DIALECTICS
AND HISTORY: POWER, KNOWLEDGE, AGENCY IN RIZAL'S DISCOURSES
By
E. San Juan, Jr.
Prologue
On
meeting for the first time after 5 years a former activist woman friend, I was
surprisingly barraged with a pile of government propaganda about the official
celebration of the Philippine Centennial in 1998. My friend also told me that
life in the Philipines has immensely improved, and everyone is or has become
prosperous. In one of the Centennial brochures, we were urged to
"relearn the values that won for us our freedom"; the practise of such
virtues as "initiative, self-reliance, industry, courteousness, and the
bayanihan spirit [that] will help achieve our vision of nationhood."
Such virtues strike us as universal, not the unique property of any group.
What "the vision of nationhood" is, seems to be left to the
imagination or, more precisely, it is left suspended in the miasma of cliches
and exhausted rhetoric (for example, Joaquin 1977).
Despite the
diaspora of 9 million OCWs, "ang mga bagong bayani" as lauded by
Corazon Aquino (chiefly domestics, entertainers, and low-skilled workers
abroad)--the wisdom of the Centennial authorities sought to instruct us that
"Filipinism is very much alive in each of us." Like the term
"mana," "Filipinism" is another floating signifier whose
content can be filled by anyone. Conversely it can be a springboard for
discursive and ideological struggle. Now, so much talk about "values"
and value reorientation should warn us that such moralizing, such indulgence in
abstract metaphysical injunction, is a symptom that the State's legitimacy is at
stake. It is either eroded or at best seriously attenuated. The
Centennial thus betokened a crisis of ruling-class hegemony. It marked a
rupture in the legitimacy of the rule of the comprador/bureaucratic elite. To
sustain the dominance of this minority, a celebration of the l896 revolution
affords an occasion for repairing the rupture, for reinforcing the fissured
"dikes" surrounding the coercive fortifications of the State.
For this purpose, the nation's history and its archive need to be refunctioned,
reinterpreted, and mobilized. Unity behind the rulers needs to be
re-established.
The bayanihan
of state-nationalism, the nation articulated by oligarchic and bureaucratic
power, is a contemporary phenomenon in many Third World dependent states freed
from direct Western control since World War II. Such nation-states have of
course remained satellites of the former colonial power, or else constrained by
multinational corporations and dictated upon by World Bank/IMF and other
financial consortiums. Any neocolonial society like the Philippines subsists in
a state of permanent crisis. This is exactly the formal effect of late
capital accumulation manifested in the periphery of the capitalist world system.
Unlike industrialized nation-states in the West (or Japan), however, the state
and the population (labelled "nation"), both as concepts and
geopolitical configurations of forces, remain terrains of unceasing political
conflict and ideological contestation. The reason for this is the
historical condition called uneven, non-synchronized development.
Uneven
development is a phenomenon of the capitalist regulation of state and civil
society in dependent or peripheral formations. Uneven development refers to the
prevalence of severe class divisions, lopsided distribution of wealth, and the
allocation of power based on property relations. Uneven development entails the
existence of a state-system that is the battleground of antagonistic
forces--local classes representing imperial interests or marginalized sectors.
The process of class formation reproduces the basic antagonism between metropole
and periphery. In this site of antagonisms, we confront not only diverse
ideas of what "Filipino identity" and "Filipinism"
signify--not just "imagined" communities as suggested by Benedict
Anderson--but also the structures of feeling, sensibilities, and conditions of
collectivities embodied in a wide array of social practices, idioms,
institutions, usages, and so on. What is central is how power is to be
constituted and for whose interests. What is at issue concerns the
principle of social order, a central and unifying vision of the good life, that
is to be identified with the nation as well as the collective identity which
distinctively synthesizes the variegated representations of our history, memory,
aspirations, dreams, fantasies, and so on. How is the Filipino nation to be
conceptualized and made intelligible for everyday experience?
My contention
is that the meaning or substance of the nation called "Filipino" is in
a perpetual process of construction so long as the country has not attained
genuine independence (for the orthodox view, see Guerrero 1963). Given the
defeat of the l896-98 stage of the national-democratic revolution, the
suppression of the plebeian or popular forces from l898 to the present, the
diverse forms of cooptation and neocolonizing rearticulations deployed by the
capitalist power bloc, the construction of a "Filipino identity"
remains an ongoing project for collective praxis and critique. In undertaking
this project, the ideas of Jose Rizal are decisive.
Fortuitous
Intervention
A struggle
over how to evaluate the legacy of Rizal, the meaning and significance of his
life and works, between the hegemonic elite and the nation-people, serves as the
occasion for this essay. The following reflection on three crucial works of
Rizal--"Letter to the Young Women of Malolos (l889), "The Indolence of
the Filipinos" (l890), and the "Philippines A Century Hence"
(l890)--are intended to contribute to the process of conscientization (to use
Paulo Freire's term), part of the project of a radical, popular-democratic
transformation of the exploitative, oppressive and unjust system we all inhabit.
In
congratulating Graciano Lopez Jaena and other compatriots for the founding of La
Solidaridad on 15 February 1889, Rizal wrote from London two days after:
"See that the periodical is just, honest and truthful so that its opinion
may always be respected. It is necessary that we show our enemies that we
are more worthy than they, morally and humanly speaking. Should we tell
the truth we shall have won our cause because reason and justice are on our
side." Inscribed in the decorum of rational discourse, truth is thus
conceived here as an effect of style founded on the avoidance of "vulgar
and ignoble language." But more than an offshoot of formal decorum,
truth appears as the effect of identifying oneself as a partisan of reason and
justice. This is one of the uses of the argumentum ad hominem that
Rizal mobilizes in the strategy of his partisan speech-acts, the culmination of
three hundred years of Spanish proselytizing and casuistry. Life precedes logic
and pedagogy.
The role
of the collective was catalyzing. While the Propagandista cause upheld the
universality and objectivity of those twin principles of reason and justice, it
should be stressed that both the Associacion La Solidaridad which elected Rizal
as honorary president and the fortnightly periodical were committed to one
all-encompassing aim: "to champion the legitimate aspirations of the
Filipino people to life, democracy, and happiness." All of Rizal's
contributions to La Solidaridad, while polemical and scholarly in form,
should be judged as texts articulating the manifold linkages between power and
truth, disciplinary power yielding effects of truth. These texts instigated
practical measures and elicited bodily effects.
Any reading of
Rizal's texts would then try to demonstrate its suasive potency as an effect of
theoretical apparatuses whose effect conceals itself within the discourse of a
self-identical, transcendent Reason once solely manipulated by the Spanish
administration and the church. Rizal's texts do not intend to substitute another
universal absolute for what they displace. Rather, in the process of
deconstructing the apparently seamless web of colonial ideology and its
libidinal investments, Rizal elucidates the breaks, ruptures, and points of
unravelling in the colonial epistemes which, by an appeal for dialogue and
communication, can constitute the space for the Other--the repressed identities
and intellects of peasants, workers, and other marginalized subjects. The
economy of colonial symbolic power and its cultural capital are thus undermined.
