CULTURAL STUDIES, FRANTZ FANON, AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIGENIZATION IN THE PHILIPPINES--by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

REVISITING CULTURAL STUDIES,  FRANTZ FANON, AND
THE PROBLEM OF INDIGENIZATION


by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.


    After the mammoth anthology Cultural Studies edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler appeared 1992, the death-spasms of an anti-Establishment social movement began without so much fanfare. Conceived as a challenge to bourgeois high culture, Cultural Studies (CS) challenged Cold War ideology and monopoly-capitalist hegemony. Its practitioners promised the construction of a democratic, een socialist, renaissance of thought and sensibility in the public sphere and quotidian life. With the end of the Vietnam War, the ascendancy of the neoliberal program of Thatcher, Reagan and their counterparts in Europe and Latin America, that promise ended in an anarchist cul de sac. Not even the formidable sub-Commandante Marcos, the veterans of the Battle of Seattle, and the World Social Forum could forge a way out. Could one have predicted this exhaustion of massive oppositional energies initially kindled by the Marxist revival embodied by E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, inspired by Gramsci, Althusser, C.L.R. James, and others?
A recent anthology edited by Paul Smith (2011) seeks to renew CS by asserting its resistant, transformative potential, its political efficacy, within the disciplinary production of knowledge. But prioritizing this epistemological function over against its dimension as social bloc or public consciousness has proven futile. Once institutionalized as an academic discipline in North America, subsumed within the commodifying apparatus of the market, CS was appropriated by the instrumental rationality of the neoliberal market and converted into a nostrum to resolve the legitimation-crisis of neoconservative, social-Darwinist politics. It seems that however triumphalist its libertarian pluralist approach, CS could not overcome positivism, empiricism, reification and pervasive commodification. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the onset of the Gulf War signaled the phenomenal ascent of this fin-de-siecle barbarism.
    While the founding of the World Social Forum at the advent of the new millennium may have revived visions of a fugitive egalitarian utopia, September 11, 2001 intervened. It will take a whole decade of carnage and torture, genocidal onslaught and assassinations by drones, to resurrect those visions in the September 2011 “Occupy Wall Street” mobilization following the “Arab Spring.” But that is the topic of another essay. Here I want to record speculations of renewing classic CS themes and modes of sign-reading (Peirce’s triadic semiosis, in particular) in order to infer possible solutions to the predicament of nominalism and Nietschean nihilism confronted by humanists in the wake of insidious humanitarian-esque globalization. Descriptive exploration, not moralization, is my modest intent here.
    After 9/11, ineluctable Guantanamo torture chambers, the  Chernobyl-like Fukushima disaster, and total surveillance of everyday life by the Homeland Security agencies, is literary study still worth pursuing? That question seems a nostalgic reprise of Theodor Adorno’s hard query: After Auschwitz, can one still write a lyric poem, much more do a line-by-line hermeneutic gloss on it? Annual conferences on the crisis of the humanities and the war of antagonistic blogs in cyberspace have made the question anticlimactic, if not moot. An empty ritualized gesture of Cartesian doubt, or Derridean melancholia, can not be easily sidetracked by the erudite antics of Zizek, Badiou, Agamben, etc. Perhaps the answer is: Yes, but not in the old way, as always, if we want to connect the classroom and the fabled boudoir with the outside world, assuming that the binary opposition, inside/outside, has not already been rendered useless by the intellectual ferment of the last three or four decades. Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze are all dead, but their Doppelganger and avatars still haunt the corridors of corporatized academe and think-tanks. Can the “Occupy Wall Street” activists and their worldwide ramifications exorcise these ghosts?
   
            Desiring Cultural Studies

One way of elucidating the crisis of the humanities (rehearsed as “the death of the author,” the refusal of meta-narratives and ideas of progress, vertigos of multiple and incommensurable meanings) has been through a passage in the site of laissez-faire “desire” called CS. The exemplary discourses  of Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris, John Fiske, Lawrence Grossberg, Tony Bennet, Manthia Diawara, Antony Easthope, and others are the key figures invoked by CS. While CS has remained open, loose, unfinished, without any fixed methodological procedures or protocols, it seems that a convergence of interests has outlined at least a “problematic” or area of investigation. As director of the initiating force centered in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK, Hall (1996) himself reminds us that “there is no single unproblematic definition of culture.”  True, CS avoids codification or reduction into privileged paradigms, but the protocols of interpretative reading and historicizing metacommentary on the “social text” have been tutorial examples. Various experimental modes of reading have of course been invented and applied on diverse artifacts, processes, events, practices, and so on.  CS as new field of interdiscplinary, cross-cultural inquiry has burgeoned as an attempt to expand and refine the tools for interpretation and evaluation of texts, the principal focus or target of analysis being “culture” itself. Indeed, contexts—social, political, economic, historical, etc.—determine the cultural object or text being examined and comprehended.
    Everything then becomes grist to the CS mill. Departing from the book-centered realm of traditional cultural authority, the target domain now includes not only canonical literature but every signifying or performative practice. Everything becomes a sign, not just written or spoken discourse. The scope of CS covers so wide a range of texts, discourses and meaning-making activities that it has offered more problems than solutions. If we can accept, for now, Hall’s definition of culture as “infinite semiosis, sense-making without end,” and qualify it by locating semiosis within determinate historical formations and socioeconomic structures, then we can arrive at a position in which our concern with form, aesthetic pleasure, and other traditional criteria of worth can be reconciled with our new interest in agency or identity and knowledge-production linked with ideology, power, and institutions. Epistemology will now synergestically interact with ethics and politics to produce a feasible scenario for the fusion of theory and practice not just for scholars/experts but for the laity and proles.
    What a CS orientation ultimately strives to accomplish is somewhat complex, all-encompassing, and amorphous. But it is not arbitrary nor totalitarian in the pejorative sense. One way to formulate it is to say that it endeavors to move beyond a merely deconstructive semiotics such as that performed by deconstructionists, Foucaultian discourse-analysis, and Heideggerian metaphysics. It seeks to do this by inducing a permanent “suspension of disbelief” which is often susceptible to a cynical or hedonistic inflection, to a point where the “final interpretant” (to use C. S. Peirce’s concept) involves a critical intervention in the epochal crux of historical experience. This can be achieved only by a community of inquirers, within a collective process of knowledge-production to transform social life (Liszka 1996). It is thus not only an interpretive activity of articulating meaning but also a revolutionary act of rebuilding whole patterns of practices, structures, ways of communal living
    Since the controversies over the nature and direction of CS are ongoing and inexhaustible, suffice it for me to make a few observations. I hope that CS as a project of critical pedagogy and cultural democratization is not simply identified with the fashionable populism of Lyotard, de Certeau, Negri, and others who seek to destroy the boundaries between high and popular/mass culture by offering courses on the art of shopping, how to wear condoms, beauty pageants, and so on. Populism finds its limits in self-complacent repetition. What follows is more by way of a reading exercise invested with a heuristic proposal. The discovery of meanings via sign-interpretation (semiosis) becomes prologue to the inquiry into the tactics and strategy of revolutionary mass struggles, given the inscription of the concrete text/reader in historically specific arenas of multi-sectoral conflicts and popular-democratic struggles.

