Passionate Revolutions. Talitha Espiritu
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or non-belonging that an individual (or an ideal, or an organization) somehow stirs up and addresses.” It also allows us to see how the structurally oppressed and the socially abject in both countries “often have strongly conflicted sentiments about themselves and the society that has made them ‘other.’”44
This ambivalence was certainly a concern for Marcos, who often referred to the shame and self-hatred of the colonized subject. But he was also wont to invoke the rage of the oppressed, stressing how this protorevolutionary emotion could have dire consequences for the republic. The containment of this terrible rage was indeed Marcos’s pretext for declaring martial law. Meanwhile, there were limits to the anti-Marcos movement’s sentimental will to correct social wrongs. From the earliest days of the dictatorship, the various “pain alliances” that comprised the anti-Marcos coalition were internally torn between those who sought radical social change and those seeking the more moderate solution of a regime change. These factions, however, stood united—however briefly and tenuously—in the belief that a compassionate public feeling was a necessary first step toward social transformation. But the deciding factor was the popular classes: Marcos and his critics routinely invoked their rage and pain and sought to control it. Both sides sought to create a sentimental bargain with the popular classes. To borrow Berlant’s terms, this involved “substituting for representations of pain and violence representations of its sublime self-overcoming.”45 Both sides however, evinced a profound lack of knowledge—distrust, even—of the popular classes. In recreating the story of Marcos’s rise and fall, I emphasize the double representation of the popular classes—as simultaneously abject and politically volatile—as a case study of how, as Deborah Gould puts it, the ambivalence of the abject and the marginalized “shapes a sense of political (im)possibilities,” and can have “tremendous influence on political action and inaction.”46
The above discussion of sentimental publicity makes clear the importance of engaging the aesthetic dimension of sentimental texts. The sentimental ideal of liberal empathy indeed grounds the various national allegories that I analyze in this book. I explicate how these texts imagine social transformation not as a structural event, but as an emotional one: how the ability to feel for the subordinate other is presented as something that progressively grows into a desire for the emancipation of that person, and by extension, the community. However, as Berlant warns, an overinvestment in the emotional event of the reader’s psychological transformation, at the expense of tracking what is needed for structural change, confines sentimental politics to the business of “delivering virtue to the privileged.”47 It thus behooves us to analyze these sentimental texts alongside the “official texts” of government (presidential decrees, congressional speeches, white papers, conference proceedings, etc.), and to place them in their proper historical and social contexts. For indeed, the “pain politics” of sentimental culture “falsely promises a sharp picture of structural violence.”48 It is necessary, therefore, to bring the political economy of the regime to bear on our discussion of the sentimental politics of the anti-Marcos movement. Lest we forget, feeling is a powerful but unreliable measure of justice.
With a historical sweep that spans twenty-one years of the Marcos era, this book presents the stories of two “passionate revolutions.” Chapters 1 through 3 examine Marcos’s so-called “democratic revolution,” while chapters 4 through 6 trace the story of people power. Chapter 1 examines the protest culture of the Philippines on the eve of martial law. I reconstruct the volatile political climate generated by the so-called First Quarter Storm, the violent street protests that rocked the nation in early 1970. I read the national allegories on display in these protests, as memorialized in Jose F. Lacaba’s Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage. Consisting of Lacaba’s first-person accounts of the protests for the Philippines Free Press, the iconic text captures the visceral performance of moral clarity at the heart of sentimental politics.49 But the sentimental publicity that enabled Marcos’s critics to become an intimate public finds a counterpart in his command of political spectacle. I examine a rare propaganda film, The Threat—Communism, which draws on the U.S. tradition of “political demonology” to contain the revolutionary sentiments then sweeping the nation. The film is a perfect illustration of the affective conditioning that constitutes melodrama’s negative pole, and constitutes a hermeneutic key for making sense of Marcos’s pivotal declaration of martial law, in 1972.
Chapter 2 examines the cultural policy of the Marcos regime. I tease out how Marcos’s cultural liberation program mimicked the paternalistic rhetoric of the colonial policy of benevolent assimilation: both decreed the ethico-aesthetic training of cultural subjects as a prerequisite to the exercise of the rights and duties of citizenship. But Marcos’s cultural liberation program also echoed Fanon’s theorization of cultural rehabilitation in The Wretched of the Earth: the cultural imperative to correct the “self-contempt, resignation and abjuration” of the colonized and thereby effect the psychoaffective creation of “new men.”50 Marcos’s New Society was indeed an ambitious cultural-policy endeavor that sought to create the New Filipino by synthesizing the paternalist, U.S.-centric and neocolonialist discourse of modernization with the populist, nationalist, and anticolonial cultural politics of an emergent Third World consciousness. The chapter revisits the Marcos romance, showing how this love plot underpins the regime’s national symbolic and its double-speaking cultural policy.
Chapter 3 examines the impact of the regime’s cultural policy directives on the cinema, beginning with a “national sexuality” campaign against a bomba (sex-and-violence) film culture that mirrored the irrational and libidinous excesses of Philippine politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I trace how a dual policy of strict censorship and artistic promotion—and Imelda’s “internationalist” aspirations for the cinema—would ironically lead to the consolidation of a cinema vanguard committed to raising awareness of political repression in the New Society among a world audience. Their antiauthoritarian cultural politics bore a striking affinity with the protest culture of the First Quarter Storm. I tease out the resonances of the First Quarter Storm and the bomba film culture in Lino Brocka’s Tinimbang ka ngunit kulang (Weighed and found wanting, 1974), a sentimental text that allegorizes social cleansing in the New Society.
Chapter 4 traces the various fronts of the anti-Marcos struggle from the earliest days of martial law to just before the Aquino assassination. I situate the movement’s pain alliances against the political-economic backdrop of the Marcos regime’s disastrous development initiatives. I read Behn Cervantes’s Sakada (1976) as a sentimental text that self-reflexively reveals the paternalism of both radical and moderate factions of the anti-Marcos movement toward the oppressed groups in whose name the struggle against dictatorship was being waged. The film begs to be read against the real-world activism of the popular classes. I thus examine two cases instantiating “democracy from below” in the New Society: the struggle of the Kalinga and Bontoc mountain peoples against militarization and the struggle of urban squatters against their forced displacement from Imelda’s so-called City of Man. With only the New Cinema, the Catholic media, and a handful of defiant journalists in the controlled media to publicize their causes, these communities fought at a disadvantage for the very ideals that Nathan Gilbert Quimpo identifies as the salient goals of democracy from below: “popular empowerment, a more equitable distribution of wealth, and a more participatory democracy.”51
Chapter 5 examines the “quiet revolt” of the establishment press, the return of the bomba film, and the sentimental publicity occasioned by the Aquino assassination, in 1983. Marcos’s failing health and a succession struggle within the national family had emboldened journalists within the controlled press to expose