No reading is
innocent. Every interpretation is already committed (San Juan 1996). I should
like to undertake here a reading of two exemplary texts from La Solidaridad
and the "Letter to the Young Women of Malolos" in a way designed to
recuperate their submerged liberatory impulses, to release latent energies--the
radical potential of Rizal's historical imagination--capable of being
reappropriated for our agenda and needs today. My commentary necessarily repeats
ideas and themes found in the other chapters, a rehearsal designed to fashion
what Walter Benjamin calls a constellation of images and motifs that may capture
the "messianic" vision in long buried archives. Let me address first
Rizal's "Letter."
Cesar Majul, author
of the magisterial The Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Philippine
Revolution, argues that Rizal's political thinking (like Jacinto's and
Mabini's) was basically a product of the European Enlightenment. While
that is generally correct, Majul's (1967) interpretation lacks substantive
historical contextualization. He thus emphasizes the metaphysical idealism
of Rizal. This is proved by the fact that Rizal stressed cultivation of a sense
of moral worth in each individual, intelligence, sense of personal dignity, and
discipline of the natural instincts by reason--Kant's tutelage. The Liga
Filipina, while upholding the need for industry and mutual help, valued
above all moral and intellectual qualities and virtues. Aside from Padre
Florentino's chiliastic prophecy of liberty as a fruit of providential
intervention, the key statement always cited to prove Rizal's gradualist,
reformist philosophy is this well-known passage from his "Farewell
Address" of December 15, 1896:
My
countrymen, I have given proofs that I am one most anxious for liberties of our
country, and I am still desirous of them. But I place as a prior condition the
education of the people, that by means of instruction and industry our country
may have an individuality of its own and make itself worthy of these liberties.
I have recommended in my writings the study of civic virtues, without which
there is no redemption.
But the crucial issue, if we apply a
historical optic, is where and how these "civic virtues" will emerge
and how they will enter the complex play of existing power relations and
alignments.
I argue here
that in Rizal's cognitive mapping of the social arena, we find elements or
rudiments of a historical-materialist understanding of the colonial formation
grounded on an implicit dialectical analysis of specific conjunctures. In
his "Letter to the Young Women of Malolos," Rizal intervened in
supporting a specific demand which, though limited in aim, signalled an immense,
unprecedented step in the awakening of female activism at that time: the Malolos
women's petition to the local religious authorities for equal educational
opportunities for women. The appeal fused traditional sentiment with modernist
hope.
It may conceded at
the outset that Rizal betrays his adherence to a Victorian ideology of
domesticity and the home as the circumscribing self-definition of woman's
identity. By setting up women as victim and goddess simultaneously, Rizal's
letter deploys the already fixed role of woman-mother as trope for the nation,
the allegorical terrain for constructing national autonomy. While it is clear
that Rizal grasped the historical determinants of character formation, he
identifies motherhood with the romantic ethos of the nurturing soil and endows
it with an organic, naturalizing essence. Consequently, he places on center
stage the physical immediacy of the mother's presence, spatial proximity
spelling affinity and equivalence:
No
longer does the Filipina stand with her head bowed nor does she spend her time
on her knees.... What offspring will be that of a woman whose kindness of
character is expressed by mumbled prayers.... The mother who can only teach her
child how to kneel and kiss hands must not expect sons with blood other than
that of vile slaves.... so long as they [the Spanish rulers] can keep the
Filipina mother a slave, so long will they be able to make slaves of her
children.
Envisaging
Womens Liberation?
The mother as
teacher disrupts feudal and tributary reproduction. In this particular instance,
however, Rizal's failure to comprehend the historicity of the nature of the
family leads him to the fallacy of mechanical materialism, that is, to a belief
in a normative social/sexual division of labor. Gender division of labor thus
becomes immutable and essentialized. His belief in maternal responsibility,
circumscribed by the notion of the complementarity of the two gender roles,
compels him to limit women to the domestic and reproductive sphere while the
male monopolizes the public domain of exonomics, politics, and all affairs of
civil society. This is a classic traditional conception of women's place in
society. Such a view of the normative division of labor as permanent and natural
can only guarantee the domination of patriarchal hegemony.
It must be
remarked, however, that Rizal attributes to women the capacity to obey "the
dictates of reason," hence the privileged position of women in
pedagogical/educational tasks: "...so long as the woman who guides the
child in his steps is slavish and ignorant, [one cannot expect honor nor
prosperity]. No good water comes from a turbid, bitter spring, no savory
fruit comes from acrid seed." This genealogical theory of personality
growth is conflated with a belief that given women's honor, "fortitude of
mind and loftiness of purpose," and of course purity, the conditions are
ripe for the renewal of the race. The situation of women is thus a precondition
for social development and prosperity of the whole community. While this
converts women into a cultural marker (the prejudiced subject-position of
nurturer and protector of young patriots) imbricated into a universalizing
project of uplifting future generations of youth, the nationalist contract is
limiting since it conscripts their symbolic power into a restricted familial
discourse subordinated still to patriarchal authority.
There is more
to the theater of representation enacted here. Within the family/mother frame of
conceptualization, the woman functions as a vehicle for the selective
appropriation of Western modernity. This may be duplicitous but not necessarily
an absolute reimposition of a masculinist omnipotence. The textual process of
subverting Christian/Spanish colonial subjection of the Filipina goes through a
circuitous route that offers self-deconstructive possibilities. Surprisingly
Rizal invokes a contrapuntal image of patriarchal governance in the historical
model of the Spartan women--and indeed, the intrusion of this pagan archaic
model decenters the Enlightenment code of autonomy and rational calculation.
This interruption by the "political unconscious" gives a twist to the
code of motherhood:
Of
all women--a woman said jestingly--only you Spartans have power over the men.
Quite natural--they replied--of all women only we give birth to men. Man,
the Spartan woman said, was not born to live for himself alone but for his
native land.
In an
unpublished draft of her doctoral thesis, Maria C. Zamora, a Filipina-American
scholar, comments on the motif of sacrifice and the logic of filiation
elaborated here: "This Spartan idealization of loss illustrates how the
patriot is bound to the motherland. Because the patriot is not born to live for
himself alone, but for his motherland, his duty allows for the reversal of
dependency between mother and child. The patriot posits his future authority
over the mother by 'bequeathing' to the patria the legacy of freedom. The
motherland inherits from her sons a great fortune--a surplus of symbolic wealth
with which to nurture future sons. Offspring and lover, the patriot is now also
father to the nation." The reservation voiced here is astutely put.
However, the testimony of Rizals
investigation of bewitchment complicates the one-sided view of Rizal as a
repentant masculinist (Rizal 1964).