Fanon’s Re-Intervention

    Reading/knowing a text is intially a process of contextualization. Its end is the formation of a habit of action. If CS is taken to be “a process, a kind of alchemy for producing useful knowledge,” as Richard Johnson (1996) puts it, let us see what is at stake if we call attention to the conditions of the production of knowledge that surrounds the reading of literary texts. We pursue one concrete goal of pedagogy in this exercise: the “elucidation and problematization of first principles” (Fuery and Mansfield 1997), one first principle being the supposed self-sufficiency of a formalist reading. Our model artifact here is Frantz Fanon and his style of demystification. In its rejection of the canonical standards of aesthetic judgment in which form occupies  the privileged center, as New Critical formalism once pontificated, Fanonian critique foregrounds the process of race and ethnicity as a dynamic relationship between the hegemonic order and resistance from the subjugated and colonized. This overturns the centrality of form and the rational coherent subject-citizen of the imperial polity.
    Despite his intricately nuanced anatomy of "race" in Black Skin, White Masks and other works, Fanon has been somehow stereotyped as an apostle of the cult of violence. This passage from The Wretched of the Earth seems to have become the touchstone of classical Fanonism: "Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organized and educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them. It frees the native from his inferiority complex, and from his despair and inaction" (1961, 94). This  free-floating quote, unmoored from its determinant context, exerts a reductive and disabling force. Severed from its body, Fanon’s thought can signify everything and nothing at the same time—a free-floating signifier in the vertiginous abyss of deconstructive nihilism.
      Postmodernist scholars come to the rescue. Claiming to salvage Fanon from this tendentious fixation as well as from the pluralism of eclectic interpretations, Henry Louis Gates offers an assessment that at first glance promises to ground Fanon in the context of the "third world." The Tunisian intellectual Albert Memmi seems to provide Gates a pretext for the revisionary intent: Memmi conjures the figure of a black Martinican torn by warring forces who, though hating France and the French, "will never return to Negritude and to the West Indies.”  Unwittingly Gates recuperates the canon by ferreting out clues of self-division in Fanon, "an agon between psychology and a politics, between ontogeny and sociogeny, between...Marx and Freud" (Gates 1994, 141). This postmortem diagnosis pronounces the demise of the author and his authority.  By inscribing Fanon more steadfastly in the colonial paradigm, the "disciplinary enclave" of anti-imperialist discourse, Gates hopes to demolish the Fanon mystique. His deconstructive move may strike some as iconoclastic and others as reactionary; Lewis K. Gordon, for example, speculates that Gates may be a surrogate for the European man in crisis. In effect, Gates disables Fanon by arguing that Fanon himself warned us of the limits of the struggle, thus presaging the virtual collapse of "the dream of decolonization."
    Postmodern Cultural Studies (inspired by the poststructuralist gurus Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard) may have taken off from Gates’s premise of skeptical individualism and neoliberal triumphalism. It has so far pursued a nihilistic agenda in rejecting "totality" (such as capitalism, nationalism, etc.), the codeword for theoretical generalizations about social relations of production and historical movements. Contemporary Cultural  Studies celebrates heterogeneity, flux, ambiguous hybrids, indeterminacies, accidents, and lacunae inhabiting bifurcated psyches and texts. Suspicious of metanarratives (Hegel, Marx, Sartre), it repudiates utopian thought, including an alleged teleology of anticolonialism informing Fanon’s texts. From this perspective, Fanon is cannibalized for academic apologetics. The version of Fanon who takes off from Hegel and Marx is rejected in favor of the Freudian (or Lacanian) disciple, thus resolving the dichotomized subject/object which postmodernist critics privileged as their point of departure.
     My argument here concerns the relevance of Fanon’s materialist hermeneutics as an antidote to the conservative formalism of the hegemonic discipline exemplified by Gates. I hold that Fanon's central insights into sociohistorical change is pedagogically transformative and enabling in a way that locates the deconstructionist impasse in the refusal of historical determinations. David Caute (1970) perceives Fanon’s serviceable legacy as inherent in his political realism, his prophetic drive to forge “new concepts” from the clash between traditional ways of thinking and novel circumstances. In one of the most astute evaluation of Fanon’s discourse, Stephan Feuchtwang points out that Fanon succeeded in rendering “as history the material of cultural organizations without assuming an original self for recognition,” showing how contingency “is culturally organized and made” and distinguishing cultural process from its multiple determinations in economic forces, political institutions, and ideological relations. By bracketing self-consciousness as totalizing viewpoint, Feuchtwang then suggests that the fundamental questions in cultural studies raised by Fanon are, among others: What people or culture is being constructed? What “social organization of cultural difference, conceived as psycho-affective organization, enhances recognition rather than denial” and “what are the economic and political conditions in which such an organization can exist?” (1985, 473).
     There are more insightful alternatives. Of major significance is the revaluation of Fanon’s world-view drawn up by Neil Lazarus in Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (1999). In the wake of rampant cynical scholasticism, Lazarus defends a critical-humanist appropriation of Fanon with its liabilities and merits against the deconstructive, ludic version of Fanon (see, for example, Sandoval 2000) whose metaphysical theorems render it vulnerable for cooptation by populist demagogues. Nigel Gibson also emphasizes Fanon’s commitment to a “rethinking of Marx’s idea of revolution” immanent in “the dialectic of individual and national self-determination” (1999, 443). Pursuing the implications of a materialist cultural politics spelled out in the preceding two chapters, I attempt here a substantiation of their concrete practicability in Fanon’s approach to the project of decolonization.

Breakthrough

        An anticipatory caveat may be offered here. We need to remind ourselves that Fanon never entertained any illusion that the revolutionary struggle against colonialism will automatically realize a utopia free from the delayed effects and legacies of hundreds of years of dehumanized social relations. I contend that he was not of two minds regarding the duplicity of Negritude, for example, or the perils of populist and demagogic chauvinism that swept Africa in the aftermath of formal independence (see Fogel 1982; Gordon, Sharpley-Whiting and White 1997). The chapters on "Spontaneity: Its Strengths and Weaknesses" and "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness" in The Wretched of the Earth are lucid proofs of Fanon's  circumspect and principled realism. The cogent diagnosis of deeply rooted reflexes of character and the  habitus of groups displays his acute knowledge of historical contradictions and the variable modalities of finitude in a world of pure immanence. It is certainly an ideological move to transpose the Manichean fixation of colonialism into Fanon's psyche and infer therefrom that we cannot derive any testable methodology or working hypothesis from Fanon's oeuvre. That dogmatic attitude forecloses any dialogue with Fanon as alternative or oppositional avatar to the fashionable “incredulity” at metanarratives and the ontological constitution of reality.
         One lesson we can extract from the corpus of texts is precisely the avoidance of the “schism in the soul,” what Spinoza calls “sadness" (1994, 188). This involves a passage from a diminished to a more heightened or enhanced capacity for action based on ideas adequately subsuming the causes and motivations of what we do. This involves all the social, economic, and political determinants that constitute the singular mode of cultural revolution, the conatus of the emergent revolutionary subject, in Algeria. To elucidate this mode, Fanon reformulates the archetypal Hegelian drama of sublation (Aufhebung) as "the only means of breaking this vicious circle," the battlefield within, although this drama is not a solipsistic or monadic affair. Desire involves the mutual recognition of two or more agents juxtaposed in a common enterprise: "I demand that notice be taken of my negating activity insofar as I pursue something other than life; insofar as I do battle for the creation of a human world--that is, of a world of reciprocal recognitions" (1967a, 218). Indeed, Fanon's project goes beyond the formulaic pragmatism of psychoanalysis: "To educate man to be actional...is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act" (19676a, 222). And this action, by risking life, enables the exercise of freedom which mediates the contingency of the present and the schematism of the future: "The Vietnamese who die before the firing squads are not hoping that their sacrifice will bring about the reappearance of a past. It is for the sake of the present and of the future that they are willing to die" (1967a, 227). This project of secular redemption reminds me of Spinoza’s axiom of humanity’s finite mode as distinguished by conatus, perseverance in striving to increase one’s power through affiliation and collaboration with others (De Dijn 1996; Yovel 1989). Both thinkers are diehard materialists.
         Fanon’s idea of praxis is geared toward realizing the freedom of multitudes via programs of action. His practice-oriented sensibility registers the movement of groups and collectives of bodies interacting in solidarity. What Marx once valorized as philosophy becoming incarnate in the world, that is, the unity of theory and practice, is accomplished by Fanon in envisioning the field of discourse or signification as a range of opportunities for action. In this field, collective power and the rights of individuals associated together coalesce. We move through and beyond the textuality of representation, the iconicity of signs, to its articulation with radical transformative practice. Indeed, Fanon’s mind may be said to be constituted by ideas about bodies, to paraphrase Spinoza’s axiom (Parkinson 1975; Lloyd 1996).

Beyond Fetishizing Textuality and Discourse

In inventorying the achievement of Cultural Studies thus far, Stuart Hall remarked how the discipline has often succumbed to "ways of constituting power as an easy floating signifier which just leaves the crude exercise and connections of power and culture altogether emptied of any signification" (1992, 286). Presciently Fanon anticipated this fetishism of textuality in his conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth: "A permanent dialogue with oneself and an increasingly obscene narcissism never ceased to prepare the way for a half delirious state, where intellectual work became suffering and the reality was not at all that of a living man, working and creating himself, but rather words, different combinations of words, and the tensions springing from the meanings contained in words" (1961, 313). A new beginning has to be made, with a new subjectivity predicated on  the bankruptcy of Eurocentric humanism and the prospect of creating a "new human being" at the conjuncture where core and periphery, center and margin, collide.
         Aside from the malaise of systemic alienation fragmenting sensibilities and psyches, the reason why the discipline of Cultural Studies has consistently failed to confront the problem of reification is its evasion of one of the most intractable but persistent symptoms of late capitalism, racism and its articulation with sexism. It is through confronting this nexus of racism, male supremacy, and commodity-fetishism in the Manichean arena of battle that Fanon was able to grasp the subtle, compromising liaisons between culture and power, between language and value.  Like Spinoza, who applied a constructive-hermeneutical method in interpreting religious texts (Tosel 1997), Fanon used rhetorical analysis to educate the subaltern imagination and provoke a more scientific critical stance toward everyday happenings. However, there is no unanimous agreement on Fanon’s accentuation of certain aspects of “third world” reality. Renate Zahar has reservations regarding Fanon’s one-sided emphasis on a psychologized notion of violence as a category of mediation, thus ignoring “violence conceived as revolutionary social work” (1974, 96). But even a trenchant critic like Jack Woddis had to admit that Fanon, despite his psychoanalytic orientation, “yearned for an end to the world of capitalism” (175). Unlike Albert Memmi’s (1967) more phenomenological and tentative diagnosis of the colonial psychosis patterned after Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, Fanon’s inquiry aimed at organized mobilization of the oppressed. The question of social determination and the directionality of change around which orthodox Marxists and the varieties of poststructuralisms have clashed hinges really on the modalities in which capital and the manifestations of its power have continued to renegotiate its recurrent crises and sustain its precarious but seemingly resilient hegemony.

