasteland) (Fer), 81–82 Luxemburg, Rosa, 12, 132, 410 n. 45 Luz, Luna, 367, 370 Lyotard, Jean-François, 124 Mabanglo, Elynia, 78–81, 93, 99, 105–27,

writings of, 188, 189; practices of accom-

134–40, 366, 395 n. 29, 306 n. 60;

modation of, 196–99, 203; screenplays by,

dynamic of finitude and infinitude of,

188, 194, 416 n. 63; sense of the marvelous

118–22, 124; empathic embodiment writ-

of, 189–91; signs of, 224, 409 n. 32

ing practice of, 109–10; feminism of, 105,

Laclau, Ernesto, 433 n. 37

109, 113, 114, 123–24, 287; Lacaba com-

Lanot, Marra PL., 72, 77–79, 97, 390 n. 25,

pared with, 201, 204; metaphorics of, 112;

390 n. 28

modes of experience articulated by, 105–6,

Lanot, Serafin, 77

122, 135, 137–38; Perez’s a≈nity with,

Laplanche, J., 394 n. 12, 442 n. 109

412 n. 11; poetics of, 135–36, 139, 396

Lapuz, Lourdes, 406 n. 59

n. 34, 399 n. 80; slippage between woman

Lauretis, Teresa de, 10

and nation theme of, 76–77; softness of

Lava brothers, 185, 279

476

Leninism, 279, 293, 300, 304, 305, 419 n. 11

tongue invoked by, 112–17

Lazarus, Neil, 326

Macapagal, Diosdado, 187

Lazzarrato, Maurizio, 12, 399 n. 75

Maceda, Jose, 442 n. 101

Lefort, Claude, 428 n. 42

Maceda, Teresita, 373

Lenin, V. I., 434 n. 41

Magbanua, Servando, 273

index

‘‘Magsasaka: Ang Bayaning di Kilala’’ (poem), 276

titution under, 11, 55, 69, 71, 72, 104, 229; quasi-fascist democracy succeeding, 330;

Mahmood, Saba, 136–37

on ‘‘rebellion of the poor,’’ 183; regime of

Makabayan, Lucia, 371

accumulation of, 201, 205; ‘‘Revolution

Malay, Armando, Jr., 419 n. 11, 420 n. 30

from the Center’’ program of, 74; secular-

Malayang Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan

ism of, 251; talismanic properties of, 306;

(makibaka), 72, 74–75, 389 n. 18 Manalo, Neil, 226 Manansalan, Martin, 247, 248, 415 n. 57, 416 n. 70

usurpation of political power by, 184–85, 406 n. 2. See also New Society Marcos, Imelda, 143, 156, 157, 160, 167, 249–50, 403 n. 29, 403 n. 33, 411 n. 4, 417

Manila, Quijano de, 407 n. 13

n. 77; crony capitalism of, 154; film center

Manila Film Center, 261

commissioned by, 261; Ministry of

‘‘Manipesto’’ (Perez), 417 n. 84

Human Settlements headed by, 166, 250;

Maoism, 270–71, 279, 293, 295–96, 300,

National Commission on the Role of Fil-

303–5, 336, 424 n. 79 Mao Tse Tung, 267, 420 n. 25 ‘‘Marami Bang Nakipaglibing?’’ (Were

ipino Women chaired by, 74, 389 n. 14, 389 n. 16; secularism of, 251; usurpation of political power by, 184–85, 406 n. 2

There Many Who Joined in the Burial?)

Margold, Jane, 126, 397 n. 53

(Montañez), 358, 365, 368

‘‘Maria Makiling’’ (Barrios), 76

Marcos, Ferdinand, 25, 143, 167, 176, 177, 194, 213, 226–27, 295, 391 n. 34, 402

Marianism, 70, 123, 330 Marx, Karl, 12, 38, 151, 276, 384 n. 41, 391

n. 21, 403 n. 29, 417 n. 78, 431 n. 21; Bal-

n. 37, 395 n. 27, 420 n. 27, 421 n. 36; com-

ikatan sa Kaunlaran (Partners in Develop-

modity analysis of, 32, 122, 129, 233, 397

ment) Movement of, 74; communist

n. 58, 413 n. 27, 413 n. 33; dialectic of,

threat invoked by, 26–27; crony capital-

297; on labor, 33, 35, 57, 105, 116, 384

ism of, 13, 154, 209, 210, 248, 250, 414

n. 44, 428 n. 37, 439 n. 81; on mystical

n. 45; cultural propaganda of, 158–59;

