Egypt's Postmodern Revolution

This short interview of Egyptian Blogger Alaa Abd El-Fatah clearly shows how important the internet has become in mobilising for political change.



"What we need now is a transition government anyway, not one that is going to last forever. Whoever comes after that is going to rule in mortal fear of the people. They are going to remember these scenes forever. So I don't think anyone is worried about who will rule. If we don't like them we will change them, if not through elections then through another revolt." - Alaa Abd El-Fatah

The Heavy - How you like me now?

Always exciting to discover new music. If this sounds familiar, its because you heard it on the film 'The Fighter.' These guys are British!

Foucault on freedom

Interesting take by A.M. Rizvi:

Capitalism thrives on creating desires and multiplying them. Without the constant production and multiplication of new desires the capitalist system would dry up. It is important for the continuous production and reproduction of the system that each and every element of the system must keep ‘desiring’ more and more. The movements that turn into movements of safeguarding people’s rights and base their struggles on the charters of demands really enhance the functioning of the capitalist system (unless the demand is unconditional dissolution and overthrow of capitalism itself - the impossible demand). This is because they work on the false premises that capitalism suppresses desires. Foucault’s turn, in his later work, to the aesthetics of existence that would be based on voluntary asceticism and disciplining desires, was in part a response to this realisation (Foucault, 1988a).

Looking forward to swimming in Foucault this semester.

Eternal Recurrence

Randy David's column today is notable enough for a repost. A crucial point:

Far from defending inherited values, Nietzsche saw in modernity the chance to formulate new ones. The release from the old, he said, must not mean that everything is now permissible. On the contrary, it means learning how to live a self-chosen but relentlessly disciplined life. This will not come naturally. One needs to fashion it for oneself through a hit-and-miss process that requires the utmost boldness and sense of adventure. This process is not theoretical or cerebral, or doctrinal. It is eminently practical. Ideas are only starting points; it is the act of living itself that is crucial and ultimately instructive.

Ars Singapura

Singapore is hypermodernity in a few hundred square kilometres. Hyper-efficient, hyper-clean, hyper-sped. A friend said to wait ‘til I see what crawls underneath. I said I do not need to see to know. Money sloughs off every gleaming building, every zipping luxury vehicle, every tinker of laughter at the night spots. But the ostentatiousness is relatively restrained. It is matter-of-fact, tasteful, very Chinese. Professor O says they are renovating the faculty for the nth time because they need to keep workers employed to stimulate the real economy, versus the fictitious one, ‘money laundering.’ I said they must call it something else. I had a mental picture of the city-state sitting in a bathtub of its plastic notes, sudsy, with rainbow-coloured bubbles on top even as grimy particles accumulate below the surface of the South China Sea.

Diasporic Filipinos

Stumbled on this essay. Some interesting propositions. An excerpt:

Firstly, the problem with the diaspora as an imagined community is that, unlike the traditional nation-state, the diasporic population often fails to constitute a viable body politic; more than just difficulty in imagining itself as possessing real political power, the Filipino diaspora also has a historical susceptibility to marginalization, either in the home country or the adopted one. This sense of liminality often creates dangerous slippages. The Flor Contemplacion episode is one such instance. Here, the Philippines’s attempts to secure mercy on one of its citizens (a domestic helper), accused of murder and sentenced to death, in Singapore in the mid-1990’s offers the grossest example of the discrepancy between the home country’s ability to extend ancillary support to its migrant population(s) and the material reality of dislocation that puts the OFW subject beyond the tentacles of the State. Similarly, the reports of employer abuse, sexual harassment, and discrimination puts the OFW in a curious, and dangerous, position — one in which the State is both responsible and helpless.

Wikileaks - leaking power in the 21st century?

Power in the olden days was constituted by those who had the ability to muster means to make people comply to their wishes. The ability to hold life and death in one's hands, i.e. military might, was power. The acquisition of military power, in turn, meant being able to organise society in ways so as to extract economic surplus to fund war machines, which can then be deployed to engage in wars of expansion and the amassing of more wealth to fortify power-holders.

Naked displays of power are still apparent today. However, overt displays of violence and coercive force are now frowned upon, unless you are the preponderant hegemon (the United States). It is perhaps no accident that Julian Assange and the entire motive force animating Wikileaks have targetted the US in their 'exposes'. The 'US' is not so much a territorial entity here as an ideational construct representing who and how power is wielded in the world. Since entities such as Wikileaks cannot contest the 'US' in terms of the old definition of power, they find ways to diminish newer ways in which power is exercised today.

Return to Myself

What it means, to nourish
These long weeks, consuming words
With so little time to truly reflect,
Ingest, ingesting them I have
Had little space to breathe
And think and write
Down to my very toes
My shriveled-up soul calls
Come home, come rest here
Stand at the very edge again,
At the very edge
To see beyond, to see behind
To see light, light those fires
Again, kindle mine
Truth to tell, truth to find
Myself, look to the precipice Sparky
Listen.

A Year Ago: The Ampatuans

Human Rights Watch recently published a report on the Ampatuan Massacre last year:

This 96-page report charts the Ampatuans’ rise to power, including their use of violence to expand their control and eliminate threats to the family’s rule. It is based on more than 80 interviews, including with people having insider knowledge of the Ampatuan family security structure, victims of abuses and their family members, and witnesses to crimes.

See the full report here.

Juana Change on the RH Bill - New, with English Subs!

Pretty detailed for Juana Change vids. Cool cameos. :-)

Migdal on my mind

A glaring omission on my part, I cannot believe I have only just read Joel Migdal. Written twenty-two years ago, this sounds so achingly familiar. On weak state leadership:

Their basic weakness in the face of continued fragmentation of social control has led them to a political style and policies – the politics of survival – that have prevented the state from enhancing its capabilities by not allowing the development of complex organisation in state institutions. Rulers have used similar styles and policies to pre-empt the development of large concentrations of social control outside the state organisation.