Exorcising the Racial Imaginary

     Fanon's little known essay, "Racism and Culture," provides clues as to how Fanon will confront the impasse brought about by the institutionalization, more precisely, the “Americanization” of Cultural Studies. For Fanon, the fact of racism cannot be divorced from the methodology and aims of any cultural inquiry: "If culture is the combination of motor and mental behavior patterns arising from the encounter of man with nature and with his fellow-man, it can be said that racism is indeed a cultural element" (1967, 32). With the emergence of industrial and cosmopolitan societies, racism metamorphosed; its object is no longer the individual judged on the basis of genotypical or phenotypical features but "a certain form of existing,” an ethos or individual ecosystem. Fanon mentions the antithesis between Christianity and Islam as life-forms locked in ideological combat. But what sharply influenced the change in the nature of racism as ideological/political practice, Fanon points out, is the "institution of a colonial system in the very heart of Europe.” Racism is part of "the systematized oppression of a people" at the heart of which is the destruction of a people's cultural values:

    For this its systems of reference have to be broken.  Expropriation, spoliation, raids, objective murder, are matched by the sacking of cultural patterns, or at least condition such sacking.  The social panorama is destructured; values are flaunted, crushed, emptied.
    The lines of force, having crumbled, no longer give direction... [The native culture] becomes closed, fixed in the colonial status, caught in the yoke of oppression. ...The characteristic of a culture is to be open, permeated by spontaneous, generous, fertile lines of force (1967, 33-34).

This mummification of practices and the hardening of institutions once alive and changing attend the loss of the native's independence and initiative. Culture dies when it is not lived, "dynamized from within." Exoticism and other modes of objectification (for example, the varieties of Orientalism catalogued by Edward Said) accompany the colonizers' coercive program of exploitation and subjugation. Myth replaces historical existence.
        What complicates the ever-present visage of racism for Fanon is historical metamorphosis, the shifts of adaptation to evolving social relations. With the development in the techniques and means of production and its elaboration, together with "the increasingly necessary existence of collaborators," racism loses its overt virulence and camouflages itself in more subtle and stylized appearances, in seductive guises, despite the fact that "the social constellation, the cultural whole, are deeply modified by the existence of racism" (1967, 36). But appearances are deceptive, and verbal mystification characterizes the introduction of a "democratic and humane ideology” courtesy of the fabled civilizing mission.  Fanon insists that "the truth is that the rigor of the system made the daily affirmation of a superiority superfluous" (1967, 37). Alienation worsens. In contrast to the apologists of the neoliberal “free market” system who reduce racism to a case of individual mental illness or syndrome, Fanon asserts the sociohistorical specificity of racism as institutional practice:
    
     Racism stares one in the face for it so happens that it belongs in a characteristic whole: that of the shameless exploitation of one group of men by another which has reached a higher stage of technical development. This is why military and economic oppression generally precedes, makes possible, and legitimizes racism....
     It is not possible to enslave men without logically making them inferior through and through. And racism is only the emotional, affective, sometimes intellectual explanation of this inferiorization (37-38, 40).
    
     In the process of demystifying the racial imaginary that subtends Eurocentric Cultural Studies, Fanon traces the dialectic of alienation and assimilation binding colonial master and colonized subaltern. He recapitulates the phases of guilt and inferiority experienced by the colonized. Racism becomes normalized when it becomes a matter of personal prejudice, dissimulating the subjugation and oppression of peoples and nationalities. Subsequently, the colonized victims react to racism by revalorizing tradition, the binary half of the Manichean cosmos. Archaic practices and their constellation of beliefs (magic, superstition) are revived and affirmed. The goal of reconquering the geopolitical space mapped by revolutionary war orients the project of national liberation: "the plunge into the chasm of the past is the condition and the source of freedom" (1967, 43). But this “return to the source” (to use Amilcar Cabral’s metaphor) is not nativism but a passage of catharsis. What it purges is the obsession with purity, a symptom of the fetishizing drive.
The critique of weapons displaces the weapon of criticism. What Fanon emphasizes is the mixed repertoire of instruments or resources that the colonized masses bring into play--"the old and the new, his own and those of the occupant," resuscitating the "spasmed and rigid culture" so as to conduct a mutually enriching dialogue with other cultures. Here, the Manichean dilemma described in "On Violence" is resolved by the agon of the historical process itself. That is to say, the "universality" achieved with the recognition and acceptance of the "reciprocal relativism of different cultures" on the demise of colonialism necessarily traverses “the experienced realities of the mode of production.” Political economy must be factored in the therapy. Fanon takes into account the improvement of technical knowledge, perfecting of machines within "the dynamic circuit of industrial production," the frequent contacts of people "in the framework of the concentration of capital, that is to say, on the job, discovering the assembly line, the team, production 'time' " (1967, 39). This historical materialist framework of comprehending the social formation grounds Fanon's judgment of cultural racism in the complex interaction of affects, passions, and appetites that control assemblages of bodies and govern the conduct of the whole body politic.

Passage to Terra Incognita

      The theme of cultural metamorphosis broached in "Racism and Culture" is further refined and illustrated in the later essay, "On National Culture" (included in The Wretched of the Earth). What is new here is the inscription of culture in the problematique of the nation and the political invention of national identity. Fanon shifts gears and plots the genesis of agency from the episodes of victimization and resistance. In the process, he underlines the contours of change in the varying responses of indigenous peoples to the violence of the European colonizer, from the poetics of Negritude and the revitalization of Islam to diverse manifestations of a utopian, future-oriented nativism. He charts the trajectory of the organic intellectual--organic to the national-popular movement of decolonization and socialist transformation--from the initial stage of assimilation to the reactive nativism characterized by humor and allegory to the subsequent third stage, the "fighting phase," where the artist tries to represent the advent of a new reality and a "new man." Fanon underscores how tradition changes with the unpredictable mutations of conflict, ushering in a "zone of occult instability" where "our souls are crystallized" with the people. What I would focus on here is not the ambivalence, indeterminacy, or the aura of the apocalyptic sublime, which one can extrapolate between the lines of this discourse, but the conatus or actualization of potential inscribed in certain moments of the national liberation struggle. Instead of monumentalizing “occult instability,” Fanon transfigures it as the cathartic passage of agents from the base to the superstructure, from pathos to desire.
        Originating from the Hegelian matrix of the dialectic of master and slave, the routine approach to Fanon’s thought replicates the West’s “civilizing mission.” In this psychodrama, the native develops and matures by undergoing the trials of self-alienation, doubt, and self-recovery; the three stages outlined in “On National Culture” reconfigure the value and function of tradition and all the properties of the indigenous life-forms in a Manichean environment.  What Fanon apprehends in these life-forms is their capacity for change and infinite adaptability: “the forms of thought and what it feeds on, together with modern techniques of information, language, and dress have dialectically reorganized the people’s intelligences and …. the constant principles which acted as safeguards during the colonial period are now undergoing extremely radical changes” (1961, 225). The affective dynamism of the anticolonial struggle explodes the mystifying influence of customs, folklore, and abstract populism associated with “gratuitous actions,” culminating at the stage in which time, agency, and the habitus of creative strategies of intervention coalesce:  “The colonized man who writes for his people ought to use the past with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope. But to ensure that hope and give it form, he must take part in action and throw himself body and soul into the national struggle…. A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence (1961, 232-33).
Now the dialectics of local habitat and global context intervenes. Culture cannot be divorced from the the organized forces of national liberation that “create” peoplehood and sustain its life.  For this project of fashioning a life-form, the national territory serves as the concretely determinate framework for shaping that national consciousness (which for Fanon is not equivalent to European-style nationalism) that allows “the discovery and encouragement of universal values.” Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national liberation that “leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history” (1961, 247). Fanon concludes this speech with the image of a paradoxical exfoliation of opposites: “It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately only the source of all culture” (247-48). Socialist emancipation requires a planetary vantage point for a comprehensive inventory of all existing historical forces cutting across North/South boundaries so as to harness them for the sake of a worldwide revolutionary project.

 Anatomizing  Insurgency

        My cardinal thesis can be recapitulated at this point. My contention is that Fanon’s idea of national liberation provides the logic of social constitution and assemblage needed for grasping the dynamics of cultural change in any geopolitical formation.  By dissolving the boundaries of self and other, of nation and global ecumene, this new mode of theorizing history undercuts the fashionable postmodernist representation of the body as sheer polymorphous matter charged with desire and presumably a site of resistance against hegemonic capital. In the first place, ensembles of corporeal energies occupy a category different from the isolated, monadic physical body that postmodernists privilege. Moreover, one can argue that bodies are not simply vessels of desire but “a plane of immanence” (to use Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion) where power and freedom born of necessity coincide. Fanon’s theory of the praxis of multitudes not only challenges the binary opposition of bourgeois elite aesthetics and an idealized massified culture of everyday life which motivates a trendy version of Cultural Studies (see, for example, Fiske 1992); it also exposes its paralyzing effect on the critical sensorium of ordinary people. Without a collective conatus catalyzed in the ethics of decolonization, the dogma of methodological individualism will continue to vitiate the attempts of Cultural Studies practitioners to move beyond the limitations of  utilitarian Enlightenment thought (racism, patriarchy, class exploitation). They will continue to affirm the imperatives of white supremacy in the interstices of difference.
         Fanon’s dialectic of the individual and collective has been learned, adapted, and revised by generations of third-world activists and militant cadres since his death in 1961.  In Beyond Postcolonial Theory (1998) I speculated briefly on the import of Amilcar Cabral’s ideas of decolonizing revolution, an alternative  paradigm complementary to if not corrective of Fanon’s inferences from the lives of combatants. Within the entangled milieu of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde islands, Cabral focused on the constitution of the popular revolutionary party and the integral function of the organic petty-bourgeois intellectual as catalyst/mediator of all groups and forces that could be mobilized in a national-democratic alliance against the colonial behemoth. Cabral sharpened Fanon’s criticism of “the pitfalls” of ethnocentric nationalism and spontaneous adventurist practice in the wake of postcolonial regressions. The fertile resonance of Fanon’s theories in Cabral’s strategy and tactics of “people’s war” (analogous to those of Mao and Ho Chi Minh in Asia) may be properly weighed when we keep in mind the variegated fortunes and vicissitudes of the decolonizing experience in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and more recently in Zimbabwe and post-apartheid South Africa.
 The great revolutionary thinker C.L.R. James perspicaciously estimated Fanon’s pivotal place in the tradition of “black power” which ranged all the way from Marcus Garvey to W.E.B. Du Bois, George Padmore, Nkrumah, and Cabral. In a 1967 lecture, James proposed that Fanon deserves the credit of warning us of “the old imperialism creeping back.” Paraphrasing Fanon, James urged his audience: “We have to carry on a desperate all-out struggle against those native leaders who may have fought for independence. Many do not represent the forward movement of the underdeveloped peoples to some new stage of economic and political progress. Says Fanon: after independence those become the enemy” (1992, 367).  Further, James (1971) illustrated the truth of Fanon’s warning in his essay on Kwame Nkrumah and “the Gold Coast Revolution,” concentrating on the decisive role of the masses in shaping the direction and goals of the revolutionary movement and its leaders, a principle of dialectical relationship absent in, for example, Ali Mazrui’s controversial 1966 portrait of Nkrumah as “The Leninist Czar” or his qualified praise of Julius Nyerere’s intellectualist politics before and after the Arusha Declaration of 1967 (Mazrui 1998). Opposed to the neoliberal Africanists and postcolonialists inspired by the Cold War and globalization orthodoxies, the works of Fanon, Cabral, and C.L.R. James offer axioms, hypotheses, and critical instruments with which to interrogate, demystify, and replace the sacrosanct illusions premised on the “free market”of goods and ideas in a world unequally divided by invidious racial, class, sexual and gender distinctions. Culture cannot escape being accountable and answerable to the basic needs, demands, and struggles of flesh-and-blood individuals and peoples in our more precarious and risky habitat.