One can
venture the proposition that Rizal, though acclaimed by some as
"father" of Filipino nationalism (Zaide 1984), would disavow the
personality cult and posit instead the freedom of autonomous individuals as the
criterion of worth and prestige. His paramount concern is the alliance and
mobilization of all Filipinos across categories of class, gender, religion, and
so on. This of course may be seen as an evasion of the sexuality/gender
problematic. Nonetheless, it is the classic populist strategy of building
a decolonizing hegemony in a tributary system.
After
repeating the axioms of Kant, Rousseau, and Voltaire in the seven items for
reflection, Rizal concludes with a singular mandate. He holds that cunning and
realism are necessary since humans are not by nature rational. To recuperate and
revitalize reason, strategic planning and collective resolve are needed. This
instruction is more political than didactic in intent. The Spartan desideratum
of balancing wills and lines of force (as Gramsci schematized in his Prison
Notebooks) can be discerned in the dialectical reasoning immanent in the
first and second advice. First, "that the tyranny of some is possible
only through cowardice and negligence on the part of others," and second,
"What makes one contemptible is lack of dignity and abject fear of him who
holds one in contempt."
In Rizal's
text, we encounter the dynamic tension between the forces of nature and of
history. This oscillation between the instrumentality of a mechanical
materialism inherited from 18th-century Hobbesian speculation and early
Renaissance physicalism dovetails with residues of a sacramental cosmology that
dates back to his early religious upbringing and schooling. This antinomy
pervades and problematizes all of Rizal's writings. But "The
Indolence" and "The Philippines a Century Hence" testify to a new
approach, one which demonstrates an authentic historicizing mode that skilfully
triangulates nature, history, and human agency. It is the germ of a truly
dialectical method of crafting a national-democratic revolutionary blueprint.
Myth
of the Lazy Native
Colonialism
thrives on naturalizing the dictates of the conquerors. In
"Indolence," Rizal engages in a typical maneuver of demystification by
comparison and contrast. One thing is clear: Rizal does not deny that
indolence among individual Filipinos exist, for such a predisposition of humans
is universal. He begins with the hypothesis of the physical environment,
specifically climate. But natural laws alone cannot account for human behavior
within the totality of the social relations of production:
Man
is not a brute, he is not a machine, his object is not merely to produce, in
spite of the pretensions of some Christian whites who would make of the colored
Christian a kind of motive power somewhat more intelligent and less costly than
steam. Man's object is not to satisfy the passions of another man, his
object is to seek happiness for himself and his kind by travelling along the
road of progress and perfection.
Yet, for Rizal, natural laws are
altered in the search for material and intellectual progress, as the
cognitive-historical mapping he performs is meant to exemplify.
The next
strategic move Rizal makes in this task of demystifying the rulers ideology is
to posit colonial society as a body afflicted with a malady. The sick
patient might have "eight million indolent red corpuscles," so would a
few white corpuscles in an agricultural colony solve the problem of indolence?
Rizal quickly maneuvers from a diagnosis of the anatomy to a historicizing
reformulation of the problem: "Indolence in the Philippines is a chronic
malady, but not a hereditary one. The Filipinos have not always been what they
are, witnesses whereto are all the historians of the first years after the
discovery of the Islands."
Next follows a
resume of the historical testimonies--from Morga, Chirino, Colin, Pigafetta,
Gaspar de San Agustin, and others--that unanimously evince the industry,
diligence, resourcefulness, creativity, and productiveness of the natives before
the coming of the Spaniards. Not only trade and crafts but also military
exploits, linguistic skills, and piracy all attest to the counter-truth that
precolonial Philippines was the site of fertile cultural exchanges, flourishing
trade in crafts and myriad products, and innovations of all kinds. There are
testimonies refuting the pronouncements of the masters.
The bulk of
this discourse, sections III and IV, contains Rizal's polemic against Spanish
arrogance and racist prejudgments. Its main thesis is the
transmogrification or the brutalization of the indigenous inhabitants by Spanish
frailocracy and mercantile greed. His diagnosis of the body politic
involves a shrewd appraisal of circumstances, human efforts, and policies:
"How then, and in what way, was that active and enterprising infidel native
of ancient times converted into the lazy and indolent Christian....?" So
the focus of understanding shifts to the mutations and alterations of the
secular space of these bodies and their interactions.
Methodically
Rizal concentrates on the wars of conquest that wasted the moral and material
energies of the country, the predatory raids of pirates and the exhaustion of
local resources for the defense of villages, and last but not least the onerous
taxation levied on the subaltern--all these factors constitute the negation of
choice and purpose. Human agency promptly dissolves under such pressure:
"Man works for an object. Remove the object and you reduce him to
inaction." Scholastic teleology is now articulated toward an instrumental
means-end universe of transactions reflective of the bourgeois market ethos.
Even when wars
of conquest, conscription, and piracy had declined or utterly disappeared, Rizal
observes, indolence persisted. This was caused by the oppressive practices of
the Spanish colonial administration and the abuses of the friars. Rizal
attacks the "pernicious example" of the colonial masters who assumed
"the chivalrous pride of the heroes" of past centuries and despised
manual labor. Spain was unable to remedy the paralysis and lethargy induced by
the Empire's accumulation of loot from the American continent. Aside from
remarks on gambling, Rizal describes the wastage of fiestas, religious rituals,
government cruelty and apathy, and above all the perverse education of the
native meant to rob him of his dignity and self-esteem: "Add to this lack
of material inducement the absence of moral stimulus and you will see how he who
is not indolent in that country must needs be a madman or at least a fool."
Allegory
of Emancipation
What strikes
us today as timely is Rizals
humanism, something repudiated by scholastic Filipinos mimicking Derrida and
Foucault. To their dismay, Rizal seems an essentialist: he affirms a core
humanity in the native who, after centuries of degradation, has been transformed
into a "half-way brute." As though drawing up a commentary on
Hegel's narrative of the bondsman and the lord in The Phenomenology of the
Spirit, Rizal stakes his wager on an irrepressible something that survives:
"the brutalization is not yet complete and because the nature of man is
inherent in his being in spite of his condition, the native protests; he still
has aspirations, he thinks and strives to rise, and there's the trouble!"
Humanity still smolders behind the damaged body, the manacled will. And so, in
spite of the changes, breaks, interruptions, something continues, perhaps the
substratum that Marx calls "species-being" which serves as rubric for
the potential for collective self-realization that can be actualized by, first,
education and then, second, by the invention of "national sentiment"
or national identity.