expression of value, 317; on nonproduc-

deposing of, 3, 15, 259, 299–301, 326,

tivity of artistic performance, 131, 132; on

327, 336, 351, 405 n. 55; dominant sig-

Paris Commune, 10; on social power of

nifying order of, 163; economic develop-

means of exchange, 398 n. 66; on surplus

ment under, 103, 146–49, 407 n. 3, 407 n. 22; as fixer, 200; gays and, 249; as hege-

value, 440 n. 83; vampire motif of, 369 Marxism, 277, 296, 300, 335, 338, 409 n. 30,

monic masculine icon, 314, 315; martial

420 n. 33, 421 n. 36; feminism and, 12, 35;

law under, 155, 159–60, 175, 187–88, 249,

Maoist-Leninist, 279, 293, 300, 303–5,

350; Masagana 99 program of, 410 n. 45;

419 n. 11; nature as object of human life

modernizationist strategies of, 19, 152, 153, 156, 160, 161, 173–74, 178, 217,

in, 368, 369, 440 n. 85; orthodox, 179, 337 masculinity, 32, 196, 204, 383 n. 26, 406

402 n. 26, 411 n. 4; nationalism of, 75;

n. 59, 406 n. 60; of capital, 35; heterosex-

‘‘patronage’’ poetry under, 113; personal-

ist, 352; hyper-, 205; military, 351, 377,

ization of political power of, 166; pros-

381 n. 9; revolutionary, 98, 272, 335, 357

Index

477

Masonic movement, 235, 260

money-subject, 55, 89, 92, 96

Maynila, Sa Kuko ng Liwanag (Maynila, At

Montana, Jason, 269

the Claws of Daylight) (film), 194 Mbembe, Achille, 117, 185, 207, 363–64, 395 n. 28, 438 n. 66 McCoy, Alfred, 350–51, 437 n. 63 McKinley, William, 39 McNamara, Robert, 160, 402 n. 26 Medina, B. S., 396 n. 37 Melendrez-Cruz, Patricia, 418 n. 9 Mercado, Leonard N., 385 n. 48 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 45, 385 n. 49 Mga Agos sa Dsiyerto (Current in the Desert) (anthology), 225, 269 ‘‘Mga Alaala ng Unang Araw Bilang Kadre sa Nayong Tinubuan’’ (Memories of My First Day as a Cadre in My Hometown) (Gacosta), 422 n. 49 Mga Kagila-gilalas na Pakikipagsapalaran (Amazing Adventures) (Lacaba), 189–94 Mga Liham ni Pinay (Letters of Pinay) (Mabanglo), 106–12, 117–21 Mga Tula Ng Digmang Bayan sa Pilipinas (Poems from the People’s War in the Philippines), 273, 296 Mies, Maria, 12 Miraflor, Norma, 404 n. 50 Miranda, Dionisio, 431 n. 25, 433 n. 36 Mirasol, Dominador, 225 Miss Universe Beauty Pageant, 72 Mitchell, Timothy, 153, 154 modernism, 112–14, 150, 180, 402 n. 26, 404 n. 50; of Marcoses, 153–54, 160 modernization, 2, 19, 151–55, 165, 169, 178, 203, 222, 226, 271, 307, 402 n. 26, 406 n. 59; authoritarian, 69, 144–50, 204, 237; Western, 386 n. 51, 401 n. 6, 402 n. 16, 412 n. 12 Mojares, Resil, 225, 277 money-form, 32, 89, 90, 170, 181, 234, 331