Re-visioning Salome’s Dance

    One way of illustrating Fanon’s singular mode of interrogating cultural practice may be sketched here in a brief commentary on his essay, “Algeria Unveiled” (in A Dying Colonialism). A recent appraisal of Fanon by Ato Sekyi-Otu regards this text as Fanon’s finest exposition of the “possibility of expressive freedom” discovered through the instrumentalization of the veil. A phenomenology of existential choice reinterprets Fanon’s discourse as an allegory of Hegelian dialectics: “The measure of freedom is the degree to which space and symbol, area of action and device of self-disclosure, are multiply configurable, open to the agent’s choice of ends and means, and are thus no longer signifiers of a radically compulsory and constricted identity” (1996, 226). This flexible disposition of the veil profiles, for Fanon, the eventual “transformation of the Algerian woman.” It is this dialectic of experience occurring in the “public theater of revolutionary action” that, for Sekyi-Otu,  embodies the resonance and efficacy of Fanon’s prefigurative hermeneutics.
     With the problematique of Cultural Studies as the context of exchange, my reading of Fanon’s mobilization of a cultural motif is somewhat different. I consider Fanon’s programmatic text as a critique of postmodernist ethnography that privileges subjective fantasies, aleatory gestures, cyborg speech, and "travelling” localizations. Fanon in fact subjects psychoanalytic speculations to the actual historic disposition of forces, using the assemblage of “composable” relationships (Hardt 1995,  28) on an immanent field of forces as a means of eliminating the need for transcendence implicit in a posited “unconscious” which perverse “Desire” supposedly inhabits. In other words, the subsumption of Fanon’s cognition of racism and sexual oppression to the experience of personal trauma (contradistinguished from fantasy) may be disingenuous in that it ascribes too much innocence to the victim on the pretext of saving him (Alessandrini 1999).
 In extrapolating Fanon’s unique critical stance, I deploy some concepts taken from the philosopher Benedict Spinoza in order to illuminate how the “common notion” of national liberation takes shape in the course of an uncompromisingly materialist and anti-empiricist account of the Algerian woman’s role, both spontaneous and constrained, in the productive rationality of the revolution. Of course, allowance must be made to the different historical and economic circumstances of the two thinkers: Spinoza reflecting the humanist revolt of the youthful mercantile bourgeoisie against feudal decadence, Fanon responding to the moribund monopoly bourgeoisie in its desperate agony to save the empire.
         Fanon begins with the customary association of the veil as the synecdochic mark of Arab culture and society for the Western gaze. While the masculine garb allows a “modicum of heterogeneity,” the white veil that defines Algerian female society permits no alteration or modification.  In the early thirties, French colonialism seized the initiative to abolish “forms of existence likely to evoke a national reality.” Based on the premise that behind the overt patrilineal armature of Algerian society lies a “matrilineal” essence, Fanon seizes on the patriarchal animus of colonial metaphysics. He rehearses the France’s fabled mission civilizatrice: “If we want to destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer the women; we must go and find them behind the veil where they hide themselves and in the houses where the men keep them out of sight” (38).  Algerian society thus stands condemned as “sadistic and vampirish,” its internal mechanics in need of revamping and overhauling.
         This bureaucratic consensus to forcibly emancipate the cloistered Algerian woman became a major policy of the French colonial administration. The rationale is strategic: to overcome the Algerian male resistance to assimilation via the control of women. This implements reproductive control, bodily and spiritually, in all senses. But up to 1959, Fanon observes, “the dream of a total domestication of Algerian society by means of “unveiled women aiding and sheltering the occupier” continued to haunt the colonial authorities. All schemes to persuade the Algerian intellectual (not just the fellah or peasant) failed. Fanon sums up this attitude to the veil as symptomatic of “the simplified and pejorative way” the French regarded the “system of values” used by the colonized to resist the erasure of their “distinct identity.” Identity here equals culture, and culture as shared history or cohabitation distinguishes the evolving body of the nation.
So imperial penetration rides the locomotive of progress. What follows is Fanon’s attempt to describe the sociopsychological causality gravitating around the penetration of indigenous society by the assimilating power. The tropes of aggressive sexuality deployed here mark the scope and latitude of the disciplinary regime France tried to impose, with the weapon of sexual seduction ironically betraying the impotence of the colonizer:

     Every rejected veil disclosed to the eyes of the colonialists horizons until then forbidden, and revealed to them, piece by piece, the flesh of Algeria laid bare….  Every new Algerian woman unveiled announced to the occupier an Algerian society whose systems of defence were in the process of dislocation, open and breached. Every veil that fell, every body that became liberated from the traditional embrace of the haik, every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer (42).

But the impression of conquest blurs as soon as Fanon inquires into the West’s cultural imaginary, with its fatal conflation of appearance and essence, phenomenon and reality, generating the Others as the guarantee of the Self’s mastery. All colonial attempts to penetrate the exoticized and objectified body—the collective body politic of exploited women and their families—recoils into an exposure of sterile blindness:  the idealist mistakes the trappings of tradition for the force of  the reality that sustains and renews them everyday.

Unsolicited  Disclosures

        Fanon understands that for the colonizer in control of the machinery of representation, every mask or disguise assumes that a truth lurks behind it. This translates hermeneutics into technocratic subterfuge. The search for the hidden face is invested with “romantic exoticism,” erotic magic, and the will to possess that belies any claim to appreciate the physical beauty of Algerian women so as to share it with others. Fanon argues that the violence of revealing the Algerian woman’s beauty is really directed at something else under the skin, so to speak; the quest is to bare the secret or mystery in order to break her opaque alterity, “making her available for adventure.” What frustrates the European’s desire to possess the Other and fulfill his dream is the habitus attached to the veil: “This women who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer. There is no reciprocity…. She does not yield herself, does not give herself, does not offer herself” (44). The “secret” is then immediately reduced to ugliness and deformation through a rape that evokes a deceptive sense of freedom for the conqueror, a passivity whose real cause escapes his comprehension—hence, the “sad” passions (e.g., humility, pity) shrouding the Manichean metropolis.
     What is striking here in Fanon’s commentary is the way the erotic affect produces a disintegration of the Western psyche. This constellation of symptoms, mapped here as “faults” and “ fertile gaps,” appears in dreams and criminal behavior. The rending of the veil then leads to an act of violent appropriation charged with a “para-neurotic brutality” projected onto the victimized: the “timid” woman hovering in the fantasy becomes transformed into an insatiable nymphomaniac. Fanon describes the dream narrative of the colonizer circumscribing a “field of women” (gynaeceum, harem). In the dream, the woman-victim “screams, struggles like a doe, and as she weakens and faints, is penetrated, martyrized, ripped apart” (46).
         The fatal mistake of the colonizer resides in his belief that he freely masters and controls the situation. Apprehending the decomposition that afflicts the colonizer, sign of an ironic pathos in which one’s capacity for grasping causality or the chain of necessity is diminished, Fanon examines next the reaction of the colonized. Initially the conduct of the occupier “determines the centers of resistance around which a people’s will to survive becomes organized” (1965, 47).  And so the veil, formerly an inert and undifferentiated element in quotidian existence, acquires a new significance: it becomes a taboo or cult object.
Contraposed to the Western focus of pedagogical energies to destroy the veil, the Algerians then weave a whole universe of affective passions (obscured causalities) around this piece of clothing to thwart the colonizer’s attacks, or at least to bring about an “armed truce.” The principle Fanon applies here guides his entire cognitive and didactic mapping of the alignment of political forces, a principle encapsulated in the maxim: “problems are resolved in the very movement that raises them” (1965, 48). In other words, the modes and occasions of struggle entail a whole repertoire of ethical choices and tactics. In response to the ferocity of the French settler and “his delirious attachment to the national territory,” the Algerian revolutionary leadership decided to mobilize women to the fullest, urging them to summon a “spirit of sacrifice”as they became part of an extended and highly differentiated revolutionary machine. This decision represents the identity of will and intellect posited by Spinoza in his Ethics (1994), precipitating joy-passion born from the common notion, the composition of bodies in mutually useful relationships (Deleuze 1988).
     Circumstances seized and assayed dictated the methodology of resistance.  Women were then incorporated into the guerilla combat units mindful of the differential rhythm of their participation. In the process of constituting this new assemblage, the FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front) realized how the taboo or cult of the veil undermined the strategy of inventing commonalities across gender and class. Reinforcing tradition as a means of resistance led to women’s loss of ease and assurance, negative affects that attenuated their cooperation with the military forces: “Having been accustomed to confinement, her body did not have the normal mobility before a limitless horizon of avenues, of unfolded sidewalks, of houses, of people dodged or bumped into. This relatively cloistered life, with its known, categorized, regulated comings and goings, made any immediate revolution seem a dubious proposition” (1965, 49).
Determined by the horizon of war and death by torture, the organization of women partisans (efficient agency for combat) accumulates knowledge of the microphysics of bodily motion that eventually precipitates the emergence of a new character “without the aid of the imagination,” the coefficient of play and imitation in art. Before Fanon offers examples of women’s creative actuality, he recapitulates the theme of culture change by acknowledging the advent of a new protagonist who will soon dismantle the Manichean theater of regimented subjects deployed in demarcated zones: “It is an authentic birth in a pure state, without preliminary instruction. There is no character to imitate, on the contrary, there is an intense dramatization, a continuity between the woman and the revolutionary. The Algerian woman rises directly to the level of tragedy” (1965, 50). Lucid awareness of what is and is not possible under the circumstances enables this symbolic redemption and surmounting of odds—Fanon’s eloquent hymn to the heroic woman warriors of his time.