In the last
section of Rizal's essay, we encounter the intuition of dialectics, the
balancing of antagonistic wills. We apprehend the vectors of conflicting
trajectories of forces. This imagination of change via class/people's war sparks
Rizal's mind beyond the prudential horizon of the lineage to which he
objectively belongs. At this point he is now laying the groundwork for the
possibility of popular insurrection. The germ or matrix of this tendency is
embedded in the contradictions produced by historical development:
Is
it any wonder that with this vicious dressage of intelligence and will the
native, of old logical and consistent--as the analysis of his past and of his
language demonstrates--should now be a mass of dismal contradictions? That
continual struggle between reason and duty, between his organism and his new
ideals, that civil war which disturbs the peace of his conscience all his life,
has the result of paralyzing all his energies, and aided by the severity of the
climate, makes of that eternal vacillation, of the doubts in his brain, the
origin of his indolent disposition.
A prime
desideratum to Rizal's Enlightenment intellect is liberty, first of the two
cures for the historical catastrophe suffered by the body politic. The necessity
of physical freedom establishes the premise for revolution, literally a return
to the original condition celebrated in the valorization of the chronicles of
the past. But such a return to the archaic scene is not recovery but
reconstruction of the new and the future:
What
the [native] asks is in the first place liberty to allow expansion to his
adventurous spirit, and good examples, beautiful prospects for the future. It is
necessary that his spirit, although it may be dismayed and cowed by the elements
and the fearful manifestation of their mighty forces, store up energy, seek high
purposes, in order to struggle against obstacles in the midst of unfavorable
natural conditions. In order that he may progress it is necessary that a
revolutionary spirit, so to speak, should boil in his veins, since progress
necessarily requires change; it implies the overthrow of the past, there defied,
by the present; the victory of new ideas over the ancient and accepted one. It
will not be sufficient to speak to his fancy, to talk nicely to him, nor that
the light illuminate him like the ignis fatuus that leads travelers
astray at night: all the flattering promises of the fairest hopes will not
suffice, so long as his spirit is not free, his intelligence is not respected.
No doubt the
danger of nostalgic nativism is thwarted by the imperative of the revolutionary
spirit. While Rizal
concludes his critique of colonial injustices with a reiteration of the
fundamental imperative of education and liberty, it is the anticlimactic insight
into "the lack of national sentiment" that functions as the center of
gravity of the entire discourse.
Lest the
spirit vaporizes desire, the focus shifts to anatomy. It is symptomatic that
here Rizal returns to the body metaphor in anticipation of his privileging
"material interests" in the concluding paragraph:
The lack of national sentiment
brings another evil, moreover, which is the absence of all opposition to
measures prejudicial to the people and the absence of any initiative in whatever
may redound to its good. A man in the Philippines is only an individual, he is
not a member of a nation. He is forbidden and denied the right of association,
and is therefore weak and sluggish. The Philippines is an organism whose
cells seem to have no arterial system to irrigate it or nervous system to
communicate its impressions; these cells must nevertheless yield their product,
get it where they can; if they perish, let them perish. In the view of some this
is expedient so that a colony may be a colony; perhaps they are right, but not
to the effect that a colony may flourish.
Rizal's
dialectical approach may be traced to pressures of specific life-circumstances,
especially his exile in Dapitan, the ordeals suffered by his mother and the
whole clan in Calamba, and his own personal agonies as son and ilustrado.
The scholastic education he received imbued him with the principles of the
idealist dialectics found in the preSocratic Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, up to
the neoPlatonists, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. It was the natural
science of the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly the discovery of
differential and integral calculus (Newton), that led to the mathematical
description of processes of motion and speculation on the unity of the infinite
and the finite, the discrete and the continuous. In addition, the
cosmological hypothesis of Kant and Laplace also demonstrated that nature enjoys
a life in time, that nature evolves in history and has a history of its own.
An
attempt to transplant Enlightenment radicalism is evident in these historicizing
commentaries. In his studies in Europe, Rizal spontaneously absorbed the ideas
of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, in particular Kant's theory of the antinomies of
Reason, together with Fichte/ Schelling's idea of opposing and contradictory
forces in the psyche and in all natural phenomena.
In both
the "Letter to the Young Women of Malolos" and the
"Indolence" essays, Rizal diagnosed the multilayered contradictions
found in ideas and attitudes. Unlike Hegel, however, who located changes and
transformations in society and nature in the self-development of the concept,
Rizal endeavored to incorporate the one-dimensional materialism of the French
Enlightenment, in particular the French socialist Saint-Simon, in his
elucidation of indolence as a collective symptom of a disorder tied to the form
of organization of social relations. Such mutable forms manifest transitoriness,
contingency and intelligible motion. Saint-Simon also designates given
historical phenomena as integral to a concrete stage of historical development
of specific formations.
In
Rizal's careful delineation of the vicissitudes of "indolence," for
example, as it traversed stages of social process, and then to the conjunction
of residual and emergent trends in the dominant structure of the colonial order,
we perceive the influence of Saint-Simon's principle of historical determination
of the social field as an overdetermined articulation of various tendencies. In
his inquiry into the Filipino character, Rizal attempted to undertake both a
micro- and macro-analysis of confluent tendencies--residues of the declining
past and embryonic forms of the emerging future, a double gesture of assigning
responsibility and causality in the past in order to locate the agency for
democratic change and mobilize popular energies for creating the future.
Advent
of the Prophet
On the
surface, "The Philippines a Century Hence" may be construed as a
lesson in cognitive mapping of colonial geopolitics. It is an exercise in
ordinary prediction or extrapolation--the term "prophecy" which
connotes chiliastic or apocalyptic fulfillment I would like to reserve later
on--based on a judicious accounting of the past. On one level, the essay is a
simple exercise of trying to infer from the evidence of past records and
testimonies the future trajectory of the country. It is an attempt to gain
knowledge of what is absent from what is present, of what must be from what has
been. An innocent exercise? On the contrary. Far from being innocent,
Rizal's text tries to destroy the pretence of historiographic objectivity
despite avowals of scientific veracity and allusions to 19th century
evolutionism and environmental determinism (more pronounced in the
"Indolence" article). In effect, the reader of signs here claims that
any such stance or pose of naivete can be interpreted as a disguise of
logocentric power.
In general
then, this essay may be considered Rizal's masterpiece of materialist dialectics
in action. It is essentially a project to extrapolate from the play of
contradictions between past and present the outline of the future. One can
construe it as a conjunctural analysis between his second exile to Europe in
February 1888 and the exile to Dapitan (1892-96).
Critique and
praxis combine to yield revolutionary ethics for the vanguard of the ilustrado
stratum. This ethics is premised on the principle that there is constant
ineluctable change in the world around us, shifts from quantitative increase to
qualitative transmutations, so that by a negation of previous stages of
development, there is a sublation of the past--both cancellation of some aspects
and preservation of others--and elevation of the rest into a higher stage. In
short, there is no repetition or simple cyclical return of the same.
