(Below is the introduction to the lecture, “Infrastructural Futures,” which I delivered at the University of the Philippines on July 7, 2010. My thanks to Professor Rolando Tolentino for the invitation.)
What follows is a response to the present, a reflection on the sense of the time of the “now.” I want to begin by suggesting that the “now” of contemporary Philippine political life, like Aristotle’s concept of the now, is difficult to arrest. Yesterday, just seven days after Aquino’s presidential inauguration, the nation awoke to the news of the murder of Fernando Baldomero, a Bayan Muna activist, whose forced death is now part of the over 1,200 political killings that have been accounted for since President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo took her seat as president in 2001. Baldomero’s undefensible death is a reiteration of a war currently being waged in the Philippines against dissent and critique, an unconscionable event which contradicts the image of change that was ostensibly to have come with the recent “modern and democratic” transition of power. As one of the headlines put it this morning, it is as though “Times haven’t changed.”
When the nation witnessed Aquino’s presidential inauguration last week, it seemed as though the political time of the nation was multiply framed: on the one hand, the transition to the new power recognized that the nation is and continues to be in an undeniable state of crisis, with widespread poverty, corruption, institutional fraud and political killings terrorizing any sense of the “now.” Yet on the other hand and at the same time, this “now” seemed also imbued with the euphoria of hope, inspired by Aquino’s campaign promises of social change, and the image of democracy his very family name – “Aquino” – seems to signify. Thus, if the “now” of Philippine politics is in a critical moment of transition, its transition hinges on the frames between crisis and hope; or better yet, it is a “now” paradoxically composed by a peculiar co-belongingness of hope and crisis. It therefore seems difficult to locate precisely where the “now” of the Philippines “is” and how exactly we are to orient ourselves to it.
An important question follows from all of this: if the “now” is difficult to locate, what, then, is the proper time of critique? This is a question about democracy because there can be no democracy without critique, without the conditions for its space and time. Hence, I want to ask the following introductory questions to frame this essay on the politics of development: In what capacity can we speak of a “now,” is there only one “now” or are there many “nows?” if the “now” is not solely our own, then in whose time or times are we in? to whom do these times belong, and where is this time of the “now” going? My hope is that a critical reflection on the temporality of the “now” will allow us to orient ourselves toward a questioning of the time of the political, and also to the question: What possibilities of the future does our present time of monumental inequality, rapid growth, state of war, collective anguish and hope makes possible today?
In times of crisis, the business of the future seems to run aground. Images of the future, whether fantastic and hyperreal, apocalyptic or utopic, become common currency. But, perhaps we should ask, why desire a future in the first place? Futures become important because when our sense of the “now” is put in danger, when we feel that the “now” risks injury, even termination and death, we resort to the future as a space of possibility. The future becomes urgent in times of crisis precisely because it becomes the means by which we enfigure the coming of the future as a kind of determinate horizon to which time, and by extension our own beings, can endure and live-on. When our sense of finitude becomes acute, the future provides comfort in the possibility of moving-on, of enduring. The future therefore becomes the horizon in which the letting-be of time can continue over and against a “now” which appears at risk of perishing into annulment.
I have been speaking here of a “now” in crisis as if it were an ailing body or organism. One finds that when traced to its etymological roots, the word “crisis” was a medical term, referring to “the crucial stage of a disease in which a decision had to be made but had not yet been reached.” This means that when a thing is said to be in crisis, it is, as we say, in “critical condition.” As such, crisis imposes on the one who is present, the one who is witness to the crisis, “difficult choices between stark alternatives— right or wrong, salvation or damnation, life or death.” The words “crisis” and “critique,” one also discovers, are closely related. They both derive from the Greek word krisis. From this, “critique” had the original sense of the act of “separating,” of “picking apart,” but also “to choose,” “to judge,” and “to decide.” Therefore, if “crisis” implies the crucial moment of decision, critique is the name of the activity of discerning and deciding precisely what to do, in which what is fundamentally at stake are life and death.
It is in these related senses of crisis and critique that we can understand, for instance, Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere as a paradigmatic example of critique: Rizal saw the violence and abuses of Spanish colonialism as a symptom of a “social cancer,” which needed to be excised, cut off from the national body-polity. For Rizal, the incision of this social cancer became also the moment of decision, the moment of critique, which ultimately also spelled his death. If crisis, as Marx argued, “emerges in the forcible establishment of a unity between different and incompatible elements,” critique becomes the method of identifying which parts are problematic in a body or social system. Here, Marx was primarily concerned about the forced unity of different, potentially incompatible, phases of production, where production refers to the modes of reproducing life, as captured in our Tagalog word, pangkabuhayan. The point I am making here in bringing together Rizal and Marx, the national critic and the theorist of crisis, is that critique-in-times-of-crisis becomes fundamentally a matter of life and death, of discerning the changing boundaries between them, which are the causes of crisis as such. The vocation of critique, thus, is linked first to securing the very time for critique (in order for there to be a moment of decision in the first place); and also, to the letting-be and letting-on of time and its movement, that is to say, the swaying hold of life itself.
I have been laboring, perhaps too long, in this introduction to stitch together four concepts: (1) the time of the “now,” (2) the figure of the “future,” (3) the moment of “crisis,” and (4) the role of “critique” in all of this. I have been suggesting that critique emerges as a purposeful, consequential task in moments of crisis, in which what is at stake behind grasping the “now” is nothing less than the determination of a future. If crisis, as it often circulates in our daily speak, determines which futures are possible and which futures are not, critique has the task of discerning and deciding not only which possibilities in a given situation are most viable, but also questions the very parameters of the possible itself. Hence, whatever else crisis is – and this is the premise on which my entire lecture hinges— crisis is also the very possibility for critical knowledge. What I mean by this is that crisis always produces the conditions not only of its own critique, but critical knowledge in general, which is the necessary basis or ground for political action. To return once more to where we began, if the “now” of Philippine politics is such that we are witnessing a moment of transition, critique will become important, should we not want the experience of crisis to lead us to despair, or the euphoria of hope to stultify one to simple complacency. Critique enables one, in the midst of a terrorizing present, this state of war, to link and translate crisis and hope dialectically toward more progressive ends. Born out of and made urgent by our “now,” what I wish to present in our lecture today is a critical reflection on the infrastructural future of Philippine modernity, whose futural dreams entail the enframing of democracy and political life. The critical spirit of this lecture stems therefore from the responsibility of safeguarding the “future of the future,” that is, of maintaining the future’s radical openness to what always remains to come, the temporal substance which are the very political possibilities of our collective times…
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