Deciphering Stigmata

     A hiatus intervenes at this juncture of the discourse. Fanon evokes a scenario of passages and shifts of position, maneuvers leading to the urgent decision to involve all women gradually in the daily tasks of the revolution.  Attention to the complex architectonics of space, a heuristic cartography of place and environment, where state power and the subject’s right  (the conatus of persevering and maximizing one’s capabilities or powers) confront each other, preoccupies Fanon. This allows him to trace the genealogy of freedom and grasp the coextensiveness of natural right (enjoyed by all humans) and power, in a manner close to the spirit of Spinoza’s politics (1951; see Gildin 1973; Balibar 1998).  Ideas dealing with the play of forces are foregrounded, marginalizing passive affects at the mercy of illusion, notions of contingency, and irrationalities that pervade social existence.
Knowledge of the objective situation and praxis become indivisible in the collective project of achieving national autonomy. Freedom inhabits the space of necessity, Fanon suggests, when the mind of the revolutionary organization acquires an idea of the nature of the body politic corresponding to its essence and objective: its affirmation of life, the collective joy of shared agency. This idea becomes manifest in the Algerian masses becoming the subject of revolution in the actuality of combat, in taking political decisions and implementing them. This is the substance of the Algerian revolution against French colonialism and its international allies.
     A geopolitical surveyor par excellence, Fanon sketches for us the stage in which the tragic mask or persona assumed by women partisans will demonstrate its irrepressible hubris. It is the revolutionary process that destroys “the protective mantle of the Kasbah,” its “almost organic curtain of safety.” It neutralizes the trauma of withdrawal and ostracism. With the fragility of Manichean barriers exposed by decolonizing reason, the Algerian woman sallies forth out of the immobilized quarters into the bare streets of the settlers’ city; in doing so, she destroys the boundaries separating tradition and modernity, the self-reproducing organs of alienation and anomie, established by the colonial state.  But even while new linkages are made and new channels of communication and logistics are set up by her own skills and intelligence, a recomposition of internal relations proceeds from within. We witness the shifting velocities of women’s striving to increase her power/right of transforming her place in society. This is the locus where the consensus of national liberation, the power of the multitude expressed to the fullest, transpires:
Each time [she] ventures into the European city, the Algerian woman must achieve victory over herself, over her childish fears. She must consider the image of the occupier lodged somewhere in her mind and in her body, remodel it, initiate the essential work of eroding it, make it inessential, remove something of the shame that is attached to it, devalidate it….  Initially subjective, the breaches made in colonialism are the result of a victory of the colonized over their old fear and over the atmosphere of despair distilled day after day by a colonialism that has incrusted itself with the prospect of enduring forever (1965, 52-53).

        An ethics of national liberation materializes through the vicissitudes of  political antagonisms. Internal relations (compatibilities, elective affinities, disaffiliations) are rearranged on the basis of what promotes the striving for the maximum expression of the collective body’s power. This involves the associative movements of love, desire, and solidarity that generate common notions, purposes, and projects giving direction to the popular struggle. With the overcoming of passions bred by the mystifications and falsehoods that comprise the oppressor’s ideological apparatus, a new agency is born armed for the next phase—the counterhegemonic use of terror. This signals the phase when “the Algerian woman penetrates a little further into the flesh of the Revolution,” her actions transvaluing the whole Manichean asymmetry of power. This unprecedented transvaluation inverts the custom-ordained proportion of motion and rest, speed and slowness, that has characterized the position of women’s bodies in urban space. The rationale of this reversal is suggested by Spinoza’s proposition: “Whatsoever increases or diminishes, helps or hinders the power of activity in our body, the idea thereof increases or diminishes, helps or hinders the power of thought in our mind” (1994, 162).
     We arrive at a point of no return. The systematic adoption of political forms of terror cannot be fully understood apart from the qualitative progression of the anticolonial struggle and its corresponding tempo of change.  Fanon sums up the stages of deliberation and the nuances of attitudes toward the “circuit of terrorism and counter-terrorism.” He reminds us that from this point on the Algerian woman becomes inseparable from the constitutive force of the militant and conscientized (to use Paulo Freire’s term) multitude.  Her “speed” is now synchronized to the momentum of the national-democratic mobilization. This is also the moment when Fanon warns against confusing revolutionary terrorism with the anarchist cult of violence, the fetishism of the deed, and the mystique of death.  
Fanon almost reaches the intensity of Spinoza’s intransigent affirmation of life in the course of defying tyranny, pain, fanaticism, and ignorance: “The fidai [guerilla combatant] has a rendezvous with the life of the Revolution, and with his own life…. To be sure, he does not shrink before the possibility of losing his life or the independence of his country, but at no moment does he chose death” (1965, 58).  The Algerian woman’s spirit of sacrifice is in fact a commitment to joy—a form of praxis identified with an enhanced, active life coincident with the nation’s construction of democratic power, the vehicle for human fulfillment in the decolonized community.

Carnal Logistics

         In the section on the reconfiguration of the woman’s body, Fanon sketches an ethics of separation and assemblage of bodies in action. This stage approximates Spinoza’s concept of freedom as the transition from the natural realm (the horizon of war) to civil society where, for Fanon, the nation-people functions as transformative agency. Freedom is the recognition of necessity, of the chain of causality, sparked by intellectual reflection. This passage to freedom is symbolized by the transformation of the Algerian woman’s “subject-position” as a relation of parts that can be decomposed and reconstituted, parts with proportions of motion and rest regulated by the variety of encounters in life. In this context, the veil becomes the signifier that actualizes woman’s power/right in a logic of collective praxis that breaks down the Manichean duality.
We arrive at a dramaturgic epitome of social liberation. In the following excerpt, we can discern the motive of Fanon’s conversion of cultural-studies ethnography into an ethical-political reciprocity of body and the world marked by the varying modalities of the expression of woman’s unleashed effectivity:
     The body of the young Algerian woman, in traditional society, is revealed to her by its coming to maturity and by the veil.  The veil covers the body and disciplines it, tempers it, at the very time when it experiences its phase of greatest effervescence.  The veil protects, reassures, isolates…. Without the veil she has an impression of her body being cut up into bits, put adrift; the limbs seem to lengthen indefinitely.  When the Algerian woman has to cross a street, for a long time she commits errors of judgment as to the exact distance to be negotiated. The unveiled body seems to escape, to dissolve.  She has an impression of being improperly dressed, even of being naked. She experiences a sense of incompleteness with great intensity.  She has the anxious feeling that something is unfinished, and along with this a frightful sensation of disintegrating. The absence of the veil distorts the Algerian woman’s corporeal pattern. She quickly has to invent new dimensions for her body, new means of muscular control. She has to create for herself an attitude of unveiled-woman-outside. She must overcome all timidity, all awkwardness (for she must pass for a European), and at the same time be careful not to overdo it, not to attract notice to herself. The Algerian woman who walks stark naked into the European city relearns her body, re-establishes it in a totally revolutionary fashion (1965, 59). 