A preliminary
symptomatic reading is offered here. In the first section of the essay, Rizal
enunciates this cardinal axiom: "When there is in nature no fixed
condition, how much less must there be in the life of a people, a being endowed
with mobility and movement!" But motion in history is not arbitrary
or merely contingent; it proceeds via the working out of contradictions, through
what Lenin calls "the law of the unity and struggle of opposites,"
which is the motive force in the unfolding of the potential of the productive
forces and the human "species-being" (as delineated by Marx in The
1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts).
We first need to
reckon with what can be deemed the "prehistory" of the people. Rizal
summarizes the past for Filipinos after the first few decades: the country
"was depopulated, impoverished and retarded--caught in their metamorphosis
without confidence in their past, without faith in their present and with no
fond hope of the years to come." This is a narrative of obsolescence and
decay, the disintegration of the organic spirit of the community. But from this
"ethical abasement" arises a contrary movement: from this pole of the
negation proceeds "sure salvation. Some dying persons are restored to
health by a heroic remedy." Evidently the logic of homeopathic medicine
shows its influence here. From this nadir of self-negation and subjection
springs a new unprecedented antithetical impulse: the will of the colonized
subject "to study himself and to realize his misfortune." Abuses
and oppression breed the flame of revolt, of sedition. Even "fear and
confusion" contribute to fueling the fire of resistance.
Rizal posits the
vicissitudes of historical necessity as an anchoring point of departure for
inferring what will happen next. He demarcates the arena for Spain fighting to
recover the natives' trust, for regaining the "ethical forces." In the
second section, Rizal compares the Philippines three centuries ago to the
present, when "the masks have fallen." Demystification, it seems,
transpires when the time is ripe. So long as the Malays have preserved their
"sensitive self-love," they will expend energies and sacrifice
everything for the sake of an aspiration or a conceit. But such expenditure is
not interminable.
At this
juncture, Rizal envisages the possibility of a popular revolt: "The
batteries are gradually becoming charged and if the prudence of the government
does not provide an outlet for the currents that are accumulating, some day the
sparks will be generated." It seems the machine of history operates without
consulting anyone, following a scheme ordained in the totality that Spinoza
calls Nature (to be exact, deus
sive natura).
In the past,
Rizal observes, insurrections were localized and were not based "on a need
of the whole race." Rizal inquires: "But what if the movement springs
from the people themselves and based its causes upon their woes?" A
new element has been introduced: "the spirit of the nation has been aroused
and a common misfortune, a common debasement has united all the inhabitants of
the Islands." Advanced technology of communication has now made inhabitants
capable of apprehending the commonalty of their sufferings and struggles (Rizal
anticipates here the recently proposed theory of the nation as an "imagined
community" a hundred years earlier). Not even poverty can arrest
these changes that require more liberty. The "peaceful domination and
tranquil suzerainty" that Spain seems to be achieving with technological
progress is challenged by "ethical" imperatives "far more
powerful and transcendental." At this point, the text engenders a cathexis
that motivates the decisive swerve of expression:
Orientals
and Malays, in particular, are sensitive people: delicacy of sentiment is
predominant with them. Even now, in spite of contact with the Occidental
nations, who have ideas different from his, we see the Malayan Filipino
sacrifice everything--liberty, ease, welfare, name for the sake of an aspiration
or a conceit sometimes scientific, or of some other nature, but at the least
word which wounds his self-love he forgets all his sacrifices, the labor
expended, to treasure in his memory and never forget the slight he thinks he has
received.
Is this characterological notion of
"delicacy of sentiment" associated with "self-love" an
inborn or acquired trait?
It now appears
that this peculiar "structure of feeling" in the native offers the raw
material, the fabula, to the plot of history where character is born: "The
terrible lessons and the hard teachings that these conflicts will have afforded
the Filipinos will operate to improve and strengthen their ethical nature."
Not equivalent to pathos, ethos springs from intention and its realization in
conflict, in the collision of will and circumstance, dream and objective
reality. The tension of contradictory forces generates the vision of
necessity Rizal calls "fate": "In short, then, the advancement
and ethical progress of the Philippines are inevitable, are decreed by fate....
For new men, a new social order." The aphorism bears repeating: "For
new human beings, a new social order." This principle explodes the fatalism
proverbially ascribed to the bahala-na-loving Filipinos.
The third
section of Rizal's discourse explores the possibility of peaceful reforms
emanating from the upper classes--a wish-fulfillment that's quickly aborted.
Could it be a mode of sublimating a desire to equal if not surpass the master
that is the secret desire, the fixation of ressentiment, of the bondsman?
Rizal replies
to critics who might accuse him of utopianism: "Yet civilization has left
the country of Utopia [invented by St. Thomas More] far behind, the human will
and conscience have worked greater miracles, have abolished slavery and the
death penalty for adultery--things impossible for even Utopia itself!"
Rizal entertains the possibility that peaceful reforms will not materialize,
that violence will suppress the cries for reform, when he urges his readers not
to turn away in horror but, as though descending into Hades, forge on to
"sound the terrible mysteries of the abyss." The figure of Virgil here
who guides him is none other than the association of propagandistas and their
reformist partisans who have exposed themselves to the danger of state violence.
We
encounter a blind spot in Rizals survey of
the future. When Rizal, in the fourth and concluding section, anticipates the
eventual independence of the islands--this ultimate schism indeed becomes the
content of a prefigurative vision, the impulse of a self-fulfilling prophecy--he
sketches a typology of 19th century colonial politics predicated on the view
that an equilibrium of the division of the planet would be reached then. It
assumes that even the United States, given her anti-colonial genesis, would be
prevented by the European powers from expansion into the Pacific. Rizal's
blindspots are obvious, his ignorance of the development of finance-capitalism
(traced acutely by Lenin in his essay on Imperialism) glaring enough
despite his recognition of the European partition of Africa in the 1870s.
Moreover, Rizal seems also not to have drawn the correct lessons from the
Mexican agitation for independence in the 1850s.
Despite these
shortcomings, we find here the most eloquent and audacious part of Rizal's
prescient deciphering of the "signs of the times." He predicts the
coming of "the great American Republic" among other possible
eventualities. Rizal is of course mistaken in thinking that the republican
traditions of the United States would prohibit their invasion and subsequent
occupation of the islands. He is ignorant, or has forgotten, the Civil War and
the failure of Reconstruction, the rise of white supremacy and violence against
people of color--a continuation of the genocide of the Indians, enslavement of
Africans, and subjugation of the Mexicans. Before the advent of American power,
Rizal invokes the physical sciences to forecast the independence of the country:
The
existence of a foreign body within another endowed with strength and activity is
contrary to all natural and ethical laws. Science teaches us that it is
either assimilated, destroys the organism, is eliminated or becomes encysted....
Encystment of a conquering people is possible, for it signifies complete
isolation, absolute inertia, debility in the conquering element. Encystment thus
means the tomb of the foreign invader.