As long as the fragmentation of social control has continued, denying state leaders effective mass political mobilisation, rulers have been reduced to ruses and stratagems; they must build and rebuild coalitions and balances of power centres while using state resources to reinforce existing distribution of power and wealth in society. Such mechanisms may at times encourage economic growth, but they do not create a more capable, autonomous state.

Once more, with feeling

Here I thought I was going to start this leg in my life's journey by immediately beginning to write a seminal piece, an innovative, brilliant contribution to humankind's collection of knowledge. Was I dead wrong. Here I am finding myself reviewing everything I have come to know in over a decade of scholarship. And then I find I have to recalibrate and reorient myself. Where to position my guns? To whom must I aim? I am told I must engage an audience. Why do I need to kowtow to the dominant scholars? To gain legitimacy? To write something publishable? All my critical, rebellious instincts are primed to flee.

Imagining our nation

We are, by nature, prisoners of our bodies and its position in space and time. A change of location affords a different perspective about one's object of inquiry. From my current perch, my mind's eye contemplates our nation as a stranger might a foreign land. Having been removed from its urgency, its demands, its paranoia, I see her as she sits, hands placed demurely on her knee, naked.

As I attend to my life here in the land of zero politics, she flutters in the periphery, her full-throated laughter alternating with wails of despair. While my conscious must set her aside, I see her still in the literature I read. I read her in my newsfeed. I recognize her in the face of a yaya walking her charge to daycare. She sits there alternately mocking, pleading, begging my attention. Mi patria adorada.

What makes a patriot? What makes a Filipino? Must I be home? Must I answer her calls? Can we not imagine her from where we are, wherever we are on the planet? I used to dream of her once, dressed in the best possible garb of hope. Justice, love and wealth deferred. She was, then, too from a distance, a bundle of potentials. I came home, for a while, and lived her existence. There I sat, steeped in her urgency, her demands, her paranoia. A dutiful daughter can only take so much.

Can we not imagine, together, a nation on the brink? Can we not tell this story, our story, from where we are on earth? What do you see from where you are today? How do you see? How would you, with the luxury of distance, write our story? How would you imagine our nation?

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I am happy that Filipino Voices is back on the interwebs. And I am happy to be writing for FV again :-)

"On Carlos Celdran's Arrest" by Mahar Abrera Mangahas

Lifted from Mahar Abrera Mangahas' Facebook Note, this is an excellent defense of Carlos Celdran:

Other than the UAAP Final (a game I actually watched and enjoyed, temporarily overcoming my aversion to anything athletic), a few other significant happenings have occurred in the past few hours. First is President Aquino actually sticking up for the government and willing to face excommunication over the issue of reproductive health; and second is the arrest of Carlos Celdran, walking tour guide extraordinaire who was arrested this afternoon for heckling Cardinal Rosales while the latter was conducting a mass at the Manila Cathedral.

Some have commented that Celdran deserves his punishment because what he did was offensive---that certain places are special and thus should be immune to an individual's demonstration of his politics. A church, some argue, is not the place where politics should happen. Never mind that it too is very much a public space. (Which, seeing that it's not taxed, is indirectly subsidized by the government.)

The thing is, what makes a church special? Because we believe it is? Because it was consecrated? Sanctified?

The truth is it's just a pile of cement which has become special because people just say it's so. Dangerously, the idea that this space is special has given its occupants more armor against criticism. The Church has shown it is willing to engage in public demonstrations against government---in fact, that's part of its threat to oppose reproductive health bills---but apparently, for a citizen to show displeasure in a creative manner at a church is forbidden because it just isn't done.

This is foolish. No edifice should be allowed to isolate and protect people, notably leaders, religious or not, from the very criticism that we deserve and have the right to deliver. Various pulpits across the country have been used as platforms against government, individuals and philosophies present in society. The difference is we are vulnerable to the Church wherever we might state our issues against them, as they are allowed to entreat their followers to harass officials at the gates and shout down public meetings from the rafters. Yet they are the privileged who can retreat to their sacred spaces and continue to deliver the worst of the their messages with relative impunity.

So Carlos Celdran took the fight to where they least expected it. Good for him. They should learn that they cannot retreat and escape from any criticism. The reason why the Church likes a public demonstration is it generates greater emotional impact. Perhaps it is time they learn how it feels themselves; they have been able to ignore everything else so far.

Filipina Migrant Wives and Sacrifice

From Lieba Faier's "On being oyomesan: Filipina migrants and their Japanese families in Central Kiso", a grounded insight:

For most of the women I met, being oyomesan meant managing two sets of domestic obligations - to both their natal and their affinal households. These women often spoke to me about the toll taken on them by these dual pressures of home...While the difficulties these women faced could be onerous, they also invoked them as evidence of the hardships they were willing to endure to be good family members. For example. many Filipina women in Central Kiso invoked a Catholic rhetoric of self-sacrifice to describe the ways that by fulfilling their roles as oyomesan they both negotiated their relationships with their Japanese in-laws and supported their families in the Philippines. Such discourses of sacrifice and suffering are heavily gendered in the Philippines.

...She sometimes described her relationship with her husband's paretns as 'my trials'; other times, however, she would ask rhetorically in Tagalog of her Filipino family's persistent requests for money and household items...Hanggang kailan? Such a statment might be understood not only as questioning how long Cora's family in the Philippines would expect her financial support but also as a query of broader global political economics...Cora's question thus might also be glossed: until when will the unequal political-economic relationships that force people in the Philippines to depend on remittances from foreign labor migrants for daily subsistence be allowed to persist?