The organizing skill and resourcefulness recounted here exemplifies not individual ingenuity but the contrapuntal play of bodies and political milieu where what used to be merely accidental encounters of veiled women evolves into organized ethical striving for expression of their united power. This accords with the democratic mobilizing principle expressed by Spinoza: "If two come together and unite their strength, they have jointly more power, and consequently more right against other forces in nature, than either of them alone; and the more there be that join in alliance, the more right they will collectively possess” (1951, 296).  The multitude as substrate of change now incorporates women, a major component of self-determination or national independence, amplifying the potential of the whole emergent nation. Women thus symbolize the power and intelligence of the masses sprung from the inexhaustible matrix of anti-imperialist revolution.
          The final testimony to how the necessity of revolutionary combat functions as the condition for freedom of the colonized subaltern coincides with the motion of women’s bodies in the streets of Algiers. Fanon describes the way women concealed bombs and weapons, illustrating how the organizing of composable parts fused spontaneous and planned elements, integrating will and contingency. The veil’s combination and permutation of opposites disrupts the conventional dichotomy of tradition and modernity. It also displaces the colonial contract, the normative codes of duty and obligation, into a field of needs and exigencies defined by the overdetermined historical situation:

     Removed and reassumed again and again, the veil has been manipulated, transformed into a technique of camouflage, into a means of struggle. The virtually taboo character assumed by the veil in the colonial situation disappeared almost entirely in the course of the liberation struggle….
     The Algerian woman’s body, which in an initial phase was pared down, now swelled. Whereas in the previous period the body had to be made slim and disciplined to make it attractive and seductive, it now had to be squashed, made shapeless and even ridiculous.  This, as we have seen, is the phase during which she undertook to carry bombs, grenades, machine-gun clips.
     The enemy, however, was alerted, and in the streets one witnessed what became a commonplace spectacle of Algerian women glued to the wall, on whose bodies the famous magnetic detectors, the “frying pans,” would be passed. Every veiled woman, every Algerian woman became suspect. There was no discrimination. This was the period during which men, women, children, the whole Algerian people, experienced at one and the same time their national vocation and the recasting of the new Algerian society (1965, 61-62).

Envisaging Redemption

      Semiotically, Fanon’s text articulates the metonymic and metaphoric, the synchronic and diachronic, levels of the decolonizing narrative. We witness in this revisiting of a phase in the national-liberation struggle the making of the Algerian masses via the composition of multiple relations between women’s bodies and their circumstantial inscription.  Fanon’s “genealogy” is really a recording of the passage of new subjects catalyzed by the “historic dynamism of the veil.” Determined by beliefs associated with tradition, the veil functioned at first as a mechanism of resistance, opposed to the occupier’s design to “unveil” Algeria.  This reaction entrenched passive affects sprung from uncomprehended external causes. In the second phase, Fanon summarizes, the veil was instrumentalized to solve the new problems created by the struggle. The veil refunctioned thus unfolds a horizon of composable relations bringing people together, enacting in the process the constitution of social power itself and its consensual legitimacy. Now with the power of acting determined by adequate ideas (knowledge of the nexus of causality), the theology of Manichean polarity dissolves and a new political organism is created that transforms what is “natural” into social history. The ethical striving underwritten by the anticolonial revolution charts the passage from the immobilized “natural” Manichean order of segregated habitats and locations to the free organizing of capacities, exploding the fallacies of bureaucratic representation, the reified market, and the injustice of the imperial social contract.
     This Spinozistic reading of Fanon’s text, arguably a hermeneutic thought-experiment never tried before, pursues the line of inquiry made by a variant of historical materialism in its postmodern interlude (see Negri 1991). In Spinoza’s political theory, we find the primacy of collective human praxis, an expression of the constitutive modality of the multitude as a determined being. Power is theoretically constructed out of the passage from human striving (conatus) through desire and imagination to the image of the power of thinking and acting as a complex productive force, generating the subject with the physical accumulation of movements.  Negri writes: “Collective human praxis, while becoming politics, supersedes and comprehends the individual virtues in a constitutive process tending toward a general condition” (1991, 188).  This condition assumes the spatial form of the City (also translated as “commonwealth”), a “collective person with common body and soul….determined by the power of the multitude, which is led, as it were, by one mind” (Spinoza 1951, 303).  This City then subverts and displaces the Manichean terrain of exclusivity, hate, and stigmatization.  Fanon anticipates the building of this City as the site of communal affections and friendships, of generosity overcoming fear and hope; a City recognized as the multifaceted protean structure that “prefigures and imitates the work of reason” (Deleuze 1992, 267).
     We have now arrived at the intuition of “free necessity” at the heart of the national-liberation model, the impulses of the future incarnate in everyday circumstances and regulating their course.  Fanon’s vision of cultural revolution implicit in A Dying Colonialism testifies to what Irene Gendzier (1973) calls Fanon’s evolution from the psychologist to the political militant. The transmogrification of European humanism in the torture of political prisoners triggered this shift. We have seen how in “Algeria Unveiled” and other essays Fanon’s disruption of the separatist, apartheid logic of colonialism harmonizes with a radical  transformative politics that is anathema to the cosmopolitan, ludic pluralism of mainstream Cultural Studies practitioners.
Given this brief exploration of Fanon’s insight into the productive social dynamic of the national-liberation project, one which is extremely relevant to the crisis of the South in our globalized cyberspace of exchange, I venture this hypothesis:  Fanon’s value for us today inheres in this discursive practice of a cultural politics that goes beyond the populist articulation of heterogeneous forces along a “chain of equivalence” (insofar as such equivalence is already embodied or contained as a causal motivation and impetus within the semiotics of language, polemical prose,  rhetoric and the virtual Babel of speech-acts replicating the structuralist “process without a subject”) to advance and illuminate the ethical drama of the multitude in the actual revolutionary process. Articulation theory cannot resolve the problems of racism and sexism founded on procedural rights of a free-market society.
For Fanon, culture as communication and praxis, not just language or discourse, is key to the revolutionary transformation of the whole communal situation in which power (potentia), the capacity for joyful experience, is rooted in the “adequate ideas” of our species-being as embedded in the totality of nature. By “adequate ideas” we refer to the appreciation of the body’s infinite capacities attuned to our reasoning power identical to our given natural right, our susceptibility to working with others in common endeavors of increasing the scope and reach of humanity’s powers. The framework of intelligibility for Fanon is the rationality of the national-liberation agenda where the recognition of Others overcomes the seemingly permanent alienation or trauma invested in and fostered by the Manichean paradigm of subjugation, self-destructive passions, and alienating difference. In this trajectory of cultural inquiry inspired by Fanon’s example, word and deed, mind and body, become one
In sum, Fanon’s critique opens up for interrogation the mechanisms and apparatus of subject-making or identity formation, the codes for the production of subjects, in a hegemonic market-dominated formation. His inquiry endorses the aim of CS to break habits, alter or change social dispositions—habitus, in Bourdieu’s (2000) terminology, enhancing “the production of a desire to become another kind of subject, to live another kind of life” (Osborne 2000, 51). Such alteration has been the permanent goal of methods such as the romantic attempt to defamiliarize what is conventional and normalized, or the Brechtian technique of alienation and narrativization of what has been dehistoricized, frozen and mystified. Awareness of racialized legitimization of imperial power blasts the continuum of the norm of “white supremacy” as the unmarked, conventionally accepted habit of social life

Across the Pacific, to the Tropical Outpost of Empire

    Meanwhile, let us examine the situation of CS in the Philippines, a former U.S. colony and now, though nominally independent, subsisting as a neocolonial outpost of globalized Wall Street/Washington/Pentagon. Note that the Philippines is not in the Caribbean or in Latin America, but in southeast Asia, near China, Vietnam and Indonesia—a geopolitical reality not registered in most cultural baedekers. However, Fanon reached the tropical islands via African-American disseminators such as George Jackson and Caribbean artists (Aime Cesaire) who reject the ambivalent, opportunist performativity of Homi Bhabha (1999) and a generation of postcolonial apologists for the Empire.
Practically a faux mimesis of Hawaii or Puerto Rico, the Philippines is now distinguished as the largest exporter of migrant labor in the world—more than 10 million Filipinos work as contracted labor around the planet—and recently as the burgeoning call-center headquarters of most transnational corporate firms. Apart from this, the Philippines boasts of one of the enduring terrorist groups, the Abu Sayyaf, that sprang from the US-trained mujahideens in Afghanistan (like Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda contingent) which lends justification to the permanent stationing of US “Special Forces,” CIA agents, etc. all over the islands. Unfortunately, just as CS has not given due attention to the post 9/11 “war on terrorism,” CS has also ignored the plight of the Moro peoples who have been subjugated and exploited for centuries by Spanish, American and Christian-Filipino colonialisms. This is perhaps a project or agenda for the next decades, or even century.
    As already indicated, CS originating from UK and North America focuses on the complex relations of “power” and “knowledge” (knowledge-production) at a specific historical conjuncture (Seventies and Eighties). Its axioms include the rejection of Enlightenment modernity/progress, metanarratives (paradigms; world-views), premised on the rational subject. Symptomatic of the alienation of Western intellectuals from technocratic market-society during the Cold War, CS reflects the crisis of finance/monopoly capitalism in its imperialist stage. It seeks to transcend reified systems  by way of privileging the differend,differance (Lyotard; Derrida), diffuse power (Foucault; Deleuze), life-world or everyday life (Habermas; de Certeau) inspired by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, and Saussure.
    Orthodox CS identifies modernity with capitalism, hence its postmodernist temper. Despite acknowledging the historicity of the discipline, postmodernist academics (Geertz, Grossberg, Clifford) give primacy to “the flow of social discourse” and the “essentially contestable” genealogy of culture. Engaged with the singularity of events centering on love, sentiments, conscience, and the existential or ethical moment in order to “bring us in touch with strangers,” with Others, postmodern CS seeks to interrogate the foundational aims of linguistics (Jackobson), psychoanalysis (Freud), philosophy (Kant, Hegel) and  political economy (Marx) by substituting  the ambivalence, contingency, and hybridity of “lived experience” for labor/social praxis as the focus of investigation. Focused on what escapes language and thought, CS  has fallen into the dualism it ritualistically condemns, complete with the mystique of a neoliberal individualism enabled by presumably value-free, normative “free market” absolutism. 
Nihilism’s  Siren Song