Rizal, however, is not fatalistic in
the sense of believing that human agency is worthless or non-existent since--as
I've already pointed out--Rizal cherished a species of romantic voluntarism that
is an integral part of the activist idealism of the European Enlightenment. So
he tries to conflate objective analysis, critique, and praxis into the following
statement: "Necessity is the most powerful divinity the world knows, and
necessity is the resultant of physical forces set in operation by ethical
forces."
Notice the
linkage of ethics and necessity in this forecast. Even when Rizal registers the
role of chance accidents in shaping the destiny of peoples, he warns us not to
ascribe too much to accidence or happenstance: "for there is sometimes an
imperceptible and incomprehensible logic in the workings of history" that
governs peoples and states.
Rizal may be
justly acknowledged here as a practitioner of a holistic realism oriented toward
critique and transformation. His scientific acumen and totalizing intellect bear
affinities with the historical genius of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci and
others. He is therefore the real founder of our indigenous tradition of
national-popular radicalism despite the objective class limits of his origin.
Revolution
via Reforms?
Rizal's
passionate plea for Spain to heed the grievances of six million Filipinos lest
Filipinas tries to "redeem herself" appears like a deceptive closure.
He may be trying to appease his Spanish audience. The whole burden and thrust of
the discourse is that Spain has already lost the allegiance of the masses, that
revolution is inevitable, and that the masses have finally entered the arena of
world-history in challenging imperial power. Is this reading plausible?
Here is the
earlier passage that illustrates how materialist dialectics links realism with
imagination, remembrance with desire, in something called "a memory of the
future" (to use Ernst Bloch's pregnant phrase). At this point Rizal has
dismissed the intervention of the United States. He speculates now on the advent
of "new men" coincident with the "new social order" about to
be established. He launches forth to inaugurate it in a lyrical paean to
renewal, progress, and harmony between humanity and nature. We find strands of
thought from Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Marx woven together in this palimpsestan eloquent
invocation of a Faustian project of reclaiming a promised land from pirates and
plunderers :
Very
likely the Philippines will defend with inexpressible valor the liberty secured
at the price of so much blood and sacrifice. With the new men that will
spring from their soil and with the recollection of their past, they will
perhaps strive to enter freely upon the wide road of progress, and all will
labor together to strengthen their fatherland, both internally and externally,
with the same enthusiasm, with which a youth falls again to tilling the land of
his ancestors so long wasted and abandoned through the neglect of those who have
withheld it from him. Then the mines will be made to give up their gold
for relieving distress, iron for weapons, copper, lead, and coal. Perhaps the
country will revive the maritime and mercantile life for which the islanders are
fitted by their nature, ability, and instincts, and once more free, like the
bird that leaves its cage, like the flower that unfolds to the air, will recover
the pristine virtues that are gradually dying out and will again become addicted
to peace--cheerful, happy, joyous, hospitable and daring.
After this visionary glimpse of a liberated future, an affirmation of a
genuinely separatist goal, Rizal qualifies the scenario with the possibility
that "remote and insignificant causes" (for example, "the great
American Republic" dreaming of foreign possession or an accident of nature
sublimated in history) may foil such destiny.
But Rizal nonetheless asserts that "it is not well to trust to accident,
for there is sometimes an imperceptible and incomprehensible logic in the
workings of history" to which governments and people are subject.
Retrospective rationalization? Or shade of Hegel eavesdropping? In spite of this
faith in a hidden historical logic, Rizal concludes with a last-ditch entreaty:
that Spain grant Filipinos their rights, or else face the necessity of a people
redeeming themselves by violence, creating themselves in the process as new
world-historical subjects. The apostrophe to Spain ends with questions that
rhetorically construct the image of the bloodsucking, barbaric exploiter and
executioner which has already been unmasked in Rizal's review of the past in the
first two sections.
We perceive at
this juncture the emergence of an aporia, an unresolved dilemma. While Rizal's
project extrapolates the peaceful assimilation of the islands despite
"three centuries of brutalization and obscurantism," in the same
breath he argues that "the advancement and ethical progress of the
Philippines are inevitable, are decreed by fate." Facticity (the past) and
desire (the future) collide here, overdetermined by filial, patriarchal
ideology. Further than this boundary, liberal thought (as exemplified by the
prudential and calculating sensibility in Rizal) is unable to proceed.
Everyone
concurs with the conventional view of Rizal as an unreconstructed
assimilationist, a reformist even up to the time of his trial and execution.
Quotations can be adduced to provide a convincing rationale for that received
opinion. This essay endeavors to qualify Rizal's reputed assimilationism (see
Constantino 1970).
Imagining
Alternatives
It might
be instructive to note that Rizal points out two alternatives facing the people:
the Philippines "will remain under Spanish domination but with more law and
greater liberty, or they will declare themselves independent after steeping
themselves and the mother country in blood." Faced with the prospect
of such "violent and fatal" political transformation "if it
proceeds from the ranks of the people," Rizal believes that the necessary
change will be "peaceful and fruitful if it emanates from the upper
classes."
The
theme of "reforms from above" versus plebeian revolt insinuates an
uneasy dualism in place of dialectical synthesis. While Rizal demands not
just palliative reform, the "plasters and salves of a physician," but
radical modes of change to solve "evils that must be cured radically,"
his conviction ultimately rests on the minimal expectation that "the
honesty and rectitude of some governors" would insure the successful
implementation of liberal reforms. This somewhat naive trust in the
privileged few makes one wonder what Rizal learned from his being beaten up by a
lieutenant of the Civil Guard, from his own earlier recitation of a "regime
of continual terror and uncertainty" unrelieved by the presence of virtuous
officials who have some respect for the honor of their office, not to mention
the rights and dignity of the people.
What is
happening here is typical of Rizal's conduct and thinking as a member of the ilustrado
fraction of the principalia. Precarious and vacillating, his position
cannot be understood without tracing the alignment of political forces and
tendencies in the specific conjunctures of his life, particularly in the context
of his identification of the masses as the gravedigger of colonial despotism.
Ambivalence and vacillation predominate in the structure of
feeling immanent in
propagandist discourse which Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Jacinto would transcend
in the didactic pathos of their manifestoes.
We might
suggest here that there are positive and negative qualities, internal
contradictions, to the ilustrado sensibility. Its weakness is
beyond dispute: above all, it cannot represent the emergent organic unity of the
masses and its counterhegemonic program. It seeks to exercise the power of the
patriarchal entrepreneur from its base in the merchant or rich peasant class.
Its strength derives from its challenge to the colonial state and the church
apparatus. In doing so, it is able to grasp two insights of countervailing
import: first, the historical fact of change in society as intimated by the
assertion: "When there is in nature no fixed condition, how much less must
there be in the life of a people, being endowed with mobility and
movement." And second, the vision of "racial" integrity:
"History does not record in its annals any lasting domination exercised by
one people over another, of different races, of diverse usages and customs, of
opposite and divergent ideals." This capacity to conceive of destiny
as an outcome of the mutual conditioning of past and future, of memory and hope,
premised on praxis (the fusion of consciousness and collective action), is what
enables Rizal to apprehend the crisis of community instanced by the people's
"ethical abasement, followed by the awakening of this "lethargic
spirit" to life when his "sensitiveness, the chief trait of the
native," is provoked.
