Passionate Revolutions. Talitha Espiritu
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to what Lauren Berlant has described as the ascendance of a political culture of true feeling.3
Berlant sees an affective public taking the place of the mythical rational public imagined at the center of classic accounts of U.S. citizenship. Challenging the Enlightenment view of rationality as the distinguishing trait of the human subject, the culture of true feeling holds that what makes us human is our ability to empathize with the suffering of others. Elevating compassion to a civic duty, the culture of true feeling is premised on the notion that subjects are “emotionally identical in their pain and suffering and therefore imaginable by each other.” As the glue that holds an affective public together, an emotional humanism presumes that “to feel emotion x in response to injustice” morally authorizes one to participate in the political sphere. Paradoxically, however, this brand of visceral politics locates political agency in private emotional acts. It transforms citizenship into a form of spectatorship, in which the “citizen is moved rather than moving.” The culture of true feeling thus keys us to the consequences of a political epistemology that sees emotion as the “best material from which determinations about justice are made.”4
Berlant’s concept of “true feeling” is a productive starting point for thinking about the power—as well as the pitfalls—of political emotions in the two stories that I trace in this book. These stories are due for a critical reappraisal in light of a renewed interest in affect and emotion in the study of political cultures. Recent work on the Marcos dictatorship has indeed begun to explore the affective and emotional dynamics of political repression and dissent. Joyce Arriola’s work on print culture and Rolando Tolentino’s prolific writings on the cinema similarly see the conflict between Marcos and his critics in terms of a binary struggle between “official” and “popular” forms of nationalism, eliciting hegemonic and abject political feelings, respectively.5 With a much broader purview that explores the relations between Philippine visuality and the visual economy of an emergent world media system, Jonathan Beller’s analysis of the protest aesthetic of anti-Marcos filmmakers draws attention to the revolutionary potential of a social realism based on emotional excess.6 And engaging the cultural legacy of the Marcos regime from the perspective of queer cultural politics, Bobby Benedicto’s study of Marcos-era architecture productively highlights how the physical ruins of the regime’s film culture constitute an affective environment that articulates a “lost sense of progress, optimism and globalism,” while simultaneously bringing to light the indeterminacy of national identity.7 Passionate Revolutions builds on these important developments in the field. As a focused study of the role of the press and the cinema in the rise and fall of the Marcos regime, it seeks to explain how political emotions operate in official and popular forms of nationalism, and how these two affective realms intersect in the interfaces between national allegory, melodramatic politics and sentimental publicity.
National Allegory, Melodrama, and Popular Struggle
What is the relationship between nationalist movements and their symbolic forms? Berlant has coined the term “national symbolic” to refer to the range of discursive resources—icons, rituals, metaphors, and narratives—that constitute a culture’s shared language for constructing a collective consciousness.8 The national symbolic is what gives “official” nationalism its “heart”—and in the postcolonial world, its importance cannot be understated. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon emphasizes the psychoaffective dimensions of this process that hinges on using national culture to “make the totality of the nation a reality to each citizen” and to “make the history of the nation part of the personal experience of each of its citizens.”9 The national symbolic, in other words, activates public subjectivity in the realm of fantasy. Here, the fractured and depersonalized colonized subject is restored to state of wholeness by an affective act of identification with an imagined national body.
Marcos’s many tracts on national culture echo Fanon’s polemic in Wretched of the Earth. Like Fanon, Marcos saw the importance of addressing the psychic wounds of the colonized subject, whose self-worth can be restored only via a program of cultural rehabilitation. This basic precept was the animus behind the regime’s cultural policy (see chapter 2). Let me signpost the affective dimensions of this policy here. Briefly put, it is not enough to have a cultivated mind; the task of national regeneration requires the citizen to have a reeducated heart. It is up to the state, then, to create a national culture that would provide a space of emotional contact, recognition, and reflection for its citizens. As a dramaturgical mirror designed to reflect back to the citizen an image of her best self, this national culture will transform the citizen into a subject of feeling: someone with affective commitments to the regime and its fantasy of a national family.
It has become a truism that Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos ruled the nation via a conjugal dictatorship that drew on the family form to secure its legitimacy.10 But much work still remains to be done to explain the complex relationship between the Marcos romance—the love plot that organizes the regime’s national symbolic—and the political and economic realities subtending the conjugal dictatorship. Two separate spheres, the intimate and the public, appear to be at work here, calling to mind related dichotomies: emotion vs. reason, representation vs. politics, and melodrama vs. documentary realism. On the face of things, these dichotomies appear to correspond with our habituated ways of organizing the disparate materials in the Marcos archive: films, literary works, and the ephemera of everyday life (what we in the humanities call texts) are studied with the interpretive approaches appropriate to the humanities, while the “hard facts” of state policy, political economy, and social movements are left up to social scientists to collect and narrate using the empirical methods of the social sciences. But if we were to take seriously the salience of “true feeling” in the political sphere, and if we were to take just as seriously the ways in which political-economic structures impinge on the national symbolic, we would see the necessity of rejecting these dichotomies in favor of a more interdisciplinary approach that blends fact and interpretation. Considering the Marcos romance as a national allegory is an important first step.
As a critical concept and political methodology, national allegory has become a prominent fixture in postcolonial discourse, particularly in Latin America. Ismail Xavier’s pathbreaking study of Brazilian cinema fruitfully traces the rise of national allegory as a militant cultural practice in the 1960s and 1970s, a time “when the movement in world history seemed to elect the so-called Third World as the epicenter of change.” In Brazil, this convulsive moment resulted in films that sought to “present a totalizing view of the country,” with a clear “preference for allegory.”11 As both a “source of knowledge” and the “embodiment of a critical view of history,” national allegory encapsulated an aesthetic and political predisposition toward creating social texts with a totalizing rhetoric anchored in a specific ideological-political conjuncture—one in which “the issues of class, race and gender were subordinate to the national question,” and the notion of “underdevelopment was the nucleus of national thinking.”12 National allegory, in other words, became the medium for analyzing—and intervening in—the postcolonial condition and the failure of the national dream.
The notion of underdevelopment resonated in the Philippines in the early 1970s, when Marcos and his critics were locked in a power struggle that culminated in his declaration of martial law, in September 1972. At the time, the dominant framework for apprehending the “national question” in the Philippines was the neocolonial, or dependency, model.13 Leftist nationalists argued that the economic practices of transnational corporations instantiated the indirect colonial rule of the United States over the Philippines, which was reinforced by the military pacts between the two countries. The nation’s dependent status vis-à-vis an external military and economic power consigned it to a condition of underdevelopment that could be corrected only by radical social transformation.
When Marcos became dictator, he assumed the position of the nation’s “official writer,” as Arriola puts it, “mix[ing] state policy with ideology and propaganda to rally the people toward a ‘nation.’”14 Marcos went so far as to “author” Tadhana: The History of the Filipino People, a multivolume