    Anti-foundationalism and anti-metanarratives distinguish orthodox CS today. Rejecting classical reason, CS refuses any grounding in political or social action as a perversion of knowledge for the ends of power. Valuing negative critique as an antidote to ideology, CS leads up to a fetishism of the Void, the deconstructive “Sublime” as a substitute for a thoroughgoing critique of the authority of received values and institutions. By various ruses of irony, uncanny cynicism and “sly mimicry,” It ends up apologizing for the status quo. Anti-authoritarianism is trivialized in careerist anecdotes,  and CS becomes reduced to conferences and publicity about fantasies of revolutionary social movements.
    Submerged and eventually displaced, the critical dimension of CS drawn  from Western Marxism (Gramsci, Althusser, Lukacs) has disappeared in the neoconservative tide that began with Reagan/Thatcher  in the Eighties. This neoconservatism continues to this day under the slogan of the “global war on terrorism.” Meanwhile, attention to racism, gender, sexism and other non-class contradictions, particularly in the colonized and peripheral formations, sharpened with the Civil Rights struggles in the US, the youth revolt, and the worldwide opposition to the Vietnam war and the current if precarious hegemony of the Global North.
    Mainstream CS today still focuses on consumption, audience response, Deleuzian desire, affects, irony, avoidance of the critique of ideology, the culture industry, and unequal division of social labor.  However, some versions of CS invokes Simone de Beauvoir, Fanon, CLR James, W.E.B.Du Bois, Rosa Luxemburg, Paulo Freire and other “third world” activists in an effort to renew its original vocation of contributing to fundamental social change. Its Foucaultian notion of “specific intellectuals” addressing a “conjunctural constituency”  may call attention to the need to address state violence and hegemonic apparatuses of public control and repression.
          Like any global trend, CS can be “filipinized” by the creative application of its original radical critique to our conditions. Various forms of CS, as mediated by “subalternists” and other “third world” conduits, have influenced such historians concerned with the marginalized Others (peasants, women, religious and ethnic communities, etc.). But except for the Latin American “theology of liberation” as a form of CS, they have all wrongly assumed that the Philippines is no longer a neocolonial, dependent formation, replete with diverse contradictions centering on the oligarchic-comprador domination of the majority of the people (workers, peasants, OFWs, Moros and other indigenous groups). The question of a singular Filipino modernity—genuine national sovereignty, autonomous individuals free from Spanish or American tutelage, a bourgeois public sphere—has been conflated and transmogrified by insidious postmodern mystifications legitimized by the illusory promise of emancipation by avid consumption epitomized in megamalls, Internet/Facebook celebrity culture, and a predatory commodifying consumerist ethos.
    The examples of what I consider the inventors of Filipino cultural studies—Jose Rizal (in “The Indolence of Filipinos” and “The Philippines a Century Hence”), Isabelo de los Reyes (folklore and ethnic studies), counteless vernacular novelists, poets, and playwrights; and memoir-writers (Mabini, veterans of 1896 and the Huk uprising)—applied criticial principles derived from Europe to the specific political and socioeconomic situations in the colony/neocolony. In the process, the power/knowledge complex acquired concrete elaboration in terms of how “everyday life”—culture as ordinary habits or patterns (Raymond Williams)--cannot escape its over-determination by the historical institutions and practices imposed by the colonial powers and mediated by regional/local ruling bloc. Time and space offer intelligible meanings by way of the contradictions between the colonial/neocolonial hegemonic institutions and the acceptance/resistance of the colonized natives. Such meanings can be found in the narratives of individuals/collectives in which the notion of subjectivity defined by various levels of contradictions (Filipino versus American, patriarchal power versus women, “civilized” versus indigenous,etc.) can be discerned embedded in the totality of social relations at specific historical moments. I am thinking of a “knowable community” with institutions and habitus, structure of power relations, not just a “structure of feeling” constituted by heterogeneous experiences
   
Arguments for  Indigenizing CS

In Philippine CS, the question of language assumes primacy because intellectual discourse and exchanges cannot sidetrack the problem of communicating to the larger public. Democratizing the means of communication is apart of the process of overthrowing the oligarchic elite and the reproduction of class and gender inequality. Such a public needs to be developed by the pedagogical program of a developing CS curriculum. The prevalence of English as an elite marker/imprimatur of privileged status will prevent this public sphere from emerging. Linked to this is the position of popular culture which has always radicalized CS by eliminating the divide between the elite/canonical culture and the proletarian/mass culture. Control of the means of communication needs to be addressed as well as the participation of a wider public in dialogues and exchanges.
    CS, if it aspires to actualize its critical potential and transformative, needs to always address the major and minor contradictions of each society within a globalizing planet. The neoliberal market ideology that pervades everyday life/consciousness militates against the growth of a critical sensibility and the development of the faculties/powers of the species, hence CS needs to focus its analytic instruments on the commodification of the life-world and everyday life by the oligopolistic capitalist order. In the Philippines, the unprecedented diaspora of domestics and overseas contract workers (OFWs) constitute the prime specimen for study and critique. This involves not only the symbolic violence of language use but also the material violence of hunger, disease, State torture and extrajudicial killings.

    In this critique mainly focused on the aborted promise of CS in the Global North, it is neither strategic nor propitious to describe in detail what the adaptation--or indigenization, if you like--of a Eurocentric CS paradigm would look like attuned to the needs and demands of neocolonized subjects in the Global South. Parts of that description may be found in my previous works (San Juan 1996,  2000, 2008). It would certainly require a longer, sustained mapping of the sociopolitical terrain of six decades after the 1946 formal independence. A political economy of group consensus and habits of belief such as, for example, the inventory of contradictions drawn up by social scientist Kenneth Bauzon (1991) would be useful to calculate the scale and degree of continued Filipino mimicry of inhumane models to perpetuate inequity and underdevelopment.
    My task here is circumscribed: to indicate in broaf strokes the limitations and inadequacies of that paradigm for subjugated or dependent constituencies of the Empire.  It is foolhardy to undertake this task until we have cleared up crucial theoretical hurdles. The first is the problem of naming the subaltern agency. Obviously the identification of "Filipino" and "Filipino nation" remains contentious, unsettled, intractable. At best we can only handle the "interpretants" (both denoted and connoted items) of those signifiers provisionally, given not only the existence of heterogeneous components of that ethnic signified "Filipino" but also the fact that the whole ethos (moral, aesthetic, evaluative) of Filipino culture, not to speak of its cognitive and existential aspects, remains suspended in the undecided battlefields of the national-democratic revolution. Mutating modes of inclusion and exclusion of group actors prevail. We can only stipulate our parameters of discourse in the light of what has been accomplished so far in liberating ourselves, neocolonized subjects, from imperialist political, sociocultural, economic strangleholds.

         For now, suffice it to remark on the need to adhere to the axiom of historical specificity (Korsch 1971) and a measure of philosophical rigor in defining such parameters. Above all, the question of ideology and the political economy of knowledge-production cannot be ignored. We cannot escape both the rules of our own communities and that of the totalizing diplomatic-technological state apparatuses of empire that modifies, coopts  and sublimates those rules. The dialectical laws of motion of interlocked asymmetrical nation-states cannot be dismissed as simply reactive or aprioristic. In this light, Virgilio Enriquez's project of inventing sikolohiyang Pilipino during the nationalist resurgence of the 1960s and early 1970s may be symptomatically read as a culmination of all previous decolonizing initiatives (from Rizal and the Propagandistas to Recto, Constantino, and Sison) to articulate a program and world-view for the masses struggling for social justice, popular democracy, and genuine independence.  It was institutionally predictable but also serendipituous.

         An analogous clarification can be offered for the roles that Filipino historians adopted before, during, and after the Marcos dictatorship. While inspired by Indian subalternist historians (laboring under the aegis of Foucaultian/post-structuralist thought) to de-center what was perceived as bourgeois-oriented chronicles such as those by Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato Constantino, Rafael Ileto (1998) succeeded to some extent in assaying the value of popular culture (the pasyon, etc.) and other marginal practices in the construction of a “non-linear” narrative of Filipino events before and after the 1896 revolution. It is doubtful whether Agoncillo or Constantino really pursued a linear, one-directional bias. Nevertheless, the revisionist method is not an original “native” discovery. Even before the late-twentieth century diaspora, the Filipino intelligentsia has been open-minded,  highly susceptible to global influences. Subalternist historiography is the product of a long record of countering the positivist, Comte-Rankean version of historicism, from the British social-history tradition (Samuel 1981) to the French Annales school and its evolutionist/functionalist offshoot in the Alfred McCoy-Ben Kerkvliet interventions in re-writing Philippine history in a more sophisticated way than Stanley Karnow's apologetic product, In Our Image (1989). Meanwhile, the Marcos Establishment historian Zeus Salazar tried to retool Enriquez's sikolohiya by purging it of its liberatory impulse and anchoring a populist version of the past in an evolving Filipino idiom via his pantayong pananaw scheme. It may be premature to judge the reformist efficacy of this effort in renewing or rehabilitating the fields of local historiography and moribund anthropology. Salazar’s disciples seem resigned to the neoliberal dispensation of the post-Marcos order, ensconced in the academic commerce of fabricating idiosyncratic terminology for archaic ideas.
    Ramon Guillermo (2003) has provided us a useful inventory of Salazar's heroic effort, together with proposals for improving its method and scope. But both Salazar and Guillermo have so far sidestepped the fundamental issue (which transcends the old emic/etic binary) of how the notion of rationality--communicative action, in another framework--central to the intellectual metier of a global community of scientific inquirers to understand and appraise cultures can be surpassed or transcended. This issue has been elaborated in the volume Rationality (Wilson 1970)—just to cite one compilation--in which a survey of the conflicting arguments prompted Alasdair MacIntyre's observation that "the understanding of a people in terms of their own concepts and beliefs does in fact tend to preclude understanding them in any other terms" (1970, 130).
    MacIntyre does not fully endorse the functionalist view that institutions must be grasped not in terms of what they mean for the agents, but in terms of what necessary needs and purposes they serve; however, he does not fully agree with Peter Winch's untenable belief that communities can only be properly understood and judged in terms of their own internally generated norms and beliefs--a proposition that pantayong pananaw advocates seem to favor, despite earnest denials (see Sta. Maria 2000).  But even assuming that isolated communities in a capitalist-gobalized world is possible, long after Max Weber took time off from “value-free” pursuits to distinguish explanation from interpretation, proponents of the primacy of hermeneutic understanding still need the benefit of analytic explanation if they want to avoid circularity and self-serving solipsism. After all, why bother understanding Others? Oppositional American thinkers such as Marcus Raskin, Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Susan Buck-Morss and others have begun to engage with the antinomies of knowledge-production faced earlier by the British in the context of the challenges of the postmodern era (Raskin 1987), an engagement coopted by the debates on terrorism, Islamophobia, and other alibis of Empire.