Contradictions
mobilize the writer to detect mutations and metamorphosis in phenomena. In the
first section, as we've seen, the text establishes death as the precondition for
the resurrection; out of degradation, the flame of the spirit is stirred into
life by those "abuses and stupid endeavors." A dialectical process in
which the ethical practice of the multitude--the productive dynamic of desires
and passions working out their contradictions--engenders the historical agent of
change.
A conversion,
something unexpected, then occurs. After building his case for Filipino
representation in the Cortes and the need for freedom of the press, Rizal
betrays his class bias, the narrow corporative blindness inherent in ilustrado
metaphysics: "We are not sure that we serve the true interests of our
country by asking for representatives. We know that the lack of enlightenment,
the indolence, the egotism, of our fellow countrymen, and the boldness, the
cunning and the powerful methods of those who wish their obscurantism, may
convert reform into a harmful instrument." He loses faith in the people he
wants to enlighten: "If after so just as well as necessary a measure has
been introduced, the Filipino people are so stupid and weak that they are
treacherous to their own interests, then let the responsibility fall upon them,
let them suffer all consequences."
Rizal even
suggests that the representatives to the Cortes (the privileged minority) may
find themselves "hostages" so that popular discontent may be
effectively pacified. These reforms are not utopian, Rizal contends, because
"the human will and conscience have worked greater miracles, have abolished
slavery and the dread penalty for adultery--things impossible for even Utopia
itself!"
In that last
quote, we perceive the humanist and rationalist kernel vitiating Rizal's
conviction that an "insurrection" of a popular character is required
"based on a need of the whole race" for human rights and justice. He
is not only foregrounding the repression of "the classes that suffer and
think," although he notes that modern means of travel, communication, and
exchange are integrating the otherwise atomized social body: "A numerous
enlightened class now exists within and without the islands," now only in
the brain, as it were, but in a few years constituting "the whole nervous
system." Rizal envisions the inevitable: "Would not a bloody chasm
yawn between victors and vanquished and might not the latter with time and
experience become equal in strength, since they are superior in numbers to their
dominators?...But what if the movement springs from the people themselves and
based its causes upon their woes?"
Rizal
as Inventor of the Katipunan
I now
propose a scandalous hypothesis: Rizal is the real inventor of the Katipunan,
or the plebeian revolution, by virtue of this prophetic discourse.
Throughout this conflicted text, the conscious thematic drive for the
reconciliation of warring parties encounters a series of blockages that inheres
in any recuperative project. This plot of resistance opens up the space for the
"political unconscious" in Rizal's anticipatory enterprise. The linear
thrust of the narrative has been aborted several times before in its quest for a
pacific compromise: the subordination of the natives to the paternal authority
of Spain. "Filipinas" and her children suffer the loss or absence of
patriarchal solicitude, the pastoral concern, which this simultaneously
retrospective and prospective appeal seeks to reinstate. Yet, invoking
Machiavelli but subsequently refuting him in the name of "stern necessity
and interests" that predominate in the arena of political struggle, Rizal
marginalizes if not completely eradicates the need for patriarchal law.
Is it
possible that the subtext of this historical commentary is the return of the
repressed envisaged in the letter to the Malolos women glossed earlier?
Subsumed
within the concept of "necessity," the text constantly subverts the
thematic goal of the family and the interest of the feudal hierarchy:
"Necessity is the most powerful divinity the world knows, and necessity is
the resultant of physical forces set in operation by ethical forces." Here
Rizal approximates the passional and corporeal logic of the mass constitution of
democracy first broached by Spinoza in his Political Treatise.
Having
constructed his plot of crisis and degeneration in the first installment of his
article, Rizal becomes the vehicle of the repetition compulsion. I refer here to
the drive for mastery over death, the unleashing of the will to communal
gratification, the release of mobility and movement (in Spinoza's terminology, conatus,
expanded to encompass a multitude of bodies) which have been frozen by three
centuries of colonial domination.
After
cataloguing all the possible ways of brutalizing and paralyzing the
consciousness of the people, Rizal posits a dialectical turnabout in the second
section: "There now exists a factor which was formerly lacking--the spirit
of the nation has been aroused and a common misfortune, a common debasement has
united all the inhabitants of the Islands." Predicated on a common
experience, the birth of a national consciousness is the rupture that cannot be
prevented. "Let us see what history says; uprisings and revolutions have
always occurred in countries tyrannized over, in countries where human thought
and the human heart have been forced to remain silent."
So then, will
the demand for a voice in the Cortes and for the liberty of expression suffice
to purge this drive for repetition of the primordial freedom and independence
the natives enjoyed before the conquest? At this juncture, the narrative
dictates its semiotic necessity under the pretext of a historical exigency that
subtends it, a pretext easily grasped as the will to affirm an ethical universal
or a categorical imperative that ultimately has to give way to the
pleasure-principle incarnate in revolution:
...Howsoever
much the Filipinos owe Spain, they cannot be required to forego their
redemption, to have their liberal and enlightened sons wander about in exile
from their native land, the rudest aspirations stifled in its atmosphere, the
peaceful inhabitants living in constant alarm, with the fortune of the two
peoples dependent upon the whim of one man. Spain cannot claim, not even in the
name of God himself, that six million people should be brutalized, exploited and
oppressed, denied light and the rights inherent to a human being and then heap
upon them slights and insults. There is no claim of gratitude that can
excuse, there is not enough power in the world to justify the offenses against
the liberty of the individual, against the sanctity of the home, against the
laws, against peace and honor, offenses that are committed there daily. There is
no divinity that can proclaim the sacrifice of our dearest affections, the
sacrifice of the family, the sacrileges and wrongs that are committed by persons
who have the name of God on their lips. No one can require an impossibility of
the Filipino people. The noble Spanish people, so jealous of its rights and
liberties, cannot bid the Filipinos to renounce theirs. A people that prides
itself on the glories of its past cannot ask another, trained by it, to accept
abjection and dishonor its own name!
Caught in the imaginary sphere where
the ilustrado seeks to justify its existence and legimitize its ambition to rule
by analogy with the master--recall Hegel's phenomenology of lord and
bondsman--the subject which is here protesting this injury to her honor belongs
to the party of peace and rational debate. She is quick to establish her
identity with the addressee because they share the same code of amor propio,
of honor and family pride: the patriarchal law of the symbolic order. But at the
same time, it accepts vulnerability and recognizes that its failure will not be
the nation's downfall since "numerous tendencies will rush to occupy the
places that we leave vacant."
Rizal sounds
the ilustrado's warning, the tone of premonition becoming a signal of its
impending obsolescence: "If what we desire is not realized...."
