Passionate Revolutions. Talitha Espiritu
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lay in a cultural liberation program directed toward an understanding, appreciation and internalization of our rich cultural heritage as a foundation for developing pride in ourselves as a people . . . meaningful and lasting change entails the reshaping not only of the existing social order but also of the consciousness of the individuals that together make up that order.36
For Marcos, national discipline rested on a concept of culture as both object and instrument of social and moral reform. Such faith in culture’s capacity to effect inner transformation as a necessary step toward securing external social transformation points to what Tony Bennett describes as a different mode of government, one “aimed at producing a citizenry, which, rather than needing to be externally and coercively directed, would increasingly monitor and regulate its own conduct.”37 For indeed, as Marcos put it, “We cannot permanently depend on the coercive powers of the state. We must give to the new political bond the force of our own individual discipline.”38 Marcos’s cultural liberation program was a bid to “governmentalize” culture—to “use culture as a resource through which those exposed to its influence would be led to ongoingly and progressively modify their thoughts, feelings and behaviour.”39
Marcos’s projection of a self-monitoring and self-regulating cultural subject bears a striking affinity with Foucault’s theory of governmentality. For Foucault, governmentality marked a radical shift in conceptions of the instruments and ends of government. Based on Machiavellian principles, earlier theories of governance gave to the state a single purpose: to secure the political obedience of the populace. This imperative was seen as the very precondition to the exercise of sovereignty, which in turn was pursued as an end in itself.40 Obedience to the law, in other words, made the end of sovereignty the exercise of sovereignty. With the rise of the modern state, Machiavellian notions of sovereignty gave way to a new conception of governance premised on the population as objects of care of the state. Eschewing the “self-referring circularity” of sovereignty, this mode of governance was characterized by a plurality of specific aims—for example, ensuring that the greatest possible quantity of wealth is produced, that the people are provided with the sufficient means of subsistence, and that the population is enabled to multiply. And so, while sovereignty looked to the law as the principal instrument for achieving obedience to the law, governmentality looked to how things were disposed to meet specific social ends.
In his Notes on the New Society of the Philippines, Marcos echoes Foucault’s observations on the circular logic of sovereignty (what Foucault calls juridico-discursive power). He concedes that the New Society readily calls to mind a Machiavellian “command society.” But such a society, he argues, has a weak social basis—a fear of authority—and can only engender a “crude discipline . . . the kind we have been subjected to as children.” It is therefore imperative to transcend the command society’s basis in notions of punishment: “We should be afraid of wrongdoing not because of the personal consequences to ourselves but because it might destroy the ‘balance’ of our community . . . Only in this way can our covenant with one another be made into a ‘lasting institution.’”41 Marcos introduces the notion of an “internal revolution” as the key to fostering a deeper social covenant:
We should not fall into the trap of a ‘surveilled’ society: this will defeat our purpose. Happily, our recourse was prescribed by Apolinario Mabini in another revolution, when he said that an ‘internal’ revolution was necessary for the success of an ‘external’ one. What this ultimately means is that we should be able to internalize the democratic revolution, make its objectives, principles and ideals a part of our being, if we expect to succeed—and make our success an enduring one.42
That other revolution, of course, was the 1898 revolution. Marcos is here channeling the hero Mabini, the nationalist leader widely regarded as one of the brains of the revolutionary movement. He argues, after Mabini, that the attainment of the revolutionary social agendas of the New Society necessarily hinges on each and every Filipino internalizing the “objectives, principles and ideals” of the martial-law state. This implies an “inner discipline that is not a response to coercion” but rather a critical engagement with, and active participation in, the developmental projects of the state.43
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