478

index

Montaña es Algo Más que Una Immensa Estepa Verde, La (Cabeza), 372 Montañez, Kris, 291, 293, 310, 313, 358, 365, 368, 403 n. 29 Monte de Ramos, Grace, 75 Nacpil-Alejandro, Lidy, 425 n. 9, 426 n. 12 ‘‘Nakatinging sa bituin’’ (Staring at the Stars) (Lacaba), 191 ‘‘Nanay Lagrimas’’ (Mother Tears) (Balgos de la Cruz), 365 Nandy, Ashis, 1 National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women, 74, 389 n. 14 National Democratic Front (ndf), 300, 302, 329, 423 n. 65, 434 n. 41 National Women’s Congress, 389 n. 14 ‘‘Need for a Cultural Revolution, The’’ (Sison), 266 Negri, Antonio, 11, 12, 38, 51, 55, 130, 131, 398 n. 73 Nemenzo, Francisco, 421 n. 36, 429 n. 9 New Age spiritualism, 258 New International Division of Labor, 29–30 New People’s Army (npa), 270, 328, 339, 349–54, 357, 358; conditions in, 341; cult value in, 310; feminists in, 72; founding of, 294; internal purges of, 300, 336; psychological operations of, 306; rural lifesupport system for, 286 New Pilipino Poetry, 113 New Politics, 301, 326 New Society, 14, 157, 164, 166, 169, 170, 180, 181, 223, 390 n. 24; disciplinary signs of, 224; hegemonic icons of, 314; humanist state ideology of, 249, 250; ‘‘magical’’ logic of, 194; martial law and, 159, 249; self-representations of, 251; sociopolitical

lexicon of, 172; synchronization of, with

Paris Commune, 10

global modernity, 161

Parreñas, Rhacel, 127–28

New World Order, 146, 148 Nicaragua, 334, 335, 337, 341, 345, 372

Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (pkp), 270, 279, 419 n. 11, 421 n. 36

Nigeria, 1

‘‘Paskil’’ (Poster) (Perez), 255–58

Ninh, Bao, 371, 372

passion, 117–22, 139; of Christ, 122, 127–

Noli Me Tangere (Rizal), 6–7, 333, 345–46

29, 281, 286, 372, 396 n. 34; diasporic,

Notes on the New Society of the Philippines

374, 396 n. 34; experience of self as, 136;

(Marcos), 183 ‘‘Nothing More Beautiful’’ (Sison), 420 n. 25 ‘‘Oberpas’’ (Overpass) (Perez), 220–25, 227, 255–56 ‘‘O Langit, O Lupa’’ (O Sky, O Land), 278– 79 Old Testament, 405 n. 54 Operasyon Kampanyang Ahos (Operation Campaign Garlic), 306 Operasyon Sukot, 310

resurrectionary, 121, 366; revolutionary, 284, 286, 290, 320, 358, 359, 361, 367, 439 n. 80 ‘‘Passion, Death and Resurrection of the Petty-Bourgeois Christian, The’’ (de la Torre), 284 ‘‘Pasyong Mahal ni San Jose’’ (The Sacred Passion of Saint Joseph) (Lacaba), 196 Patnaik, Prabhat, 410 n. 43 Patterson, Orlando, 440 n. 86 Payeras, Mario, 335 People Power revolt, 3, 143, 299, 327, 377

Pagsanghan, Onofre, 230

People’s Artists and Writers, 423 n. 65

pagkakatulad (likeness), 85–89

Perez, Tony, 14, 220–25, 228–32, 238–48,

‘‘Pahabol ng Dyip’’ (Running after a Jeep) (Mabanglo), 201

250, 260–61, 412 n. 11, 412 n. 22, 416 nn. 68–69; everyday life as focus of, 225,

pakikibagay (accommodation), 196–99, 203

227, 229; narrative style of, 245–46;

pakikipagsapalaran (fate playing), 99, 110,

poetry of, 417 n. 84; political articulation

199 paksa (Writing for the Development of the People), 267, 436 n. 54 ‘‘Paksiw na Ayungin’’ (Fish Cooked in Vinegar) (Lacaba), 198, 200 Palestinians, 363 ‘‘Panambitan’’ (Supplication to the Dead) (Luz), 367, 370, 438 n. 75 Panulat Para sa Kaunlaran ng Sambayanan (paksa), 267, 436 n. 54 ‘‘Para sa Mga Kapatid na Manunulat na

of subjective liberation by, 252–59; psychological themes of, 176, 229–30; spirit quest of, 261, 418 nn. 93–94; theatrical works of, 223, 230, 412 n. 13, 415 n. 61; vernacular language of, 230–31; whiteness and, 231–32. See also under titles of works by personhood, 11, 73, 81, 98, 111, 118, 136, 240; ailments of, 230; denial and destruction of, 120, 375, 376; outmoded forms of, 132–33, 253 Philippines, University of, 300