The narrative cannot postpone anymore the end through detours of pseudo-rational
pleas and argument; the narrator is now compelled to enunciate the figure of a
descent into the underworld as the insignia of prophecy, the intervention of
charisma: "...let us frankly descend into the abyss and sound its terrible
mysteries." Argument by hypothetical inference mutates into polemic and
warning of dire consequences.
What are these
mysteries but the destruction of one people by another, the inexorable overthrow
of the colonizer and the redemption of the oppressed? The future springs from
bloodletting, carnage, a fight to the death. Even death guarantees by
accident the joy of the future: "a cross on Calvary and a just man nailed
thereon changed the ethics of half the human race, and yet before Christ, how
many just men wrongly perished and how many crosses were raised on that hill!
The death of the just sanctified his work and made his teachings
unanswerable." But such an accident is easily reconciled with the
"imperceptible and incomprehensible logic in the workings of history"
after which the last paragraph, a rhetorical plea or prayer to Spain that the ilustrado
class must not be sacrificed, becomes a pathetic anti-climax.
Without
Seeing the Dawn
Rizal has
skillfully performed the role of prophet and pedagogue without apology. While
this essay purports to cast the horoscope of the future for the islands, to
decipher the "destiny of a people" from the traces and marks of the
past and present, the process of summing up history leads to an ethical
judgment: "delicacy of sentiment," self-love, and a people's pride in
the past will inform necessity and determine the operations of fate. The
future heralds a return of the repressed.
What is the
lesson of this diagnostic appraisal of the past, a catechism of symptoms?
The narrative insists: "So we repeat and we shall always repeat, while
there is time, that it is better to anticipate the wishes of a people rather
than to yield to force." Acknowledging ominously the repetition
compulsion in the distribution of bodies and their aggregation, the narrative
dissolves into a gesture of a dialogue that never quite materializes. A
monologue takes over: "Spain, must we someday tell Filipinas that thou hast
no ear for woes and that if she wishes to be saved, she must redeem
herself?" Not a submission to the castration threat but an injunction
to slay the father is what this discourse expresses, sacrificing the dream of
the ilustrado to be the rightful surrogate.
We witness then a
discourse of class suicide and "racial" self-emancipation exhibiting
its process of birth and elaboration. We follow Rizal performing a magical
ritual of exorcising the pettybourgeois hubris by its assimilation not with the
civilizing patriarch--the symbolic order has disintegrated into a mockery of its
former self, now narcissistically self-deluded (as suggested in the previous
essays)--but with the Oriental and Malay race. Self-love returns to execute
vengeance on the usurper. Wishing that Spain will change to its former chivalric
self--an impossibility because "new men" now require "a new
social order," Rizal is forced to frustrate that wish when he accumulates
the massive testimony of uninterrupted injustice and oppression. The
Philippines "will remain Spanish if they enter upon the life of law and
civilization" characterized by respect for human rights.
But such
respect is denied under the "pretext of the integrity of the fatherland and
the safety of the state." In sum, by the ruse of a self-deconstructing
procedure, Rizal exposes the deadly contradictions, the paradox and irony,
integral to a reformist conscience that dare claim history and truth on its
side. What the text dramatizes is the self-negation of reformism and the
assimilationist wish. That wish undergoes encystment in the articulation of its
future and thus, in the text's own formulation, "signifies the tomb of the
foreign invader." The reformist eventually gives way to the
insurrectionist.
What is the
real message behind the pretense of prophecy? Amid the equilibrium of
world-powers hovering over the Philippines at the turn of the century (we find
ourselves in an analogous position), the stasis of anticipation and reversal is
disturbed by the discovery of a new subjectivity looming in the horizon. What
Rizal invents here is the spectacle of a revolutionary people that has secured
their independence "after heroic and stubborn conflicts" frightening
enough to repel other European invaders reluctant to suffer a fate similar to
Spain's defeat.
The concluding
passage quoted earlier is unsurpassed for its prophetic edge, its apostrophe to
a future still in the womb of the past and the entrails of the present, its
projection of a hegemony that constitutes precisely the substance of what later
became the Katipunan, and later on became sedimented in all the
popular-democratic institutions of our people--from Sakay's resistance to the
Huks to the current insurgency (legal and underground) and other dissidents of
various persuasions. It is no longer valid to counterpose Bonifacio to Rizal: in
their difference and similarity, they are constitutive and integral parts of our
revolutionary nationalist heritage. We need to draw energies from this durable
reservoir of our submerged history.
Lessons
from the Unknown Rizal
What then are
the lessons to be gained from studying Rizal's signifying practice embodied in
these essays?
Let me provide
the outline of an answer by recalling commonplace evidences adduced by anti-Rizalists.
I cite first the alleged confession Rizal made to General Jose Alejandrino:
I
regret having killed Elias instead of Crisostomo Ibarra; but when I wrote the
Noli, my health was badly broken and I never thought that I would be able to
write its sequel and speak of a revolution. Otherwise I would have preserved the
life of Elias, who was a noble character, patriotic, self-denying and
disinterested--necessary qualities in a man who leads a revolution--whereas
Crisostomo Ibarra was an egoist who only decided to provoke the rebellion when
he was hurt in his interests, his person, his loves and all the other things he
held sacred. With men like him, success cannot be expected in their
undertakings
(Alejandrino 1986, 3-4)
In the scheme of the narrative, Ibarra
and Elias constitute the polar forces that unfold the dialectic of freedom--each
individual seeks its own interest but ultimately subserves the "ruse of
Reason" in history. This Hegelian "cunning of Reason" (immanent
in the ironic plots of his two novels) haunts Rizal's discourse and now reveals
its worldly incarnation as the collective project of popular emancipation and
national liberation.
Overall,
Rizal's grasp of social contradictions as represented by classes and groups, his
comprehension of the struggle and unity of opposing forces, their genealogy and
their progression into higher forms of social motion--that is what is exemplary,
not any particular judgment or interpretation or dated inferences attributed to
him by cultists and ultra-leftists. Rizals texts in
themselves embody multiple contradictions that reflect the clash of
heterogeneous forces that shaped the configuration of his life. But in their
strategy of argumentation, their feel for the process of change, the force of
the rhetorical "structures of feeling" and their prophetic reach as
well as pragmatic potential, Rizal's essays--I have only concentrated on the
ones most often read and studied by millions of Filipino youth (San Juan 1968,
1971, 1984)--can serve as weapons for mass conscientization and self-organizing
of popular-democratic agencies, for understanding the working of power/knowledge
in the political terrain. They are discourses for collective self-activation and
renewal. They can serve as tools for the comprehension of the laws of motion of
social reality and the revolutionary transformation of our everyday lives.
We can ask nothing more valuable than this at this impasse in our national
odyssey.--
REFERENCES
Alejandrino, Jose. 1986. The
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