Filipinization as A Concrete-Universal Project

    My own position strives to be a dialectical-materialist stance that privileges historical specificity and counterhegemonic imperatives on the question of adapting ideas originating from other sources (San Juan 2007). In my view, language is only one of the criteria for hypothesizing the nation as "imagined community,” to use Benedict Anderson’s formula. However, the quest becomes more problematic when the language at issue, "Filipino," is still a matter disputed by other participants of the polity such as the Cebuanos, the various Moro groups, and by the English-speaking intelligentsia and bureaucracy. More seriously, it is not possible to conceive of the notions of "pantayo"  and "pangkami"  without the whole dynamic network of differences first outlined by Saussure but complicated by the wide-ranging semiotic principles explored by C.S. Peirce, Lev Vygotsky, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, and Roman Jakobson, far beyond the findings of Whorf, Sapir, Humboldt, Frobenius, etc. The linguistic symbol, as Jakobson reminds us, is not only a vehicle of the sedimented past (icons) or the present (indices) but also of the future. He quotes Peirce's speculation premised on the triadic theory of the sign: "The being of a symbol consists in the real fact that something surely will be experienced if certain conditions be satisfied....The value of a symbol is that it serves to make thought and conduct rational and enables us to predict the future" (1987,427).
         Language is, to be sure, only one signifier of national identity, not an absolute qualifier, whose correlation with other practices and collective actions needs delicate orchestration (Yinger 1976, 200-02). Earlier (San Juan 2008), I registered my discomfort with the logocentric tendency in Enriquez's otherwise conscientious indigenization attempt. In the total program of liberating the majority of Filipinos (workers, peasants, women) from market exploitation and alien oppression, a nationalist ideology as such should prioritize the act of foregrounding democratic national rights and collective welfare. Hence we need an internationalist worldview such as that provided by Marxism (articulated, of course, to our specific conditions) with its universalistic, critical position grounded on a "concrete universal," with all the richness of the particular social-formation in the Philippines, in creating a sense of Filipino nationhood (Lowy 2000).
    Filipinizing CS thus requires not merely linguistic readjustment but, more importantly, reconceiving the sense of rationality, justice, equality and democratic participation that cannot be hermetically encapsulated within the bounds of a single Filipino language-in-the-making. My firm conviction is that no indigenization project will fully succeed unless it includes a program of systematic decolonization, particularly an uncompromising indictment of U.S. colonialism/neocolonialism in its totality, together with its complicit transnational allies. Neither postcolonial hybridity, modernizing technocratic pragmatism, nor transnational flexibility will do; we need dialectical cunning and a bricoleur’s resourcefulness in taking advantage of what our forebears--Rizal, Recto, Agoncillo, Constantino, Hernandez, and others--have already won for us. After all, the enemy can also speak in Filipino and even dance the tinikling and sing "Dahil sa Iyo" in more seductive, innovative, postmodernist ways. We need to combine specifics and universals in both strategic and tactical ways that precisely cannot be learned at this time from orthodox CS and its postcolonial. transnationalist variations.

    To recap: Conceived as a reaction to capitalist high culture in the late twentieth century, CS initially  challenged Cold War norms and Western hegemony.  It promised a democratic, even radical, renaissance of thought and sensibility inside and outside the academy. Its early practitioners drew heavily from the Marxist and socialist traditions. But when it became institutionalized in the Eighties and Nineties, CS distanced itself rapidly from mass political struggles in the metropoles and the “third world.” It reverted to ethical individualism, aestheticism, Nietzschean performative displays, and the fetishism of differences/hybridity, becoming in the process a defensive ideology for predatory finance capitalism and technocratic globalization. If we want CS to be meaningful to the majority of Filipinos, it needs to address the urgent realities of our society and contribute to the democratic and egalitarian ideals of our history.

Prophetic Cognitive Mapping

The current war on terrorism by the imperial powers led by the United States exhibits its exemplary form of “epistemic violence” in its attack on national-liberation and popular-democatic struggles everywhere. One example is the US attack on Moro insurgents, including the group stigmatized as the terrorist “Abu Sayyaf.” Working through neocolonial instrumentalities, as well as regional alliances, Western hegemony continues to delegitimize this Moro demand for self-determination into a dangerous conspiracy that needs to be coopted or suppressed. Exploiting splinter groups utilized by local compradors and elite bureaucrats, the US tries to convert the age-old class conflicts in the Philippines into the discourse of war between civilizations. Mixing outright propaganda and vestiges of cold-war rhetoric and counterinsurgency policies, finance-capitalism seeks to resolve its accumulation crisis by intensifying ideological-cultural conflicts that hide the historical material grounds of injustice and oppression. The Moro struggle in the Philippines will remain a crucible for U.S. “manifest destiny” after 9/11, but no serious and substantive CS inquiry has been devoted to it.
And so far, except for notable instances such as Lauren Berlant’s (1996) “The Face of America and the State of Emergency,” I know of no serious and wide-ranging CS study of “terrorism”—except perhaps Naomi Klein’s invaluable The Shock Doctrine--as the new ideological-political strategy of global capital to maintain its hegemonic stranglehold on the planet (contrast Berlant with the scholasticism of Tsing 2011). This is a symptom of a profound malaise afflicting the  intellectual public sphere of the Global North. Unless CS pays attention to what Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” in particular the situation of peoples of color fighting for survival, with dignity and freedom, such as those in the Philippines, CS cannot renew its radical or oppositional beginnings, much less revive the proverbial “speaking” virtue of the much deconstructed postcolonial subaltern. We can see how, in two recent surveys of British Cultural Studies (Morley and Robbins 2001) and French Cultural Studies (Forbes and Kelly 1995), this new country-oriented CS has incorporated a reflexive, more critical optic on its nationalist provenance and shifted focus on the imperialist encroachments of the elite, as well as the impact of the “natives” and migrants on the nativist codes and ethos.
    It may be redundant to rehearse what we have elaborated in various earlier discourses (1998; 2002), but the capacity to remember (the historical sense or imagination) in consumer society is all but stultified and dessicated. So allow us this excess. In the Philippines and other subordinated formations, CS can be regenerated by renewing its anticolonial, popular and democratic inspiration and re-engaging in a radical, transformative critique of oligopolistic corporate power, the political economy of global finance capital and its commodified/commodifying culture.  It can challenge US imperialism and its agent-satraps in its current modality of warring against “terrorism” or extremism (codewords for anti-imperialists) by returning to, first, the primacy of social labor; second, the complex historical articulations of the mode of production and social relations; and, third, the importance of the materialist critique of norms, assumptions and premises underlying existing inequalities, injustices, and oppressions.
    The radical critic Teresa Ebert notes that CS capitulated to conservatism by abandoning Marxism and indulging in textual play, discursivity, the ‘troping of reality” and textualizations of ethnography” (2002, 47). We thus need to rehabilitate if not remodel the inherited CS to conform to the needs and pressures of the Philippine situation. To Filipinize CS is to reconfigure the modality and thrust of Western CS in order to address the persistent and urgent problems of the exploitation of Filipino labor worldwide, the lack of genuine sovereignty and national independence, and the profound class, gender and ethnic inequalities that have plagued the country for so long. In short, intellectuals engaged in CS need to situate their practice and vocation in the actual society that underwrites their labor and provides it some measure of intelligibility and significance. Otherwise, they will continue to serve the interests of the capitalist Leviathan and undermine their own claims to integrity and independence, not to speak of “academic freedom,” humanistic ideals, and scientific objectivity. This is urgently the case today when the advanced putrefaction of global capitalism, with its putatively postmodern cosmopolitan culture being offered as a panacea, characterized by enclosures, the “privatization of the global commons and the exploitation of wage laborers in the vast cultural corporations” (Denning 2011, 141). Given the truth that every cultural accomplishment is also a document of barbarism, we concur with Walter Benjamin that “no cultural history has yet done justice to this fundamental state of affairs, and it can hardly hope to do so.” Nor can CS do it. De te fabula.

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