Nabaliw at Nagpatiwakal’’ (For Sister-

Philippines Free Press, 188

Writers Who Went Mad and Took Their

Philippine Society and Revolution (Guerrero),

Lives) (Barrios), 97

178–79, 291–95

Index

479

Phongparchit, Paul, 409 n. 29

Ramos, Fidel, 123, 200, 401 n. 8, 430 n. 9

Pietz, William, 392 n. 40

Rectified National Democratic movement,

‘‘Pina, Pina, Saan Ka Pupunta?’’ (‘‘Pina,

Recto, Claro M., 27

39–56, 393 n. 52

Redfield, Marc, 432 n. 30

pinagdaanan (experiential passage), 170, 221, 344 Piriyarangsan, Sungsidh, 409 n. 29 ‘‘Pitso Manok’’ (Firmeza), 271 poiesis, 5, 135, 276, 278, 290, 399 n. 79; historical, 291–98; social, 136

Reformation, 405 n. 54 ‘‘Regla sa Buwan ng Hunyo’’ (Period in the Month of June) (Mabanglo), 76–77, 80– 81, 113 religion, 12, 70, 89, 251, 282; of capitalism, 275; commercialized, 84; ‘‘of everyday

Polotan-Tuvera, Kerima, 176, 225

life,’’ 413 n. 27; revolution and, 277. See

Pomeroy, William, 270, 419 n. 11

also Catholic Church; Christianity

Pontalis, J.-B., 394 n. 12, 442 n. 109

reproduction, 10–11, 35, 91–92, 98–99, 122–

Pontecorvo, Gillo, 350

23, 373, 392 n. 42, 443 n. 113; of capital,

Portuguese colonialism, 233

139; heterosexist, 40; mechanical, 432 n. 30;

Posadas, Mano de Verdades, 293, 434 n. 42 postcolonial theory, 7–8, 15–16, 130–32, 147, 185; feminism and, 134; modernity in, 153 post-Fordism, 12, 30, 130–38, 208, 398 n. 74 primitive accumulation, 12, 133, 206, 330, 398 n. 73, 440 n. 87 ‘‘Program for a People’s Democratic Revolution,’’ 291 Protestantism, 235, 240, 252 Provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty), 130 Puerto Rico, 20, 207 ‘‘Puta’’ (Whore) (Barrios), 94–95 Quindoza-Santiago, Lilia, 95, 113 race, 12, 30, 39, 104, 134–36, 228, 233–35,

social, 30, 51, 376, 392 n. 40, 440 n. 86 reproductive labor, 12, 34–36, 38, 50, 89, 92, 101, 105, 130, 131, 133, 136, 177, 378, 399 n. 81 resistance, 6, 22, 134, 207, 302, 363, 420 n. 30; Christian, 252; discourse of, 80; to global capitalism, 105, 212; against Japanese occupation, 270; to modernization, 150, 386 n. 51; proletarian, 279, 397 n. 58; to regime of accumulation, 210; subjective, 232; of women, 31, 73, 128 Revolution of 1896, 329, 346, 390 n. 20, 403 n. 29 Reyes, Edgardo, 225, 243 Reyes, Jun Cruz, 14, 151–81, 194, 218, 220, 404 n. 41, 405 n. 58, 409 n. 32, 410 n. 49,

413 n. 32, 435 n. 50; class and, 122, 136,

434 n. 40; accommodation to present

248; construction of, 41, 134

times deplored by, 196–97; appearance of

‘‘Radical Histories and Question of Enlight-

corruption portrayed by, 202; fixer para-

enment Rationalism’’ (Chakrabarty), 324

digm used by, 199; generation addressed

Rafael, Vicente, 236, 255, 397 n. 51

by, 158; horizontal location of protest of,

‘‘Rain and Sun on the Mountains’’ (Sison),

159; lumpen labor devalued by, 211;

270 ‘‘Rain’’ (Lacaba), 419 n. 21

480

301

Pina, Where Are You Going’’) (Garcia),

index

poetry of, 422 n. 53; practices of protest of, 159, 172; psychology as narrative prin-

ciple for, 176; rendering of history by, 52,

Santos, Aida, 387 n. 66

155–57, 161–63, 224; use of language by,

Santos, Benilda S., 80, 83, 246

171, 175, 404 n. 50; valorization of solidity

Santos, Ildefonso, 195

by, 406 n. 60. See also under titles of works by

Sassen, Saskia, 219

Rich, Adrienne, 40

Scapular Gallery Nomad (Sibayan), 127

River, Ma. Virginia, 369

Scarry, Elaine, 376

Rivera, Temario, 441 n. 89

Schmitt, Carl, 432 n. 32

Rizal, José, 6–7, 44, 326, 345–46

School of the Americas, 437 n. 63

Robespierre, Maximilien de, 435 n. 51

‘‘Second Coming, The,’’ (Yeats), 1–2

Rocamora, Joel, 409 n. 29, 425 n. 1

Second Golden Age of Philippine Cinema,

romanticism, 113–14, 393 n. 46, 395 n. 18, 422 n. 59, 436 n. 54 Romero, Eddie, 428 n. 36 Rosca, Ninotchka, 225

