Passionate Revolutions. Talitha Espiritu
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More recently, Sheetal Majithia has problematized the implicit privileging of reason over emotion, the secular over the sacred and the West over the non-West in melodrama studies. Postcolonial melodramas, Majithia argues, show how powerful political attachments are formed through the affective reason activated by melodrama: the way it illuminates “our power to affect the world around us and our power to be affected by it.”32 Susan Dever also sees the democratic potential of melodramas, which may “provide a means for newly-enfranchised subjects to reflect—both cognitively and affectively—on the significance of their participation in nation-states whose sacred legitimacy revolution has called into question.”33 Building on these insights, this book examines how melodrama can channel the desires of disempowered groups to articulate a popular democratic politics in resistance to the elitist and paternalistic discourses that dominate “Philippine-style” democracy.
As Reynaldo Ileto argues, the history of political struggle in the Philippines has been characterized by the coexistence of two competing notions of politics: pulitika, the deficient formal democracy of the elite, and the more “meaningful politics” of the oppressed. Dismissed by elites as mere “emotional outpourings,” the latter produced numerous popular uprisings galvanized by such concepts as awa (pity) and damay (empathy) for an aggrieved person or community.34 Popular forces, in short, have understood political struggle as melodrama. And here, the social and the political become legible only “as they touch on the moral identities and relationships of individuals.”35 As I demonstrate in this book, the national allegories of the oppositional media engaged the audience’s visceral capacity to recognize the pain of the popular forces as proof of virtue. They denigrated the civic ardor of those still invested in pulitika as the chicanery of a debased democracy. Such denigration of “official” politics is a clear indicator of the sentimental ethos animating the anti-Marcos movement. But despite its concerted efforts to distance itself from Marcos, the movement shared with the dictator an unwavering faith in the logic of true feeling. As we shall see, a sentimental politics based on compassion is not qualitatively different from Marcos’s own claim to govern the nation with love.
National Sentimentality: Once More, with Feeling
What is the place of painful feeling in the making of political worlds? Berlant’s work on “national sentimentality” centers on this question, which resonates in my reading of the national allegories documented in this book. Let me briefly outline the central premises of the concept and explain how they inform my methodology.
Berlant describes national sentimentality as a mode of political rhetoric that makes a captivating promise to its public. Simply put, it promises that the social injustices fracturing a nation will be put to right through the power of empathy and identification. This promise comes out of the long-standing contest between two models of citizenship that roughly correspond to the above description of pulitika and the “meaningful” politics of the oppressed. On the one hand, there is the classic model of citizenship that sees the value of each citizen to lie in their juridical status as an abstract person before the law. On the other hand, there is a sentimental model of citizenship that Berlant traces back to the labor, feminist, and antiracist struggles in the United States in the nineteenth century. These social movements imagined a nation peopled not by abstract persons but by “suffering citizens and noncitizens” structurally excluded from the “American dreamscape.”36 Lest we forget, the U.S. Constitution constructed the person as the unit of political membership in the American nation, but in practice, this privilege really only belonged to white, property-owning males. The notion of national identity thus serves to protect the implied whiteness and maleness of the original American citizen, whose privilege it was “to appear to be without notable qualities.” Indeed, the notion of abstract personhood so dear to the classic model of citizenship presupposes a white male body as the relay to legitimation. And the power to suppress this body becomes the measure of one’s authority in the public sphere.37
Sentimental politics turns the classic model of citizenship on its head, positing the pain of subaltern subjects—those who have never had the privilege to suppress the event of the body—as the true core of national collectivity. It insists that a utopian society can be achieved by identification with their pain. Note, however, that a power imbalance supports this transaction of pain and recognition, which is focalized from the perspective of the culturally privileged. The pain of African-Americans, women, and the poor “burns into the conscience of classically privileged national subjects, such that they feel the pain of flawed or denied citizenship as their pain.”38 Sentimentality, in short, assumes that structural social change is possible, provided that a bond of compassion—“an affective and redemptive linkage”—can be forged “between the privileged and the socially abject.”39
What creates the bond of compassion? The short answer: sentimental publicity. Sentimental citizenship abhors the “official” institutions of politics. It locates its interventions not in the political domain but “near it, against it, above it,” in the “juxtapolitical” space of everyday life, whenever and wherever an intimate public forms around scenes and stories of social injustice. Books, newspapers, films, TV, and all other forms of popular narrative are the diverse media of sentimental publicity. They provide the material infrastructure for circulating sentimental narratives and for gathering an intimate public together—whether physically, as in the case of the gregarious communitas of cinema spectatorship, or imaginatively, as in the case of the solitary reader/viewer who imagines a shared horizon of experience with other readers/viewers of sentimental texts.
But it is a sentimental aesthetic that allows sentimental narratives and their representations of social wrongs to gain political traction within this intimate public. And this aesthetic is defined by the use of personal suffering to “express or exemplify conflicts in national life.” In sentimental narratives, stereotypes and clichés imbue a “local drama of compassionate attachment with a sense of import beyond the scene of its animation.” The struggle of an individual thereby takes on the expansive and totalizing logic of national allegory. And when crises of the heart are resolved, the “emotional justice achieved on the small scale figures its resolution on the larger.”40
The sentimental aesthetic seeks to transform its privileged public. It elevates reading to a powerful act of compassionate cosmopolitanism: to read a sentimental text is to enter a space of dis-interpellation insofar as one is compelled to identify with someone else’s pain. Identification with suffering is indeed the only ethical response to a sentimental plot. Liberal empathy—the idea that you will never be the same—is thus the “radical threat and great promise” of the sentimental aesthetic. It embodies the ethico-aesthetic project of cultural policy writ large: the idea that “proper reading will lead to more virtuous, compassionate feeling and therefore to a better self.”41
Again: sentimental publicity locates compassionate citizenship in the transactions of pain and recognition that bind the members of an intimate public. But resting primarily on an aesthetic activity, sentimental publicity generates a mode of citizenship that does not easily map onto the political sphere, if we understand the latter as a “place of acts oriented towards publicness.” What we get instead is a “world of private thoughts” projected outward. This, in essence, is what a sentimental public is: “private individuals inhabiting their own affective changes.”42 This brings us to the “unfinished business” of national sentimentality as Berlant sees it: how do changes in feeling, even on a mass scale, bring about structural social change?
This book seeks to weigh in on this question from the postcolonial perspective of the Philippines during the historically significant period of the Marcos dictatorship. A critical feature of my methodology is to draw attention to the process of rough translation that has accompanied the transplantation of U.S. models of democracy and cultural policy to the former colony. These rough translations attest to what Majithia describes as the “coeval but uneven conditions that characterize postcolonial and global conditions.”43 Taking a relational perspective indeed allows one to appreciate how the sentimental political culture described by Berlant also inheres in a nation-state conceived in the image of the United States. It allows us to see how political attachments in these two distinct—but profoundly