188, 428 n. 36 Second Great Rectification Movement, 302 Second Propaganda Movement, 267, 420 n. 25

Rubin, Gayle, 37

secularism, 136, 251–52, 254, 275, 416 n. 68

Russia, 402 n. 16

Seriality, 109, 117, 343

‘‘Sa Aking Katulong’’ (To My Maid) (Barrios), 97 ‘‘Sabado ng Hapon’’ (Saturday Afternoon) (Lacaba), 191 sacrifice, 290, 406 n. 58, 440 n. 83; revolutionary, 313–15, 337, 356–57, 364, 373; by women, 26, 46, 122–23 ‘‘Sagada’’ (Makabayan), 371 ‘‘Sa Isip Lang’’(Only in Thought) (Lacaba), 202 ‘‘Sa Kanto ng Langit at Laong Laan’’ (On the Corner of Heaven and Ever-Ready Streets) (Lacaba), 189–90, 192, 200–201 Sa Kuko ng Liwanag (At the Claws of Daylight) (Reyes), 243 Salazar, Zeus A., 389 n. 9 Saldaña-Portillo, Maria Josefina, 335–37, 357 Sandinistas, 335, 372 San Juan, E., Jr., 4, 259, 274, 398 n. 63, 419 n. 20, 431 n. 21 Santiago, Jess, 287 ‘‘Santong Paspasan’’ (Holy Haste) (Lacaba), 206

Servants of Globalization (Parreñas), 127–28 servility, post-Fordist, 130–37 sexuality, 12, 28, 30–32, 39, 104, 108, 134, 228; in constitution of labor, 33–36; displays of, 176; feminine, 26; male, 384 n. 44; revolutionary, 436 n. 53 Sibayan, Judy, 127 Sicat, Luna, 60–72, 86, 88, 92, 100, 101, 222, 412 n. 11 ‘‘Sickness in the Towns, A’’ (Mojares), 277 Sidel, John, 411 n. 54 Singapore, 109–12, 120, 387 n. 56 ‘‘Sionny and Manang’’ (Barrios), 97 Sison, Jose Ma. (Amado Guerrero), 178, 186, 265–68, 276, 295, 419 n. 10, 419 n. 21, 420 n. 33, 424 n. 77; clarification of term ‘‘people’’ by, 265–66; Communist Party leadership of, 178, 185, 265; cultural revolution advocated by, 266–67, 292–93; Maoist optimism of, 424 n. 79; poetry of, 269–70, 274, 307, 420 n. 25, 420 n. 32; theism of revolution of, 277, 278, 294. See also under titles of works by ‘‘Sky Rose’’ (Granrojo), 310–25, 342, 367

Index

481

Snyder, Joel, 309 ‘‘Some Are Smarter than Others’’ (pamphlet), 203

collective, 53, 321; distinction between object and, 37; feminist, 50, 55, 97, 130;

Soriano, Zelda, 326, 441 n. 91

masculine, 14–15, 46, 60, 248, 380; metro-

sorrow, 361–78, 437 n. 59, 439 n. 77, 440

politan, 14, 180, 240; national, 6, 7, 55, 74,

n. 83; divine, 15, 21, 361–71, 441 n. 91,

81–82, 274; political, 17, 53, 83, 167, 178,

442 n. 109, 443 n. 117; global tragedy vs.,

324, 338; revolutionary, 268, 269, 272–74,

376–78; time of, 371–73

276, 286, 313, 318–19, 337, 354, 357, 358;

Sorrow of War, The (Ninh), 371, 372 Soto, Hernando de, 411 n. 50 sovereignty, 4, 290, 338, 374–77, 437 n. 62,

transnational, 43, 51, 144 subjectivity, 45, 66–68, 71, 78–79, 86–87, 135; feminine, 113; of global labor, 130–

438 n. 66, 442 n. 104; capitalist, 368–71;

31; masculinist, 175, 383 n. 46; selfhood

collective, 96; crisis within cultural, 36–

and, 125; sovereign, 46, 52, 56, 60, 74–75,

38; national, 6, 72–73, 115, 219, 295, 336,

88–92, 111, 112, 116, 114, 122, 179, 329,

347, 351, 353–57, 435 n. 50; revolution-

388 n. 67. See also agency, sovereign;

ary, 372–78, 435 n. 51, 436 n. 53. See also agency, sovereign; subjectivity: sovereign Spanish colonialism, 31–32, 234, 393 n. 46, 397 n. 59, 427 n. 22; conversion to Chris-

kapwa; loob subsumption, 53, 147, 184, 218, 251, 260, 425 n. 8; capitalist, 12, 21, 30, 46, 53, 83, 131–34, 214, 236

tianity under, 232–33, 236, 240–41, 255;

‘‘Sulat Mula sa Pritil’’ (Miraflor), 404 n. 50

movements against, 7, 16, 235, 266, 346,

‘‘Summer’’ (Magbanua), 273

366; racialization under, 41, 232

Supling (O√spring) (Mabanglo), 105, 124

‘‘Specific Characteristics of Our People’s War’’ (Guerrero), 270

Surin, Kenneth, 30 surplus, 15. See also excess, urban

spectacularity, 41–44, 48, 116, 151–52, 314–

surplus value, 34–36, 104, 132, 163, 208,

15, 362, 364, 437 n. 62; of capital, 42–43,

210, 211, 236, 307, 374, 403 n. 39, 440

48, 386 n. 55; of image-commodity, 54; of

n. 83

media, 50; of social technologies, 330; of

‘‘Syering’’ (Reyes), 422 n. 53

violence, 350–51

synecdochic logic, 43, 52, 71–72, 82, 92, 101

Spillers, Hortense, 108 Spivak, Gayatri, 12, 41, 134, 295, 331, 400 n. 6, 420 n. 27 Sri Lanka, 138 Stalin, Joseph, 442 n. 104 Star Cable tv, 221 Stau√er, Robert, 156 Struggle for Democracy (Sison), 295 struggles, decolonizing, 3–6 subalternity, 7, 29–31, 150, 348 subaltern studies, 6, 7, 21, 281–82, 338–39

482

subject, 10, 60, 84–89; of capital, 45, 60, 178;

index

Tadhana (Destiny) (Marcos), 159 Tadiar, Carlo, 239–40, 414 n. 50 Tagalog literature, 47, 93, 94, 194, 195, 277, 422 n. 59; fiction, 245; plays, 47, 240–41, 412 n. 13; poetry, 93, 105, 114, 192, 195, 200, 287, 392 n. 46, 407 n. 18, 408 n. 28, 421 n. 28, 422 n. 59. See also under titles of works Tagalogs, 300, 423 n. 61; conversion of, to Christianity, 232 , 255, 423 n. 59; language of, 7, 389 n. 7, 390 n. 20, 404 n. 52

Talks at Yenan Forum (Mao), 267

231, 261; capital investment in Philippines

Tanzania, 20, 210

by, 229; disposable elements of culture of,

Tarrosa-Subido, Trinidad, 6, 7

172; Filipino and Filipina immigrants in,

Taylor, Mark, 233

42, 48–49, 417 n. 70; imperialism of, 133,

Taylorism, 31

234–37, 266, 292, 295, 336, 424 n. 79;

Tejada, Sgt. Elpidio Rosario, 437 n. 63

importation of brand name commodities

Teodor, Luis, 195

from, 240; military presence of, in Philip-

Thailand, 138

pines, 3, 25–26, 30, 189; mundane incar-

Things Fall Apart (Achebe), 1

nation of God symbolized by, 251; post–

Thompson, Mark, 426 n. 13

World War II aspiration of, for global

time, 10, 14, 81, 119, 388 n. 3, 392 n. 43; of

power, 41; racism in, 109, 413 n. 32. See

castaways, 161–63; of catastrophe, 157–

also American colonialism

60; Christ-time, 120, 123, 138–39; of

universality, 56: secularist, 254

loneliness, 70–71; ‘‘small-time,’’ 254; of

‘‘Usapang Babae ’’ (Woman Talk) (Barrios),

sorrow, 371–73; of su√ering, 130–40; of waste, 91, 101–2; women and, 60–62 Tinio, Rolando, 195, 223, 230 Tiu, Macario, 310–25 Torres, Camilo, 422 n. 51 ‘‘Tra≈c in Women, The’’ (Rubin), 37 tragedy, 335, 376 trauma, 162, 175, 255; of authoritarian modernization, 144–50, 178; sexual, 108 Tripp, Aili Mari, 210 Tronti, Mario, 131 Truong, Thanh-Dam, 381 n. 10 Tsing, Anna, 135 Tutubi, Tutubi, ‘Wag Kang Magpahli Sa Mamang Salbahe (Dragonfly, Dragonfly, Don’t Let Yourself Be Caught by the Savage Man) (Reyes), 151–81, 194, 197, 220, 404 n. 50, 434 n. 40 U.S. Agency for International Development (usaid), 336

96 use value, 129, 133, 174, 392 n. 43, 398 n. 63 Utos ng Hari (King’s Command) (Reyes), 197–98 ‘‘Uyayi’’ (Lullaby) (Lacaba), 191–92 value, 11–15, 29, 30, 32, 53–55, 130, 132– 34, 168–70, 235–42, 262–65; bourgeois conception of, 413 n. 27; capital, 368, 376; exchange, 79, 133, 137, 179, 341, 383 n. 30; extraction of, 185, 189–90, 400 n. 6; human, 14, 139, 143, 228, 230–32, 241, 247, 253; labor theory of, 12; masculinist, 49; power and, 282, 284; spectacular, 43; racialization of, 232–37; systems of, 41– 42, 89, 144, 244, 383 n. 33; use, 129, 133, 174, 392 n. 43, 398 n. 63. See also cult value; surplus value Vietnam War, 41, 189, 345, 371 violence, 189–91, 201, 204, 269, 363, 398 n. 73, 417 n. 71, 438 n. 66; divine, 51, 361,

Uchiyamada, Yasushi, 125–26

366, 368, 436 n. 58, 437 n. 59, 443 n. 117;

‘‘Unfinished Story’’ (Dayrit), 61

against the masses, 269; of modernity,

United Nations Declaration of the Decade

138, 145, 146, 149, 164, 410 n. 48; myth-

of Women, 74 United States, 20, 26, 27, 39, 52, 127, 160,

ical, 361, 375–76, 437 n. 58; political, 114, 408 n. 24; revolutionary, 362, 378, 443

Index

483

violence (continued)

White, Hayden, 377, 430 n. 19

of, 350–51; against women, 100, 104, 177,

‘‘Why Is the Face of the Sun Red?’’ (Fir-

385, 391 n. 34, 434 n. 46

meza), 439 n. 79

Virgin Mary, 70, 76

Williams, Raymond, 21, 227, 338

Virno, Paolo, 12, 131–32, 135, 208, 399

Women Writers in Media Now (women),

nn. 78–79 virtuosity, 116, 131–32, 135, 136 von Werlhof, Claudia, 12 vulgarity, aesthetics of, 207 Wallon, Henri, 45 Walong Dekada ng Makabagong Tulang Pilipino (Eight Decades of New Pilipino Poetry) (Almario), 105, 113 Weekley, Kathleen, 336–38, 414 n. 51 Weeks, Je√rey, 239

484

Werlhof, Claudia von, 369

n. 117; of Savage Man, 180, 181; spectacle

index

390 n. 25, 390 n. 28 ‘‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The’’ (Benjamin), 309–10 World Bank, 103, 146, 160, 336, 402 n. 26, 403 n. 33, 417 n. 77 World War II, 41, 184, 187, 231, 267, 336; Japanese occupation during, 270, 306 Wynter, Sylvia, 18, 19 Yeats, W. B., 1–2

neferti x. m. tadiar is a professor of women’s studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004) and the editor, with Angela Y. Davis, of Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representations (2005).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tadiar, Neferti Xina M. (Neferti Xina Maca), 1964– Things fall away : philippine historical experience and the makings of globalization / Neferti X. M. Tadiar. p. cm. — (Post-contemporary interventions) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-4431-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-4446-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Globalization—Philippines. 2. Philippines—Civilization. 3. Women—Philippines. 4. Philippines—Social life and customs. 5. Philippines—Emigration and immigration. 6. National characteristics, Philippine. i. Title. ii. Series: Post-contemporary interventions. ds664.t33 2009 2008053654

305.5%609599—dc22